This thesis analyzes paintings and prints of the period to better understand the concept of the patriot soldier or citizen in arms which emerged at the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775 and then again at the start of the French Revolution. The patriot soldier is an individual who is seen as putting aside his civilian occupation spontaneously in order to fight for what he sees as a national cause. While in America contemporary Revolutionary works are little known and not numerous, in France there are thousands of them, spanning genres from history paintings and portraits such as those of Lallemand and The*venin to periodical illustrations such as those of Prieur and Janinet. In America, the patriot soldier was the hero of words and images relating to the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill in 1775. But soon thereafter, the Continental Army was formed and subsequent images of even these early battles, such as those of Trumbull, glorified the role of officers rather than that of patriot soldiers. In France, the taking of the Bastille at the outset of the Revolution generated both words and many images praising and highlighting the role of civilians who had taken up arms against the Government. In contrast with America, a national Revolutionary army did not come together in France until several years later, in 1793-4. However, during the intervening period, a number of events such as the march on Versailles led artists as well as writers to express severe misgivings about the consequences of allowing or depending upon martial activity by citizens in arms. In both France and America, the citizen soldier was a transitional figure who was put aside once the revolution achieved a stable and unified political and military structure.

Summer, 1762. England and Prussia are at war with France and Spain. There are fronts in Europe and the colonies in Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. On the southern coast of England, Dr Benjamin Franklin is about to return home to Philadelphia. He is 56 years old, a retired printer, a published scientist, but at London he is better recognised as a low-born statesman from Pennsylvania with a reputation for causing trouble with the establishment. His mission was as simple as it was outrageous: oust Penn’s sons from their inherited rule and transfer the colony’s governance to the Crown. He has been wildly unsuccessful. In five years he’s done little more than to strengthen his enemies, multiply his own vulnerabilities, and nearly bankrupt his employers. But despite these professional failures he has discovered the metropolis to be extremely suited to his moral, cultural, and philosophical interests – and to his infinite ambition. It’s almost three decades since his first attempts at Philadelphia to nurture the local citizenry out of ignorance, superstition, low morals. In England he has discovered a country where, to his delight, there are ‘in every neighbourhood more sensible, virtuous and elegant minds than we can collect in ranging a hundred leagues of our vast forests’. When he sets sail, half-reluctantly, it is with the promise to cross over again as soon as he can … and if he can convince his wife to make the dangerous voyage … to settle in London forever. I interpret this moment as a turning point for Franklin, a final attempt against increasing personal and political friction to realise his elusive dream of uniting in one place his family, his career, and the activities that lent meaning to his life. The three chapters bound here comprise the first half of that story. At Philadelphia he would meet with a horrorshow: deadly fever, failed harvests, reports of vicious murders on the western frontier, a terrorist insurgency amassing on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the ruthless partisanship of Pennsylvania politics. The next two years – 1762 to 1764 – contained an almost brutal panorama of colonial American life. The contrast to the stability and intelligent bustle of London was as stark as it was dispiriting, and Franklin’s letters reveal how near the edge of the world he felt himself to be during this time. How would Poor Richard fare, haunted by a sense of futility and the inescapable reality of isolation? Here I have pursued Franklin in the midst of the culture and intrigue of his Georgian London, through the storms and progress of his colonial Philadelphia. It seems as though he understood these cities to be not just landscapes of sights and sounds and smells, some more wonderful and magnificent than others – not just sets, but actors, too. It was the talking, thinking element that could finally evoke for him two ways of being, scenes and stages and indeed whole theatres upon which one’s interests and insecurities might be shaped and his ambition played out. And as such, two places could evoke for Franklin two different dimensions of himself, a distinction so profound that in a moment rich with