Violence

VIOLENCE. It goes without saying that violence played a significant role in the outbreak and over the course of the American Revolution. It was, after all, a war for American independence. The nature and meaning of that violence, however, demands interpretation. Perhaps the foremost task in the interpretation of revolutionary-era violence, whether protest or war, is to understand it from the perspective of contemporaries. With regard to war, for example, contemporaries understood that war naturally carried with it death and destruction. The killing of hundreds or thousands in the context of the battlefield excited no repugnance or outrage—fear, worry, desperation, yes, but not outrage. However, acts considered atrocities or, more simply, behavior outside accepted norms for wartime violence, did inspire outraged reaction, and the political consequences could be significant. Again, whether referring to the riots of the prewar period of imperial tension, or to the acts of competing armies, historians have confronted a similar question: what in fact was the relationship between violence and political reaction? Did it provide a "liberating" quality that fostered democratization, or did it simply inspire fear and thus a conservative reaction? Perhaps violence led to both outcomes in different circumstances, and the trick is to find the source of the difference.

RIOT AND PROTEST

At one level colonists saw violence as simply one more tool in the arsenal of political protest. As tensions in the imperial relationship rose and fell, violence as a way of communicating discontent always existed as an option. This understanding of protest violence as communicative is crucial. It reminds us that late eighteenth-century colonial protestors and rioters were hoping for a response—an alteration in existing conditions or relationships. They were not trying to destroy or fundamentally rewrite the nature of society. As a result of this overall intention, they structured their violent behavior in such a way as to convey both their intent and their sense of their own legitimacy in so acting. Communicative rioters (as opposed to the riots of the truly hopeless, which are usually much more violent) are playing to audiences: themselves, their opponents, and, crucially, the undecided.

In the eighteenth century that desire to convey legitimacy led rioters to lean on precedent. They acted violently in ways calculated to seem familiar; much of their violence, such as mock trials and mock hangings, for example, simulated penal measures. Riots were also in part public festivals, drawing on imagery and practices from more peaceful kinds of festivals. Of particular importance in Boston, for example, was the annual Pope's Day (transmuted from England's Guy Fawkes Day) festival (5 November), which provided much of the structure for political riots there during the 1760s and 1770s. Because rioters also intended to correct problems, they often focused on particular persons with whom they had a grievance. Mock trials and hangings incorporated the shaming qualities of many judicial punishments of the era, thus putting public pressure on the targeted individual. Not all scholars are comfortable with this limited characterization of eighteenth-century American rioting as communicative in nature; yet that characterization is hard to dispute for those protests most closely associated with the colony-mother country relationship.

In contrast, local riots, especially over the access to land, could be much less restrained, especially when they were less public; some were not even "riots" so much as a raid on someone else's home. Violent behavior that remained within expectations about rioting, conforming to penal and festive traditions without seeming too greatly to threaten the social order, were generally tolerated; the "audience" understood them as forms of communication. Authorities, whether local or imperial, usually reacted by at least appearing to fix the problem, while also publicly deploring the violence and officially asserting the sanctity of the state and the social hierarchy. Behavior that seemed outside the expected norms generated much more stringent reactions.

This basic understanding of protest violence can be found operating from the earliest clashes of the revolutionary era right up to the outbreak of war. The Stamp Act riots are exemplary. Colonists around the continent began their protests almost as soon as the law's passage became known. Crucially, however, they began their protests in writing, fulfilling a standard "requirement" prior to a riot: the need to petition peacefully for redress. The first act of violence hit Boston on 14 August 1765, when the South End mob, spurred on by Samuel Adams and the Loyal Nine, hanged an effigy of the new stamp distributor, Andrew Oliver, paraded the effigy through town, and then tore down the stamp distribution building as well as Oliver's house. Oliver promptly resigned his distributorship. The Boston violence peaked eleven days later when the rioters pillaged and destroyed the mansion of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Word of Boston's riots spread quickly around the colonies, and as 1 November (the date for the law to take effect) approached, riots broke out in nearly every colony. In most of them the violence remained confined to the most visible symbols of the act: forcing distributors to resign, preventing the landing of the stamps, or tearing up customs records. The rioters effectively nullified the act, and Parliament got the message. Parliament repealed the act in early 1766, at least momentarily confirming for Americans the effectiveness of their actions.

Although many observers considered the destruction of Hutchinson's house to be excessive, for the most part rioters around the colonies worked hand in glove with local elites and were specific and discriminatory in their violence, while fully adhering to the penal and festive traditions of riot. Some scholars have even argued that the colonists understood such corrective riots aspart of a legal process of popular enforcement. Events in New York City were in marked contrast to the Boston riots. There the Stamp Act riots quickly spun out of control, gripping the city for a full twelve months. The scholar Philip Ranlet has argued that this experience of excessive protest violence energized moderate and conservative forces within the city's leadership and led New York in the succeeding years to be among the most reluctant of the revolutionary colonies.

