Riot and Revelry in Early America
Edited by William Pencak, Matthew Dennis
and Simon P. Newman
Introduction: A Historical Perspective by William Pencak
It is impossible to think about American history without riot and revelry coming to mind. From the Boston Massacre to the Los Angeles riots that protested the beating of Rodney King, and from the Fourth of July celebrations in 1776 that toppled statues of King George III to the cheering of millions who hailed returning Gulf War veterans in 1991, ‘‘the people outof- doors’’ not only witnessed history, but made it. This volume, which arose from a conference on Festive Culture in Early America sponsored in Philadelphia by the American Philosophical Society and the McNeil (then Philadelphia) Center for Early American Studies in April 1996, seeks to bring to life how, what, and why Americans protested and celebrated ‘‘roughly’’ (in both senses of the word) from 1750 to 1860—that is, from Revolutionary times to the Civil War.
Between November 17 and 20, 1747, during a war with France, hundreds if not thousands of people in Boston seized some officers of a visiting British fleet and held them hostage. They were protesting what they considered illegal impressment of sailors from ships in the harbor for service in the Royal Navy, and they hoped to trade the officers for the release of the unfortunates who had been taken. While British Commodore Charles Knowles eventually freed some of the men, after first threatening to blow up the town, this crisis—the greatest riot in Boston before the Stamp Act— inaugurated a debate over the nature of popular protest that still continues today. ‘‘Our Province in a peculiar manner requires some more severe acts against Riots, Mobs, and Tumults,’’ wrote physician William Douglass.
The Boston Town Meeting attempted to avoid responsibility for actions of a crowd that included many townspeople. Boston’s inhabitants expressed their ‘‘utmost Abhorrence of such Illegal Criminal Proceedings,’’ which they blamed exclusively on ‘‘Foreign Seamen Servants Negroes and other Persons of Mean and Vile Condition.’’1
One voice dissented from the cover-up. Within two months of the riot, the first antiwar newspaper in America, the Independent Advertiser, was published by a group of political outsiders that included the twenty-fiveyear- old Samuel Adams. This group opposed Massachusetts’ exertions against the French as both economically disastrous and downright murderous, and expressed outrage that ‘‘the sober sort, who dared to express a due sense of their injuries, were invidiously represented as a rude, lowlived mob.’’ Elsewhere, the newspaper responded to Douglass’s charges by affirming that the mob was no mob, but rather ‘‘an Assembly of People drawn together upon no other Design than to defend themselves.’’2 The proper role of ‘‘the people out-of-doors’’ in American public life has never been resolved. Forty years later, Samuel Adams led the hardliners who wanted not only to put down but also to hang the leaders of what became known as ‘‘Shays’s Rebellion’’: ‘‘In monarchies the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.’’ I call attention to the name pinned on this event because the farmers of western Massachusetts who closed courthouses and proposed changes in the Massachusetts constitution emphatically did not consider themselves rebels. They believed they were patriots, following the example of Adams himself in protesting taxes of which they and their representatives— who found attending the eastern-dominated legislature in Boston difficult—disapproved.3
The metamorphosis of Samuel Adams from crowd leader to champion of law and order reflects scholarly debate that still exists concerning the nature of early American crowds. Adams’s opinion of colonial disturbances and crowd mobilization during the preliminaries of the Revolution has been seconded by historian Pauline Maier. She maintains that during the colonial era the ‘‘mob’’—which historians now dignify as ‘‘the crowd,’’ to avoid the very slur Adams complained about in 1747—enjoyed a quasilegal and respectable existence. Maier writes that colonial mobs carefully selected targets and limited violence: ‘‘They served the community where no law existed, or intervened beyond what magistrates thought they could do to cope with a local problem.’’ In keeping with Americans’ image of their revolution as respectable and conservative, the crowds that resisted the British killed no one, and specifically targeted the shops and residences of offending individuals in the ten years separating the Stamp Act riots and the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The casualties, as in the ‘‘Boston Massacre,’’ occurred largely among those who protested. Only during the Revolution itself, as loyalists battled patriots, did crowds become violent and acquire a negative reputation.4
Beginning in the 1960s, however, some historians argued otherwise. In- fluenced by protests of that decade, New Left historians, such as Jesse Lemisch, Staughton Lynd, Dirk Hoerder, and Alfred F. Young, insisted that even if people of different classes appeared in the same crowds, the agendas of sailors (always an important element in colonial ports), African Americans (a sizable contingent among seaman as well as a presence in the cities), and the less well-to-do were different from the agendas of their leaders in the upper classes. They wanted to reform society in a more democratic direction, not merely remove obnoxious grievances and pro-British officials.
