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.

After the American Revolution a number of Loyalists, those colonial Americans who remained loyal to England during the War for Independence, did not relocate to the other dominions of the British Empire. Instead, they sought to return to their homes and restart their lives. Despite fierce opposition to their return from all across the Confederation, their attempts to become part of a newly independent America were generally successful. Thus, after several years of struggle most former Loyalists who wanted to return were able to do so. Various studies have concentrated on the wartime activities of Loyalists, but few have examined their post-war return to America. This dissertation corrects this oversight by tracing the process of the reintegration of the Loyalists. It analyzes this development from a primarily American perspective, although former Loyalists are consistent members of the story. The work considers the emotional significance families and friends played in affecting the desire to return. On the American reception of their former enemies, this work explains that the nascent idea of federalism required the process to occur on a state-by-state basis. Also important to Loyalist assimilation was a critical shift from the republican ideological belief in the necessary of virtue to the survival of the community to a growing awareness, tolerance, and respect for individual rights, for those who held views perhaps inimical to the polity. Critical to the process of reintegration was a jurisprudential transformation from an older, English common law understanding of the law to a more modern view that law is commanded by a sovereign. It is my contention that popular sovereignty drove this transformation and allowed for the wartime legal persecution of the Loyalists, but in order for former Loyalists to peacefully co-exist, popular sovereignty had to be reined in by the very same and new legal ideology that it had helped develop. Finally, the process of reintegration required Americans to permit citizenship to their former traitors. Thus, the dissertation closes by showing the procedure former English subjects underwent to renounce their allegiance to England and become republican citizens.

The study of southern evangelicals during the late colonial and revolutionary eras of American history has focused primarily on the social antagonisms that separated evangelicals from southern elites and has concluded that the rapid growth of post-war evangelicalism came as a result of evangelical acquiescence to southern gentry mores. Most study of southern evangelicals has concentrated on the upper South missing important developments in the Deep South which contradict historical assumptions of Separate triumph and the subsequent subversion of radical evangelicalism by evangelical leaders eager for societal acceptance. Evangelicals were not a monolithic movement. Key doctrines, primarily the need for conversion, united them, but the social range of evangelical groups included outcast Separate Baptists to elite members of Charleston and Savannah society. Because evangelicals have been viewed as outside the mainstream of southern society, evangelical contributions to the revolutionary cause have gone mostly unnoticed. This work seeks to illuminate the contributions of evangelicals to the American Revolution by examining the roles of evangelicals in the Imperial Crisis and in the war itself. Evangelical leaders were strong proponents of American rights. Far from being outcasts, many evangelicals enjoyed positions of prominence in southern society and several served in the governments of South Carolina and Georgia. Almost all evangelicals in this region supported the American cause and were viewed by many elite revolutionaries as indispensable to solidifying the unity necessary to fight Great Britain. Evangelicals and Anglican elites worked together to cement support for provincial government and bring about the disestablishment of the Anglican Church. Evangelicals also served an important role in winning the American Revolution in the South. Evangelicals, particularly New Light Presbyterians and Regular Baptists, formed a major portion of the militia that rose to bedevil Lord Cornwallis‟s attempts to implement British strategic goals. His failure in South Carolina led to his ultimate downfall at Yorktown. In the final chapter, this work examines the proud, if divided, republicanism of southern evangelicals, highlights their political activity, and explores the beginning of the evangelical ascent to religious dominance in the Deep South.

