The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America

"In The Will of the People , I had several goals. One was illuminating the lives of often overlooked people of the revolutionary period. The Will of the People is complementary to the work of intellectual historians, like Bailyn and Woods. Ordinary men and women in towns and villages across what became the United States were absolutely essential to launching and sustaining the Revolution. The ideas articulated by ordinary people launched the Revolution and the sacrifices ordinary people made sustained the American Revolution, even when things were going very badly on the battlefield. Sons, fathers and husbands laid down their lives for the Revolution. Families sacrificed their consumer comforts and economic welfare for the cause. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I tell the stories of the people that don’t make it into the accounts of the intellectual historians and who are not the subjects of any biographies. Understanding their lives is just as vital to understanding the Revolution. I was able to read virtually all of the surviving newspapers from the Revolution. I surveyed all the published materials of the era, including sermons, which gave ordinary people religious justifications for protest. After all, the American Revolution was not just an ideological conflict. Revolutionaries had to withstand misery and fear and bloody conflict. The basics of war—misery and fear—get left out of the story. I tried to restore the emotional register of the Revolution so that readers get a fuller sense of what it meant to fight for independence. The initial goal of the Revolution was simply to make Parliament back down. When Parliament wasn’t eager to compromise, the goal became to gain independence. But to sustain the war effort and the vacuum left as British authorities retreated, citizens’ committees of safety and committees of observation were created, some elected, some appointed. These citizens’ committees not only ran the revolution but governed the colonies and got loyalists on board. So, these committees, like the committees of safety during the French Revolution , policed the Revolution at key moments. It’s estimated that as many as 20,000 adult white males suddenly found themselves in positions of authority. They had never been elected before. They might’ve been seen as too poor or too uneducated for government affairs before. Huge numbers of new people became involved in government. During the Revolution, the colonies became a republican country. They had not set out to become a government of the people, but in the course of the war, that’s what occurred. By the end of the American Revolution, in 1783, to a degree that no founding father planned and that no one anticipated, the United States became a nation run by the people."