Reviews of Books

Blueprints for Violence

Reviewed by David Grimstead, University of Maryland, College Park

Wayne E. Lee, assistant professor of history at the University of Louisville, approaches the study of social violence in North Carolina, 1758–1783, from a perspective different from that inaugurated by historians George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm more than forty years ago.1 These English scholars explored collective violence in the early modern era from a basically academic Whig-Marxist framework, and through the work of Jesse Lemisch, their outlook was brought to colonial American history.2 In this view, popular violence was not an indiscriminate surge of irrational anger, as Gustave LeBon and sociological tradition once supposed. Rather, "crowds"—the words "mob" and even "riot" were seen as too disparaging—were socially purposive and modulated actions by the oppressed or unempowered that generally advanced progressive class/democratic changes. Several influential studies subsequently scrutinized colonial mobs and offered positive assessments, deeming them lower and middling class contributions to the coming of the American Revolution and democracy.3	1
These studies sought to establish the social justice of particular protests and emphasized the specific context, social rationality, and moderation of such riots. Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina stresses riotous restraint as well, but contends that social and class issues matter less in explanations of mob actions than do "cultural norms about violence [that] . . . patterned violent behavior" (p. 222). Lee's slant on the centrality of traditions of social violence is an interesting adjunct to the scholarly extension in recent years of cultural tropes over socio-class-economic explanations.	2
Lee's approach calls attention to some aspects of violence often neglected. He notes that violence tends to be "surrounded by words" and "justificatory rhetoric" (p. 1). Certainly in relation to American riots, the amount of ink spilled over them has surpassed the blood shed. He also calls attention to the way mobs are often organized to open or further a process of social negotiation over issues where rioters hope to sway the tolerating or indifferent community to their side. "Careful rioters," in Lee's words, act on calculations about what measures of violence will be helpful rather than counterproductive. Careful officials similarly understand that their responses will be weighed by public opinion.	. . .