“I’ll force you to Obedience you Rebellious Slut”! If you want to grab attention from your audience, saucy language and a female brawl featuring a right hook to the breast is a fairly successful route. For me, teaching early American texts is about engaging students with new historical materials in an accessible way, cultivating critical thinking, and giving them a splash of fun. “The Female Combatants” (1776) is a favorite text to introduce students into the early American world. Combining Revolutionary politics with the social and cultural valences of gender, race, class, nation, and power, this political cartoon serves as a multidimensional cipher which people at every knowledge level can participate in analyzing. Once students have a cursory understanding of the symbolism of the image, a debate over tone, audience, and intention can prove fruitful.

While the titillating image captures the audience’s attention, it simultaneously allows even the newest student of history to speculate analytically about its meaning. What can we know upon initial glance? First, that it is a physical brawl labeled with “1776.” Great Britain, embodied as an opulent woman adorned in expensive, high regal fashion, is standing off against her bare-chested foe, a woman decorated in tattoos, feathered skirt and headdress, representing the popular anthropomorphic image of the North American colonies as a beautiful but vulnerable, hostile but virgin Native American princess in a “state of nature.” Native Americans were a people fraught with the dialectics of exoticism—both alluringly interesting and unnervingly different. In masculine artists’ hands, women’s bodies were often displayed for diverse rhetorical and metaphorical meanings, representing more the creative intentions of the artist and the consumptive desires of the male literate public than a lived womanly reality. Womanhood was metaphorical.

The verbal exchange between the combatants demonstrates the differing ideological premises of the colonists and the English. The popular Filmerian system, articulated by political theorist Sir Robert Filmer, characterized the family and the state as parallel and symbiotic institutions, fixed the king as both ruler and father, the British Empire as mother to dependent colonies, and embedded that relationship in a rhetoric of natural power dynamics. The brawl between Mother England and Daughter America points toward the cleavage of the colonies from the metropole and helps us understand the ideological fracturing between English systems of natural authority and submission and the new American conceptualization of government as, unlike a parent-child relationship, based upon free choice and consent.

Foregrounding the image are metaphors both accessible to the young scholar and interesting to the experienced one. Some may recognize the ancient Phrygian cap of liberty perched atop a flourishing tree, holding a banner “FOR LIBERTY,” and a shield marked with the Gallic rooster of France. These symbols mark the allegiance of the American colonists with the enlightened French and the right to freedom from an oppressive government. On the side of Britannia lies a withering stump upholding a banner “FOR OBEDIENCE” and a German-style shield with a northern-facing compass rose—nodding toward both Lord North, the Revolutionary-era prime minister of Great Britain, and the authoritarian German government.

Little is known regarding the artist, but we can do some detective work to develop an argument about where the creator’s loyalties lay. It is a debate among scholars as to who is “winning” or “right” in the engraving. If America is indeed sluttish, her licentious and irresponsible behavior would undermine the authority to her claims for liberty—a mother must discipline her wayward daughter; a daughter must be obedient to her mother. Control over women’s sexuality was considered a male right in the seventeenth century, and if we assume the artist is likely male, the “liberty” cries of a libertine daughter would inflame many moral consciences. If, however, we read Britannia’s dress as a display of the conspicuous consumption of excess as a critique of the tyranny of English aristocrats, this paired with the British Empire’s withering tree, Britannia’s unvirtuous speech and unladylike attack creates a portrait of cruelty and unfairness. One could provoke debate about the sexualized imagery throughout the cartoon, the purpose of a racialized America, the ways in which imagery of class, race, and gender intersect, and the place of the “civilized” European versus the “natural” American in the rhetoric of the American Revolution. Does the artist believe Britain holds the moral right; does the cartoon display America’s winning ideology? Which should win, or who shall?

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Jonathan Beecher Field for inviting me to write this post, to Kathleen Brown for helping me interpret the source, and to Rachel MacKinnon, Matthew Reid Krell, Daniel Brunson, Samuel McLean, and Taylor Spence for reading earlier drafts.

Further Reading

Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2008).

David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas (Oxford, 2004).

Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 (Baltimore, 2014).

Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996).

Amelia Rauser, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark, 2008).

Ruthann Robson, Dressing Constitutionally: Hierarchy, Sexuality, and Democracy from our Hairstyles to our Shoes (Cambridge, 2013).

Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 2007).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

Stephanie McKellop is a PhD student in history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies the history of marriage, the body, and the family in early America.

How Thomas Paine saw South Asia in North America

Every once in a while, usually after teaching a course on the American Revolution, I wonder if I have the American Revolution all wrong. It’s a sobering thought. After all, I can speak at length about the economic, religious, and political terrain of British America; about the pace and sequence of the imperial crisis of 1763-1775; and about the costs and contingencies of the war that followed. And I can offer up a range of competing historiographies for my class to wrestle with. So, sheer ignorance is not the problem, as far as I know. But I can’t shake the sense that my point of departure for teaching the Revolution is just plain … wrong. More to the point, I wonder if I’ve taken Carl Becker’s famous line about the Revolution being an argument, not over home rule, but over who shall rule at home, too much to heart. I wonder if I’ve been so eager to showcase the Revolution’s consequences for American society that I’ve forgotten an older view of what it originally and fundamentally was: a colonial revolt, not a social revolution.

The writer who has suffered the most from my neo-Becker approach is Thomas Paine. In my class, his incendiary pamphlet of January 1776, Common Sense, always makes an appearance but never a splash. This baffles me. How could students who do so well arguing the fine points of urban rioting and land shortage in colonial America approach this fiery classic with all the enthusiasm of a Clinton at an Obama rally? Why doesn’t it raise even a bit of the passion it did in 1776? Perhaps the problem is that I am too keen to relate Paine to the social and cultural developments we now associate with the Revolution and its aftermath, to enlist him in our ongoing feuds over republicanism and liberalism and democratization. Later in his up-and-down, stranger-than-fiction career, it is true, Paine would draw up plans for a free and decent society, one that balanced rights and duties while renouncing privilege and violence. But that is not what Common Sense is about, and when you try to explain it in those terms, you pour water on its marvelous anger, leaving your class confused and bored. At least, this has been my experience.

Fortunately, I’ve had occasion to revisit Paine’s writings, and what I’ve found makes the pre-Becker view look a lot more interesting. For it seems that Paine was deeply influenced by imperial misdeeds, not only in North America, where he arrived late in 1774, but also in South Asia. At a crucial moment in his life and career, just before his trip to America, he came upon a set of atrocities committed by British soldiers and fortune seekers in Bengal and Bihar—what is now eastern India and Bangladesh. These crimes against people on the eastern fringes of British rule seared dreadful images into his mind, images that he then relayed to people on its western margins. Mass shootings, plunder, famine—this is what Thomas Paine came to know of South Asia’s recent past and to expect of North America’s near future.

Recovering this dimension of Common Sense not only helps us to understand Paine but also to see the American Revolution as a fist shaken at imperial brutality. Although the term empire carried a neutral accent in the moral language of the day, the violence and plunder associated with British advances in the “East-Indies” conditioned Paine’s response to British measures in the American colonies during 1775. The crimes committed against India, he swore that year, would be “revenged.” Yet the great majority of Americans, then and now, had little concept of their connection to the Hindus and Muslims of eighteenth-century South Asia, people compelled by low literacy rates to suffer in silence. This reminds us of a troubling pattern in the life and memory of nations, whereby certain atrocities are reported to the point of exaggeration (see Massacre, Boston) while others all but disappear from the historical universe, reemerging only in coded phrases and vague allusions.

At the beginning of 1772, Thomas Paine was a tobacconist and excise officer whose ideas landed him on the left margins of English political culture. As a friend recalled, he was a Whig of “bold, acute, and independent” opinions. Paine was also a member of the Headstrong Club, a debating society in the town of Lewes, fifty miles south of London. Evidently, his exposure to Enlightenment rationalism (from public lectures and newspapers) and Quaker egalitarianism (from meetings he attended with his father) had convinced him that Britain was too stratified and tradition bound. Indeed, the thirty-five-year-old agreed that year to represent his fellow excise officers in a petition to Parliament, asking for more respect or, at least, better pay.

That he did so speaks to an emerging culture of political dissent and libertarian nationalism. Beneath and between its profoundly conservative and aristocratic institutions, Paine’s Britain was a rude, irreverent place where power was fragmented and liberty celebrated. Britons also built a new camaraderie by identifying with the hearty, apple-cheeked John Bull (the rough equivalent of Uncle Sam), singing “God Save the King,” and claiming to despise all things French. Military heroes were the shock troops of these sentiments, with General Wolfe, martyred on the Plains of Abraham outside of Quebec in 1760, serving as patron saint of Britannia. As of 1772, Paine lived within this patriotic paradigm, addressing his superiors in the deferential idiom of a loyal subject and even writing an ode to the fallen Wolfe three years later.

Along with its celebration of liberty, the moral appeal of early British nationalism rested on a shaky claim to national innocence. Unlike the rapacious Spaniards and benighted French, the story ran, the British led an empire of law and civility. They had no desire to conquer unwilling peoples, only to spread the blessings of commerce and Christianity (in that order). The global truth behind this tale was that no major European power was yet capable of crushing its rivals. In southern and eastern Asia, British merchants and soldiers competed with their French and Dutch counterparts, while the three Islamic empires—the Mughals of India, the Ottomans in the Levant, and the Safavids in Persia—remained strong enough to set the terms of trade and control access to resources. When this began to change on the Indian subcontinent, leaving Europeans in charge of huge tracts of land, the British self-image struggled to keep pace with the rapid expansion of the British Empire.

At the heart of this new, more aggressive imperialism were the East India Company and its most visible spokesman, Robert Clive. Son of a provincial lawyer, Clive was a self-made man of the least admirable kind. Haughty, manic-depressive, and very, very ambitious, he got his start as a company clerk, helping to bring the silks and spices of southern Asia to the precocious consumers of the North Atlantic. By midcentury, the company had begun to take advantage of the weakening Mughal grip in Mysore, the Coromandel Coast, and Calcutta, the major port of Bengal. When the nawab (Muslim ruler) of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, briefly seized that city in 1757, Clive seized the day, retaking Calcutta at a time of global military malaise for British arms. In 1761, Robert Clive became Baron Clive—a merely Irish peerage, he complained, but a major honor all the same. Three years later, a company force won the decisive Battle of Buxar, solidifying British control over northern and eastern India. Never one for subtlety, Clive wrote to his nominal superiors about future dominion over the entire subcontinent.