This thesis is a micro-history of the formation of the various identities that shaped the Revolutionary War experiences of one eighteenth-century Vermonter (Thomas Johnson) whose life is documented in a manuscript collection at the Vermont Historical Society. I break down Johnson's identities into three levels: social class, state, and national. My argument is that what it meant to be a provincial gentleman, to be a Vermonter, and to be an American were still being constructed at the time of the Revolution and were therefore in a state of flux. The fluid nature of these identities shows us how America's founding fathers' generation was full of ambiguity and a multiplicity choices. The first section of my thesis analyzes how Johnson's identity as a gentleman officer influenced his experience as a prisoner-of-war. I argue that Johnson's identity as an American patriot and his role as a double-agent can only be understood in relation to his conflicted identity as a provincial gentleman. The second section, on the identity of Vermont in the context of a new American nation, starts with historical background on the formation of Vermont first as part of New Hampshire, then as part of New York, and, finally, in negotiations with the British in Canada to rejoin the British empire, with which Johnson participated. In this section I argue that the shifting identities of colonial and revolutionary Vermont provided a backdrop of fluidity and change, as well as animosities between eastern and western residents, which influenced the identities of individual Vermonters during the war, including Thomas Johnson. For the national level, I look at how European Americans had divided loyalties during the war, with an emphasis on the Revolution as a civil war. My thesis departs from most historiography on the Revolution as a civil war, though, by examining it as a war with gray area - not just black and white, or Patriots versus Loyalists. I use this analysis to examine how Johnson's community was divided and why Johnson's neighbors reacted so diversely to the possibility that he was working with the British. In a last and brief section of my thesis, I look at how Johnson has been memorialized in his town's history, and how doubts of his American loyalty have all but disappeared over time, regardless of the intense debates they provoked during his lifetime. I aim to show that despite the consensus view that has shaped much of the historical memory of the American Revolution, the actual process of revolution was full of disorientation and turbulence.

Thesis advisor: Cynthia Lyerly / My dissertation examines the social, cultural, and political lives of women in the early Republic through an analysis of the first women's literary circle formed in the United States after the Revolution, the Boston Gleaning Circle. The Gleaners, as the women referred to themselves, instead of engaging primarily in charitable and religious work, which was the focus of other women's groups, concentrated on their own intellectual improvement. The early Republican era witnessed the first sustained interest in women's education in North America and the Gleaners saw women as uniquely blessed by the Revolution and therefore duty-bound to improve their minds and influence their society. My study builds on, and challenges, the historiography of women in the early Republic by looking at writings from a group of unmarried women whose lives did not fit the ideal of "republican motherhood," but who still considered themselves patriotic Americans. The Gleaners believed that the legacy of the American Revolution left them, as young women, a crucial role in American public life. Five of the Gleaners had a father who was a Son of Liberty and participated in the Boston Tea Party. Their inherited legacy of patriotism and politics permeated the lives of these young women. Many historians argue that the Revolution brought few gains for women, but the Gleaners demonstrate that for these young Bostonians, the ideas of the Revolution impacted them. Making intellectual contributions was not easy, however, and the young women were constantly anxious about their Circle's place in society. By the 1820s, the opportunities that the Revolution brought women had been closed. Prescriptive literature now touted a cult of True Womanhood told women that they were to be selfless, pious, and submissive. These ideas influenced the Gleaners and by the 1820s they no longer met for their literary pursuits, but for charitable purposes. No place in society remained for women in a self-improvement society. Instead, women had to work to improve others, demonstrating the limited opportunities for women in the antebellum period. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Throughout 2013 the governments of the Austrian Republic and United States of America celebrated the 175th anniversary of diplomatic relations between them. This date marks the accreditation of ambassadors in 1838 but obscures the sixty-year prehistory, begun when the first American envoy reached Vienna in 1778. The Habsburg Monarchy became the last European Great Power to recognise the United States, but the reasons behind this also have eighteenth-century origins. The United States and the successor states to the Habsburg Monarchy, therefore, share a much longer, more complex and deeply entangled history stretching back to the American Revolution. This dissertation focuses on how and why attempts to formalise relations failed between these two states in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, something which, until now, has received little historical attention. This dissertation uncovers a neglected but illuminating story of US-Habsburg relations between 1763- 1789. In doing so it demonstrates the evolving nature of early modern diplomacy and the wider international struggle of the American founding. In both regards, this dissertation argues the economic motivation of economic agents and the role of personalities were the new and instrumental factors. What follows is a new history of the broader, much deeper impact of the American Revolution and the transatlantic entanglements of the Habsburg Monarchy. A history of a relationship which looks beyond 'desk diplomacy' and towards a more holistic interpretation of the attempted relations between unlikely states. To this end, this dissertation relies upon a broad base of archival material from personal papers to quantative data from both sides of the Atlantic.

