Ray Raphael > Quotes

“In 1777 the rebels tried to round up the rest of Johnson’s former tenants, but they too escaped to Canada. For the remainder of the Revolution Sir John Johnson and his Scotsmen, together with their Iroquois allies, engaged in protracted and violent warfare with the American rebels along the northern frontier.18 Several other groups of recent immigrants remained loyal to the Crown. Although many Dutch and Germans supported the Revolution, those who maintained their own language and culture did not. Similarly, the Huguenots who settled in New Rochelle, the only French immigrants who continued to speak their native tongue, supported the British. William Nelson explains why: Taking all the groups and factions, sects, classes, and inhabitants of regions that seem to have been Tory, they have but one thing in common: they represented conscious minorities, people who felt weak and threatened. . . . Almost all the Loyalists were, in one way or another, more afraid of America than they were of Britain. Almost all of them had interests that they felt needed protection from an American majority. Being fairly certain that they would be in a permanent minority (as Quakers or oligarchs or frontiersmen or Dutchmen) they could not find much comfort in a theory of government . . . based on the “common good” if the common good was to be defined by a numerical majority.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“On November 14, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, made it official: And I do hereby further declare all indented Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free, that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining HIS MAJESTY’S Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to HIS MAJESTY’S Crown and Dignity.42”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“The pan-Indian confederation in the South during the 1780s and 1790s was a direct consequence of the Revolutionary War. With Great Britain defeated, American settlers swarmed from Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas into the region between the southern Appalachias and the Mississippi.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Once they had survived the winter and returned to the warpath, these Indians would not simply be fighting for the Crown—now, they had good reasons of their own to seek revenge against the American patriots.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“The theory of “diffusion”—ideas spreading from top down, from the few to the many—still informs much of our telling of history. But that’s not always the way history works. Except in totalitarian societies, people (even common people) tend to pursue, of their own volition, their personal interests and the interests of their communities. This was certainly true during the years leading up to the American Revolution.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Free blacks tended to enlist for “three years or the duration” while slaves promised to serve until the end as a condition of obtaining their freedom.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Ebenezer Fox returned to Boston in May of 1783, only twenty years old but a seasoned adventurer. During his time at sea he had survived several battles, endured the hatch of the Jersey, and escaped from both the British and the French. His life had been endangered on numerous occasions, he had been wounded in the encounter on Jamaica, and he had lost part of his hearing. At the end of it all he received $80, his share of the Flora’s plunder. By prior agreement his master was to receive half of this, but upon Ebenezer’s return Mr. Bosson demanded it all. Legally, that was his right. Despite more than three years of harrowing escapades and service to his country, young Ebenezer Fox was still apprenticed until his twenty-first birthday to a Boston barber who never went to war.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“As of April 1, 1779, those who refused to take the oath were barred from holding public office or serving on juries—and that was all. There would be no more imprisonment or threat of confiscation for the crime of not signing an oath. As much as the government wanted loyalty, it could not afford to lose tens of thousands of hard-working citizens for the lack of their names on a piece of paper.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“In the smallest town there was at least one individual who could discourse on the British Constitution even if he could not spell.”43”
― Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord

“What galled soldiers the most was the apparent well-being of those who chose not to fight. Although many civilians, like their counterparts in the army, suffered from shortages and high prices, the men who endured hunger, cold, and enemy fire on behalf of their country could not abide by those farmers and merchants who appeared to prosper”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“The intrusions upon the civil liberties of religious pacifists in the American Revolution revealed an ironic twist: the rebels who professed to carry the torch of freedom did their best to extinguish it, while those they accused of demonstrating a “destructive tendency” to subvert “freedom and independence” were the ones who kept that torch ablaze.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“The drinking continued, Chickasaw warriors failed to rally to the king’s cause, and men who might have been killed in battle died by the bottle instead. On a different level, the failure of Chickasaws to come through for the British can be explained by simple geography: they were not in the direct line of fire.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“In 1768, at Fort Stanwix in New York’s Mohawk Valley, British Americans negotiated a treaty with the Six Nations which placed most of the Iroquois land off-limits to white settlement. In return, the Iroquois ceded all rights to the land south and east of the Ohio River—land which was inhabited by other groups of Native Americans, not themselves.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“According to Wood’s critics, however, this “idea of equality” left many in the lurch: women who could not vote, almost half a million slaves, somewhere between 110,000 and 150,000 Native Americans, about 80,000 to 100,000 loyalists who had to leave their homes (as well as hundreds of thousands of others who remained where they were but faced repercussions for their prior allegiances), and even many patriots who remained without property at war’s end.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“When we focus on those few women who fought in the war, and when we further mythologize their deeds, we inadvertently downgrade the real lives of the mass of women who did not raise arms but who still played active and important roles in the Revolutionary War.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“(The rape of “ladies” was strictly taboo, but this protection did not apply to women and girls without social standing.) The fear of rape, as well as the actual experience, gave a unique twist to women’s experience of the Revolutionary War.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“However distorted by the eyes of white masters, the courageous struggles for black freedom during the American Revolution are still evident in the historical sources. Behind every advertisement for a runaway slave lies a saga of heroic proportions:”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Although some common folk might enjoy a sip now and again, the major consumers of tea participated in a ritual activity which was prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of colonists.21”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Since free people of color, almost invariably poor, came cheaply, prior restrictions against their enlistment were either overturned or ignored. Despite national policy, even slaves were allowed to enlist; some towns paid bounties to masters who allowed their slaves to join the army.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“In April of 1778 the assembly got tougher yet: failure to take the oath could result not only in imprisonment but in the loss of citizenship, banishment, and the confiscation of property. On the day the new law went into effect, nineteen Moravians were arrested”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“With the murder of Cornstalk, who had tried so hard to avoid war, most of the Shawnee joined the British and the western tribes to fight against white Americans.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“The leading patriots of Bedford County, Virginia, with Colonel Charles Lynch presiding, conducted trials and meted out harsh sentences; typically, a prisoner received thirty-nine lashes, and those who refused to shout “Liberty Forever” were suspended by their thumbs until they did so. These were the first “lynchings,” administered from a large walnut tree in Judge Lynch’s own yard. As with many latter-day lynchings, government officials knew about the proceedings but did not care to stop them.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Independence was declared by wealthy merchants, planters, and lawyers; independence was won by poor men and boys while those who were better off gave but grudging assistance.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“This was a conflict of interests and personalities, not ideologies. Yet southern loyalties cannot easily be explained by religion, nationality, or class. Anglican and Presbyterian, English and German, rich and poor appeared proportionately on both sides of the conflict. Some loyalists owned slaves while others did not, and the same held true for patriots. Robert Lambert, in his analysis of loyalists in South Carolina, found only one characteristic in common: they were all recent arrivals, making them “less likely to look favorably on a movement that was defying the authority from which they had obtained their lands.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Only the hundreds who left for England and some (but scarcely all) of those headed for Canada did so as free men and women. Virtually all the emigrants to the British Isles wound up in London, where they lived in impoverished communities with few economic opportunities and no prospects for social advancement. Shortly after their arrival, many were persuaded or coerced into emigrating once again, to Sierra Leone this time. Unlike the later colonization from Nova Scotia, this early “Back to Africa” movement was promoted exclusively by whites who wanted to rid London of its people of color. For a host of reasons, the settlement failed. Former slaves from Virginia or South Carolina who had fled to the British army and finally arrived in a land of freedom wound up dying of tropical diseases or being sold back into slavery.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“as draftees of any substance searched for substitutes to fill their slots, boys and men of little property who were willing to sell their time and bodies found no shortage of takers.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Vacuous pronouncements of good will meant little while “the violent spirit” ruled people’s hearts. Time, and time alone, would heal the many wounds of the Revolution.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“When farmers discussed what to do about pigs in the streets, their words were set to paper by men educated at Harvard.”
― Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord

“When the rebels tried to get them to join the army, or pay extra taxes for the war, or at the very least sign a loyalty oath, the Mennonites just said no.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“This was a real revolution: the people did seize power, but they exercised that power at the expense of others—loyalists, pacifists, merchants, Indians, slaves—who, although certainly people, were not perceived to be a part of the whole. This was, after all, a war. It would not be the last time Americans sacrificed notions of liberty and equality in the name of the general good. Frontier vigilantism, night-riding in the South, the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, red-baiting in the 1950s—these extreme manifestations of majoritarian rule did not violate our beginnings but reflected them. However crude, they echoed the tarring and feathering, the forced administration of loyalty oaths, and the general subjugation of unpopular minorities which characterized the American Revolution.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence