The Revolution of the People: Thoughts and Documents on the Revolutionary Process in North

366 Pages·2006·1.29 MB·English

by  Wellenreuther, Hermann (ed.)

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Hermann Wellenreuther (ed.)
The Revolution of the People
erschienen im Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2006
Hermann Wellenreuther (ed.)
The Revolution of the People
Thoughts and Documents on the
Revolutionary Process in North America
1774-1776
with contributions
by
Maria Gehrke
Marion Stange
Hermann Wellenreuther
Universitätsverlag Göttingen
2006
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek
Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der
Deutschen Nationalbibliographie; detaillierte bibliografische
Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.ddb.de> abrufbar.
Picture: “The Alternative of Williams Burg” 1775, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
The title of the engraving is „The Alternative of Williamsburg“. It was produced by
Philip Dawe and published in London on February 16, 1775 by Robert Sayer. The
engraving represents the first satirical reaction in England to the association of the
Continental Congress and its adoption by many of the colonists – in this case those at
Williamsburg. The texts on the engraving read: 1 on the barrel: „Tobacco / A Present
/ For / John Wilkes Sqr/ Lord Mayor of / London“; 2nd on the two sheets of the
barrel: “The Resolves of the Congress” and below “Non-Importation”. The flag car-
ried by the child has the inscription “Liberty”. On the crossbeam in the background
the text reads: „A cure for the refractory“. Under the statue the text is “Botetour”
representing Narbonne Berkeley, 4th Baron of Botetourt, Governour of Virginia from
1768 to 1770. The statue was erected in 1773 in Williamsburg. The engraving is re-
produced with the kind permission of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Layout: Marion Stange
Cover Layout: Kilian Klapp, Maren Büttner
© 2006 Universitätsverlag Göttingen
ISBN 3-938616-42-3
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 1
Hermann Wellenreuther
1. Introduction 3
What is Revolutionary in the American Revolution? 3
PART I THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS, 1774 - 1776 11
Hermann Wellenreuther
2. Associations, The People, Committee of Observation and Inspection
and the Culture of Rights, 1774 – 1776 13
1. Prolegomena 13
2. The collapse of colonial governments 14
3. Forming Associations of the People, 1774-1776 17
4. The arguments of the Associations 18
5. Getting the Association signed by all 23
6. The creation of Committees of Inspection and Observation 26
7. The “invisible” activities of the Committees of Observation 28
8. The “visible” activities of the Committees of Observation 30
9. Reasons of Committees of Observation to publicly “ostracize” persons 33
10. Values and principles propagated by the Committees of Observation 35
11. After the collapse: Terminological problems and the emergence of “The people” 45
12. Procedures and judicial process and the Committees of Observation 49
13. Committees of Observation and their electorate 51
14. The problem of rights I: liberty of conscience 54
15. The problem of rights II: freedom of the press and of opinion 56
16. The problem of rights III. The right to property and “necessity” as an argument 60
17. The problem of rights IV: The Massachusetts Court of Inquiry 62
18. The People, the Revolutionary process, and the culture of rights: A summary view 63
Marion Stange
3. Defining a Nation: Patriotic Associations, 1774-1776 67
1. Definition 68
2. Distributing the Associations 68
3. The Language of Patriotism: Keywords 70
I
4. “His Majesty’s loyal subjects” or “friends of American Liberty”: The Patriots’ Self-
Conception 75
5. “Wicked ministers” and “beloved sovereign”: How the Patriots Presented Their
Adversaries 81
Great Britain 81
Loyalists 86
6. Associations: Mirrors and Instruments of Revolutionary Mobilization 88
Hermann Wellenreuther
4. From the Past to the Future of the “American Israel”: Sermons in the
American Revolution 91
1. Sermons as Agents 91
2. Demonizing the Mother Country, 1775-1776 100
3. “The Cause of AMERICA … is the cause of GOD” 109
4. The Future before May 1776: Independence 113
5. The Future as a Vision of the American Israel 117
PART II SOURCES AND DOCUMENTS 125
Marion Stange, Hermann Wellenreuther
5. Texts of Associations, 1774-1776 127
Maria Gehrke, Caren Buchmüller
6. Advertisements of Committees of Inspection and Observation in New
England in Colonial Newspapers 197
Introduction 199
Boston Gazette, October 20, 1774 – July 4, 1776 201
Providence Gazette, October 20, 1774 – July 4, 1776 248
7. Appendices 297
List of Abbreviations 299
8. Bibliography 323
Unpublished Sources 325
Published Sources 325
Secondary Literature 336
9. Index of Persons and Places 345
II
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to many people for their support. The Huntington Library at San Mar-
ino has always opened their rich library resources for Hermann Wellenreuther; the
archivists at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at the New Jersey State Archives, the Maryland
Historical Society and at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress lived
easily up to the expectations of a European historian. Closer home the staff of the
Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek of the Georg-August-Universität
Göttingen and of the Library of the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University
of Berlin supported our project with generously providing us with material that usually
is not available through interlibrary loan. We are very grateful to these institutions for
their assistance and support. Caren Buchmüller, Olga Jürgens and Lasse Hoyer helped
us with the transcriptions and with checking titles and facts. And Dr. Frauke Geyken
and Marianne Steneberg with their usual cheer helped us solve all the little problems
that can make life so difficult – like locating a particular text in the internet or making
sure that individual items were printed out just when we needed them. And finally, all
our spouses, friends, and Romans suffered a little bit from our strange interest in co-
lonial newspapers, committees of inspection and observation and revolutionary asso-
ciations. We sing their praises.
Maria Gehrke
Marion Stange
Hermann Wellenreuther
1

