Donald F. Johnson - Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution

INTRODUCTION

The Experience of Occupation

The quotidian experiences of military occupation and the transformations they wrought were central to the failure of British authority in North America. The American Revolution transformed deeply held beliefs in radical ways. The results of this upheaval are well known: by 1783, a group of anti-tax revolutionaries had defeated the most powerful empire in the world and established an independent republic. But despite two centuries of historical study, the experience of revolution for ordinary Americans remains frustratingly unclear. Rejection of imperial authority did not take place only, or even primarily, in the abstract realm of political philosophy. Nor did change happen solely based on social conditions or military campaigns. Rather, it occurred for most people in the course of their everyday lives, in intensely personal and highly contingent ways, especially when confronted with the most visceral aspects of the Revolutionary War. Most women and men living in what became the United States did not switch their loyalties in an instant but did so gradually, as their lived experiences of enduring war altered their attitudes toward British rule. Nowhere is this everyday process of political change more evident than in the port cities the British Army occupied during the war.

We are not accustomed to thinking of the American Revolution in terms of intense and prolonged personal struggles. In 1815, an aging John Adams influenced centuries of popular memory when he reflected that the American War of Independence was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. For the second president, the revolution was in the minds of the people; rejection of British authority had already occurred before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. Although Adamss words have shaped numerous historical interpretations, many of his contemporaries would have balked at the idea that the war played no role in shaping their politics. William Tillinghasta physician living in occupied Newport, Rhode Islandhad a profoundly different experience of the American Revolution; one that reflects how the wartime experience of occupation, more than radical political arguments during the imperial crisis, caused many to abandon their faith in royal rule.