Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (review)

Carp’s Cities in the American Revolution embodies a fourth generation of scholarly emphasis on the importance of Anglo-America’s port towns in the movement for American independence. He follows Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1918), who depicted urban merchants’ vital role in organizing resistance; Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York, 1955), who first stressed the central role of Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston in the imperial conflict; and Gary B. Nash, who demonstrated the reality of interclass friction in The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). Carp provides a fresh analysis of the role of colonial cities in the earliest phase of the contest with Parliament and the Crown. Conceptually, if not methodologically, innovative, Cities in the American Revolution will interest historians of the period and those who specialize in urban history.

The originality of Carp’s approach lies less in the ground that he covers—though he builds on more than a generation of fresh, creative scholarship—than the manner in which he organizes his analysis. Eschewing a purely city-by-city approach, Carp invites readers to consider institutions: the waterfront (especially in Boston), the tavern (especially in New York), religion (especially in Newport), domestic spaces (especially in Charleston), and politics (especially in Philadelphia). He systematically reaches back into the first half of the eighteenth century to provide context for the stormy events of the 1760s and 1770s. In contrast to Bridenbaugh, who reified cities as direct participants in the Revolution, Carp treats the port towns as “sites of radical change” (9). In these places, he explains, pluralistic culture and society, social unrest, and conflict with the royal government were concentrated and communicated to rural America.

Absent the cities, Carp—like Schlesinger, Bridenbaugh, and Nash before him—argues that Yankee farmers and Tidewater gentry would not have made a revolution. In Boston, for example, waterfront conflicts with royal authority served as catalysts for townwide and colonywide protests. Carp explains that tarring and feathering was a shipboard punishment dating from the twelfth century and that the image of death on a 1774 almanac wielded a fisherman’s spear to attack Governor Hutchinson. He explains that in Newport and Philadelphia, sectarian enmities shaped political allegiances and that the fear of Congregational and Presbyterian dictation was so strong in Philadelphia that Quakers and Baptists demanded that the Continental Congress affirm religious freedom as a condition of support for Boston in 1774.

Carp presents the most important insight of this learned and carefully crafted study in his epilogue, where he explains that though urban politics crucially shaped the coming of the Revolution, the cities became expendable and obsolete politically during the war years and thereafter. Having served as catalysts for the mobilization of the countryside, the cities’ influence shrank in the aftermath of independence. “Only Boston remained the center of government, economy, and society in Massachusetts” (219). Elsewhere, he points to the political ascendency of the cities and to the arc of their relative decline thereafter.