Review of *The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution*

Robert G. Parkinson’s The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution is a major contribution to the historiography of the American Revolution.  Parkinson argues that national political elites at the helm of the Revolution used race to manufacture patriotic consent among white colonists.  His book is thus particularly important to understand how ordinary Americans were mobilized into a revolutionary force. The book also offers a powerful historiographic critique.  By illustrating the centrality of racial fear and identity to the patriots’ “common cause,” Parkinson illustrates the dangerous instability of histories of political ideology shorn of their potentially disturbing contexts and shadows.  This critique crashes down upon historians who cling to a normatively proud national history of the Revolution and the founding of the United States. Deeply researched and powerfully argued, Parkinson’s book demolishes the legitimacy of this aging if persistent whiggish interpretation.

Parkinson’s Common Cause is a history of how patriot leaders used the middle pages of newspapers to transform white colonists into revolutionaries.  This was “greater” than the “propaganda” we confront today because “patriot political leaders and newspaper printers worked together to shape the news” in support of the revolution.  But the stories that they placed in the inside pages were also quite real. (18) The leaders of the revolution were thus “patriot political and communication leaders” because in 1775 they realized the potential mobilizing power of the newspapers. (25)  Newspaper stories that emphasized the danger of runaway or disloyal slaves and purportedly murderous Indians suddenly proliferated and displaced Europe from the inside pages.  Around the time of the Battle of Bunker Hill, fears proliferated about the possible “role African Americans and Indians might play in the burgeoning war,” and especially about when Great Britain would decide it was time to set loose America’s “internal enemy,” as Alan Taylor has so memorably called it, against itself.  Parkinson painstakingly tracks how small stories that sewed local fears then flashed across the emerging nation.  Day after day, week after week, tales of British-led slave insurrections, Indian war parties, and loyalist scheming were virtually the entirety of the middle pages.  Fear of these groups was what American patriots had in common—this was the common cause.  And once it had started to coalesce, news of the Continental Army’s gradual successes only solidified the patriots’ support against their enemies.

Understanding the significance of this book means coming to terms with the tradition it seeks to confront.  Since immediately after the War of Independence ended, historians have argued that ideas were central to the American Revolution.  Mercy Otis Warren lamented that the idea of “the rights of human nature” that spurred the revolution, had already dissipated during her lifetime.  For George Bancroft, writing in the mid-nineteenth-century, it was the idea of freedom: “They were rushing towards revolution, and they knew it not,” impelled as they were by “the idea of freedom.”  Widespread scholarly acceptance that ideas caused the American Revolution explains the negative reception of Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution in the Progressive Era.  How could it be, as Theodore Clark Smith explained, in the book’s wake, that “nothing is left” of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, or the Federalist, other than mere rhetoric “to veil the real intentions” of the so-called Founders.  In postwar America, as David Waldstreicher and Michael McDonnell have recently argued, a “neo-whig shift” revived “a more positive assessment of the role of ideas in the coming of the revolution.”  That positivity pervaded the subsequent debate over the soul of the Revolution and the founding of the United States.  Joyce Appleby and others argued that the liberalism was chiefly responsible. Building upon the work of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, Robert Shalhope and argued for the centrality of republicanism.  Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution was the apogee of this tradition in which the Revolution is celebrated as a civic text even as it is studied as a historical event.

But Parkinson’s Common Cause is the most recent and perhaps most powerful critique of the celebratory instincts of the historiography of the Revolution.  A deep current of critical scholarship, including the work of Winthrop Jordan, Edmund Morgan, Edward Countryman, Gerald Horne, and Ibram Kendi have illustrated the centrality of race and racism to revolutionary thought.  Yet their structural arguments obscure intentionality behind, for example, paradox and dialectic, in the case of Morgan and Kendi. Parkinson however, seeks to directly and repeatedly show patriot political leaders purposefully manipulated racial fears to build a movement and then a nation.  This was a “patriot propagation campaign” that emphasized the patriots’ virtues while denigrating Indians, the enslaved, and other persons of color. Put differently, and more ominously, Parkinson’s work explains the celebratory tendencies of so much of the historiography of the American Revolution: the common cause never died.  We contend with it today, and are likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

Parkinson’s achievement in The Common Cause is considerable but his analysis has limits.  First, despite his detailed attention to the mechanics of colonial and postcolonial newspaper dissemination, he surprisingly minimizes the role of printers.  In his relentless focus on showing how “patriot political leaders” made the news, he relegates printers to those who robotically “assembled” the news. The “master and journeymen” of the printing press “were passive receivers.”  This does not correspond with what we know about printers’ political activism in the revolutionary era and early republic as explained for instance by Jeffrey Pasley and Joseph Adelman.  Hermeneutics pose a second considerable issue in The Common Cause.  Parkinson expertly parses the middle pages of the newspapers and brings us to the precipice of colonists’ granular experience of holding, reading or hearing newspapers.  But there it stops. We get no sense of how individuals consumed the common cause, of how critical contexts shaped consumption, and how individuals’ formulated dissent to the common cause.  It is therefore left to other scholars to connect Parkinson’s major structural finding of the founders’ intentional manipulation of race and ethnicity in the newspapers to the practices of revolutionary mobilization among the people themselves.

The book is also far too long.  Two lengthy if informative appendices push it over the seven-hundred page mark.  As one might expect, the text is peppered with detailed citations. Sometimes footnotes drift from sentences into paragraphs.  Parkinson could surely have condensed his study into a shorter book by cutting a great deal of his analysis of evidence and corresponding notes without detracting from the power of his argument.  It is important to note that this is not merely a cosmetic complaint as some readers might grow frustrated with the excess of evidence and slow pace of argument and thus lose sight of Parkinson’s significant achievement in The Common Cause.

Parkinson, after all, has embarked on a brave confrontation with the whig interpretation of the American Revolution. Consider for a moment a recent exchange between Gordon S. Wood and Joseph Ellis in which the two famous historians offered a declension narrative of American Revolution historiography.  “What students are being fed,” offered Ellis, “is that American history should be called, anti-American history.” Scholarly focus on Indians, slaves, and women—“Those are all storylines that are worth exploring, but for that to then take the form that it has taken…that young people coming into college don’t learn about the revolution.”  Wood concurred. He lamented that these histories meant that historians were “ignoring this larger public which is hungry for knowing this story of the founding.” Ellis then put a fine point on it: “if you say you want to study early American history and you don’t want to study the founding, that’s like saying I’m going to go to Fenway Park with a lacrosse stick.”  For Wood and Ellis, historians who study race, ethnicity and gender during the American Revolution are studying sideshows—interesting ones, perhaps, but sideshows nonetheless—while not addressing the real American Revolution: “the founding.”  Parkinson is not the first to do so, but his book shows us why race was anything but a sideshow to the true American Revolution.  Race and racism were the raw material of the “common cause” without which there would have been neither a Revolution nor a “founding.”