Chapter 13. Internal Revolutions

As avidly as people from all strata of American society united to fight the British for independence, many were also fighting to alter their society at home—to eliminate political privilege and create a polity that lived up to the ideals of liberty and popular sovereignty enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Backwoods yeomen, commonly abetted by the poor stratum of “mechanics” in the large towns and cities, pitted themselves against plantation aristocrats, Hudson valley patroons, merchants large and small, land speculators, shippers, landlords of all sorts, well-to-do artisans, and an emerging financial stratum that profiteered from the war and from the deflation of the currency. If broad republican ideals were “self-evident” to Whigs and patriots generally, they were by no means in agreement about what kind of republic would replace the royal administration. Indeed, patriots such as Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, James Duane, John Dickenson, and Robert Morris could easily have become loyalists, so abhorrent were the “mob” and “democracy” in their eyes.

In some provinces more than others, serious clashes emerged within the patriot party itself—between radical patriots and conservative Whigs. The radicals asked a crucial question: Would the thirteen new independent republics retain politically powerful elites that might well become bastions of privilege, corruption, and even tyranny in their own right? Or would these republics be based on majority rule by the broadest possible male citizenry? The conservatives, on the other hand, asked: Would the new independent republics contain governmental “checks and balances” to prevent the “mob” from gaining power—and keep an unchecked majority from forming a tyranny in its own right? Would the independent republics protect large landholdings and mercantile wealth against “the people,” who might try to undermine privilege?

NEW YORK: RADICAL PATRIOTS AND CONSERVATIVE WHIGS

These differences long predated the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. New York, as we have seen, had a history of clashes between the privileged and the powerless during the colonial period, and in the prerevolutionary decade the lines of internal tension were redrawn in even sharper terms during the struggle over the Stamp Act. To be sure, the stamp tax generated wide opposition in all social strata, among merchants as well as artisans in the cities, and among landholders as well as yeomen farmers in the countryside. In fact, it was merchants who had originally formed the Sons of Liberty in New York to oppose the Act, and merchants and landowners had even encouraged popular demonstrations to exhibit colonial solidarity in opposition to the hated measure. But when demonstrations became riots, in which artisans and mechanics threw bricks at British forts where the stamps were stored and hung the lieutenant-governor in effigy, the upper classes became deeply alarmed. “This sort of thing brought men of property to a realization of the consequences of stirring up the mob,” Carl Becker observed.

A little rioting was well enough, so long as it was directed to the one end of bringing the English government to terms. But when the destruction of property began to be relished for its own sake by those who had no property, and the cry of Liberty came loudest from those who were without political privilege, it was time to call a halt. These men might not cease their shouting when purely British restrictions were removed. The ruling classes were in fact beginning to see that “liberty and no taxation” was an argument that might be used against themselves as well as against the home government. The doctrine of self-government, which for so many years they had used to justify resistance to colonial governors, was a two-edged sword that cut into the foundations of class privilege within the colony as well as into the foundations of royal authority without. Dimly at first, but with growing clearness, the privileged classes were beginning to realize the most difficult problem which the Revolution was to present to them: the problem of maintaining their privileges against royal encroachment from above without losing them by popular encroachments from below. It was this dilemma which gave life and character to the conservative faction.[182]

When the wealthier New York opponents of the Stamp Act felt that resistance had eluded their control and become too radical, opposition to British imperial policy divided sharply into radical and conservative factions. Thereafter, the wealthy and established merchants, the lawyers, and the Anglican clergy in the province began to resist the king’s actions by cautious, moderate, and strictly legal means, forming their own separate party in order to do so. In 1770 they unilaterally abandoned the resistance policy of nonimportation of goods that the colonists had agreed upon as a means of resisting the Townshend Act, thereby essentially ending the boycott in the province.

In rural areas of New York, where the patroon system flourished, the large landholders were no less frightened by the specter of popular rule than were the merchants in the city. And their fears were more than justified. The tenant farmers who worked their ever-larger baronial estates had long suffered under patroon rule and their resentments ran high. The rents the tenants were required to pay for their leaseholds were excessive, indeed, in some cases, they were obliged to pay quasi-feudal dues. When they sought recompense in court, justice was often meted out by a judge appointed by the landlord. Although many tenant farmers could meet the forty-shilling qualification for voting, they were reluctant to exercise this right in their own interests because voting occurred in public in the province—and people who dared to vote had to do so viva voce. Thus, a vote that was cast against the pleasure of the landholder upon whom the voter was precariously dependent could cost him his leasehold or worse.

In 1766, the year after the Stamp Act riots, tenant farmers in Westchester and Dutchess Counties finally refused to pay rents until landlords converted their tentative leaseholds into permanent freeholds. The landlords responded by evicting the tenants, who then took up arms, driving out local officials and smashing up the Poughkeepsie jail. In the hope that the Sons of Liberty in New York would rally to their support, they then threatened to march on the city and burn down Pierre Van Cortlandfs home. But the merchant-dominated organization, instead of acknowledging the commonality between its own demands for liberty and those of the oppressed rural poor, joined the landholders in urging royal troops to suppress the insurrection being waged by the rural “levelers.” Long after the royal troops obligingly put down the revolt, the tenant farmers harbored a deep bitterness against the city’s wealthy Sons of Liberty. In turn, the landholders either joined the fairly conservative Whigs in the city—among them the Van Cortlandts, Livingstons, De Lanceys, and Philipses—or else they became outright Tories and supported the British cause.

