Reviews of Books

A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere. By Jayne E. Triber. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Pp. xii, 314. $32.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

To invoke a favorite technique of historian John Murrin--whose students honored him in March 2001 with a conference entitled "What If?: Counterfactualism in Early American History"--study of the origins of the American Revolution in Massachusetts raises a host of tantalizing alternative histories. What if a more conciliatory governor, say Benjamin Franklin, had been appointed in 1760? What if Thomas Hutchinson had sent the tea back in 1773, as did the other colonial governors, or if the British had accepted offers of private payment for the tea? What if a less cantankerous crew of customs collectors had been sent to regulate the trade of the province that had exerted itself the most and yet suffered the most severe aftermath of the Great War for the Empire? There probably still would have been an American Revolution, but the time, place, and circumstances of its outbreak would surely have been different.	1
Such questions suggest the importance of political biography as a genre, an importance Colin Nicolson argues persuasively in the first scholarly biography of Francis Bernard--an amazing fact in itself, considering that four of his successor Thomas Hutchinson have been published since 1974. Nicolson argues cogently that Bernard's behavior and reports as governor during the critical years from 1760 to 1769 significantly, and disastrously, shaped both the British ministry's measures and the province's resistance to provoke revolution, which plausibly could have been avoided at that time and place.	2
Bernard's sins were mortal. Most important, he took the most extreme manifestations of crowd protest in Boston, exaggerated them in dispatches claiming law and order and support for government were at an end in the province as a whole, accused public officials of either favoring such protests or remaining impotent and indifferent before them, and persuaded the British ministry that only troops and a hard line against all forms of resistance could preserve the empire in Massachusetts. Nicolson shows that time and again, Bernard antagonized even potential supporters who abhorred crowd violence by lecturing the colonists on their theoretical subordination to Parliament, a position that almost all the many potential "friends of government" in Massachusetts denied. Another of Nicolson's important accomplishments is to show that opposition to the leaders of the Boston crowd was indeed considerable, in the legislature, in the towns, and among the elite and that popular mobilization was far harder for the brace of Adamses and their accomplices to achieve than most accounts would lead us to believe. That the more extreme elements were successful, Nicolson shows, owes much to Bernard's confrontational attitude.	3
Bernard also, like the empire he represented, was a bundle of inconsistencies that Americans could easily brand as corruption. On the one hand, he proclaimed the theory of British sovereignty and the duties of subjects; on the other, he profited handsomely from questionable seizures of merchant goods by the customs service. He designed an elaborate plan for an American nobility and a restructured, united government that he thought could reconcile rising colonial aspirations and imperial expectations of the colonies. Short of that, he doubled the number of justices of the peace in Massachusetts and attempted to distribute official posts to curry support in such a transparent way that his policy backfired. Men such as John Adams refused positions they would have been happy to receive under normal circumstances. In his appointments policy, Bernard made the mistake of generalizing his own experience: although an able lawyer, he owed his rise to his wife's kinship to William Wildman Viscount Barrington, who rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer and stood at the center of imperial power throughout the 1750s and 1760s. Bernard similarly thought Americans could be bought off with the pelf and prestige of office.	. . .