War and Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts (review)

John Resch and Walter Sargent's collection of essays brings together some of the best new scholarship on the American Revolutionary War. It is divided into two sections, one concerning the motivation and mobilization of soldiers and the other the wartime experiences of a variety of allies, communities, and women. The editors, who themselves contribute fine essays to the first part of the collection, include a thoughtful introductory overview of the works they have chosen and conclude with a historiographic essay on the changing scholarship of the Revolutionary era over the intervening centuries.

The subtitle of the book makes its mission clear, that understanding the mobilization of all Americans is key to understanding the Revolution itself. Indeed, an understanding of mobilization gets to the heart of longstanding questions about the possible motivations of participants in the war. The writers on military mobilization wisely examine Continental and militia forces. This has allowed them to see sustained participation by all social ranks in New England communities reflecting their "collective military effort" (p. 10). Other regional and topical essays on recruitment discourage generalizations from that experience. By parsing a variety of communities, the contributors discovered that recruitment experiences were organic and reflected local connections and stress lines.

The essays of the first half of the volume are tightly cohesive. Those of the second are less so and that is both a strength and a weakness. It allows for a broad range of individually compelling topics to be explored that illustrate that this was a war without any clear delineation between home front and battlefront. Holly Mayer's essay on the women who traveled with the army, Joan Gunderson's account of the trials of refugee women, and essays on the southern backcountry concerning loyalists, slaves, and Native peoples remind readers of the emptiness of any such discrete conceptualizations. These topics are critical to an understanding of the Revolution and the quality of the scholarship and writing in all of them is exemplary. However, there is somewhat less focus and they could have benefited from a tighter editorial hand to connect them to the larger themes of the book.

Like many works about war and society, the impact of violence tends to get short shrift. This is somewhat resolved by Wayne Lee's thoughtful essay about the "values and understandings of violence" (p. 165) in the Carolina backcountry, an exciting and provocative topic. It also opens up a whole other field of scholarship that begs for expansion in a section of its own. However, this is a minor gripe and just provides other scholars in the field, and perhaps Resch and Sargent themselves, with another volume to consider.

Readers, students especially, will find much to excite them in these pages. The essays are all written in a clear, accessible style. Those new to the field will find many of the essays provocative and specialists will be armed with a collection from some of the best scholars in the field.