Hermann Wellenreuther
1. Introduction
What is Revolutionary in the American Revolution?
I.
Probably with the exception of the Civil War no other period in US-American history
has received so much attention as the American Revolution. It seems that not only all
heroes and anti-heroes but also all sniffles have found their chroniclers. A bibliogra-
phy of the historiography of this truly vital epoch published at the time of the bicen-
tennial covered two thick volumes;1 and in the period since then no year has passed by
that did not experience the publication of a number of substantial monographs and a
plethora of articles that dealt with particular events of the American Revolution.
A number of battles have been fought. Back in the 1960s I grew up with the battle
about the borderlines of the revolutionary era. Did it, as Lawrence Henry Gipson
maintained, begin at the time of the Peace of Aix-La-Chapelle or, as others opined,
with the Peace of Paris in 1763 – a view shared at least in retrospect by a significant
number of Revolutionaries?2 The argument for 1748 had some interesting implica-
tions. It linked the revolutionary process to the reform plans hatched by British politi-
cians like the new president of the Board of Trade, George, earl Dunk-Halifax. The
reforms were designed to create a new British Empire in which the imperial govern-
ment controlled colonial politics much more tightly. The thesis about the beginning of
the revolutionary period in 1748 shifted the emphasis from the Stamp Act as a meas-
1 Cf. Ronald M. GEPHART (comp.), Revolutionary America, 1763-1789: A Bibliography, 2 vols., Washing-
ton, DC 1984. I will refrain from annotating my statements in this short essay. Readers interested in
particulars are invited to consult any of the numerous general histories of the American Revolution or,
should they read German, my Ausbildung und Neubildung. Die Geschichte Nordamerikas vom Ausgang
des 17. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausbruch der Amerikanischen Revolution 1775 (= Geschichte Nordameri-
kas in atlantischer Perspektive von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Eine Darstellung in sieben Bänden,
ed. N. FINZSCH, U. LEHMKUHL, H. WELLENREUTHER, vol. 2). Münster and Hamburg 2001.
2 Lawrence Henry GIPSON, The British Empire Before the American Revolution, 15 vols. New York
1939-1970.
3