They were indeed ‘‘Foreign Seaman Servants Negroes Boys and Others of Mean and Vile Condition’’ who frequently took the lead in revolutionary politics, forcing their putative betters to adopt increasingly radical positions.5
Whatever their opinion on the class dimension and socially radical intentions of colonial and revolutionary crowds, historians have generally failed to examine these factors from the perspective of traditional crowd protests that employed ‘‘rough music’’ against those who violated community norms. Before the chapters published in this volume by Steven Stewart, Thomas Humphrey, Brendan McConville, and Susan Klepp, no scholarly collection or monograph has dealt with early American ‘‘rough music’’ in detail. Stewart’s pioneering but unfinished dissertation, written in the late 1970s, has been used by Alfred Young and Paul Gilje in their discussions of colonial rioting, but until now there has not been much more. European historians—for instance, Natalie Zemon Davis, E. P. Thompson, and David Underdown—have done better.6
‘‘Rough music,’’ also known as ‘‘skimmington’’ in England and ‘‘charivari’’ in France, occurred when a community took the law into its own hands against a deviant, who was beaten, roughed up, or run out of town. A public procession usually climaxed the event. The playing of real, rough music, such as banging on drums and pots and pans, gave the practice its name. It is impossible to say when rough music became frequent in the colonies. Before the 1730s there were few newspapers, and incidents in rural areas, if there were any, have not survived in any accessible historical records. All we can say is that rough music in the form of skimmington first began to be noted regularly beginning in the 1730s, when colonial society was exhibiting the strains of conflict between increasingly cosmopolitan, anglicized elites and a localist populace defending traditional sexual morals and community norms.7 Early manifestations of rough music hint at the disruptions that were just around the corner: the New Hampshire riots over masts reserved for the Royal Navy in 1739; the Stono slave revolt in South Carolina the same year; the Great Awakening; the Massachusetts land bank crisis of 1739–41; the raucous Philadelphia election of 1742; and the perhaps imaginary lower-class/slave New York ‘‘Conspiracy of 1741.’’ All these events pitted cosmopolitan religious, political, or mercantile elites against locally oriented communities. Similarly, Bostonians improvised variations on rough music to bring down the governing elite of Massachusetts in the 1760s. Formal revolutionary bodies and informal crowds did likewise to secure the Revolution from loyalists, who retaliated in kind.
While skimmington occurred in various colonies—and many more instances doubtless went unreported—it is especially noteworthy that most of the cases we know of occurred in New York. One reason for that may be simply that New York Attorney General John Tabor Kempe took excellent notes, which have survived. But New York had always been known for a contentious population in which members of different groups lived in close proximity and thus were especially prone to offend one another.8
New England, on the other hand, maintained a fairly homogeneous society outside of Rhode Island—where two skimmingtons occurred, in addition to one just outside the factious community of Boston and another in Attleborough, a town Rhode Island disputed with Massachusetts. In the South, conflict pitted a well-defined, plantation-studded tidewater against an equally distinct yeoman backcountry. Pennsylvania Quakers preached and practiced a pacifism that terminated in sectional strife pitting the three oldest, Quaker-dominated counties against the Scots-Irish/German frontiersmen. But in New York, all sorts of people lived side by side: great proprietors and tenants, yeomen of different ethnicities, a large number of African Americans, and even many Indians from different societies, among them the Iroquois, the Mohawks, and the Mahicans. Unencumbered with the moral mission of either Pennsylvania or New England, New York’s com- mercial culture and turbulent development were reflected in its numerous skimmingtons, some of a political nature that Thomas Humphrey explicitly relates to landed disputes over land ownership.
