Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution by Donald F. Johnson (review)

At the heart of Donald F. Johnson’s new book on military rule in revolutionary America is a deceptively simple thesis: Revolution is not an event but a process. In Johnson’s telling, the Revolution did not occur in the minds of the people prior to Lexington and Concord, whatever John Adams would later argue. It instead occurred over time as the implications of military occupation in six port cities—Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah—reconfigured popular perceptions of crown legitimacy. In analyzing the slow withering of royal authority in these cities, Johnson has produced an engaging and thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of the War of Independence. Thoroughly researched and presented with careful attention to the ambiguities of military rule, this is a book that helps us understand why the crown failed to subdue the rebellious colonies.

Occupied America sets out to challenge older readings of revolutionary loyalties, which tended to see allegiance as something that was constructed through popular participatory politics in the years before 1776. With the symbols and functionaries of royal authority exiled or intimidated into silence—so this reading goes—the revolutionaries set about the process of raising the men and matériel necessary to ensure the independence that had already been achieved. Johnson instead turns to more recent investigations of political authority, popular mobilization, and violence to understand how crown legitimacy withered over time through the experiences of living under military occupation.

The cities explored in Occupied America are fascinating places. Johnson offers an array of individual stories that speak volumes to the complexity of social interactions in the occupied zones. Occupied cities were locations where British officers practiced elite socialization and displayed their gentility and refinement. They were places where young women were able to “break free from patriarchal family structures” (92) and where the enslaved rallied in the hopes of liberation. But they were also dangerous places. Cities were a world turned upside down where the “ever-present tension between reinvention and ruin lent cities a frenetic, almost desperate character” (81). They were localities of massive social instability where starvation, disease, sexual assault, and death made the lives of some of the most marginal terrifyingly precarious.

It was also within these cities that crown legitimacy collapsed. Structured around a declensionist narrative, Occupied America explains how, at first, the British moved to establish cooperative civil–military relationships and made vigorous efforts to “give Americans a stake in military rule” (58). As a result, large numbers of urban dwellers collaborated with British military authorities. But the imposition of harsh and overcrowded conditions and the precarious position of an occupying force dependent on supplies from the sea meant that few people could be made to believe that the occupation offered a path toward security and stability. The book is at its best when explaining how even those who supported the British regime were forced to circumvent it in order to survive. Communication with family and friends in rebel-held areas not only maintained pre-war contacts but became an important survival strategy, especially after Yorktown when a British withdrawal from the cities became a probability. Johnson’s careful reading of “opportunism” (138) as a perfectly understandable reaction to the precariousness of occupied life—and the complex ways in which fluid notions of identity and allegiance played out against a backdrop of fickle royal protections—is wonderfully engaging and highly convincing.

Where more work could have been done is in the theoretical structures upon which the book’s fascinating story plays out. Occupied America is under-theorized and tends to use highly charged terms such as “collaborators” and “occupation” without adequate discussion. While the opening pages suggest that use will be made of comparative approaches to military occupation in other times and places, little of it is evident in the text. Occupied America’s frequent...