Meanwhile, in the city itself the younger lawyers and merchants, led by Isaac Sears and Alexander McDougall, were forming their own popular movement, and their radical agitation caused consternation among the urban elites. After the Boston Tea Party and the closing of the Port of Boston, the arrogantly conservative Whig, Gouverneur Morris, wrote in a letter on May 20,

These sheep, simple as they are, cannot be gulled as heretofore. In short, there is no ruling them, and now, to leave the metaphor, the heads of the mobility grow dangerous to the gentry, and how to keep them down is the question. While they correspond with the other colonies, call and dismiss popular assemblies, make resolves to bind the consciences of the rest of mankind, bully poor printers, and exert with full force all their other tribunitial powers, it is impossible to curb them.

Morris went on to disgorge his contempt for the popular movement:

The mob begin to think and to reason. Poor reptiles! It is with them a vernal morning; they are struggling to cast off their winter’s slough, they bask in the sunshine, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it The gentry begin to fear this.... I see, and I see it with fear and trembling, that if the disputes with Great Britain continue, we shall be under the worst of all possible dominions; we shall be under the domination of a riotous mob.[183]

And yet Morris favored independence from Britain. Apparently, conservative Whigs such as he realized that they would have to join the resistance if they hoped to dominate and control its trajectory. They set about to capture the organization by running fifty-one of their own nominees for a Committee of Correspondence, of whom many were elected; but when the time came for the committee to oversee the election of delegates to the Continental Congress, a Committee of Merchants tried to skew the results in its own favor. It was prevented from doing so only by an alert Committee of Mechanics, composed largely of artisans and journeymen, which acted as a watchdog on the activities of elite committees. When other provinces tried to organize a nonimportation boycott following the blockade of Boston, the New York elites were able to delay their participation until the Continental Congress definitively adopted a nonimportation policy in the fall of 1774.

In January 1776 the New York Committee of Mechanics enthusiastically welcomed the publication of Paine’s Common Sense and demanded that the province’s delegates to the Continental Congress be elected at large and instructed to vote for independence. A few months later, in May, while the Provincial Congress was establishing the procedure for a new state government, the Mechanics became alarmed by a provision that accepted whatever constitution the new Congress prepared without ratification by the people of New York. Calling for sovereignty of “the people at large,” the Mechanics insisted that “inhabitants at large exercise the right which God has given them, in common with all men, to judge whether it be consistent with their interest to accept, or reject, a Constitution framed for that State of which they are members.” This, they argued, is “the birthright of every man.”[184] The Mechanics, in effect, demanded a popular ratification of the state constitution, but by this time the conservatives had gained control of the Provincial Congress and dominated the revolutionary government. The Mechanics’ demands were haughtily rebuffed, and it may well be that “only the timely invasion of Long Island by the British saved the aristocrats from a political crisis of an explosive character.”[185] A genuine class conflict existed in New York, which the Revolution stoked up into a virtual class war.

THE CAROLINAS: BACKCOUNTRY LOYALISM

Unlike the tenant farmers in rural New York, yeomen farmers in North Carolina easily obtained their own freeholds, but their economic independence was not accompanied by political freedom. Although two-thirds of the population lived in the backcountry on the eve of the Revolution, small farmers were drastically underrepresented in the Assembly, which the numerically smaller coastal elites completely controlled. Nor was there any tradition in the South of voters instructing their representatives on how to vote, as was the case in New England. Local government, too, in North Carolina was egregiously unrepresentative. Not only were there no town meetings in the province, but the tidewater aristocracy had constructed a system in which all political authority at the local level rested with officials in the county courts, such as magistrates, clerks, registers of deeds, sheriffs, and constables, with the result that people who had differences to resolve were obliged to travel to distant courts to transact their business, especially in North Carolina, where most county authorities were appointed by the governor.

The county authorities routinely overcharged ordinary people for their services and formed what amounted to a scandalous extortion ring. Justices of the peace demanded exorbitant fees for the dizzying array of services they concocted, while the sheriffs embezzled part of the tax revenues they collected, sometimes charging more than the required legal amount. When a farmer was finally charged with greater fees than he could afford to pay, his land was expropriated and sold off for a pittance to friends of the courthouse gang. In one hypothetical case that epitomized the farmers’ plight,

a man ... has had execution levied on him by a merchant for a five pound debt secured by a judgment note. Personal effects to the amount of the judgment are seized, but the poor man’s troubles are not over. For entering the judgment on the court docket and issuing the execution—“the work of one long minute”— the justice of the peace demands forty-one shillings and five pence. Unable to pay the fee, the unfortunate debtor is confronted with the alternative of a distraint or twenty-seven days work on the justice’s plantation. But even after he has worked out his debt to the justice, the poor man’s account is not settled. “Stay, neighbor ... you must not go home. You are not half done yet. There is the damned lawyer’s mouth to stop.... You empowered him to confess that you owed five pounds, and you must pay him thirty shillings for that or else go to work nineteen days for that pickpocket...; and when that is done you must work as many days for the sheriff for his trouble [in levying execution and selling the debtor’s goods], and then you can go home to see your living wrecked and tore to pieces to satisfy your merchant.”[186]

The Regulator revolt of 1768–70 erupted largely in retaliation against this overt extortion ring. In 1768 the sheriff of Orange County in North Carolina announced that rather than go around the county to collect taxes, he would go to only five places in the county, to which the farmers were obliged, often at considerable distances, to travel to pay him. Those who failed to make the journey would be penalized. This announcement, coupled with the news that the Assembly had just allotted £15,000 to build a new gubernatorial palace, was the last straw. Farmers mobilized and formed “associations”—a militia term— to “regulate” or reform the system, flatly refusing to pay any more taxes until the courthouse gangs provided an open public accounting of county finances—a demand that the magistrates duly declined.