finality he even named them: Reason (America), and Inclination (London). This Franklin, unable to quite reconcile these twin spirits, is not the man whom I have encountered in prior portraits. He is more agitated, more conflicted, hypochondriac, and sometimes almost paranoid. He is a great reader, but sometimes not a careful one. He is given to escape into endless experiments with an ever-larger scientific apparatus. He is a frugal tinkerer, a playful refiner, a conjurer of agreeable little shocks. He is susceptible to fits of intensity and melancholy, to spells of vindictiveness, and to sustained, probably displaced antagonism towards the authority of the Church. He could never quite accommodate that far-flung American stage. And after five years in London, he was even less able to readjust to what became for him a set of confinements – intellectual, material, spiritual, and social. II So I have come to believe that the pivot of Franklin’s life, the essential tension, is expressed in the continual self-enhancement that led him back into London society. Partly because it was also expressed in the two versions of his memoirs that tension has come to frame, under different guises, Dr Franklin’s afterlife. To erase it, or resolve it, as many biographers have attempted to do, and therefore to claim Franklin for one side of the water or the other, is no way to recover his experience. Biographers must consider carefully the nature of a record so charged with national identity as Franklin’s in its preservation, presentation, and editorial interpretation. The Prologue, in tracing early Franklin life-writing and the publication of his memoirs, exposes and explores some of these problems. I wrote the Prologue – ‘The Life of the Life of Dr Franklin’ – not so much as an introduction to the biographical chapters but rather as a companion or parallel commentary to them. Its creative footing owes a good deal to such modern/historical split narratives as those by Dava Sobel (Longitude) and Josephine Tey (The Daughter of Time), and also to some of the ideas of self and memory explored in the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. The setting is a time in the not very distant future, when the United States, as a nation, is become so removed from the pretended innocence of its original ideals that the mythologies surrounding its foundation and its so-called Founding Fathers are no longer the darlings of biographers but rather curiosities for the amusement of antiquarians. Such are the protagonists, two men neither young nor old corresponding across the Atlantic, each possessed of the right amount of time and eccentricity for making enquiries of a bygone age. Indeed, the two voices, though opposed in some ways (Cladentweed the donnish foil to the footstepper’s stumbling independence), both appear to call out to the past – or even from it. The reader whom the Prologue will benefit most will be familiar with Franklin’s autobiography and the correspondence he inserted into it. Dr Farrand’s introduction to the Parallel Text edition, cited early on in the footnotes, and also Henry Stevens’s history of the lost holograph of the autobiography are especially helpful in tracing its journey into and out of obscurity. Both pieces of scholarship provide a remedial dose for the misconception of the historical record as a set of involuntary footprints, a lucky trail left by the human passage through a natural forest of events. A third source, informative (with reservations) and rewarding in its own way, is the account by John Bigelow – the U. S. minister to France under Lincoln – of locating and editing the lost holograph in the years just following the American civil war. It was when reading Bigelow’s memoirs that I wondered how he had come to the conclusion that the draft he possessed was more authentic than the text published by Temple Franklin in 1817 – in short, that the differences he found between holograph and printed edition were to be put down to Temple himself, and not to a later, lost draft made by Franklin. Two copies of the holograph are known (and were then known) to have been made. And Franklin’s letters confirm that the copies were made under his personal instruction. (These letters were also published well before 1866, in numerous editions.) If the changes attributed to Temple were found to be present in the copies, it would almost certainly indicate that Franklin was aware of them, that Bigelow’s ‘Bohemian’ ‘mutilations’ were nothing more offensive than Franklin’s own corrections: his turns of phrase become less colloquial and his grammar more syntactic in the twenty years between first and second drafts. But neither copy has been found. / (Why not? Where are they? One was almost certainly destroyed at the print house. I tracked the other as far as rural Maine, but there the scent is lost.) Lacking one of these copies, it is impossible to know for certain just what Temple Franklin changed or did not change.

