26 The New York Review
Liberty Is Sweet:
The Hidden History of the
American Revolution
by Woody Holton.
Simon and Schuster, 779 pp., $37.50
American Republics:
A Continental History
of the United States, 1783 –1850
by Alan Taylor.
Norton, 515 pp., $35.00
The battles over American history pro-
voked during the latest national reckon-
ing on race have focused heavily on the
Revolution and the Civil War. As David
A. Bell recently observed in these pages,
descriptions of America’s egalitarian
founding principles as covers for white
supremacy—“formulated to promote
exclusion and oppression”—have gained
a sudden currency.^1 By these lights, the
Revolution was in large measure a pro-
slavery secession sparked by American
fears of British threats to slavery. The
Civil War supposedly originated as a
clash between contending white suprem-
acists over the spread of slavery, which
ended by replacing chattel bondage with
a new regime of black subjugation.
Two ambitious new studies, Liberty
Is Sweet by Woody Holton on the Rev-
olution and American Republics by
Alan Taylor on the decades that led to
the Civil War, examine far more than
the history of American slavery and
racism. Both take up the array of po-
litical and social transformations that
shaped the nation’s growth from an
aspiring republic hugging the eastern
seaboard to a boisterous, even bellicose
capitalist democracy that spanned the
North American continent. Yet both
books advance claims in accord with
interpretations of white supremacy as
the driving force of American history.
Holton and Taylor are serious scholars,
and given the larger stakes involved, the
reliability of their conclusions on these
matters assumes importance in debates
that go far beyond the academy.
Woody Holton is the McCausland
Professor of History at the University of
South Carolina, the author of four pre-
vious books, and the recipient of many
honors, including the Bancroft Prize
for his biography of Abigail Adams.
That book aside, his scholarship has
chiefly concerned relatively obscure
Americans—enslaved men and women,
Native Americans, indebted small farm-
ers. While building on the work of re-
cent historians including Gary B. Nash
and Peter H. Wood, Holton has also
sought to establish how the Revolution
was, in the formulation of the Progres-
sive historian Carl Becker more than
a century ago, a battle not simply over
American home rule but over which
Americans should rule at home. Thus,
he has argued, turmoil among ordinary
Virginians in 1775 persuaded the col-
ony’s gentry to declare independence
from Britain lest they lose their own
local control. And he has asserted, in
an updating of a famous interpretation
by Becker’s contemporary Charles A.
Beard, that the framers of the Constitu-
tion, unnerved by popular uprisings like
Shays’s Rebellion, designed a strong na-
tional government responsive to the in-
terests of economic elites, at the expense
of the great majority of small farmers.
Very much in that vein, Li berty Is
Sweet offers what its subtitle proclaims
is the Revolution’s “hidden history,”
as made by enslaved workers, contrary
women, prophetic small farmers, and
resistant Native Americans, among oth-
ers. After what Holton acknowledges as
more than a half-century of research on
the Revolution from the bottom up—in-
cluding work on black history that, he
writes, “has... fought its way from the
back of the bus to the driver’s seat”—a
great deal of that history is, in fact, no
longer so hidden. Nor, with all of its un-
familiar stories, does Li berty Is Sweet
venture a major new interpretation of
the Revolution. Still, Holton is a profi-
cient and tireless researcher who, using
his own findings and those of others,
presents fresh appraisals of important
developments based on lives and events
long condemned to obscurity.
He explores, for example, the con-
nections between the evangelical Great
Awakening of the mid- eighteenth cen-
tury and the Revolution, long a matter
of intense academic dispute. His discus-
sions, though, center not on well-known
religious thinkers like Jonathan Edwards
or George Whitefield but on Sarah Os-
born, a remarkable teacher and spir-
itual leader in Newport, Rhode Island.
Osborn, in defiance of prevailing patri-
archal norms, gathered her own weekly
meetings of the faithful, including black
converts as well as white. By telling her
story, Holton presents the Awakening
as an outburst of religious intensity that
helped generate the revolutionary era’s
powerful democratic currents.
Readers of Holton’s earlier work will
find more surprising his copious treat-
ment, making up nearly half of Liberty
Is Sweet, of the Revolution’s military
history, a subject less prominent in re-
cent decades as historians have focused
on politics, ideas, and culture.^2 Hehighlights the military importance of
unfamiliar individuals as distant geo-
graphically and socially as Haidar Ali,
the sultan of Mysore, who, half a world
away, was involved in both starting the
war and ending it. Holton emphasizes
the participation of Native American
warriors on both sides of the fighting,
as well as the military exploits of Af-
rican Americans, especially those who
joined the British.
