Preconceived History

...Not surprisingly, she agrees with Bailyn that American sons of liberty patterned their resistance efforts after the thoughts of radical Whigs...

...Consequently, readers of Maier's book find themselves confronted with mobs—one might even employ the more pleasant term "crowds"?that were both restrained and well-ordered...

...Reviewed by James Kirby Martin Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University In recent years scholarship about the American Revolution has been passing through what might be called an "ideological" phase: Historians now concentrate on how the colonists perceived their political situation to explain the events of the period...

...True, few of the sons of liberty left records behind, but until someone draws a tight social profile of both mob leaders and participants at several different points in time and in several different locations, we will have to keep guessing about the composition of colonial mobs...

...Yet the radical Whigs were not fiery revolutionaries...

...Pamphleteers described a conspiracy, a plot being carried out by British government officials and their appointed agents in the colonies...

...A small, dissident and powerless faction, the English Whigs wrote numerous political tracts to warn their countrymen of the dangers of corruption...

...grasping officials threatened the liberties of all citizens and, if not somehow checked, would turn the political system into a tyranny...

...The Whig message, Bailyn shows, was absorbed by the colonists and applied to the American context...

...Surely at least a few participants saw the rioting as an opportunity to get drunk at the expense of an upper-class gentleman...

...To take one important example, she says that 18th-century American mobs were normally composed of all social classes, and that the majority of participants were middle-class citizens...

...Pauline Maier has given us a flawed explanation of crowd behavior during the period leading up to the American Revolution...

...To oppose the trend of corruption they urged that political subjects exhaust the available legal channels within the system before considering the possibility of force...

...Or did something as mundane as the wine in the cellar of Oliver's magnificent home lead people to join in the nights of protest and property destruction...

...Lustful ministers, they argued, anxious for power and the spoils of office, were upsetting the government's delicate balance between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, as represented by the King, the Lords and the Commons...

...Until someone does the necessary research on the composition of colonial mobs and the frequency of their confrontations, we must accept her hypothesis as merely that, nothing more and nothing less...

...Finally, by the mid-1770s, it appeared that only two alternatives remained: political repression or open rebellion...

...They functioned in extra-institutional rather than anti-institutional fashion, working to bring about in the political arena what colonial leaders could not or would not obtain through petitioning and pleading with royal officials...

...Nor can we be sure that there were fewer riots after 1765 since no one, including Maier, has collected data about their frequency and intensity in the period 1765-76...

...Maier handles the inconsistency by suggesting that the colonists realized they had been hasty and were thereafter more restrained...

...Focusing on mob action and other types of popular resistance, the author has written what she describes as "a study of the political perception" of the American radicals who led the opposition to Britain from the time of the Stamp Act in 1765 to the Declaration of Independence...

...Was the rioting undertaken solely to protect the interest of the Boston community—and by implication American liberties...

...Among other problems, this interpretation fails to take into account the relationship between violence and coercion...

...No doubt many of the rioters wanted to coerce Oliver into resigning his stamp distributor's commission, and the mob was quite successful in accomplishing this...

...Thus, Bernard Bailyn of Harvard has demonstrated in his widely read books that after 1763 Americans adopted the outlook and ideas of radical English Whigs...

...Even as mobs, though, according to the author, the Americans knew to a man and woman that they had to act out their parts in the unfolding drama of revolution within a certain intellectual framework...

...Instead of pursuing this crucial question, she tends to lose sight of confrontations after 1767, devoting the latter half of her book to a fuller explanation of the radical Whig world view as seen through the letters and diaries of provincial leaders...

...This was in violation of the Whig script, which called for a completion of the petitioning process before mob action was taken...

...Although this assertion reigns supreme throughout the book, the support for it is extremely thin, amounting to little more than some quotations from the leaders of the groups...

...Gaining no satisfaction, they could then turn to force through mob action...

...Still another example of how Maier has forced the facts to conform to her thesis is her attempt to prove that rioting proceeded according to the radical Whig formula...

...Appointed officials were unquestionably more willing to listen to radical American leaders once widespread property destruction had actually occurred...

...Maier's logically constructed argument seems to be built on assumption rather than fact, however, with the author forcing the evidence to fit her preconceptions of the discontented...

...Perhaps these people were responding through violence to nonpolitical grievances...

...Leftist historians like Jessie Lemisch and Staughton Lynd, for instance, have posited a quasi-Marxist explanation for mob behavior preceding the American Revolution...

...One of the most important series of colonial riots occurred in Boston during mid- and late August, 1765...

...On the first night of hostilities, Andrew Oliver, Massachusetts stamp distributor, was the focal point of crowd action...

...Echoing the radical Whigs, these writers exhorted colonists to be ever watchful of those in England and America who threatened to impose a tyranny on the provinces...

...And these notions, he concludes, paved the way to revolt...

...While this creates the impression that violence was less prevalent, the reality of the patterns of provincial resistance remains in question...

...At times one wonders what the study is supposed to be about...

...And adding to a reader's suspicions that Maier may not have presented the full picture is the fact that a book ostensibly dealing with mob action and ideology contains hardly a word about such significant events as the Boston Massacre and the tea parties in Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere...

...Specific in their targets and respectful of human life, they used force, not as revolutionaries, but in the hope of saving their political system...

...Most certainly, threats and intimidation had greater meaning to imperial officers on the scene in the colonies after the Stamp Act riots...

...Yet it is possible that some mobs were composed of the inarticulate downtrodden, and that their discontent was different than that of the outspoken leaders...

...Once force has actually been employed and property destroyed, the possibility of more force can by itself serve as the equivalent of physical confrontation...

...Maier has further assumed that the "mind" of the rioters may be grasped by reflecting upon what the most articulate members of the elite had to say...

...Only when all else had failed did overt revolution?dedicated to the cause of preserving liberties—become a legitimate form of political resistance...

...Pauline Maier's From Resistance to Revolution, which originally took form as a doctoral dissertation under Bailyn, is an extension and an elaboration of this picture...

...But can we be positive that this was the only motivating factor...

...The colonists, Maier suggests, responded to each phase in the deepening imperial crisis knowing that revolution was the last resort, but that before taking this final step they first had to petition for a redress of grievances, or perhaps use the threat of economic boycott...

...Public disorders occurred throughout the colonies in the late summer and fall of 1765, long before Parliament had the opportunity to respond to formal Assembly petitions directed against the Stamp Act...

...Maier may very well have overpoliticized human motivation in a desire to establish the universality of her model...