Since the Loyalists were closest to the governors they had the inside track. Speculators secured government land grants and subdivided them into small parcels for farmers, a very profitable business. In the decades before the revolution the population grew rapidly. The Loyalists and the Patriots competed for the huge profits to be made from land speculation.
Those with very little or no property were not allowed to vote. Then there were the common people with little property who had to work hard just to make ends meet. Many were successful business men such as landlords, merchants, and lawyers who had built their own wealth rather than inherited it. The Patriots were also men of property, but had less influence with the British than the Loyalists. They were close to the governors who were appointed by the British Parliament. The Loyalists came from well to do families, many with pedigree blood lines. America, while very important to Britain, was but one of many concerns in its global empire.Īs the American colonies grew before the Revolution, three constituencies developed.
Taylor shows how the Patriot’s policies grew out of the politics of colonial society and how British policy was made by the need to balance its domestic and imperial priorities. He delves into colonial culture explaining its impact on the Revolution and its aftermath. He details the many relationships and competing interests of the participants placing the Revolution in a broad context. Taylor gives us a unique perspective on the forces that led to the American Revolution and shaped the new republic. But it was Jefferson’s expansive “empire of liberty” that carried the revolution forward, propelling white settlement and slavery west, preparing the ground for a new conflagration. Assuming the mantle of “We the People,” the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government. The discord smoldering within the fragile new nation called forth a movement to concentrate power through a Federal Constitution. The war exploded in set battles like Saratoga and Yorktown and spread through continuing frontier violence. When war erupted, Patriot crowds harassed Loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. Emerging from the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, the revolution pivoted on western expansion as well as seaboard resistance to British taxes. The American Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain’s colonies, fueled by local conditions and resistant to control. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history.
The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework.
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