Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (2007), ix þ 334 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, £19.99/$35.00).
This review first appeared in Social History 34, no. 3 (Aug., 2009), 387-389.
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Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution
Benjamin L. Carp
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
In this lively and extensively researched book, Benjamin L. Carp has tackled some big and enduring questions. What was the place of the cities in the coming of the American Revolution? How did Americans find common cause among a fractious and diverse population? And to what extent did Americans manage to forge a civic consciousness in the cities that would help lay the foundations for a new nation? Though the answers to such questions have long been thorny and contested, the genius of Carp’s book lies in his focus on urban spaces to explore the process of political mobilization. Long a staple approach of urban historians, few historians of Revolutionary America have taken a zoom lens and focused on colonial streets, taverns, churches and houses to explore the diverse ways in which Americans forged a Revolutionary consciousness.
As Carp notes, while John Adams famously noted that the Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, this book makes a serious argument that the Revolution took root in ‘Americans’ homes, streets, and public buildings’ (13). Exploring such key sites as the waterfront of Boston’s maritime community, the taverns of New York, the churches of Newport, the homes of Charleston and the streets of Philadelphia, Carp effectively demonstrates that the urban landscape helped define and set the parameters of political mobilization and social change during the imperial crisis. If we look closely enough, Carp argues, it was in these places that Americans had to wrestle with each other to forge some degree of common ground amid a welter of disparate interests. In these places, colonists had to confront most starkly a pluralistic urban diversity of opinions, social unrest, the coercive forces of British authority and the need to communicate their grievances with one another and the rest of the colonial population. And where they confronted these problems mattered in shaping the nature of the debate. The often desperate – sometimes furious – negotiations, debates and violence that characterized this search for a common purpose could be fuelled by punch, restrained by pews or frustrated by legislative doors literally blocking access to power.
In compelling prose, Carp skilfully leads us through the places where the contests and conflicts that defined mobilization played out as would-be Revolutionaries were forced to enlist the co-operation of a diverse range of groups within their pluralistic cities. Sites such as Boston’s polyglot waterfront, for example, could engender a recognition of its inhabitants’ interdependence, as well as their differences. And in places such as the taverns and clubs of New York, city-dwellers were barely able to forge enough of a civic consensual consciousness – often based as much on the physical exclusion of the previously socially and politically disenfranchised as on the inclusion of others – to sustain a movement that would ultimately end with the Declaration of Independence. Carp’s detailed examination of the different churches of Newport also shows that not all differences could be overcome, even temporarily. Here, differences between and within diverse congregations created a civic impasse that frustrated political mobilization even while the blacks and women in their midst were politicized by the emerging conflicts. In the process of uncovering these details, however, Carp also raises questions about the larger debates on the issues he examines. In particular, the strength of the emerging civic consensual consciousness at any one time is never clear. Carp admits that it was an ephemeral phenomenon. It had never really existed before the imperial crisis, and it fragmented quickly under the pressure of wartime demands. Yet this consensus also seemed shaky in the years of its supposed high tide. There is no doubt, as Carp shows, that the interests of different groups and classes overlapped and often coincided with each other during this turbulent period, and that leaders of each sought to use this to promote their own views. But elite sources, often written to convince others of the unity behind resistance, imply a more cohesive movement than might have been the case. And while Carp effectively demonstrates the intimacy of many public spaces where face-to-face negotiations were vital, it can only be inferred that these relationships fostered a feeling of maritime community (in the case of Boston). They might, and in many cases did, lead to contempt. That many of these coalitions shattered so quickly after 1775, as Carp is quick to point out, would suggest the latter inference.
The problem of reading elite sources as evidence of consensus becomes clearer in the chapters on Charleston and Philadelphia. For Charleston, Carp uses the only written sources available, those of the gentry, to assert – but not prove – that fears of a slave rebellion helped cement the movement in South Carolina. In Philadelphia, rowdy groups of militia and others on the streets are sometimes heard in dialogue with radical leaders, but we do not hear their voices with as much clarity as those who apparently tried to direct them. This perspective undermines when it could have strengthened the force of Carp’s argument, particularly when he asserts that militia groups were ‘important tools for political mobilization’ (203). Ultimately, we learn, ‘Philadelphians’ encountered ‘negative’ aspects of Revolution, such as the violent nature of mobs and the ‘unruly nature of participatory democracy’. Of course, from a different perspective among some ‘Philadelphians’ at least, these ‘lessons’ were the goals of the Revolution (212). Finally, while the focus on ‘spaces’ illuminates a great deal about the dynamics of Revolutionary mobilization, it does not necessarily explain the Revolution. While Carp uses spaces to illuminate the process of mobilization, he ends up making an argument about the importance of cities to Revolutionary mobilization. A more convincing argument about Revolutionary mobilization would have included spaces both rural and urban. Indeed, a close look at the Baptist churches of Virginia, for example, would have only strengthened his argument. On the other hand, Carp’s claim about the centrality of the cities in the Revolution rests on an argument about the transmission of ideas to the countryside that he does only a little to sustain. Carp’s focus only allows us to guess that he is probably right.
Yet Carp has already done enough. It is impossible to do justice to the nuances of his argument in a short review. He paints a vivid and detailed picture of the intense negotiations that took place in and out of doors and subtly tracks the contours of a process that was fluid, contingent, contested and shaped by its setting. And, in the end, he has written a provocative, engaging book that will help reset the agenda for future debates about the relationships between places and people, the coming of the Revolution, the importance of the cities, and the development of a civic consciousness both before and after the Revolutionary crisis.
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