Having endured all they could take, Regulators in 1770 invaded the county seat of Orange County, removed the justices, and simply tried cases on the docket themselves, whereupon the Assembly passed a riot act, forbidding gatherings of ten or more persons. If those taking part in a gathering of ten or more refused to disperse when ordered, they could be shot outright. When the Regulators protested, the governor organized a military force whose officers came from the gentry but whose unruly rank-and-file refused to follow, agreeing to do so only upon the offer of a bounty. They inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Regulators at the town of Alamance, due mainly to the lack of competent leadership among the latter.

Whereas some of the tidewater gentry who had fought at Alamance went on to become major Whig leaders in the province, many backcountry farmers, in turn, became intensely pro-British. Others who would have favored the patriot cause raised demands for democratic reform, such as the transfer of county courts to eighteen “selectmen” elected by white manhood suffrage; still others demanded an unrestricted suffrage for all freemen and the popular election of clerks and sheriffs. None of these demands, however, came to anything; if, in later years, the state constitution ultimately incorporated some Regulator demands, it failed to inaugurate responsible local government. The old courthouse cabals remained intact, and justices of the peace in North Carolina were still appointed by the governor.

In Virginia, the seaboard planters and the yeomen in the interior waged a continual struggle over the social order that would emerge from the Revolution, while in South Carolina, as the Beards observe.

slave-owners of the lowlands and merchants of the towns engaged in almost daily contests with mechanics from the shops and farmers from the back country.... So threatening in fact was the menace—a group of “levelers” bent on overthrowing the aristocracy of “wealth and talents”—that the notables of the state had to exercise considerable skill in saving their privileges and prestige. Across the border in Georgia the social battle between conservatives and radicals was carried to such a pitch that in a moment of bitter rivalry the patriot party could boast of two legislatures and two executives.[187]

BACKCOUNTRY PATRIOTS

No less intransigent were backcountry farmers in Maryland and Pennsylvania, where radicals found that the wealthy elites who constituted the Whig resistance moved too slowly against the British, delaying or even impeding the struggle for independence. Rather than siding with the British, as in North Carolina, the backcountry farmers used the opportunity presented by the Revolution to break with the established system of political privilege and, arms in hand, acquire long-sought rights.

Before the rupture with Britain, Maryland’s colonial assembly had consisted of large landowners and slaveholding tobacco planters, whose base was in the capital, Annapolis, and generally in Ann Arundel County. But more and more of the settlers moving into northwestern Maryland were Scottish Presbyterian yeomen farmers, differing from the established Episcopalian gentry in both ethnicity and religion. Urban support for these farmers came from the city of Baltimore, filled with its restless population of mechanics, whom the Maryland Assembly disdainfully refused to grant a city charter that would have given it even a modicum of self-government. From 1729 to 1786, Baltimore was governed by commissioners who were picked by the Assembly. Not a single local official was elected.

With the advent of the Revolution, Baltimoreans seized the opportunity to strike a blow against the Assembly. During the Stamp Act crisis, members of the Mechanical Company formed the core of the Sons of Liberty in Baltimore. As we have seen, the strongest impetus for local democratization came from the militia: specifically, the Baltimore Mechanical Volunteer Company, whose privates were electing their officers in 1775. The militia was also the most important institution in politicizing the mechanics. When citizens of Baltimore subsequently chose Committees of Inspection and Observation to enforce the Continental Association, they created an embryonic municipal government and for the first time provided the townspeople with a taste of home rule.

But in Annapolis, the Whig leaders who controlled the provincial revolutionary government were conservatives—indeed, some even wanted a reconciliation with Britain—and, led by wealthy planters and lawyers such as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, they differed little in social status and wealth from the royal administration. These conservative Whigs made up the Baltimore and Annapolis Committees of Correspondence and the provincial Council of Safety, who called the provincial conventions and dominated their sessions. As a result, a furious patriot General Lee was obliged to turn to the radical Baltimore committee—made up mainly of artisans—to challenge the Provincial Committee and oppose the governor’s barely disguised support for the British.

Nor did the backcountry farmers of Maryland become loyalists. Although they had been grossly underrepresented in the colonial assembly and their resentments might well have inclined them toward the British, many of their local committees issued resolves in favor of independence. Not only were these formers strong patriots, but they had little patience with the machinations of Whigs in the Provincial Convention, where debates were often kept secret from the public. The most decisive factor that seems to have rallied the Baltimore mechanics and backwoods farmers against these oligarchs, however, was the feet that the Maryland Whigs seemed to fovor a reconciliation with Britain. The Frederick County committee for the mechanics and farmers bluntly declared that the Provincial Convention was “incompetent to the exigencies of the province and dangerous to our liberties.”[188] Not until June 28,1776, under strong pressure from Baltimore radicals and backcountry patriots, did the convention instruct Maryland’s delegates to the Continental Congress to vote for independence.

