Coercion in the Cause of Liberty: The Popular Politics of Allegiance in Revolutionary America, 1775–76

During the earliest stages of the American Revolution, ordinary citizens across Britain’s North American empire spontaneously formed independent governments in their towns, counties, and provinces. Each of the thirteen British provinces overthrew imperial rule and established provisional administrations. While most scholars have focused on continental and provincial-level organizing, the vast majority of this activity occurred at an extremely local level, in the small towns and rural communities of colonial America. In polities of all sizes, citizens organized in newly formed committees and congresses to assert, usurp, and expand political authority. The new governments that emerged based themselves on interpretations of revolutionary principles such as local representation and individual rights.

Despite these underlying philosophies, one of the first priorities of most local governments was coercing allegiance from those who refused to go along with the new regime. Records from county and town-level revolutionary governments demonstrate how the earliest independent regimes re-enforced their authority by black-listing those who violated their decrees against doing business with British merchants; appropriating weapons, food, and essential supplies from those who refused to donate it willingly; and even imprisoning and exiling those who refused to renounce their loyalty to the crown. However, because these committees depended on local support, they also readily forgave the trespasses of those who demonstrated willingness to comply in the future and engaged in complex negotiations to secure the loyalty of those on the fence. Still, that the pioneering governments of an independent America based their power largely on coercion complicates narratives that persist in many of the most-read histories of the Revolution of an ideologically coherent grass roots revolutionary mobilization in the countryside. This paper explores that tension, revealing the coercive, pragmatic authority—and the ordinary people who wielded it—at the heart of the Revolution’s promise of a new nation based on liberty.