Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (review)

Ten years ago, prevailing histories of the American Revolution lived within the conceptual arc of the “cultural turn.” They explored revolutionary politics in terms of cultural expression and ideological ferment, often locating their subjects between the familiar poles of republican virtue and liberal self-interest. Since then, however, historians such as Holton and Young have revived the Progressive approach once associated with Beard, who stressed the class interests of the Revolutionary elite and the resulting betrayals of the nonelite masses.¹ In Taming Democracy, Bouton makes a major contribution to the neo-Progressive renaissance. He asks, “What kind of democracy did common folk want from the Revolution?” and “How happy were they with the version of democracy the Revolution brought?” (3). His answers produce an extremely important contribution to the literature about the Revolution.

Bouton’s approach rests on two lines of inquiry, each with its inevitable shortcomings. First, his geographical focus on the state of Pennsylvania makes sense: Pennsylvania was home to an ethnically diverse but overwhelmingly rural population, much like the new nation as a whole, and it played host to the major political events and institutions of the time. Most of Bouton’s eleven chapters concentrate on Pennsylvania while also alluding to analogous developments in other American states.

Second, his research, which is primarily concerned with the economic outlooks and political values of “the people” on the one hand and “the elite” on the other also makes sense, because from the 1760s to 1790s Pennsylvania endured an economic crisis comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Studying the Revolution without that crisis in mind, Bouton suggests, would be as fruitless as exploring the New Deal without close attention to the Depression.

Drawing from a massive evidentiary base of tax rolls, court records, petitions, and correspondence, Bouton shows how British policies during the 1760s and 1770s occasioned a liquidity and credit shortage for farmers and artisans. The afflicted masses protested with a widely resonant ideology of liberty and equality that drew from both Whig radicalism and Christian morality. “Guided by those beliefs, Pennsylvania’s revolutionary generation—rich and poor alike—turned the Revolution into an attempt to expand political rights and ensure a relatively equal distribution of wealth” (32). Ordinary farmers devised comprehensive plans for progressive taxation and the equitable repayment of both private and public debts. They pushed cautious gentlemen to declare independence and to draft a state constitution in 1776 that not only empowered ordinary white men but also enabled free black men to vote. Pennsylvania, for a moment, was a liberal democracy in the full sense of both words—although, as Bouton duly notes, “the people” were also eager to kill Indians and bully Quakers.

That democracy did not last. In a “stunning reversal,” Pennsylvania’s elite refashioned itself in the mold of the British oppressor (61). Due to a determined, shameless campaign by Robert Morris and a disheartening series of betrayals by arriviste politicians, the state government embraced many of the policies that had provoked the Revolution (and the hard times) in the first place. Bouton provides startling evidence that Morris and his cohort consciously planned to enrich the wealthy at the expense of everyone else and to deploy state power on behalf of the moneyed elite. After further protest from the people, elites turned to the federal Constitution, the prohibitions of which on paper currency and debt relief “effectively outlawed most of the . . . popular reforms that ordinary Pennsylvanians had tried to enact” (178). Rushed into law, the Constitution dissolved the “rings of protection” that rural communities had built to ward off the devastating effects of pro-creditor and pro-speculator policy (146). By the 1790s, the people resorted to desperate insurrections, which the national and state leadership first crushed and then belittled.

The overall story is convincing, not least because Bouton strikes an admirable balance between quantitative and qualitative evidence...