Humphrey, Thomas J

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Review of The Other New York: The American Revolution Beyond New York City, 1763-1787, edited by J.S. Tiedmann and E.R. Fingerhut

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law

Cleveland State UniversityEngagedScholarship@CSUHistory Faculty Publications History Department6-2006Review of The Other New York: The AmericanRevolution Beyond New York City, 1763-1787,edited by J.S. Tiedmann and E.R. FingerhutThomas J. HumphreyCleveland State University, tom.humphrey@csuohio.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clhist_facpubPart of the History CommonsHow does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!Publisher's Statement© 2006 by University of Chicago Press. Available on publisher's site at http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/ahr.111.3.829.Repository CitationHumphrey, Thomas J., "Review of The Other New York: The American Revolution Beyond New York City, 1763-1787, edited by J.S. Tiedmann andE.R. Fingerhut" (2006). History Faculty Publications. 22.https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clhist_facpub/22This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the History Department at EngagedScholarship@CSU. It has been accepted forinclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of EngagedScholarship@CSU. For more information, please contactlibrary.es@csuohio.edu.Original CitationThomas J. Humphrey, "The Other New York: The American Revolution Beyond New York City, 1763-1787, edited by J.S. Tiedmannand E.R. Fingerhut," American Historical Review 111 no. 3 (2006): 829-830.Canada and the United States 829if they remained at home. For the civilian patriotsamong the classes, revolutionary and postrevolutionarychanges influenced their futures. Most members of thiscohort settled into lives that were comfortably medio-cre: moderate prosperity, local respect, and social po-sition. What they had in common was that the turmoilof the revolution caused most of them to get a late startat family and career formation, which in turn shortenedwhat Wright calls their "age of responsibility" (p. 136).Alumni who aspired to leadership in their fields faceddaunting challenges. Financiers and merchants ex-panded their business universe to the early Americanfrontier and international trade, because traditionalsettlement patterns and markets no longer sufficed inthe aftermath of revolution. Those in the professionswho wanted to mentor newcomers no longer could sim-ply take them on as apprentices. Now they had to foundand join professional schools, professional associations,and private societies to preserve standards and protecttheir own status. Aspiring civic leaders at the state andnational levels found more opportunities than in pro-vincial America, but the decline of deference in thewake of the revolution brought greater competition andgreater suspicion of the elite. As a result, a smaller per-centage of these classes found success in politics, andthose who did came from humbler origins than theirpredecessors. Moreover, all who embraced politicsfound themselves in a new universe of partisan com-petition largely driven by ideology. A similar divide ap-peared in religion, for the long simmering differencesbetween orthodox and liberal interpreters of Christian-ity began to formalize in the decades after 1780. ManyHarvard alumni chose orthodox Congregationalism,but those who chose Unitarianism outnumbered them.Of the thirty-five members of these classes who aspiredto be clergymen, only twenty-seven actually receivedcalls, and one-fourth of these relationships did not workout. It was harder to become an established ministerafter the revolution than before, but most of thosewhose tenures ended prematurely engaged in mundanerather than ideological disputes with their congrega-tions.If Wright's cohort of prerevolutionary Harvard stu-dents differed in life course from their predecessors,there was much continuity in their life cycles. He dis-cusses them as they move through eight stages fromearly childhood to late old age (he makes clear hismethodology in a brief appendix). For each stage welearn the behaviors and expectations appropriate togenteel males and are provided with examples of howthis generation of Harvard students met (or failed tomeet) them. Drawing on a considerable array of ap-propriate secondary studies, Wright describes child-rearing patterns, schooling, the choice of college orwork, the life of the college student, career choices,choices regarding marriage and family, as well as theresponsibilities of full adulthood and the decline intoold age. All of these topics are the subject of specializedstudies, but Wright discusses them briefiy and cogentlyand illuminates