After the beleaguered Mughals handed Clive the diwani, or civil administration and land revenues, of Bengal and the nearby provinces of Bihar and Orissa, the Baron returned to Britain in pomp and splendor. Rumors circulated that he carried egg-sized gems from the east, and in fact he had profited as few imperialists before and many since from a combination of gifts, bribes, and sheer plunder. (He later compared the riches he found to a beautiful but married woman who tried to seduce her husband’s friend; eventually, any man would give in to the entreaties of “flesh and blood.”) Still, Clive could not shake his parvenu insecurities. So he chased more wealth, more power, more honor. He and other company officials set off a boom in East India stock from 1766 to 1769, and when this bubble burst, public suspicions about the “nabobs” (corrupted from nawab) returning from the east intensified. In early 1772, with the company’s finances in shambles along with its reputation, Parliament resolved to find out what was happening on the far end of the empire. Clive answered charges of misrule and corruption with his signature grandiloquence, appealing to “my Country in general” to restore his good name.

When red-blooded Britons like Clive boasted of their liberties, they did have a point. Compared to the Frenchman or Hessian of the day, the average Englishman was not only safe from arbitrary arrest but also free (and able) to read unflattering things about his government. The sheer amount of circulating ink—newspaper sales reached 12 million in the 1770s—established de facto freedom of the press even as libel and sedition laws undercut its de jure status. And beginning in March 1772, the testimony of Lord Clive and many other witnesses hit the London streets. The London Chronicle and other papers reprinted the report in segments, while the Evening Post sold the findings as a single volume: The Minutes of the Select Committee Appointed by the House of Commons, to Enquire into the Nature, State, and Condition of the East India Company, and of the British Army in the East Indies. Two books and many pamphlets on the subject also came out that spring and summer, while a new play, The Nabob, opened in theaters. So Clive was right: he was testifying to his country in general. Among the many Englishmen who listened and read over the next year was Thomas Paine, just arriving in London to find readers for his petition.

By any measure, the stories that turned up were horrifying. The collapse of Mughal rule and the onset of civil government by a for-profit corporation made an ideal milieu for corruption, venality, and violence. Failed rains in late 1769 and 1770 triggered severe hunger in Bengal, and when company agents disrupted both the production and distribution of rice—in some cases profiting from the sudden spike in the price of calories—crisis turned into catastrophe. Several million people perished. Witnesses spoke of bodies clogging the streets, contaminating the rivers, and satiating the birds and rodents. In testimony to Parliament in May 1772, Major Hector Munro discussed his handling of a mutiny among the native soldiers, or sepoys, serving under him eight years before. Four at a time, the mutineers were marched to the front of his assembled troops, tied to the mouths of cannon, and “blown away.” In all, twenty-four sepoys went up in gun smoke and gore. None of Munro’s listeners in Parliament questioned these tactics, although they did wonder about his pay. One even noted the “merit” of his service.

Perhaps the image of two dozen noncompliant natives being pulverized somehow reminded Paine of his Quaker kin, long despised for their refusal to bear arms. Perhaps he saw parallels between his own work as revenue collector and the calamities brought on by the diwani. Or perhaps his brief tenure aboard a privateer fifteen years earlier alerted him to the physical agonies of hunger and whipping. Human empathy is a mysterious thing; no one knows why it sometimes breaks through the usual mesh of self-interest and apathy. In any case, shame and embarrassment, if not empathy, were plentiful in London during the spring and summer of 1772. “Oh! my dear Sir, we have outdone the Spaniards in Peru!” Horace Walpole wrote to a friend in March. “We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped—nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company?” In April, Walpole imagined the later-day ruins of Lord Clive’s fabulous home, a future relic of Britain’s decline into luxury and “famine at home.” The company was a spectacular qualifier to the national narrative of civility, not to mention a four-alarm look at corruption in high places. As the insufferable title character of The Nabob scoffed when warned about God’s vengeance, “This is not Sparta, nor are these the chaste times of the Roman republic.”

In part, the public outcry of 1772 was about Clive, a man who had grown too big for his own good, and about the “nabobs” returning from South Asia, who were widely seen as fops and upstarts. In part, it was about the East India Company, which had pushed the country into financial and military commitments around the world. And in part, it was an early act of a recurring imperial drama, whereby the violent reality of colonial imposition returns “home,” upsetting the nice narratives that normally shelter an empire’s citizens from its deeds. As we all know, however, the bloody crimes of imperial actors do not readily undermine the wider projects they serve. The anachronistic comparison is unavoidable: the conduct of Blackwater Worldwide in Iraq—as revealed in the September 16, 2007, bloodbath in Nisour Square, Baghdad—did not prompt any fundamental questioning of the American presence there. Instead, blame (and charges) fell on a few bad apples or on a general milieu of chaos with origins too complex to consider.

Likewise in Britain during 1772, a brief period of naïve shock was followed by the long, easy labor of disowning and forgetting. If the wrongdoing centered on the company, not the empire, then Parliament could tidy that up with new regulations (plus a bail-out that would spark a tea party in Boston the following year). If the evildoers could be named, then the wider networks of power they obeyed could be cleared. The very term nabob coded these men as foreign and exotic, corrupted, as Edmund Burke would later say, by long exposure to “Muhammadan tyranny.”

In May 1773, after much sound and fury, Parliament scolded Clive for his extravagance but also commended his “great and meritorious service to this country.” The exposés of plunder and murder came and went, and the imperial consensus held. However tarnished, Clive emerged free, rich, and famous—a hero, more or less. Meanwhile, Paine’s petition for better pay to excise officers was not so much refused as ignored. After carrying it around London, looking for an audience with Parliament, Paine gave up on this first venture into political activism in early 1773. And while Clive set off on a grand tour to Italy, hoping to burnish his aristocratic credentials, Paine’s life unraveled. By the fall of 1774, he had lost his excise post, sold his property, and separated from his second wife.

We have little record of Paine’s feelings and opinions before 1775, and thus no starting point from which to measure the extent of his alienation. Apparently, though, the crush of events in 1772 and 1773—his approach to Parliament, his exposure to East Indian atrocities, and the simultaneous rebuff of his petition and vindication of Robert Clive—worked like acid on whatever sense of Britishness he carried, eating away at inherited ties to king and country. Apparently, the hard memory of personal failure attached itself to the galling thought that no one had been punished for blowing away those innocent natives. Paine boarded a ship to Philadelphia in late 1774, carrying a valuable letter from Benjamin Franklin and a gathering fury at the empire.

On November 22, 1774, while Paine was still at sea, Robert Clive committed suicide. After arriving and landing a job at the Pennsylvania Gazette, Paine took up his pen with all the freedom and vigor that distance from London allowed. “Reflections on the Life and Death of Lord Clive,” published in March 1775, introduced Philadelphians to the ugly truths of empire. Blending Christian ethics and Swiftian j’accuse, the article memorializes slain Asians more than the departed Clive. “But, oh India! thou loud proclaimer of European cruelties, thou bloody monument of unnecessary deaths, be tender in the day of enquiry, and shew a Christian world thou canst suffer and forgive.” Clive’s lust for power and dominion, Paine explained, had crashed like a storm upon the people of Bengal, whom he represented as a widow and orphan. Wherever Clive and the East India Company had ventured, “murder and rapine” had followed, with “famine and wretchedness” not far behind.

With “British Sword” in hand, Clive had bullied and bribed the natives, treating them as nothing more than stepping stones to “an unbounded fortune.” He had then returned in glory to a fatuous nation, Paine continued. Yet the bloody deeds had reappeared in the newspapers like “specters from the grave,” whispering “murder” and demanding justice. Discredited and forgotten despite his acquittal, Clive had fallen ill and wandered the streets of London, where he was mistaken for a ruined beggar. “Hah! ’tis Lord Clive himself!” Paine imagined the city’s downtrodden having said. “Bless me what a change!” The reborn ex-pat taunted the dead imperialist: “A conqueror more fatal than himself beset him, and revenged the injuries done to India.” In addition to its warnings of supernatural judgment, what is most striking about Paine’s early work in America is its repeated condemnation of military violence and conquest, as distinct from monarchy or aristocracy.

What did Paine read or hear of the first clashes between British regulars and Massachusetts colonials in the spring of 1775? How did he process the news of bloodshed within his adopted country? It seems reasonable to begin with the four reports that arrived at his magazine’s office on the afternoon of April 24, 1775, five days after the fighting broke out. These spoke of thirty to forty Massachusetts militiamen, “innocently amusing themselves” on Lexington green, facing down one thousand British redcoats, who then opened fire “without the least provocation.” One dispatch said that some of the Americans had taken refuge in the town church, whereupon the redcoats “pointed their guns in and killed three.” Another reported that the British had searched for rebel leaders at their homes “and not finding them there, killed the woman of the house and all the children, and set fire to the house.” They then marched on, “firing and killing hogs, geese, cattle, and everything that came in their way, and burning houses.” Blending fact and fear, these reports recalled for Paine, not the veiled absurdity of hereditary rule, but the crying obscenity of imperial violence.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1775, Paine was clearly frustrated at American caution and reluctance. His Quaker brethren, in particular, clung to what he saw as hard-hearted loyalty to the king. Although “a Lover of Peace” and “thus far a Quaker” himself, Paine wrote, he could neither understand nor abide their refusal to see this “ruffian” enemy for what it was. The British, he announced, “have lost sight of the limits of humanity,” and yet the Friends spoke of reconciliation. Even the hot-headed rebels from Boston paused on the brink, reiterating their fealty to George III and their claims to the British constitution. Deference to British civilization died hard, even—or perhaps especially—for American provincials who were never sure if they were fully British. As late as 1774 and 1775, most Americans wanted, in some important sense, to be Britons. It was Paine, the recent émigré, who was most willing to denounce the empire itself rather than its corruptions.

His October 1775 essay, “A Serious Thought,” fairly shouted at his readers to wake up to their peril. “When I reflect on the horrid cruelties exercised by the British in the East-Indies,” he proclaimed, and “read of the wretched natives being blown away, for no other crime than because, sickened with the miserable scene, they refused to fight—When I reflect on these and a thousand instances of similar barbarity, I firmly believe that the Almighty, in compassion to mankind, will curtail the power of Britain.” The atrocities in South Asia were the most recent and relevant clues as to British intentions. And they had gone unpunished, mocking the sovereignty of nature’s God over the moral world. Paine’s “Serious Thought” went on to report that the British had also “ravaged the hapless shores of Africa, robbing it of its unoffending inhabitants to cultivate her stolen dominions in the West.” Plunder and atrocity followed the British sword as night followed day.