As to the new convention that was to be held on August 1 in order to draft a state constitution, the backcountry militia declared that whether they met the property qualification or not, they had the right to vote for delegates since they had “armed in defense of the country.” Although this principle guided the Frederick County voters in electing their delegates, the convention refused to seat them. It finally adopted a constitution that was based on the typically conservative “checks and balances” model that preserved the political privileges of the elites. But in 1777, the Baltimore radicals formed the extralegal countervailing Baltimore Whig Club to express their dissatisfaction with the conservatism of the new state government and vigorously pressed it to harry Tories from the land.

PENNSYLVANIA DEMOCRACY

Undoubtedly the most radical and, for a time, the most successful internal revolution in the American provinces occurred in Pennsylvania, where backwoods yeomen fought furiously not only to achieve independence from Britain but to take political power from the Quaker and other oligarchs in Philadelphia. While the conflict between America and Britain overshadowed internal conflicts in many of the other colonies, in Pennsylvania internal conflicts ultimately even superseded the conflict for independence in importance. The Revolution radically transformed Pennsylvanians from parochial and docile freemen who bowed to their cultural and social betters into cosmopolitan, contentious citizens. More than any other province, Pennsylvania was torn by a genuine class war.

On paper, Pennsylvania’s charter of 1701, granted by William Penn, had provided the colony with a relatively democratic government: annual elections, an upper house of only limited powers, and an assembly with a wide range of legislative powers. In the backcountry, moreover, western Pennsylvanians had far less to complain about than had the inhabitants of the Carolinas. Pennsylvania’s yeoman farmers had, if not town meetings, at least relatively responsive local government: the citizens elected their own sheriffs, the justices of the peace as well as the members of county boards who levied their local taxes. Nor was the voting franchise narrow; rather, in the west the suffrage was so broad and land so abundant that nearly every farmer of whatever ethnicity had the requisite freehold to qualify for the vote.

Yet in practice, Pennsylvania at the provincial level was as oligarchical as North Carolina. As late as 1774, Quaker merchants and lawyers essentially ruled the colony by means of two devices. One was a suffrage based on a high property qualification for residents of the city of Philadelphia. Unlike the suffrage in the west, this restriction excluded most lower-class inhabitants of the city, so that only about one-third of the white males could vote. Second, the Philadelphia elite saw to it that the western inhabitants were grossly underrepresented in the colonial assembly. Although the Quakers made up only one-tenth of the colony’s population, they controlled more than a third of the assembly representation. In 1770 the original eastern counties of Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester and the city of Philadelphia sent a combined twenty-four representatives to the Assembly, while the five western counties sent only ten. The ever more numerous westerners continually petitioned the Assembly to gain representation proportionate to their numbers, but the Quakers consistently denied their petitions lest reapportionment cost them their political control. At times when, under pressure of circumstances, they could no longer avoid admitting representation to a newly created county, the oligarchy would draw its borders much larger than the densely populated eastern counties, and allot it only a few representatives. Inasmuch as representation was based on a county, irrespective of its area or demographic numbers, western delegates increased only slightly in number, even though their potential constituents grew rapidly over time. Another source of western discontent was the fact that the Quaker Assembly refused to aid the westerners in their backcountry wars with the Indians. The pacifism of the Quakers enraged the frontiersmen, who, as in western North Carolina, were also ethnically and religiously different from the coastal elites— primarily Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and German religious dissidents rather than English.

Initially, the early years of the revolutionary period were very tranquil in Pennsylvania. The British imperial policies that outraged other provinces had left the local, presumably pacifist, Quaker elite remarkably unruffled. Indeed, the Pennsylvania legislature was the only major assembly in British North America that engaged in no sharp controversy with the ministry during the years between the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the Intolerable Acts in 1774. The Pennsylvania elite may have considered these breaches to be affairs of the royal colonies; after all, Pennsylvania remained a proprietary colony, technically a possession of the Penn family and not of the Crown. Although Philadelphians formed an effective committee during the Stamp Act crisis, to resist the Act, and held a number of demonstrations, citizen protests were mild compared with the furor that the Act aroused in New York and New England. Led most notably by the merchant Charles Thomson, Pennsylvanians participated in the Townshend Act boycott in March 1769, electing a Committee to enforce it.

In 1770, Thomson, called by John Adams the “Sam Adams of Pennsylvania,” formed a faction on the committee that was committed to earnestly resisting imperial policy. This faction both helped and was helped by a growing articulate and united mechanic class in Philadelphia. In September 1770, however, the Pennsylvania merchant Whigs, like their fellow importers in New York, unilaterally abandoned the nonimportation boycott of the Townshend duties. The mechanics’ spokesmen denounced the merchant Whigs for this betrayal; since the boycott affected the public welfare, they argued, all “tradesmen (merchants and artisans], farmers, and other freemen” should have participated in any decision on making such a change.[189] This act of betrayal destroyed the merchants’ reputation among the politically active community of the province, which ceased to look to them for leadership.

Clearly a new, more radical set of leaders and institutions was needed. In particular, Thomson mobilized a new resistance movement in the city’s neighborhoods, and by November 1773 the patriot faction formed a Committee of Twenty-four to resist the passage of the Tea Act, whose members included the core patriot spokesmen at this time: Charles Thomson, Thomas Mifflin, and Joseph Reed. Although the members of this committee were less affluent than any established Pennsylvania committee, they increasingly defined the resistance movement more in ideological rather than economic terms. In 1774, townspeople militantly refused to allow the East India Company’s tea to be unloaded in the City of Brotherly Love; partly as a result of the committee’s efforts, a large number of Philadelphians had moved from a resigned acceptance of all British authority to opposition to the imperial policies. In time, most of the leading wealthy families of the city, including merchants, lawyers, and liberal members of the Quaker oligarchy, came to favor the Whig cause, but the Whigs were still sharply divided over how far to carry resistance to British imperial policy. While conservative Whigs favored a cautious and legal approach, the radicals favored bold and extralegal action, with the result that between 1774 and 1777, the conservative and radical factions began to openly struggle with each other for control of the resistance movement.

