Class war? Class struggles during the American revolution in Virginia

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 63, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 305-344

  McDonnell, Michael A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

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EID: 60949987898     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (141)

1. Edmund Pendleton to James Madison, Jan. 1, 1781, Joseph Jones to Madison, Nov. 18, Dec. 2, Dec. 8, 1780, in William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, eds., The Papers of James Madison (Chicago, 1962), 2: 268, 183, 219, 232-33
2. Theodorick Bland Sr. to Theodorick Bland Jr., Jan. 8, 1781, in Charles Campbell, ed., The Bland Papers: Being a Selection from the Manuscripts of Colonel Theodorick Bland, Jr. (Petersburg, Va., 1843), 2: 51
3. See also A. Drummond to John Coles, Mar. 13, [1781], in Carter-Smith Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
4. Ironically, Edmund Morgan's analysis of seventeenth-century Virginia gave historians one of the most powerful and explicit class-based analyses of colonial society ever written (Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia [New York, 1975])
5. see also T. H. Breen, "A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660-1710," in Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York, 1993), 127-47
6. For gentlemen's reluctance to talk about problems, see Emory G. Evans, "Trouble in the Backcountry: Disaffection in Southwest Virginia during the American Revolution," in An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1985), 180 ("dirty linen")
7. See, for example, Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass 1979)
8. Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (Baltimore, 1981)
9. Billy G. Smith, The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990)
10. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991)
11. Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520-1770 (Cambridge, 1999)
12. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000)
13. Thomas J. Humphrey, Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Are of Revolution (DeKalb, Ill., 2004)
14. Important exceptions to the idea of an untroubled or undivided Virginia can be found in Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982)
15. Albert H. Tillson Jr., Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740-1789 (Lexington, Ky., 1991)
16. Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999)
17. In a similar vein, Stephanie McCurry writes about the powerful images that have obscured modern readers' view of lower- and middling-class farmers in antebellum South Carolina (McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country [New York, 1995], esp. 37-45)
18. Even among African American communities, divisions were sometimes pronounced. See Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)
19. The "Bulk of the People," as they were sometimes called by literare elites, were not actually slave owners or, if they were they owned one or two slaves at the most (George Mason to George Mason Jr., June 3, 1781, in Robert A. Rutland, ed., The Papers of George Mason, 1725-1792 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970], 2: 693). In 1988 John E. Selby concluded that at war's end, "the typical white Virginia male was a small farmer ... [who] had access to no more than a couple of hundred acres, at most a slave or two, and some cattle." Just under 50 percent of white males were small landowners, 10 to 20 percent were tenants (concentrated in the Northern Neck), and 20 to 30 percent were agricultural laborers or indentured servants. Of those who were farmers, even in slave-rich areas such as the tidewater and the heart of the Piedmont, as many as 30 percent of families worked their land without enslaved help
20. Isaac, Transformation of Virginia
21. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998)
22. See also Steven Sarson, "Landlessness and Tenancy in Early National Prince George's County, Maryland," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 57, no. 3 (July 2000): 585-94
23. Astonishingly, from 42 to 75 percent of white males in Loudoun may have been landless (Loudoun County Personal Property Tax Records and Land Tax Records, 1784, Library of Virginia; see also Willard F. Bliss, "The Rise of Tenancy in Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 58, no. 4 [October 1950]: 429-30)
24. For cosmopolitan versus local elites, see Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (New York, 1984), chap. 5
25. For divisions among yeomen and slaveholders, see McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, esp. 47-55
26. See esp. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988)
27. Greene, "Convergence: Development of an American Society, 1720-1780," in Diversity and Unity in Early North America, ed. Philip D. Morgan (London, 1993), 43-71. Despite the now-vast literature on social conflict and the revolutionary period, very few scholars, with several notable exceptions, have openly talked about class conflict and the Revolution
28. The most obvious example is Richard B. Morris, "Class Struggle and the American Revolution," WMQ 19, no. 1 (January 1962): 3-29, which is actually a historiographical review
29. Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Country and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and the "Lower Sort" during the American Revolution, 1775-1783 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987), is probably one of the most explicit class analyses in the last twenty years. Apart from discussion of the middle classes, even scholars who are acutely aware of diverse layers of social conflict in early America refrain from using the phrase class conflict
30. Two exceptions appear in Alfred F. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, Ill., 1993)
31. Gary J. Kornblith and John M. Murrin, "The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class," 27-79
32. Allan Kulikoff, "The American Revolution, Capitalism, and the Formation of the Yeoman Classes," 80-119
33. Allan Kulikoff, "Whither the Progress of Inequality," WMQ 57, no. 4 (October 2000): 832 (quotation). Significantly, historians of early America have long been comfortable with acknowledging elite perceptions of class and have spent a great deal of time of late demonstrating the various ways in which elites consciously strove to distance and distinguish themselves from other classes. Despite this literature, however, historians have much more trouble acknowledging lower- and middling-class consciousness. Surely, elites' constant striving to distance themselves from the rest of colonial society did not go unnoticed?
34. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963)
35. Simon Middleton, "Rethinking Class in Early America: The Struggle for Rights and Privileges in Seventeenth-Century New York" (paper presented at the Seventh Annual Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Conference Glasgow, Scotland, July 12, 2001), 2, wherein Middleton argues that class is tied too forcefully and exclusively to the emergence of what he calls the "immiserating effects of early industrialization" in the nineteenth century and the emergence of a clear and coherent "working class." See also Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith, introduction to unpublished paper
36. E. P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class? Social history 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 147-50 (quotations, 147, 150). On the necessity for class struggles to predate class, Thompson writes: "Classes do not exist as separate entities, look around find an enemy class, and then start to struggle. On the contrary, people find the themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this disovery as class-consciousness. Class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process" (149)
37. See also Wood, Politics of Social Conflict, chap. 1
38. Peter Way, "Rebellion of the Regulars: Working Soldiers and the Mutiny of 1763-1764," WMQ 57, no. 4 [October 2000]: 765
39. C. Dallett Hemphill, "Manners and Class in the Revolutionary Era: A Transatlantic Comparison," WMQ 63, no. 2 [April 2006]: 345-72). Allan Kulikoff echoes this idea I of class as a social relationship rather than a structure or location and also argues | that human agency is central to class as men and women "not only respond to structural constraints on their lives, but make decisions that profoundly shape the formation of classes and the relationship between them" (Kulikoff, "Death and Rebirth of Class Analysis," 7)
40. Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, eds., Inequality in Early America [Hanover, N.H., 1999]
41. Sarson, WMQ 57: 569-98
42. Claudio Saunt, "Taking Account of Property: Stratification among the Creek Indians in the Early Nineteenth Century," WMQ 57, no. 4 [October 2000]: 733-60)
43. Holton, Forced Founders
44. See also Kulikoff, "Death and Rebirth of Class Analysis," 32. My debt to Allan Kulikoff, in particular, for his theoretical work and long-term perspective is great
45. In addition to the other works cited in this article, see also Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), esp. 1-2
46. Kulikoff, "Was the American Revolution a Bourgeois Revolution?" in The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 58-89
47. Kulikoff, "Revolutionary Violence and the Origins of American Democracy," Journal of the Historical Society 2, no. 2 (April 2002): 229-60
48. For a look at the extent of so-called loyalism in Virginia, see esp. Adele Hast, Loyalism in Revolutionary Virginia: The Norfolk Area and the Eastern Shore (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982)
