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Reviewed by:
  • Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania by Kenneth Owen, and: Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830 by Peter E. Gilmore
  • Judith Ridner (bio)
Keywords

Pennsylvania, Irish, Immigration, Presbyterians, Community, Protestantism, Ethnicity

Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania. By Kenneth Owen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 224. Cloth, $85.00.)
Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830. By Peter E. Gilmore. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Pp. 248. Cloth, $ 29.95.)

For at least fifty years, historians of colonial, revolutionary, and early republican America have characterized Pennsylvania as a place where ethnic, religious, and racial pluralism bred a particularly contentious and competitive brand of interest-group politics that foreshadowed later developments in modern America. As the story goes, William Penn's policies of toleration and his recruitment of Protestant immigrants set the stage for Pennsylvania to become a heterogeneous colony where different groups jockeyed for power. Then came the Revolution, which only intensified the competition as various ethno-religious minority groups, particularly Irish Presbyterians, rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the termination of the Penn family's proprietorship and the withdrawal of Quaker pacifists from government. The actions of these new leaders, which included the drafting of a radically egalitarian state constitution and the imposition of the repressive Test Acts, brought nearly two decades of turmoil that finally ended in the 1790s when moderates spear-headed a backlash that yanked state politics back to the center.

Kenneth Owen and Peter Gilmore take these premises as their starting points. But instead of emphasizing the chaos that ethnic infighting wrought in the state during and after the Revolution, they offer community as a new paradigm for understanding this history. Specifically, they investigate how Pennsylvanians forged communities as either a philosophical construct to promote participation, advance the collective interest, or regulate government, or how they harnessed their Old World [End Page 397] communal values to unite and sustain themselves during times of change. Indeed, whether it was Owen's activists who constructed a radical political community to promote the people's interest, or Gilmore's Irish Presbyterian immigrants who employed their shared ethno-religious identity as a conservative bulwark to shield themselves from assimilation, community—and not class or race—these authors argue, best explains Pennsylvania's development between 1770 and 1830.

With a focus on state politics from the Revolution to Fries's Rebellion, Owen traces the rise and persistence of a radical political community in Pennsylvania. This community, a conceptual one that united political leaders with the ordinary people, grew from the participatory politics of the 1770s and the egalitarian notions of participatory citizenship that Pennsylvanians codified in the state constitution of 1776. This "radical manifesto" (19), he says, enshrined a notion that government was supposed to serve "the people" by securing their interests and being directly responsive to their needs. Yet, achieving this ideal was neither an easy nor peaceful process because Pennsylvanians held competing notions of how government should serve and protect "the people's" interests. Political community thus fostered an especially intense and sometimes violent brand of activism as "the people" mobilized themselves, often through extra-legal organizational channels at the local level, to express their will. Most important to his argument, these patterns of popular mobilization did not end when moderates rewrote the state's constitution in 1790.

Pennsylvania's revolutionary and early national politics are hardly new topics for scholars. And Owen's book treads much familiar ground, from its coverage of the debates surrounding the state and federal constitutions, including the 1788 Carlisle riot, to the Whiskey and Fries's rebellions. Yet, he reframes our understanding of this turbulent period and challenges longstanding interpretations of the triumph of a conservative counter-revolution with new research or novel re-readings of oft-cited texts. By flipping this model of counter-revolution on its head, Owen demonstrates the persistence of popular activism and explains how notions of government accountability to the people set the stage for a state government that would be responsive to the entire community over the long term, regardless of whether that government was led by radicals, moderates, or conservatives.

Gilmore, by contrast...

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