All of which helps to account for an opening passage of Common Sense, which otherwise exaggerates the extent of British violence in North America as of December 1775. “The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling.” The abuses you have suffered are no anomaly or corruption, Paine told his readers. They were the means the empire would use to reduce you to subservience, so that it could plunder the country at and for its pleasure. This time, he did not mention the East Indies by name, turning instead to graphic generalities. “Thousands are already ruined by British barbarity; (thousands more will probably suffer the same fate).” Yet the warning about “Fire and Sword,” rooted in his understanding of imperial history, shaped the argument of Common Sense at every crucial point. The colonies could not reconcile with the Crown, nor trust its military, because British ships and redcoats were threatening the people with murder most foul. The colonists should not forgive Britain as the so-called mother country because any kinship only made the crimes more appalling.

In addition to exploring the origin of Jewish royalty, the actual strength of the Royal Navy, and the future market for American exports, then, Common Sense points the reader to atrocities past, present, and future. It is a warning siren on British cruelty. Referring, by footnote, to the “Massacre at Lexington,” Paine also cites “that seat of wretchedness,” Boston, where a trapped population was left “to stay and starve, or turn out to beg.” Besieged by their own people and “plundered” by the British occupiers, they lived in fear of “the fury of both armies.” As for George III, he was a wretch, a brute, a “sullen tempered Pharaoh” who shrugged off the “slaughter” of his subjects. Paine’s most startling message was not so much independence as the pressing reason for that course: the British were vandals and brutes, their empire evil and insatiable.

Paine stayed on point with his “Forrester” letters, written as Common Sense spread through the colonies in the spring of 1776. Responding to a Tory writer known as Cato, Paine referred again to “the havoc and desolation of unnatural war … the burning and depopulating of towns and cities.” When Cato warned that rebellion would bring foreign troops to American shores, Paine pointed once more to the appalling reports from 1772. “Were they coming, Cato … it would be impossible for them to exceed, or even to equal the cruelties practiced by the British army in the East-Indies: The tying men to the mouths of cannon and ‘blowing them away’ was never acted by any but an English General, or approved by any but a British Court*—read the proceeding of the Select Committee on India affairs.” (The endnote: “*Lord Clive, the chief of Eastern plunderers, received the thanks of Parliament for ‘his honorable conduct in the East-Indies.'”) The juxtaposition of British rhetoric and British cruelty became a staple of Paine’s work, a favorite way to foster disgust with his former rulers.

As British and Hessian troops did what invading armies usually do in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in late 1776 and 1777, Paine’s pen flowed on, recording the history he had foreseen. King George III, he wrote in January 1777, sought “to lay waste the world in blood and famine … to kill, conquer, plunder, pardon and enslave.” Instead of “civilizing” the world, he fumed the next year, Britain had opted “to brutalize mankind.” As the months went by and the war dragged on, Paine widened the circle of blame. “She is the only power who could practice the prodigal barbarity of tying men to mouths of loaded cannon and blowing them away,” he suggested of Britain. No longer the burden of Lord Clive or King George III alone, the sins of conquest fell upon the nation itself. Under “the vain unmeaning title of ‘Defender of the Faith,’ she has made war like an Indian against the religion of humanity.” (Here, “Indian” referred to the indigenous Americans for whom Paine never showed much sympathy.) The island seclusion of the British people, Paine came to suspect, had sheltered them from the bloodshed they inflicted around the world. But someone—God, Europe, world opinion—was watching and keeping score. “Her cruelties in the East-Indies,” he vowed in 1778, “will never, never be forgotten.”

“If I have any where expressed myself overwarmly,” Paine announced during the War of the American Revolution, “’tis from a fixt immovable hatred I have, and ever had, to cruel men and cruel measures.” We can safely say that Thomas Paine sometimes expressed himself overwarmly. The roots of his righteous fury, on the other hand, are elusive, for like any essential feelings they are the singular possessions of minds unlike our own. In Paine’s case, though, that “fixt immovable” sentiment clearly involved the revelations about South Asia that came to London in 1772. From then on, whenever he attacked “government” in general and British rule in particular, he had in mind not only the formal apparatus of the state but also the appalling crimes done to Bengal. From then on, he recalled Lord Clive, resting his case before a fawning Parliament, or Major Munro, reporting with a shrug that sometimes, in the line of duty, a commander had to blast mutineers from cannons. Paine carried his rage into the global tumults of the 1780s and 1790s, eventually inviting the Irish to rise up against his homeland and the French to invade it.

Back in London, imperial atrocities kept coming home. In 1783 and 1784, unsettling reports arrived from Mysore, including an account of four hundred “beautiful women” who were killed, injured, or raped by British soldiers. Edmund Burke and other statesmen were shocked, just shocked, and they passed another set of regulations that reined in the company while legitimizing the empire. In 1806, London learned that the governor of Trinidad, just taken from Spain, had ordered the torture of a mulatto girl accused of aiding a robbery. More shock and scandal, more sound and fury, and another storm that blew over. Increasingly after the 1818 publication of The Practice of Burning Widows Alive, an exposé of suttee, Europeans began to replace Enlightenment-era critiques of imperial barbarity with Victorian assumptions about South Asian, Chinese, and Islamic barbarity. The white man’s burden was to end such customs by force if necessary, dragging the dusky races to Christianity and Law and Progress and so on.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, memories of imperial violence helped to form the self-concept of new nations around the globe. They made up the popular core of one of the modern world’s defining ideologies: anti-colonialism. Irish citizens recall the “Bloody Sunday” of 1972 and the even bloodier “Troubles” of the 1910s; Indians memorialize Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden in the northern city of Amritsar where British troops killed 379 unarmed people on April 13, 1919. In these cases and many others, the specific killings evoke a lasting captivity, a national experience of long humiliation and final emancipation. To recall these atrocities was, and is, to recall suffering in its most basic form—not a political grievance but the galling fact of physical domination and destruction.

Because they broke away from European empire so early in the world-historical scheme of things, American citizens did not have to cope with such memories. They did not have to think of themselves being tied to cannons and blown away. The full horror of imperial dominion had never fallen upon them, the atrocities of the two Anglo-American wars notwithstanding. Even in the Revolutionary era, much of the suffering was virtual, imagined through tales from far-away lands and far-off times. By the mid-nineteenth century, as they rationalized the taking of native lands by defining native peoples more as vagrants than sovereigns, American citizens could disown both the guilt and the humiliation of empire. They could take pride in the belief that they had never been imperial villains orcolonial victims. Instead, they had broken away because of a constitutional and political dispute, because of unfair taxes and poor representation. As for references to British crimes in India and elsewhere, these disappeared as the foreign policies of the English-speaking powers began to align after the 1820s.

As we continue the work done by Carl Becker to break down and see through this tame narrative of national creation, then, we should be careful to recall the awful violence it conceals, the nameless victims it forgets. We should take eighteenth-century fears of plunder and famine as seriously as those of “conspiracy” and “slavery,” tracing out the specific accounts and stories that informed popular reactions to imperial impositions. In that way we might learn something, not only about how to teach the American Revolution, but also about how to consider the crimes and redactions of our own times.

Further Reading:

Historians continue to gain new insights into Thomas Paine, connecting his ideas to the larger histories of democracy, nationalism, human rights, and international relations. See, recently, Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008) and Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York, 2006). For relevant studies of imperial violence and its domestic fallout, see Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 2008) and James Epstein, “The Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Picton and the Cause of Louisa Calderon,” American Historical Review 112 (June 2007): 712-41.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

J. M. Opal is associate professor at McGill University and the author of Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (2008). He is working on an edited collection of Paine’s writings and influences, to be published by W. W. Norton and Company, and on a new book about Jacksonian Democracy and vengeance in American public life.

If, as more and more scholars now affirm, the American Revolution was a civil war, how does that framing open the door to comparisons to uprisings elsewhere? I began thinking about revolution-as-civil-war while writing my first book, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina, about the attempts of North Carolina farmers on the eve of the American Revolution to create economic and political justice. The Regulators were defeated by the very men who shortly afterward led North Carolina into revolution. Many backcountry farmers proved disaffected or “neutral” during the American Revolution, skeptical that their erstwhile opponents could bring them the economic democracy and independence for which they had already fought without success. Such disaffection was common. As Michael McDonnell and others have suggested, perhaps as many as three-fifths of all Americans chose to remain neutral in the War of Independence. As I conducted research for my next project about a large and long-lasting slave rebellion in an eighteenth-century Dutch colony west of Suriname, I was struck by how many people there, too, were neither committed rebels nor loyalists. Rather they ducked, opted out, or took off on their own. These “disaffected” have been little studied, in the American Revolution or in slave rebellions.

The way historians have framed both the American Revolution and slave rebellions accounts for their reluctance to engage the topic of the disaffected. The emphasis on liberal notions of freedom as the goal of revolutions and insurgencies renders opponents and “fence-sitters” morally suspect. Moreover, it leads historians to privilege the anti-colonial contest over political struggles and conflicts among people in their own communities. Consequently, we know a lot more about the aspirations and political ideas of revolutionary leaders (usually male) than we do about the fence-sitting rank and file. As historians, in other words, we privilege people’s identities as colonized or enslaved beings, rather than as members of specific communities with aspirations and dreams that are not all related to being national or imperial subjects. We have studied colonists and slaves in rebellions more as embodied legal categories than as multi-dimensional human beings. Let me use my current work to expand upon this.

I am writing a book about a little-studied but well-documented slave rebellion in Berbice, a small Dutch colony in today’s Guyana in South America. The rebellion started in February 1763 and lasted eighteen months, longer than any slave rebellion prior to it. My source base includes the examinations of some 900 enslaved people, about a third of the adult enslaved population, taken as the rebellion wound down. These judicial records, along with other sources, offer a picture of the events from the perspective of the enslaved. The testimonies suggest the need to re-evaluate our emphasis on freedom in revolutionary narratives.

Historians have tended to assume that enslaved people inevitably, and eagerly, resisted slavery in a quest for liberty. Yet in fact, in the Berbice rebellion, many enslaved people were reluctant to join. Many were distrustful of the rebellion’s leadership, ethnic “Amina,” Akan and Ga speakers from the Gold Coast and its hinterland who favored upward mobility through the ownership of slaves. Others were unprepared to risk everything in violent rebellion. After all, while rebellions such as those of the Dutch against Spain in the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) or the American colonists against Britain during the American Revolution (1763-1783) were slow to unfold, giving people months if not years to decide their loyalties, slave rebellions required of those who were not involved in the planning split-second decisions under chaotic and dangerous circumstances. Yet others appeared not to agree with the plans of the rebels to establish a new coercive labor regime in a state with themselves on top. Consequently, the rebels had to use force to get people to participate, and they even re-enslaved some of their compatriots to ensure that work on the sugar plantations continued.

