Bibliographical Essay*

The material written on the American Revolution is almost limitless, and it would be folly to try to list all of it in a brief space. Indeed, the purpose of this as well as of the bibliographic essays in the companion volumes of Conceived in Liberty is not to cite an endless array of sources, but to highlight for the reader the most important works on the period, those to which it would be most fruitful for him to turn next. This essay is deliberately confined to secondary sources; primary sources from the period are cited in the secondary sources which we discuss below.

A concise, judicious, overall summary of the military, political, social, and economic history of the American Revolution is fortunately available in John R. Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–1783 (1954). Alden supersedes the previous overall, one-volume history, John C. Miller, Triumph of Freedom, 1775–1783 (1948), which tends to be unreliable.

The most important and dramatic change in interpreting the history of the American Revolutionary War has come about very recently: a realization that the Americans won because, and insofar as, they were conducting a massive guerrilla war, a “people’s war,” against the superior firepower and conventional military strategy and tactics of the British imperial power. With modern guerrilla war coming into focus since the late 1960s, recent historians have begun to apply its lessons to the American Revolution, not only to the tactical analysis of the individual battles, but also in basic strategic insights, for example, the realization that guerrilla war can only succeed if the guerrillas are backed by the great majority of the populace, a condition which obtained during the American Revolution. The valuable military histories of the Revolution, therefore, can be grouped into two categories: those which antedate and those which incorporate modern insights into the nature and potential of guerrilla warfare.

Thus, the best detailed history of the military conflict, devoting keen analysis to each battle, is Christopher Ward, The War of the Revolution (2 vols., 1952). A useful and relatively brief one-volume military history is Willard M. Wallace, Appeal to Arms: A Military History of the American Revolution (1951). More specifically, the standard military history of the first year of the war, is Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (1934), and the initial battle of Lexington and Concord is described in Arthur B. Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord (1963).

None of these books, however, was written recently enough to incorporate modern insights on the importance of guerrilla as opposed to conventional war. An important one-volume military history that does so is Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789 (1971). Particularly important, both for guerrilla insights and for penetrating “revisionist” studies of particular generals and their strategies and tactics, is George Athan Billias, ed., George Washington’s Generals (1964). Particularly important in this volume is George A. Billias, “Horatio Gates: Professional Soldier,” about the general who used guerrilla strategy and tactics against Burgoyne, culminating at Saratoga; Don Higginbotham, “Daniel Morgan: Guerrilla Fighter,” in which Higginbotham apologizes for the fact that his valuable biography of the war’s greatest guerrilla tactician had been written before the advent of his own and other general interest in guerrilla warfare (Don Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman (1961)); and especially John W. Shy, “Charles Lee: The Soldier as Radical,” in which Shy favorably rediscovers the outstanding military libertarian and guerrilla theorist, strategist, and general of the American Revolution. Lee, who had been drummed out of his number two post of command and court-martialled unfairly by Washington, is favorably reassessed in a biography by John R. Alden, Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (1951). Gates has also been maltreated by historians, who tend to be sycophants of Washington, but see the reevaluation by Bernhard Knollenberg, Washington and the Revolution: A Reappraisal (1940).

Shy, who of all historians has the best grasp on the importance of guerrilla warfare in this period, trenchantly interprets the various phases of British strategy during the war (from police action to conventional war to counter-guerrilla attempts at “pacification” in the South) in “The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (1973). John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (1976) is a collection of his essays on military history, some of which contribute to a positive reevaluation of the importance of the militia in defensive warfare. R. Arthur Bowler, Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775–1783 (1975) shows that the hostility of the local populations contributed to the failure of food supplies. This hostility was compounded by British attempts to seize the food they could not purchase.

On militia and guerrilla warfare as against the conventional deployment of the Continental Army in a local area see Adrian C. Leiby, The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground, 1775–1783 (1962). On the fierce guerrilla and counter-guerrilla conflicts in South Carolina during the last phase of the war, see Russell F. Weigley, The Partisan War: The South Carolina Campaign of 1780–1782 (1970). Albert T. Klyberg, “The Armed Loyalists as Seen by American Historians,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society (1964), stresses the Tories as armed combatants rather than merely as victims. North Callahan, Royal Raiders (1963) is episodic and noninterpretive.

