Between Sovereignty and Anarchy

The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era

Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onuf, Brian Schoen, Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onuf, Brian Schoen

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780813936796
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Between Sovereignty and Anarchy considers the conceptual and political problem of violence in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic, charting an innovative approach to the history of the American Revolution. Its editors and contributors contend that existing scholarship on the Revolution largely ignores questions of power and downplays the Revolution as a contest over sovereignty. Contributors employ a variety of methodologies to examine diverse themes, ranging from how Atlantic perspectives can redefine our understanding of revolutionary origins, to the ways in which political culture, mobilization, and civil-war-like violence were part of the revolutionary process, to the fundamental importance of state formation for the history of the early republic.

The editors skillfully meld these emerging currents to produce a new perspective on the American Revolution, revealing how America—first as colonies, then as united states—reeled between poles of anarchy and sovereignty. This interpretation—gleaned from essays on frontier bloodshed, religion, civility, slavery, loyalism, mobilization, early national political culture, and war making—provides a needed stimulus to a field that has not strayed beyond the bounds of "rhetoric versus reality" for more than a generation. Between Sovereignty and Anarchy raises foundational questions about how we are to view the American Revolution and the experimental democracy that emerged in its wake.

Contributors: Chris Beneke, Bentley University · Andrew Cayton, Miami University · Matthew Rainbow Hale, Goucher College · David C. Hendrickson, Colorado College · John C. Kotruch, University of New Hampshire · Peter C. Messer, Mississippi State University · Kenneth Owen, University of Illinois at Springfield · Jeffrey L. Pasley, University of Missouri, Columbia · Jessica Choppin Roney, Temple University · Peter Thompson, University of Oxford

INDEX

Act for the More Effectual Disarming of the Highlands in Scotland, An (1746), 47

Act of Toleration (1649), 66

Adams, Abigail, 84, 239

Adams, John, 84, 143, 192, 201, 219, 224, 232–35, 268, 290

Adams, John Quincy, 232, 235

African Americans, 16, 65, 140–60

Alien and Sedition Acts, 192, 194, 201

Allen, William, 95

Alliance, Treaty of (1778), 220

American Apollo, 246

American exceptionalism, 189, 285, 288

Amherst, Sir Jeffery, 49–50

Amherst’s War, 50

Anglo-American Treaty (1783), 152, 227, 264, 266, 268–96

Anti-Federalists, 172–78, 223, 230, 235

Appalachian Mountains, 48, 52, 264, 266–70, 278

Arab Spring, 188, 198

Armeé du Nord, 254

Armitage, David, 8

Articles of Association, 99–101, 157

Articles of Confederation, 219, 235, 264, 268

Associators, 84, 90, 93, 95, 97–106, 140–41, 146, 148, 152, 154–55

Atlantic system, 6, 16, 216

Atlantic world, 16, 32, 41–42, 55, 118, 126, 194, 244, 254, 263, 265, 267, 279

Bache, Benjamin Franklin, 201–8, 210

Bacon’s Rebellion, 142

Bailyn, Bernard, 2

Baldwin, Ebenezer, 147

Baltimore Rangers Light Infantry Company, 253

Baltimore Republican Society, 209

Barton, Thomas, 53

Bastille, 245

Bayle, Pierre, 66

Behn, Aphra, 26, 28

Bemis, Samuel Flagg, 267

Berlin, 232

Bermuda, 142

Bernard, Franci...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• “The Constant Snare of the Fear of Man” Authority and Violence in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic
• Destroying and Reforming Canaan Making America British
• “Not by Force or Violence” Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, and Rights of Conscience in the Early National United States
• Government without Arms; Arms without Government The Case of Pennsylvania
• Stamps and Popes Rethinking the Role of Violence in the Coming of the American Revolution
• Social Death and Slavery The Logic of Political Association and the Logic of Chattel Slavery in Revolutionary America
• Violence and the Limits of the Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania
• Whiskey Chaser Democracy and Violence in the Debate over the Democratic-Republican Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion
• Escaping Insecurity The American Founding and the Control of Violence
• American Hercules Militant Sovereignty and Violence in the Democratic-Republican Imagination, 1793–1795
• The Battle of Fallen Timbers An Assertion of U.S. Sovereignty in the Atlantic World along the Banks of the Maumee River
• Epilogue
• List of Contributors
• Index