The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution

Description

When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like "domestic insurrectionists" and "merciless savages," the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic. In a fresh reading of the founding moment, Parkinson demonstrates the dual projection of the "common cause." Patriots through both an ideological appeal to popular rights and a wartime movement against a host of British-recruited slaves and Indians forged a racialized, exclusionary model of American citizenship. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. Dedication Acknowledgments Contents List of Illustrations Introduction 1. “A Work of Difficulty”: Communication Networks, Newspapers, and the Common Cause Interlude: The “Shot Heard ’round the World” Revisited 2. “Britain Has Found Means to Unite Us”: 1775 3. Merciless Savages, Domestic Insurrectionists, and Foreign Mercenaries: Independence 4. “By the American Revolution You Are Now Free”: Sticking Together in Trying Times 5. “It Is the Cause of Heaven against Hell”: To the Carlisle Commission, 1777–1778 Interlude: Franklin and Lafayette’s “Little Book” 6. “A Striking Picture of Barbarity”: Wyoming to the Disaster at Savannah, 1778–1779 7. “This Class of Britain’s Heroes”: From the Fall of Charleston to Yorktown 8. “The Substance Is Truth”: After Yorktown, 1782–1783 9. “New Provocations”: The Political and Cultural Consequences of Revolutionary War Stories Conclusion Appendix A: A Note on Newspapers during the Revolutionary War Appendix B: Pennsylvania Journal Subscription Books Appendix C: Contents of Pennsylvania Journal, 1775 Index