The Stamp Act episode set another precedent that would contribute strongly to the character of later imperial riots. The intercolonial Stamp Act Congress, with its call for a boycott of English goods, set a precedent for future cooperation among the colonies, and the boycott required enforcement. Rioters thus found a further basis for their legitimacy as popular enforcers of a local congress's decrees. Violence came part and parcel with the developing notion of popular sovereignty—with the people's will defined in extralegal conventions and conferences, and enforced in the streets.

The almost refined quality of the protest riots, and the increasing control over the rioters' behavior exercised by an elite committed to principles of preserving property, culminated in the Boston Tea Party. This was a highly controlled protest exercise that in fact generated little to no actual violence. In Boston the "rioters" even replaced a broken padlock and punished those few who tried to steal tea for personal use. During a similar tea dumping in New York "persons of reputation" stationed themselves on the ship to make sure that the crowd only dumped tea. The British reaction, however, was of a different order. Despite a clearly expressed colonial restraint, Parliament and the ministry saw only the destruction of valuable property and retaliated with a series of punitive acts, the Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts. Britain's outraged response would eventually create the circumstances for the march on Concord, and the violence there would lead to war.

Violence as a component of the protests between 1765 and 1774 advanced the level of friction and disgust on both sides of the Atlantic, and thus helped lead to revolution. This was true in part because violence as a tool of communication is an awkward medium, easily misunderstood and frequently hard to keep "on message" when passions of the moment break free of control. The infamous Boston Massacre represents a good example. The poorer workers of urban Boston had grown to resent moonlighting British regulars and had begun insulting and challenging them in the streets. On that particular March night in 1770 the resentments of the workers spiraled out of control, and their taunts and rocks finally led a small, scared troop of soldiers to open fire. Passion and fear ended up dictating the violence on both sides, and no clear message emerged except for the propagandized version later constructed by the Whig leadership: the redcoats were in Boston to impose tyranny. It was easy to take rhetorical advantage of violence.

Imperial protest violence had other effects. The consistent use of riot as a means of popular expression over a long period of time helped widen the political public. As large numbers of people participated in political action in the streets, they felt included in the wider discussion, and this helped create an expectation that they would be included in all political discussions. Furthermore, American militia laws (in most colonies) that nominally required all free men to own weapons meant that a riot always held the menace, and sometimes the actual presence, of armed force. In many circumstances, in fact, the militia formed the nucleus of a body of protestors. In the minds of the colonists, such a body of men, in their ranks with their officers at their head, did indeed represent the political will of the people. From a British perspective, such a body of men represented a dramatic escalation away from traditionally structured riots and toward something that looked much more like a rebellion.

WAR

Eighteenth-century Americans were no less cognizant than we that war inevitably entailed a certain amount of indiscriminate destruction and death. War, and the violence therein, carried with it a certain legitimacy. That legitimacy did not extend to acts seen as outside the bounds of acceptable wartime behavior. The issue of the legitimacy of wartime violence, especially in terms of the political effect of that violence, was most pertinent in the interactions of armies and civilians. Eighteenth-century European armies, although still highly cosmopolitan and international, were nevertheless uniformed, and the distinction between soldier and civilian was at least theoretically clear. During the Revolution, as civilians suffered from the actions of soldiers who were clearly soldiers, or from the actions of irregulars pretending to be soldiers, or as soldiers suffered from the actions of guerrillas not in uniform, resentment and anger built, leading to an escalation and intensification of violence.

The War of Independence was in fact an ideal arena for an escalation of violence based on perceptions of illegitimacy. First of all, it had begun with an act widely perceived as an atrocity: American propagandists portrayed the British march on Concord, and especially British actions on the march back, as unprovoked attacks on civilians, women, and children. Reports of Lexington and Concord played a major role in spurring the rage militaire—the filling of the ranks of the Continental Army and the militias during 1775 and 1776. As for the British, they initially conceived of the war as a rebellion; both by tradition and by recent codification (in the juristic works of Hugo Grotius and Emmerich de Vattel), rebels in arms merited no restraint. This attitude plagued British planners and officers throughout the war, as they never consistently settled on a policy of fire-and-sword destruction (as appropriate to a rebellion) versus one of conciliation and counter-revolution. Even those counterrevolutionary activities that the British did undertake—supporting Loyalists, encouraging slave revolt, and leaning on Indian allies—were all seen by colonists as acts outside the bounds of legitimacy, and thus all were used as excuses for intensifying violence. Finally, and perhaps most significant in terms of day-to-day activity over an eight-year war, were logistical difficulties for both sides—for the British, the Atlantic Ocean; for the Americans, financial and demographic shortfalls. These difficulties led to a nearly constant reliance on the populace for supply, and the impressment of supplies from locals has ever been fraught with the potential for violence. Such violence might be considered the collateral damage of an early modern army on the move, but by the late eighteenth century it had come to be regarded as illegitimate.

