| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. By Woody Holton. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xxii, 231 pp. Cloth, $39.95, isbn 0-8078-2501-8. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-8078-4784-4.)

"The American Revolution is generally remembered as a supremely confident step," Woody Holton writes, but for the men who led the revolutionary movement in Virginia it was "less a display of confidence than an act of desperation." Revolution is, of course, a dangerous act, not to be undertaken "for light and transient causes," as Thomas Jefferson put it, and it is certainly not without a necessary risk to "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." But the virtue of this persuasive study is that it helps us see the various sources of the anxiety that beset the Virginia gentry in the revolutionary era and, in so doing, helps us see the roles of other people who have not otherwise been so prominent in the historical record. . . .

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