My thesis explores the American Revolution and War for Independence within the broader context of the British Atlantic world. It examines how the war and the revolutionary ideology affected the ways in which Britons living throughout the Atlantic world understood and articulated their loyalty to Great Britain. The American Revolution directly challenged the legitimacy of British whig ideology and self­-definition, and forced peoples and communities throughout the Empire to rethink commonplace assumptions about their rights and liberties as British subjects. The thesis is organized and focused around five specific British Atlantic communities: London, New York City, Glasgow, Halifax (Nova Scotia) and Kingston (Jamaica). During the first half of the eighteenth century diverse peoples throughout Britain’s Atlantic empire united in their allegiance to the Hanoverian monarchy and expressed a Protestant whig identity that was contrasted with the perceived oppressive regime, and lack of political and religious freedoms of an alien French enemy. The American Revolution, however, presented an explicit challenge to these Protestant whig ideals, for these same beliefs had also inspired the American Patriots. For the first time, Britons were opposed in war not by the French, but rather by fellow Protestant Britons. Consequently, American resistance and eventual rebellion to British imperial rule in the 1760s and 1770s served to divide rather than unite loyal Britons throughout the Atlantic world. Britons struggled to articulate a shared empire-wide opposition to an enemy and ideology that appeared not all that different from their own Protestant whig beliefs. The Franco-American alliance of 1778 thus assumed enormous significance for loyal Britons. Once again, they could identify the enemy as opponents of whig and Protestant beliefs. Britons were shocked by the hypocrisy of a revolutionary ideology that was supposedly based upon a superior definition of whig ideology, yet was now allied with an arbitrary empire. Britons throughout the Atlantic world were able to redefine their American foes as no longer being fellow Britons, while simultaneously celebrating their loyalty within a broader empire-wide conception of Britishness. The result of which was a more determined and defiant expression of loyalty to Great Britain that was shared by Britons throughout the Atlantic world. Thus the American Revolution not only created a new American nation, but it also created a more determined British national identity shared by Britons throughout the Atlantic world.

The published work which forms the basis for consideration of my application is The Cornwallis Papers: The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Theatre of the American Revolutionary War (Uckfield: The Naval & Military Press Ltd, 2010) ("the CP"). Consisting of six volumes, it comprises a corpus of work in which each volume deals with a distinct aspect of the southern campaigns. Volume I deals with the Charlestown campaign and the occupation of South Carolina and Georgia; volume II with the Battle of Camden and the autumn campaign; volume III with Cornwallis's refitment at Winnsborough; volume IV with the winter campaign in North Carolina and the march into Virginia; volume V with the Virginia campaign; and volume VI with the occupation, siege and capitulation of Yorktown and Gloucester. This essay describes the overall place of the CP in the historiography of the Revolutionary War. It goes on to discuss examples of the original contributions to history made, on the one hand, by my commentary in the introductory chapters of the CP and, on the other, by my voluminous footnotes forming part of it. The essay concludes by drawing on my commentary to re-evaluate the strategy and tactics pursued by the British in the southern campaigns.

This thesis examines the experiences and impacts of the deployment of Highland soldiers to North America in the mid to late-eighteenth century. Between 1756 and 1783, Britain sent ten Highland battalions to the North American theatre, where they fought for the duration of both the Seven Years‟ War and the War of American Independence. The pressures of recruiting, utilizing, and demobilizing these men created powerful new forces in the Scottish Highlands, occurring, and in some cases prefiguring, the region‟s severe socio-economic problems. The impact of military contributions to the imperial state also had significant implications for Gaelic self-perception and the politics of loyalty and interest. This thesis asserts the importance of imperial contacts in shaping the development of the Scottish Highlands within the British state. Rejecting the narrative of a centrifugal empire based on military subjugation, this thesis argues that Gaels, of all social groups, constructed their own experiences of empire, having tremendous agency in how that relationship was formed. The British Empire was not constructed only through the extension or strengthening of state apparatus in various geographical spaces. It was formed by the decision of local actors to willingly embrace the perceived advantages of empire. Ultimately, the disproportionately large Highland commitment to military service was a largely negative force in the Highlands. This thesis establishes, however, the importance of political and ideological imperatives which drove these decisions, imperatives that were predicated on inter-peripheral contacts with British America. It establishes the extent to which Highland soldiers willingly ensured the development of British imperialism in the late eighteenth century.

