Contemporary Authors

• The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2016

1. The common cause : creating race and nation in the American Revolution LCCN 2016000574 Type of material Book Personal name Parkinson, Robert G., author. Main title The common cause : creating race and nation in the American Revolution / by Robert G. Parkinson. Published/Produced Chapel Hill : Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, [2016] Description xi, 742 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm ISBN 9781469626635 (cloth : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER E209 .P34 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Binghamton University - https://www.binghamton.edu/history/people/faculty/parkinson.html

  Robert G. Parkinson
  Assistant Professor
  Ph.D. University of Virginia, 2005
  Early America, American Revolution
  Office: LT 605
  Phone: 607-777-4416
  Email: rparkins@binghamton.edu
  My research interests are in early American history, especially the American Revolution. My book, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution, was published in June 2016 with the Omohundro Institute series with the University of North Carolina Press. It explores how questions of race collided with pressing issues of nation building at the Founding. I argue that patriot political and communications leaders embraced the publication of war stories about resistant slaves, hostile Indians, and German mercenaries to define the British as the enemies of American freedom and bind the thirteen colonies together in a "common cause," a campaign that buried ideas of racial difference deeply in the foundation of the new nation. My current book project, Incident at Yellow Creek, is a microhistory about how the grisly murder of nine Indians on a tributary of the Ohio River in 1774 exerted a surprisingly powerful influence in the political and rhetorical life of the early American republic.
  My teaching interests include the American Revolution and Founding, Colonial America, history of American slavery, Native American history, nation-making and race in the early modern world.
  Publications
  The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, June 2016).
  "Friends and Enemies in the Declaration of Independence," Jeffersonians in Power: Essays in Honor of Peter Onuf, Johann Neem & Joanne Freeman, eds. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, forthcoming).
  "'Manifest Signs of Passion': The First Federal Congress, Antislavery, and Revolutionary Decisions about America's Identity," Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation, John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason, eds. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 49-68.
  "The Declaration of Independence," Blackwell Companion to Thomas Jefferson, Frank Cogliano, ed. (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 44-59.
  "Print, the Press, and the American Revolution," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, Jon Butler and Christopher Grasso, eds. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
  "Twenty-Seven Reasons for Independence" in Declaring Independence: The Origin and Influence of America's Founding Document, Peter S. Onuf and Christian Dupont, eds. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). * reprinted in The American Revolution Reader (Routledge Readers in History), Denver Brunsman and David Silverman, eds. (Routledge, 2013)
  "War and the Imperative of Union," invited comment in Forum on David Waldstreicher and Staughton Lynd, "Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence," William & Mary Quarterly 3rd series 68 (October 2011): 631-634.
  "From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen: The Revolutionary Transformation of Michael Cresap," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series 63 (January 2006): 97-122.
  "First from the Right: Massive Resistance and the Image of Thomas Jefferson in the 1950s," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 112 (July 2004): 2-34.
  I have published book reviews in the Journal of American History, William & Mary Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Journal of the Early Republic, Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, Common-Place, The Historian, Interario, Law & History Review and the Virginia Quarterly Review.
  Awards and Fellowships
  Institute-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg
  I have held fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Rockefeller Library at Colonial Williamsburg, the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, the David Library of the American Revolution, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.

• The Way of Improvement Leads Home - https://thewayofimprovement.com/2016/07/11/the-authors-corner-with-robert-parkinson/

  The Author’s Corner With Robert Parkinson
  JULY 11, 2016 / JOHNFEA
  Robert Parkinson

  Robert Parkinson is Assistant Professor of history at Binghamton University. This interview is based on his new book The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

  JF: What led you to write The Common Cause?

  RP: It started with a comment Peter Onuf threw off in a class, about the continued association with British and Indians on the frontier for years after the end of the Revolution. I thought that needed some research, but I had no idea where to start. So I figured, newspapers were as good as any place to begin. There I found a tremendous amount of material about British agents fomenting slave and Indian resistance against the “cause.” As I read more, I began to find the same stories repeated in different newspapers over and over and over again, and I began to wonder a) how that happened, and b) what did it mean? The central argument of The Common Cause came from the newspapers themselves.

  JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of The Common Cause?

  RP:In order to achieve and sustain union among the 13 jealous colonies after the shooting started, patriot leaders elaborated upon the “common cause” argument: all Americans should resist British tyranny because imperial officials were inciting the enslaved, Indians, and foreign mercenaries to destroy them. Spreading these ideas through weekly newspaper articles, patriot leaders (especially Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Washington) made the “common cause” about racial exclusion.

  JF: Why do we need to read The Common Cause?

  RP: For a long time now, scholars have gnashed their teeth and lamented about the impasse in Revolution historiography: ideas vs. interests, top-down vs. bottom-up, no synthesis only stasis since the 1970s. I didn’t set out to write an interpretation that merged the two, but I think I have. Unlike Wood’s Radicalism, I not only show how ideas actually move, but I explain just how prevalent and present African Americans and Indians were to the everyday strategizing, planning, and publicizing of the American Revolution.

  JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?

  RP: As for most of us, it started at a very young age. I remember being enthralled at reenactments at Lexington Green and demanding to go to Plymouth Plantation every Saturday. I didn’t decide to be a professional historian, though, until my senior year in college, doing serious research in social history in local historical societies, cemeteries, and county courthouses in Pennsylvania. In other words, because of public history.

  JF: What is your next project?