And so, not surprisingly, people’s responses to the insurgency varied. Some chose to join the Dutch. Many joined the rebels. Yet many others, perhaps the majority, while they might have joined in the plunder of their masters’ houses, remained aloof, choosing no allegiances. By their own accounts, they hid in the woods and savanna behind their plantations as soon as they heard the rebels approach and they moved back to their plantations when the rebels had passed by. Some no doubt claimed non-involvement to avoid prosecution. Others likely spoke the truth. The very fact that so many thought such claims believable is suggestive. It makes sense that people would have been wary, and preferred watching events from afar. They would have wished to keep their children and elderly safe, to protect their huts from fire, their produce from confiscation, and their chickens from the rebels’ barbecues. They may have disliked or mistrusted those who supported the insurgency on their plantations, especially drivers (always men), who may well have disciplined them in the past. And they no doubt feared Dutch or rebel retaliation if they bet on the losing side.

But we should not assume that hiding from the rebels only signaled a fearful refusal to participate in the rebellion. Likely, for many it was as much a statement about their own preferences for life without masters, a declaration of independence if you will. By hiding, former slaves in fact became maroons in their own backyards, living independently of the Dutch and the rebels, near their gardens and plantation food supplies, if those had not been destroyed or taken, in their own communities. This alternative may have been preferable, especially for women, children, and the less-able bodied, to joining a military and violent rebellion.

So the freedom paradigm does not hold up very well. The rebellion did not bring “freedom” to everyone, “freedom” did not mean the same to all, and many people turned down this version of “freedom.”

This account of the Berbice rebellion suggests the need to investigate the aspirations of the mass of enslaved people rather than assume that every enslaved person cared only about the kind of liberty rebel leaders dished up. Rather than focus exclusively on the fight against Dutch slavery, we need to ask questions related to social relations in the insurgency: how did enslaved people relate to each other, how was power distributed among them, what internal conflicts plagued their communities, and to what did they aspire? Historians are asking such questions for the American Revolution (though the answers have so far only minimally changed the rhetoric of liberty), but historians ask such questions less frequently for slave rebellions.

One important facet of internal politics and horizontal relations, often left unexamined, is gender. How did gender shape the experience of rebellion and civil war, once they were underway, and how did it complicate collective resistance?

In Berbice, it turned out, men could profit greatly from rebellion, while women more often lost out. For men, whether they joined eagerly or were pressed into rebellion, military service in the rebel army opened up significant avenues for advancement, enrichment, and prestige. Women were not allowed to be soldiers, and they were by and large excluded from rebel military and political leadership. In fact, some women were passed around as spoils of war, serving as tokens of prestige among prominent male rebels. They sustained the soldiers with domestic services, including sex. Moreover, women became the majority of forced plantation workers.

Perhaps in part because armed rebellion presented them with fewer opportunities to change their lives, it appears that women constituted the majority of those “opting out,” choosing marronage-at-home. But over time, especially once the Dutch mounted a massive counteroffensive six months into the rebellion, most of them became refugees. Fearful for their lives, they wandered the jungle and savannah in search of food and shelter, pursued by all parties. Such women negotiated warfare, hunger, and disease encumbered by children and the elderly, an experience that was anything but liberating. They were “free”—there was no master—but they found themselves enslaved in a new way, to survival. Many eventually “voluntarily” surrendered to the Dutch.

And so, while men and women shared much in rebellion, their experiences also powerfully diverged. For men, the prolonged military conflict offered opportunities for increased status and new identities as soldiers and leaders, from which women were largely excluded. War created novel hierarchies that gave advantages to men over women. As an emancipatory process, in other words, slave rebellion did not work the same for all. Focusing on women brings into sharp relief what rebellion meant to the great majority of enslaved people in Berbice: not freedom served up by sword and bullet, but a scramble for life that imposed devastating choices.

There are important parallels here with what historians are saying about what I might call the “silenced majority.” By emphasizing human freedom as the righteous goal of both the American Revolution and of slave rebellions, we have turned those who tried to stay out of the fray into morally suspect people unworthy of study. And that emphasis has led us to prioritize vertical relationships—those of colonizer vs. colonized; slave master vs. enslaved—over horizontal ones—those among colonists and within the slave quarters. We have given short shrift to the internal politics of colonial and enslaved communities, and we have been averse to seeing inequalities and conflicts within either population in our eagerness to affirm unity in fighting for universalized understandings of freedom that were highly manufactured. As a result, we have cut ourselves off from grasping the aspirations and politics of the majority of people caught up in these major upheavals, in the process shearing slave rebellion of its moral complexity.

So I would like to make several suggestions. First and foremost, we need to write new narratives of revolution and rebellion that do not rely on a rhetoric of “freedom.” Second, we need to focus on the internal politics and divisions of communities and on both leaders and the rank and file. Third, we need to take seriously the activism of the disaffected and the “neutrals,” realizing that their politics are, of course, never “neutral.” And lastly, we should pay greater attention to how civil war and violence shaped—and hindered—processes of emancipation.

Further Reading:

For a call to study the internal politics of resistance, see Sherry B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37:1 (1995): 173-93, and Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114:5 (2009): 231-49. For a cogent summary of the “disaffected” in the American Revolution, see Michael McDonnell, “Resistance to the Revolution,” in Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole, eds., Companion to the American Revolution (London and New York, 2000): 342-351.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Marjoleine Kars chairs the Department of History at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). She is writing a book about the Berbice slave rebellion of 1763.

Teaching the Declaration of Independence through the musical comedy

Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1972 movie musical 1776 has been a natural fit in middle-school classrooms for several years. Every time I conduct a professional-development session, teachers tell me about planning several class periods each year so their students can view the film version of the Broadway musical. They speak of the activities they’ve had their students complete after watching the film—everything from writing biographies of the delegates to reenacting the Congress to rewriting sections of the musical and performing it for their fellow students. While these teachers often mention the need for these special projects (even after taking several class periods to watch the entire film) they are keenly aware of the many days of instructional time consumed by this use of 1776.

The American Musicals Project (AMP) at the New-York Historical Society has developed a curriculum unit to incorporate the musical in a different way. Rather than screening the entire film, AMP lessons focus on using small sections of the musical in class. These clips, which are single songs or specific scenes from 1776, range from two minutes to ten or twelve minutes. Clips are chosen because they strongly support the teaching of sections of the social studies and English language arts curriculum. Most importantly, all AMP lessons also incorporate the use of primary-source materials into student work with the musical. An array of materials is included—maps, broadsides, portraits, advertisements—along with questions to guide student observation.

But why use the musical 1776? Why not stick with the textbook and maybe add a few primary-source documents? Why take class time even to show segments from a film? To start out simply, the music reaches students in a way that written material does not. The music, when used in the film clips and combined with primary-source materials and libretto excerpts, can reach all types of learners in a classroom, especially those who fade away from more traditional methods of teaching. Teachers are often reluctant to introduce a film musical from the 1970s into a classroom full of seventh graders in 2006, fearing that students will reject it because it’s not the pop or hip-hop music to which they typically listen. However, while students may giggle when the first clip begins, they really do listen to and enjoy the music. Many of them will leave class singing the songs or beg to see the rest of the film. Their interest is piqued, and the things they see and hear tend to stay with them.

The visual aspect of the musical is also important. Using a clip from 1776 in a classroom can provide students with a vivid connection to a time period that may seem distant and often uninteresting to them. Rather than reading about John Adams in a text book or looking at a flat portrait of him, students can experience an actor bringing the character to life when they view the “Sit Down, John” segment. They see his clothing, watch his mannerisms, hear his voice, and note his mounting frustration with delegates who do not support the plan that he so passionately presents. When students view the film, John Adams is no longer just another name in a history text. He becomes a human being with strengths, hope, flaws, and passion.

Using clips from 1776 also helps students see the complexities involved in major political change. It’s no secret that the Congress did declare independence and that the new nation was the victor in its war against Great Britain. It is often difficult, though, for students to grasp the challenges, uncertainties, dangers, and new responsibilities that came with independence. When they watch clips from 1776, students hear about the fear of British spies. They watch delegates debate the grievances of the individual colonies. They hear about the troublesome issues of slavery and trade, and they watch delegates grapple with the decision to remove the slavery section from the Declaration of Independence. Once they understand the issue of independence more fully, they are then able to think more critically about the process of creating the Declaration of Independence.

Incorporating 1776 into classroom lessons also helps students become active, savvy media viewers. Students watch television and films all the time. They come home from school, plop down on the couch, and turn on MTV. They do their homework with a football game blaring in the background. They go to the movies and see the latest action film, passively letting the images wash over them. Far too often students don’t know how to really read those images and analyze their meaning. They don’t know how to question the truthfulness or accuracy of what they are seeing and hearing.

With “Sit Down, John,” to take just one number from the musical, the classroom teacher can begin to encourage students to move from passive to active viewers. She or he can help them recognize and interpret the historical images and objects they see—men in strange clothing, quill pens and candlesticks on the desk. Adams’s opening monologue about independence can be used as a way for students to analyze what his words and action tell us about his character. When the delegates finally sign the declaration, students can turn to primary-source documents to investigate the accuracy of the portrayal of this event.

Above everything else, the music and the performances of 1776 are emotionally engaging. Students enjoy watching the segments, and the arts can be a powerful tool to motivate students to learn about history. Some songs and scenes make them laugh, others make them angry, but the drama of all of the segments draws them into history. They become engaged in the country’s struggle for independence and involved in the debates about religion and tyranny and liberty and safety. When students feel invested in these issues, which are just as relevant now as they were in 1776, they become better citizens.

The following is an excerpt from an AMP lesson using a clip from 1776 and primary-source documents from the collection of the New-York Historical Society. (You can obtain a copy of 1776from your local DVD retailer and/or rental service, and the primary sources can be downloaded from the New-York Historical Society’s site by clicking on the images on this page.) Sample questions and activities are included to assist teachers who would like to try this kind of work in their classroom.

1776: an excerpt from a lesson, using video clips and primary-source documents

The opening scene from the film of 1776, which takes place in the bell tower, and the first song, “Sit Down, John,” can be used to help students create a visual picture of the time period for themselves, explore John Adams as a character, and understand some of the events that led to the Declaration of Independence.

