Susan Branson. These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. ix + 210 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $47.50 (cloth); $17.50 (paper).

Ray Raphael. A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence. New York: The New Press, 2001. xix + 361 pp. Notes. $25.95.

Review first published in Reviews in American History 29.4 (2001) 502-509.

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These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia
Susan Branson

A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence
Ray Raphael

Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney

As Ray Raphael so vividly reminds us, the American War of Independence was one of the costliest, bloodiest conflicts in American history. Few Americans today, reared on films and documentary accounts of World War II and the conflict in Vietnam, know that only during the Civil War did a greater percentage of the population perish in any one conflict. As John Shy has calculated, the twenty-five thousand service-related deaths alone in the eight-year-long war is the per capita equivalent of about two million deaths in the United States today. Two million. [1] Moreover, on an unprecedented scale, hundreds of thousands of men and women, black, white and Native American, were dragged into a war, most often not of their making, and forced to choose sides, act, and suffer usually miserable consequences. The outcome of the Revolutionary War, of course, has always overshadowed the event itself. Indeed, beginning with the Founding Fathers themselves, most notably Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, Americans have too often whitewashed the true nature of the conflict. Yet judged from the perspective of thousands of ordinary Americans, we can only conclude that the Revolutionary War was nothing less than a divisive, damaging, and confusing civil war. Was it also a transforming experience?

As his title suggests, Raphael's book is an attempt to retell the stories of the many and varied people who got caught up in the Revolutionary War. With considerable passion, Raphael aims to put an end to the sanitized versions of the Revolution that have prevailed in the public mind. Published by The New Press, a not-for-profit press established in 1992 to disseminate ideas and viewpoints that may not be commercially viable or that are under-represented in the mass media, Raphael's work is the first in a new "People's History" series edited by Howard Zinn. As such, Raphael's book is clearly aimed at a more general audience. Following the lead of the series editor, Raphael wants to "deconstruct" and then "reconstruct" the story of the American Revolution (defined here as the War for Independence), replacing all too familiar and popular iconographic images of Bunker Hill, George Washington, and Benedict Arnold with accessible and meaningful stories of the experiences of Jeremiah Greenman, Sarah Hodgkins, Joseph Louis Gill, and Emanuel de Antonio. By shifting the lens of history away from men like Thomas Jefferson to the enslaved people he owned, the Native Americans he helped displace, and the men and women who actually fought in the war, Raphael breathes life into the stories of many hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. For the average reader who picks up this book, it will be an eye-opening experience. This is not to say that students and scholars alike will not also benefit from the book. As the list of names above suggest, not all these people will be familiar, even to scholars of the American Revolution. For Raphael, a non-specialist, has done a remarkable job of synthesising the best of the last twenty-five years of scholarship on the social history of the American Revolution. As such, it is a palpable reminder of just how much has been done.

Each chapter--on political mobilization in the prewar period, military mobilization, women, loyalists and pacifists, Native Americans and African Americans--is thorough and detailed. A long chapter on Native Americans is typical and particularly welcome, not just because of the very inclusion of this often-neglected group, but also because of Raphael's sensitive and nuanced approach. Again drawing on the very best and most recent scholarship, Raphael focuses on no less than ten major Native American communities that became embroiled in the Revolutionary conflict in different ways. Not only do we get a sense of the diversity of experiences among Native American communities, but because of this, we also get a sense of the numbers and the influence of the tribes when viewed collectively. From this overview, remarkable personal and collective stories emerge, of destruction, of civil war within Native American communities, and of survival. At the same time that Raphael draws parallels between Native warriors and the experiences of men like Joseph Plumb and James Collins, he also makes it clear that most Native Americans faced a distinct and uneasy dilemma in negotiating their way through the Revolutionary War and into the early republic.