Particularly important in George Billias, ed., George Washington’s Opponents: British Generals and Admirals in the American Revolution (1969) is the essay by Ira D. Gruber, “Richard Lord Howe: Admiral as Peacemaker,” which indicates clearly that one of the major reasons for the British failure to crush Washington’s army in the first two years of the war was the Howe brothers’ virtually treasonous opposition (as dedicated Whigs) to the British war effort against the Americans. For a fuller account, see Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (1972). Also see Gruber, “Lord Howe and Lord George Germain: British Politics and the Winning of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly (April 1965), pp. 225–43. On the British view of the war, see Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (1964); for its direction by Germain, see Gerald S. Brown, American Secretary: Colonial Policy of Lord George Germain (1963). Eric Robson, The American Revolution in its Political and Military Aspects, 1763–1783 (1955) is pro-British, but it reveals the crippling contempt which the British held for the Americans. William B. Willcox, Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence (1964) is a biography of the best of a rather poor lot of British generals; but see the review of the book by Curtis P. Nettels in the Journal of American History (June 1965) for a useful critique of the unfortunate tendency to psychoanalyze Clinton’s personality.

On specific aspects of the fighting, Donald E. Reynolds, “Ammunition Supply in Revolutionary Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (January 1965), pp. 56–77, treats the devastation in that state, while Dale Van Every, A Company of Heroes: The American Frontier, 1775–1783 (1963) is a lively account of the war in the West and with the Indians. A previously unknown tenant rebellion in New York is discovered in Staughton Lynd, “The Tenant Rising at Livingston Manor, May 1777,” New York Historical Society Quarterly (April 1964), pp. 163–77.

The most recent general history of the American Revolution, Page Smith, A New Age Begins: A People’s History of the American Revolution (2 vols., 1976) incorporates many detailed insights about guerrilla warfare from primary sources.

On the political history of the American Revolution, Edmund Cody Burnett, The Continental Congress (1941, 1964) remains a thorough and definitive history of that national political institution; Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774–1781 (1948) is an excellent study of the struggles around the Articles and the attempt to carry nationalism even further. Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 (1961) studies the opponents of the nationalizing trend. Despite its age, Allan Nevins, The American States During and After the Revolution, 1775–1789 (1924), remains by far the best, indeed the only satisfactory, state-by-state political history of the revolutionary period. An unfortunate attempt to replace Nevins, Jackson Turner Main, The Sovereign States, 1775–1783 (1973) is sketchy and overly schematic, while Main’s Political Parties Before the Constitution (1973) is a tangled statistical web based on a fallacious and unenlightening division between alleged “localists” and “cosmopolitans.”

Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922) is a well-written and still valuable study of the Declaration. Curtis P. Nettels, George Washington and American Independence (1951) demonstrates Washington’s early devotion to independence. Eric Foner’s Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976) is an excellent and sympathetic study of the great sparkplug of independence as a libertarian and laissez faire radical. None of the full-scale biographies of Paine do him justice; best is David Freeman Hawke, Paine (1974).

Elisha P. Douglass, Rebels and Democrats: The Struggle for Equal Political Rights and Majority Rule During the American Revolution (1955) is a valuable Beardian study of state politics during the Revolution. A thorough documentary history of the struggle over the Massachusetts state constitution during the war is presented in Robert J. Taylor, ed., Massachusetts, Colony to Commonwealth: Documents on the Formation of Its Constitution, 1775–1789 (1961). The older view that confiscated Tory land in New York did not devolve upon the tenants of the feudal landlords is set forth in Harry B. Yoshpe, The Disposition of Loyalist Estates in the Southern District of the State of New York (1939), and is refuted in Staughton Lynd, Anti-Federalism in Dutchess County, New York: A Study of Democracy and Class Conflict in the Revolutionary Era (1962), and Beatrice G. Reubens, “Preemptive Rights in the Disposition of a Confiscated Estate: Philipsburgh Manor, New York,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1965), pp. 435–56. In contrast, Ruth M. Keesey, “Loyalism in Bergen County, New Jersey,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 1961), pp. 558–76, shows that Tory lands in New Jersey tended to be small rather than feudal.

