Buying, Believing, Rebelling: T.H. Breen and Bernard Bailyn on the American Revolution

I should point out the dangers inherent in analyzing a 300-page book based on 2 pages. The Ideological Origins was published in 1967, Marketplace of Revolution in 2004 – conventions of historical writing have changed, as have the theoretical frameworks that influence historians. And although Breen is responding to The Ideological Origins (among other interpretations), his argument is not diametrically opposed to Bailyn’s. It would be easy to misconstrue the debate in the selection of passages.

I have tried, therefore, to contextualize as much as possible. In both sections analyzed here, the authors are making key connections for their arguments. In each, the argumentation is roughly parallel: Bailyn posits a particular set of political beliefs as the prelude to revolt; Breen locates the origins of revolt in consumer choice and the natural rights that the power to choose suggested. Both sections include extensive quotations. And both are typical of the books in their uses of evidence and persuasive techniques.

Bailyn, 141-143: “The Logic of Rebellion”

“The Logic of Rebellion” may not be Bailyn’s best chapter – that honor goes to the remarkable Chapter 6, “The Contagion of Liberty” – but it compares most fruitfully with Breen’s argument. By the time Bailyn gets to Chapter 4, he has explained his sources (pamphlets), delineated the traditions on which the pamphleteers based their arguments, and outlined what he takes to be the dominant “theory of politics” in pre-Revolutionary America. The Revolution, he argues in this chapter, resulted more from conspiracy theories than from consumer choice, more from political ideals than from market participation. Given the colonists’ beliefs about the fragility of liberty – imported beliefs that were given a new power by the colonial context – the actions of British and colonial authorities from 1763 to 1773 signified a “deliberate assault” on liberty. If naked power was to be constrained, the colonists would have to resist. From Greece, to Rome, to England, the burden finally passed to the American colonists, and it was up to them to keep the “‘sacred flame’” of liberty burning.

Having thus laid out the “logic of rebellion”, Bailyn brings us to the crucial moment: “Now, in 1774, that ‘future occasion’ was believed to be at hand.” With one sentence he transitions us smoothly from the preceding paragraph, in which Jonathan Mahew described the millenarian destiny of the American colonies, and recreates 1774 as if it were the present. We suspend our disbelief, waiting to see what will happen in 1774, looking toward the next chapter to find out what this “elevating, transforming vision” would entail. It is as if it really were contingent and unknown. It is quite a trick.

Bailyn’s rhetorical skill is not limited to transition sentences, however. He is also a master of questions and conditionals. “What would an independent American nation be?” he asks, and then answers, “A republic, necessarily.” The next paragraph, as seen below, consists almost entirely of conditional statements: if this, if that, then “ways would be found . . . to solve the problems of a new society and government.” These literary devices reflect the overall flow of his argument. What is inchoate, unarticulated, contradictory – often posed as questions and conditionals – becomes in the end clear, coherent, emphatic. If his reader will ask the question Bailyn poses, then she is more likely to come to the answer Bailyn provides. The technique is extraordinarily persuasive.
Bailyn also uses quotations in a particular way. He illustrates points with block quotes throughout the book, but he is at his best when he strings together quotes from various authors. For example, consider the following series from pages 142-143:

it was impossible, some said, to “recollect a single instance of a nation who supported this form of government for any length of time or with any degree of greatness.” Others felt that independence might “split and divide the empire into a number of petty, insignificant states” that would easily fall subject to the will of “some foreign tyrant, or the more intolerable despotism of a few American demagogues”; the colonies might end by being “parceled out, Poland-like.” But if what if the faint-hearted called the “ill-shapen, diminutive brat, INDEPENDENCY” contained within it all that remained of freedom; . . . if it were indeed true that “the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind”; if “’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time by our proceedings now” – if all this were true . . . let every lover of mankind . . . “stand forth!”

But this is not an exegesis of one work, as it might appear. The citation includes five different pamphlets: Braxton, Seabury, Leonard, Galloway, and Paine. By grouping them all together, Bailyn creates the impression of a unitary colonial “logic”, a single ideology that drove the Revolution. By citing the five sources in one block, he makes it difficult to tell who is writing what. And Bailyn manages to weave the quotations with his own words almost seamlessly. Instead of making a point and transparently producing a proof-text, Bailyn in effect channels the Revolutionary pamphleteers, so that their voices and his join together to make one argument.

This unitary effect is heightened by the way Bailyn treats the colonists as a group. So he speaks of the “colonists’ logic”; he tells us that “everyone knew” submission to tyranny to be a crime; he notes that it “was believed” and that “it could be said” – all without specifying who was deducing, believing, saying, knowing. Out of a diverse group of lawyers, clergymen, merchants, Whigs, and Tories, Bailyn creates a group called “the colonists”, explaining in his foreword that he does not “attempt to describe all shades of opinion” but only “the dominant or leading ideas of those who made the Revolution.” This assumption of a leading ideology allows Bailyn to end Chapter 4 with the eminently quotable Thomas Paine. Although we later discover that Paine was regarded with suspicion by “some of the most ardent patriots,” here he becomes the voice of all liberty-loving colonists.

Not that Bailyn’s argument is simplistic. He is careful to qualify that in spite of this “logic of rebellion”, the colonists “hesitated to come to a final separation . . . . because their future as an independent people was a matter of doubt.” The force of their ideas, in other words, was not irresistable: they still had to make the leap to rebellion. But Bailyn introduces such qualifications without referring to himself, outside of the introductory materials. Once he is in the midst of his argument, he does not step back from it to make self-conscious remarks about problems with the sources, or other interpretations. His tone is thoroughly authoritative, which leaves one either impressed or uneasy, depending on how much trust Bailyn inspires or how much value one gives to methodological transparency.

