In this new study of the American Revolution in Virginia we are happily confronted by a major and important question. How were people mobilized for the war for Independence in Virginia, and how did the successes and failures of that mobilization impact the nature of revolutionary change? McDonnell believes that the best way to answer this question is to emphasize class conflict, and to foreground the complaints and experience of the ‘ordinary’ inhabitants – the smallholders, the slaves, the ‘lower orders’ – over the intentions, wishes, and interests of the ‘elite’, the gentry, and the ‘patriot leaders’. In doing so, McDonnell places himself firmly in a historiographic tradition that stresses the ‘history from the bottom up’ in their telling of the American Revolution, while at the same time elegantly wedding his analysis to the social history of warfare, which understands the revolutionary war experience of ordinary Americans as a ‘political education’.
The great strength of the book lies in McDonnell's crucial recognition that the problem of fighting the war for independence in Virginia cannot be understood without a steady awareness of the stresses imposed by socio-economic divisions among the people that were particularly shaped by the ownership of land and labour. So Virginia's effective manpower never merely reflected population levels, or tax revenues, but required a political solution that dealt with strains endemic to the labour regime. As such McDonnell's story of the ‘politics of war’ reveals great tensions related to who could control access to labour; enslaved, servant, and free. The dilemma was complicated by the agency of the enslaved themselves, whose desires were often diametrically opposed to the interest of the owners of slaves, but also not clearly compatible with the needs and interests of the free white labourers, who had an annoying proclivity to go their own way. The bitter experience of a long and increasingly unpopular struggle tended to expose ‘divisions and internal conflict far more than any consensus and shared values’ (p. 527), an experience, McDonnell argues, that shaped political behaviour in the post-war state.
McDonnell is strongest when discussing the numerous failed attempts of the colony to compel the population to mobilize, either for the Continental service or for the much maligned militia. Desertion and incomplete quotas were endemic. Failure to create an effective draft policy led to widespread draft resistance, which included an occasional riot or murder. A lack of a vent for tobacco, and a lack of credit and circulating currency created distress and rioting over the terms of tenancy. Blockades and embargoes stimulated shortages, graft, and often violent theft. Citizens and farmers simply refused to fight and pay for the war on terms that they found unacceptable. At the very least, the perpetual conflicts – as described by McDonnell in great detail – help explain why the British military consistently thought that there were deep divisions to exploit amongst the rebels, that the new governments were not popular, and that the Southern States could be easily peeled away from the Union.
McDonnell argues that these conflicts led to real changes in the political dynamic of the new state. As he shows, the traditional leadership of the colony made numerous concessions to the propertied ‘middling ranks’ to ensure support for the war which had a potent impact on the type of government that would rule the new state. In the face of this grudging alliance of gentry and smallholders, un-propertied labourers and ‘the lower sort’ drew the short straw, while slaves lost out. Nevertheless, McDonnell argues people in each of these groups found various opportunities to exploit the contest for individual gains, and often made ‘heroic’ fights for independence and liberty on their own terms. The first Virginia Constitution, which not only possessed an extensive declaration of rights, assured that power in the state would be wielded by two representative assemblies directly responsible to the electorate. This is a distinction, which McDonnell points out in contradiction to numerous historians, that made Virginia's new government (next to Pennsylvania and Vermont) one of the most democratically accountable of all the first American state governments, most of which had an upper house that was elected by the lower house and often a governor with veto power. While McDonnell shows that middling property owners gained the most from these struggles, he eschews linking this liberalization of government with any narrative that finds the ‘roots of democracy’ in the revolution, which McDonnell seems to believe would require something more dramatic and inclusive. Rather, he argues, the conflicts of the war years continued into the 1780s and helped spur what he considers the ‘reactionary’ movement for a ‘national’ government. His rapid dénouement toward the Constitutional Convention points directly to Woody Holton's new Unruly Americans and the origins of the Constitution (2007), a new progressive interpretation of the framing of the US Constitution that McDonnell describes as ‘much more than a sequel’ to his own book (p. x).
The book is a thick narrative divided into four unequal parts, which are chronologically and thematically arranged. McDonnell is to be congratulated for the depth of his research and his vivid recreation of numerous small stories, obviously dug up with great glee. The strength of this design is the great sense of contingency and uncertainty that he gives to the problem of creating a functioning political order in a shifting and often chaotic situation. The weakness of this design is that it tends to obscure his larger arguments in vast detail and is much too long. It could have benefited from more editing. We have 250 pages of dense and overlapping narrative (much of which covers well-known territory) before we even come to independence. We run from crisis to crisis, all of which are created equal, and all of which put the colony ‘on the brink of civil war’. Is the conflict over lack of salt really on a par with the fleeing of the slaves to Dunmore? No, it is resolved by effective state and private action, first by legislative bounties and public salt works and eventually by new lines of trade with France, the West Indies, and Europe.
