The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (review)

While I was discussing the American Revolution with a group of freshmen not too long ago, one student expressed an interest in the current British perspective on the war. Informed by The Politics of War, I suggested that class seems to have more credence as a historical motivator than perhaps American historians are willing to concede. Certainly, when giving due diligence to Michael McDonnell's new book, we see a focus on class, and race as class, that helps further delineate the arguments of Edmund Morgan and Rhys Isaac, while suggesting a new avenue for approaching historical research in the tradition of Fred Anderson that has previously not been attempted. Class conflicts inherent in a socially hierarchical culture define for McDonnell a solution to the historical problem of how colonial Virginia could become a wellspring of revolutionary rhetoric and political action in the 1770s and 1780s while continuing to operate under an institution of slave labor until the American Civil War. Simultaneous to elite patriot attempts at leading the Revolution from above, middling farmers, poor whites, and enslaved blacks in Virginia resisted efforts to be mobilized for war and co-opted the same revolutionary rhetoric to advance their own agendas and demand greater autonomy. By the end of the war, it was the reaction of elites to these demonstrations that led to the drafting of the Constitution and the formation of the United States government.

McDonnell argues against a unified bloc in support of the Revolution along racial divides. In fact, McDonnell sees no revolutionary consensus whatsoever within colonial Virginia. Rather, class tensions existed throughout this period and were heightened by both the conflict and its demands for military mobilization among the inhabitants of the region. From the beginning of the war, only elites and slaves engaged meaningfully with the revolutionary movements, though free whites of the middling and poorer classes did utilize the Revolution as a meaningful event when it suited their purposes. While elites focused on nonimportation and other political sanctions against Britain in 1775, middling farmers and yeomen continued to struggle against economic hardships brought on by the recessions following the Seven Years' War and the taxes levied after to mitigate the war debt. These whites were concerned with harvesting and selling their tobacco before the nonexportation measures were effected, and they could not be swayed to join militia companies to defend against a possible British invasion. Black bondsmen, however, were focusing their attention upon the possibility of a "civil war" among whites in the region as a possible opportunity for freedom.

For the majority of the war years, then, from 1775 to 1781, there was a class struggle with four camps. Each faction had its separate political and economic desires, each was motivated for revolution, and all were striving for autonomy against those both above and below them. Central to this portrait of revolutionary Virginia was Dunmore's Proclamation of 1775, which declared those held in bondage by rebel masters free to join the British forces in return for their manumission. Far from acting as a unifying force among the whites of the South, McDonnell argues instead that the proclamation fractured Virginian society along class lines and immobilized the colony's efforts to support the Revolution militarily. Elites were unwilling to leave their plantations to fall into British hands, middling farmers were unable to enlist for fear of a general insurrection, poor whites were adamantly against defending plantations and property they did not own, and slaves escaped to British ships whenever the opportunity presented itself. Only those serving in Revolutionary positions outside the colony seem to have achieved any objective view of the movement away from this class conflict.

This, then, is the conclusion McDonnell reaches: that the defeat of the British at Yorktown in 1781 was the defeat of the real revolution (with the recapture of many escaped slaves fighting for the British), and...