Reviewed by Ken Miller | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3

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Reviewed by Ken Miller | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid- Atlantic. By Liam Riordan. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 367 pages. $49.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Ken Miller, Washington College
Part comparative community study, part historical ethnography, this book takes a long view of the American Revolution, linking revolutionary change to the formation of Jacksonian society. Liam Riordan reconstructs public life in three towns located along a 130-mile stretch of the Delaware River to illuminate "local encounters of cultural difference" (11) and to investigate the ways in which the region's varied ethnic, racial, and religious groups shaped early national society. Broadly, he is concerned with tracing the Revolution's achievements and shortcomings for particular groups of ordinary people in specific locales over several decades. As Riordan explains, the imperial crisis inaugurated an era of revolutionary identity politics that stretched into the 1820s, empowering some and marginalizing others as newly politicized groups sought to defend or advance their particular interests in the new nation.	1
The study begins with a brief introduction to three towns: New Castle, Delaware; Burlington, New Jersey; and Easton, Pennsylvania. With a conveniently situated port on Delaware's western shore, New Castle developed as a flourishing commercial center and became Delaware's capital following English colonization in the 1660s. As a vibrant port community, the town attracted a transitory population of Irish and African American maritime workers. After the Revolution, slaves remained a visible presence in New Castle, although increasing numbers of the enslaved gradually obtained their freedom. A colonial capital with a transatlantic port, Burlington was founded by Quakers during the 1670s. The town's affluent Quaker and Anglican leaders forged a close relationship during the 1700s, cooperating across religious lines to administer community affairs. Established eighty miles north of Burlington at the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh rivers during the mid-eighteenth century, Easton began as a small frontier community, whose predominantly Germanspeaking population lived in uneasy proximity to neighboring Indians. The Germans' relatively late arrival in Pennsylvania combined with cultural and linguistic barriers and frontier conditions to marginalize the recent immigrants from their English-speaking neighbors. While Easton's German Reformed and Lutheran residents achieved solidarity as ethnic outsiders, the town's small Scots-Irish elite enjoyed disproportionate influence in local affairs prior to the crisis with Britain.	2
Residents of Easton, Burlington, and New Castle experienced the Revolutionary War differently but wrestled with common questions of allegiance, shaped in each context by preexisting ethnoreligious identities and the "logic of local circumstances" (44). With strong ties to Britain, Burlington's Quakers and Anglicans chose loyalism and quickly declined in influence. Because of the town's imperial attachments, residents escaped British assault but suffered periodic harassment from patriot forces. A more divided community, New Castle gradually fell under the control of radical Scots-Irish patriots and felt the sting of the British Navy and loyalist privateers. The town's fractured allegiance and vulnerability to British assault fueled bitter internal disputes between patriots and loyalists and between radical and conservative patriots. Adding to local tensions were the efforts of enslaved African Americans, who made the most of revolutionary ideals and wartime disruptions to secure their freedom. The war bred similar tensions in Easton, where the small Scots-Irish elite, with strong ties to the proprietary faction, was soon displaced by the German-speaking patriot majority. German patriots embraced the opportunities for social advancement offered by military service and closed ranks against hostile natives on the northern and western frontier. Situating themselves along a racialized divide separating "civilized Americans from savages" (79), Easton's German patriots cemented their place in the nation.	. . .

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