Breen's analysis of emotion and popular support in the American Revolution

Breen's book showed that the American Revolution was built more on instinctive emotion than the rational action and decision-making that some think it to be. I also learned that the revolution was more popular with far more people supporting it, and vociferously so, than I had believed from movies such as 1776. Lastly, I was astonished to discover that the pitch and passion of the people was regulated by safety committees that were set up throughout the fighting nation to control and regulate the mood.

Passion of war

According to John Adams, "the Revolution was affected before the war commenced." It did not come about in a rational cause-and-effect manner as a result of the taxes leveraged at the end of the French war against the British as many history textbooks make it seem to be. Rather the colonists had long and entrenched feelings of distrust and animosity against the British, and the taxes were the last actions that flared emotion into war.

Anger, a sense of injustice, and sentiments of religious belief fueled the impetus of the Revolution. Political reasons hardly, if ever, entered the equation. The mass of them willingly entered the army "without bothering to reflect on the abstract political theories that allegedly justified the Revolution" (36), and, in fact, many of those famous people who we know about who were involved in the Revolution primarily acted from "anger rather than enlightened debate." (ibid.). It was emotion, then, that largely defined the Revolution rather than the political motivation of founding a democracy and establishing themselves as a nation that characterizes the reasoning given for the Revolution by some of the history textbooks.

3. Committees of Safety

Even whilst war was going on, the colonists imposed some form of structure instituting committees of safety or observation that were authorized by the First Continental Congress in 1774.

Analysis of these committees is, however, mixed since they seemed sometimes to play on both sides of the party lines as well as being controlled by non-democratic processes. North Carolina's royal governor Josiah Martin, for instance, viewed them as seized by "the Mob" whilst many colonists feared likewise. These committees played a great deal in developing the revolution by seizing control of local governments, transforming political culture, and ultimately, in a peripheral manner, forming the republican form of government of the United States. They were positive in that they helped regulate revolutionary violence, although their contribution is mixed.

In the end, Breen's book opened me up to factors of the Revolution that I was unaware existed and it changed some of my previously held assumptions.

Source

Breen, TH. American insurgents. American patriots: The revolution of the people before independence. Hill & Wang, USA, 2011.