Wood--My Highlights of Ch. 1-4

For what it's worth, here are what I saw as the highlights of Ch. 1-4:

Intro.

Thesis: If we measure the radicalism of revolutions by the degree of social misery or economic deprivation suffered, or by the number of people killed or manor houses burned, then this conventional emphasis on the conservatism of the American Revolution becomes true enough. But if we measure the radicalism by the amount of social change that actually took place—by transformations in the relationships that bound people to each other—then the American Revolution was not conservative at all; on the contrary: it was as radical and as revolutionary as any in history.

By the time the Revolution had run its course in the early nineteenth century, American society had been radically and thoroughly transformed. One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich.7 But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed, and decisively so. By the early

thinking. The Revolution not only radically changed the personal and social relationships of people, including the position of women, but also destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western world for at least two millennia. The Revolution brought respectability and even dominance to ordinary people long held in contempt and gave dignity to their menial labor in a manner unprecedented in history and to a degree not equaled elsewhere in the world. The Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics;

Monarchy

Ch. 1 Hierarchy

Monarchy presumed what Hume called “a long train of dependence,” a gradation of degrees of freedom and servility that linked everyone from the king at the top down to the bonded laborers and black slaves at the bottom. The inequalities of such a hierarchy were acceptable to people because they were offset by the great emotional satisfactions of living in a society in which everyone, even the lowliest servant, counted for something.

stilts.” Ideally, people were expected to find and attend to “the proper Business” of their particular place within the social order and to “consider their mutual Relations and Dependencies, and duly perform the Duties of their respective Stations” and thus promote the moral consensus and harmony essential for a healthy society.

                -The colonies had their hierarchy.

They thought of themselves as connected vertically rather than horizontally, and were more apt to be conscious of those immediately above and below them than they were of those alongside them.

Ch. 2 Patricians and Plebeians

So distinctive and so separated was the aristocracy from ordinary folk that many still thought the two groups represented two orders of being. Indeed, we will never appreciate the radicalism of the eighteenth-century revolutionary idea that all men were created equal unless we see it within this age-old tradition of difference. Gentlemen and commoners had different psyches, different emotional makeups, different natures. Ordinary people were made only “to be born and eat and sleep and die, and be forgotten.” Like Mozart’s Papageno, they knew “little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action, pride, honour, and ambition.

We will never comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we appreciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness. Only then can we begin to understand the radical changes in this consciousness of humility, among other things, that the American Revolution brought about.

Ultimately, beneath all these strenuous efforts to define gentility lay the fundamental classical characteristic of being free and independent. The liberality for which gentlemen were known connoted freedom—freedom from material want, freedom from the caprice of others, freedom from ignorance, and freedom from having to work with one’s hands. The gentry’s distinctiveness came from being independent in a world of dependencies, learned in a world only partially literate and leisured in a world of laborers.

honor was the very life and soul of monarchy. It set all parts of a monarchical society in motion and by its very action connected them together.

3. Patriarchal Dependence

Since most relationships in this hierarchical society were still very personal, they were also necessarily paternalistic.

The family was, in fact, not simply those living under one roof but all those dependent on the single head. And this head, the patriarch, was the only one who dealt with the larger world.

Slavery could be regarded, therefore, as merely the most base and degraded status in a society of several degrees of unfreedom, and most colonists felt little need as yet either to attack or to defend slavery any more than other forms of dependency and debasement.

Many colonists, therefore, not only black slaves but white servants and young men and a variety of tenants and of course all women, knew firsthand what dependence meant. Dependence, said James Wilson in 1774, was “very little else, but an obligation to conform to the will … of that superior person … upon which the inferior depends.” People who were dependent could not be free; in fact, “freedom and dependency” were “opposite and irreconcilable terms.” Dependents were all those who had no wills of their own; thus like children they could have no political personalities and could rightfully be excluded from participation in public life. It was this reasoning that underlay the denial of the vote to women, servants, apprentices, short-term tenants, minors, and sons over twenty-one still living at home with their parents.

4. Patronage

Personal relationships of dependence, usually taking the form of those between patrons and clients, constituted the ligaments that held this society together and made it work. The popular “deference” that historians have made so much of was not a mere habit of mind; it had real economic and social force behind it. Artisans in America, like their counterparts in Britain, still had patrons more than they had customers. Tradesmen and shopkeepers were told that “the Seller is Servant to the Buyer”…most colonial craftsmen still made wigs or boots or built homes or ships on demand for familiar gentlemen (“bespoke work”) and felt obliged to them. And that sense of obligation and dependency could have emotional and economic satisfactions that often more than compensated for any loss of freedom and independence.

Credits and debts more often worked to tie local people together and to define and stabilize communal relationships. Because such debts were individually small, were locally owed, and often lacked any explicitly stated promise to pay, they implied a measure of mutual trust between people. Such debts could even be regarded as social bonds linking people together.

The great planters were the protectors, creditors, and counselors—“friends”—of the lesser farmers. They lent them money, found jobs or minor posts for their sons, stood as godfathers for their children, handed down clothing to their families, doctored them, and generally felt responsible for the welfare of “our neighbors who depended upon us.”

Only a society that intuitively conceived of individuals as enmeshed in social relationships—bound tightly to the community in a variety of personal ways—could make sense of such public confessions and of the traditional public punishments still common in the eighteenth century.