The American Revolution brought with it a crisis of identification. The political divisions that fragmented American society did not distinguish adherents of the two sides in any outward way. Yet the new American governments had to identify their citizens; potential citizens themselves had to choose and prove their identities; and both sides of the war had to distinguish friend from foe. Subordinated groups who were notionally excluded from but deeply affected by the Revolutionary contest found in the same crisis new opportunity to seize control over their own identities. Those who claimed mastership over these groups struggled to maintain control amid civil war and revolution. / History

In the autumn of 1775, American revolutionaries invaded Canada in the hope of winning a fourteenth colony for the cause, dealing a fatal blow to the British war effort, and forcing London to reconcile on American terms. Led by Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold, the two-pronged effort met with nothing but victory on the way to Quebec. Set back by an unexpected repulse on December 31, however, the Northern Army was finally forced to retreat from the province altogether in the summer of 1776. Having failed either to secure an alliance with Canada or to achieve reconciliation with Britain, the campaign proved a total disaster, and has therefore been understudied or ignored completely by most historians. This dissertation argues that the invasion of Canada proved crucial in destroying the British empire in America and creating the social logic for independence. When the campaign failed to deliver on its primary objectives, American leaders in Philadelphia and colonists throughout the home front recognized that reconciliation was impossible. Historians frequently give credit to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense for igniting widespread calls for independence, but it was the failure of the Canadian campaign that lent urgency to these arguments, occasioning the swift transition from colonial rebellion to all-out civil war for American independence. The nature of the conflict had changed, creating a political-military context that made foreign assistance and a declaration of independence essential to sustaining the Revolution. This study also hopes to break down military history as a category too frequently walled off from other branches of historical inquiry. Early American historians tend to imagine the American Revolution and the War for Independence as two overlapping but distinct events. By analyzing the Canadian campaign’s effect upon the American home front, this dissertation seeks to use military events as a lens to reorient our understanding of the breakdown of empire and the path to independence. / 2022-08-31T00:00:00Z

This dissertation studies the Continental Army’s attempts to control navigation on the Hudson River in the New York Highlands during the American Revolutionary War. It examines the overlapping lines of authority between federal, state, and military entities; the escalation of civil-military tensions over supplies, provisions, and pay; how American strategy created varying levels of resources and troops in the region, and the failure of efforts to mitigate that risk; the anxiety created in Continental officers when they rejected a French engineers’ advice on the location and scope of riverside defenses; and how George Washington and his officers used the fortifications at West Point to demonstrate the legitimacy of the United States to domestic and foreign audiences. This dissertation utilizes correspondence, diaries, memoirs, the journals of legislative proceedings, orderly books, archeological studies, and contemporaneous newspapers to reveal that, despite the hindrance of overlapping authorities, the fortifications in the Highlands enabled US strategy and displayed the aftermath of colonialism in the United States. Controlling river traffic in the Highlands began as a colonial project with plans that outstripped available resources and relied on technology incapable of achieving its purpose. The New York Provincial Congress relocated its efforts five miles south and included a physical obstacle in the water. A British attack overwhelmed the defenses at the southern location in just a few hours. The Continental Army, contrary to the advice from a French military engineer, decided to rebuild near the original site and began the iterative development of a system of layered defenses. The project successfully deterred the British from attempting to take the works forcefully. Civil-military relationships grew tenser as the war wound down, but Washington’s intervention assured continued civilian control of the army. This dissertation uses the example of the Highlands fortification process to provide a new understanding of strategy that gives the term more explanatory value. It takes seriously the impact of the power imbalance between Great Britain and its North American colonies and analyzes the lingering effects of that relationship on the United States. Finally, it reveals the tension and conflict between different lines of authority throughout the war and uncovers the roots of civil-military tensions in the young republic. / History

Faced with an economic crisis following the French and Indian War, the British Parliament, along with a young and inexperienced King George III changed its longstanding policy towards the North American colonies. Prior to 1763, Parliament allowed the colonies to generally govern themselves. After 1763, Parliament began to pass legislation aimed at increasing revenue received from the colonies. As the colonies protested these new taxes on constitutional grounds Parliament began a process of implementing and repealing different attempts at controlling the economic system in the colonies. Due to differing interpretations of the British Constitution regarding Parliament's authority over the colonies, resistance to the change in policy by Parliament escalated in the 1760s and 1770s. It is this difference in interpretation that eventually led the colonists to open rebellion in 1775.