Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act ed. by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

Did the Stamp Act crisis represent a new beginning for Britain's North American colonies, one that inevitably led to an independent American nation? Or should scholars situate that crisis within a larger story of British imperial and national identity in the eighteenth century, seeing it as the conclusion of the Seven Years' War? A new volume edited by Zachary McLeod Hutchins, Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act, engages with those questions. Published to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act crisis (1765–66), the eight essays in the volume challenge one of the key arguments advanced by Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan in their monograph The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (U of North Carolina P, 1995). In that work, the Morgans contended that the colonial debates over taxation and representation during the Stamp Act crisis foreshadowed the oppositional thought of the following decade leading up to American independence. In terms of constitutional principles, the colonists "'stood Bluff ' in 1776 on the line they had drawn in 1765," the Morgans argued (307).

By contrast, Community without Consent posits an indirect line from the Stamp Act crisis to the American Revolution. In his introductory remarks, Hutchins asserts that "resistance did not always lead to revolution." He cautions early Americanists, who possess "the burden of historical awareness," against interpreting revolution and American nationhood as the inevitable outcomes of the Stamp Act crisis (xii–xiii). This new perspective results from the volume's methodological approach to its historical subject. The essays in Community without Consent reflect the cultural and linguistic turn in historiography, shifting the focus from constitutionalism and political thought to popular culture as revealed in sermons, slave narratives, poems, print media, and accounts of crowd actions and riots. Rather than treating these historical texts as straightforward documentary evidence, the literary critics and historians who contributed to this volume approach these sources creatively, exploring their production, reception, dissemination, and often ambiguous and multiple meanings.

J. Patrick Mullins, for instance, explores the historical evidence for the assertion made by many historians that a sermon by Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew led a mob to destroy the home of Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, in August 1765. Mullins convincingly argues that the evidence for that causal connection derives from the Tory supporters of Boston's Crown officials, thus casting doubt on its veracity. Mullins's innovative examination of the contextual and circumstantial evidence for both the sermon's performance and the riot cast further doubt on the causal link between sermon and riot. Though a Whig, Mayhew remained ambivalent about the crowd's actions, fearing that resistance might lead to civil war. Mullins, thus, considers Mayhew's Whig ideology from the perspective of 1765 rather than projecting those beliefs forward to 1776.

Other contributors similarly problematize the traditional divide between Whigs and Tories, Patriots and Loyalists. In her examination of the evidence for crowd actions during the Stamp Act crisis, which included newspaper reports and pamphlets, Molly Perry demonstrates that individuals within the crowds reflected various degrees of allegiance to the Patriot cause. Not every participant was a committed Whig and, moreover, people's participation and loyalties often shifted over time. In fact, the early crowd actions featured the participation of people across the social spectrum; but, Perry concludes, elite Whigs quickly seized control of the protests, as they began to emphasize "genteel participation and limited crowd involvement" (58). Just like individuals, not all written works fall neatly into Patriot or Loyalist categories. Gilbert L. Gigliotti explores "the purposely inconclusive dynamic" at play in "Fabula Neoteric vel Dialogus inter Leonem et Murem," a neo-Latin poem that appeared in a Boston newspaper during the Stamp Act crisis (85). Ambiguous in meaning, the poem featuring a dialogue between a royal lion and a mouse could serve the propaganda needs of either Loyalists or Patriots, depending on how contemporary readers interpreted...