There are plenty of well-told stories to keep students interested and engaged, and lectures lively and engaging. Also reflecting the strength of scholarship in the last twenty years or so, there are dozens of detailed stories of individual women and African Americans as well. Indeed, the wealth of detail that Raphael musters in these chapters almost threatens to overshadow the numerous stories of white men involved in the conflict in different ways. Importantly, there are few heroes to replace George Washington and Patrick Henry. Just as we begin to sympathize with the efforts of local militia in repelling British coastal depredations, Raphael makes it clear that those same men could just as easily lynch their neighbors with equal ferocity. For every woman who participated in patriotic spinning bees, there were plenty more who compelled their husbands and sons to desert the army and who readily sold supplies to the British. And, of course, as many African Americans as there were who ran from their masters when the opportunity arose, most were unable to find real freedom, or liberty. Raphael pulls few punches when dealing with the human costs of the war and he drives home the point that the war was a punishing, gruelling affair--long passages detail the atrocities perpetrated by and upon British and Continental soldiers, partisan militia, women, enslaved blacks, and Native Americans. As Raphael's review of the literature suggests, the picture we can now draw of the American Revolution is far richer and much more detailed than a generation ago, but it is also disconcertingly more messy, complicated, and problematic.

Yet if Raphael does an admirable job of bringing the war to life, he nevertheless leaves us wanting more. Though we get a vivid sense of how the war affected ordinary men and women in the colonies and new states, we only get glimpses of how they in turn affected the course and the shape of the war. We learn, for example, that many men refused to join the Continental Army and often protested violently when coerced. We do not learn, however, just to what extent this crippled the war effort and frustrated the likes of George Washington. This is, of course, unfortunate in light of Washington's later role in the nationalist movement. We are also left wondering what happened to these same people when the war ended. Native Americans are the only group for which we get a sense of their fate in the postwar period. What happened to the white farmers who fought for home-rule when they were faced with an even greater, more intrusive threat from their own new national government? What happened to the thousands of African Americans who tasted, but did not acquire, full freedom? What happened to the thousands of women who got involved in the war, were politicized by their experience, and took on new, more challenging roles when they were told to return to their domestic duties? Raphael's end point, of course, merely reflects the bulk of writing about the Revolutionary War.

In the end, if Raphael fails to explore the consequences of the people's Revolution, he also stops short of examining the meaning of that Revolution for those who were involved. Though he promises from the outset to show what the Revolution and the creation of a new nation actually meant for ordinary people, Raphael fails to deliver. Ultimately, the reader is left not quite sure what to make of all of this information. Did the war change people? Did it all add up to something other than common misery and hardship? Raphael cannot be blamed for these omissions. Constructing meaning from experience is a common and as yet unresolved problem in dealing with the histories of the inarticulate, or rather, the inaccessible. Moreover, Raphael's limits reflect a limit in the state of current scholarship. Since John Shy challenged historians to look again at the experience of the Revolutionary War almost twenty-five years ago, many have taken up the call, as Raphael's book shows. Yet scholars have been slower to answer the question Shy asked about the legacy of the war: did it make any real difference?

Susan Branson, in a very different kind of study, offers one answer. In a detailed, careful monograph based on primary sources, Branson focuses on women's rising participation in the culture and politics of the new republic, specifically in Philadelphia in the 1790s. Though she makes passing reference to women's wartime mobilization, what emerges from Branson's study is that three postwar developments were more crucial in enabling women to exploit any wartime gains to their fullest: a communications revolution that initiated a rapid rise in the availability of printed materials and increased readership, the revival of cultural institutions such as theatres and salons, and the development of a national political culture--based in the thriving city of Philadelphia--in which a party system quickly arose. Women, Branson asserts, were able to take advantage of these developments to initiate and maintain a discussion of their place in society, to participate in politics, and to "develop a consciousness as an important constituency for the competing political parties" (p. 3).

Branson's work intersects with several strands of a vibrant body of literature that deals with the post-Revolutionary period in general, and the 1790s in particular. Drawing upon the work of recent scholars interested in the rapid rise of American print culture, Branson first shows that women were increasingly exposed to and then contributed to a growing body of written material about their status. As publishers and readership alike expanded with technological and educational developments, women's issues increasingly came to the fore. Though subjects were often confined to more traditional content, the very idea of female-centered content had radical implications as women quickly realised that the world of print gave them a new forum to discuss and debate women's familial, social, economic, and political roles. The growing body of literature ranged widely--from excerpts of Wollstonecrafts's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to misogynistic reprints of epitaphs to women who had strayed from their wifely duties--but the end result was inevitable: even when literature did not explicitly challenge gender roles or encourage change, the frequent attention to women's roles in the publications of the day often raised important questions about their very status.