New Jersey, also disputatious, merits its own detailed discussion of rough music in this volume. Not coincidentally, all the rough music Brendan McConville reports occurred in northern New Jersey, formerly East Jersey, the half of the province most similar to New York. As in New York, heavily tenanted proprietary estates prevailed in northern New Jersey, whereas western or southern New Jersey gravitated commercially toward Philadelphia and resembled Pennsylvania with its Quaker presence and freehold farms.9
Pennsylvania, which had an extremely high crime rate in the colonial era, also witnessed at least four recorded instances of rough music, two of which Steven Stewart notes and two of which are considered by Susan Klepp in this volume. During the Revolution, crowd violence accelerated. In this collection, Klepp reports a case in which lower-class and middleclass revolutionaries mocked the European hairstyles and fashions flaunted by both the elite Whig women and loyalist women in Philadelphia. Elsewhere, Thomas Slaughter has discussed two incidents when Philadelphia women attacked and killed other women suspected of witchcraft. These murders occurred in 1776 and 1787, the very years in which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were adopted. In 1779, six people were also killed in a Philadelphia riot known as ‘‘the Fort Wilson incident,’’ and another seventeen to nineteen people were ‘‘dangerously wounded’’ when a protest against wealthy men who could avoid military service got out of hand. The Revolution disrupted Pennsylvania’s formerly hegemonic Quaker rule and instituted one of the most contentious state political systems in the new nation. If the diverse population in the Middle Colonies made possible the first approximations of the nation’s future political parties, in which competing factions campaigned for support among different groups in the hope of harmonizing them, it also accounts for the numerous social divisions, of which rough music was evidence, that exploded outside the bounds of politics.10
As with other crowd actions in colonial America, skimmingtons re- flected people’s willingness to take the law into their own hands in order to eliminate threats to well-being or moral norms. The real culprits, the crowds believed, were the individuals who flouted legitimate communal values. Women were able to reverse the gender hierarchy to punish im- moral men, and freeholders and tenants challenged obnoxious landowners, judges, and merchants. Remoteness from authorities who could enforce the law against deviants (and also against crowds) was one factor that led to incidents of rough music, but not the only one. Most rough music took place in rural areas, such as the Hudson Valley and North Central New Jersey, but other instances occurred in New York City, just outside Boston, and in Philadelphia. Because governmental authority lacked the force and tradition that sustained it in Europe, colonial officials in North America were unable to command the respect and fear of authority that characterized European hierarchies in the eighteenth century.
Class conflict was another precipitator of rough music, which an outraged community inflicted either on members of a cosmopolitan elite (merchants, in at least two cases) or on marginal members of the community, such as a homeless victim in New York. The crowd practiced a ‘‘moral economy’’ (like that which E. P. Thompson found in England), in which outraged community members stepped in to punish those who have transgressed communal norms but were either protected by or fall beyond the reach of law enforcement.11 An anglicized elite that was unconcerned with or unable to enforce traditional, especially sexual, morality was drawing apart from a populace that insisted that family and local norms be respected.
In rough music, then, we see the germ of crowd violence—such as tarring and feathering of loyalists, including members of the same elite—a violence that was to occur much more frequently and turn deadly during the American Revolution. Examining crowd violence in Boston from 1765 to 1775, I look, in my chapter, at rough music in conjunction with other activities of the sort John Huizinga has termed ‘‘play,’’ to show how the protesters rehearsed symbolically, as theater, the new forms of government and ideas they would articulate explicitly only once the Revolution had begun.12
Rough music did not disappear when the Revolution ended. Bryan Palmer has found hundreds of instances in the rural United States and Canada well into the twentieth century—including a brutal form known as whitecapping, which involved flogging moral offenders.13 Yet as the Revolution approached, violence in America became more politicized, more deadly, and more reflective of the social divisions that rough music only mildly foreshadowed. As Thomas Slaughter cogently notes, much of this violence occurred at the margins of white settlement.14 Bloody frays between the ‘‘Regulators’’ and the government of North Carolina; the Paxton Boys’ massacre of peaceful Conestoga Indians near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1764; the boundary disputes between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and between Pennsylvania and Connecticut settlers claiming the Wyoming Valley; and the land riots in New York, New Jersey, and the future state of Vermont—all were far more violent than the activities initiated by the urban crowds on which Pauline Maier primarily focuses. If the American Revolution began with restrained violence in the cities designed to resist British taxation, the class, intercolonial, and racial violence that had become endemic throughout the colonies in the years after 1750 intensified once the war was under way. As historian John Murrin points out, the American Revolution was more of a civil war than the Civil War itself,15 for—except in the border states, the mountains of eastern Tennessee and West Virginia, and New York City during the draft riots of 1863—two coherent sections fought each other while easily suppressing internal resistance. In the Revolution, on the other hand, loyalist and revolutionary partisans battled each other throughout the nation.
