Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution
The "People's History" movement attempts to correct mainstream historiography's distorted emphasis on society's thin upper crust: the Kings, Queens, Presidents and Generals around whom conventional historical narratives center. As Howard Zinn writes in the preface to the series of which this is one volume,
Not surprisingly, as the lens shifts the basic narratives change as well. The history of men and women of all classes, colors, and cultures reveals an astonishing degree of struggle and independent political action. Everyday people played complicated historical roles, and they developed highly sophisticated and often very different political ideas from the people who ruled them. Sometimes their accomplishments left tangible traces; other times, the traces are invisible but no less real. They left their mark on our institutions, our folkways and language, on our political habits and vocabulary. We are only now beginning to excavate this multifaceted history.
Contributing to this excavation, Raphael presents a bottoms-up view of the American Revolution emphasizing the documentable motives of rank-and-file participants. Who were the people who volunteered to become common soldiers, in the Tory ranks as well as the Patriot? Why were they motivated to volunteer? What kinds of opportunities and risks did the Revolution present to African-American slaves? To Native Americans? To women, of contrasting social classes? How did these people influence the outcome of the conflict? Raphael answers these questions with vivid documentary evidence from letters, journals, newspapers, and other primary sources.
The narrative which emerges is incomplete, sometimes contradictory, and often disturbing. That Patriots practiced terrorism and torture on a wide scale is usually downplayed in mainstream narration; Raphael underscores it relentlessly. That the Revolution was also the first American civil war is demonstrated forcefully.
Raphael's major merit is probably his knack for conveying complexity. There are no neat divisions into Patriots and Tories. Loyalties divide communities and families. Individual decisions are made from desperation, for money, or because the alternatives are worse. The tenants of Patriot landowners become Loyalists from resistance to the oppressor closest to home. The Green Mountain Boys split into Patriot and Tory wings based on conflicting appraisals of the most promising strategy for winning separation for Vermont from the State of New York. Individuals and groups switch sides based on immediate need and self-interest. While there are exceptions, Raphael's world is considerably lacking in explicitly political motivation.
Raphael's weakness is probably lack of a systematically-articulated political sociology, by which I mean, a sense of class dynamics in the interplay of events and motivations. Raphael's focus is on the lower orders. But his emphasis is on individual experiences, not collective ones. What became of defeated Tories? Were they expropriated en mass? Did they flee to Canada in significant enough numbers that we can speak of their destruction as a cultural force within American society? These are not Raphael's questions, and their absence seems to leave the individuals he documents adrift in random motion through history. The fact that history, as distinct from individual destinies, isn't random, seems lost in this story.
People's History is a principled attempt to turn the dominant paradigm of historiography on its head. Combined with a rigorous appraisal of class dynamics the results might seem less arbitrary.
-- Mark Phillips, 2/4/03
