The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (review)

One of the tried-and-true tricks of graduate school is to learn historiography through the careful study of acknowledgement pages. Gary Nash's The Unknown American Revolution does not disappoint. His list of friends is really a who's who of "new" social historians, including Alfred Young, Peter Wood, Francis Jennings, Jesse Lemisch, Robert Gross, Mary Beth Norton, and Linda Kerber. This group of diverse and prolific scholars began in the late 1960s and early 1970s to emphasize history from the "bottom up" with the purpose of recovering from the dustbin scores of dynamic and significant actors who were not elite white males. Nash himself, of course, was a luminary in this project of giving voice to the traditionally voiceless, producing such important books as Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (1974) and The Urban Crucible: Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979) early in what would be a prodigious, pathbreaking career. It is fitting then that Nash be the one who provides the capstone to that generation of scholarship.

On the first page of his book, Nash restates Carl Becker's near century-old formulation that the Revolution was as much about home rule as it was who would rule at home. The Unknown American Revolution proceeds to spend more than four hundred pages detailing vividly the contestation over the latter but far too little noting the significance of the former. This concentration of the spotlight solely on the race, class, and gender battles over who would rule at home illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of the now-not-so-new "new" social history. In the end, by throwing the founding fathers out with the bathwater, and by extension the whole political project of nation-making (or home rule), Nash's synthesis is ultimately unsatisfying.

The Unknown American Revolution consists of eight chapters that document how, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, an increasing number of discontented African Americans, Indians, women, urban workers, and rural farmers began to demand better treatment in colonial society, a "peoples' revolution" that brought on and made possible the movement for American independence (xvii). Broken down into chronological bites, each chapter is made up of subsections that follow the formula of race, class, gender. Nash's list of players that, for him, created the Revolution is an expansive one (although most are hardly unknown to scholars of the Revolution): Thomas Peters, Dragging Canoe, Herman Husband, Boston King, Thomas Paine, Anthony Benezet, Joseph Brant, Ethan Allen, Mum Bett, Ebenezer McIntosh, and the mutinous troops in the Continental Army.

The Unknown American Revolution tells the stories of these lesser-known revolutionaries with vigor. Building on his excellent work on emancipation and the African American experience in Pennsylvania, Nash's discussions of black participation in the Revolutionary War, the efforts of Quaker abolitionists to prick the conscience of America, and how America missed its best opportunity to end slavery in the aftermath of independence are first-rate. His expertise with urban mobs also demands that attention be paid to his portrayal of the Stamp Act crisis in Boston and the Fort Wilson riot in Philadelphia as violent expressions of a growing demand for democratic justice in America. Areas where he has not previously published, including on women and Indians, are familiar and do not sparkle as brightly. Sparks hardly lack in Nash's portrayal of the founding fathers. They appear in the text as foils whose flaws far outweigh any redeemable qualities. Jefferson and other "luminous Virginians" are hypocrites, Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton are proto-robber barons, and John Adams comes off as a paranoid reactionary (435). They are all "reluctant revolutionaries" who have to accept political, social, and economic changes—price controls, gradual emancipation, constitutional reapportionment, and politically active women—against their will (453).

Setting aside his scorn for elite white men, Nash runs into...