Ray Raphael

A great look at the founders' divergent views on what our chief executive(s) should look like, how our current setup was implemented, and all of the discussion, rancor, and maneuvering it took to accomplish all of it. (Includes some explanatory material concerning the Electoral College and the Hamiltonian aversion to popular rule.)

Also a decent look into how the minds and personalities of Washington & Jefferson shaped many of the Presidential trappings we recognize today. Highly recommended for those interested in American and/or constitutional history, and *especially* recommended for anyone who likes to invoke the "founding fathers" as a monolithic group.… (more)

This history of the role of the common people in the American Revolution is a necessary complement to any general political history of the period. One might expect it to be full of statistics and generalizations that would lack the drama and significance provided by the best political histories. However, this is decidedly not the case. This book portrays the reality of the American Revolution better than any political history could and does so in a way that keeps the reader’s interest from the get go.

The secret to its success is that the author divides the book into several groups of the “common people” and then within each group explains the role it played in the revolution. Each chapter is made up of five or six different subsections which relate the experience of individuals or groups. The groupings are as follows: participants in rebellion, the people who fought in the Army, women, Loyalists, Native Americans and African-Americans.

The reader gets a real understanding not only of the hardships that the revolution brought to so many people but also the complexity and contradictions in the positions adopted by different people in different circumstances. While many individuals in each of the groups managed to survive the revolution, very few were better off. Most of the soldiers were poor people who had no other options. They suffered privations, delays in pay, and uncertain pensions. Other than ladies in the upper class, women suffered in the war and gained nothing in terms of their own rights and liberties. The loyalists, pacifists and others who wanted to remain neutral suffered deprivation of property, tarring and feathering and exile. Most Native Americans were unable to remain neutral (which was probably the course of action that was most in their interest where possible), suffered heavy losses in battle and in the decade following the war lost most of their lands east of the Mississippi River. A few African Americans obtain their freedom, but in the South many who sought to escape were returned to their masters or died in seeking freedom.

The author concludes by summarizing one of the key contradictions in the American Revolution: by seeking liberty for patriots (primarily white males) the revolution also denied liberty to many groups of ordinary people including the loyalists, women, Native Americans and African-Americans.

The author also addresses Gordon Wood’s theme that the American Revolution was radical because it made equality and democracy the main principles of American life. As many critics have noted, this was not true for many of the common people. Raphael recognizes that Wood’s theme can be seen as setting out the future path for American development and that it is a fallacy of insight to judge the revolution solely by how certain groups were treated at the time. But he does point out that the reality is undeniable that equality as a goal simply was not available to many of the residents of the new nation.… (more)