Breen, 190-191: “The Corrosive Logic of Choice”

The Marketplace of Revolution, in contrast, is an extremely self-conscious work. Throughout Breen makes asides to the reader about the sources he uses, the arguments he is not making, or the interpretations with which he disagrees. His central concern is with what he takes to be the major shortcomings of the ideological model: the failure to address the problem of colonial solidarity, the need for emotional links to ideas, and the popularity of economic resistance. Breen’s keystone is Chapter 5, “The Corrosive Logic of Choice: Living with Goods”, in which he contends that “choice in the consumer marketplace gradually merged with a discourse of rights.” This “rights talk” in turn led colonists to resist Parliament’s efforts to “curtail participation” in this marketplace. This section is crucial because in order for his argument to work, Breen must establish the connection between consumer choice, the language of rights, and political resistance. He must show that for the ordinary men and women who bore the sacrifice of the non-importation agreements and shouldered arms for the Revolution, natural rights stemmed from their participation in the market.

Breen explains in this chapter the empowering effects of choosing consumer goods, particularly for the politically marginalized such as women and landless people. In spite of efforts by elites and clergymen to curb what they viewed as wasteful luxury, ordinary citizens of the republic went right on consuming. As examples of this empowerment, Breen presents on page 190 the honest housekeepers and caulkers of Boston who “insisted simply on enjoying genuine and equal consumer choice” and viewed consumption as a right, not a privilege. He concludes the section with an analysis of a pamphlet that “link[ed] a political crisis to the purchase of consumer goods.”

Marketplace of Revolution, though not as magisterial as Ideological Origins, is stylistically sound. Transitions between paragraphs and sections move the argument along, as on page 190: “Within this contentious environment . . . . Within this interpretive context . . .” Questions and conditionals are present, though not quite as prominent as in Bailyn.

Breen employs other techniques that are absent in Bailyn, however. He peppers his prose with contemporary comparisons, presumably to make his argument seem relevant. “As a modern anthropologist might say,” he writes in the section at hand, citing a Jean-Christopher Agnew article in Consumption and the World of Goods, “for them, goods were good to think.” Elsewhere in the text, Breen compares the colonists’ reaction to the Stamp Act to the response of “more modern people” to “the destruction of the World Trade Center or the assassination of President John Kennedy,” and refers variously to “modern television viewers,” those “familiar with Soviet Russia and Maoist China,” and “modern Americans” who “accept the notion that the federal government should bail out failing corporations.” This technique can bring eighteenth-century moments to life; it can also have the opposite effect of emphasizing the distance between their time and our own.

Unlike Bailyn, who qualifies his argument by using quotations, Breen’s qualifications tend to be self-referential. Thus, while he has been arguing for a connection between consumer choice and natural rights, he limits this argument carefully:

The claim made here, therefore, is not that the experience of living in a robust consumer marketplace caused liberalism or that it directly explains the subsequent popularity of Locke’s Second Treatise among the revolutionary generation. Whatever the long-term possibilities may have been, however, it seems clear that within this particular context – a colonial society dependent on consumer goods – the concept of freedom of choice was elevated into a right, and within that mental framework, choice no longer had to be defended on purely prudential or historical grounds.

The self-consciousness apparent in this quotation is typical of Marketplace of Revolution. “The goods themselves did not generate these ideas,” he explains elsewhere, they “did not cause a change in collective behavior,” they simply provided a “mental link between the personal and the political.” Again, Breen writes later, the “point is not that non-importation” led directly to Revolution, but that it helped build colonial solidarity. These frequent, self-conscious, qualifications contrast sharply with Bailyn, who confines such remarks to his introductory materials. Instead of authoritative and sweeping, Breen appears tentative, aware of history’s complexities and reticent to make grand generalizations.

Finally, Breen’s use of quotations is different from Bailyn in at least two respects. First, Breen enhances his argument with colorful lists of items purchased by colonists, as in the first paragraph on page 190: “‘Velvet Hoods, red Cloaks, or Silk Garments.’” Earlier in the book, he discusses advertisements for runaway servants, which frequently dwelt on the clothing of the escapee: “a pail blue duroy waistcoat, a pear of deep blue sagathy breeches, coarse shoes . . . steel buckles, coarse felt hat, a Newmarket coat of light bath coating, not bound, but stitched on the edges, with death buttons on it . . .” For such a simple technique, it is a remarkably effective way to illustrate the colonial obsession with textiles and other consumer goods.

Second, in contrast to Bailyn’s amalgamations of quotes from disparate sources, Breen tends to focus on one quotation to analyze and paraphrase. Thus, on pages 190-191 he uses “one text” that “brilliantly captured the move from experience to ideology” – The Good of the Community Impartially Considered by “Rusticus” – to represent the “ideological shift of immense significance” that colonists took at this time. Breen alternates quotes with interpretation and paraphrase (“In other words…”) to coax the reader to the same conclusion he drew from the document: that behind the “politeness and gentility lurked philosophic concerns about power, equality, and freedom.” The device is effective, perhaps as effective as Bailyn’s use of strung-together quotations, unless the reader asks how representative Rusticus is of this putative ideological shift. This question is not addressed.

In the end, in spite of the shortcomings of the ideological argument that Breen rightly points out, I find Bailyn more persuasive. Breen works his findings too hard. While he has uncovered a vast amount of information about the eighteenth-century “empire of goods” and demonstrated that these goods helped to create a common culture among colonists, it is not clear that this information explains the American Revolution as well as he wants. Stylistically, Marketplace of Revolution is long, repetitive, and uneven at times, while Ideological Origins is well-organized and tight in its argumentation. Breen’s sources may be just as important as Bailyn’s, but they are not as well-presented. The comparison is a good reminder that the historian is an artist as well as a craftsman.