  RP: I am currently working on a short project and then taking on another long study. About a decade back, while doing research for The Common Cause I came across the elaborate funeral in NYC of the renowned frontiersman (and notorious Indian killer) Michael Cresap, and I wrote up my findings in a WMQ piece. I’m returning to that research now, writing a short book on the Cresap family and the consequences and legacies of the 1774 murders on Yellow Creek that I am aiming at an undergraduate/survey audience. We need more short books on the Revolution (look who’s talking!), especially ones that incorporate natives and the frontier, for the survey.

  The long study is at this point not much more than a question: how do you write an environmental history of the Constitution? I am trained as a political historian, not an environmental one, and I think that has the chance to offer fresh insights and blend those two fields. Many of the questions in environmental history revolve around law and legal practice; how human rules intersect with, get inscribed onto, and shape nature. I think the supreme law of the land deserves study in this way. But the task is daunting, thus my phrasing: how do you write it?

  JF: Thanks,Robert!

Parkinson, Robert G.: The Common Cause:
Creating Race and Nation in the American
Revolution
John R. Burch
Library Journal.
141.9 (May 15, 2016): p90.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Parkinson, Robert G. The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. Univ. of North
Carolina. Jun. 2016. 768p. illus. maps. notes. index. ISBN 9781469626635. $45; ebk. ISBN 9781469626925. HIST
"Common cause" was a phrase often utilized in Europe during the 18th century to justify imperial alliances against a
shared enemy. In this engrossing monograph, Parkinson (history, Binghamton Univ.) recounts how colonial leaders,
including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, co­opted the phrase through
colonial newspapers to bind the 13 colonies to fight the American Revolution. Their aims were achieved through the
constant publication of inflammatory articles alleging that Great Britain was arming Native Americans and Africans to
wage war on the respective colonies. While kernels of truth existed in a fraction of the stories, they were at best gross
exaggerations, if not outright fabrications. The consequence of the tactic was that when the war was over, it ensured
that there was no place in the new country for Native peoples or Africans and their descendants. This included those
people of color who were devoted patriots who had fought and died alongside the colonists for the common cause.
VERDICT A must­read for anyone interested in the American Revolution and issues of race. For further exploration,
consider James Corbett David's Dunmore's New World.­­John R. Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Burch, John R. "Parkinson, Robert G.: The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution."
Library Journal, 15 May 2016, p. 90. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883855&it=r&asid=98878d42ff9b3250a65953e9c5154f93.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452883855

The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation
in the American Revolution
Publishers Weekly.
263.18 (May 2, 2016): p41.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution
Robert G. Parkinson. Univ. of North Carolina, $45 (768p) ISBN 978­1­4696­2663­5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In this extensively researched study, Parkinson, assistant professor of history at Binghamton University, explores the
roles played by concepts of inclusion and exclusion among the supporters of the patriot cause in the American
Revolution. Drawing primarily upon an immense array of colonial American newspapers, Parkinson emphasizes the
methods by which leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, and both John and Samuel Adams mobilized the
printed word in countering the "catalog of forces acting against American unity." To undercut the divisiveness of issues
such as voting rights, land distribution, religious heterodoxy, and slaveholding, these revolutionaries focused their
readers' hostility against both their British rulers and perceived enemies within their own communities. Their literature
increasingly centered on the supposed dangers presented by Native Americans and slaves­­groups that the British
urged to revolt against local authorities. The book is academically focused, offering a detailed and insightful analysis
of how newspapers became loci of communication and shapers of individuals' and communities' senses of themselves
as political actors. Moreover, Parkinson persuasively explains the intensely racialized nature of citizenship in the newly
independent U.S. and the long­standing problems posed by the exclusion of Americans of indigenous or African
heritage from the "common cause" of the Revolution. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution." Publishers Weekly, 2 May 2016, p. 41.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452884017&it=r&asid=00688d69c10d2f243f4ea26aa4155065.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452884017

Burch, John R. "Parkinson, Robert G.: The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution." Library Journal, 15 May 2016, p. 90. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883855&it=r. Accessed 2 Feb. 2017. "The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution." Publishers Weekly, 2 May 2016, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452884017&it=r. Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.

• New York Review of Books
  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/american-revolution-captive-aliens-our-shame/
  Word count: 3695

  The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame
  Annette Gordon-Reed JANUARY 19, 2017 ISSUE
  The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution
  by Robert Parkinson
  University of North Carolina Press, 742 pp., $45.00
  Johannes Adam Oertel: Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, 1848
  Collection of the New-York Historical Society
  Johannes Adam Oertel: Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, 1848
  It is a commonplace that being an American is a matter neither of blood nor of cultural connections forged over time. It is, instead, a commitment to a set of ideals famously laid down by the country’s founders, and refined over generations with a notion of progress as a guiding principle. The Declaration of Independence, with Thomas Jefferson’s soaring language about the equality of mankind and the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” is the most powerful statement of those ideals. It is sometimes called America’s “creed.”

  Of course, what it means to be an American is not—has never been—so simple a proposition. Seeing the men most typically described as the “founders” of the United States as sources of inspired ideals equally available to all conflicts with our knowledge of the way most of them saw and treated Native Americans and African-Americans during the founding period. Indeed, for decades now, much of the historiography of the founding has presented a complex story, exploring the many ways in which the Revolution, and the people who made it, fell far short of sharing with all people the Spirit of 1776’s indictment of tyranny and calls for liberty and equality. A good number of the most famous revolutionaries enslaved people, and the ones who did not own slaves chose not to work actively against the institution—even when they recognized that slavery was a great injustice. Some of those same men, eager for westward expansion, talked of removal of Indians whose land would then be taken by white settlers.

