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Review
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The American Revolution, by Joseph C. Morton. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2003. 248 pages, $45.00 cloth.
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Morton begins this collection of interpretive essays and research
materials with a concise though illuminating description of the
regional variations of the pre-Revolution population and the proprietary,
royal, and charter systems of colonial administration. In this first
chapter he also supplies his readers with a clear explanation of
how British mercantilism operated in North America. In his brief
discussion of the Revolution's impact, he claims that the "exciting
events of the years 1763-1783 could truly be called revolutionary"
because the American victory served as a catalyst for the Eighteenth
Century "age of democratic revolutions." (p. 1) Although
this brief statement will help students understand that the Revolution
took place within a wider Atlantic history, one wishes that Morton
would have pursued this theme throughout the book to better reflect
the latest scholarship on the colonial period.
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1
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Entitled "The Road to Revolution,"
Chapter Two supplies a coherent account of how the end of "salutary
neglect" provoked an imperial crisis between Britain and its
North American colonies. This chapter patiently explores how the
successive revenue acts of the Grenville and North ministries, calculated
to recoup the debts Britain incurred during the French and Indian
War, provoked increasingly hostile responses from American colonists.
The author is acutely sensitive to how the imperial innovations
of George III's ministers sparked incrementally more sophisticated
attempts to organize intercolonial resistance. Unfortunately, because
he chooses to focus on both British and colonial elites, and on
famous documents like the Declaration of Independence, his account
leaves out the political organization of the multiracial, mixed-gender
urban crowd in America's eastern seaboard cities. Students would
benefit from comparing the words of the Declaration of Independence
and the life experience of its slave-holding author, Thomas Jefferson,
to the democratic, egalitarian goals of the working-class revolutionary
crowd. This would serve as well for the other prominent revolutionaries
Morton focuses on, for example, John Adams, Jefferson's coauthor
of the Declaration, who repeatedly expressed his fear and loathing
of democratic government.
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2
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Chapter Three, "The Necessary
War," offers an insightful discussion of American and British
military strategy. The campaigns, starting with Lexington and Concord
(1775) and ending with the humiliating surrender of Cornwallis at
Yorktown (1781), are explained with a clear-eye toward the tactical
considerations and military objectives of the opposing commanders.
Chapter Four concentrates on "The Homefront" while the
fifth chapter explores "Revolutionary Diplomacy." "The
Homefront" is perhaps the book's least developed chapter, devoting
only one paragraph to women and several pages to an overly optimistic
assessment of the Revolution's direct impact on abolitionism. Conversely,
the diplomacy chapter provides an instructive account of the negotiations
between America and the European powers France, Spain and the United
Provinces. While the diplomacy of the Revolution often receives
short shrift in most textbooks, Morton's account clearly shows that
securing foreign alliances proved instrumental in winning the war.
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3
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The remainder of the book includes
an interpretive essay, biographies of nineteen key players in the
Revolution, eleven primary documents, and an annotated bibliography
of seventy two books, seven electronic resources and two films.
Ringing endorsements of American exceptionalism mar this final chapter.
This interpretive essay raises the study of the Revolution and its
immediate results to the level of an unqualified moral exercise,
an exercise wherein the nation's democratic, egalitarian principles
"largely, but sometimes imperfectly, implemented during
or soon after the American Revolutionary Era," offer a
wall of defense against "an ill-defined enemy" in the
Twenty-first Century. (p. 102, italics mine) Such statements inaccurately
give students the impression that the United States achieved the
realization of its lofty ideals almost immediately after its inception,
and continued throughout its history to act in complete accordance
with them at home and abroad. However, the annotated bibliography
can function as a helpful starting point for student research, although
classics like Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution and Gary Nash's The Urban Crucible are curiously
absent.
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4
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In conclusion, despite problems of
interpretation and points of emphasis, Morton's book, by providing
students with a concise overview of the prewar imperial crisis,
military strategy and diplomacy, can directly benefit secondary
school students in need of topical supplements to their textbook's
treatment of the Revolution. It therefore can be a useful resource
for teachers and students of the American Revolution
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5
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Mt. Lebanon H.S., Pittsburgh, PA
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John Donoghue
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