Despite the American success against Great Britain, the new nation found it difficult to persuade its diverse citizenry to coexist peaceably within a legal framework. ‘‘Rebels’’ in Pennsylvania violently protested federal taxes with what are known as the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and in Fries’s Rebellion of 1799. (The word ‘‘rebels’’ appears in quotation marks because those involved considered themselves to be merely protesting unjust taxes.) Philadelphians mobbed African Americans who tried to retain the right to vote, Bostonians set fire to a convent where Catholic immigrants were trying to educate their children, and abolitionists in both North and South took their lives in their hands if they spoke out against slavery. African Americans conspired against their masters in Gabriel’s Rebellion, Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion, and Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Dueling became an acceptable means for upper-class men to settle disputes, as did wrestling matches that could end in eye-gouging or castration for the lower orders. Groups of desperadoes thought nothing of invading Florida, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, or lands in Georgia guaranteed by treaty to the Cherokee Indians. Fatalities in riots became common, reaching more than one hundred in the New York City draft riots of the Civil War.16
Historian Paul Gilje has offered the best explanation for the transition from the limited, communally acceptable violence of the colonial period to the more murderous form that became more frequent during the new republic. The colonial ideal of localities as communities sharing a coherent civic identity in which everyone had a place in a hierarchical order gave way to a more democratic and egalitarian society. But that new society incorporated racial, ethnic, religious, regional, and other such loyalties, in addition to a national identity, where, for example, white Northern Protestants considered African Americans, the Irish, Roman Catholics, and eventually Southern secessionists to be un-American elements unworthy of the benefits of citizenship. Even traditional festivals, such as New Year’s Eve celebrations in New York, featured tensions that arose from these separate allegiances and became deadly brawls. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century, government’s traditional positive task of promoting the common good through moral and economic regulation came to be transformed into the negative one of remaining theoretically neutral and serving as arbiter between competing groups of people.17
In consequence, a host of institutions and reform movements arose in the early nineteenth century to quell democracy run amuck. As society became even more fragmented between such groups as employers and laborers, immigrants and the native-born, or southerners and northerners, the ‘‘Second-Party System’’ of the Whigs and Democrats developed to unite people of all sorts under their banners. Penitentiaries (or reformatories) replaced the simple jail and were intended to cure as well as punish the criminal. The temperance movement blamed liquor for the prevailing disorder, while the women’s movement that overlapped it stressed the need for the civilizing influence of women in political life. Sunday schools were created to socialize children. Required attendance at common schools developed to educate the young systematically for conservative citizenship, replacing the part-time schools children had attended, when they could be spared from family farm chores.18
The Second-Party System, which pitted Andrew Jackson and the Democrats against Henry Clay and the Whigs, provided political stability in the midst of social violence from the early 1830s until sectionalism overcame nationalism in the 1850s. The parties united sections and classes through ‘‘machines’’ run by ‘‘bosses,’’ which (usually peacefully) fought for power at the polls. Unlike the ‘‘First-Party System’’ of Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, who dueled for control of the government from 1790 until the 1810s, the competitors in the Second-Party System had come to understand the concept of a legitimate opposition. Whereas Hamilton and Jefferson understood only ‘‘factionalism,’’ in which all partisanship represented close to treasonable opposition—not to another party but to the republic itself—the partisans of Jackson and Clay realized that both sides had much to gain from healthy competition. Social tensions could be lessened as men of different classes and regions joined in a struggle for office against a similarly composed coalition.19
What both party systems had in common, however, was the extensive use of parades and public celebrations as a means of creating—and not just reflecting—national unity, obtaining support, and overcoming divisions. Beginning in the 1780s, elite groups sought to mobilize people through public spectacles. Parades honored the ratification of the Constitution, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s Birthday, the victories of the French in their Revolution or of the Americans in the War of 1812, and the return of Lafayette in 1824. These occasions permitted leaders to orchestrate displays of patriotism in order to instill a sense of loyalty in a populace that rarely experienced the federal government directly except through the post office. Parades and the ‘‘perpetual feˆtes’’ that French Minister Edmond Geˆnet observed became the principal means of popular participation in public life. Songs, banners, floats, orations, and theatrical pageants dotted the calendar and linked local public spaces throughout the land to political and national events, while simultaneously providing entertainment and patriotic education.20
The chapters by Roger Abrahams and Matthew Dennis in this volume show how Americans in the new nation resurrected mythical heroes to serve as symbols of unity. A Philadelphia fishing club composed of well-todo men named itself the ‘‘Sons of St. Tammany’’ in honor of the Indian chief who had supposedly signed the first ‘‘treaty’’ with William Penn (itself almost certainly a mythical event, as no copy has been found21), peacefully ceding the land for the earliest settlement of Pennsylvania. During the revolutionary era, ‘‘White Indians’’ had resisted greedy landlords in the backcountry and the landing of British tea in Boston, but urban whites in the early republic disguised themselves as Indians to promote fraternity, have a good time, and celebrate holidays. The symbolic nationization of the Indian by commemorating the alleged donation of land to William Penn legitimated the disappearance of real Indians and made the authority of the new state seem unquestionable and ancient. And the neutralization of the Indian, his transformation from savage to ‘‘saint,’’ mirrored what the national elite hoped civic celebrations would accomplish for a potentially obstreperous populace.22
In the long run, Matthew Dennis explains, Christopher Columbus, the first European to conquer Indian territory, was a far more enduring symbol than the Pennsylvania chief who had made a treaty with the world’s only pacifist society. Because Americans knew little about the real Columbus, he served as a convenient empty vessel into which different parties and regions could pour their own notions of what the new nation should be doing. The new world that Columbus discovered became the prototype for the new republican world Americans hoped the United States would inaugurate, paradoxically through a conquest similar to Columbus’s own achievement. More places in the United States are named after Columbus than anyone, except George Washington, and the new nation almost took the name Columbia.23
Early American nationalism, however, was not opposed to regionalism, partisan politics, sectionalism, and relationships of class, race, and gender, but it was tied to them. For instance, by 1800 Fourth of July parades became Democratic-Republican holidays, and Washington’s Birthday celebrations became Federalist preserves.24 Susan Davis has written of how working-class Philadelphians, unhappy about required militia service and unable to join the upper-class volunteer companies that purchased fancy uniforms and staged elaborate functions, protested by electing a half-witted hunchback colonel of their regiment and following him around town. Their mockery led to the end of compulsory militia service.25 David Waldstreicher has shown that Jeffersonian Republicans escorted French Minister Edmond Geˆnet on a nationwide tour, in effect countering the triumphal journeys President Washington had undertaken to cement support for the new nation and his administration.26 These two books in general explain that although members of the working class, women, and African Americans who were dissatisfied with their lot in society could not hope to obtain full citizenship, they could temporarily take over public space and transform parades from civic celebrations to statements of criticism. Crowds transformed what were supposed to be rituals of nationalism into protest demonstrations by those who felt excluded from a republic dominated by white middle-class and upper-class males.
In the present volume, Susan Branson and Simon Newman demonstrate that both Federalists and Jeffersonians appealed to women to observe, applaud, and ultimately participate in their various festivities. The Revolution had spurred debate about the position of women in the new republic, and many people of both sexes and parties had accepted a new role for women as the republic’s guardians of moral virtue and the educators of its children. However, the more assertive examples of women during the French Revolution, and the writings of Britain’s Mary Wollstonecraft, encouraged some women to demand political influence and even full citizenship. As a consequence, parties soon relegated women to the sidelines—without, however, stifling the issues that eventually led to the women’s rights movement.27 William Piersen shows in his chapter that African Americans too were adept at using European holidays for their own purposes. While borrowing somewhat from such Euro-American holidays as Christmas, Easter, and Election Day, the celebrations of Jonkonnu, Pinkster, and Negro Election Day incorporated African rituals and symbols to a far greater extent. Just as rioting came into disrepute among elite whites, who tried to channel lower-class energies into civic festivals, the new nation’s small African American elite discouraged raucous demonstrations as harmful to the respectability they sought for their people.28 They did not, however, as Shane White has shown, reject African nationalism, but rather redirected it into print and politics.29
At least one local elite also found American nationalism itself wanting. Long before the rest of the South, South Carolinians were contemplating secession. Len Travers’s chapter shows that these disunionist sentiments took symbolic form beginning in the late 1820s. The state replaced Independence Day with Palmetto Day, June 28, as its principal holiday, to celebrate the fact that the week before the Declaration of Independence was signed the spongy palmetto logs that fortified Charleston absorbed the cannonballs of a British fleet and repulsed the invaders. The rise of Palmetto Day accompanied the Nullification Crisis of 1828, as well as fears about William Lloyd Garrison’s radical abolitionist movement, which emerged in 1831 almost simultaneously with Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. Elsewhere in the United States, however, nationalism and sectionalism usually reinforced rather than contradicted each other. No one, for instance, could question Robert E. Lee’s nationalist credentials until the moment when, with great difficulty, he chose Virginia as his country over the United States. To this day, southerners see no contradiction in flying Confederate-inspired state flags alongside the Stars and Stripes.30
The chapters in this collection provide the general reader with colorful tales from America’s past, but they also illuminate several issues that are of concern to historians and others who think about the nature of our national heritage. First and perhaps foremost, they seriously call into question a major theory of early American politics. The propensity of both rural and urban folk to riot explodes the notion that the ‘‘lower sort’’ deferred to their ‘‘betters’’ and largely allowed them to manage colonial political and economic life, a point Michael Zuckerman has powerfully argued. To be sure, in some places this was true, as in Tidewater Virginia, where planters like George Washington dominated the House of Burgesses with little opposition. But elsewhere, the deference that did exist was largely ‘‘performative,’’ as Robert Gross has pointed out. Outwardly, laborers and farmers respected the merchants and landowners who employed them, bought their products, and loaned them money. But they were equally capable of voting them out of office, closing the courthouses where suits for debt were heard, or destroying their houses—if they put their private interests above those of the community.31
The festivities of the early republic orchestrated by the elites in their turn raise doubts about the historical successor to deference—namely, consensus history. Not only did elites have to go to great lengths to create a national spirit, essentially bribing and propagandizing the masses with rum and roast oxen at elections, if not with bread and circuses, but the masses frequently refused to be bought. Women, African Americans, South Carolinians, and working people modified, disrupted, or created counterfestivities that were highly political acts reflecting alternative visions of the social order.
