The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits, ed. by Jack P. Greene (review)

SHORTERBOOK REVIEWS Jack P. Greene, ed. The American Revolution: Its Characterand Limits. New York: New York University Press, 1987. x + 422 pp. The American Revolution: Its Characterand Limits is composed of a series of papers and comments delivered at a Johns Hopkins University conference sponsored by the Maryland Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities during March, 1985. The purpose of the conference was to bring together "a great many promising young scholars" to "consider some of the many problems that had been raised but not resolved by the American Revolution and that remained to confront the new American society" at the war's end (vii). Participants included fifteen individuals, all of whom have made prior contributions to Revolutionary historiography and seven senior American historians whose role was to reflect on the conference papers. As usual with such collections, the essays cover a wide range of topics. Wayne Carp and Jonathan Dull offer different perspectives on America's post-war prospects for self-defence and continued viability. Carp emphasizes divisions among Americans over the relative merits of a professional army, while Dull, through a comparison of the United States and the Netherlands, argues that the American republic had important if accidental advantages in international politics. Jack Rakove and Lance Banning offer reflections on the evolution of American politics. Rakove directs his attention to changes in the nationalists' 1787 agenda compared to that of 1783;Banning emphasizes the new values and interests that changed the character of American political behavior by the War of 1812. Peter Onuf and Drew McCoy reflect in very different ways on the political economy of the new nation. While Onuf focuses narrowly but intelligently on the way western lands were perceived in the 1780s as a foundation for the social and economic fabric of the new society, McCoy ranges widely from the 1760s to the 1820s pointing out that concerns about American economic dependence remained as acute in the nineteenth century as they had been in the previous century. A series of four 108 Shorter Book Reviews essays by Robert Calhoon, James Merrell, SylviaFrey and Elaine Crane deal with specific social and cultural groups. While Calhoon stresses the extent to which American society stretched to reintegrate loyalists whose differences with their republican counterparts were essentially political, the other three writers stress the exclusivity and rigidities of existing social norms. Merrell describes the consistent underlying hostility of whites to Amer-Indians despite variations in American policies and changes in Indian tactics; Frey points out that while the Revolutionary value of liberty touched the lives of northern slaves, that of equality passed all blacks by; as for republican women, Crane argues that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw only a deterioration in the position of women, rather than an acceptance of new standards of autonomy and equality. Finally, in a series of five essays, Melvin Yazawa, Lester Cohen, Jay Fliegelman, Catherine Albanese and Nathan Hatch use educational theory, historical literature, novels and religious beliefs of early-nineteenth-century Americans to get at the problem of American self-definition. The Revolution left Americans struggling to find out who and what they were; the intensity of that struggle, the essayists argue by implication, is best reflected in the literary, religious and educational concerns of self-consciousAmericans. Of the various critics represented in the volume, Gordon Wood is the most enthusiastic, crediting Yazawa, Cohen and Fleigehnan with "exciting chapters" in "a new kind of cultural history" (355). Yet in her comments on the Albanese and Hatch papers, Patricia Bonomi sounds a note that is more appropriate for the volume as a whole. She credits Albanese and Hatch with important insights into the way in which "Americans expressed their religious sensibilities and remodelled religious institutions" but only "at either end of the early national religious spectrum" (407-408). The implication is that the essayists' emphasis on minority and singular religious experiences allowed them to dance around the edge of a fundamental problem without directly confronting it. The same might be said of those whom Wood praises. As Wood himself admits, there was a large gap between the sensibilities of "the masses of ordinary Americans" and the self-conscious...