The stirring and ominous term “revolution” conjures the lurid image of an established order violently overthrown. In the post-Enlightenment era, it is the French Revolution that first comes to mind, from the fall of the Bastille through the reign of terror. A similar sort of political spectacle, both bloody and cruel, played out in Russia and China in the 20th century. The American Revolution, though, seems to follow a separate pattern. In “The Will of the People,” T.H. Breen, a distinguished historian of colonial America, looks closely at the struggle for American independence and asks what made the American revolutionary experience so different.
Efforts by the British in the 1760s to strengthen their control over the North American colonies provoked local inhabitants, but Mr. Breen argues that it took the Coercive Acts following the Boston Tea Party of 1773 to turn sporadic discontent into resistance. Britain’s punitive measures at that point attacked the principles of self-governance that the colonists so prized—by restricting the frequency of town meetings, giving the crown the right to make appointments that had once belonged to colonial assemblies, and limiting the authority of colonial courts. Mr. Breen emphasizes the effect of such measures on ordinary people: Local committees took charge in Massachusetts as British authority there collapsed; similar groups elsewhere directed efforts to send relief to New England and began seizing control over government.