First, view the clip with the class. There is a lot of information there, and it may be useful to show the clip several times, focusing each time on a different aspect of the scene. Provide students with focus questions before viewing the clip, and discuss the questions after viewing.

• Describe the setting of this scene (time, place, conditions). Where are the delegates? How are people dressed? What are some of the differences between 1776 and today? What are some of the similarities? What do these things say about life in 1776?
• Focus on John Adams, his appearance, his statements, and his actions. Describe John Adams’s clothes. What do they say about his social class and status? Choose three adjectives to describe John Adams’s personality. Why did you choose those words? Do you like John Adams? Why or why not? Do you think this is an accurate portrayal of John Adams? Where might you go to find more information?
• What is the conflict between John Adams and the rest of the Congress? What does Adams want the Congress to do? Look closely at his opening monologue. What reasons does Adams have for calling for this strong measure? How does the Congress feel about Adams’s point of view? What do they want him to do? Why won’t they open up a window? How does Adams react to the Congress?

After viewing the clip from 1776, use primary-source documents to deepen students’ historical investigation. Three sources are provided here.

In his opening monologue, Adams refers to the Stamp Act. Use the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser from October 31, 1765, and “Glorious News” (the repeal of the Stamp Act) to learn more about how people felt about this act.

Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser

• How much time was there between the publication of this broadside and the start date of the Stamp Act?
• Who published the broadside?
• Why did he publish it?
• How does he describe the times?
• What images does he use for the stamp?
• What is the meaning of this image?
• What connection does he make between the Stamp Act and slavery?
• What is he hoping will happen to the Stamp Act?
• What is he asking of his subscribers?
• In what ways is the broadside like a tombstone?
• Look closely at the language used in the broadside. Why did the author choose to use these specific words and phrases?

“Glorious News”

• What is this broadside announcing?
• Where was the news originally printed?
• Where was the broadside printed?
• How did the printer receive the news?
• How long did it take for the printer to receive the news?
• Look at the second paragraph starting “An ACT to REPEAL . . . ” What does it say that the original act was meant to do?
• Look at the fifth paragraph starting “Yesterday morning . . . ” Why do you think the North American merchants paid a visit to “his Majesty”?
• How else did people respond to the news?

In the song “Sit Down, John” the Congress does not react positively to Adams’s call to discuss independence from Great Britain. On several occasions they sing about not opening the windows, which is because they are afraid of people hearing their discussions. Use “Proclamation! For Suppressing REBELLION and SEDITION” to learn more about this danger.

“Proclamation! For Suppressing REBELLION and SEDITION”

• What is rebellion and sedition?
• Who are “our Subjects?”
• What are “ill designing men” doing to them?
• What power has “protected and sustained them”?
• What “disorderly acts” have the people committed?
• Who has “promoted and encouraged” this rebellion?
• Why is this royal proclamation being issued?
• What is the proclamation declaring?
• What are people being commanded to do about the rebellion?
• Who do you think was making this proclamation?
• What is the significance of the last line of the proclamation?

After using the 1776 clip and primary sources to begin to understand these issues, continue to explore these topics through writing activities:

• Create a character study of John Adams, based on the film as well as additional research. Take on the role of Adams and write a letter to Abigail summarizing the events and arguments of the day. How does he feel about the discussion with the Congress? Why does he feel this way?
• Using the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser as an example, write a broadside that reports on today’s events in Congress. Be sure to include the following: setting, conflict, people involved, headline, location, and date. Add illustrations to the broadside to help make the point of view clear.
• Using “Glorious News,” write a journal entry from the perspective of Jonathan Lowder or Thomas Brackett. How do they feel about the repeal of the Stamp Act? How do they feel about King George? As an additional activity, investigate the British point of view more closely. Write a journal entry from the point of view of King George. What is his perspective on the colonists and the repeal of the act?

For more information about the American Musicals Project and these and other materials, contact the N-YHS at 212-485-9276 or visit www.nyhistory.org and www.americanmusicalsproject.org.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

Adrienne Kupper is the director of education at the New-York Historical Society and is responsible for all their programming for students and teachers, from prekindergarten to college. A former classroom teacher with a background in arts education, she has conducted professional development workshops as a master teacher for WNET’s National Teacher Training Institute since 2001 and contributes lesson plans and educational pieces for WNET’s Website. She has served as the program director for the American Musicals Project at the New-York Historical Society.

On July 4, across the United States of America, hot dogs sizzle on barbeques. Marching bands trumpet the anniversary of American independence. Fireworks fill the night sky from coast to coast. Independence Day is hard to miss. It is bright. It is loud.

Not so in my sleepy New England hometown of Exeter, New Hampshire. No trumpets or firecrackers here. Tumbleweeds might as well be rolling down the streets of New Hampshire’s revolutionary-era capital on the nation’s birthday. Exonians are not unpatriotic; they just like historical accuracy. Here, the independence celebration is keyed not to the adoption of the text of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, but to the arrival of these words in Exeter. Check back with us in about two weeks.

It is July 16, 2016. The boom of canons has alerted the town to gather on Water Street between Folsom Tavern and Stillwells, an ice cream shop. The crowd is a motley crew. Some people hold iPhones; others hold ten-pound flint-lock muskets. There are folks dressed in wicking Under Armour, and others in wool uniforms. Children lose their grips on red “Exeter Historical Society” balloons, and a blacksmith stokes a portable forge preparing to make hand-wrought nails. At 11 a.m., the sounds of a fife and drum corps approach, followed by a thin man on a horse. John Taylor Gilman is making his entrance.

Gilman dismounts and ascends the hill to the platform outside the Ladd-Gilman House (now the American Independence Museum). He waits his turn. First, the museum’s executive director and then a representative of the town of Exeter’s Board of Selectmen address the crowd. A message from New Hampshire’s governor is read. Finally, George Washington steps up to the microphone. Washington will be spending the day in the tavern museum schmoozing with the hoi polloi as they drink a local brewery’s take on eighteenth-century beer. The nation’s first president introduces Gilman. On July 16, 1776, Gilman was the twenty-two-year-old son of New Hampshire’s revolutionary treasurer. He would have a lifelong career in New Hampshire state politics, but on that day, legend has it, he performed a nation-making piece of oratory as he read to the citizens of New Hampshire the hot-off-the-presses Declaration of Independence.

Gilman unfurls a large single-sided piece of paper and begins to read, “When in the course of human events …” As Gilman reads every one of the Declaration’s 1,320 words, the gathered crowd listens in silence for what, to twenty-first-century ears, seems like an eternity. After a few minutes, there is some noticeable pushing and shoving as a new group of listeners arrives. They are wearing a variety of eighteenth-century British military uniforms. Gilman reads the line, “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations.” Suddenly, the new arrivals start shouting “boo” and “traitor.” Ragtag militiamen respond to the heckling with loud cries of “huzzah.” Their camp followers—women and children—join in the shouting match. The patriots and the loyalists (including a lone Hessian) begin to square off. They are scheduled to fight a mock battle later in the afternoon. But right now, as Gilman reaches the end of the document, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” the crowds line up to enter the un-air-conditioned museum.

This is the beginning of Exeter’s American Independence Festival, which in addition to a schedule of activities, is the once-a-year opportunity for the public to view the American Independence Museum’s most valuable holding, a Dunlap broadside. This document is the raison d’être of the museum, the festival, and Exeter’s delayed celebration of American independence. So what is it?

The Dunlap Broadside and the Society of the Cincinnati

In Philadelphia on July 2, 1776, the delegates to the Continental Congress voted to declare independence from Great Britain. On July 3, John Adams wrote, “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.” He was close. The next day, Congress voted to adopt the words we now know as the Declaration of Independence. The iconic endorsing signatures of all the delegates would be inked a month later, yet the text of the Declaration itself was so meaningful that July 4 became the nation’s birthday.

For these words to spread, however, they needed to take material form; they needed to be printed. That evening, after the votes were tallied and the Declaration adopted, printer John Dunlap was tasked with setting the type and producing approximately 200 copies of the text. His version involved no swirls of calligraphy, just simple seriffed letters printed on a single side. Before all the ink was fully dry, John Hancock, president of the Congress, sent these copies to the colonial legislatures, committees of safety, and military leaders. The broadsides traveled to their destinations via express riders moving at the speed of horse hooves. It took nearly two weeks to get to New Hampshire, the northernmost rebelling colony. As a result, Exeter’s residents thought they were King George’s subjects twelve days longer than Philadelphians. In a letter to Hancock written at Exeter on July 16, 1776, the New Hampshire Committee of Safety acknowledged receipt of its copy and reported, “Such a Declaration was what they most Ardently wished for. And I Verily believe it will be Received with great Satisfaction, Throughout this Colony, a very few Individuals excepted.”

In reference to the printer’s name and the poster-like format, the physical documents printed during this first edition of America’s most foundational text have become known as “Dunlap broadsides.” In 2017, only twenty-six copies are known to survive. These rare sheets of old paper have been found in all sorts of unusual places. One copy was discovered in an unopened crate in a bookstore. Another was being used to wrap a bundle of other papers in an attic. In 1989, one was found behind a painting bought at a flea market for four dollars. In 1991, it sold for $2.42 million; in 2000, it was sold again for an unprecedented $8.14 million. Invaluable words, yes. Priceless paper, no. Dunlap broadsides command prices, huge prices. They are very valuable commodities. 

The Dunlap broadside (the broadside) on display during Exeter’s American Independence Festival was “discovered” in 1985 in the attic of the Ladd-Gilman House. The house was built in the early eighteenth century and was the home of the politically prominent Gilman family. During the Revolutionary War when Exeter was the state capital and a booming inland seaport, the house served as the treasury. In 1902, the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Hampshire acquired the house from the Gilman family. The society, a hereditary organization composed of the eldest male descendants of New Hampshire’s commissioned officers who served in the Continental Army and Navy, named it Cincinnati Memorial Hall. In this clubhouse, members gathered for meetings and brought with them artifacts from the revolutionary era for a kind of grown-up show-and-tell. Some of these objects had been passed down in their families; others were acquired over time. The collection grew: political cartoons, swords, furniture, rare books, original drafts of the Constitution complete with handwritten notes, an eighteenth-century purple heart, and portraits of revolutionary leaders by famous artists. Despite the value of the items at Cincinnati Memorial Hall, the collection was unorganized and record-keeping haphazard. The society, however, knew it owned valuable artifacts. In 1985, the society hired a local electrician to install a security system, which required attic access. Local lore suggests that the electrician’s assistant “discovered” the broadside in a stack of old newspapers serving as insulation. The society, in turn, argues that the broadside was “rediscovered” by a member during an inventory of the items stored in the attic inspired by the electrician’s need for access. Regardless of who should be credited with finding the document, it quickly became clear that this piece of paper was worth quite a lot of money. By selling the broadside, the society could afford to repair and restore the rest of its collection, including the Ladd-Gilman house and Folsom Tavern.