Pennsylvania, the most radically libertarian state during the war, is examined in Robert L. Brunhouse, The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776–1790 (1942), and its radical constitution specifically in John P. Selsam, The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 (1936). A valuable general work on western Pennsylvania politics in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary periods is Russell J. Ferguson, Early Western Pennsylvania Politics (1938). Maryland is studied in Philip A. Crowl, Maryland During and After the Revolution (1943).

On biographies of American revolutionary leaders, in addition to the ones mentioned above, the definitive of the numerous Jefferson biographies is the magisterial study by Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, of which see volume one: Jefferson the Virginian (1948). There is no wholly satisfactory biography of the great George Mason, whose Virginia Declaration of Rights inspired both the Declaration of Independence and the later Bill of Rights, but Robert A. Rutland, George Mason: Reluctant Statesman (1961) is useful though brief. Also see George Mason, Papers, 1725–1792, R. Rutland, ed. (3 vols., 1970), and Helen Hill Miller, George Mason: Gentleman Revolutionary (1975). The radical Pennsylvania leader, the astronomer David Rittenhouse, is studied in Brooke Hindle, David Rittenhouse (1964). Of the Massachusetts leaders, there is no satisfactory biography of Samuel Adams. John C. Miller’s Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (1936) is hostile and vituperative. Of the numerous biographies and studies of John Adams, best for this period, though not always reliable, is Catherine Drinker Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution (1950). The doughty and steadfast western Massachusetts radical, Joseph Hawley, receives a valuable biography in E. Francis Brown, Joseph Hawley: Colonial Radical (1931). And two leading New York conservative rebels receive biographies in Frank Monaghan, John Jay (1935), and the excellent George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746–1831 (1960). General Nathanael Greene is studied in Theodore Thayer, Nathanael Greene: Strategist of the American Revolution (1960). A moderate Pennsylvania leader receives an important biography in Kenneth R. Roseman, Thomas Mifflin and the Politics of the American Revolution (1952). New York’s wartime governor is studied in Ernest W. Spaulding, His Excellency George Clinton (1739–1812): Critic of the Constitution (1938).

On the economic and financial history of the war, E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790 (1961) is a superb account of the machinations of Robert Morris and the Nationalists during and after the war, including the expropriation of public funds for private purposes by Morris and his associates, and the drive for a strong central government to consolidate and extend those privileges and similar ones. This should be supplemented by Ferguson’s study of the first nationalist drive, which, though it failed, prefigured the later push for the Constitution: E. James Ferguson, “The Nationalists of 1781–1783 and the Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” Journal of American History LVI (1969), pp. 241–61. A useful biography of Morris is Clarence L. Ver Steeg, Robert Morris, Revolutionary Financier: With an Analysis of His Earlier Career (1954). There is no overall study of inflation during the war, but Anne Bezanson, “Inflation and Controls, Pennsylvania, 1774–1779,” Journal of Economic History, Supplement VIII (1948), pp. 1–20, is a careful statistical study. Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (1946) reveals the dismal record of price controls during the war; the book is made all the more valuable by the author’s sympathy with the control program.

Special groups in relation to the American Revolution are treated in Charles H. Metzger, Catholics and the American Revolution: A Study in Religious Climate (1962), and in the excellent work by Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961). Jesse Lemisch’s rather quixotic program for writing history “from the bottom up” works in a particular case where data are fortunately available, in his article, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly XXV (July 1968), pp. 371–407.

There has been increased interest in recent years in the fate of Tories during the Revolution; of these the best works are William H. Nelson, The American Tory (1961), and Paul H. Smith, Loyalists and Redcoats: A Study in British Revolutionary Policy (1964). Also see Robert M. Calhoun, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (1973), and Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (1972). A single Tory is studied in Carol Berkin, Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist (1974). The oppression of Tories in two states receives detailed treatment in Leonard W. Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (1963), and Richard C. Haskett, “Prosecuting the Revolution,” American Historical Review (April 1954), pp. 578–87, for Virginia and New Jersey respectively. Harold M. Hyman’s history of the imposition of loyalty oaths in America, To Try Men’s Souls (1960), contains a chapter on the Tories in the Revolutionary War.

