Roots of Resistance
American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution.
By Peter Shaw.
Harvard University Press. 279 pp. $17.50.
On August 14, 1765, a Boston crowd protesting the Stamp Act hung two effigies from an elm tree in the South End. One represented Andrew Oliver, the newly designated stamp distributor; the other featured a devil’s imp concealed in a boot (a reference to the Earl of Bute, the Scottish botanist and former royal tutor whom the colonists wrongly regarded as the secret source of their troubles). At night the effigies were taken down, placed in a coffin, paraded about town, and finally burned. One group of “mourners” destroyed a small building belonging to Oliver, another broke into his house and consumed the contents of his wine cellar. The next day, Oliver offered to resign his commission. Eleven days after that, his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Governor (later Governor) Thomas Hutchinson, suffered equal humiliation and greater loss when another crowd ransacked his house, destroying everything but the kitchen furniture.
These two incidents have figured prominently in all recent histories of the beginnings of American resistance to England. They tell us something about the colonists’ resort to “extralegal” coercion, the volatile nature of Boston politics, and the peculiar role that the furies of revolution were already reserving for the ill-fated Hutchinson. In the years to come, other crowds would reenact these early incidents, combining their distinctive elements of crude threats and arcane symbols into an effective vehicle of resistance.
If Peter Shaw is right, however, far more was at stake in such episodes than we have yet supposed. Like other recent students of the Revolution, Shaw believes that the stylized forms of colonial protest and the paranoiac strain of American rhetoric must be read for meanings that go well beyond the merely political dimensions of agitation. Shaw is not alone in assuming that “there were powerful, unconscious forces at play” among the patriots who led and joined the protests of the 1760’s and 1770’s. What sets his approach apart is the conviction that the forces that drove Americans to revolt may be uncovered in the ritual elements of their movement—much as skeptical commentators on the 1960’s emphasize the forms rather than the objects of youthful protest.
Revolutionary rituals, Shaw argues, were of two kinds, public and private. The former were rites de passage performed “out-of-doors” by crowds, often youthful, who strung up effigies, tarred and feathered dissenters, baited soldiers, and commemorated their victories by proposing, and perhaps even drinking, 45 toasts (a figure hallowed in patriot numerology for its association with the cause of John Wilkes, the London radical and “friend of America”). Private rituals took the form of crises de conscience which individual patriots had to surmount to prepare themselves psychologically for the transfer of allegiance from British crown to American people.
The symbolism of the public rituals was elaborate indeed. In an impressive and imaginative analysis, Shaw succeeds in linking patriot demonstrations to the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day in England; to Pope Day, the New England derivative of that holiday; to the Wilkite demonstrations in contemporary England; and beyond all these, to an ancient tradition of saturnalian festivals in which authority could be at once mocked and reinforced.
But the dramatic center of his story consists of case-studies of the revolutionary ambivalence of four Massachusetts patriots: James Otis, John Adams, Joseph Hawley, and Josiah Quincy. All were “conscience patriots” who, repelled by the crowd’s disorder, wavered either in their own political commitments or over the issue of independence. More to the point, their personal crises all centered on the figure of Hutchinson, toward whom they felt both hostility and, later, remorse. Hutchinson became a surrogate for the king they unconsciously hoped to overthrow and the scapegoat whose alleged treachery relieved the anxiety their own challenges to authority evoked.
Shaw’s conscience patriots do seem eligible for admission to a clinic for the rebelliously disturbed. Otis was mad (though not all of the time); Hawley, the son of a suicide, was given to hypochrondria and melancholy; the tubercular Quincy could not express anger easily; and John Adams was, well, John Adams. Hutchinson often thought his opponents acted deranged, and Shaw seems receptive to his diagnosis.
Left to their own devices, these men might not have been able to “work through” their anxieties about authority. The public rituals, however, helped to alleviate the patriots’ private crises. As rites de passage rather than riots of passion, they made acceptable the defiance the patriots inwardly feared. In part this was because the rituals expressed an ambiguity that mirrored their own personal turmoil. The crowds continued to proclaim loyalty to George III but were nevertheless mocking his representatives. And the public rituals had a further, therapeutic function. They constituted, in effect, rehearsals for the revolution—for the killing of the king—that the colonists unconsciously desired. As rehearsals they retained an essential ambiguity, but they also “predicted, anticipated, and even encouraged revolution”—which is to say that they gave men like Adams the fortitude they otherwise lacked to see the thing through.
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Shaw is not the first to examine the psychological roots of resistance, but his emphasis on patriot ambivalence and guilt reverses the judgments that other scholars have offered. Usually it is the loyalists who are made to appear less than self-reliant, unable to support resistance because their own insecurity left them dependent on established authority figures: fathers, patrons, kings. The revolutionaries, by contrast, have been portrayed more favorably as men whose confidence and sense of autonomy enabled them to renounce a king and resolve to govern themselves. Not so, Shaw implies. There is no reason to believe that the revolutionaries “represented psychological types more highly evolved in personal traits of independence than their contemporaries.”