49. Evans, "Trouble in the Backcounrry."
50. see also Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain [New York, 1999], esp. chap. 1)
51. Fairfax County Militia Association, [Sept. 21, 1774], in Rutland, Papers of George Mason, 1: 211 ("gentlemen Voluntiers")
52. See esp. William Lee to R. C. Nicholas, Mar. 6, 1775, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee, 1766-1783 (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1891), 1: 144
53. James Madison to William Bradford, Nov. 26, 1774, in Hutchinson and Rachat, Papers of James Madison, 1: 129-30
54. Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York, 1972)
55. Peter H. Wood, "The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685-1790," in Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln, Neb., 1989), 38
56. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J., 1991)
57. James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 75-76
58. Wood, "'Liberty is Sweet': African-American Freedom Struggles in the Years before White Independence," in Young, Beyond the American Revolution, 154, 160
59. Holton, Forced Founders, 141, 248
60. Robert L. Scribner and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence (Charlottesville, Va., 1977), 3: 406, 463, 466, 471, 476
61. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia ... (1821; repr., Charlottesville, Va., 1969), 9: 27-35
62. George Mason to Martin Cockburn, Aug. 5, 1775, in Rutland, Papers of George Mason, 1: 245-46 (quotations, 245)
63. For studies of this martial tradition, see Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 340
64. E. Wayne Carp, "Early American Military History: A Review of Recent Work," VMHB 94, no. 3 (July 1986): 272
65. Don Higginbotham, "The Military Institutions of Colonial America: The Rhetoric and the Reality," in War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia, S.C., 1988), 19
66. Titus, The Old Dominion at War, 4, 59, 80, 98-99
67. Proceedings of the Fifth Virginia Convention, June 4, 1776, ibid., 7: 349
68. "Petition of Inhabitants of Lunenburg County," [Apr. 26, 1776], ibid., 6: 474-77
69. Hening, Statutes at Large, 9: 89, 28, 31
70. Allan Kulikoff discusses the struggle over exemptions of overseers and its significance in Kulikoff, "American Revolution, Capitalism, and Formation of the Yeoman Classes," 80-119
71. Charles Lee and George Washington later noted that a wide pay gap was essential to military discipline and subordination in the ranks. If an officer was in no way distinguished, Washington argued, his men would "consider, and treat him as an equal; and ... regard him no more than a broomstick" (Washington to the President of Congress, Sept. 24, 1776, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799 [Washington, D.C., 1932], 6: 108-9 (quotation, 110)
72. General Orders, Apr. 3, 1776, in "Orderly Book of the Company of Captain George Stubblefield, Fifth Virginia Regiment, from March 3, 1776, to July 10, 1776, Inclusive," in Brock, Miscellaneous Papers, 1672-1865, 159
73. "Address of George Gilmer to the Inhabitants of Albemarle," ibid., 126, 128)
74. For a full account of the minuteman failure, see Michael A. McDonnell, "Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below," Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (December 1998): 946-81
75. See also "Norfolk, September 20," notice for Plim, Va. Gaz. (Dixon and Hunter), Sept. 23, 1775
76. See, in particular, Ronald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore, 1973), 147-48
77. Committee of Northampton County to the President of the Continental Congress, Nov. 25, 1775, in Scribner and Tarter, Revolutionary Virginia, 4: 468-69
78. See also Accomack County Committee to the Delegates of the Proceedings of the Fourth Virginia Convention, Nov. 30, 1775, ibid., 4: 498
79. John Collett to Lord Dunmore, Dec. 20, 1775, ibid., 5: 198, 204 n. 3
80. Patrick Henry to Edmund Pendleton, Dec. 23, 1775, ibid., 5: 227
81. Petition of Inhabitants of Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties, [Jan. 8, 1776], ibid., 5: 362-63
82. Proceedings of the Fourth Virginia Convention, Jan. 13, 1776, ibid., 5: 396-97
83. Walter Jones to Landon Carter, Oct. 14, 1775, in Sabine Hall Collection, University of Virginia. For an account of the circumstances surrounding this episode, see Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia, chap. 5, forthcoming
84. For a full account of the Loudoun County uprising, see Woody Holton and Michael A. McDonnell, "Patriot vs. Patriot: Social Conflict in Virginia and the Origins of the American Revolution," Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2 (August 2000): 231-56
