A good account of what the American colonists, the average people, were doing in the months and years surrounding Lexington and Concord. In the buildup to revolution, Breen shows that average people talked about rights, railed against the British, organized, wrote, formed committees, formed local governments, harassed British and their sympathizers, etc. It is a fine example of history from the bottom up, and a great counter to the idea that the Revolution was born in the minds of men like Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson. It was a mass movement of the people as well.

What bothers Breen, is that the revolutionaries are so... in a word... conservative. Oftentimes it seems Breen is sad that the committees don't resort to violence, or destruction and redistribution of property, or the like. Basically he is waiting and wanting them to be like the revolutionaries of 1780 France or the workers Soviets of 1917 and... they don't. Breen is, at the same time, pointing out this oft-forgotten revolution of the people and trying to magnify it into a proto-communist people's government. Instead, they are nice, respect property, talk about Locke and the Bible, etc.

But, still, a great book. ( )

If you study popular books on the American Revolution, it's easy to come away with the idea that the Revolution was led by the 56 men, give or take a few that were taking care of business elsewhere during pivotal moments in American history. American Insurgents, American Patriots shows that there's much more to the story than that.

From the role of the Black Regiment to the periodicals and pamphleteers to every day working men — and women — this book tells the story of a revolution that would never have succeeded without the blood, sweat and tears of the common people.

T. H. Breen's style of writing is engaging and easy to understand without being pedantic. I listened to the audio version narrated by John Pruden, one of my favorite narrators for this type of book. His elocution and pace are pitch perfect.

For the most part, Breen provides a source for the claims he makes. For example, when he shares the opinions of Elizabeth Shaw, a Tory who saw the events from a decidedly different point of view, you know he's getting the information directly the source. Or at least her letters, since she's been long gone. I did a quick "look inside" on Amazon and there are plenty of footnotes - enough to satisfy even the most source hungry among us.

Breen doesn't gloss over the events of the Revolution either. While there is no outright murder of Tories mentioned, plenty of lives are destroyed and at least one dies from a splinter in his groin (ouch!) after being paraded about on a rail. The fact that there wasn't more death directly attributed to the protest and informal action always struck me as the best evidence of divine intervention.

That said, Breen is far more factual and less agenda-driven than I've come to expect from most academics. (You would think they would all be unbiased, but you would be wrong, these days.) I am adding T.H. Breen to my list of favorite authors of American history, and I am eager to read another one of his books. My only problem is going to be choosing which one. ( )

Persuasive, interesting, and historically-grounded argument that widespread popular sentiment for independence from Britain was evident by 1774. Nothing against the Founding Fathers and their actions, asserts the author, but their proclamation of independence in 1776 was the colonial meritocracy's tail wagging a populist dog that already had demonstrated, in many different places and ways, the strong resolve to sever ties with Britain.

I enjoyed this book, which sheds an angle I hadn't thought much about regarding the insurgents who underpinned and provided the muscle for the War of Independence. I didn't realize the popular foment for independence was so widespread prior to 1776. That being the case, I'll need to learn more about the Revolutionary War to understand why Gen. Washington's troops had such a hard time with loyalists in and around New York in 1776. (See "1776" by David McCullough.) Given Breen's characterization of the overall situation in 1774-6, I'd have thought the American fighters would have encountered a friendlier local population who was more supportive to their cause. ( )

Using original documents from the "middling sort" of people, Breen makes a case that the American REvolution was a popular insurgency, where the "leaders", the people we think of as the Founding Fathers, had to work hard to keep up with what the people were doing on the ground--and doing, as Breen says "without consulting a single Founding Father."

The scholarship is forst-rate throughout, but the narrative falls apart in places, becoming redundent and losing coherence. The last chapter reads like it was just tacked on to improve page-count. The book could have been 5-star with a better editor and another draft, I think. ( )

T.H. Breen's American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (Hill and Wang, 2010) is a timely look at the period between late 1773 and mid-1775: the period, he argues, in which the American Revolution was effectively begun (in this he agrees with John Adams, who wrote in 1818 that the Revolution had occurred in the "minds and hearts of the people" before the first shots were fired).

By defining a revolution as the "willingness of a sufficient number of people to take up arms against an unelected imperial government that no longer served the common good," (p. 10), Breen maintains that this threshold was met in America "sometime in mid-1774" (which may be true for some areas, but considering all the evidence Breen presents, seems fairly early for other sections of the colonies).

In general Breen's book makes for an absorbing read, and he's chosen some very apt examples to illustrate his points. His examination of colonial society and demographics at the time of the imperial crisis is well done, and I found his focus on what he terms "ordinary Americans" mostly useful (although I think his frequent reiteration of terms like "insurgency" and reminders of his thesis that the people were "ahead" of those we think of as their "leaders" got in the way of his argument at times). His use of case studies like the Boston Committee of Donations records (which document supplies received by the city after the Port Bill closed the harbor and supplies were shipped in from throughout the colonies), William Goddard's attempt to form a new postal system, Janet Schaw's account of loyalists being hassled in North Carolina, &c.) worked well, and provided an appropriate level of "personal focus" without relying on the usual "Founding Father" suspects.

That said, I think Breen at times keeps his focus too much on his idea that the "insurgency" started in the aftermath of the Intolerable/Coercive Acts, and does not give enough credit to the resistance methods developed during the latter half of the 1760s during the pushback against the Stamp Act and other parliamentary enactments (not to mention the Tea Party itself). His relation of public pressure against Massachusetts men who accepted royal commissions under the Massachusetts Government Act sounds awfully similar to the methods used against the Stamp Act commissioners a decade before, but Breen almost seems to go out of his way not to connect the two periods.

The most interesting section of the book for me was the seventh and eighth chapters, comprising Breen's discussion of the local committees of inspection or safety that were formed following the passage of the First Continental Congress' "Association." Just how that document ended up serving as something of a "working Constitution" with details (including the composition, size, and powers of the committees themselves) worked out at the local level - and how the committees managed to maintain almost universally a commitment to the rule of law and did not descend into arbitrary rule or violent chaos, is a remarkable story, and I think the one that Breen's book tells most effectively.

A few small errors marred the reading for me: Breen sometimes tries to have it both ways, as on p. 242 where he writes "In general terms, the Americans were all children of the great seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. But one should not exaggerate his influence. Many Americans had never read Locke's work; quite a few would not have even recognized his name." But on p. 245, Breen begins a two-page discussion of Locke's impact, noting that the famous "Appeal to Heaven" inscription on an early Revolutionary flag originates with Locke: "Ordinary Americans had encountered the phrase in the pages of Locke's Second Treatise, where 'Appeal to Heaven' appears numerous times." Again, on the following page: "The Continental soldiers who justified their own political resistance through an 'Appeal to Heaven' did not have to rummage through musty libraries to read Locke's words. Nor did they have to rely on ministers ... or educated lawyers to tell them what [he] had written. A popular edition of the Second Treatise had just been issued by a Boston publisher ...". To be fair, Breen tries to thread the needle here by saying that Locke's works had been ignored prior to 1773, but this is hardly a universally-accepted notion.

Breen seemed to have particular trouble with Delaware representative Caesar Rodney, who on p. 133 is mistakenly transferred to Maryland and then twenty pages later misdescribed as "the oldest looking man in the world." John Adams, the author of that quote, had written to Abigail that Rodney was the "oddest looking man in the world." Not sure which is more flattering for the poor fellow, to be fair.

Minor missteps aside, Breen's book is an important reminder that the Continental Congress' debates and deliberations were only a small part of what was happening "on the ground" during the heady days of the early 1770s, and that there were other actors on the stage besides the men whose names we already know.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/09/book-review-american-insurgents.html ( )