Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution by William B. Warner (review)

Near the opening of this thoughtful study of the nature of political communication in Revolutionary America, William B. Warner quotes a passage from Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book On Revolution that I also often cite in my writing and teaching:

Whatever the merits of the opening claim of the American Revolution—no taxation without representation—it certainly could not appeal by virtue of its charms. It was altogether different with the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing which proved necessary to drive this claim to its logical conclusion: independent government and the foundation of a new body politic.

(10)

Arendt wrote as a grand political theorist, but here she captured an insight that many working historians of the Revolution, writing amid a scholarly preoccupation with political ideology, have missed. The lived experiences of speaking and writing and persuading were not merely the means by which political intentions were translated into revolutionary consequences. In their own way, they were the essence of revolutionary activity itself and they became a source of pleasure, a way of pursuing political happiness, for the participants in the common cause of independence.

The real point of departure for Warner’s analysis, however, lies with the formation of the Boston Committee of Correspondence (BCC) in November 1772. (This, too, has a strong personal appeal to me: its records were the first set of archives I worked through at the start of my dissertation research, long ago.) The colonists had, of course, developed a few mechanisms of intercolonial cooperation during the Stamp Act and Townshend duties crises of the 1760s. And as the late Pauline Maier demonstrated in her seminal first book, From Resistance to Revolution (1972), correspondence among a small network of American “radicals” also played a significant role in coordinating colonial resistance. But these contacts, though episodically important, were hardly systemic. In the early 1770s, after the repeal of the Townshend duties (save that on tea) and the Boston Massacre, there was no active network of correspondence lying ready for resistance leaders to mobilize. It was only in 1773 that Samuel Adams, our favorite proto-Trotskyite, began corresponding with Richard Henry Lee in Virginia and Charles Thomson in Philadelphia.

The creation of the BCC changed all that, first within Massachusetts, but then prototypically for the colonies in general. Its contribution to the volatility of provincial politics was carefully examined in Richard D. Brown’s important monograph, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts (1970), and brilliantly reflected in Bernard Bailyn’s psychologically astute study of The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974). Warner’s concern is not to retrace the ground historians have already covered—though his account of what historians actually do, or what they have written, seems thin and simplistic. Instead Warner attempts to explain how political communication actually worked, and what made the development of a revolutionary nexus of committees so innovative. Two concepts dominate his analysis. The first, captured in the title, is protocol, by which Warner means “rules that shaped and constrained, in order to enable, communication” (19). The tacit adoption of these constraints was empowering, not limiting, because they provided a coherent basis for coordinating political action. The second key term is network, which emerges when the defining protocols are applied to form the lines of communication among communities and institutions. These networks can be defined in topological terms, and Warner provides a cute chart of six forms (bus, ring, star, extended star, hierarchical, and mesh) that networks could take (21). Much of the book is devoted to describing how these networks functioned, with first the BCC and then the Continental Congress respectively operating as the “hub” of a star or extended-star system.

The general argument of Protocols of Liberty rests on several sets of propositions. One is that the Boston Whigs were genuine innovators. The creation of the BCC and its reproduction in committees throughout Massachusetts [End Page...