Meanwhile, between May 1774 and July 1776, the new committees that sprang up in the city not only reflected this struggle but gave the citizenry dramatic experience in self-government. As Richard Alan Ryerson points out, this movement

quietly worked a revolution in Pennsylvania politics. In these twenty-six months more than 180 Philadelphians served on civilian committees; another hundred sat on the city militia’s Committee of Privates. In rural Pennsylvania, another thousand persons were committeemen on civilian boards alone. Perhaps 90 percent of these individuals had never before held public office. The committees revolutionized Pennsylvania politics not only by what they planned, said, and did, but by what they were.[190]

In May 1774, word of the closing of the port of Boston spread to Philadelphia. When Paul Revere rode into Philadelphia bearing an appeal from the Boston Committee of Correspondence for the city’s support, he was greeted enthusiastically not only by the radical Whigs but by the committees, who agreed to support the city. On June 1, the day the port was to be shut down, radical committeemen tried to mobilize the whole community, and, as a public show of support for Boston, Thomson called a “solemn pause” in which all regular business was suspended so that citizens could “ponder” the imperial crisis. Thomson, in effect, had called a general strike. Typically, the Quakers refused to participate, but most Philadelphians closed their shops, and church bells rang out for the entire day.

In anticipation of the upcoming Continental Congress, which was to meet in Philadelphia, the Committee of Nineteen demanded that Governor Thomas Penn call the Pennsylvania Assembly into session so that it could choose delegates for the Congress, but the stubborn Penn refused, whereupon the committee called a public assembly on June 18 that elected a larger Committee of Correspondence that was empowered, in the Assembly’s stead, to call a provincial convention to elect the delegates. This committee sent out a letter to all the counties in Pennsylvania, urging them to form committees of their own. The members, they advised, should be chosen by citizens in every district and township in the county. These county committees, in turn, were asked to send delegates to the provincial convention, which would then choose delegates to the Continental Congress.

Thus, between June and July, with the help of Philadelphia radicals, a comprehensive committee system was created that essentially coordinated the resistance effort throughout the province. Pennsylvanians formed local committees and assembled delegates at the provincial convention with such eagerness that one can only conclude that their distrust of the Assembly’s ability to handle the crisis must have been enormous. The men they elected to the Provincial Convention met on July 15, 1774, passed resolves against all the abuses of British imperial policy, voted to join the Continental Association, and chose delegates to the Congress.

In the meantime, realizing that the situation might well slip out of his and the Assembly’s control. Governor Penn decided to call the Assembly into session after all. Dominated by conservative Whigs, the Assembly met at the same time as the radicals’ Provincial Convention; indeed, Pennsylvania was the only colony where rival assemblies met simultaneously. The official Assembly’s aim was to keep resistance activities legal: it ignored the Provincial Convention’s extralegal resolves and activities and chose its own delegates to the Continental Congress. Led by Joseph Galloway, these delegates were distinctly conservative in outlook, and were given no instructions to vote for independence. Provocatively, Galloway declared that the competing extralegal Provincial Convention had no power whatever and would only set up “anarchy above order.” This statement infuriated the yeomen farmers, who raised an outcry for the complete transformation of the province’s political structure. The Provincial Convention, they argued, was legitimate even though it was extraconstitutional, and, far from being anarchic, its meetings were conducted with scrupulous attention to procedure, since the delegates believed fervently in the importance of expressing the popular will in proper form. Nor were the radicals averse to hearing opposing views; on the contrary, they were committed to debate and sought to involve everyone in the general discussions.

Significantly, when the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in September 1774, the delegates assembled in Carpenters’ Hall, a popular committee meeting place, instead of the State House, the venue of the conservatives. After the Congress voted in favor of the Continental Association and recommended the formation of committees to enforce it, Philadelphia elected a radical Committee of Observation and Inspection that had little difficulty in enforcing nonintercourse with Britain, since the boycott was already very popular in Philadelphia. During the next few years, whenever the Philadelphia Committee faced elections, the members that the citizenry returned were ever more zealous, ever younger, ever more radical and ever more of mechanic-class origins. In time, the revolutionary committees became the real government of the colony.