A more significant question should be raised, however, about whether McDonnell's overall framework – his obsession with ‘class’ conflict – can effectively provide a full history of the ‘politics of war’ in revolutionary Virginia. The book often feels like an argument in search of evidence, more than a thesis that arose naturally from the sources. While overflowing in detail, we lack a sense of intimacy with the people who lived through this ordeal. McDonnell provides only a blurred picture of how things got done; it is too dialectical, tendentious, and, for all its complications, too simplistic. We get little analysis of how religion and regional differences in the state informed or muted socio-economic solidarities. We have no sense of the importance of patronage and clientage, and we get no clarity about the place of kinship and personality in the political compromises of the fight for independence. This was, after all, a society characterized by ‘a tangled web of cousinry’. Even McDonnell's understanding of ‘class’, which he asserts is informed by E. P. Thompson's vision of class as ‘a process’, tends to come across as nothing more than a rigid marker of vaguely described socio-economic groups: labourers, ‘middling ranks’, and great slaveowners. Such a notion of vast horizontal solidarities in this society is simply not enough to understand the factions of Virginia politics in the coming, course, and successful completion of the war for Independence. ‘Class’ conflict not only elides numerous vertical alliances between the great men and the smallholders, but strains to fit what we know about differences amongst the ‘patriot leaders’ themselves, who, like all of McDonnell's groups, are strangely shadowy figures. Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Pendleton, Richard Henry Lee, and George Washington shared many things, but they were on the opposite side of numerous arguments throughout their political careers, and their own bases of support, family networks, religious views, educational backgrounds, and ultimate influence came from very different sources – not solely their status as ‘elites’. The ‘enslaved Virginians’, for their part, have no humanity or individuality in McDonnell's study; they are only defined by their character as ‘inmates’ on plantations (p. 178). They are heroes and victims, to be sure, but they are not human. We have no sense of any differences between African-born, Virginia-born, or mulatto, skilled artisans, or field hands, Christian or otherwise, or even the differences between black men, women, or children.
The book has forty pages on the burning of Norfolk and five on the siege of Yorktown. It makes the absurd and tendentious claim: ‘the only Virginians who participated in the siege of Yorktown with any great enthusiasm were the hundreds of black Virginians who had joined the British’ (p. 475). So much for George Washington and Colonel James Monroe. So much for the Virginia riflemen under Major John Willis. So much for the Virginia militia under Colonel John Mercer who stopped the foraging of Banestre Tarleton and ensured the complete encirclement of Cornwallis. So much for James Armistead Lafayette, the Virginian slave who spied on Cornwallis and received his freedom for it, eventually becoming a slave-owner himself.
Despite the length of the work, the book is weak on important parts of the ‘politics of war’ in revolutionary Virginia. Most glaring is the lack of a complete discussion of the problems of supplying and paying for the various armies, a problem at least as large as actually manning their quotas. By 1781, the state was barely limping along, not because it was unwilling or incompetent, as McDonnell would have it, but because it was broke. McDonnell's discussion of various tax reforms are neither complete nor fully persuasive – in part because he underestimates the radical intentions of some of the dreaded ‘patriot leaders’. We are missing any discussion of the naval and privateering activities of the state, strange, especially considering that manpower for the navy was so low that the commonwealth eventually needed to resort to the hated British method of impressment, a story which fits McDonnell's design. There is no discussion of the effort by George Nicholas to impeach Thomas Jefferson for his conduct of the war, or the rapid decline of popularity of Governor Thomas Nelson, Jr, for his extensive confiscation of goods for the support of the French military. Perhaps these stories are not told because they do not fit easily into a politics of class warfare. The attack on Nelson was led by George Mason, in support of the ‘freeholders’ of Prince George County, who accused the governor of unconstitutional abuses that had not been seen since the tyranny of King Charles I. Since McDonnell's ‘patriot leaders’ are all caricatures, he has no ready explanation for such contentious fights amongst gentlemen.
For all of McDonnell's extensive research, and even his occasional flashes of great insight, historians of the war in Virginia will still find John Selby's The revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (1988), indispensable. And yet, McDonnell should be congratulated for his aggressive insistence on the importance of the experience of the war in the transformations of independent Virginia, and his work should stimulate future work on the social context of the politics of war in revolutionary America.
