American Insurgents, American Patriots

Review by Sanford Levinson

T. H. Breen’s superb new book, American Insurgents, American Patriots, is an almost necessary complement to another superb recent HBC selection, Jack Rakove’s Revolutionaries. Rakove focuses on a number of leaders of the Revolution, many of them, of course, household names. Breen, on the other hand, focuses on a host of unknown Americans whose decision to become “insurgents” against British rule in 1774-75 in fact made the American Revolution possible. As he writes, “Without tens of thousands of ordinary people willing to set aside their work, homes, and families to take up arms in expectation of killing and possibly being killed, a handful of elite gentlemen arguing about political theory makes for a debating society, not a revolution.”

It is a mistake to view Breen’s subjects as “followers” of Rakove’s “leaders,” for Breen’s central point is that they came to their own decisions and, indeed, pushed the ostensible “leaders” to take more vigorous action than they might otherwise have wished. He is not asking us to “discount the contributions of leading political figures” such as those examined by Rakove. “Rather, by restoring the people to the history of their own resistance, we rediscover a complex interplay between the deliberations that took place in Carpenters’ Hall [in Philadelphia in September 1774] and what was happening on the ground.”

Breen focuses on the remarkably disastrous consequences of the British response to the Boston Tea Party (with which Rakove also begins his own book), which was to occupy Boston and close its port. This bit of 18th-century “counter-insurgency” led many colonists—and not only those in Massachusetts or even New England—to engage in fundamental changes in consciousness by which loyal, even if sometimes complaining, British subjects transformed themselves into “Americans,” who freely referred to a newly imagined “our country” in their bitter fulminations against the British. “Without bothering to consult a single Founding Father, the people took up arms en masse against the empire.” The British attack on Concord and Lexington on April 19, 1775, only corroborated what had become a widely shared view that the British were intent on “enslaving” the colonists.

Breen certainly succeeds in presenting a distinct view of the origins of the American Revolution and emphasizing the importance of the unknown “Americans” he often brings vividly to life, in their own language culled from varieties of obscure sources. “[U]nlike the more acclaimed figures of the period,” he points out, “they often expressed their aspirations within a self-consciously religious framework.” But it is clear that Breen intends his book, beginning with the title, to evoke much more contemporary instances of “insurgency” and “counter-insurgency.” Thus the book concludes with his observing that “[t]hrough the crucible of confrontation that stretched from years of resistance to Britain’s eventual capitulation, American insurgents emerged as American patriots. And now, as so many other people throughout the world demand their rights and justice, they challenge modern Americans to remember their own revolutionary origins.” Both overt text and the obvious subtext amply justify my enthusiasm for this remarkable book.