Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State by Christopher R. Pearl (review)

This important book breaks new ground on an old topic: the origins of the American Revolution. Using eighteenth-century Pennsylvania as a case study, Christopher R. Pearl argues that one of the main causes of the American Revolution was how poorly the British administered the colony, creating widespread antipathy toward British rule even before Parliament enacted infamous policies like the Stamp, Townshend, and Coercive Acts. In what amounts to a new entry in the “Imperial School” of interpretation, Pearl shows how the imperial government in colonial Pennsylvania failed to meet the basic needs of its inhabitants. Those failures came on multiple fronts, mostly through a lack of government institutions: law enforcement, judges, courts, and land offices. Even when the institutions were present, they tended to operate in ways that benefited the local elite at the expense of ordinary citizens. The result was a population primed for revolution and ready to embrace a stronger government that protected their communities, which, as Pearl demonstrates, is exactly what the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution gave them—not just because it was more democratic, but because it created a bigger, stronger, and more locally active government.

The strength of this book is Pearl’s extensive local-level, archival research. Pearl digs deep in court records and petition files to show how many ordinary Pennsylvanians were dissatisfied with their government prior to start of the imperial showdown. During most of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvanians complained that there weren’t enough courts, judges, sheriffs, or constables in most counties and that the ones that existed were concentrated in county seats and long-settled townships, many miles away from where many of the county’s inhabitants lived. William Penn’s ideas of governance relied on non-governmental institutions, like churches, picking up the slack by acting as agents of social control. But there weren’t enough of those either. The result left large numbers of people without any kind of meaningful government presence, leading to long and expensive trips to courthouses, where few citizens could expect justice in a legal system overwhelmed with a backlog of cases. This meager government presence produced rampant crime, with roving gangs and powerful families terrorizing communities with wanton lawbreaking. Time and again, Pennsylvanians petitioned for redress only to have requests for more courts, judges, and constables rejected by colonial governors, the king’s ministers, and the king himself.

These difficulties form a crucial backdrop to the rise of the revolutionary movement in Pennsylvania, which, according to Pearl, was more about ineffective local governance than it was about new imperial policies enacted after the Seven Years’ War. As Pearl puts it, “The coming of the revolution was the result of a cataclysmic breakdown after a long period of crisis encapsulating local grievances and struggles, which was exacerbated by imperial measures that gave oppositional focus to a large swath of the colonial population” (129).

With independence, the leaders of Pennsylvania’s revolution made improving local governance a central part of their efforts. Pearl shifts our attention away from the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution’s democratic provisions to examine how that document beefed up county and township administration, local law enforcement, courts, and judges. He then shows how state assemblies under the new charter further increased the reach of government, bringing it closer to “the people” by creating new counties and increasing the number of state officials at the township level. In all these ways, the revolutionary government made exactly the kinds of changes that many Pennsylvanians had been demanding for the better part of a century.

As strong a case as Pearl makes, his argument has some big holes in it that are largely a product of ignoring interpretations and evidence that don’t fit his thesis. The biggest problem is that the Revolution was often strongest in the parts of Pennsylvania where the institutions of colonial government were concentrated. The county seats (which...