After the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, when militias were mobilized in all the American provinces, all counties of Pennsylvania formed voluntary militia units, called Associations, under the auspices of each local committee. Although they acted with no legal foundation, the Association militias drilled intensively and grew rapidly, so that by May 10 there were more than thirty companies in Philadelphia alone, aside from the backcountry, which mustered its own companies with equal zeal. Wherever the committee movement opened the way for political activity by the mechanics, the militia movement brought in still poorer artisans, journeymen, apprentices, daylaborers, and even servants. Such privates were not to the taste of the Assembly Whigs, who disdained them as “in general damn’d riff raff—dirty, mutinous, disaffected.”[191]

From the start, the radicalism of the Pennsylvania militiamen assumed a highly militant form; indeed, no longer a “mob,” they were now organizing politically as well as militarily. Deeply committed to the preservation of their communities and their liberties, they opposed all those who resisted their rights in Pennsylvania at least as much as they opposed British imperial policy. Like the Maryland radicals, “the political procedures of the individual companies fostered a spirit of democracy,” as Elisha Douglass observes. Political debates among the Associators—as the Pennsylvania militiamen were called—was intense: the uneducated soldiers learned from the radical intellectuals they met in the ranks, and privates elected the junior officers and even some of the senior officers who were to command them. “The associations served as a kind of school for democratic processes”[192]—much like the New Model Army during the English Revolution. Their commitment to egalitarianism even extended to uniforms; although the officers were demanding that they wear expensive and distinctive uniforms, the ordinary militiamen in a May 1775 broadside declared that all soldiers should wear cheap hunting shirts, which would “level all distinctions” within the ranks.[193]

Proud of their own patriotic virtue and service to their community, these men felt strongly that service in the militia should be universal. Every ablebodied man, they argued, should associate as a matter of civic virtue. Increasingly, they despised those who refused to associate as opportunistic and self-interested, seeking only to profit from the war that others were fighting. Indeed, a man’s worth was to be judged, they contended, not by his birth or wealth but by the intensity of his commitment to the Revolution. If a man could not serve, for whatever reason, he should at least make some significant financial payment to underwrite those who did.

A source of particular resentment for the Associators was the pacifism of the Quakers and the privileges this ideology conferred upon them, an ideology for which the conservative Whig Assembly exhibited an inordinate degree of solicitude. Indeed, the Quakers were exempt not only from serving in the militias but from paying any taxes to support them. The Associators viewed this exemption as a dodge by which the Quakers used their religious scruples to avoid aiding the patriot cause, a hostility that was exacerbated by the fact that Quaker oligarchs owned some of the largest and wealthiest estates in the province. Thus the Associators strongly felt that the Quakers should at least be taxed—preferably in proportion to the property they owned—to pay the soldiers who were protecting their community and to support their families while they were away from their fields. Time and again, the Philadelphia Committee demanded that the Assembly guarantee pay for the Associators, which the Assembly repeatedly rebuffed—again feeding the resentments of the backcountry farmers.

Ill-feeling toward the Assembly’s failures grew, as it had to. Perhaps more than in any other province, the conservatives of Pennsylvania were intractable about making concessions to those who would challenge their rule. Accordingly, the Philadelphia Committee called another Provincial Convention, which met in early 1775, to protest the tepid way in which the Assembly was conducting the opposition to Britain. During the summer of 1775, a large network of institutions, often with overlapping memberships—the local Committees of Observation and new Committees of Militia Officers, even Committees of Militia Privates, so redolent of the Leveler agitators a century and a half earlier in Britain—began to function as the real power in the colony.

The Committee of Privates was particularly militant in demanding sacrifices from the Quakers. Its members refused even to serve as Minutemen as long as the Quakers were exempted from both service and special taxation, a decision the officers endorsed, declaring that it was “unreasonable” to expect privates “to remain in the field, while a great number of men equally able to bear arms are suffered to remain at home.”[194] Further, the officers noted that people

sincerely and religiously scrupulous are but few in comparison to those who upon this occasion, as well as others, make conscience a convenience;—that a very considerable share of the property of the province is in the hands of people professing to be of tender conscience in military matters; that the associators think it extremely hard that they should risk their lives and injure their fortunes in defense of those who will not be of the least assistance in this great struggle.[195]

When the conservative Assembly met again in September, the privates demanded that it tax non-Associators in lieu of military service. At length the Assembly gave in, but even in making this concession it humiliated the Associators: the levy, some fifty shillings, was not only woefully inadequate but seemed to place a pitifully low price on privates who were endangering their lives in the patriot cause. Gallingly, it even stipulated that the pay for the soldiers in the training period was to be drawn from poor relief rather than from a special fund—another flagrant insult, inasmuch as the privates hardly saw remuneration as charity and demanded full support for their entire term of military service.

In particular, the Assembly insulted the Philadelphia Associators by continuing to deny them the right to vote. The Associators considered it a selfevident truth that every armed man who was defending the province should have the franchise, regardless of how much property he owned (indeed, even if he received alms or was a servant or tenant), and regardless of age. Despite a resolve by the Committee of Privates to this effect on February 23, 1776, the Assembly not only denied its request but even had the effrontery to choose officers for the Associations. As the Committee of Privates declared to the Assembly, those who “expose their lives in defense of a country, should be admitted to the enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of a citizen of that country which they have defended and protected.”[196] The Associators thereupon openly repudiated the authority of the Assembly altogether, setting the stage for an open conflict between the two clashing authorities.

During the period between the Intolerable Acts of 1774 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776, most of the other colonies were already at war with Britain and had already shed their colonial governments and royal governors, which meant almost inescapably that they were committed to independence. The conservative Pennsylvania colonial government, which had been established under British rule, still held office even as revolutionary passions boiled over among the citizenry. Not only did the colonial Assembly refuse to pay soldiers adequately but it still refused to extend the franchise to them and, as we have seen, refused to instruct Pennsylvania’s delegates to vote for independence in the Continental Congress. Independence now became a crucial issue in the province because it meant an end to the existing colonial government as well as the establishment of a republic. In short, arguments for independence in Pennsylvania were actually direct assaults on the legitimacy of the Assembly and established government by the supporters of committee power. The only way to secure the liberties of the people, the committeemen concluded, was for the people to run their own affairs. No longer in revolt merely against British rule, they were calling for a new political and social order in the colony itself.