Taken collectively, the chapters in this book permit a measure of reconciliation between scholars who describe crowds as unified community responses that deal with moral or political delinquents, and those who think they reflect class tensions between groups competing for legitimacy. At the margins of settlement in America, as in European folk culture, rough music began as a means of dealing with those who violated traditional expectations of family behavior—adulterers and wife beaters, for example. Then during the revolutionary era, such practices became politicized and were deployed against landlords and loyalists. In the cities, relatively little rough music occurred until the revolutionary crisis, when tarring and feathering loyalists, hanging them in effigy, or pelting their houses with excrement transformed the urban populace into a political force to be reckoned with on a regular basis.
The chapters also powerfully confirm the critics of Jürgen Habermas who have objected to his romanticization of the ‘‘bourgeois public sphere’’ that arose in the eighteenth century. Writing about eighteenth-century Eu- rope, Habermas correctly pointed out that through coffee houses, voluntary associations, taverns, newspapers, and public prints accessible to a literate middle-class public, ordinary individuals began to take an interest in and participate in public life. In the context of the Enlightenment, the rationality of a political argument offered in the public sphere came to matter more than the authority of the source (for instance, a king or a priest) from whence it came. However, although extremely useful for explaining eighteenth-century political upheaval, Habermas’s theories have their limitations. While opening doors to middle-class and upper-class white males, the new public sphere closed them to women, the poor, and the nonwhite. The old regime had recognized such people as dependents who had a certain place in a patriarchal society. Now, as ‘‘equals,’’ their inferior social position could be attributed to their group’s collective lack of rational faculties as a class, a race, or a gender. Furthermore, politicization had its downside—the mass mobilization of the French Reign of Terror or Napoleon’s armies, to cite two examples.32
As with Habermas and his critics, the chapters in this book deal with different questions than those that historians were addressing in the 1960s and 1970s, which perhaps explains why Stewart’s work was ahead of his time. Instead of mustering evidence from crowd activity to help in understanding such political phenomena as the causes of the American Revolution or the meaning of Jacksonian Democracy, these scholars are primarily concerned with discovering how people who do not write ‘‘traditional texts’’ are actually the ‘‘authors’’ of riot and revelry. To be sure, many of these incidents shed light on traditional political history, but the main concern of the present chapters is to discover what, in fact, moved early Americans to participate in rough music or societal rituals. As such, this volume contributes to the study of popular culture and to the semiotic reading of ‘‘texts’’ and ‘‘discourses’’ that express mentalities that appear on the streets or in the woods and that articulate what remains unspoken in the pages of political tracts or religious sermons.
Most of these mentalities, for all their democratic rhetoric, have been profoundly exclusionary. ‘‘The people’’ usually means ‘‘people like us.’’ Hence, the most zealous advocates of democracy in America argued that a woman’s place was in the home and that her nature was emotional, not reasonable. They opposed the emancipation and education of slaves, blamed the poor for their poverty, and pursued national expansion at the expense of ‘‘inferior peoples,’’ who, they believed, had to be civilized or removed ‘‘for their own good.’’ That women and African Americans resisted these imposed definitions is strongly evident in Piersen’s and Branson’s chapters. The chapters on ‘‘rough music,’’ too, show the willingness of the urban and rural poor to demonstrate against their ‘‘betters’’ when their interests failed to coincide.
Yet we should also remember that elites also claimed the streets. They orchestrate the parades and set the issues that arise. Furthermore, as with the heads of antiabolitionist crowds in the 1830s, the defenders of ‘‘100 percent Americanism’’ during the Red Scare of 1919–20, and the attempted repression of dissent during the Vietnam War, ‘‘gentlemen of property and standing’’ took the lead in combating what they viewed as illegitimate efforts by a national movement to challenge their local rule.33 They did so again in repressing unionization in the working classes throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in opposing the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Some limited their opposition to words, others condoned or instigated the violence such words provoked. By insisting that the only legitimate ‘‘American’’ community was defined by moral conformity and geographical contiguity, they of course denied the reality on which their very existence depended—that of a complex national and world economy. This was as true when northerners were indirectly bene- fiting from the profits of slavery in the nineteenth century as it is today, when opponents of equal rights for recent immigrants have no trouble benefiting from the labor of those they condemn.