The society had stumbled upon a bounty, or at least the members and appraisers thought so. The society reached out to leading sellers of historic documents and rare books. Most valued the broadside at around $500,000 (adjusted for inflation to 2017, that would be about $1.1 million). This is probably a low estimate given the more than $2 million sale price of the copy discovered and sold just a few years later.

The price tag, however, proved inconsequential. As the society prepared to send the broadside to auction, the state of New Hampshire intervened. It turns out that, in legal terms, the mystery of who found the broadside matters a lot less than who lost it. Did a member give it to the society during the show-and-tell meetings sometime after 1902? Or was it the original copy—the one sent to the Committee of Safety by Hancock that arrived on July 16, 1776—hidden in the attic of the state treasury? In 1776, after all, the broadside was not a rare, valuable piece of old paper; it was treason. If the Gilmans hid the broadside in their house in the 1770s, it was never theirs to convey to the society. It was technically state property. And the state of New Hampshire wanted it back.

Lawyers for the society and the state battled for five years. In 1990, they reached a deal that, among other things, required the society to transfer “its rights and interest” in the broadside and “title” to all of its other “Historical Material” to a new non-profit corporation, “which will actively operate a museum and study center of the American Revolution . . . on the Society’s historically significant properties in Exeter, New Hampshire.” The state’s goal was to keep the broadside in New Hampshire and “afford the public maximum opportunity for its viewing.” The parties agreed that by displaying the document at the new museum, “the public shall have ample opportunity to view the broadside.” Thus, the American Independence Museum was born.

The American Independence Museum and Exeter’s American Independence Festival

With the agreement with the state of New Hampshire, the broadside had transformed from the Society of the Cincinnati’s bounty to its burden. Whereas a sale might have brought money into the society, ownership came with costs. The agreement did not require the state to commit any financial support to the American Independence Museum. Running the museum was more expensive than maintaining a private clubhouse. The society became the museum’s largest donor not only in terms of its collection but also in terms of operating budget. And over time, the museum exhibited its most important artifact less and less. By far the most valuable piece of paper in Exeter if not in the entire state of New Hampshire, the broadside needed both security and preservation. The security system installed at the time of its discovery was inadequate to safeguard it. The historic Ladd-Gilman house where the museum was located could not be climate controlled. To save the valuable paper from theft, humidity, and temperature fluctuations, it was moved to a bank vault. A full-size duplicate was put on permanent display, but according to the agreement with the state, the museum still needed to provide the public with access to the original.

By the early 2000s, the museum decided that the original Dunlap broadside would only be available for public viewing during its most important annual event held every year on the third weekend in July.  Exeter’s American Independence Festival, earlier called Revolutionary War Days and originally a part of the town of Exeter’s Old Home Days, was created in 1990. Although the local Chamber of Commerce and various town committees were involved, the museum’s staff turned a collection of contemporaneous programming into a single event, which aimed to draw attention and paid attendance to the museum. They used posters and printed schedules to pitch a celebration of Exeter’s revolutionary era glory. The broadside (printed to be hung like a poster) inspired a festival created by a poster.

During its twenty-seven-year history, the festival has changed a great deal. It has expanded to four days and shrunk to one. It has featured canoe rallies and clambakes, petting zoos and parades, archaeological digs and artisanal demonstrations, funnel cakes and fifes, duck races and sidewalk sales, hot air balloon demonstrations and hay rides, a giant teepee and a giant Declaration, and even the “tar and feathering” (with maple syrup) of the museum’s first director.

Four essential features, however, have been constant. First, the town of Exeter launches its fireworks display on the Saturday night (in the spirit of Yankee frugality, it enjoys a post-Fourth fireworks discount). Second, militia re-enactors convey the dependence of American independence on war (a fitting lesson from the descendants of George Washington’s military officers). Third, the text of the Declaration of Independence is performed as public oratory (John Taylor Gilman’s re-enactor has at times shared this honor with the local Boy Scout troop).  And fourth, since the festival’s inception, the broadside has always been made available for public viewing. It is, after all, the reason the festival exists.

Every year numerous historical inaccuracies are incorporated into the festival (among the most glaring: no revolutionary battle was fought here, and George Washington enjoyed a meal at Folsom Tavern in 1789, not in 1776). Much of the event is historical re-enactor fantasy and fairground kitsch. Nevertheless, what makes the festival fascinating is that it actually does celebrate historical accuracy in a keenly local way.

Regardless of their geographic distance from Philadelphia, most American cities and towns celebrate Independence Day on July 4. This small New Hampshire town celebrates American independence when the king’s subjects in Exeter would have gotten the news that they had been declared American citizens. If you can ignore the microphone, Gilman’s oration of the Declaration’s poetic statements of universal rights and its long litany of royal usurpations is still powerful. After nearly two and a half centuries, the enunciation of these words commands silence, raises goose bumps, and makes eyes water. The Declaration’s text still deserves its celebration. And, the nearly two-week wait for fireworks and festivities literally brings home the power of the broadside as an object. It is a concrete reminder that the Declaration was once a material thing, ink on paper that traveled by literal horsepower. As a public history lesson, the festival historicizes “timeless” documents and our expectations of instantaneous communication. It reminds us of the roles of tyranny, force, and eloquence in the creation of the American nation.

Whether or not the document on display on July 16, 2016, is the same piece of paper that took nearly two weeks in the saddle to be delivered to Exeter on July 16, 1776, it is an original printing of the Declaration of Independence. And it was found in a small town that often feels like it exists outside history. No longer a bustling seaport, Exeter has become an academy town where elite high school students escape the world to focus on their educations. The festival reminds us that Exeter was once a more politically important place. Exonians at the festival celebrate their town’s outsized past by looking at and hearing a work of national creation that traveled a long way and a long time to get to them.

 Acknowledgments

As an early American historian, I relished the novel delight of interviewing my sources for this article, and want to express my gratitude to Carol Walker Aten, Tracey McGrail, Stephen Jeffries, Bob Mitchell, Laura Martin, Victoria Su, and Emma Bray. I am also deeply indebted to several archivists: Rachel Passannante of the American Independence Museum, Barbara Rimkunas of the Exeter Historical Society, and Brian Burford of the New Hampshire State Division of Archives and Records Management.

Further Reading

For the history of the Declaration of Independence, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997); David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); Frederick R. Goff, The John Dunlap Broadside: The First Printing of the Declaration of Independence (Washington, 1976); and online resources based on the “Declaration Database” project at the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University.

For the history of Exeter, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, ed., Cross-Grained & Wily Waters: A Guide to the Piscataqua Maritime Region (Portsmouth, N.H., 2002); and Barbara Rimkunas, Hidden History of Exeter (Charleston, S.C., 2014). Early histories of the town were written by Charles Henry Bell in 1876 and 1888 and are available online.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.1 (Winter, 2018).

Jessica Lepler is an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her first book, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis, won the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

With Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, Benjamin Carp gives us a fresh, insightful perspective on why the Boston Tea Party occurred and its outcome. Although the outlines of this chapter in provincial American history are well defined, its details have remained obscured, largely because most of the actual participants honored their oath of secrecy. This tightly structured monograph goes a long way toward clarifying how Boston’s Whig leaders shaped public opinion to oppose Parliament’s revenue-generating tax policies, and how they put their ideals into action by working with the town’s mechanics to destroy the “obnoxious weed.” Most importantly, Carp wants us to see this event as the catalyst that unified the British Empire’s thirteen North American colonies against Parliament’s tax policies and placed them on a course that led inevitably to independence.

Carp begins with a chapter devoted to the history of tea as a global commodity and the British East India Company. It establishes that tea was the commodity upon which England’s empire was built. The survival of the company that distributed it and its consumption by English colonists in colonial America was thus essential to the Empire’s economic health. This chapter, and much of the history that is woven throughout the narrative, highlight that the destruction of the East India Company’s tea on December 17, 1773, in Boston was not just a local rebellion, but one attended with global consequences. Other thematic chapters pursue how tea and the Tea Party affected women, enslaved people, and Native Americans. These draw heavily from secondary sources, and consider the Tea Party from somewhat unexpected, but important and informative, perspectives. Carp explores New Englanders’ relationships with Native American peoples to illumine how Bostonians who observed the Tea Party would have interpreted participants’ Mohawk disguises. His reflections on the ties between tea, sugar, and slavery remind us that New England was every bit as involved in slavery and the slave trade as were the southern colonies.

Most of Defiance of the Patriots, however, is structured around the men who actually participated in the Tea Party—those who planned it, those who managed it, and those who provided the muscle. Surprisingly, Carp’s Boston Sons of Liberty are not the vanguard of the revolutionary era, as we have often seen them depicted, but rather a lot of wayward republicans. In public, they opposed taxation without representation in Parliament, but in private, they couldn’t resist a good cup of tea. Apparently, Boston’s merchants were less reliable in boycotting the purchase of East India Company tea imports than were their counterparts in New York and Philadelphia. Indeed, in what is probably his most original contribution, Carp argues that it was guilt over past lapses in republican virtue, reinforced by incendiary newspaper articles from Philadelphia and New York, that drove Boston’s Whigs to their more radical response in December 1773. Unlike Charlestown, Philadelphia, and New York, the tea consigned to wholesalers in Boston was destined to go awry, per Carp, because Boston’s Sons of Liberty needed to demonstrate their commitment “to defend American liberty” not only to Parliament, but also to patriot leaders in the other American colonies, who worried that Boston’s Sons of Liberty could not be relied upon (174). Their need for redemption, coupled with a royal governor who lacked leverage in the arena of persuasive politics and a Council more interested in being re-elected than upholding the law, created the recipe for one harbor of salt-water tea.

In this respect, Defiance of the Patriots could have been titled “Defiance of the Tyrants.” Carp summarizes succinctly the myriad political, economic, and moral arguments Boston’s Whigs used to justify their opposition to the Tea Act and destruction of the East India Company’s tea. Despite weeks of extra-legal meetings of the “Body of the People,” Boston’s Sons of Liberty felt they could not trust pro-government merchants and Bostonians in general to honor the non-importation and non-consumption agreements. Rather than risk the possibility that popular commitment might waver, as it had in the past, Boston’s Whig leaders determined that the tea stored in the holds of the Beaver, Eleanor, and Dartmouth must be destroyed (126). As Benjamin Franklin observed, though, the patriots destroyed private property to demonstrate their objections to public policy (191). In their zeal to secure one liberty, they violated another liberty of fellow British citizens, who had a legal right to sell, buy, and drink British tea. Whatever influence their arguments against taxation without representation might have held with members of Parliament was lost in the face of potential economic catastrophe for the Empire.