85. Landon Carter to George Washington, May 9, 1776, in W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series (Charlottesville, Va., 1991), 4: 236-37, 240, 240 n. 5
86. McDonnell, Politics of War, esp. chap. 7
87. Scholars have been influenced by an older, more patriotic scholarship, reinforced by Charles Royster's powerful image of the rage militaire that gripped the colonies in 1775-76, in Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979)
88. and backed up by detailed New England studies such as Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976). The extent of the rage militaire in places such as Virginia remains suspect
89. See McDonnell, Journal of American History 85: 946-81
90. By mid-1777 George Washington believed that the Virginia line of the Continental army was full of convict servants purchased from their masters by recruiting officers. "Convict Servants," he explained to Congress, "compose no small proportion of the Men from the Upper and more interior Part of that State" (Washington to the President of Congress, May 13, 1777, in Fitzpatrick, Writings of George Washington, 8: 56
91. Nicholas Cresswell, The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell [London, 1925], 176, 180, 186-87 [Dec. 14, 1776, Jan. 7, Mar. 3, Mar. 10, 1777])
92. The assembly formalized the practice of enlisting servants in May 1777 when it allowed recruiting officers to enlist servants and apprentices, apparently without their masters' consent (see Hening, Statutes at Large, 9: 12, 216-17, 275-76)
93. They also opened the door for enslaved Virginians to gain their freedom from their masters by offering to serve as substitutes for them if they were drafted (see Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961], 56-57)
94. Edmund Pendleton to William Woodford, June 28, 1777, in David John Mays, ed., The Letters and Papers of Edmund Pendleton, 1734-1803 (Charlottesville, Va., 1967), 1: 215
95. For details of lower-class resistance in 1777 and 1778, see McDonnell, Politics of War, chaps. 8-9
96. See also McDonnell, "Fit for Common Service? Class, Race and Recruitment in Revolutionary Virginia," in Revolutionary War and Society, ed. John P. Resch and Walter Sargent (DeKalb, Ill., 2006)
97. Granville Smith to Leven Powell, Aug. 28, 1777, in "The Leven Powell Correspondence, 1775-1787," John P. Branch Historical Papers of Randolph-Macon College 2 (June 1902): 125
98. Raleigh Colston to William Aylett, Oct. 24, 1777, in Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 172. The aggrieved captain thought the crew were "a sett of unfeeling animals." As the Virginia legislature continued to print money to pay the large bounties it promised and other wartime costs, prices for goods and also for military labor rose quickly
99. H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Legislative Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia [Richmond, Va., 1918], 2: 99, 112-13 [Mar. 7, Mar. 30, 1778])
100. On labor shortages in the mid-Atlantic region during the war, see esp. Michael V. Kennedy "The Home Front during the War for Independence: The Effect of Labor Shorrages on Commercial Production in the Mid-Atlantic," in A Companion to the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Maiden, Mass., 2000) 332-41
101. For "demon of avarice," see Pendleton to Washington, May 21, 1778, in John Robert Sellers, "The Virginia Continental Line, 1775-1780" (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1968), 289
102. There were "none at all offering for that service" (Diary of Robert Honyman, Mar. 15, 1778, Alderman Library, University of Virginia)
103. Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763-1789 (New York, 1971), 352-54
104. Eliga H. Gould, "To Strengthen the King's Hands: Dynastic Legitimacy, Militia Reform, and Ideas of National Unity in England, 1745-1760," Historical Journal 34, no. 2 (June 1991): 329-48
105. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), esp. 72-105
106. Berkeley County Petition, [Nov. 18, 1780], Virginia Legislative Petitions, Library of Virginia
107. Hening, Statutes at Large, 10: 257-62
108. See also Journal of the House of Delegates of Virginia (Charlottesville, Va., 1781), 14
109. H. J. Eckenrode, The Revolution in Virginia (1916; repr., Hamden, Conn., 1964), 259
110. Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 274
111. Frey, Waterfront the Rock, 156-57
112. Frey, Water from the Rock, 159, 167
113. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 259
