Reviewed by Steve Rosswurm | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4

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Reviewed by Steve Rosswurm | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia. By Michael A. McDonnell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 564 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
Reviewed by Steve Rosswurm, Lake Forest College
This is a big book in every sense of the word. Containing more than five hundred substantial, dense, and deeply researched pages, it argues a major point: class is the best analytic tool available for understanding the Virginia Revolution. If on this score The Politics of War is not entirely convincing, it does contribute greatly to the social history of the Revolutionary War.	1
Michael A. McDonnell uses "wartime mobilization" (5) as a way to understand Virginia both before and after the war's inauguration in April 1775. What he finds is neither a state united around the protection of slavery and racial privilege nor a society of deference: "the tremendous demands of the Revolutionary war exposed existing social fissures even as the war created new ones—and most often those divisions were between whites" (5). Those "deep internal fissures exposed in Virginia by the unraveling of imperial authority" (13) are the theme of the book's first half, while the theme of the second is "the transformation the Revolutionary experience wrought on those divisions and the critical influence the new social and political realities thereby exerted upon the reconstitution of authority" (13). The story, finally, of The Politics of War is "how ordinary Virginians, free and unfree, directly and indirectly transformed a War for Independence into a Revolutionary war, fundamentally changing the course of their history and the new nation they created, for better and for worse" (15).	2
The best way to understand that transformation, McDonnell argues, is through a class analysis. "Class seemed to be at least as important as race in thinking about mobilization and social relations within the new state" (7). "Control over labor" (11), of which slaves were a significant component, proved to be the "defining element in social relations during the war and was at the heart of class divisions in Virginia" (11).	3
There are several problems with McDonnell's approach to class, and in one way or the other he acknowledges each of them, though he underestimates their implications. There is relatively little direct evidence, particularly in the first few years of the war, that those in the middle or the bottom saw their situation in class terms. They may have acted in class ways or those above them may have described them acting in class ways, but neither is the same as class consciousness. McDonnell is therefore left to ascribe class motives to Virginians' actions. This is risky business, as Eric Van Young demonstrates in his magisterial work on the Mexican War for Independence, for the historian is substituting himself for the actors.¹ One solution would be to distinguish between a "class-in-itself" and a "class-for-itself," but McDonnell does not do this.	4
There is no doubt that Virginia, especially as the war wore on, was a divided society, filled with contention and conflict. McDonnell's chapters on mobilization provide considerable evidence of this. That class is the best explanation for this behavior, though, is another issue. Time and time again, those below acted on behalf of their interests, but why interpret that behavior in class ways? Why not self-interest? Why not culture? Why not gender?	. . .

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