Revolutionary New England, 1691-1776
WITH the same integrity of purpose, felicity of expression, and appreciation of scholarship that characterized his earlier volume, Mr. Adams now comes forward with a further installment of his story, presenting with insight, imagination, and an ever broadening vision those phases of New England’s history that presaged the coming storm of revolt and accompanied the actual outbreak of hostilities. To an extent even greater than in his previous work — because the situations are more complex and the areas of action more widely distributed — he has given his treatise the form of a series of expository essays, often detailed as to facts and well fortified as to references, which deal with the dynamic aspects of his subject — the movements of liberation and expansion and the gradual transfer of power from the conservative to the radical elements in the colonies. He is concerned with periods of crisis and with those activities, mental as well as physical, that connote friction, conflict, and change. It is of ‘Revolutionary New England’ that he writes, of the contests of groups, classes, and sections within the colonies and of the radical element in America during the pre-Revolutionary period with the extremists in England committed to a policy of coercion.
He makes it all a delightful, even fascinating, story, full of life and action, and of the doings of an animated, but sinful, humanity possessed of the attributes of men and not of paragons and demigods.
The treatment is highly subjective, and the book, though rarely partial or unfair, is distinctly one of commentary, judgment, and criticism. Mr. Adams accepts willingly, and even eagerly, the opinions and findings of others more coolblooded than himself, and searches widely for evidence upon which to base his conclusions; but in the end the deductions he draws are his own. He distributes praise and blame with an even hand, though on the whole he is more inclined to condemn than to extol. Whether intentionally or not, I cannot say, he leaves upon the reader impressions rather pessimistic than otherwise, as if there were something inherently bad about the Puritan and naturally artful about the New Englander in general. His merchants indulge in orgies of corruption; his capitalists are profiteers, obtaining their substance by doubtful methods. He leaves the further impression of a confused and disordered civilization in eighteenth-century
New England, likening the course of its history to a deafening rush and tumult, a crash of waters, a veritable Niagara. He has nothing to say of placidity and calm, of quiet lakes and gently flowing courses, of times of contentment, ease, and good behavior. I am far from certain that he has not overcolored his picture. Can it be that he is interpreting the past in the mood of one still under the influence of the late war and its aftermath of depression and ferment?
Mr. Adams adds materially to the strength of his arguments and the interest of his reader when he turns to more recent history for illustrations and parallels wherewith to confirm his conclusions. He finds in the conditions attending our possession of territories and insular dependencies new points of view from which to judge the working of the old British colonial system, and in Great Britain’s relations with her colonies and dominions to-day an opportunity to resolve some old-time questions. He makes occasional appeal to our present-day psychological reactions, when he notes that ‘mobocracy’ and revolution, though lauded in some quarters because as matters of history they have made us what we are, take on quite a different appearance when viewed as current events. Some of these comparisons are sure to bring the thoughtful reader to a realizing sense of the absurdity and injustice of many former verdicts and, in common with other parts of this admirable book, to effect a wholesome revision of historical judgments that have overlong possessed the popular mind in America.
CHARLES M. ANDREWS.