Documenting United States History

166 ChaPTER 6 | GrowinG painS | period three 175 4 –18 0 0

WorKinG WiTh SeConDarY SoUrCeS

AP® Short Answer Questions

rationales for revolution

Although American history celebrates the contributions of almost mythical figures in the

American Revolution, the role that was played by the common person is less clear. For

average people, especially colonists who remained loyal to Great Britain, the process

of coming to see their “natural rights” as something worth sacrificing their lives for was

complicated. The early republic had wide gaps between the ruling elite and the ordinary

citizen, so how the common man came to lay down his life for the Revolution is a subject

that historians study. You have already read various sources that reflect competing views

of the common man toward Britain. As you read the two passages below, consider how

different historians interpret the role and motivations of the common man in the Ameri-

can Revolution.

[In England,] [o]rdinary people—laboring men and women as well as members of

a self-confident middling group—who bellowed out the words to the newly com-

posed “Rule Britannia” and who responded positively to the emotional appeal

of “God Save the King” gave voice to the common aspirations of a militantly

Protestant culture. Or, stated negatively, they proclaimed their utter contempt

for Catholicism and their rejection of everything associated with contemporary

France....

... For most English people, the expression of national identity seems to
be been quite genuine. Indeed, by noisy participation in patriotic rituals, the
middling and working classes thrust themselves into a public sphere of national
politics....
... Within an empire strained by the heightened nationalist sentiment of the
metropolitan center [of London], natural rights acquired unusual persuasive force
[for the American colonists]. Threatened from the outside by a self-confident
military power, one that seemed intent on marginalizing the colonists within the
empire, Americans countered with the universalist vocabulary of natural rights,
in other words, with a language of political resistance that stressed a bundle of
God-given rights....
— t. h. Breen, “ideology and nationalism on the eve of the american revolution:
revisions Once More in need of revising,” Journal of American History 84
(June 1997), 13–39.

Many of the figures we will encounter were from the middle and lower ranks of

American society, and many of them did not have pale complexions. From these

ranks, few heroes have emerged to enter the national pantheon. For the most

part, they remain anonymous. Partly this is because they faded in and out of the

picture, rarely achieving the tenure and status of men such as John Adams and

John Hancock of Boston, Robert Morris and Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia,

Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of New York, or Thomas Jefferson, Patrick

Henry, and George Washington of Virginia, all of whom remained on the scene

from the Revolution’s beginning to the very end. But, although they never rose to

P erioD three

175 4 –1800

working with Secondary Sources 167

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