| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia. By Michael A. McDonnell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xx, 544 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3108-3.)

In this volume, Michael A. McDonnell succeeds more fully than earlier neoprogressive historians in displacing the prevailing consensus view that a stable, well-supported planter elite led Virginia through the revolutionary era with little change to the commonwealth's hierarchical social and political order. Instead, he suggests that leading planters struggled with ordinary Virginians who held very different ideas on how to organize their society and to fight and finance the war. Those ordinary Virginians refused to fight or make other sacrifices when they perceived that doing so simply served the interests of their "betters" or that they were carrying a disproportionate share of the human or financial costs. They wanted to fight on their own terms rather than those dictated by traditional forms of military discipline.

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