The Assembly patently feared political and social revolution more than anything else, and its fears were only heightened after Paine’s Common Sense appeared in January 1776. One of the Pennsylvania Whig leaders, John Dickinson, who had formerly worked with the more radical elements, now lauded the power of the king and Parliament as “indispensable to protect the colonies from disunion and civil war.” Without the monarchy, “the democratic power” might “prostrate all barriers, and involve the state in ruin.”[197] Besides, the Whigs argued, there was no need for a revolutionary government; after all, they controlled the Assembly. When the Assembly met in May, however, it once again refused to instruct the delegates to vote for independence. The radicals now decided to remove the conservatives from power by force, seize sovereignty in the state, and establish an independent revolutionary government.

The Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, meanwhile, was eminently willing to help them. The Congress had looked upon the Pennsylvania Assembly’s obstinacy with increasing impatience; clearly, if Pennsylvania were ever to cast its vote for independence, its delegates would have to be under the instructions of a different provincial government. It was with this situation in mind that, on May 10,1776, John Adams proposed a resolution that those provinces that had not yet adopted governments “sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs” should be encouraged to adopt such government “as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular and America in general.”[198] No government that still held power under the authority of Britain could be considered satisfactory any longer; new governments should be formed that derived their power from the people. For all practical purposes, the Congress’s advice amounted to a general recommendation that the provinces still under the old system of colonial government undertake a revolution, and, since all the other provinces had by then shed their old governments, the recommendation was clearly directed at Pennsylvania.

Adams’s resolution was passed on May 15, and a general meeting of Philadelphia inhabitants on May 18 used it to legitimate the abolition of the Assembly. The existing Assembly, it resolved, had no right to form a new state government, since any government it formed would be a means “of subjecting us and our posterity to greater grievances than any we have hitherto experienced.”[199] Two days later, the Philadelphia Committee—now directed by Tom Paine, James Cannon, and David Rittenhouse—called for a Constitutional Convention for Pennsylvania to be held the following month to carry out the resolve of May 15 and, in a demand cheered by the four or five thousand people who attended the meeting, to form a new government for the province.

The Assembly’s days were quickly running out. For its June 10 meeting it could not even attract a quorum of members, and on June 14 those members who were present quickly instructed the delegates to vote for independence. The Provincial Conference of Committees met on June 18 and declared the end of the Assembly. Moreover, the conference directed that all adult associators and legal voters who repudiated loyalty to Britain be eligible to vote for delegates to the Constitutional Convention, whose purpose was to establish a new government, “on the authority of the people only.” No unrepentant Tory who had attacked this takeover of power by the committees could vote, and the people were urged to mandate their delegates with instructions on how to vote at the Convention.

When the Constitutional Convention met on July 15, 1776, the more conservative Whigs did not show up, thereby abandoning the political stage to their radical opponents. The delegates in attendance were mainly farmers and artisans who had been active Associators, led chiefly by Paine, Rittenhouse, Cannon, and Thomas Young, and the constitution they established was the most democratic that any American state had created up to that time (to be surpassed only by the one that Young subsequently wrote for Vermont after he left Pennsylvania), closely resembling the model that Paine had recommended in Common Sense.

According to its preamble, government was to hold power “without partiality for or prejudice against any particular class, sect or denomination of men whatever.”[200] There was to be only a single legislative chamber in the government, rather than two, elected annually by citizens, whose franchise would not be limited by any property qualification. Every tax-paying freeman over the age of twenty-one could both vote and hold office. The doors of the meeting place of the assembly hall were to be open to all citizens at all times, and bills passed by the new assembly would not take effect until they had been published and then approved by the next elected assembly—that is, until the people had expressed their will through what approximated a referendum. In addition to the assembly there would be a Supreme Executive Council that had only coordinating and administrative duties, chaired by a president who was merely a first among equals. All officers were to be “servants... at all times accountable” to the people. The constitution also provided for the continuation of democratic local government: justices of the peace, sheriffs, coroners, commissioners, and tax assessors were to still be locally elected.

Its popularity was immense; as Lemisch points out, “The people cherished their copies as they did the Bible, and they would later take up arms against its domestic opponents.”[201] Although the radical constitution went into effect, the struggle over its legitimacy consumed state politics. It was as bitterly opposed by the conservative Whig leaders as it was supported by the people, and ultimately the powerful elites in Pennsylvania succeeded in replacing the 1776 constitution with a conventional “checks and balances” constitution in 1790.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania finally fully entered the Revolution, throwing all of its resources into defeating the British. In March 1777 insurgent radicals terminated the moderate Committee of Safety, which had been handling military affairs all this time, and established a revolutionary Committee of Safety in its place. This Council took over the militia and quartered its troops in the homes of non-Associators. It arrested suspected Tories and subjected them not only to imprisonment but even to capital punishment, confiscating arms, supplies, and landed estates from its known opponents. Between mid-October and early December 1777, the revolutionary “dictatorship” of the Committee of Safety conducted what Agnes Hunt calls a “reign of terror,” which came to an end only on the order of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council.[202]

EFFECTS OF THE INTERNAL REVOLUTION

Actually there was no reign of terror in the American Revolution in any way comparable to the unrestrained bloodletting in France a decade and a half later. But the grassroots nature of the American Revolution, its chronic fury, and the deep-seated structural changes it introduced made it at least as far-reaching in its effects as the French. As a result of the Revolution—whose effects were both internal and external—all the colonies saw a large-scale confiscation of loyalist property, including vast western territories held by loyalist land speculators. As loyalists either fled the American provinces or were forced to leave, the committees seized and put up for sale the lands they left behind. In New York, the patroon system was largely demolished: land holdings like the threehundred-square-mile Philipse estate, as well as those of the De Lanceys, the Van Cortlandts, and the Coldens, were confiscated and put up for sale.