Defiance of the Patriots is meticulously researched and rich in detail. The sheer volume of data could have overwhelmed readers, but Carp handles it deftly and assembles a coherent, engaging story. Carp’s narrative is most interesting where it adds voices from Philadelphia, New York, and Charlestown, emphasizing that boycotting tea as a political statement was not limited to Boston, but rather a pan-colonial concern. Here, it would have been interesting to consider how the Empire’s other colonies (Nova Scotia, West Indies) responded to the Tea Act. Focusing upon only the thirteen colonies that eventually became America assumes more than was known in 1773. Also, even though Carp situates Defiance of the Patriots within the broader context of worldwide trade in exotic goods, the records of Parliament are never referenced. Parallels between Parliament’s need to develop a political solution to rescue the Empire’s largest corporation from bankruptcy and the world’s economic condition today will be obvious to even the most casual reader. Parliament’s struggle to craft global economic policy is absent. The Tea Act appears whole cloth, and Parliament’s members are portrayed as tyrants, intent on lining their own pockets. In this regard, it should be noted that Defiance of the Patriots is somewhat celebratory in that it tends to cast the Sons of Liberty as heroes, and Parliament and the East India Company as villains. Massachusetts’ royal governor reported to “masters in London” (183), and patriots refused to drink tea “rather than meekly submitting to the whim of royal officials” (126). Language of this sort is found throughout the text. It makes for popular reading among the general public as it reinforces familiar stereotypes, but it also cheats knowledgeable readers of the complexity involved in crafting global economic policy and the fluidity of the relationships between the various colonial legislative bodies and Parliament.

Although Carp situates the Boston Tea Party within a global framework, he does not discuss the long-term causes that led to the constitutional crisis over whether Parliament or the colonial legislatures controlled the prerogative to tax within the colonies. The narrative begins in 1765, when America’s port cities were already suffering economically. No mention is ever made that the colonies, New England especially, had already been a point of contention between Massachusetts’ General Court and Parliament for more than a century. This truncated starting point and omission of other historical reference points could be charged to an editor’s desire to limit the book’s scope and length, but engagement of the politics that preceded the era of Imperial Crisis would seem to be essential for a monograph that seeks to explicate why Boston’s patriots believed they were justified in their defiance of British law.

These limitations pale, however, when compared to what Carp has achieved with Defiance of the Patriots. This book has much to offer to professional historians as well as history buffs. It is encouraging to find that, even with an event as iconic as the Boston Tea Party, the past still has much to tell us—and can even surprise us—if we approach it from an informed but unassuming perspective.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.4 (July, 2011).

Christine LaHue is a Ph.D. candidate at the Ohio State University, where she is completing her dissertation, The Resurrection of John Wise: Congregational Republicanism and Popular Mobilization, 1688-1772. Ms. LaHue readily confesses that she is a committed tea-drinker, and would likely have become a lapsed republican, as did so many well-intentioned patriots.

Part I

In 1786, fifteen-year-old Barbara Witmer suffered a horrific assault. A group of men kidnapped her from her Pennsylvania home at gunpoint, and one of these men repeatedly raped Barbara before her family and friends managed to rescue her. Her rescuers quickly brought Barbara to a local justice of the peace to press charges against the attackers, but she had difficulty telling the magistrates about her ordeal. One justice of the peace asked her “8 or 10 times to begin” her testimony. When she said nothing, the justice decided that Barbara was “confused” about what had happened, so he gave up and went to bed. Another magistrate, however, seemed to understand that Barbara might be too traumatized to tell her story. Rather than immediately categorizing Barbara as a confused and therefore unreliable witness, he saw her as “very bashful” about what had happened to her. This justice “spoke very mildly & told her no one could hurt her for telling the Truth.” After waiting through ten or fifteen more minutes of Barbara’s silence, the magistrate called in her mother and uncle to provide support, and Barbara hesitatingly told her story. Eventually, six men were convicted in the attack. The man who had raped Barbara received a death sentence.

Because the rape of Barbara Witmer was an obvious and brutal assault, it made a relatively easy case for legal prosecution. More than a dozen witnesses testified that Barbara had screamed for help as the men carried her away at gunpoint, that she had seemed terrified, and that she had immediately run to her rescuers when they found her being held captive in a nearby house. Together, these witnesses removed one of the biggest barriers to the successful prosecution of rape cases in early America: the question of whether the woman had consented to the man accused of raping her. Given that the penalty for rape was a death sentence in colonial America and up to twenty-one years in prison in the early republic, courts required a woman to be exceptionally convincing in her accusation of forced sexual assault. Researchers in women’s and legal history over the past few decades have discovered a fair amount about the courtroom prosecution of rape and other sexual crimes in early America. Especially by the eighteenth century, courts seemed loathe to prosecute many rape cases, and women often had great difficulty proving to an all-male jury that they had been raped. But how did such an intimate crime—with its horrifying blend of sex and violence—ultimately become part of a public courtroom proceeding?

Barbara Witmer’s experience reminds us that obstacles to successfully prosecuting rape lay as much out of the courtroom as in it. The case against Barbara’s attackers was clear cut, she had supportive family members who encouraged prosecution, but Barbara still had great difficulty telling her story to legal officials. Stories like Barbara’s invite us to investigate exactly how assaulted women made their way to the criminal justice system. My examination of more than nine hundred incidents of sexual coercion across British America between 1700 and 1820 shows several consistent patterns in the ways that women, families, and communities transformed private sexual assaults into public prosecutions. Layers of unwritten cultural practices shaped women’s roads to legal recourse. While bringing an incident of rape to legal officials was undoubtedly challenging for all victims, ironically, the cases that might be most successfully prosecuted were often the most difficult for victims to bring to court.

After a sexual attack, a woman would rarely pick herself up and run to the nearest justice of the peace to file a legal complaint: bringing an official complaint was less often a victim’s immediate reflex than the end point of a series of decisions to share her misfortune with family and community. Unlike the assailants in Barbara Witmer’s case, most men committed sexual attacks without witnesses, so a victim had to independently make the difficult decision to tell someone what had happened to her. And a woman who had been sexually assaulted might have a variety of reasons to keep the attack secret. An early American double standard that held women responsible for engaging in any sexual behavior outside marriage probably encouraged women to blame themselves for not avoiding attack. Or, like Barbara, they may have been afraid of retribution from their attackers, or embarrassed at the thought of telling intimate sexual details to male court officials or jury members.

The reactions of the first people a woman told about an attack greatly influenced whether she would bring her claim to legal officials. If they did not believe her story they might encourage her to keep her secret. Even when neighbors and kin believed a woman’s account, they might still think it best to avoid public legal recourse, fearing public reaction, the effect on the victim’s reputation, or the legal system itself. When family members or friends did pursue judicial redress, a husband, father, master, or other male household head would generally accompany the woman to court. Because women depended on this kind of male support, daughters raped by their fathers, or servants raped by their masters, might find legal recourse especially difficult to attain. Thus, multiple factors—a woman’s relation to her attacker, the reaction of those around her, and her own ability to tell others about intimate details of a sexual assault—influenced whether rapes ever came to the attention of early American courts. This extended pre-legal process not only meant that many sexual assaults might never come to the attention of a criminal justice system, it meant that the very cases most likely to result in conviction (such as fathers’ abuse of their daughters) were often the least likely to wind up before a jury. Exploring how rapes came to court helps us to examine the surprisingly circuitous relationship between acts of sexual coercion and the prosecution of rape in early America.

Part II

Unlike the attack against Barbara Witmer, most sexual assaults did not occur in front of witnesses. Accordingly, victims had to make an initial decision to tell about their suffering, and they often only did so with significant prodding from family or close friends. In 1804, Kentuckian ‘Franky’ Tomlinson told no one about her uncle’s sexual assault on her for at least a week, perhaps because she was afraid to let her parents know what her father’s brother had done to her. After her mother wondered why the uncle skulked near their house “in the weeds or in secret places more than she thought necessary,” Franky broke down and confessed that the uncle “had ruined her forever.” Franky used the opening provided by her mother’s comment about the uncle’s odd actions to admit that he had attacked her. Perhaps her mother raised the issue of the uncle’s strange behavior because she suspected, even subconsciously, that something was wrong: Franky’s mother would later recall that her daughter “even in her sleep would cry out [for her uncle] to let her alone.”

Like Franky, many single women told their stories only after others began to suspect some problem. Several men sexually assaulted Mary Anderson in New York City in 1754. She did not mention the incident to anyone until one of her attackers asked if she had gone to a justice of the peace yet to complain. Overhearing the conversation, Mary’s mother demanded to know what had happened and took Mary to file a complaint. In an 1812 Philadelphia case, Deborah Williams testified that “I don’t know that I shd have said any thing” about being raped if her master had not questioned why she looked so disheveled. Questions from astute family and household members could be the first step in encouraging a woman to bring charges against a man who had sexually assaulted her. Victims without interested, aware, or sympathetic family members might suffer in silence, and their cases might never reach court.

And there was often good reason for such silence. Young girls who were sexually assaulted might hesitate to tell anyone about the attack because they often believed their attackers’ threats of great harm should they do so. In nineteenth-century Philadelphia, John Kinless told four-year-old Mary McElroy that he would “give her to the sweep” if she told anyone that he had raped her, and Mary said nothing for nearly a month. Five-year-old Sally Briggs was covered in blood after a sexual attack in Virginia in 1808, but would not tell her mother anything until her mother could assure her that “there was no danger of his killing her.” After an assault in New York in 1810, six-year-old Sally Carver kept silent because her attacker had “told her not to tell and if she did tell he would buy two cow skins and two horse whips and would Twist them up together and would whip her—also that he would borrow a knife . . . and would cut her ears off and her head.” While older women might recognize that community involvement and legal prosecution could protect them from retribution, young girls were especially susceptible to believing that the men who had already hurt them so much could make good on such horrific threats. Ironically, cases involving child victims were often the most successfully prosecuted because few jurors would question whether the young girl had chosen to have sexual relations with her attacker. But because fear of their assailants prevented many young girls from telling anyone that they had been raped, such cases might be significantly underrepresented in early American courts.

