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Reviews of Books
| Taming Democracy: "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. By Terry Bouton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 342 pages. $29.95 (cloth).
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Reviewed by Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University, Camden
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In this work of neo-neoprogressive history, Terry Bouton reminds us of the centrality of economic interest and class conflict for the revolutionary period. His emphasis on class conflict is a fresh leaven for a historiography that has stressed ideology in the coming of the Revolution and will demand the attention of all students of revolutionary America. |
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In 1776 many Americans, particularly Pennsylvania smallholders, imagined a radical alternative to colonial society. Pennsylvania yeomen demanded rough equality of condition, widespread ownership of productive resources, and the accountability of governors to the governed. Indeed, as Bouton describes their democratic vision, it appears that their ideal society held little room for policy making beyond the most local levels. |
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In an impressive treatment of the relentless difficulties experienced by these ordinary folk during the 1780s, we learn just how likely ordinary Pennsylvanians were to face foreclosure for debt. In some counties there were more foreclosures than there were residents, meaning that some families were foreclosed on more than once. In addition, ordinary Pennsylvanians saw the most critical locus of governance moving farther away from their localities. They responded in creative ways that ranged from imagining almost complete alternative structures of law, government, and taxation to blocking roads, particularly those that led to courthouses and market towns. In addition, from below there were many proposals for repaying Revolutionary War debt that directly challenged the boondoggle Alexander Hamilton provided the wealthy. These democratic proposals were intended to keep resources widely distributed. |
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Connecting revolutionary-era rural insurgency to Pennsylvania's two famous uprisings, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and Fries's Rebellion of 1799, Bouton demonstrates a long continuity in rural grievances. Rural critics of elite consolidation did not necessarily communicate these grievances over decades and distances; rather, smallholders in Pennsylvania consistently committed to revolutionary struggle and republican institutions because they expected to govern and control their communities. Given the broad-based and widespread appeal of that expectation, a similar reaction over several decades and throughout a state as large as Pennsylvania to the concentration of political and economic power should not surprise us. |
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This discussion of the culture, politics, and political economy of Pennsylvania's small property holders is superb. But Bouton largely ignores the historiography treating the ideological sources of Whig thought. One would never know from this book that, among other things, the Revolution was part of a centuries-long and international conversation about republican political theory, the ills that had befallen past republican experiments, and the possibilities and perils that came when a modern society dispensed with hereditary political institutions. Revolutionary gentlemen, in Bouton's hands, end up looking rather like stock villains. The immense gulf between them and smallholders could have been more fully explained by taking a bit more time to consider an elite worldview that equated democracy with anarchy and often compared events in the 1780s to scenarios that many elites believed had destroyed republics in the classical past. |
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