Informal, popular justice exercised by a community can be a powerful agent for collective liberation, but it must be exercised against people who are perceived as threats from the outside or as agents of moral rot boring away from within. Can we applaud the destruction of Thomas Hutchinson’s house in September 1765 by an enraged mob of Bostonians who would undoubtedly have killed him if he had not acceded to his daughter’s pleas to escape? Yet without such acts of intimidation, there would have been no American Revolution. The Tories were supposedly conspiring to destroy their country’s liberties, even though they had collectively demonstrated their loyalty through peaceable behavior and considerable public service. And many Tories who did not leave the country in time were persecuted or killed.
Must we therefore conclude that no group achieves liberty except at the expense of ‘‘an-other’’? For example, Edmund S. Morgan brilliantly demonstrated in American Slavery, American Freedom that if Africans had not become a viable supply of cheap labor, the poor whites of Virginia would not have been freed from tenancy to work for themselves.34 Would the American middle class enjoy its privileged life or liberty without clothes from Sri Lanka, electronics made in China, and the labor of an abundance of poorly paid workers within its borders? Vigilante action at home, like intervention abroad, betters the lot of some at the expense of others. Whether justifications appear reasonable or contemptible depends on what ‘‘facts’’ one chooses to leave out of the rationalization offered.
When exercised by those claiming to speak for ‘‘the’’ community, crowd action becomes the iron fist in the velvet glove of the ‘‘tyranny of the majority’’ that was diagnosed in the new republic so astutely by James Madison in Federalist 10 and by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. E. P. Thompson has reminded us that ‘‘the rituals of rough music and charivari, transposed across the Atlantic, contributed not only to the good-humored ‘shivaree’ but may also have given something to lynch law and the Ku Klux Klan.’’ Such acts, in fact, represent some sort of local majority—and if they do, does that make them right? America has a long tradition of vigilante ‘‘justice’’ that is still with us today as inner-city gangs, bombers of abortion clinics, gay-bashers, and rural militiamen claim to represent rather than transgress American values. And they are right, in a way. We cannot choose to remember only the savory parts of our history, for there are those whose tastes are different. If we call for the revival of our revolutionary tradition or a return to the intentions of the founding fathers (the Samuel Adams of 1747 or of 1787?), we need to remember that crowd punishment of deviants outside the bounds of law is as American as ‘‘mom,’’ for women played their music as roughly as men. And, as Klepp’s chapter shows, attempts to create a patriotic culture that excluded some and exalted others through political spectacles began with independence itself.
This volume is unusual in that it offers two Introductions, not just one. My Introduction is written from the perspective of history. The Introduction by Roger Abrahams, which follows as Chapter 2, reflects the concern folklorists have with the persistence of tradition and emphasizes the continuity of rough music and revelry rather than the revolutionary potential that historians are anxious to find. Relying on a different scholarly literature, Abrahams offers an alternative interpretation that shows how historians and folklorists can learn from one another.
1. Independent Advertiser, February 8, 1748 (available in microfilmed newspapers in Clifford Shipton, ed., Early American Imprints [Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1959]); Boston Town Meeting Records, in Boston Record Commissioners’ Reports, 31 vols. (Boston, 1880–1902), 14:127.
2. Independent Advertiser, December 5, 1749, and February 8, 1748.
3. William V. Welles, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, 3 vols. (1865; reprint, Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 3:246. See also William Pencak, ‘‘Samuel Adams and Shays’s Rebellion,’’ New England Quarterly 62 (March 1989), 63–74.
4. Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 3.
5. For a comprehensive discussion of the ‘‘New Left’’ historians with bibliographical references, see Alfred F. Young, ‘‘American Historians Confront ‘The Transforming Hand of Revolution,’ ’’ in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 346–493.