Similarly, even though incestuous sexual assaults were some of the most fiercely prosecuted rapes, daughters who endured ongoing sexual abuse from their fathers had particular difficulties sharing their suffering with others. In early-eighteenth-century New England, Hannah Hood could not see how to complain against her stepfather. She recounted, “i knew not what to do. I went to one house and to another and to a third thinking to declare my grife to them, but when I came thear, thear being strangers to me, I had not the power to speake, but sat downe and cry.” A century later, New Englander Phoebe Bailey also could not admit that her father had been sexually abusing her for years. Her mother “often saw her with cheeks bedewed with tears, on account of his new and astonishing behaviour,” but recounted that “such were [Phoebe’s] fears of him, that she did not dare to talk with me, or any other person upon her situation.” Despite their obvious suffering, these young women could not find a voice to complain against the man who was meant to be their protector, and such sexual abuse often went on for years without discovery. These family dynamics might sound somewhat similar to modern incestuous sexual abuse. However, while daughters in both the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries might hesitate to accuse their fathers of rape, daughters in the eighteenth century were at a further disadvantage: their fathers provided a necessary link to the all-male legal system, and without the support of a male head of household, the victims could not easily pursue legal redress.

Daughters of abusive fathers had additional incentives to keep the secret of sexual assault within the household. As household heads, fathers had not only the social power to scare their daughters into submission, but the legal right to punish disobedient daughters. Household heads also generally had the ability to make their own voices heard over the claims of their dependent children. In Connecticut in 1725, Sarah Perkins testified that her father “threatends he would have her hand cut off for being a dissobedient child and to disinherit her” because she would not agree to have sexual relations with him. A century later, Betsy Wheeler’s father told her to keep his attack a secret or he would “kill me in the most cruel way he could think of.” Indeed, Betsy did not complain of his assaults until after her mother had ordered him out of their house. Only when she had enlisted her mother as an ally and her father was no longer an immediate threat could Betsy speak about his attacks. Such fears of a father’s retribution were not unfounded. In 1800 in New York City, Maria Cottle may have avoided the judicial system because she believed her father’s threat that “he would kill her if he should be hung for [his rapes of her].” Instead Maria ran away. But when her father caught her, he “whipped her severely . . . and kept her chained for about a week.” When an attacker was a seemingly all-powerful father figure, his retribution might be worse than anything a victim might gain from sharing her story of sexual abuse.

Daughters of abusive fathers also had to consider whether even successful judicial redress would necessarily improve their lives. While Maria ultimately successfully prosecuted her father for repeated sexual assaults, his conviction meant that she, now homeless, was put in the almshouse. Given the possibilities of physical retaliation, homelessness, or poverty, keeping sexual assaults a secret sometimes made sense. Women needed to carefully weigh these kinds of serious repercussions against the possible gains that could come from public knowledge of sexual abuse.

Even when victims managed to tell neighbors or family members about their ordeal, others’ knowledge of the assault did not necessarily insure swift legal action. Family and friends might still think that the risks of prosecution outweighed its potential benefits. Some did not want to bring charges that might take the life of the rapist, some might fear that the jury would not believe the victim’s story, and some worried that a public trial would cause embarrassment or dishonor to the victim and her family.

Accordingly, family and neighbors sometimes betrayed a willfulness not to know what had happened to an assaulted woman. After Rachel Davis’s master repeatedly sexually assaulted her in early-nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, Rachel told her sister what had happened. But when the sister tried to enlist a female neighbor’s help, the neighbor refused, saying “that I wanted to hear no more.” Sometimes family members could not bear to learn that a loved one had suffered the horror of rape. A man from a nearby plantation raped Lucinda Jeffries in early-nineteenth-century Virginia. When her stepfather found her by the side of the road, he seemed unwilling to learn the full extent of the assault. He told Lucinda that “he hoped [the attacker] had not effected his purpose,” and Lucinda “made no reply for some time.” Perhaps her stepfather realized that his own need to minimize the damage done to Lucinda inadvertently made her unwilling to admit what had happened. When he changed his approach and “told her to tell him the truth,” Lucinda acknowledged that she had been raped. Other family members might mix a need to deny an assault with disbelief that someone they knew could commit a rape. When Christiana Waggoner told her husband that a neighbor had raped her in Revolutionary-era Pennsylvania, her husband’s immediate response was that “he did not think [the neighbor] would do such a Thing.”

A general reluctance to think that a friend could commit a horrific sexual attack, a neighbor’s desire not to get involved, or an aversion to putting words to one’s worst fears might all contribute to a community’s silence about a sexual assault. Moreover, rape was a difficult crime to prosecute successfully in early America: in the nearly two hundred known rape prosecutions against white men from 1700 to 1820, fewer than one-third resulted in a guilty verdict. Far more charges were dismissed, settled out of court, or led to convictions for only lesser crimes. Since court days were public events, most community members would have known the difficulties that a rape victim faced and factored that knowledge into their decision to encourage or discourage legal redress for a sexual attack.

Family members might also try to seek redress outside the legal system, redress that could range from private settlements to their own version of justice. One victim explained that her husband had planned to “make Some arrangement with [her attacker]—therefore she did not Lodge her Comp[lain]t” with a justice of the peace. Some attackers tried to avoid legal prosecution by making their own amends. After James Dunn tried to force Sylvia Patterson to have sex with him in early-nineteenth-century New York, he tried to avoid punishment by offering a watch as a down payment on a future monetary settlement.

Some family members took more direct (and more illegal) action to derail a court prosecution: The family of Franky Tomlinson decided to hide Franky until her uncle could be acquitted of raping her, promising to “send back for her” when the trial ended. The Tomlinsons knew that without Franky’s testimony, the prosecutor could not prove a rape charge. This case highlights the difficult position of a rape victim who accused a family member, well-liked neighbor, or respected community member. Even when family and friends believed her story, they might not want the attacker to suffer the full wrath of the criminal justice system.

Because male household heads typically accompanied female victims to court, fatherless families faced additional obstacles to judicial redress. Mothers who were household heads seemed particularly hesitant to usher their assaulted daughters through the judicial process. Mary Anderson’s mother eventually took Mary to complain before a magistrate, but told him that if the men who had attacked her daughter would only give assurances not to bother Mary, she would prefer to drop all charges. In Boston in 1817 another mother baldly refused to go with her daughter to file a complaint about a sexual assault, explaining that “I am a poor woman and did not wish the trouble.” Especially for lower class women without husbands, the legal system could be a site of intimidation rather than salvation. Neither assault victims nor the women to whom they turned with their stories necessarily thought the legal system provided an easy or satisfying resolution.

But however difficult their circumstances, at least assaulted white women had the option to turn to an early American court. Even unequivocal social support, however, would not lead to legal prosecution for one group of early American women: enslaved women had virtually no judicial recourse for sexual assaults. Legally, enslaved women could bring a claim of rape against a white or black man to the attention of an early American court. However, early American statutes often would not allow enslaved women to testify against white assailants, and a rape case could rarely be prosecuted without a victim’s testimony. Accordingly, such prosecutions were exceptionally rare. Indeed, we know of no white man convicted for raping an enslaved woman in all of early American history.

The scant evidence that survives suggests that, like their white counterparts, enslaved women who were raped would first turn to family and community members about their mistreatment. Unlike their free and white counterparts, however, enslaved women did not usually have kin or neighbors who could serve as liaisons to the legal system. Without legally recognized fathers or husbands, slaves could not rely on a patriarchal figure to represent them at early American courts. And slaves might suffer greatly if they told others about a white man’s—let alone a master’s—sexual misdeeds. Former slave Lewis Clarke recalled that his master repeatedly sexually assaulted his sister. When Lewis’s sister complained to other slaves about their owner’s behavior, the “master was so mad . . . that he sold her right off to Louisiana.” In her famous narrative of her time in slavery, Harriet Jacobs recalled that other slaves knew of her master’s sexually abusive acts, but that “they were aware that to speak of them was an offence that never went unpunished.” The oppressive realities of slavery denied most African American women the possibilities of social or legal assistance in cases of sexual abuse. Denied patriarchal protection by virtue of their bondage, enslaved women represented the most extreme example of the difficulties all early American women faced in transforming a sexual attack into a rape prosecution. While many victims who had a hard time bringing their attacker to court might at least face a relatively sympathetic court system, enslaved women suffered from the worst of both worlds: community support could not render much assistance, and institutional redress was permanently denied to them.

Part III

When Barbara Witmer eventually testified against her assailants in court, their lawyer questioned why she had initially refused to tell her story to the first justice of the peace. She answered, “I was frightened . . . I had not the Courage to speak before him.” Women who were sexually assaulted in early America certainly needed courage to bring their complaint to a public forum for judicial redress. But the criminal prosecution of a sexual attack required more than individual courage. The decision to prosecute a sexual assault was a personal, legal, and, perhaps most importantly, social decision.

The legal prosecution of rape involved more than what went on in front of lawyers, judges, and jurors. Of crucial importance were the extensive negotiations that preceded any direct involvement of the judicial system. Despite the numerous obstacles, many women persevered and got their day in court. But untold numbers of other sexual assault victims never completed the long road to the courtroom door. By tracing the entire process from sexual coercion to prosecution, it’s possible to realize how much of early American women’s sexual abuse might remain hidden—not just from their families, communities and legal system—but also hidden forever from the historian’s view. Given that some of the most easily prosecutable cases were often the most difficult for victims to bring to early American courts, we should not assume that rape was simply an underreported crime. Rape appears to have been (and very well may still be today) underreported in very specific and systematic ways.

Further reading: Quotations in this article comes from manuscripts at the Connecticut State Library (Hartford), Kentucky Library and Archives (Frankfort), New York Municipal Archives and New York Hall of Records (New York), Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Library of Virginia (Richmond), as well as from a variety of published and reprinted sources. For more on rape in early America, see Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1699-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 231-84; and Marybeth Hamilton Arnold, “‘Life of a Citizen in the Hands of a Woman’: Sexual Assault in New York City, 1790-1820,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, edited by Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons with Robert A. Padgug (Philadelphia, 1989). On servants’ and slaves’ reactions to masters’ sexual abuse, see Sharon Block, “Lines of Color, Sex, and Service: Comparative Sexual Coercion in Early America,” Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, edited by Martha Hodes (New York, 1999), 141-63.  

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Sharon Block, assistant professor of history at University of California, Irvine, is the author of He Said I Must: Sexual Coercion in Early America, forthcoming from the OIEAHC imprint of the University of North Carolina Press.