The Soldiers' Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (review)

With the widespread availability of interlibrary loan and the National Archives microfilm publication efforts, modern historians have long had access to the amazingly rich Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant Application Files. Comprising nearly 3,000 full microfilm reels and 80,000 files, these documents seem overwhelming at first glance. As their title indicates, these were files generated by veterans and their heirs who were attempting to qualify for long-delayed rewards provided by the federal government for military service. Now historians are doing what genealogists have done in the past: find a subject that allows one to work with a manageable number of these records. One of the obvious organizational schemes is to look at the war records for a single state or former colony. This is exactly what Gregory T. Knouff has done for Pennsylvania, adding into the mix information from Loyalists claims filed by Pennsylvanians who fought for the British. This is quantitative and qualitative history in abundance from the bottom up.

Those who feel that military history no longer yields valuable insights should take a look at what a specialist like Knouff, trained in cultural and social history, can do with military records. The Soldiers' Revolution is first-rate history from many perspectives. Knouff asks a number of interesting and important questions as he considers his material, looking first at soldier motivation and community ties. One of the principal themes of Knouff's work is that local circumstances determined whether one took up arms or not. However, this localism involved a sense of place as defined by the times, not by the surveyed borders that constitute modern states on classroom maps. Southeastern Pennsylvanians found little reason to march to the aid of or even mobilize for comrades experiencing troubles along the state's western frontier, or in faraway Massachusetts, or even in closer New York. Those who lived at a distance from Philadelphia shared the same sentiment, only in reverse. Pennsylvanian participation in the Revolution was measured by how close the war was to home.

Race and gender also were key to understanding the activities of veterans in Pennsylvania. Since the state permitted slavery and was situated close to major concentrations of African Americans held further south, Governor Dunmore's success in Virginia in attracting bondsmen to the King's cause by offering freedom encouraged revolutionary supporters in Pennsylvania to exclude most blacks from their military units. Indeed, most rebels viewed the war as a white man's contest. The Revolution hardly created Pennsylvania racism, but it certainly exacerbated it. Excluded even to a greater degree were Native Americans. As those in rebellion forged a sense and definition of community, Native Americans were excluded no matter what their position might be on ties to England. Pennsylvanians saw little difference between those who fought for England and those who attempted to remain neutral or even supported independence.

As the war hesitatingly unfolded for one Pennsylvania community after another, gender played an important role. Knouff notes repeatedly that the American sense of masculinity, heavily influenced by Native American cultures along the western border, dictated that men were warriors and hunters, while women were not. Knouff almost argues that this concept of masculine behavior had more to do with mobilizing and recruiting soldiers than any of the ideological issues so often emphasized in modern textbooks. In a curious way, this concept of masculinity often proved fatal in camps like Valley Forge. It was women's work to clean, and no amount of coercion, threats, and speeches could convince Pennsylvania soldiers to keep their domiciles tidy, sanitary, and healthy. The result of such gender ideals was an extremely high death rate caused by preventable diseases.

One of the most fascinating parts of The Soldiers' Revolution is a section dealing with memory and the war. While the pension records were first-hand accounts, few of...