6. Alfred F. Young, ‘‘English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,’’ in Margaret D. Jacob and James R. Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 185–212, relies on Stewart. Young, in turn, is used by Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 20–21, 40, 43, 65, 67, 99, 108, 182, 254. See also Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 16, 29, 47, 81; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivari in Sixteenth- Century France,’’ Past and Present 50 (February 1971), 41–75; David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press 1985), esp. 99–103; E. P. Thompson, ‘‘ ‘Rough Music’ or English Charivari,’’ Annales 27 (March–April 1972), 285–312. A more extensive version of this article appears as chapter 8 of Thompson’s Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
7. For Anglicization, see especially John M. Murrin, ‘‘Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts’’ (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1966); and Rowland Berthoff and John M. Murrin, ‘‘Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder: The American Revolution Considered as a Social Accident,’’ in Stephen Kurtz and James Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973). For increasing levels of social disorder and class conflict in mid-eighteenth-century America, see the collections edited by Alfred F. Young, The American Revolution (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976), and Beyond the American Revolution (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987).
8. Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).
9. Peter Wacker, Land and People: A Cultural Geography of Preindustrial New Jersey Origins and Settlement Patterns (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975); Brendan McConville, ‘‘Those Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace’’: Agrarian Unrest and the Struggle for Political Legitimacy in New Jersey (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).
10. In addition to the incidents discussed by Stewart and Klepp below, Paul Gilje, Rioting in America, 49, has uncovered evidence of a wife-beater punished with a beating of his own in Philadelphia in December 1753 (citing the New York Gazette & Weekly Post-Boy, February 12, 1753); Thomas P. Slaughter, ‘‘Crowds in Eighteenth-Century America: Reflections and New Directions,’’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 115 (January 1991), esp. 31–33; Patricia U. Bonomi, ‘‘The Middle Colonies: Embryo of the New Political Order,’’ in Alden T. Vaughan and George A. Billias, eds., Perspectives on Early American History: Essays in Honor of Richard B. Morris (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 63–92. For crime in Pennsylvania, see Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe, ‘‘Violent Crime, Victims, and Society in Pennsylvania, 1682– 1800,’’ Explorations in Early American Culture 3 (1999), 24–54 (or vol. 66, supplemental issue of Pennsylvania History).
11. E. P. Thompson, ‘‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Past and Present 50 (February 1971), reprinted in Customs in Common, 185–258.
12. See Young, ‘‘English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism’’; and Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
13. Bryan Palmer, ‘‘Discordant Music: Charivaris and Whitecapping in Nineteenth-Century North America,’’ Labour/Le Travailleur 3 (1978), 5–62.
14. Slaughter, ‘‘Crowds in Eighteenth-Century America,’’ 30–33.
15. ‘‘From Jamestown to Desert Storm: War and Society in America,’’ unpublished paper delivered at the Penn State History Department Colloquium, November 3, 1998.
16. See, among many sources, Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). On Fries’s Rebellion, see the various articles in a special issue of Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 67 (Winter 2000) (guest co-editor Simon Newman). See also Don Carlos Seitz, Famous American Duels (1929; reprint, Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1966); Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckles Prize-Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); John Hope Franklin, The Militant South (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956); David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
17. Gilje, Rioting in America, 63–64; Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 255.
18. Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959); Anne Firor Scott, Making the Invisible Woman Visible (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status, Politics, and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966); Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
19. The classic work is Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
20. The best recent works on this subject are Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); David Waldstreicher, ‘‘In the Midst of Perpetual Feˆtes’’: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Simon P. Newman, Parades and Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Matthew Dennis, Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: Identity, Public Memory, and the American Calendar (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).
21. J. William Frost, ‘‘ ‘Wear the Sword as Long as Thou Canst’: William Penn in Myth and History,’’ Explorations in Early American Culture: A Supplement to Pennsylvania History 4 (2000), 13–45.
22. See also Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
23. See also Claudia Bushman, America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992).
24. David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
25. Davis, Parades and Power, chaps. 3–4.
26. Waldstreicher, ‘‘In the Midst of Perpetual Feˆtes,’’ 133–36.
27. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Linda Kerber,Women of the Revolution: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
28. Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992); William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an African American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); idem, Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture, Nationalist Theory, and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
29. Shane White, ‘‘ ‘It Was a Proud Day’: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741–1834,’’ Journal of American History 81 (1994), 13–51, and with Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Soot (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).
30. See Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
31. Michael Zuckerman, ‘‘Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America’’; John M. Murrin, ‘‘In the Land of the Free and the Home of the Slave, Maybe There Was Room Even for Deference’’; and Robert A. Gross, ‘‘The Impudent Historian: Challenging Deference in Early America,’’ all in Journal of American History 85 (June 1998), 13–42, 86–97.
32. For Habermas and his critics, see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), esp. 10–13.
33. I analyze this persistent behavior in ‘‘Legality, Legitimacy, and the American Middle Class,’’ in my book History, Signing In: Studies in History and Semiotics (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 219–35.
34. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). 35. Thompson, Customs in Common, 530–31.
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