The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution by Robert G. Parkinson (review)

Thorny questions about the origins and nature of the American Revolution have long concerned scholars. What and who drove the revolution? Was it ideology or interests, elites or those out-of-doors? And just what was the revolution? Was it a contest for liberty or a war of conquest, a pathway to democracy or a promise unfulfilled? Historians have also struggled to reconcile accounts of colonial America that stress the differences, divisions, and conflicts between and within the colonies, and a historiography of the revolution that often emphasizes themes of unity and nation building in order to explain the creation of the Constitution and the founding of a new nation. And we still struggle to reconcile what John Shy long ago called the “destructi[ve]” War for Independence with the “constructive” political revolution.¹

In this wonderfully written and deeply researched new monograph, The Common Cause, Robert G. Parkinson uses two strategies to cut through these Gordian knots. First, he focuses on the Revolutionary War itself. While that might seem a self-evident strategy for historians outside the field, few scholars have looked to the conflict for answers to these questions. Instead, they have tried to find them in the patriot resistance movement or the political developments that culminated with the adoption of the Constitution. Second, Parkinson has revisited well-used sources, colonial/state newspapers, with a fresh perspective that makes excellent use of scholarship that has emphasized African American and Native American agency on the eve of, and during, the American Revolution. While many have mined the newspapers for political commentary and the scant few details they reveal of the social history of the period, Parkinson’s major innovation is to ignore the headlines and instead read the middle pages. In an exhaustive, almost forensic study of how colonial printers stitched together and juxtaposed news from all over the colonies and new states during the war, Parkinson reveals a very different and much darker picture of the revolution.

Parkinson’s great insight is to show that leading patriots and patriot printers were well aware of the divisions that beset American colonists and were equally cognizant that something extraordinary was needed to unite colonists in the “Common Cause” against Britain. Reports of conflicts with Indians over coveted land and new slave revolts made many patriots fear that a war with Britain would only exacerbate such divisions. But instead of backing down from their confrontation with Parliament, they began to exploit those stories for their own ends. Patriot printers tied those stories to the threat posed by Britain. If enslaved Americans rebelled, or Native Americans attacked, it could only be because the British were behind it. As resistance turned to open conflict, patriot committees of safety conspired with newspaper printers to emphasize, amplify, repeat, and even fabricate stories about the threats from and damage done by the King’s “proxies” (22)—most notably African American slaves, Native Americans, and, at least initially, the Hessians. Readers were treated to a potent and often horrifying mix of news stories from across the colonies that all pointed to the perils of ignoring the threat from Britain. No colony was safe from such dangers. Unity was imperative.

Full of illuminating insights about familiar events, the book is at its best when describing just how the patriot partisan story was created, represented, and propagated in the pages of newspapers. Parkinson shows clearly how patriots controlled not just the narrative—the war stories that would be printed and how they would be framed—but also at times the very roads along which those stories traveled. Publishers and editors magnified reports of slave insurrections, downplayed and sanitized divisions between white colonists, and represented Britain’s new allies as savage—sometimes to reassure readers, sometimes to alarm them. We learn that even in New England, reports...