Free 1775 by Kevin Phillips Page A

themselves into volunteer uniform companies; drums beating, fifes playing; squads of men exercising on the outskirts of the town; a military spirit pervaded the whole country; and Charleston had the appearance of a garrison town; everything had the face of war; though not one of us had the least idea of its approach.” 35 As we will see, South Carolina, like Massachusetts, had been pulling the British Lion’s tail for a decade and a half.
    Virginia, too, was proactive. Between September 1774 and May or June 1775, 27 different county volunteer independent military companies were organized. On March 14, five weeks before Lexington and Concord, Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth, the American secretary, saying that the colony was preparing for war and that the extralegal Provincial Convention had voted to raise troops. 36 Then in the early morning hours of April 21, before news arrived from Massachusetts, 20 marines from HMS
Magdalen,
moored near Williamsburg, entered the town magazine on Dunmore’s orders and took fifteen and a half barrels of powder to their vessel, subsequently transferred to the frigate HMS
Fowey.
But when the detachment was discovered, aroused Williamsburg Patriotsneeded quieting by local leaders. Confrontation, these men advised, would be premature. Irate volunteer companies soon marched on the capital, and on June 8, Dunmore fled.
    Two more explanations flesh out vital timing. Military historian Charles Royster, in
A Revolutionary People at War,
was appropriately blunt: “Popular
rage militaire
vanished by the end of 1776 and never returned. Even in 1776 it was a weak echo of its loudest moments in 1775…throughout the war they called for a revival of the spirit of 1775.” 37 David Ammerman, an expert on the First Continental Congress, specified that “in attempting to explain the advent of armed conflict in British America, the months between May 1774, when news of the Coercive Acts first arrived in the colonies, and April 1775, when British troops clashed with the provincials at Lexington and Concord, are of crucial importance. Prior to passage of the first of the Coercive Acts a variety of courses lay open to both the British and the colonists; after the engagement at Concord there was almost no possibility of avoiding full-scale civil war.” 38 Both assertions ring true.
    New England and plantation-colony episodes are rarely interwoven in the history books, which helps to downplay the Revolution’s deep roots in the winter of 1774–1775. Even in Quaker-imprinted Pennsylvania, 1774 resolutions condemning Britain’s Coercive Acts were numerous in Scotch-Irish and to a lesser extent in German towns and frontier settlements—Hanover (June 4, 1774), Middletown (June 10), Frederickstown (June 11), Lancaster (June 15), and so forth. 39 As we will see, zealous Presbyterian Scotch-Irish constituted the third early leg of Revolutionary sentiment along with Yankee New England and southern tobacco and rice planters.
    These pivots and calendars involve more than snappy titles and minor hair splitting. Over the last two centuries, the Revolution has become the defining event—the political touchstone—of national patriotic sentiment and self-portraiture. Every year brings another ten or twenty interpretations, thanks to the efforts of U.S., Canadian, and British historians. Semantics sometimes promote confusion. The “War for American Independence” ended in 1783, but has the broader underlying “American Revolution” ever ended? Many contend it has not, enthusing that the process—and the American Mission—is ongoing.
    That argument is one these pages will sidestep. This book’s more narrow purpose is to distill and chronicle the new psychologies, beliefs, and antagonisms of 1774 and 1775 that launched the Revolution and to a considerableextent entrenched its existence at the grass roots. It is also about the forces that shaped the emerging republican plurality