Such questions about women's public and political roles took on a new lease of life in an increasingly popular American political culture that developed in response to events in France after 1789. Again, drawing on a spate of excellent recent scholarship that has helped reposition the French Revolution as a defining event in American politics and culture, Branson makes a persuasive case that it also served as a catalyst for the expansion of women's public roles. Women followed events in France through the newspapers as avidly as men, and they were particularly interested in French women's participation and role in their Revolution. The political activism of French women provoked at times admiration, emulation, and sometimes horror. In response, American women adopted new clothing and language, they took to the streets to participate in political rituals both for and against the Revolution, and they increasingly became embroiled in and manipulated by partisan politics. Indeed, the growing fissure between Democratic Republicans and Federalists was the final and essential key in propelling women into the public sphere. As male politicians realized that they could add strength and legitimacy to their own partisan causes through the inclusion of women in public rituals, women were positively encouraged to get involved. In turn, some women were able to exploit the intense partisanship of the period to assert their own allegiances and expand their participation in the wider public political culture.

Yet as much as the experimental and charged political atmosphere of the 1790s allowed more space for women's participation in the public sphere, Branson is less sure about the long-term impact of these developments. In the end, she concludes that it was in less avowedly political areas of American life that women were able to maintain an increased public presence. For example, political partisanship also initially helped propel women center-stage, quite literally, as authors, audiences, and subjects in Philadelphia's burgeoning postwar theatre culture. Once accepted in the theatre, however, at least some women used the stage to articulate support for greater recognition of women's place in the intellectual and social life of the new nation. The emergence of a national elite based in Philadelphia also provided another opportunity for women to exert a more subtle influence on the cultural and political life of the nation through the development of a salon culture. As a part of the public sphere where gender, politics, and society intersected, the Philadelphia salon provided women with greater informal access to public political space. Though these chapters could have been developed in more detail, Branson's suggestive conclusions mesh well with Catherine Allgor's recent work, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (2001). Allgor's sensitive reading of the role influential women played in the new capital city in the early nineteenth century shows that women retreated from the streets, as it were, and adopted a less overtly political stance. However, women were simultaneously able to exert an influence on politics by forming informal social and political networks, by lobbying their male relatives, and by continuing to play a central role in salons and other social events.

As much as Branson's study is to be commended for furnishing a unique insight into women's public political and cultural place in the new republic, Raphael's book reminds us of its limits. Branson rightly points out that Philadelphia had all the "necessary ingredients to be the focal point of the nation's interests: diversity, density, culture, and politics." And to contemporary observers, she notes, "it truly may have seemed as though all the world was in Philadelphia" (p. 7). Yet as the literature on which Raphael based his work has so clearly shown in the last twenty-five years, all the world was not Philadelphia, nor even the colonial world that would become the United States. The diversity of experiences in the colonial world was astonishing to contemporary observers and historians alike. Branson, of course, is careful to note that her study is, after all, focused mainly on women in Philadelphia, yet throughout the book, women in Philadelphia all too often and too easily become "American women." We all make generalizations, but they do need to be made carefully. The constant slippage of language seeps into the consciousness.

Yet even within Philadelphia itself, it is doubtful whether Branson's broader claims could be upheld. As Branson also makes clear, her study is mainly of upper-middle-class and elite women. Race gets little mention, and though Branson claims that class played a defining role in the practices and activities examined in the book, class differences are woefully under-examined. This is a particular shame given that Branson's own evidence is wonderfully suggestive of both intersections and differences between elites and commoners. Class issues arise throughout, but Branson for the most part brushes them aside. In the end, such limits do raise more problematic questions. Articulate and elite white women in Philadelphia may have helped themselves to a greater share in the cultural and political life of the new nation, but it is doubtful that few women outside the temporary capital were able to do the same or even benefit from such gains. Indeed, some of Branson's evidence suggests that elite women were able to make their presence felt in part precisely because they were willing to join arms with their male counterparts in excluding many working men and women, black and white, from their notion of the public sphere. Such an interpretation would certainly jar less with what we already know of the Revolution.

