Rejoinder

32 Historically Speaking · March/April 2005 Rejoinder Pauline Maier The first of my "disjunctions"— between scholarship on colonial America and on the American Revolution—provoked more discussion in these thoughtful comments than anything else I said. Although I carefully stated that I was merely noting—not criticizing—that disjunction , some respondents inferred that I was complaining about it or found it frustrating. In fact, the tendency toward interpreting colonial America more broadly than the original thirteen colonies makes considerable intellectual sense. It avoids the obvious anachronism in defining the subject in terms of a future identity that most colonists did not foresee and wanted above all to avoid. But a colonial America defined as a history of all the peoples of North America or as part of the Atlantic world does not easily connect with the more nation-based study of the American Revolution. A disjunction in historical scholarship is not, however, a disjunction in history. Nobody since Thomas Paine has, I think, seriously argued that time began anew in 1776, such that all previous history could simply be forgotten. To put it another way, Edward Gray's dream of a time when "questions about the creation ofthe United States cannot be divorced from important questions about the colonies" has long since been fulfilled. The profound penetration of a British identity beyond the political order into virtually every aspect of colonial life that Gray mentions is precisely what made independence so difficult to accept. Even a quick survey of debates in the Constitutional Convention shows how much delegates remained excolonists : both those who cited British precedents and those who denied their relevance testified to the continuing presence of the imperial past in American minds. Moreover, as Don Higginbotham notes, there exists a substantial older literature on the colonial background of the American Revolution. Those of us who teach and write on the Revolution can and do draw on that work—as well as some more recent books, such as John Butler's BecomingAmerican: The Revolution before 1776 (2000), which I probably ought to have mentioned. The current interest in empire might, as Peter Onuf suggests, lead scholars toward "a fresher sense of the geopolitical context and consequences of the Revolution." But will it weaken or destroy the disjunction between scholarship on colonial America and that on the Revolution, as Gray and Onuf claim? I remain skeptical. The former field seems firmly committed to a broad geographical scope, while the latter will probably remain for the most part an event-laden episode in national history even when enriched by a broader comparative context. Certainly the books by Max Edling and David Hendrickson that Onuf cites focus on American statebuilding and fail to bridge the colonial and Revolutionary periods unless, as Onuf surprisingly asserts in his first sentence, the drafting and ratification ofthe Constitution— not 1776 or even the peace of 1783—should be seen as linking those periods. The only book he mentions that ties the colonial period —as conventionally understood—to the Revolution is Jack Greene's Peripheries and Center, which was published almost two decades ago. I cannot resist questioning Onufs historiographical summary and analysis. The discovery of the Revolution's ideological origins , as I witnessed it as a Harvard graduate student, allowed historians to see events through 18th-century eyes and so constituted a major victory in the struggle against anachronism that lies at the heart ofgood history . Moreover, it did not suggest that politics and political institutions were ideologically determined. Patriots and Loyalists, after all, drew different conclusions from the same Whig assumptions; and, although the broad popular base of both extra-legal and, later, constitutional government owed much to Whig ideology, institutional forms nonetheless provoked prolonged and lively debate. The "republican synthesis" can be safely forgotten along with its obsession with "virtue," based as it was on a very selective reading of the documentary record. We cannot, however, stop taking ideas seriously without taking a major step backward in historical understanding . Rakove is nearer the truth, I think, when he says that scholars of the 1960s and 1970s—who built on the rediscovery of Revolutionary ideology—produced a "fundamentally constitutional and political" account of the Revolution...