The classic work on the foreign policy of the American revolutionaries is Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (1935). A far more revisionist work, treating the origins of the American Empire and focusing on internal and external policies of European states rather than on strictly diplomatic history, is Richard W. Van Alstyne, Empire and Independence: The International History of the American Revolution (1965). Felix Gilbert’s To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (1961) is an excellent work which shows the isolationist inferences for foreign policy drawn from libertarian principles by Tom Paine and other American revolutionaries. The detailed work on the negotiations of the Peace of Paris is Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (1965). But a fascinating corrective is Cecil B. Currey, Code Number 72/Ben Franklin: Patriot or Spy? (1972). Currey not only demonstrates Franklin’s participation in Robert Morris’ peculations during his ministry in Paris, but he also offers newly discovered evidence of Franklin’s probable role as a double agent on behalf of Great Britain. His shift to a pro-French role during the peace negotiations is also detailed, as well as the well-founded distrust of Franklin by Arthur Lee, John Adams, and John Jay.

There is no space here to deal with the numerous works on the nature and consequences of the American Revolution, or on the vitally important topic of the relationship between the Revolution and the Constitution. Here we may mention Gordon S. Wood’s careful and important study of the way in which libertarian ideology was conservatized during and especially after the Revolution: Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969). Richard B. Morris has many judicious insights in his The American Revolution Reconsidered (1967), and treats the American Revolution more fully as the first war of national liberation and independence from European colonialism in The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution (1970).

Perhaps the most important controversy among historians in this period is on how radical, and how revolutionary, were the nature and the consequences of the American Revolution. The first volume of Robert R. Palmer’s monumental two-volume work, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, volume one: The Challenge (1959), weaves together a scintillating tapestry of trans-Atlantic history. Palmer demonstrates the radicalism of the Revolution by pointing out both its decisive inspirational effect on the succeeding European revolutions of the late eighteenth century, and the similarity of their goals and ideologies. Palmer also shows that, by one important criterion, the American Revolution was more radical than the French, since proportionately far more Tories were driven out of America than aristocrats from France, and far fewer returned. Also see Louis Gottschalk, “The Place of the American Revolution in the Causal Pattern of the French Revolution,” in H. Ausubel, ed., The Making of Modern Europe (1951), vol. 1, and particularly Jacques Godechot, France and the American Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799 (1965). Elisha P. Douglass traces the impact of the Revolution on German intellectuals in “German Intellectuals and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly (April 1960), pp. 200–218. The best discussion of British politics in relation to the American scene is Charles R. Ritcheson, British Politics in the American Revolution (1954). The British radical movement, linked in many ways with the American cause, is studied in many works, including George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (1962).

The classic view defending the social radicalism of the American Revolution is J. Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926). This thesis was attacked and seemingly refuted during the consensus period of American historiography in the 1950s, particularly by Frederick B. Tolles, “The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement: A Re-evaluation,” American Historical Review LX (1954–1955), pp. 1–12; and by Clarence Ver Steeg, “The American Revolution Considered as an Economic Movement,” Huntington Library Quarterly XX (1957), pp. 361–72. But Robert A. Nisbet, in a brilliant article, has now rehabilitated the thesis of the American Revolution as having radical consequences, specifically in a libertarian direction. In his The Social Impact of the Revolution (1974), Nisbet shows that the Revolution had a radical libertarian impact on American society in abolishing feudal land tenure, in establishing religious freedom, and in beginning to abolish slavery. Thus, to the insight of Bernard Bailyn on the libertarian sources of the Revolution (whose works were cited in the bibliographic essay in volume three of this work) is added the Nisbet discussion of its libertarian consequences.

The impact of the Revolution on suffrage may be found in Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (1960). Staughton Lynd revives the neglected older view of the great importance of sectional conflicts over slavery as early as the 1780s, in Staughton Lynd, “The Abolitionist Critique of the United States Constitution,” in M. Duberman, ed., The Anti-Slavery Vanguard (1965). Challenging insights are to be found in Staughton Lynd, “The Revolution and the Common Man,” part one (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1962).

Finally, for further bibliography on the Revolution, John Shy, comp. The American Revolution (1973) is indispensable for work published before 1972; unfortunately, as in the case of all the Goldentree series, the bibliography is not annotated.

*Part of this essay appears, in altered form, in Murray N. Rothbard, “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution,” Literature of Liberty (January/March 1978), pp. 16–41.