Essential Workers

These three investigations of the American Revolution focus on civilians in military contexts. All were completed while Officer Brian Sicknick and George Floyd still breathed but speak loudly to present-day concerns. Serena Zabin and T. Cole Jones depict colonists’ and rebels’ complex and contradictory interactions with the Royal Army, while T.H. Breen documents their equally conflicted treatment of Loyalists. Jones’s Captives of Liberty challenges Americans’ widely shared belief in their ethical exceptionalism. Zabin’s Boston Massacre reveals men in uniform abusing Boston residents in a variety of ways, provoking an urban insurrection that exposed both sides’ conflicting loyalties. And Breen’s Will of the People is a meditation on civilians’ occasional resort to violence and their leaders’ less-frequent efforts to restrain them. All three authors paint their protagonists as torn between countervailing pressures to treat Loyalists and redcoats harshly or humanely. In this and other quandaries, Americans’ ambits were circumscribed by their fears for loved ones who had either joined or been captured by the enemy. In that sense as well as others, these three works should all be considered contributions to the history of emotion.

In the midst of the American War of Independence, Thomas Jefferson urged his fellow advocates for religious liberty to strike while the iron was hot. “From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia. “It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded.”¹ A wagon glides down a mountain road, even without an animal in the traces, and in normal times, the governing class glides right along, too. Only when it must “resort every moment to the people for support” will it attend to their demands. In all three books under review, ordinary Americans discovered their importance to the battle against Britain—but also that their influence was ephemeral. Numerous scholars have shown how eighteenth-century Native Americans and African Americans used their military value to Europeans and European Americans to obtain concessions from them. These three books focus, as Jefferson did, on free whites, documenting their still-greater success at getting paid for their work. It becomes clear that even for them, democratization was advanced less by the American Revolution’s ideals than by its leaders’ labor shortage.

Each of these three authors signed with a different kind of publisher. Captives of Liberty was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Zabin landed a coveted commercial contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And Breen’s Will of the People, the Goldilocks of the group, comes to us from the semi-commercial Harvard University Press. But all three authors make their arguments in the form of stories—an especially admirable trait in Jones, since this is his first book. So all three works are likely to have both academic and popular appeal.

In just 234 pages, Serena Zabin’s Boston Massacre: A Family History tells two distinct but related stories: one about female “camp followers” in the eighteenth-century Royal Army and the other about how the British women and men who occupied Boston from 1768 to 1770 got on with the locals. Zabin makes a powerful case that “camp follower” is a slur, but we early Americanists are probably stuck with it, along with other originally insulting terms, from Puritan, Quaker, Shaker, and Mormon to the Pontiac and Whiskey Rebellions (p. 3). She notes that the Royal Army routinely provided half rations to 60 women in every 600-man regiment, an implicit acknowledgement of their vital work as cooks, cleaners, and seamstresses...