  Balancing the tragic aspects of the country’s origins against the triumphant is a tricky business. And some may even question whether a balance should be struck, thinking that either tragedy or triumph so obviously predominates that it is unnecessary, if not foolish or immoral, to do any weighing. But it appears that the more complicated narrative, which now includes blacks and Native Americans, has heightened interest in the founding of the United States. People who may have been frustrated reading histories that failed to acknowledge how the past had worked upon their ancestors—or avoided reading them at all—feel part of a searching conversation. That inquiry almost invariably touches on the extent to which the past influences the present on matters of race, for there is every reason to believe that the basic contours of the country’s treacherous racial landscape were fashioned early on in our history.

  There have been many occasions of late to think about these matters. A series of widely reported events involving black people and law enforcement has raised anew the question of exactly what type of citizenship African-Americans possess. That the United States has a race problem is not exactly news. Explorations of this aspect of our culture have produced some of America’s finest fiction and nonfiction over the years. But technology now brings the problem home in urgent and visceral ways. With too great regularity, encounters between blacks and police officers, captured on smartphones, fly across cyberspace, revealing to the world what African-Americans and other people of color have been saying for years: the Constitution does not work for black people as it works for whites.

  Instead of being treated as citizens at liberty in a republic who have the right to be free from tyranny, African-Americans are treated as if the words “liberty” “republic,” and “tyranny” have no application to them. These were some of the words the founders used as they made the case for breaking away from the British Empire and setting up a federal union for the benefit of a newly constituted American citizenry. The policing of black people, in contrast to the treatment of true citizens, too often employs tactics that might be used against a captive alien group living in a country at the sufferance of a dominant community. How did this happen?

  Certainly the institution of slavery, with its plantation rules and slave patrols, helped tell both Americans and the world how blacks living in the United States were, and are, to be seen and treated—“plantation to prison” is now a familiar plus ça change remark, linking the black present to the black past. And then there is 1787, when the framers in Philadelphia, seeking to “form a more perfect Union,” ended up creating what the historian David Waldstreicher has called “slavery’s Constitution,” which enshrined racially based slavery in the “supreme law of the land.” What could be a more powerful statement about how people of African descent can be treated?

  Robert Parkinson, in his brilliant, timely, and indispensable book The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution, offers a provocative alternative to the conventional views that blacks’ perpetual alien status in the United States is simply a natural outgrowth of having been enslaved, and that making them—and Native Americans—outsiders in the United States was a post-Revolutionary, early-nineteenth-century project. Americans were deciding who was “in” and who was “out” as soon as they began to fight Great Britain.

  Parkinson does not discount slavery’s importance to shaping attitudes about African-Americans. Nor does he deny that the early American republic saw the rise of open calls for a “white man’s government” and the formalized policy of Indian Removal. But he goes back to 1775, when the American Revolution turned into the Revolutionary War, to locate the origins of racial exclusion in the society that would become the United States of America. It was during these days, Parkinson says, that patriot leaders made a fateful choice. They embarked upon a specific and concerted plan to place blacks and Native Americans—no matter what their condition, whether they believed in the patriots’ ideals or not—firmly outside the boundaries of America’s experiment with democratic republicanism.

  “Men like Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Washington,” Parkinson writes, “developed a myth about who was and was not a part of the Revolutionary movement; about who had an interest and who did not.” Other esteemed advocates of the Revolution, such as Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette, joined the effort. According to Parkinson, these men chose to prosecute the American war for independence in a way that put race at the heart of the matter. They used—actually helped foment—racial prejudice as the principal means of creating unity across the thirteen colonies in order to prepare Americans to do battle with Great Britain. The base sentiments they promoted for “political expediency” survived the fighting, and the “narrative” that dismissed blacks and Native peoples as alien to America—and conflated “white” and “citizen”—“lived at the heart of the republic it helped create for decades to come.” It kept both groups from “inclusion as Americans.” Parkinson is blunt about the results of this program:

  This refusal to extend to African Americans and Indians the benefits of emerging concepts of liberal subjectivity in the form of citizenship had ghastly consequences, for it legitimated and excused the destruction of vast numbers of human beings.

  Parkinson writes with authority on military, political, social, and cultural history, reconstructing the story of this critical period as it actually unfolded, with everything happening at once. Instead of picking representative samples, he addresses what was happening across the breadth of the colonies. This makes for a long book, but scholars and readers interested in race and the Revolution will be grateful for all the detail. The Common Cause lays bare the patriots’ activities with such precision that it will be impossible to think seriously about the American Revolutionary War—or the revolutionaries—without reference to this book’s prodigious research, wholly unsentimental perspective, and bracing analysis.

  How is a society persuaded to go to war, and to persist in the face of mounting casualties and all the suffering and dislocations attendant to war? This was a particularly vexing question for the proponents of war with Great Britain in the 1770s who, if they were to have any chance of success against the most powerful nation on earth, had to find a way to make thirteen separate societies act as one. Parkinson reminds us:

  Jealousies, rivalries, and even violent controversies alienated the colonies in the early 1770s. Border conflicts, religious disputes, and concerns about slavery drove them apart. The colonies were just as poised to attack one another as to join together on the eve of war. The near impossibility of getting the colonies to agree to oppose Great Britain with one voice meant compromises on the most divisive issues on the one hand, and creative storytelling on the other….

  The leaders of that movement had to craft an appeal that simultaneously overcame some of those inherent fault lines and jealousies, neutralized their opponents’ claims, and made them the only true protectors of freedom. They needed to make what they called “the cause” common.

