British Traditions and Revolutionary America

British Traditionsand Revolutionary America JohnPhilip Reid. In De_/i'ance of the Lall': TheStanding-Army Control'ersy. Tll'oConstitutions. andthe Coming of the American Rel'olution. ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press. 1981. 239pp. PeterShaw.American Patriots and the Riwals ofRel'olz11ion. Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress. 1981.231pp. DavidP.Szatmary. Shays Rebellion: TheMaking of an Agrarian Insurrection. Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press. 1980. 134+xiv pp. PhilipLawson The wheel has turned practically full circle in American historiography of the revolutionary period. These three interdisciplinary studies follow a recent trend of investigation that concludes that it is no longer acceptable to write of a unique American revolutionary ideology in the 1760sand 1770s.This should come as no surprise to those who have read the work of historians like D.G. Allen and E. B. Tucker. 1 Ifsocial and religious life in New England could be similar to that of village communities in rural Norfolk during the seventeenth century. it does not require too great a leap of historical imagination to accept that other aspects of day-to-day existence had undergone little change in crossing the Atlantic. In these three studies it is clear that the singular British attitude to authority of any sort remained deeply etched in the American psyche before, during and, to some extent, after the Revolution. This line of approach has certainly produced a more reasonable interpretation of the colonial break with Britain, putting the required emphasis on how painful it was for most Americans to turn from resistance to rebellion. One drawback common to all three studies, however, is their concentration on Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular. The reader is constantly being asked to take local behavior as representative of a wider and more disparate society, and this is not always convincing. The recent work done by B.W. Labaree warns that such an approach to the thirteen colonies can be beset with difficulties. 2 Canadian Review of Amencan Studies. Volume 14. Number 2. Summer 1983. 165-73 166 Philip Lawson Notwithstanding such problems there is no doubt that each of these books has something to offer in a better understanding of the American mind in this period. The Standing Army Controversy attacks a complex argument with authority and a wealth of legal expertise. The study begins with an explanation of the offense caused in Massachusetts by Britain's decision to keep a standing army in America after 1763.To the colonial mind. maintaining the army was illegal in the framework of the English constitution: "It was a fear central to English constitutionalism. a constitutional standard vital to ' the preservation of British liberty .. (p. 11). Long before troops were sent to Boston in 1768. Reid points out, colonial leaders depicted the evils arising from the use of a standing army in peacetime: the Crown could not be trusted with such "an overbalance of power"; the use of soldiers as policemen threatened constitutional liberty, and laws that had to be enforced by troops "were not properly law" (p. 9). This analysis is supported by an examination in the main body of the book of the similarities between British and American arguments over maintaining standing armies. Reid argues with conviction that American rhetoric on this issue should not be dismissed as meaningless cant: for the ideas it contained were firmly rooted in the British political tradition. The language used by Andrew Fletcher in 1698to attack the standing army favored by William of Orange to halt Louis XIY's march across Europe, was not too distant from the terminology employed by Josiah Quincy against George III seventy years later (pp. 94 and 154).Indeed. in the author·s view here lay the root of the trouble: there were, in effect. two English constitutions in existence at the time of the revolution not compatible with a peaceful development of Anglo-American relations. The Americans still spoke and thought of government in 1770 as though living in the years immediately after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Bill of Rights and the sanctity of the militia over the tyranny of a standing army were still respected tenets of constitutional thought in mid-eighteenth-century America (p. 1021.The colonists...