Book Review

Canada and the United States

Citing the paucity of published work on the American Revolution in that part of Pennsylvania "beyond Philadelphia," the editors of this volume have collected nine essays that examine the activities of hinterland residents—the vast majority of the colony's population—during this pivotal era. Eight contributors trace the course of the war in specific counties or regions; a ninth looks at revolutionary-era violence along Pennsylvania's entire Indian frontier. In an introductory essay, editors John B. Frantz and William Pencak reprise events leading up to the Revolution as viewed by Pennsylvanians and highlight a few common threads in the diverse local stories that unfolded during wartime. A brief afterword by Pencak seeks to place Pennsylvania's "revolutions" in a broader interpretive context and also notes the study's relevance to backcountry studies and questions of loyalism and allegiance in the revolutionary era.	1
The sheer complexity of the American Revolution when viewed through the microscopic lens of local history is the most immediate impression conveyed by this volume. That the revolutionary experience differed from colony to colony, or between seaboard and backcountry areas, is now a commonplace observation. These essays go even further to demonstrate the difficulty of generalizing about the Revolution from county to county. The result is at times a dizzying collection of local stories but also a suggestive glimpse of how ambiguously a large historical drama plays out on the local stage.	2
Frantz and Pencak organize their contributors' essays into three broad regional patterns of near-metropolitan, middle, and western experience, but ethnic, religious, political, and economic particulars complicate even those broad categories. Rosemary Warden examined Chester, one of the near-metropolitan counties that profited from trade with Britain in the prewar period. She found, not surprisingly, that many of its citizens only reluctantly supported the break with England. Over the course of the war, the county experienced significant internal strife, as its citizens divided into hostile factions of loyalists, neutrals, and revolutionaries of both conservative and radical persuasion. In neighboring Bucks County, Owen Ireland discovered an early unity in rejecting British claims of parliamentary supremacy, but a later sharp division over how best to resist the imposition of those claims. Neighboring the metropolis, Chester and Bucks also shared many wartime experiences. In both counties, ethnicity and religion mattered more than occupation or social-economic status in determining group loyalties. In both, a pacifistic Quaker elite was replaced with new leaders from dissenting religious traditions and a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Finally, both of these older counties lost political power at the provincial level as newer counties gained greater representation in the Assembly.	. . .