The notion that patriots were better adjusted while loyalists were somehow stunted reflects, of course, the almost irresistible biases of our national history. There is much to be said for Shaw’s efforts to depict the anxieties that a looming revolution may engender among its supporters and opponents alike. Where the last generation of historians has tended to explain the Revolution as a result more of British stupidity than American restiveness, Shaw brings us back to an earlier view which questioned far more severely the motives—or perhaps one should say the impulses—of the rebels. If Shaw too often gives Hutchinson the benefit of the doubt—the governor was not quite the disinterested public servant here portrayed—he does succeed in showing why the patriots’ defenses of their actions may also be doubted.
Yet having said this, one must immediately add that Shaw’s admittedly eclectic argument is subject to some formidable objections. Some of these concern the anthropological apparatus he brings to bear on the public rituals, which seems to combine some very fashionable and some very dated ideas. Others, to my mind more important, concern underlying problems of historical interpretation.
Shaw’s approach would be more convincing if it were confined to asking what the coming of revolution meant to these individuals and to showing how the two forms of ritual could both express tensions and ease doubts. Yet despite a disclaimer that he is offering not an “interpretation” of the Revolution but only a “reading of its ritual language,” Shaw’s reading often verges into an explanation of why the Revolution occurred. And here his analysis becomes overextended. It is, after all, one thing to say that some men revolt because of deep personal anxieties. It is another thing entirely to imply that revolutions occur because such anxieties exist. What is at issue involves more than the obvious objection that Shaw risks reducing the event he is illuminating to trivial proportions.
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Three assumptions seem critical to Shaw’s explanation of why the defiance of authority so tormented the conscience patriots. The first is that habits of deference to the king were so deeply rooted in America that the inclination to challenge, much less overthrow, his rule was not easily confronted. A second assumption is that to his antagonists Hutchinson was indeed “a figure of political and social authority who was the equivalent, much in the manner of a king, of the father in a family.” Finally, Shaw assumes that in defying the king symbolically, and Hutchinson personally, the colonists by 1765 already desired the independence they attained a full decade later.
There are serious problems with each of these positions. To begin with, Shaw’s image of kingship seems more appropriate to 17th-century absolutist claims than to 18th-century constitutional monarchy. The affection that Americans expressed for a distant, unseen king was florid but superficial, cheaply offered, and, in the end, not so difficult to revoke. Although the petitions they sent George III were reverently couched, the language reflected the logic of the colonists’ constitutional arguments, which led them to exalt the connection between crown and colonies in order to weaken parliament’s claim to supremacy over America.
The notion that all officials of government were still “invested” with “the aura of kingly presence” is also questionable. Many colonists might have welcomed a bit more kingly presence in their officials, since the men who actually represented imperial authority possessed precious little. These officials were either the visible beneficiaries of a patronage system so elaborate it could have drawn praise from the late Mayor Daley, or colonists who had found influential patrons “at home” in England. But such connections were gained at a price: American appointees often found themselves commanding the resentment rather than the respect of their countrymen. The possession of office bestowed no royal luster. Some governors established miniature courts, but their power was social, not magical.
This was the situation confronting Hutchinson. He and his remarkably interbred family had a stranglehold over the highest positions in Massachusetts. But the only thing that seemed to set the Hutchinson-Oliver clan apart was its success. The trappings of kingship were too feeble to count for anything—and Hutchinson knew it. The expedients he continually urged his superiors to adopt all implied not the awesome character of his authority but its weakness.
The final weakness in Shaw’s argument is the most telling. It is true that, from 1765 on, patriots and imperial officials alike believed that the quarrel with Britain could well end in independence. But no evidence exists to corroborate Shaw’s view that independence was what the patriot leaders and their festive followers desired all along—unless we choose to elevate his interpretation of their unconscious wishes over the more accessible sources we ordinarily prefer and have better reason to trust. American leaders long remained ambivalent about independence not because they shrank from the symbolic implications of killing a king, but because they doubted whether separation was in America’s interest or whether, as John Adams observed in 1774, there was “spirit enough on either side to bring the question to a complete decision.” The very word independence was itself, one should note, ambiguous. Until 1775 it tended to denote a rejection of parliamentary, not royal, authority.
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Objections such as these need not take away from much that is valuable in Shaw’s book. His interpretation of the symbolism of political rituals illuminates meanings that no one has yet deciphered, much less fully appreciated. Similarly, his portrait of revolutionary ambivalence should help to free us from a tendency to depict American leaders as more purposeful and consistent than they actually were. But the problematic quality of some of his key assumptions suggests that this book should be conidered more provocative than persuasive.
