The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumers Politics Shaped American Independence

The revolutionary fervor that forged America began as a movement of bold ideas in print—long before shots were fired at Lexington or at Concord. Those were certainly the convictions of the people who lived then and wrote about it. In his History of the American Revolution, David Ramsay characterized the colonial struggle as a war of ideas in which the press inspired both the heart and the mind, demanding of the body only the courage to follow. “The pen and the press,” he recalled, “had merit equal to that of the sword” in securing American independence.[1] In her own History of those troubling days, Mercy Otis Warren also characterized the Revolution as a war inspired by words: “Perhaps no single step contributed so much to cement the union of the colonies, and the final acquisition of independence, as the establishment of committees of correspondence.”[2] To Warren, the mass circulation of letters united the fragmented colonies of North America, forming the very life-thread that held the burgeoning Republic together. During that struggle to nationhood, she took up her pen and used the press to voice her discontent. In the satirical play, she discovered her most useful outlet.[3]

Modern scholars concur. The revolutionary fervor that forged America did began as a movement of ideas in print. Such was the view of Bernard Bailyn whose Ideological Origins of the American Revolution has become a seminal work in the study of the crisis in early America. Like Ramsey, Bailyn agreed, the press functioned as an agent of social change. Michael Warner has also expressed similar sentiments in his recent study of eighteenth-century print culture which observed how the colonial press acted as a means by which Americans from different settings achieved a shared sense of awareness and revolution.[4] T.H. Breen also revisited the American Revolution. But, in his judgment, the events that led colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia to unite are more textured than previous scholars have claimed. In his Marketplace of Revolution, Breen offers a fresh view of what moved the founding fathers to break with England.

Rather than bold ideas, a variety of consumer goods assumed center stage in the story Breen tells. Instead of impassioned rhetoric over taxation without representation, the William Smith Mason Professor of History at Northwestern University observed, insignificant items like gloves and hats, fine cloth and linens, porcelain tea sets and other ceramics of wide assortment formed the basis of a complex consumer culture that fostered a sense of nationalism among Anglo-Americans who in turn used that new sense of selfhood to rally in protest and eventually wage war with England. Complicating the ideological interpretation of the American Revolution purposed by Bailyn, Warner, and others, Breen=s analysis of colonial Americans= increasing need to possess pretty things reveals the substantial role consumption played in the unfolding events that inspired eighteenth-century Americans to rebel. Instead of focusing on the politically-charged literature of the day and how it served as a medium to reach others across “boundaries of space and class,” Breen gets at the core of the conflict between Great Britain and her overseas colonies by addressing a long ignored question: what import did the items taxed by the British crown have in the lives of most, if not all, Americans of the period?

At the center of this engaging interpretation of the American Revolution lies a revealing explication of what Breen calls the varied “inventories of [Anglo-American] desire” (34). Starting in the 1740s, he explains, colonials—from poor yeoman farmers to wealthy planters—began spending and increasingly so on credit. In descriptions by travelers and government officials of “the colonists= changing market behavior,” probate records, customs accounts that “monitored the flow of exports through English and Scotist ports,” and newspapers that “carried long, detailed advertisements announcing the availability of the latest British imports,” Breen demonstrates this burgeoning consumer culture in which early Americans became well-clad Englishmen in their own right. Analyzing museum artifacts and archaeological remains, he challenges the present historical account of the revolution. “Historians today,” as Breen explains it, “sometimes seem surprise—occasionally disappointed—when they encounter eighteenth-century colonist buying painted mirrors, pewter spoons, and colorful stone” (35). And yet, therein lies the real story of the founding fathers and of the American Revolution.

Between 1740 and 1765, the colonists= appetite for everything British grew. For many of them, buying English baubles and dishes and tea (particularly after the French and Indian War) served as a way to realize meaningful ties with the mother-country. “However the colonists construed loyalty to the British Empire—and the impulse to define consumption as a form of patriotism seems to have been the product of a peculiar and unprecedented set of historical conditions—they shared with English writers a conviction that commerce implied reciprocity” (94). Consumption, in short, became a way for colonials to express nationalism. As Breen tells it, this new sense of collective identity became most apparent when the crown attempted to administer a series of colonial policies that were designated to pay for debts it had incurred from fighting other European powers. In that setting, the protests over the Stamp Act and the Townsend duties became an unwitting and yet useful training ground through which many colonials began to see their habits in the marketplace as important agents for political mobilization. But no habit galvanized the early American public quite like drinking tea. As Breen points out, while few Americans (the affluent notwithstanding) drank tea at the beginning of the eighteenth-century, that had not been the case by the latter part of the century. By the 1740s, everyone, black and white, rich and poor alike, were consuming the beverage. Along the way, they also had acquired a number of accessories for drinking the spirited liquor (303-305). Consequently, when the crown decided to nullify all of the Townsend Acts with the one exception of the duty placed on tea, the third act of Breen=s three part drama began to unfold.

Perhaps one of the most striking aspects in this thoughtful account is Breen=s discussion concerning women. In the market culture he describes women emerge as important actors of the American Revolution. Elaborating on the current view that the emerging political ideas of the day inspired a revolutionary generation of women, Breen argues that new spending habits transformed and empowered women throughout the colonies. “Eighteenth-century commentators,” as he puts it, “knew who was chiefly to blame from what they perceived as the confused state of society. Women were responsible. The colonial Jeremiahs found that they could hardly discuss the challenge of the consumer economy without immediately denouncing the legions of wives and daughters who had compromised the common good in the interests of satiating their own selfish desires.” Unbeknownst to their frugal, pence-counting husbands, colonial women encouraged the very economic activity that would later push their unsuspecting men folk toward rebellion and eventually revolution (172-173). In place of the politicized spinning amazons of the non-importation protests and the republican mothers who would later demand education, women (like Deborah Franklin who taught her husband, Benjamin the invaluable lesson that fashions communicates both power and status) are depicted as being the architects of the emerging American republic (154).

For those familiar with Breen=s “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,” “>Baubles of Britain=: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” and “Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution,” the Marketplace of Revolution offers a deeper context and analysis of his earlier work. But for those who are not, the Marketplace of Revolution presents a refreshing, new way of understanding what led colonials to break with England. In this insightful narrative, ordinary people became enraged not simply by bold ideas in print but by everyday things that mattered to them most; things like a strong cup of tea that helped most colonials through the day or things like ornamental baubles that served as reminders of why they worked so hard. Rather than characterize women as insignificant figures in the greater scheme of things, Breen=s work recaptures the nuance of an era, demonstrating the essential role that women played in the American Revolution. As Breen reveals, they were indeed founding mothers whose fancies inspired a revolutionary generation of men like Washington and Jefferson and numerous others. In his Marketplace Revolution, T.H. Breen reveals this uncelebrated story and that of other colonials from different walks of life who severed their ties to England and became Americans.

NOTES.
[1].David Ramsey, The History of the American Revolution (1789; reprint ed., New York 1968), 2: 319.

[2].Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations (1800; reprint ed., Indianapolis, 1989), 2: 61.

[3].DonnaMaria Gerych, “The contagion of liberty=: Mercy Otis Warren and the Beginnings of Feminist Sensibility” (Master=s Thesis, Old Dominion University, 2000), 41-64.

[4].Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the America Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1-22; Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century American (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1-33.