  At left, a black soldier in the Yorktown campaign; detail of a sketch by Jean Baptiste Antoine de Verger, circa 1781
  Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library
  At left, a black soldier in the Yorktown campaign; detail of a sketch by Jean Baptiste Antoine de Verger, circa 1781
  American colonials were familiar with the phrase “common cause” from two traditions. Protestants used it to exhort the faithful to stand against other denominations and religions, and British monarchs spoke of the “common cause” in annual messages describing the empire’s participation in one or another military contest—messages that were then printed in colonial newspapers. It signaled that something important was at stake and, at the same time, created an inside “us” versus an outside “them.” Delineating a common cause—protecting the colonies against alleged overreaching by the British government as it made various imperial reforms—was a necessary first step in the process of binding the colonies to one another. A crucial question would be how to figure out who was the “us” in this formulation and who was to be designated “them.”

  The patriot leader John Adams perhaps has been the most influential voice in shaping the historical view of how the colonies came to make common cause with one another. His words on the subject have echoed through the years, influencing scholarly and popular conceptions of the Revolution and the war:

  The complete accomplishment of [uniting the colonies], in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind. Thirteen clocks were made to strike together—a perfection of mechanism, which no artist has ever before effected.

  The image of “thirteen clocks” striking all at once is poetic, to be sure. It captures both the autonomy of the colonies (each its own clock) and the uncanny nature of the unity achieved once they came to believe their “cause” against Great Britain was “common.” It does not, however, tell us exactly how they came to “strike” together. It was as if the concerns about taxation, representation, and British tyranny made it self-evident why the colonies ended up in an armed conflict with their cousins across the sea. Parkinson convincingly demonstrates that the clocks did not strike at once all on their own. Patriot leaders, Adams among them, were setting the clocks to ensure they struck as near together as possible.

  In a late-in-life missive to Thomas Jefferson, Adams drew a distinction between the American Revolution and “the war” that “was no part of the Revolution.” “The Revolution,” Adams insisted, “was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775.” While “a sea change in the attitudes of many colonists toward Britain and the empire” did take place within the period Adams set out, the American Revolution was far from complete in 1775. As they pushed out the British, the Americans were actively creating, in their minds and in practice, the world that would exist once the British were gone. Situating the Revolution in the mind privileges the abstract ideals associated with the Spirit of 1776, diverting our attention from the interplay between thought and action—that is to say the ideological justifications for starting the Revolution and prosecution of the war that made the Revolution successful.

  After Lexington and Concord, Parkinson writes, “the patriots needed a new script to animate a new kind of resistance. They needed war stories.” The war stories the patriots told, and in some cases declined to tell, “made republican policies of exclusion possible by supplying patriotic ammunition for attacking Indians and expanding west” and gave “rhetorical cover for those who sought to deepen and extend the slave system.” The common cause narrative thus buried “race deep in the political structure of the new republic.”

  Effective war stories were definitely required because despite the colonists’ complaints about tyranny and being reduced to—of all things—“slavery,” they were “the least taxed, most socially mobile, highest landowning, arguably most prosperous people in the western world.” Convincing a critical mass of this population to believe their lives were so miserable that they had to take up arms to fight their so-called oppressors required a very good story, indeed. Eloquent words about abstract rights would not do. History has taught the sad lesson that fear and contempt are the most predictably powerful motivators for galvanizing one group to move against another. The same was true for the American colonists with regard to their “cultural cousins.” Leaders of the movement “had to destroy as much of the public’s affection for their ancestors as they could.”

  It was essential, Parkinson argues,

  to demonstrate that the British were strangers. Suspicious foreigners. To accomplish this vital, difficult task they embraced the most powerful weapons in the colonial arsenal: stereotypes, prejudices, expectations, and fears about violent Indians and Africans.

  They tied blacks and Indians and, for a time, Hessian mercenaries to George III, labeling them as his “proxies.” They were all to be considered “strangers,” even though blacks (enslaved and free) had lived among white Americans for years and, in spite of the many conflicts with Native peoples, whites and Indians did not only meet in battles. They were not unknown to one another. British overtures to Indians and blacks were, according to Benjamin Franklin, enough to “dissolve all Allegiance” with the Mother Country.

  Franklin made up stories about groups being used by the British—proxies—and worked with Lafayette to prepare a book (never published) with illustrations for “children and Posterity” detailing British abuses of Americans. Of the twenty-six proposed illustrations—we have Franklin’s suggested twenty and Lafayette’s six in their own hands—many revolve around proxies. Lafayette suggested an illustration showing “prisoners being ‘Roasted for a great festival where the Canadian Indians are eating American flesh.’” He also proposed a scene depicting “British officers” taking the “opportunity of corrupting Negroes and Engaging them to desert from the house, to Robb, and even to Murder they [sic] Masters.” Britain’s military mercenaries, the Hessians, were not depicted. Americans today often speak of racial prejudice as a thing that simply exists—like air—with no nod to the actual work it takes to create and maintain systems based upon prejudice. Parkinson homes in on that work: what it took in the 1770s to stoke racial hostility and keep it in place.

  Patriot leaders helped spread the racially based narrative of a common cause through newspapers, the “most advanced method of communication of the age.” They planted stories and supplied letters and other documents to make the case. This material was not placed on the front pages, which were directed at “elite colonists”—containing political and cultural writings—or the back pages, which carried advertisements. It was placed in “the interior of the newspaper[s], where the bulk of the actual news appeared,” a place, Parkinson argues, that has received insufficient attention from historians of the Revolution. These pages were made up of reports gathered through the newspaper exchange system by which publications shared news of events in cities and towns throughout the colonies. Before the Revolution, they were filled with stories from “the eastern side of the Atlantic.” Once the Revolution and the war started, the exchanges were nearly always concerned with intercolony affairs.