them with the experiences of real peo-ple. It is this last technique that generates one of the fewcriticisms I have of this study. Wright too often focuseson the same people to illustrate his generalizations. Nodoubt this stems from the availability of information,but the biographies of about a dozen graduates such asJohn Trumbull (the artist) and Fisher Ames tend todominate the narrative. My other concern takes theform of a question. If the lives of men in the classes of\11\-\11A were affected by the revolution, why werenot those of some or all of the classes from 1775-1783?Would Wright's conclusions be modified or reinforcedby analysis of this larger sample?DAVID W. ROBSONJohn Carroll UniversityJOSEPH S. TIEDEMANN and Eugene R. Fingerhut, editors.The Other New York: The American Revolution beyondNew York City, 1763-1787. (An American Region:Studies in the Hudson Valley.) Albany: State Universityof New York Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 246. $60.00.Revolutionary New York's remarkably heterogeneouspopulation fulfilled every aspect of John Adams'sthree-part assessment of the revolutionary populace.One group wagered everything to win independencefrom Britain; another took similar risks to defeat co-lonial insurrectionists; and a third hoped to survive thewar by not joining either side. Although historians haveexplored how New Yorkers participated in the Amer-ican Revolution, much ofthat work has focused on peo-ple who lived in New York City or Albany. Most NewYorkers, roughly ninety percent of the population atthe time of the revolution, lived not in cities but in thecountryside. To correct what they see as an imbalancein the historiography, evident in the literature on nearlyevery other northern state as well, the editors and au-thors of this collection study how the American Rev-olution changed the lives of people who inhabited thestate's vast rural landscape. To be fair, historians havebeen studying the impact of the revolution on rural NewYorkers for some time. Indeed, all the authors in thecollection have written on rural New York and the rev-olution, and they cite an extensive literature. This book,however, puts the stories of these regions during theRevolutionary War into a single volume.The book is divided into three sections that movefrom the downstate region north to the Hudson Valleyand, finally, to the far reaches of the state. In the first,Edwin G. Burrows, Joseph S. Tiedemann, John G.Staudt, and Phillip Papas describe the revolution inKings, Queens, Suf'folk, and Richmond counties. In thesecond, Jacob Judd, Thomas Wermouth, and StefanBielinski examine events in the Hudson Valley. And inthe final section, Robert W. Venables and Paul R. Hueyoutline the rebellion on the eastern and northern edgesof New York. Even though most of the authors begintheir narratives before 1763, they tend to adhere to atraditional periodization and follow the more conven-tional notion that the national revolution gave greaterAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2006830 Reviews of Booksmeaning and credibility to ongoing local movementseven if they started before 1763 and ran long after 1787.The essays follow a structural pattern. Before dis-cussing their region specifically, each author outlinesthe geography of the county, enduring political alli-ances, and the racial, religious, and social make-up ofthe population. Not surprisingly, that populace was in-credibly diverse, a characteristic the authors rightlyhighlight. For example. New Yorkers owned nearlynineteen thousand slaves when the revolution endedand, although some New Yorkers argued for immediatemanumission, slavery persisted into the nineteenth cen-tury. Similarly, even though some Native Americangroups sided with the revolutionaries, at the end of thewar they all faced a new colonial threat posed by theUnited States and the state of New York. But keepingwith conventional time constraints prevents some of theauthors from exploring fully how independence forsome inhabitants of the region led to further subjuga-tion and even extermination for others.New Yorkers also characterized themselves and oth-ers through their religious beliefs and their relationshipto the land. Anglicans, Quakers, Dutch Reformed, Lu-therans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Meth-odists all vied for souls. In nearly every essay, the au-thors demonstrate how colonial New Yorkers' religiousdifferences exacerbated lingering political or social dis-putes. The revolution heightened the inherent relation-ship between religious beliefs and political alliancesand left New Yorkers roiling in turmoil. Social discon-tent matched religious upheaval. Rural New York con-tained some of the largest landed estates and one of thelargest tenant