The Common Cause
Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like “domestic insurrectionists” and “merciless savages,” the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic.
In a fresh reading of the founding moment, Parkinson demonstrates the dual projection of the “common cause.” Patriots through both an ideological appeal to popular rights and a wartime movement against a host of British-recruited slaves and Indians forged a racialized, exclusionary model of American citizenship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this extensively researched study, Parkinson, assistant professor of history at Binghamton University, explores the roles played by concepts of inclusion and exclusion among the supporters of the patriot cause in the American Revolution. Drawing primarily upon an immense array of colonial American newspapers, Parkinson emphasizes the methods by which leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, and both John and Samuel Adams mobilized the printed word in countering the "catalog of forces acting against American unity." To undercut the divisiveness of issues such as voting rights, land distribution, religious heterodoxy, and slaveholding, these revolutionaries focused their readers' hostility against both their British rulers and perceived enemies within their own communities. Their literature increasingly centered on the supposed dangers presented by Native Americans and slaves groups that the British urged to revolt against local authorities. The book is academically focused, offering a detailed and insightful analysis of how newspapers became loci of communication and shapers of individuals' and communities' senses of themselves as political actors. Moreover, Parkinson persuasively explains the intensely racialized nature of citizenship in the newly independent U.S. and the long-standing problems posed by the exclusion of Americans of indigenous or African heritage from the "common cause" of the Revolution.