Historians have approached the topic of wartime violence in various ways. Nineteenth-century folklorists tended to exaggerate the level of British and Loyalist atrocity, and their accounts held sway for many years. Later historians preferred to avoid the subject in favor of a cleaner political or military narrative. Some scholars have begun to move past nineteenth-century assumptions to ask just how bad the violence was. More significantly, other historians have returned to the issue of violence as part of an effort to understand the experience of the home front, both for its own sake and for its possible radicalizing influence on postwar popular politics. Some scholars have used the contours of the violence (who used violence, against whom, and how) to examine issues of regional and social relationships. Following one such approach, historians have argued that the violence represented a continuation of prewar social struggles exacerbated by the elite-led revolutionary government. The alternative argument contends that localism and a desire for order were more central and that, in the end, the Whig government was the most effective in meeting those demands for order.

Just how bad was the wartime violence? There is no general consensus on the issue. The answer depends on perspective—whether you were an Indian, a Tory, a house-holder in a theater of operations, a British soldier, or a Continental Army soldier. The war was fought on a continental scale, with operations of varying intensities in widely dispersed locales; all had consequences for residents in the area. Whether driven by an ideological belief in the cause or by an intensely localist instinct for self-preservation, much of the unconventional violence of the war followed the patterns of violence in other "people's wars" in its intensity and in its tendency to escalate through upward spiraling rounds of retaliation. It is also true, however, that despite Whig propaganda to the contrary, much of the conventional confrontation between British forces and Washington's Continentals tended to follow eighteenth-century prescriptions for restraint in war. There were glaring exceptions, especially by the British, perhaps most famously the poor conditions and treatment of American prisoners of war, or such events as the 1780 massacre of surrendering Continentals at Waxhaws, South Carolina, by Banastre "Bloody" Tarleton. Washington, for his part, was largely successful in containing the worst effects of an army on the move—never perfectly, but nevertheless impressively.

The conflicts between Whig and Loyalist adherents generated significantly more violence, and in some regions apparently deteriorated into widespread destruction and vigilantism. Even in this environment of civil war, however, both sides sought to clothe their actions in legitimacy either through pretensions at judicial forms or with reference to the Law of Retaliation. The famous hanging of Loyalist prisoners taken after battle at Kings Mountain, South Carolina, for example, followed not only a consultation of the North Carolina law for the establishment of a court, but also a trial, complete with references to retaliation for Loyalist violence in South Carolina. In the end only nine of some six hundred prisoners were hanged. The remainder were marched away and for the most part forced to enlist in the Patriot militia. In one sense, the easiest way to acknowledge the restraint that persisted even in the worst episodes of Whig—Tory violence is to compare it to the kind of warfare waged against Indian enemies. In the campaigns against the Cherokees or against the Iroquois, the precedents of white-Indian war and the all-consuming desire for land required little to no restraint. Few rules applied, and women, children, the old, and the towns and crops themselves were all regarded as legitimate targets.

Even more elusive is a consensus on the political ramifications of the experience of violence. Indeed, the debate on the political ramifications of the Revolution as a whole still rages on, and the impact of violence alone is a mere subset of the larger question. The historian Richard Maxwell Brown has suggested that the whole experience of resistance and war contributed to an expansion of the expectations of popular sovereignty. John Shy and Alan Kulikoff each have gone farther, arguing that military participation and the widespread violence of the war deepened democratic impulses. Contradicting Shy and Kulikoff, Sung Bok Kim has argued that sheer exhaustion from the high level of violence in Westchester County, New York, in fact brought about a depoliticization. A. Roger Ekirch has argued that the level of violence in North Carolina inspired a demand for a return to older standards of order and thus won support in the countryside for the order-imposing Whigs. It is possible to see a trend toward greater centralized control of the militias, at least in North and South Carolina, as a response to the unconstrained militias who were sowing violence in the countryside. The conservative reaction of the late 1780s is usually blamed on the experience of a weak central government during the war. Its inefficacy in raising money and running a war frustrated many, and led some leaders (including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton) to demand a more powerful government. The experience of violence may have had a similar effect on a more popular, visceral level. Some revolutionary leaders had lost their confidence in the ability of republican virtue to contain excessive violence and now instead looked to establish stronger forms of authority. Other colonists, having engaged in violence during the war, expected a similar freedom to be violent in the early republic.

SEE ALSO Boston Massacre; Boston Tea Party; Guerrilla War in the North; Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts; Kings Mountain, South Carolina; Stamp Act; Tarleton, Banastre; Waxhaws, South Carolina.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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