This essay by historian Ray Raphael was published in the Journal of the American Revolution on March 16, 2017.
Peter Oliver, the Crown-appointed Chief Justice of provincial Massachusetts, knew how to discredit popular protest. Mindless and incapable of acting on their own, crowds that opposed British imperial policies “were like the Mobility of all Countries, perfect Machines, wound up by any Hand who might first take the Winch.” They needed a director who could “fabricate the Structure of Rebellion from a single straw.”[1] Without ringleaders or rabble-rousers, the masses would remain inert.
To this day, country crowds in Revolutionary Massachusetts are often viewed this way. One recent account of the 1774 popular actions in rural Massachusetts puts it this way: “Radical leaders drew forth the mobs. In the nether parts of the province, armed mobs utterly refused to allow the courts to open.”[2] Unwittingly, this reflects the old Tory view of revolutionary dynamics: so-called “mobs” do not act on their own volition but must be aroused by politically astute leaders.
Such portrayals skew our narratives of the American Revolution. Rebellious colonies were overwhelmingly rural—in Massachusetts, ninety-five percent of the people lived outside of Boston. To understand how that province cast off British rule, we need to take a closer look at crowd actions in the hinterlands. Who were those people whom leaders supposedly “drew forth”? How did they organize, and what, exactly, did they do? …
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