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Reviews of Books
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The Soldiers' Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging
of Early American Identity. By
Gregory T. Knouff
. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Pp.
xxiv, 312. $45.00.)
Reviewed
by
Guy Chet
, University of North Texas
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The Soldiers' Revolution is a cultural rather than a social history of the lower orders of American society. Gregory Knouff draws on testimonies of combatants on both sides of the American Revolution to offer a meaningful argument about the way these combatants viewed the American Revolution, how they saw themselves in this conflict, and how they viewed the United States. As Thomas P. Slaughter did in his study of the Whiskey Rebellion, Knouff examines the experiences and testimonies of previously anonymous and voiceless Americans, rather than focusing on the great white men who led the Revolutionary movement and commanded patriot forces. This is not a product of an ideological preference for the study of the poor and disenfranchised, but a focal point dictated by the sources: the bulk of the fighting (both in the Continental army and in local militias) was performed by members of the lower classes. |
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Knouff suggests that these men's perceptions of the war and of the new Republic differed from the familiar judgment offered by the founding fathers. More than an imperial conflict between the forces of monarchy and republicanism or between American and British interests, Knouff's subjects present the conflict as a Pennsylvanian civil war. To them, the American War of Independence was a local affair, and the American Revolution was a struggle over local political power and social status (on the state, county, or township level). In this respect, this study lends credence to the contention that, for most Americans, the American Revolution was a "states' rights" revolution, rather than a struggle prompted or defined by American nationalism. Knouff makes an effort to mold this motley collection of private and local causes into a national cause, arguing that combatants' localist agenda did not preclude a nationalist outlook, since "localism was the central strand of American nationalism for many citizens of the new republic" (p. xiv). The utility of such a definition of nationalism remains debatable. |
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Although the focus of this research is the American War of Independence and its role in shaping the lives, cultures, and psyches of Americans, it is also a cultural history of colonial British America. In the early chapters, Knouff uses the concept of "imagined community" to articulate and complicate his definition of localism as a driving force in the political culture of English settlers in Pennsylvania. Using his subjects' own words, Knouff outlines overlaying and competing communities defined by class, race, gender, region, and religion. Pennsylvanians' perceptions of their membership in these imagined communities illuminate their views on their place in society and their role in the world, the empire, the economy, and the space that they inhabited. Taken as a whole, The Soldiers' Revolution indicates that, before, during, and after the Revolution, Pennsylvanians were motivated by their membership in local communities, rather than in a national community, if one existed at that point (Knouff certainly demonstrates that the United States of America was not a particularly effective or evocative imagined community for most Pennsylvania soldiers who fought for American Independence). This is clearer still in Knouff's examination of western communities, where the challenges that triggered inhabitants' political and military activism in defense of their local interests came not only from London but primarily from within their own colony—Pennsylvania's eastern population centers and the colonial legislature. |
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