Donald F. Johnson. Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution (Early American Studies). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 256 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-5254-5.
Reviewed by Joan E. Jockel (College of William & Mary)
Published on H-Early-America (October, 2021)
Commissioned by Troy Bickham (Texas A&M University)
While reflecting on the American Revolution in an 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams wrote that the American War of Independence “was not part of the revolution, it was only an effect and consequence of it.” Adams believed that “the revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.”[1] According to Adams, the war had little role in shaping revolutionary political responses and the rejection of British authority. Donald F. Johnson’s Occupied America challenges this prevailing historical interpretation.
Concentrating on the large port cities of the Atlantic Seaboard between 1775 and 1783, Johnson argues that British military occupation significantly changed the minds of colonial people. In keeping with a methodological trend toward a social history of revolution, he details the everyday lives of ordinary citizens in the Crown-controlled ports of Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savanah, and Charleston. Using vignettes taken from letters, newspapers, trial documents, military records, diaries, narrative accounts, police reports, and petitions, Johnson draws out common threads of occupation across temporal and geographic lines. He demonstrates how, over time, the prolonged hardship and violence of war caused colonists throughout these cities to lose faith in royal rule. Johnson acknowledges that most of the sources in this comparative study will be familiar to scholars of revolutionary America. However, he posits that drawing together these narratives sheds light on the importance of commonplace colonial Americans’ experiences and the specific way that “their belief in self-governance was forged through the intimate experience of military rule” (p. 6).
Johnson notes that this process was gradual and complex. In militarily occupying port cities and establishing new municipal governments, the British hoped to restore order and incentivize Americans to pledge their allegiance to the Crown. Some citizens embraced British occupation and the new, possibility-rich society it created. The presence of thousands of newcomers, attempting to build networks and secure loyalty, provided enterprising locals with extraordinary economic, social, and political opportunities. However, such means of advancement were not without risk. Military rule also brought with it a climate of repression and violence that left many individuals vulnerable to “harassment, robbery, assault, rape, and even murder” (p. 8). As armies grew and came to outnumber civilian populations in some ports, severe fuel and food shortages also plagued these commercial centers.
Over the course of the eight years, British occupation failed to restore social stability and economic prosperity to urban spaces. Instead, it highlighted the differences and increased tensions between Americans and British soldiers. Rather than work to meaningfully resolve these divisions, British military leaders generally pressed what they saw as their own advantage, promoting schisms between loyalists and patriots and instituting increasingly draconian martial law. To survive, civilians were forced to adopt flexible policies of accommodation, allegiance switching, and negotiation, accepting British incentives when it suited, but progressively fostering ties to rebel camps. Johnson explains that by the end of the war, this undermining of imperial authority had brought British rule in America to its breaking point.
The progressive nature of this collapse is described across six well-crafted, thematically organized chapters and an epilogue. In the first two chapters, Johnson explains that British officials began with the intention of winning the hearts and minds of colonial citizens. They specifically sought to establish their collaborator regimes without the violent and coercive tactics of the existing rebel governments, relying instead on civil administration. In New York City, which became the royal military’s headquarters and the model for other occupied cities, the British offered a civilian police force, housing incentives, civilian contracts and employment, and charity programs to invest citizens in their municipal government. The unique structure of occupation provided particular opportunities for marginalized groups such as women and enslaved peoples. Johnson writes that “as ex-slaves filtered into occupied zones, they remade their lives and created new societies within the larger occupation society” (p. 80). Similarly, he recounts that some women “found empowerment in their capacities as purveyors of accommodations, food, and clothing, and as social and sexual partners for British soldiers” (p. 80). However, in collaborating with the British, colonists walked a fine line between risk and reward. They could face serious retribution if they lost their protectors. Their property or even their freedom could be forfeit if they were tried for treason by revolutionaries.
On a larger scale, scarcity proved possibly the biggest problem of occupation. Though imported luxuries flooded occupied zones from foreign merchants, the loss of local trade links to the countryside made feeding, fueling, and housing the influx of soldiers as well as cut-off civilians all but impossible. This phenomenon of “starvation amid plenty,” the title of Johnson’s fourth chapter, stoked violence and resentment. It also required Americans to adopt “complex political calculations, and those who inhabited port cities became adept at espousing different beliefs to different people at different times” (p. 137). Perhaps the most enlightening sections are the closing chapters, which explore the purposeful erasure of these varied survival strategies. According to Johnson, early American historians and public figures reinterpreted the complex realities of the war to create a more simplified and usable history. Aimed at unifying the new republic, this sanitized narrative ignored the pervasive accommodation of individuals under harsh conditions, instead focusing singularly on the atrocities of the British army and the unilateral resistance of heroic patriots. Johnson explains how all but the most flagrant collaboration was forgotten, and over time the complexity of occupied experience has disappeared from our collective national memory.
Occupied America offers important interventions into the historiography of the American Revolution, violence, urban life, loyalism, and the contingency of war. However, those seeking the broader early American context of revolution and occupied ports, specifically those in the Caribbean, Canada, and Latin America, will need to look elsewhere. On this note, some scholars may take issue with Johnson’s occasional conflation of the Atlantic Seaboard with the entirety of North America. For example, when he writes that “between 1775 and 1783 every large North American city—Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Charleston—fell under British military rule at some period,” one might wonder why a discussion of other key colonial North American ports (both British ruled and otherwise) such as Kingston, Bridgetown, Halifax, Québec, Veracruz, Acapulco, and Campeche is missing (p. 2).
However, in centering the experiences of those Atlantic Seaboard colonists under British military rule, Johnson not only offers us a more personal understanding of the war and the origin of revolutionary sentiment, but also powerfully contests historiographic conventions. In Occupied America Johnson subverts traditional historical narratives that treat the actual “War for Independence” as a less significant event and political radicals as the only consequential actors in revolutionary change. By observing civilian experience and taking the war itself seriously as a vehicle for political change (rather than strictly vice versa), Johnson shows how ordinary Americans became agents of revolution and how their “everyday experiences shaped the radical transformations wrought by the American Revolution” (p. 7).
Note
[1]. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815, in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little Brown, 1865), 10: 172.
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Citation:
Joan E. Jockel. Review of Johnson, Donald F., Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution (Early American Studies).
H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56316
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