posts.
During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose “great and overgrown rich men…they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.” The Privates Committee drew up a bill of rights for the convention, including the statement that “an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property.”
In the countryside, where most people lived, there was a similar conflict of poor against rich—which political leaders would use to mobilize the population against England, granting some benefits for the rebellious poor, and many more for themselves in the process. The tenant riots in New Jersey in the 1740s, the New York tenant uprisings of the 1750s and 1760s in the Hudson Valley, and the rebellion in northeastern New York that led to the carving of Vermont out of New York State were all more than sporadic rioting. They were long-lasting social movements, highly organized, involving the creation of countergovernments.
In North Carolina, a “Regulator Movement” of white farmers was organized against wealthy and corrupt officials in the period from 1766 to 1771, exactly those years when, in the cities of the Northeast, agitation was growing against the British, crowding out class issues. The Regulators referred to themselves as “poor Industrious peasants,” as “labourers,” “the wretched poor,” “oppressed” by “rich and powerful…designing Monsters.” They resented the tax system, which was especially burdensome on the poor, and the combination of merchants and lawyers who worked in the courts to collect debts from the harassed farmers. The Regulators did not represent servants or slaves, but they did speak for small owners, squatters, and tenants.
In Orange County, North Carolina, in the 1760s, the Regulators organized to prevent the collection of taxes and the confiscation of the property of tax delinquents. Officials said “an absolute Insurrection of a dangerous tendency has broke out in Orange County,” and made military plans to suppress it. At one point seven hundred armed farmers forced the release of two arrested Regulator leaders. In another county, Anson, a local militia colonel complained of “the unparalleled tumults, Insurrections, and Commotions which at present distract this County.” At one point a hundred men broke up the proceedings at a county court.
The result of all this was that the assembly passed some mild reform legislation, but also an act “to prevent riots and tumults,” and the governor prepared to crush them militarily. In May of 1771 there was a decisive battle in which several thousand Regulators were defeated by a disciplined army using cannon. Six Regulators were hanged.
One consequence of this bitter conflict is that only a minority of the people in the Regulator counties seem to have participated as patriots in the Revolutionary War. Most of them probably remained neutral.
Fortunately for the Revolutionary movement, the key battles were being fought in the North, and here, in the cities, the colonial leaders had a divided white population; they could win over the mechanics, who were a kind of middle class, who had a stake in the fight against England, facing competition from English manufacturers. The biggest problem was to keep the propertyless people, who were unemployed and hungry in the crisis following the French war, under control.
In Boston, the economic grievances of the lowest classes mingled with anger against the British and exploded in mob violence. The leaders of the Independence movement wanted to use that mob energy against England, but also to contain it so that it would not demand too much from them.
A political group in Boston called the Loyal Nine—merchants, distillers, shipowners, and master craftsmen who opposed the Stamp Act—organized a procession in August 1765 to protest it. They put fifty master craftsmen at the head, but needed to mobilize shipworkers from the North End and mechanics and apprentices from the South End. Two or three thousand were in the procession (Negroes were excluded). They marched to the home of the stampmaster and burned his effigy. But after the “gentlemen” who organized the demonstration left, the crowd went further and destroyed some of the stampmaster’s property.
Now a town meeting was called and the same leaders who had planned the demonstration denounced the violence and disavowed the actions of the crowd. And when the Stamp Act was repealed, due to overwhelming resistance, the conservative leaders severed their connections with the rioters. They held annual celebrations of the first anti—Stamp Act demonstration, to which they invited, according to Dirk Hoerder, not the rioters but “mainly upper and middle-class Bostonians, who traveled in coaches and carriages to Roxbury or Dorchester for opulent feasts.”
When the British Parliament turned to its next attempt to tax the colonies, this time by a set of taxes which it hoped would not excite as much opposition, the colonial leaders organized boycotts. But, they stressed, “No Mobs or Tumults, let the Persons and Properties of your most inveterate Enemies be safe.” Samuel Adams advised: “No Mobs—No Confusions—No Tumult.” And James Otis said that “no possible circumstances, though ever so oppressive, could be supposed sufficient to justify private tumults and disorders.…”
The quartering of troops by the British was directly hurtful to the sailors and other working people. After 1768, two thousand soldiers were quartered in Boston, and friction grew between the crowds and the soldiers. The soldiers began to take the jobs of working people when jobs were scarce, and on March 5, 1770, grievances of ropemakers against British soldiers taking their jobs led to a fight.
A crowd gathered in front of the customhouse and began provoking the soldiers, who fired and killed first Crispus Attucks, a mulatto worker, then others. This became known as the Boston Massacre. Feelings against the British mounted quickly at the acquittal of six of the British soldiers (two were punished by having their thumbs branded and were discharged from the army). The crowd at the massacre was described by John Adams, defense attorney for the British soldiers, as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.” Perhaps ten thousand people marched in the funeral procession for the victims of the massacre, out of a total Boston population of sixteen thousand. This led England to remove the troops from Boston and try to quiet the situation.
Impressment—drafting colonists into military service—was the background of the massacre. There had been impressment riots through the 1760s in New York and in Newport, Rhode Island, where five hundred seamen, boys, and Negroes rioted. Six weeks before the Boston Massacre, there was a battle in New York of seamen against British soldiers taking their jobs, and one seaman was killed.
In the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 tea was seized from ships and dumped into Boston Harbor. The Boston Committee of Correspondence, formed a year before to organize anti-British actions, “controlled crowd action against the tea from the start,” Dirk Hoerder says. The Tea Party led to the Coercive Acts by Parliament, virtually establishing martial law in Massachusetts, dissolving the colonial government, closing the port in Boston, and sending in troops. Mass meetings rose in opposition.
Pauline Maier, who studied the development of opposition to Britain in the decade before 1776 in her book From Resistance to Revolution, emphasizes the moderation of the leadership and, despite their desire for resistance, their “emphasis on order and restraint.” She notes: “The officers and committee members of the Sons of Liberty were drawn almost entirely from the middle and upper classes of colonial society.” Their aim, however, was to broaden their organization, to develop a mass base of wage earners.
In Virginia, it seemed clear to the educated gentry that something needed to be done to persuade the lower orders to join the revolutionary cause, to deflect their anger against England.
It was a problem for which the rhetorical talents of Patrick Henry were superbly fitted. He found language inspiring to all classes, specific enough in its listing of grievances to charge people with anger against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the rebels, and stirring enough to build patriotic feeling for the resistance movement.
Tom Paine’s Common Sense, which appeared in early 1776 and became the most popular pamphlet in the American colonies, did this. It made the first bold argument for independence,