A People's History of the American Revolution 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

“Ordinary men from Waltham, Watertown, Concord, Charlestown, Cambridge, and Framingham—not the famous Whigs from Boston—had forced the lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, one of the most powerful men in the colony, to renounce an appointment to His Majesty’s Council.129”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“But is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one? Especially when it is considered that Men frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“And yet the opposite is true as well. When women marched for the right to vote, when workers sat down in their factories for the right to form unions, when African Americans engaged in mass demonstrations to terminate Jim Crow in the South—these extensions of democracy also reflected our beginnings, mirroring the Yankees who paraded “with staves and musick” during the court closures of 1774. Our Revolutionary heritage works both ways. “The body of the people,” the dominant force during the 1770s, has empowered and deprived.”
― 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

“All men are created equal,” at the time, was certainly not intended to include women, slaves, or Indians. It was a radical concept for its day, regardless of its limited scope. Beyond that, as Wood and others have maintained, the concept of equality served as a blueprint for the future, pointing in a direction which would eventually extend across the lines of gender and to all racial, ethnic, religious, or political minorities.”
― 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

“The story of our nation’s founding, told so often from the perspective of the “founding fathers,” will never ring true unless it can take some account of the Massachusetts farmers who closed the courts, the poor men and boys who fought the battles, the women who followed the troops, the loyalists who viewed themselves as rebels, the pacifists who refused to sign oaths of allegiance, the Native Americans who struggled for their own independence, the southern slaves who fled to the British, the northern slaves who negotiated their freedom by joining the Continental Army.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“The spirit of Revolution prevailed throughout, with common people on each side fighting a war in order to challenge what they perceived as the forces of oppression.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Even within the rigid structure of the military, common soldiers exercised more power than usual. They elected their own noncommissioned officers. Often, they refused to obey orders; occasionally, they mutinied. They deserted almost at will. More so than in most wars, they challenged or ignored traditional lines of command: try as he might, George Washington was never able to force his men to kick women camp followers out of the wagons.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Native Americans and African Americans, although victimized, hardly remained passive. Using a variety of strategies, they tried to take advantage of the rift between colonists and the mother country:”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“These great troubles, although affecting the rich along with the poor, did not affect rich and poor alike. The rich, when pillaged, had more to fall back on. “Ladies” were rarely raped. When loyalists were exiled at the end of the war, the well-to-do went to England or island plantations, the others to cold and often barren regions in Canada. Commissioned officers, when taken prisoner, were generally placed on parole and allowed to continue with everyday life, while privates languished in the hulls of prison ships. Few rich people and many poor people suffered from diseases related to the unsanitary conditions of camp or prison life.”
― 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

“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

“White resistance to putting African Americans under arms was strongest in areas with the greatest concentrations of slaves. But even in Virginia, the heart of tobacco land, patriots could not ignore the possibilities for exploiting black manpower. More than half the free Negro males of military age in Virginia joined the army, probably for the same reason that freemen from the North enlisted: it was the best or only job available.”
― 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

“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

“On January 16, 1776, Congress reluctantly resolved “that the free negroes who have served faithfully in the army at Cambridge, may be re-inlisted therein, but no others.”154 During the course of 1776 all northern states issued some sort of restrictions on the recruitment of African American soldiers.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“By the end of the year, however, Washington suddenly reversed this decision. In his general orders of December 30 he announced this: “As the General is informed, that Numbers of Free Negroes are desirous of inlisting, he gives leave to the recruiting Officers, to entertain them, and promises to lay the matter before the Congress, who he doubts not will approve of it.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“On October 8 Washington convened a war council to determine “whether it will be adviseable to re-inlist any Negroes in the new Army—or whether there be a Distinction between such as are Slaves & those who are free?” The Council voted “unanimously to reject all Slaves, & by a great Majority to reject Negroes altogether.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“circumstances. Although tens of thousands remained in bondage in the 1770s—some 6,000 in Pennsylvania, 9,000 in New Jersey, 20,000 in New York, and 13,500 in New England139—the institution of slavery did not buttress the entire socioeconomic system, as it did in the South. About 10 percent of African Americans in the North had already managed to become free (contrasted with less than 3 percent in the South),”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“In the early 1790s, when African American émigrés were offered a chance to emigrate once again—to Sierra Leone this time, in Africa—many former slaves, including Boston King and David George, seized the opportunity. The Revolutionary War, through a most circuitous route, led almost 1,200 people who had been reared in bondage on American plantations not exactly back to their homelands (few, if any, had ancestors from Sierra Leone) but at least to a place where they hoped to assume some command over their lives.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“The English had compassion upon us in the day of distress, and issued out the Proclamation, importing, That all slaves should be free, who had taken refuge in the British lines, and claimed the sanction and privileges of the Proclamations respecting the security and protection of Negroes. In consequence of this, each of us received a certificate from the commanding officer at New-York, which dispelled all our fears, and filled us with joy and gratitude. Soon after, ships were fitted out, and furnished with every necessary for conveying us to Nova Scotia.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Unlike the tens of thousands of emigrants who were still enslaved and the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who remained in bondage in the new United States, a handful of free black émigrés left written accounts of their personal adventures.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“According to official records, exactly 3,000 free African Americans departed from New York to Canada in 1783—1,336 men, 914 women, and 750 children.”
― 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 the British withdrew first from Yorktown and Wilmington, then Savannah and Charleston, and finally New York and St. Augustine, they carried on their ships a great many African Americans. Estimates vary as to the numbers, but historians estimate that it was in the tens of thousands.121 At first glance, it might appear that such a mass exodus signaled freedom and new beginnings, but the vast majority—in the vicinity of 80 percent—remained enslaved, the property of loyalist émigrés or British officials.122 Some of these had always belonged to loyalist masters; others had escaped to the British to find freedom, only to be commandeered by army officers or given to loyalists as compensation for lost property.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Literally and figuratively, this was the fate of many southern slaves in the Revolutionary War. They had scented freedom—some had even managed a taste—but here they were on a desolate plain, starving and diseased, cast out and abandoned between two sets of white men who had once used them to great advantage.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“As governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson signed a bill granting every white male who enlisted for the duration of the war “300 acres of land plus a healthy sound Negro between 20 and 30 years of age or 60 pounds in gold”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Both the British and American armies viewed slaves as mere pawns in the game of war. When British soldiers captured rebel plantations, they divided up the spoils—including slaves. When patriot soldiers captured loyalist plantations, they too divvied up the take. As roving bands of partisans, both patriot and loyalist, plundered and pillaged throughout the countryside in the later years of the war, they commandeered all slaves they could find for their personal use or sale. Booty—including human beings—constituted an important component of a soldier’s recompense”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence