The War for Independence devastated British North America, tearing society apart throughout the new nation, and only white Virginians “entered their Revolution as something close to a united people” (Edward Countryman, The American Revolution (1985), 120). As Edmund S. Morgan observed in his epochal American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975), Virginian society achieved peace in the midst of war and revolution on the basis of

Virginia's patriot elite successfully maintained their rule and social stability, with white social and political unity founded on the bedrock of racial slavery.

Or so historians thought, at least until the publication of The Politics of War. It is hard to underestimate the impact of this impressive work on our understanding not just of late eighteenth-century Virginia, but also of the nature and experience of the long and bloody war from which the American republic emerged. Deeply researched in the surviving records of wartime Virginia, McDonnell's book reveals a Virginian society torn apart by the war, with many lower and middling white Virginians all but ignoring the agonized warnings of racial unrest sounded by elite planters, and mounting sustained and often successful class-based challenges to the rule of the plantocracy. Throughout the years of war “disaffection and discontent in Virginia at times reached critical proportions – most often, when patriot leaders tried to persuade, entice, or coerce men into military service” (3).

McDonnell paints an extremely detailed picture of Virginia at war, showing the elite patriot planters to have been a “conservative, anxious, sometimes fearful group clinging to traditional notions of hierarchy, deference, and public virtue in an attempt to maintain its privileged position” (6). The constant demand for soldiers, both in the militia and for the continental army, set both lower- and middle-rank Virginians against the planters who demanded their military service. Most had few or no slaves to labour for them and their families, and thus these householders protested that their labour was vital to their own independence and the well-being of their dependents. “Control over labor, then, emerged as the defining element in social relations during the war and was at the heart of class divisions in Virginia” (11). McDonnell convincingly illustrates that the social protests and conflicts that tore apart the white society of revolutionary Virginia were “often expressed in a kind of language of class and seemed to reflect class divisions” (7). For historians who have long believed that Virginia furnished the model for an antebellum southern society in which class differences were minimized by a white republican unity founded on the institution of black slavery, McDonnell's persuasive argument that class in fact trumped race during the war seems as revolutionary as Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

As a consequence we are left with a picture of the full turmoil of a society at war with itself, with constant and dramatic changes in local leadership, routine defiance of both state and national laws, and occasionally violent encounters between the patriot elite and the majority of whites below them. While the structures of government and society changed little in Virginia, their social composition was transformed during the war. This makes the eventual inauguration of the federal constitution eight critical years after the victory at Yorktown all the more remarkable: we had long known that a majority of white Americans most likely opposed the new constitution, but McDonnell's book enlarges our understanding of the depth of lower- and middle-class opposition to centralized elite authority.

McDonnell's analysis of wartime Virginia might have been enriched by more consideration of the position and the range of experiences and actions of enslaved black Virginians, whose class identity must surely be redefined by his new approach. But this is already a long, deeply researched and radical new take on the War for Independence and the creation of the American Revolution. It is McDonnell's achievement that he has successfully challenged our most basic assumptions about both of these events.