In most histories of the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers are foregrounded. In The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, T. H. Breen recovers the forgotten history of our nation’s true founders—ordinary Americans. We spoke with him about what he discovered while writing the book, and what relevance it might have to today’s politics.
What was your goal in writing this book?
My research alerted me to a missing piece in our understanding of the American Revolution. What has been long ignored in familiar accounts of the nation’s founding are the ordinary men and women who sustained resistance to Great Britain over eight years of war. After all, they were the ones who made huge personal sacrifices and risked physical harm. It seemed curious to me how rarely they appeared in the revolutionary story.
Although the challenge was difficult, I wanted to do more than offer just another history of a handful of founding fathers guiding the country to independence or to chronicle once again the abstract philosophic principles that allegedly inspired revolutionary leaders.
Rather, I intended to recover how ordinary Americans living in small communities gave meaning to the events that transformed their lives. The Will of the People introduces readers to forgotten revolutionaries who at various moments during the conflict were consumed by fear, who were desperate even after the fighting began for reconciliation with Great Britain, who were anxious about the possible betrayal of former allies who seemed more interested in personal wealth than in creating a just society, and who were tempted by the appeal of revenge against neighbors who had sided with the king.
How did you reconstruct the revolutionary experience of ordinary Americans?
The sources for a history of ordinary revolutionaries are different from those that we associate with the biographies of the Founding Fathers. Letters and diaries were helpful but frustratingly rare. What was most important in opening the world of these people were the newspapers. Although newspapers had been around for a long time, they took on powerful new significance during the imperial crisis. Contributors to the journals expressed their hopes and fears about military success, about the dangers posed by real and imaged domestic enemies, about runaway inflation, and about the welfare of sons and fathers who served as militiamen or Continental soldiers.
Reports of resistance in one town were communicated to people in other towns—distant strangers—and the information provided readers with a sense of confidence that other Americans were supporting a common cause. It was in the pages of the newspapers that I encountered people struggling to enforce revolution by serving on committees of safety and observation. It quickly became clear to me that for most Americans the committees were the effective face of revolution.
How does your book change how we ordinarily think about the American Revolution?
It introduces the element of process to the revolutionary story. Ordinary Americans did not initially resist Great Britain in the name of independence, much less, in the hope of creating a new republic or democratic polity. The goal in 1774 and 1775 was persuading parliament to radically reform obnoxious imperial policies. People wanted to restore the old order under conditions that allowed for proper American representation.
But parliament refused to back down. As effective British authority in the countryside—from Georgia to New Hampshire—collapsed, new men came forward to guide local affairs. They found themselves making decisions about other Americans, about who was an enemy, about recruitment of soldiers, and about relations with state and congressional authorities.
This was a moment of transition in the entire character of the revolution. The people who served on the committees of safety found themselves speaking in the name of the people. The point is that no one set out to form a republican form of government, much less a democratic one, but during the course of the revolution, Americans created a republican structure that no one had anticipated. It happened as a practical response to the challenge of war.
Is there anything about your book that is relevant to the political situation today?
I was struck by how the meaning of words fundamental to our shared political vocabulary have changed radically over the last two centuries. Liberty provides a good example of this shift. For the revolutionaries, liberty was the essential element for the preservation of freedom. They claimed that it encouraged innovation; it was a source of prosperity.
But those who praised liberty so highly also described it almost as a volatile chemical that might at any moment explode. They insisted that uncontrolled liberty might lead to licentiousness, to a belief that liberty allowed ordinary people do whatever they wanted to do. Too much liberty was another term for anarchy.
What the revolutionaries repeatedly declared was that liberty involved social responsibility, an obligation to defend the rights of other members of the community. It was certainly not a justification for extreme individualism. As one revolutionary writer explained, “Liberty is frequently used to denote a power of doing as we please, or of executing our acts of choice.” We must reject that kind of thinking, he observed, because “civil liberty does not consist in a freedom from all law and government, but rather, in a freedom from unjust law and tyrannical government.”
The people who sustained revolutionary resistance would have found it hard to understand modern Americans who define liberty as the right to do whatever they please during a time of national crisis.