Nor did the provincial and state committees and governments simply resell confiscated lands to wealthy bourgeois, such as occurred to a great extent in the sale of the Church lands during the French Revolution. By and large, in what amounted to a virtual land redistribution, the broken-up estates were sold in small parcels to ordinary farmers and agricultural workers. To sell tracts of land in excess of 500 acres was viewed with opprobrium. Characteristically, the enormous De Lancey estate in southern New York was parceled out among 275 independent buyers, while the Roger Morris estate in Putnam County was acquired in modest plots by about 250 purchasers. As C.H. Van Tyne observed of the loyalist movement in New York, the revolutionaries in their land policy were “thus leveling, equalizing, and making more democratic the whole social structure” of at least the northern colonies and those of the mid-Atlantic seaboard.[203]

Nor was it simply the quasi-feudal estates of the New York patroons that were broken up. A sizable part of the lands of the American landed aristocracy as well as lesser gentry were disposed of in this fashion. The largest estate confiscated in all colonies was that of the Penn family, which at 21.5 million acres was worth a million pounds. Under the Divesting Act of 1779, Pennsylvania’s Assembly took control of these vast holdings of the proprietor’s family. Virginia confiscated the six-million-acre Fairfax estate. In Massachusetts, a law was passed confiscating the property of everyone who had fought against the colonies; the aristocratic William Pepperel lost his lands, which stretched for thirty miles along the coast of Maine (then part of Massachusetts). In New Hampshire twenty-eight Tory estates were confiscated, including the property of the royal governor, Wentworth, while in New Jersey five hundred Tory estates were taken over and sold in smaller packages to other citizens. In North Carolina, confiscated land was sold in two-hundred-acre plots. The Crown domains also fell into the hands of state legislatures, most notably the forests of New Hampshire.

This intensive political education in human rights and liberties could not help but call attention to the plight of those who, in America itself, had none. The Quaker oligarchy in Philadelphia fought slavery as resolutely as they opposed the patriots, owing largely to their pacifism; indeed, the first antislavery society in the world was formed at a meeting of Quakers in Philadelphia on April 14,1775. This society as well as subsequent ones gained direct or indirect support from such prominent figures as Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, Abigail Adams, Tom Paine, and a multitude of small religious sects. In 1780 Pennsylvania passed a law instituting the gradual abolition of slavery; as its preamble stated, “When we consider our deliverance from the abhorrent condition to which Great Britain has tried to reduce us, we are called on to manifest the sincerity of our profession of freedom, and to give substantial proof of gratitude, by extending a portion of our freedom to others, who although of a different color, are the work of the same almighty God.”

In 1785, the Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves was formed in New York and a similar society in 1788 in Delaware, which had already abolished the slave trade in 1775. Connecticut and Rhode Island outlawed the slave trade in 1774, while Vermont, even before Pennsylvania and other colonies, forbade the existence of involuntary servitude in any form whatever from its inception as a short-lived republic in its constitution of 1777. In 1780 the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the state’s constitution had abolished slavery within its borders when it said “all men are born free and equal.” Even in Virginia, a law easing manumission in 1782 led to the freeing of more than 10,000 slaves in eight years.

But in most southern states the very opposite pattern prevailed. North Carolina made the manumission of slaves more difficult than before the Revolution. South Carolina gave slaves as bounties to induce white residents to enlist in the Continental Army, turning them into a form of human currency to pay soldiers from the South. If Americans, tragically, did not abolish slavery in the South until some ninety years later, they legally eliminated all remaining feudal privileges that had been carried over from the Old World to the New.

To be sure, more state constitutions instituted by the Revolution followed the guidelines prescribed by John Adams in his relatively conservative Thoughts on Government than those of Tom Paine in Common Sense. Thus, most of the new states had two legislatures, and property qualifications for voting and holding office disfranchized many people until decades later, when the qualifications were dropped completely. To this extent, the conservative Whigs prevailed in the internal revolution. “The Whig leaders of 1776,” observes Douglass, “could congratulate themselves after the struggle that their revolution, like that of 1688, was glorious as much for what it left untouched as for what it had altered.”[204] As in the English Revolution, the radical tendencies were ultimately defeated.

Yet the mobilization for the Revolution brought active and direct participation in political life to thousands. Not only did republicans stand in opposition to royalists, but democrats stood in opposition to republicans, if not in name then in practice. Indeed, the revolution both preserved and built a democracy within the American Republic. This democracy took the form of committees that oversaw a wide variety of crucial tasks; of town meetings, which swept from New England to the other provinces and which the ruling strata dismembered only in part after the war. It took the form of a democratic and popular militia. And people abroad avidly watched the Revolution unfold, later borrowing its radical vocabulary as well as its insurrectionary institutions. “What an engine!” John Adams wrote of the committees. “France imitated it and produced a revolution.... And all Europe was inclined to imitate it for the same revolutionary purposes.”[205]