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  • Not Your Grandpa's Military History
  • Serena Zabin (bio)
Aaron Sullivan, The Disaffected: Britain's Occupation of Philadelphia During the American Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 304 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.
Rachel B. Herrmann, No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. 296 pp. Notes and index. $24.95.

Military history is making a comeback in the study of the American Revolution. The former reserve of armchair generals and military officers manqués has become a hot (or at least warm) topic again, as scholars have recently turned their attention to armies, occupations, fighting, and encampments. Both of the books under review here grapple with the question of what it meant to experience the American Revolution in physical, even visceral, ways. Intellectual questions of liberty are beside the point; struggles for power were both personal and material.

The decisions of generals and the movement of regiments only begin to define the meaning of warfare in these two studies. Following Michael McDonnell's call to take the Revolutionary War more seriously, both scholars treat it as an ugly and cruel conflict distinct from the concurrent political revolution.1 Yet the war that each book describes is so different in its places, peoples, chronologies, and scales that it is hard to believe that it is the same conflict. The juxtaposition of these books reveals more than the various elements of a complicated and wide-ranging eight-year war; it also helps to explain the implications of the ways that we tell the story of the American Revolution.

Aaron Sullivan's The Disaffected studies the occupation of Philadelphia by British troops from 1777 to 1778. While those committed to the Continental Cause fled the city as British troops approached, thousands of others, perhaps three quarters of the total population, stayed in Philadelphia, waiting for the British troops with a combination of hope and fear that managed to displease both sides. General Washington and General Howe were equally dismayed at how little support they found among the Pennsylvanians; Washington had hoped that the seat of the Continental Congress would stand firm against the [End Page 507] British invasion. Philadelphians, however, allowed the Redcoats to take the city without firing a shot, yet declined to welcome them with open arms. Those who stayed in Philadelphia cautiously tried to keep from offending anyone. But why should they, or we, assume that conflict always divides people into two camps? The claim that "we assume all Americans must be classified as either "'Patriots'" or "'Loyalists'" (p. 7) has been untenable for at least half a century now.2 As a frame for Sullivan's book, it is a straw man.

Many Quaker civilians of course resolutely tried to remain neutral. Wealthy urban women like Elizabeth Drinker (whom Sullivan characterizes as the individual best suited "to represent the story of the occupation," p. 6) watched her husband, who refused to commit to one side or the other, and many people like him marched out of the city. Still others, particularly the farmers outside Philadelphia's limits, found themselves and their produce ravaged by "foraging" troops. As Sung Bok Kim described 30 years ago, Westchester farmers in a similar situation tried to keep their heads down and simply hoped for survival.3 Sullivan describes the Whitalls, a family of Quaker farmers whose farm south of Philadelphia was repeatedly raided by British and Continental soldiers, as doing "what they could to avoid engagement with the politics and violence of the imperial contest" (p. 193). Indifference, even more than fear, seemed to define the Whitalls' politics.

Why did some people refuse to take sides? Sullivan defines the disaffected as those whose "defining feature was less loyalty to than a lack of support or affection for either party in the dispute." (p. 7). But refusing to choose a side is itself a choice. Sullivan often suggests that economic self-interest drove decisions. The shifting fortunes of war "prompted disaffected Pennsylvanians to once again reevaluate which political and commercial choices offered the most peaceful and profitable future for themselves and their families" (p. 177). The real reason, however, that no...

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