The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America by T. H. Breen (review)

In The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, T. H. Breen examines "the day-to-day experience of resistance on the ground" of Americans "living in small, largely agricultural centers and in larger ports as well" (pp. 3, 4). By recapturing the voices of ordinary people, he seeks to explain "how they turned a colonial rebellion into a genuine revolution and in the process constructed a new political culture," and why that "revolution ended differently from most other revolutions that have shaped the modern world" (pp. 1, 2). His answer is that free ordinary white Americans avoided fear-stoked violent excesses because of their continuing commitment to the rudimentary rule of law—for other white people but not for Native Americans or African Americans.

Breen identifies four elements missing from conventional accounts of the Revolution. First is the crucial role of local committees of safety, through which ordinary people mobilized widespread resistance to Britain and later sustained the war effort in the face of eroding public morale. When the Continental Congress authorized the creation of these local committees in 1774, it "effectively ceded responsibility for policing political resistance to the small communities of America" (pp. 37–38). Second is the role of passions—anger and fear—in effective popular political resistance, which were balanced by restraints on unconstrained liberty, creating "a locally grounded political culture that defended freedom and order in the name of liberty" (p. 226). Third, ordinary people turned to other sources to justify revolt—newspapers, committee correspondence, and shared religious assumptions about political responsibilities—rather than to the abstract philosophical arguments elite founders employed. Fourth, most revolutionary experiences were profoundly local, forcing Patriots to seek local solutions to enforce order.

Breen also posits six "shifting emotional environments" among ordinary Americans between 1774 and 1784 (p. 15). First was a sense of rejection and marginalization within the empire, triggered by Parliament's harsh response to the Boston Tea Party, that led to widespread mobilization. Second was a search for assurance from local clergy that resistance had intellectual and moral legitimacy, which "resonated persuasively within their own communities" (p. 54). Third was fear fueled by the breakdown of British rule and the outbreak of partisan hostilities, leading people to define political allegiance in black and white terms and forcing them to take sides and punish perceived enemies for ideological crimes. Fourth was a search for justice as committees policed political dissent and mobilized resources while trying "to avoid the appearance of abandoning a rule of law," keeping the Revolution "from spinning out of control" (p. 125). Fifth was a sense of betrayal at the depreciation of paper currency, leading to futile attempts to control inflation by identifying and shaming unpatriotic speculators. Sixth was a brief desire at the close of the war for revenge against returning Loyalists who were protected by an unpopular peace treaty, but revenge quickly gave way to an acceptance of reconciliation as people turned to rebuilding their lives.

Readers may dispute the characterization of the Revolution as a relatively "tame affair" because Patriots "stopped short of instituting a reign of domestic terror of the sort that we associate with other revolutions" (pp. 87, 121). Although acknowledging that they used violence and threats of violence—including demonizing adversaries, denying their shared humanity, and banishing individuals suspected of disloyalty—to crush dissent, Breen maintains that they seldom pursued personal vendettas or resorted to physical punishments. From similar evidence, however, Holger Hoock reaches an opposite conclusion in Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth (New York, 2017). Breen also argues that ordinary people "crafted a more nuanced sense of the meaning of liberty" than did elites, prioritizing social order and community solidarity over selfish individualism (p. 224), but he does not address Michal Jan Rozbicki's argument that making ordinary "people the source of all authority did not cancel out...