populations in the mainland colonies.While some tenants farmed the land contentedly, oth-ers disagreed with what they saw as the economic, so-cial, and political constraints of a system designed tofunnel goods, resources, money, and power from ten-ants to landlords. Rebel tenants resorted to violenceafter they had exhausted peaceful approaches to theproblem. As a result, tenant rebellions rocked the Hud-son Valley in the twenty years before independence,and those conflicts continued through the revolutionaryperiod. Unfortunately, the authors studying regionsshaken by insurgency during the revolution chose not todiscuss the events extensively.x\fter setting the colonial background, the contribu-tors describe how rural New Yorkers reacted to Britishattempts to exercise greater control over the colonists.Not surprisingly, in such a varied community, not everyBritish act affected every New Yorker to the same de-gree. Some New Yorkers reacted more violently to theTownsend duties or the Coercive Act than to the StampAct. Freehold and tenant farmers, for instance, foundrestrictions on their trade that resulted from colonialboycotts far more burdensome than the Stamp Act.Thus, boycotts of British goods laid the groundwork forloyalism among some farmers because they limitedtheir economic opportunities. Some rural New Yorkersdid not act one way or the other until after the skir-mishes at Lexington and Concord, while others did notpick a side until after the Declaration of Independence.Qther New Yorkers hoped to avoid picking a side at all.While these choices muddied the water in New York,as they did elsewhere, the authors clearly demonstratehow New Yorkers made their longstanding racial, so-cial, political, and religious disputes part of the revo-lutionary movement and thus part of the new nation. Indoing so, they turned the American Revolution into apersonal, local event.Nothing epitomized the local and personal nature ofthe revolution in New York like military violence. Sol-diers and military leaders rejected neutrality; war com-pelled people to make choices. This was especially so inrural areas, whose inhabitants endured years of dep-redation as both armies stomped through the country-side, living off the land, taking what they needed, andtrying to force locals to join one side or the other. NewYorkers witnessed every aspect of war. Great militarybattles raged across their fields and traitors almost sin-gle-handedly sank the war effort. At the same time, rev-olutionaries and loyalists practiced a brand of guerrillafighting that turned much of the once fruitful New Yorkcountryside into a frightening wasteland. The contrib-utors are, in general, at their best when recounting themilitary conflict in their regions and demonstrating howconflict could deteriorate into brutal civil war that pit-ted neighbors and family members against each other.Invariably, such a high level of military exposure anddepredation profoundly shaped people's political alli-ances.Taken together, the authors argue that the War forIndependence fundamentally changed the lives of ruralNew Yorkers as new men from the lower ranks of so-ciety jumped into the political fracas and claimed long-lasting power. They held power because revolutionariesneeded more men to serve in rebel political institutions.Those men increasingly came from lower down the so-cial ladder, and they held on to their positions because,once in power, they and other like-minded men democ-ratized landholding, the basis for political power in NewYork. Moreover, revolutionaries expanded religioustoleration and, so the editors claim, slavery "was put onthe road toward legal extinction" (p. 229). While thevolume has its limitations, it is a clearly written collec-tion of essays that demonstrates how local populationsembraced a broad movement, made it their own, andbecame a state in an emerging nation.THOMAS J. HUMPHREYCleveland State UniversityRHYS ISAAC. Landon Carier's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolu-tion and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation. New York:Qxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xxii, 423. $35.00.The seeds of this book were planted in Rhys Isaac's cel-ebrated 1982 work. The Transformation of Virginia,1740-1790. After making brief cameos throughout thattext, Landon Carter, a Virginia planter and slave mas-ter, took center stage in the appendix. Isaac's insightfulinterrogation of a passage of Carter's diary was a lastAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2006

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Review of The Other New York: The American Revolution Beyond New York City, 1763-1787, edited by J.S. Tiedmann and E.R. Fingerhut

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