Book Review: The American Revolution

The American Revolution:Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 1764-1776Gordon Wood, editorLibrary of America, 2015The Library of America follows up its fantastic two-volume boxed set covering the Constitution debates of the newborn United States with this equally-fantastic two-volume set dramatizing the crucial earlier debate: the intellectual firebrands in the colonies fighting a pamphlet war for the minds of the people on the question of rebellion itself. The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 1764-1776 forms the perfect bookend to The Debate on the Constitution, vividly bringing to life the unprecedented circumstances of America's birth. Ensconcing yourself with both these sets will do more for your immediate understanding of the American Revolution than the reading of a dozen histories on the subject.And just to cover that base, each set is introduced by one of the greatest living writers of those history books – in the former set's case, Bernard Bailyn, and here, Gordon Wood, who opens his brief remarks by painting a masterfully comprehensive and openly sympathetic case for the British, recent victors in the Seven Years War and sudden inheritors of a greatly expanded empire for which a good deal of money was now needed:

Confronted with this wartime debt and these rising military expenses, the British government naturally looked to the North American colonies for new sources of revenue. After all, it seemed, the war had been fought in large part for their benefit. And with returning British soldiers bearing tales of American prosperity, the government presumed that the colonists could easily afford to help out the mother country in its time of need.

In fact, Wood makes such a sympathetic case for this hugely expanded and awkwardly adjusting British Empire that were he to repeat it in less polysyllabic terms in certain bars in South Boston, he'd likely face some variation of wedgies, wet willies, and the dreaded rear admiral. And yet he's not wrong: what the British Empire was asking of its distant colonies was, by any previously used metric, only fair. Many an opinion-maker in London remarked that the agitators among the colonists were using these new taxes and duties as an excuse to cause trouble and stir up a largely-indifferent public, and many of those agitators get their time on stage in the two volumes of this set – John Dickinson, Stephen Hopkins, James Otis, Joseph Warren, Charles Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and of course Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense is given in full (but not, alas, Samuel Adams, without whose dogged persuasion most of these others would have found something else to do with their time). In fiery and often spellbinding prose, these men tell a very different story from the British conception of a “mother country in its time of need.” Silas Downer, writing in 1768, makes a typically jesuitical case for these impost measures being the end of all life as we know it:

The common people of Great Britain very liberally give and grant away the property of the Americans without their consent, which if yielded to by us must fix us in the lowest bottom of slavery: For if they can take away one penny from us against our wills, they can take all. If they have such power over our properties they must have some proportionable power over our persons; and from hence it will follow, that they can demand and take away our lives, whensoever it shall be agreeable to their sovereign wills and pleasure.

These two volumes contain dozens of passionate sustained arguments on legal and social issues that would all be settled ultimately with sword-thrusts and musket fire. On the 4^th of July millions of Americans gather on riverbanks and in town squares and at restaurants and barbecues in order to celebrate the fruits of the independence these and other pamphlets won, and it can be safely assumed that virtually none of those Americans have read the documents collected with such care in these two Library of America sets. But once the fireworks and feasting are over, they really should.