  The importance of these papers for “propagating” the common cause was clear from the start.* By “the summer of 1775,” the “majority” of the stories on the inside of colonial newspapers were about “the role African Americans and Indians might play in the burgeoning war.” While historians have focused much attention on George Washington’s going to Cambridge to head the Continental Army, the real story of 1775, Parkinson says, was the “hundreds of smaller messages” that were pushed through colonial newspapers about the threat that blacks and Indians, allegedly under the total control of the British, posed to patriot lives. These messages continued throughout the war.

  The patriots did have cause for concern about some blacks and Indians. Many enslaved people saw the war as an opportunity to gain their freedom, while many free blacks saw fighting in the war on the American side as a way to prove their patriotism. Great books have been written about these men, which Parkinson duly acknowledges. The offer of Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, to free men enslaved by patriots in return for their military service inflamed white colonists and brought scores of blacks to the British side. And some Native Americans, long accustomed to playing European power politics, sided with the British. Patriot leaders “worked assiduously to make this the foundation of why colonists should support resistance [to the British] and, eventually, independence.” They did so despite the fact that other blacks and Indians fought alongside white patriots, and more would have done so had the patriots been willing to put more of them in uniform.

  Parkinson shows, however, that the newspapers did not circulate stories about black and Indian patriots:

  Unless Americans watched the army march by, they had scarcely any idea that there were hundreds of African Americans and Indian soldiers serving under Washington’s command. Even though the Continental Army would be the most integrated army the United States would field until the Vietnam War, most Americans had little knowledge of their service in fighting for the common cause.

  Items about blacks acting as soldiers in the British army and of Indian massacres (often in retaliation for massacres committed by whites) were regularly reported, and some of the stories about the Indians’ depredations were hoaxes.

  There was no sorting of African-Americans and Indians into “good” or “bad.” Members of those groups could never be “good” no matter what they did, because they could never be white. Things were different for the Hessian mercenaries, also hated as “proxies.” Feared and reviled in the newspapers as “men monsters” when they arrived in America, the tune about the Hessians changed during the war. After Washington soundly defeated them at the Battle of Trenton, these white men were gradually transformed into sympathetic victims of the British. Eventually they were offered permanent places—land—in the new country they had tried to prevent from coming into being. There would be no redemption for their fellow “proxies.” Nor could the patriots undo what they had done in marking blacks and Indians “as alien” and “unfit to fully belong as members of the new republic.”

  If Americans know how the patriots’ rhetoric of the common cause exploited fears about the “proxies” of George III, it is likely because of Jefferson’s recitation, at the end of the Declaration of Independence, of the monarch’s “long train of abuses.” These included “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death,” inciting “domestic insurrections amongst us,” and endeavoring “to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” Parkinson sees that language, and the other grievances, as central to the patriots’ cause. In his view,

  the Declaration was an effort to draw a line between friends and enemies, between “us” and “them”—or…between “we” [the Americans] and “he” [the King].

  It is the “first assertion of an ‘American people.’”

  While the language of grievance was central to the patriots’ cause, that is not the language that has moved generations the world over:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

  Parkinson insists that “the most important two words in the Declaration are not about equality or happiness.” The most important words are “he” and “we,” speaking of King George and the American people, the opposing forces to which the common cause addressed itself. But that is true only if the Declaration is, as some originalists and textualists say of the United States Constitution, a “dead” thing that can only bear the meaning given by the people who wrote it, and we can never move beyond their intentions—and their limitations.

  Whatever one wants to believe about the Constitution, the course of American history shows that the Declaration is alive. Seeing the document’s pronouncements about equality and happiness as living and important—as our guiding light to progress—offers the best chance we have of vanquishing the continuing effects of the mischief Parkinson so ably describes in his very important book.

• Advocate (Graduate Center, CUNY)
  http://gcadvocate.com/2016/12/17/dark-side-american-revolution-review-robert-parkinsons-common-cause-creating-race-nation-american-revolution/
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  POSTED ON 17 DECEMBER 2016 BY ZAMMATARO
  The Dark Side of the American Revolution: A Review of Robert Parkinson’s The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution

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  Evan Turiano

  front-coverCivics curricula in the United States teach us a particular narrative about the American Revolution in terms of its origins and motivations. This prevailing story is that the ideas of liberty, property, and equality unified thirteen diverse colonies under what was known as the “common cause.” This process was supposedly an organic one, and was founded in the people’s belief in democratic values.

  Robert Parkinson, an Assistant Professor of History at Binghamton University, provides a radical departure from this narrative in The Common Cause: Creating Race and Class in the American Revolution, published this past May by the University of North Carolina Press. Parkinson shows that — for the patriots at the fore of the Revolution — turning colonists against their cultural and ancestral cousins was no easy task, and certainly was no accident. The essence of his argument is that the patriot coalition consciously and proactively used newspapers to propagate and disseminate revolutionary ideas. Furthermore, he argues that the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were only partially responsible for the fervor of the revolution, with racial fears resting at the heart of the discourse.