In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson argued that his goal in the American Revolution had been to eliminate “feudal and unnatural distinctions” in colonial American society as part of the struggle for independence. This thesis focuses on Jefferson’s years as a revolutionary legislator in the new state of Virginia, and argues that while he was correct in labelling Virginia a feudal society, his reforms were insufficient to the scale of social reformation that he identified. Material addressed includes Jefferson’s synthesis of British feudal and mercantile history that he constructed during the early years of the revolution, his proposed constitution for the state of Virginia, and his legislative reforms to the judiciary, landownership, the established church, education, citizenship, and slavery.

In the aftermath of the American revolution, elites sought to defend their power and status against newly empowered popular governments and egalitarian demands. They developed new discursive and political strategies, transforming pre-revolutionary ideas about authority and legitimacy, moving from traditional forms of hierarchy based on deference and allegiance, towards a structure of power relations based on the inviolability of property and contractual rights. A new American ruling class began to constitute itself through these strategies and ideas during the 1780s, replacing structures of British imperial rule. It did so in response to threats from popular and (white male) egalitarian politics—that is, class struggle and class formation drove each other. Both, in turn, generated identities and ideologies that were central to the development of capitalist ideology in the following century. This thesis gives an account of that process from the perspective of a variety of American elites, focusing on the fragmented and contradictory nature of elite discourse and strategy as well as on the emergence of commonalities and the role of class interests. It deals with the formation and early controversy around the Society of the Cincinnati; with the development and debate over new conceptions of public education; with the elaboration of various legal and discursive mechanisms for the defence of property rights; with the interrelated roles of land claims, banking, corporations, and the rights of contract; and with the elite sense of the dual threat posed both by state legislative democracy (tyranny) and by rural insurrection (anarchy). It also assesses the role of the 1787 constitutional convention within this process, as a radical move that can be seen as both a culmination and a break from prior elite strategy.

This dissertation examines the political origins of Loyalism in New York City between 1768 and 1778. Anchored by an analysis of political mobilization, this dissertation is structured into two parts. Part I has two chapters. Using a variety of private and public sources, the first chapter analyses how 9,338 mostly white male Loyalists in New York City and the counties of Kings, Queens, Suffolk and Westchester were mobilized. Chapter 1 argues that elites and British forces played a fundamental role in the broad-based mobilization of Loyalists in the province of New York. It also recognises that colonists signed Loyalist documents for many different reasons. The second chapter of Part I is a large-scale prosopographical analysis of the 9,338 identified Loyalists. This analysis was based on a diverse range of sources. This analysis shows that a majority of the province’s Loyalist population were artisans aged between 22 and 56 years of age. Part II of this dissertation examines political mobilization in New York City between 1768 and 1775. In three chapters, Part II illustrates how elite and non-elite white male New Yorkers coalesced into two distinct groups. Chapter 3 concentrates on the emergence of the DeLanceys as a political force in New York, Chapter 4 on their mobilization and coalescence into ‘the Friends to Liberty and Trade’, or ‘the Club’, and Chapter 5 examines the political origins of what became Loyalism by studying the social networks of three members of ‘the Club’. By incorporating an interdisciplinary methodology, Part II illustrates that members of ‘the Club’ developed ties with one another that transcended their political origins. It argues that the partisanship of New York City led members of ‘the Club’ to adopt inward-looking characteristics that affected who they interacted with on an everyday basis. A large proportion of ‘the Club’’s members became Loyalists in the American Revolution. This dissertation argues that it was the partisanship that they developed during the late 1760s and early 1770s that defined their allegiance.