Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society by Vaughn Scribner (review)

Vaughn Scribner’s Inn Civility argues that the American Revolution was spurred not by taxes or concerns about liberty but by urban elites’ anxieties about the inferiority of their provincial society when compared to England and Scotland. These anxieties were channeled into resistance to the Empire’s new taxes starting in 1765, leading ultimately to American independence. The Revolution was caused by cultural concerns that grew out of both the promise of urban taverns and coffeehouses, and those same institutions’ failure to achieve elite colonists’ aspirations.

Scribner builds on a growing body of work that connects the urban social experience of such public places as taverns and coffeehouses to broader questions of social order and political mobilization during the crisis leading up to the American Revolution. Many books, including Benjamin Carp’s book Rebels Rising (2007), have also made a case for the centrality of the tavern and other physical spaces for mobilization. Scribner moves the conversation forward by linking midcentury concerns about polite society among provincial elites in British North America’s cities to the Revolution itself.

Midcentury urban elites on the margins of the civilized world sought to prove to themselves and to their counterparts across the Atlantic that they were equal. This meant demonstrating that they were as “civilized” as their metropolitan peers. The development of urban coffeehouses and taverns was part of midcentury elites’ effort to refine themselves and others. New coffeehouses and taverns created, ideally, set apart spaces that were finely furnished for gentle people. But, unfortunately, these spaces were never quite as cloistered as they were supposed to have been. Would-be gentlemen consistently found themselves forced to share rooms—and even tables—with the unrefined. In this sense, despite efforts to produce “civil society,” gentlemen consistently interacted with working-class whites, women, and enslaved and free African Americans in “uncivil society.”

Inn Civility contains amazing descriptions of what it was like for a person—gentle or otherwise—to enter into a mid-eighteenth-century coffee-house or tavern. Drawing largely on elite sources such as the writings of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, and from secondary sources by other scholars, Scribner paints a beautiful picture of how urban taverns brought together a cross section of urban society, thus serving as sites for reinforcing, as well as undermining, the ideal colonial social order. To elites, public spaces ought to reproduce the hierarchy of society, with of course themselves at the top. In practice, status was flexible and uncertain, and deference never what it might have been. To elites, this meant not just that colonial cities were not as civilized as London or Edinburgh but also that their efforts to appear as refined as the British were consistently undermined by their fellow citizens.

Scribner argues that these anxieties and failures were at the heart of the American Revolution. To Scribner, “the long-smoldering inconsistencies of elitist colonists’ civilizing mission provided the perfect tinder to set fire to the Stamp Act resistance” (112). There are two aspects to this claim. First, building on Jack Greene, T. H. Breen, and others, Scribner argues that despite their best efforts to create a British society in North America, elite colonists realized that the British elite would never grant them equality. “No matter how ardently they participated in the various threads of imperial thought and culture,” Scribner writes, “the British metropole did not see them as equals but rather as provincial upstarts on the fringes of a global empire” (166). The Revolution, then, was the product of cultural, rather than social or political, causes.

At the same time, Scribner tackles the long-standing debate, dating back to before Edmund Morgan and Helen Morgan’s classic The Stamp Act Crisis (1953), over how elites mobilized middling and working-class colonists. Here, Scribner argues, the “inconsistencies” of colonial polite society—namely the inability of elites to create taverns and coffeehouses that were truly refined spaces—allowed those...