  Parkinson makes exhaustive use of evidence from well over fifty different newspapers from across the colonies to present his thesis that the patriots, in their pro-revolutionary newspaper propaganda campaigns, participated in race-making that would come to define citizenship and liberty in the United States for decades to follow. Patriots capitalized on latent fears of slave insurrections and of Native American hostility, painting both groups as dangerous agents of the crown. In November of 1775, the Earl of Dunmore, who was the last of Virginia’s royal governor, issued a proclamation that promised to free slaves whose enslavers were rebelling against the crown and who were willing to fight for the British.

  Dunmore’s Proclamation proved to be a spark for this racially-charged Patriot propaganda. Stories of imperially sanctioned violence by these groups spread like wildfire through colonial presses. Parkinson argues that these fears, perhaps even more so than the positive good offered by republican democracy, united the colonies around the “common cause.” More importantly, he points out the collateral effect of this propagation — as the subjects of these depictions, Blacks and Native Americans were excluded from the “common cause” and from the liberty that it promised.

  Parkinson’s work is, in many ways, a masterful achievement. With The Common Cause, he’s crafted a text that is both accessible and comprehensive. It is truly rare for a book that fundamentally reframes the historiography on the Revolution to be accessible to such a broad readership. This text is an important contribution to many different historiographical strains: the places of race and class in the Revolutionary struggle, the long history of media propagation towards political ends, and the disparities between memory and reality in our nation’s founding.

  Likewise, the shortcomings of this text are few and far between. Parkinson misses an opportunity in not taking a firm stance on the role that the Revolution ultimately played in the long history of slavery and abolition. There is a debate within the historiography on the post-Revolutionary trajectory of slavery in the North, and Parkinson perhaps over-emphasizes the gradualism of northern abolition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While he acknowledges recent work on abolition and the Revolution, much of which has come out of the Graduate Center History Department in the last few years, perhaps he is lacking a complete exposure to and understanding of that scholarship.

  This misstep on the part of Parkinson is pervasive in scholarship on the Revolution. His work is more nuanced than many others, but in some ways falls into the trap of “racial consensus”—the assumption that Whites in early America were essentially in agreement about the inferiority of African Americans. This leaves several questions unanswered: How did the abolition of slavery come about in Northern states so quickly after the war? How did we find ourselves at the Emancipation Proclamation less than a century after the Revolution? It cannot be denied that the Revolution established the status of the “free African American,” and this reality warrants further interrogation.

  Another miscalculation of this text that stems from the same framework is the conflation of the myriad issues and debates surrounding African Americans in the early republic. Parkinson’s evidence does a good job showing how the “common cause” by and large excluded Blacks from citizenship. It further shows that the Revolution further stoked fears of slave rebellion among Whites. Neither of these things necessarily tell us a great deal about what the Revolution did for sentiments about abolition and emancipation, and yet Parkinson conflates them all into a singular issue. This oversimplification of debates around race in early America is just one of many reasons why much of the scholarship has missed Northern antislavery sentiment after the Revolution.

  When one thinks of media-wielding elites affecting political change by exacerbating fears of racial “others,” their minds are far more likely to be drawn toward 2016 than 1775. By turning a foundational American narrative on its head, Parkinson provides stunning evidence of the long history of propaganda and fear in the political dialogues of the United States. His work can perhaps help to contextualize our modern abundance of fear-based politics in the media, and their effectiveness within populist movements.

  Historians once approached an understanding similar to Parkinson’s; there are multiple texts from the 1930s and 1940s regarding the American Revolution that feature the word “propaganda” in their titles. However, encounters with fascism and the rise of the Frankfurt School momentarily shifted how we understood media propagation, and this historiographical strain was lost. While attempting to not be overly cynical, I highly doubt that many elements of Parkinson’s alternative narrative of the Founding Fathers and the Revolution—one of media power and racial fears—will replace the origin story presently found in public school classrooms. However, I look forward to seeing how scholars build upon Parkinson’s book, and how other narratives that flow from the Revolution will be reframed to account for his work.

• Reviews in History
  http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/2025
  Word count: 2573

  Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American RevolutionPrinter-friendly versionPDF version

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  Book:
  Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution
  Robert G. Parkinson
  Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2016, ISBN: 9781469626635 ; 640pp.; Price: £33.52
  Reviewer:
  Dr Jonathan W. Wilson
  University of Scranton
  Citation:
  Dr Jonathan W. Wilson, review of Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution, (review no. 2025)
  DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2025
  Date accessed: 2 February, 2017
  In 1775, Samuel Johnson had already identified the central paradox of United States history. He notoriously challenged British readers to explain why ‘we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes’. Generations of historians have tried to answer that question. How could a movement espousing belief in liberty include so many slaveholders? More importantly, why did it build a republic so thoroughly implicated in enslavement and frontier race war?

  Typically, historians have responded by crediting the American Revolution with imperfectly realized but laudable ideals, as well as with crucial contributions to 19th-century reform. Over the last decade, however, many historians have dispensed with treating the American revolutionary era as an ideologically coherent moment. Instead, they depict it as a moment of complicated social division and civil war, part of a wider context of Atlantic and continental conflict. Their accounts suggest the violence – which neither began nor ended with the imperial crisis – helps explain subsequent decades of racial hatred and oppression in the United States.(1) In their emerging synthesis, however, racism’s role in the American Revolution itself, as an intellectual and political founding moment, is elusive.(2) The old paradox of the liberty-minded slavedriver remains.

  In The Common Cause, his new contribution to this synthesis, Robert G. Parkinson presents a bold explanation of the contradictions between patriot leaders’ ideals and the republic they built. He leaves mostly unexplored the inconsistencies in their personal beliefs. Rather than their core principles, The Common Cause argues, their war effort established white supremacy as the basis of United States citizenship. From the beginning, patriot publicists defined the war against Great Britain as a war against non-white peoples.

