Middlekauff - The glorious cause: the American Revolution, 1763-1789

More than any work that I have written, this one draws on the studies of other historians. I have used with great profit books and essays by Bernard Bailyn, Julian P. Boyd, Irving Brant, E. James Ferguson, Douglas Southall Freeman, Lawrence Henry Gipson, Ira D. Gruber, Merrill Jensen, Forrest McDonald, Piers Mackesy, Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, Lewis Namier, J. H. Plumb, John Shy, Christopher Ward, Franklin B. and Mary Wickwire, and William B. Willcox, and a great many others. In mentioning these scholars, I do not mean to imply that I agree with all that they have written; nor would they agree with everything in this book.

On most of the important problems discussed in this book, I have read some of the eighteenth-century sources. I cite them in the footnotes but not in this bibliographical note. I have, of course, read only a small sample.

In the note that follows, I have not repeated all the citations appearing in the footnotes nor have I listed all the studies that I have consulted. Rather, I have indicated some of the major studies that I believe will be helpful to anyone wishing to pursue further investigation of the Revolution. There is no full or satisfactory bibliography of the American Revolution, and there probably cannot be. Most of the studies cited in the footnotes and this note contain bibliographies on their subjects. The literature on the Revolution is enormous, of course, and it is growing.

W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 17141760 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977) is a fine starting point for study of the English background. Besides the works cited in my footnotes, see also H. J. Habakkuk, England, in A. Goodwin, ed., The European Nobility in the EighteenthCentury (London, 1967), and J. D. Chambers, Population, Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial England (Oxford, 1972). English crowds are studied most helpfully in E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, Past and Present 50 (1971). For the Anglican Church, see Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1934). On financial change, P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution (Oxford, 1967) is outstanding; R. Davis, A Commercial Revolution: English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1967) is short, but helpful. See also J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 17501780 (London, 1966) and Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1965).

Biographies which sketch in the times of the subjects are often informative. J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman and Sir Robert Walpole: The Kings Minister (Boston, 1956, 1961) are superb. See also Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, Conn., 1975) and Ross J. S. Hoffman, The Marquis: A Study of Lord Rockingham, 17301782 (New York, 1973). The biographies cited in my footnotes are particularly helpful, especially those by Basil Williams (Pitt) and John Brooke (George III).

Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953), and three books by Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass, 1967), The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1968), and The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), offer penetrating analyses of the ideological basis of American resistance to British measures before independence.

The political cast of that resistance is thoroughly reconstructed in Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 17631776 (New York, 1968), and in such studies of states as Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence, R.I., 1954), Charles A. Barker, The Background of the Revolution in Maryland (New Haven, Conn., 1940), Jere R. Daniell, Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolution, 17411794 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), Kenneth Coleman, The American Revolution in Georgia, 17631789 (Athens, Ga., 1958), W. W. Abbot, The Royal Governors of Georgia, 17541775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 17601776 (Providence, R. I., 1958) Ronald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore, 1973), Oscar Zeichner, Connecticuts Years of Controversy, 17501776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1949), Bernard Mason, The Road to Independence: The Revolutionary Movement in New York, 17731777 (Lexington, Ky., 1966), Larry R. Gerlach, Prologue to Independence: New Jersey in the Coming of the American Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J., 1976), Richard M. Jellison, ed., Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York (New York, 1976).

A brilliant essay by Perry Miller, From the Covenant to the Revival, in Natures Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), provides a valuable starting point for studying the relationship of religion to the Revolution. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1966) is suggestive, as are Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 17271795 (New Haven, Conn., 1962), Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of Americas Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968), James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, Conn., 1977), Frederick V. Mills, Sr., Bishops by Ballot: An Eighteenth-Century Ecclesiastical Revolution (New York, 1978), Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 16891775 (New York, 1962), and Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament (New York, 1977).

Other studies which aid in understanding the coming of the Revolution are Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 17431776 (New York, 1955), Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible; Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), Jack Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 16891776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963), Charles S. Olton, Artisans for Independence; Philadelphia Mechanics and the American Revolution (Syracuse, N.Y., 1975), Alison Gilbert Olson, Anglo-American Politics: The Relationship between Parties in England and Colonial America (Oxford, 1973), Roger J. Champagne, Alexander McDougall and the American Revolution in New York (Schenectady, N.Y., 1975), Aubrey C. Land, The Dulanys of Maryland