Reviews of Books

For four decades Harry M. Ward of the University of Richmond has been steadily turning out sound books on the War of Independence. Through no fault of his own, his collective works have not brought the recognition he deserves in the historical profession. His offerings have been neither revisionist in argument nor on the cutting edge of new scholarship. Even so, specialists have appreciated his attention to military subjects. He has produced separate biographies of Generals Adam Stephen, William Maxwell, and Charles Scott, co-authored a history of Richmond, Virginia, in the Revolution, and composed a monograph on the Department of War from the Confederation through George Washington's presidency. Consequently, he is well qualified to contribute The War for Independence and the Transformation of American Society to the Warfare and History series under the general editorship of Jeremy Black.	1
For several decades, war-and-society studies have been in vogue, but the subject has generated only modest interest among chroniclers of the American Revolutionary era. Most of the existing literature has concentrated on the War of Independence strictly as a military phenomenon or viewed the American Revolution as separate and apart from the conflict that brought Independence. Even J. Franklin Jameson's classic The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Princeton, 1926) preferred to stress alterations in thought and feeling and in formal institutions such as the established churches. Gordon S. Wood has led the way among present-day investigators in elaborating brilliantly on Jameson's themes in The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill, 1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992). But neither Jameson nor Wood looked closely at how the war itself affected society during the fighting and as a result of the conflict. To be sure, Jameson touched on these matters, albeit briefly, especially in chapters on the status of persons and on the land. More recently, Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert edited a volume in the United States Capitol Historical Society series on the Revolution, The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement (Charlottesville and London, 1996), in which eleven essayists probed Jameson's influence and new dimensions of the subject. Although stimulating and provocative, this collection, too, only rarely makes a direct connection between the war and social change.	2
Ward wastes no time in setting the reader straight about his purpose. "This book assesses the impact of the War for Independence on the lives of Americans during the period of the conflict" (p. ix). This "all but passed over" aspect of the Revolution, he concedes, "is a challenging task since trends and activity cannot be neatly boxed, with social change having roots before the war and extensions into the postwar period" (p. x). The author might have acknowledged another obstacle, the constraints of space, in taking on such a many-sided topic, for as a volume in a series that is obviously pointed toward an audience of undergraduates and general readers, he had fewer than 250 pages of text in which to accomplish his purpose. Yet this is a book to be taken seriously, even if it can be, for scholars at least, no more than an introduction to a neglected aspect of the Revolution. Ward has skillfully mined a mountain of secondary literature, including obscure publications on local history and little-used doctoral dissertations, drawn extensively on the major documentary projects about the Founding Fathers, and sampled pension records and other unpublished materials.	. . .