  At the heart of Parkinson’s book is the difficulty of uniting 13 disparate peoples in a ‘common cause’ against a powerful and generally beloved parent nation. To resist the empire, Parkinson writes, colonists needed both ‘to make the familiar alien’, in order to cut emotional ties with Britain, and ‘to see common-ness in one another’, in order to muster the will to fight (p. 21). Both needs, rebel leaders realized, could be met by supplying American audiences with stories about the English king’s control over three alien forces: European mercenaries, Native American allies, and escaped slaves. Patriots energetically circulated stories about the combined menace. As they did so, they convinced other white Americans not only to hate the British, but also to view non-whites as passive tools of a foreign power.

  They propagated such stories mainly through newspapers, which Parkinson examines in a delightful close study that amounts to a book within the book. His key insight here is that the most important section of a typical newspaper was the interior, where most news items were placed, rather than the front page, where one might read a political treatise or a public document. Parkinson shows that the resistance movement in Massachusetts, where nearly a quarter of the colonies’ newspapers operated, were early to recognize the importance of the inside pages. Later, the Continental Congress would direct printers to circulate particular items of information throughout the colonies. As the war began, the interior pages were the primary means by which most Americans learned what was happening, and over time, the balance between European news and colonial stories shifted. Increasingly, colonists were reading about each other rather than the European metropoles.

  Although the London ministry was slow to understand their full strategic importance, Parkinson relates that the mainland colonies’ three dozen newspapers were targets of war by late 1775. In Virginia, the royal governor Lord Dunmore dispatched marines to seize a press at Norfolk in September. A Connecticut militia company retaliated by confiscating the printing type of a New York City loyalist. By then, it was clear that local newspapers were part of larger communication networks alongside the famous committees of correspondence. In a process already familiar to historians of early American print culture, editors circulated news by ‘exchanging’ their papers, copying from each other’s pages to move news relatively quickly around the continent. In addition, although surviving details are scarce, they maintained their own regional distribution networks, arranging transportation to send copies to subscribers in the countryside.

  On a technical level, Parkinson’s key contribution to the history of early American newsprint is to pair the local and continental dimensions of circulation. He documents the reprinting of specific stories across the colonies (an impressive task by itself) and describes the operations of particular printers. The most important of these to The Common Cause is William Bradford, not only because his Pennsylvania Journal was centrally located in Philadelphia but also because its subscription books from 1774 and 1775 have survived. From these, Parkinson derives a detailed picture of how copies of the Journal circulated, showing that the imperial crisis dramatically increased its subscriptions. To that information he adds a close study of the Journal’s contents, determining that 40 per cent of its news items during 1775 came from other colonial newspapers, and that as the war began, these included an increasing number of stories from places beyond the middle colonies and Boston.

  With that valuable new knowledge of communication infrastructure as a basis, Parkinson devotes most of The Common Cause to documenting the war that passed before the eyes of colonial readers between 1775 and 1783 – what he calls the ‘Revolutionary War’, as distinct from the political ‘American Revolution’. The resulting narrative is built around moments of psychological and propagandistic rather than military significance.

  The war of the newspapers, in Parkinson’s account, was a war of convergences and juxtapositions. When news of the opening shots in Massachusetts reached Virginia and South Carolina in early May 1775, for example, it coincided with panic about rebellions planned by the enslaved along the James River and insurrectionary sermons preached in Charleston by ‘Black David’. If white southerners had any trouble connecting these terrors to the new war, Lord Dunmore, serving the king entirely too well, clarified matters by threatening Virginia’s capital with bombardment and emancipation. Meanwhile, the second Continental Congress, assembling in Philadelphia the same month, was preoccupied with reports that the Indian superintendent Guy Johnson planned to incite frontier attacks in New York. Parkinson shows that newspapers stoked both sets of fears and relayed them around the country; the New-York Journal and the South-Carolina Gazette printed a claim that London was sending 78,000 guns and bayonets ‘to put into the hands of N[egroes], the Roman Catholics, [and] the Indians and Canadians’ (p. 94). From the start, then, the war of the colonial imagination was a proxy war.

  On both sides, Parkinson writes, white leaders assumed the empire had the power to control black and Indian fighters, to whom they ascribed little agency. Through the rest of 1775, as colonists waited for the main power of the British military to reach them, stories abounded of British officials instigating insurrection. Some of the stories were true. Parkinson argues, however, that outrage over such provocations as Lord Dunmore’s promise of liberty to enslaved men who joined the British, and his commissioning John Connolly to raise a force of Ohio Indians, resulted from careful work by patriot printers. They populated their pages with the names of these and many other villains – white men who threatened the continent with warfare by non-white surrogates. Directing everything, colonists came to believe, was the king himself. Thus, Parkinson argues, the long bill of indictment against George III in the Declaration of Independence should be understood as a crescendo of fear, ending with the charge that patriots saw as the greatest crime: fomenting slave rebellion and frontier massacres. On Long Island, a public reading of the Declaration inspired a crowd to blow up a royal effigy bearing a black face and a feather headdress.

  Of course, King George threatened America with German mercenaries as well. Despite their importance in the summer of 1776, however, Parkinson suggests the Germans’ hold on the colonial imagination was limited. Europeans, unlike African Americans and Indians, could be rehabilitated. After General Washington’s easy capture of 1,000 Hessians at Trenton, Parkinson writes, newspapers began depicting them as hapless fellow victims of monarchy. The rhetorical shift, undertaken in part because of the need to cement German Americans in the common cause, underscores the Revolution’s ongoing dehumanization of non-whites.

