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  • Gone with the Wind
  • Andrew R. L. Cayton (bio)
Jean B. Lee. The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County. New York: Norton, 1994. xviii 388 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, sources, and index. $28.95.

Jean B. Lee wants us to know that the American Revolution ruined Charles County, Maryland. Lying north and east of a great bend in the Potomac River, Charles County was, according to Lee, a prosperous, vital place in the middle of the eighteenth century. Its tiny urban area, Port Tobacco, was a major terminus of Atlantic commerce. Black slaves grew tobacco, which their white owners traded for the rapidly expanding number of consumer goods that were flooding North American markets. Not everyone in Charles County was happy, of course. But most people seemed contented. Enmeshed in a web of obligations and inequality, they nonetheless lived in a world of “relative equilibrium” (p. 221). Even for blacks, “From a purely demographic perspective, the possibilities for reasonably stable... family and community life reached a peak on the eve of the Revolution” (p. 70). For the white gentry, life was very good indeed.

Then revolution disrupted this nearly idyllic world. Despite their alienation from the proprietary government of Maryland and the administration of the Anglican Church, the people of Charles County were not eager to rebel against the British government. After all, they had so much to lose. Throughout the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s, they remained distant from the sound and fury of protest and war. Yet, led by the county gentry, virtually all of the county’s residents supported the American War for Independence (or kept their mouths shut). Many white males welcomed the increased participation in public affairs; women and slaves, too, pushed against the boundaries of the world into which they were born. Together, the people of Charles County stood on guard against possible attacks from His Majesty’s ships in the Potomac River and contributed to the war waged by the Continental Congress.

And what did they get when it was all over? What did the American Revolution do for these people? According to Lee, the events of the late 1770s [End Page 402] and 1780s pretty much destroyed the elegant world the residents of the county had sought to protect and defend. To be sure, more white men participated in public politics, and gentlemen became more sensitive to their wishes. Nearly everyone was less deferential. Indentured servitude for whites virtually disappeared. The growing importance of domesticity and improved literacy elevated the status of some white women. The number of free blacks doubled between 1755 and 1800 and the number of runaway slaves doubled in the early 1780s.

But even as some people tried to institutionalize the spirit of improvement associated with revolution in new buildings and associations, most found themselves worse off in the 1790s than they had been in the 1760s. Economic depression even cost a few gentlemen their estates; Sheriff Francis Ware ended up as a tenant on his own plantation in the 1790s. Many whites, facing uncertain economic prospects in the late 1780s and 1790s, simply went west, taking enslaved blacks with them or selling them to others. The decline of Charles County was long-term. Between 1790 and 1860, the county’s population of slightly more than 20,000 decreased by 20 percent. In 1860, over 60 percent of the residents were African Americans; a century earlier, almost 60 percent had been white. Not until after World War II would Charles County have as large a population as it did in 1790.

Lee’s emplotment of the Revolution is familiar enough to contemporary historians. A hierarchical colonial society is dislocated by British officials trying to govern an expanding and profitable empire; colonists resenting the threats to their stable and harmonious way of life rebel not so much to embrace the future but to freeze the present in place, or at least to protect a comfortable way of life. Ironically, the experience of revolution and a very long war transforms their society, democratizing everything from social relationships to political authority.

Jean Lee breaks from the pack in her conclusion. She wants us to know that not everyone...

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