He is just as perceptive, however,
when he assesses the strategy, tactics,
and leadership of George Washington,
as well as Washington’s fellow Ameri-
can and allied French officers and their
British adversaries. His writing sparkles
in these chapters, in crisp, assured expo-
sitions. While attentive to the cold logic
of command, Holton never minimizes
warfare’s grotesque inhumanity. His
book’s real achievement may be to re-
direct academic historians’ attention to
the battlefields and to appreciating anew
some of the least hidden aspects of the
Revolution.Other of the book’s central interpre-
tations are less convincing. Follow-
ing the earlier Progressive historians,
Holton describes the colonial leaders’
grievances as mostly economic and
self-interested: they aimed at enriching
themselves by removing Native Amer-
icans and speculating in western lands;
trading freely in commodities that were,
as often as not, produced by slaves; and
avoiding taxes imposed to support the
British Empire. From this perspective,
the ideology shaped by Americans’ po-
litical complaints about taxation without
representation, ministerial corruption,
and arbitrary, unconstitutional gov-
ernment can appear like lofty rhetoric
meant to ennoble unlofty purposes.
The crass aims and activities Holton
describes were real enough, but as
the record shows, the colonists were
also inflamed by material issues that
were inseparable from constitutional
matters and political ideals. Opposi-
tion, for example, to the Stamp Actin 1765—the movement that initiated
the colonists’ resistance—arose from
genuine anger at a British tax that
Americans of all classes truly could
not afford to pay, which reasonably
led to charges that the king’s ministers
and Parliament had become tyranni-
cal. Nine years later, when Parliament
responded to the Boston Tea Party of
December 1773 by punishing the city
with the ham-fisted Coercive Acts,
political issues beyond narrow self-
interest pushed the colonies rapidly to-
ward independence. As the best recent
study of the Stamp Act crisis notes,
“constitutional and commercial consid-
erations were difficult to distinguish in
a mercantile empire such as Britain’s,
where both were stretched and folded
into a system of imperial governance.”^3
By slighting the first consideration in
favor of the second, Holton elides how
the relationship between them helped
produce the revolutionary movement.
Holton goes on to assert that despite
the furious immediate response to the
Coercive Acts that led a year later to the
bloody engagements at Lexington and
Concord, colonial leaders remained
skittish about independence until pop-
ular turmoil finally pushed them to
abandon efforts to reconcile with the
Crown. The argument is overstated.
Well before the outbreak of armed
hostilities, writings like Thomas Jef-
ferson’s Summary View of the Rights of
Briti sh America, published in Virginia
in 1774, denied the Crown’s authority
over the colonies and strongly augured
revolution unless Britain immedi-
ately changed course. By mid-1775 the
Continental Congress, although still
willing to communicate politely with
London via petition, firmly refused to
yield, while the British government re-
sponded by proclaiming the colonists in
open rebellion and preparing to crush
them violently. Royal authority had
broken down in most of the colonies,
rendering them virtually independent.^4
Holton concedes that for “many
Americans,” from New Hampshire to
North Carolina, the bloodshed at Lex-
ington and Concord in April 1775 was
“the final argument for independence.”
Yet he also contends that for many oth-
ers, especially in Virginia, the question
remained open until much later, and
that the decision for independence was
“heavily influenced by the 40 percent
of the [southern] population that was
enslaved.” He points in particular to a
panic late in 1775 over a supposed in-
cipient uprising of the enslaved in coor-
dination with the British—and here his
book leaps into the current history wars.Three months prior to the publication
of Liberty Is Sweet, Holton captured
attention with an op-ed for The Wash-The Paradox of the American Revolution
Sean Wilentz
‘Flight of Lord Dunmore’; postcard, 1907Jamestown Amusement and Vending Co. /L
ibrary of Congress(^1) “Whose Freedom?,” September 23,
2021; a review of Tyler Stovall, White
Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea
(Princeton University Press, 2021).
American Revolution, 1763–1789 (Ox-
ford University Press, 1982); and David
Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Cross-
ing (Oxford University Press, 2004).
(^3) Andrew David Edwards, “Gren-
ville’s Silver Hammer: The Problem of
Money in the Stamp Act Crisis,” Jour-
nal of American History, Vol. 104, No.
2 (September 2017), p. 361.
(^4) On the rapid growth of pro-
independence sentiment, see Mary Beth
Norton, 1774 : The Long Year of Revo-
lution (Knopf, 2020); reviewed in these
pages by T. H. Breen, March 11, 2021.
(^2) Important exceptions include Robert
Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The