  During late 1776 and 1777, as colonial enthusiasm for the war ebbed, Parkinson argues, patriot printers kept the revolutionary spirit alive with sensational new tales of atrocities – notably the death of the young loyalist Jane McCrea, apparently at the hands of General John Burgoyne’s Wyandot scouts. In 1778, after the French treaty shifted major military operations to the south, the anti-Indian rhetoric of the patriots only intensified, and actual warfare with Native Americans escalated. In the Wyoming Valley of northeast Pennsylvania, when a British and Iroquois force killed hundreds of militiamen, newspapers inflated the death toll with thousands of imaginary women and children. A year later, when Washington ordered General John Sullivan to retaliate against the Iroquois homeland, destroying its settlements – crops and food stores included – 13 patriot newspapers reprinted Sullivan’s report to Congress in full. These events have been told before, but Parkinson invests them with new purposefulness; they were part of an organized propaganda war. His evidence bears this out, although throughout the book he may ascribe greater clarity of intention to the printers than they had at the time.

  In the southern colonies, later British campaigns seemed to confirm patriot rhetoric as enslaved black Americans fled their plantations, often to British lines. Newspaper coverage in the South, however, was very poor; when Charleston fell in May 1780, word reached Paris (via London) before it reached Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. Parkinson argues that this contributed to the famous chaos of the southern theater. In the absence of effective means to manage public opinion, the inland South descended into directionless civil war. He argues, however, that the common cause rhetoric remained powerful. It helps explain why, even as a British army threatened Charleston and state officials contemplated total surrender, John Laurens could not persuade South Carolina to consider enlisting slaves in its defense. In those places where thousands of black soldiers (or Stockbridge, Oneida, or Tuscarora Indians) did fight for the United States during the Revolution, patriot newspapers refrained from mentioning the fact. In print, African Americans and Indians could only be the enemy.

  The Common Cause argues that the consequences of patriot rhetoric lasted long after the Battle of Yorktown ended major North American operations in 1781. Not only did patriotic racism lead to, for example, the slaughter of 90 neutral Lenape by white militia at Gnadenhutten, Ohio, in 1782. It also wrote Native Americans and black Americans out of the national social compact. This conclusion of Parkinson’s is provocative. Other historians do not deny that the American founding was compromised by slavery, but many have argued the Revolution promoted the liberation of the enslaved, at least in northern states and elsewhere around the Atlantic world.(3) In The Common Cause, however, Parkinson depicts the war effort as a long-term retardant on any egalitarian impulses the revolutionaries may have had.

  In this respect, the evidence Parkinson provides is persuasive, though one might wish his book devoted more space to the post-war settlement. His final chapter surveys how American literature, art, and historiography depicted the Revolution from the 1780s to the 1810s, demonstrating that whites’ fund of racial fear had diminished little by the time a second British war began. Meanwhile, on the frontier, uncertain conditions left behind by the Treaty of Paris in the 1780s and 1790s promoted the celebration of white settlers as patriotic heroes, to the detriment of Native American inhabitants. The final chapter also examines the implicit theory of citizenship embraced by American law during that period, especially in the 1790 naturalization act, which limited US citizenship eligibility to aliens who were free and white. Parkinson argues that the logic of treating non-whites as passive proxies during the war limited the white public’s ability to conceive of them as independent members of the state afterward. These arguments are compelling.

  Paradoxically, however, focusing on printed accounts means The Common Cause itself seems to downplay the active public roles that African Americans, if not patriot-allied Native Americans, played during the revolutionary era. This forecloses discussion of events that would prove crucial to black activism and free northern African-American identity in the early republic. In addition, Parkinson sometimes seems to divide the Revolution against itself, treating the war effort and the patriots’ core ideas as entangled but fundamentally different elements, in a way that protects the latter from some of the most troubling implications of his account. Citizenship theory aside, it seems to me this has the curious effect of divorcing white American nationalism from white American idealism, limiting the impact of his interpretation. Nevertheless, The Common Cause also provides a powerful basis for examining both issues in new ways. In particular, I would be interested in Parkinson’s answer to the question whether core patriotic ideals themselves were refracted by the medium of wartime newsprint and changed by the course of events. How, for example, did newspaper exchanges shape public convictions about representation, natural rights, or indeed the abstract injustice of enslavement, as the war continued?

  Overall, The Common Cause is an account that deserves attention from any historian studying early American national identity, racism, western expansion, or print culture, not to mention historians studying the Revolution itself. In clear prose, discussing a vast research program, Parkinson effectively reevaluates the meaning of the entire continental war – and through it, the nature of the American founding.

  Notes
  Consider a large literature including Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and the Revolutionary Frontier (New York, NY, 2007); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, NY, 2011); Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York, NY, 2015); The American Revolution Reborn, ed. Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (Philadelphia, PA, 2016; forthcoming at the time of writing); and particularly Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York, NY, 2013), together with other books by the same author.Back to (1)
  See, however, Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, NY, 2014).Back to (2)
  The most influential account to this effect is Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). A major new history of American abolitionism argues that the Revolution facilitated and accelerated existing forms of anti-slavery activism, most importantly by giving free and enslaved African Americans an opportunity to mobilize in the name of liberty: Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT, 2016), pp. 34–85.Back to (3)
  The author appreciates Jonathan Wilson's careful, thoughtful review.

  November 2016

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