114. Cassandra Pybus does a good job separating rhetoric from reality regarding the number of enslaved Virginians who fled to the British in Pybus, "Jefferson's Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution, WMQ 62, no. 2 (April 2005): 243-64. The exaggerated accounts given by contemporaries, however, raise intriguing questions about the perceptions and magnified feats of planters during the crisis
115. Edmund Pendleton to James Madison, July 6 July 23, 1781, in Mays, Letters and Papers of Edmund Pendleton, 1: 365, 367
116. Emory G. Evans, Thomas Nelson and the Revolution in Virginia (Williamsburg, Va., 1978), 100-101
117. Frey, Water from the Rock, 166
118. Contrary to usual practice, locals demanded that the court execute Jack and make him "an example of Justice and not of Mercy" (Palmer, Calendar of Virginia State Papers, 1: 477-78
119. Elizabeth City County Petition, [Mar. 8, 1781], Virginia Legislative Petitions, Library of Virginia
120. He wrote that the "helpless wives and children were at the mercy not only of the males among the slaves but of the very women, who could handle deadly weapons; and these could not have been left in safety in the absence of all authority of the masters and of union among neighbors" (Randolph, History of Virginia, ed. Arthur H. Shaffer [Charlottesville, Va., 1970], 285)
121. Gould, Persistence of Empire, esp. 72-105
122. Gould, Historical Journal 34: 329-48. For "most indigent circumstances," see Pittsylvania County Petition, [June 19, 1781], Virginia Legislative Petitions, Library of Virginia. See also Amherst County Petitions, [May 29, 1781], ibid
123. George Skillern to Jefferson, Apr. 14, 1781, in Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 5: 449-50
124. Charlotte County Petition, [May 26, 1780], Virginia Legislative Petitions, Library of Virginia
125. See Joseph Jones to James Madison, Nov. 18, 1780, in Hutchinson and Rachal, Papers of James Madison, 2: 182-83; undated bill, Legislative Department, Rough Bills, Library of Virginia (brought to my attention by Brent Tarter at the Library of Virginia)
126. For militia members not staying the course, see Evans, Thomas Nelson, 117-18
127. Nelson to Davies, Sept. 19, 1781, in H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Official Letters of the Governors of the State of Virginia (Richmond, Va., 1929), 3: 59
128. For the number of enslaved Virginians with Cornwallis and the British, see Pybus, WMQ 62: 256-57
129. For enslaved Virginians and early royal efforts to subdue the patriots, see Holton, Forced Founders, esp. chap. 5
130. For the importance and centrality of patriarchy and the household economy, see esp. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds
131. as well as Alice Kessler-Harris, "Treating the Male as 'Other': Redefining the Parameters of Labor History," Labor History 34, nos. 2-3 (Spring-Summer 1993): 202
132. For postwar, proslavery petitions, see Fredrika Teute Schmidt and Barbara Ripel Wilhelm, "Early Proslavery Petitions in Virginia," WMQ 30, no. 1 (January 1973): 133-46
133. See Herbert Sloan and Peter Onuf, "Politics, Culture, and the Revolution in Virginia: A Review of Recent Work," VMHB 91, no. 3 (July 1983): 280, 279
134. See also Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1781-1800 (New York, 1978)
135. and more generally, the revealing findings of Woody Holton, "'Divide et Impera': Federalist 10 in a Wider Sphere," WMQ 62, no. 2 (April 2005): 175-212
136. and esp. Holton, "'From the Labours of Others': The War Bonds Controversy and the Origins of the Constitution in New England," WMQ 61, no. 2 (April 2004): 271-316
137. The link between army officers and Federalists is an old one, but the reasons for this connection have been less well explored. See Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution (Washington, D.C., 1962)
138. For John Shy's comments, see Shy, "American Society and Its War for Independence," in A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (New York, 1976), 119, 131-32
139. For an extended rumination on this theme, see Michael A. McDonnell, "National Identity and the American War for Independence Reconsidered," Australasian Journal of American Studies 20, no. 1 (July 2001): 3-17
140. For two other suggestive outcomes of tying the war years together with the postwar years, see Saul Cornell's nuanced and class-based evaluation of Anti-Federalism, in Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999)
141. and Terry Bouton's superb piece, Bouton, "A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania," Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (December 2000): 855-87