What Branson's work does show is that a small but influential network of women used their position in the cultural and political capital of the new nation to begin to identify common interests and agitate for a greater role in an expanding national milieu. Such a conclusion intentionally points Branson firmly forward; she is, she admits, interested in closing the gap between eighteenth-century women's history and nineteenth-century women's history. In particular, she raises important questions that challenge our notions about separate spheres and the extent and nature of republican motherhood. She is also keen to make connections between the nascent protofeminism of individuals like Judith Sargent Murray and Mary Wollstonecraft with the public political activities of women in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

In looking forward, Branson also and more generally joins the ranks of a growing number of scholars whose work focuses on the expanding political participation of traditional outsiders in the 1790s. Such studies, it seems, have diverted historians' attention away from the Revolution, with some salutary results. Certainly, as Branson and others show, the popular origins of an American national identity and American nationalism are far more profitably studied in the post-ratification period. [2] At the very least, as Branson also reminds us, it might be better to think of the American Revolution as but one in a series of revolutions, rebellions, and reform movements that shook the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century. Such an approach allows us to get beyond the perhaps now worn question of how radical the Revolution was, and explore other popular movements that give the period as a whole a less coherent but no less dynamic flavor.

But before we lay the American Revolution to rest, we might yet profit from looking backwards, too. Indeed, Branson's book, taken together with Raphael's, point to a problematic gap in Revolutionary historiography. On one hand, Raphael and the majority of the social historians he draws upon only take their stories up until the end of the war, and they often neglect to explore the longer term impact that the war had upon their subjects. On the other hand, Branson and other scholars of the popular political culture of the 1790s often only pay lip service to the upheaval of the war. Branson acknowledges the pervasive, intrusive, and transforming experiences of women during the Revolutionary war as essential to their postwar exploration of cultural and political possibilities, but her study only implicitly deals with the impact of the Revolution on women in the postwar period. Branson is in fact hard-pressed to find any direct or concrete connections between the actions of the kinds of women that Raphael presents, and the women she has studied. In short, it seems an awfully long way between the chaotic mess of the war years and the parlour rooms of the Philadelphia salons.

Of course, the shortcomings of these two books also point to the possibility of a much wider and still coherent interpretation of the period--one that extends well beyond the end of the war and one that connects that formative experience, in a far more tangible way, with developments in the 1790s. Indeed, taken together, Branson and Raphael at once allow us to expand our definition of the Revolutionary era, and to begin to think about how we can close the gap between these two fine books. But to do so, it is quite clear that we need to look far more closely at the piece in-between-- the 1780s. This missing link between Branson and Raphael is often the missing ingredient in many older works dealing with the Revolutionary war, and also the new and exciting work being done on the 1790s. Shays's Rebellion notwithstanding, the social history of this middle period remains obscure, and popular political studies are scant. Yet as at least two recent studies of popular political culture show, the 1780s proved fertile ground for continued experimentation, protest, and the politicization of ordinary Americans. [3] If Raphael's summary of the literature on the war years is anything to go by, these studies are but the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, when juxtaposed with the experiences of Native Americans and African Americans in these same years, of which, in fact, we already know perhaps a little more, the period might just become as complicated as that of the war. In the end, greater study of the 1780s would help us to get a little bit closer to finally answering John Shy's call to measure the impact of the war on American society. It will also help us to make more coherent and concrete connections between the War for American Independence and the creation of a new nation.

Endnotes

1. See John Shy, "The Legacy of the American Revolutionary War," 249-251 and other essays, in Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (1990). This estimate does not include slaves who perished, civilian casualties, nor loyalist flight from the U.S.

2. The now-standard works are Simon Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (1997); Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (1999); and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997).

3. See Terry Bouton, "A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania, "Journal of American History 87: 3 (Dec. 2000): 855-887; and Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (1999). See also John L. Brooke, "To the Quiet of the People: Revolutionary Settlements and Civil Unrest in Western Massachusetts, 1774-1789," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., 46: 3 (July, 1989), 425-462.

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