SCRIPT - Strategy of Protest and Revolution 3: The American Revolution (1763-1775) [16/4/2021]

 

 

 

Hi, and after a long hiatus, welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is the third video on “The Strategy of Protest and Revolution”, where we’ll look at how ordinary revolutionary and protest movements win against establishments with the state’s power at their fingertips. In particular, we’ll focus on the following questions:

 

                - How do activists turn public discontent into a coordinated movement?

                - What do successful movements do to achieve their goals?

                - And how have successful strategies changed over time?

 

To answer them, today, we’ll be looking at the American Revolution from 1763 to 1775.

 

 

Problem: Colonial Disunity

Starting in 1763, the colonists of British North America began resisting the policies of the British imperial establishment, headed by Parliament. By 1775, their movement would overpower imperial authority in 13 colonies, beginning a war that would end with the independence of the United States. How did the colonists achieve such a feat?

 

Let’s first review what movement strategy is all about. A movement aims to unite ordinary people and use their collective power to impose change upon society. In this, it is inevitably resisted by an establishment representing existing interests, and who often uses the powers of the state to suppress opposition.

 

To counteract this power, a movement does two things. First, it brings up ‘Issues’ to encourage the public to participate; second, it creates ‘Organizations’ that convert this participation into power. A strong enough movement will either overpower the establishment or force it to back down, which leads to victory and the imposition of the change the movement wants.

 

In the American Revolution, the power of the opposing British imperial establishment was actually very weak. That’s because much of the state power that the British Royal Governors theoretically had was actually in the hands of the colonists, whether it be local elites staffing the government, or local militias keeping the peace. In a way, the colonists already had the power to overthrow the British; all they needed was to collectively decide to do it.

 

That, of course, was the problem. As it turned out, the main obstacle the colonists faced was never actually the British, at least not until the crisis developed into a Revolutionary War. Instead, the real obstacle was their inability to create a strong movement.

 

Much of this was because of the sheer fragmentation of colonial society. Even when we consider the white, male, Protestant cohort that dominated colonial politics: there were class and economic divisions between merchants and landowners, and between them and the urban workers and tenant farmers. There were religious divisions between Anglicans and non-Anglicans, and cultural ones between British, Gaelic and Continental European ethnicities. Then there were political divisions, from the territorial disputes between Virginia and Pennsylvania, to the patronage wars between the New York DeLanceys and Livingstons. And on top of that, there was also a generational division – half the colonists in 1775 were under the age of 16, meaning that they had no direct connection with the struggles that had begun a decade earlier.

 

Fragmented societies are bad for movements, because the presence of many groups, each with their own priorities and needs, makes it very difficult to find a common issue that can get most people working towards the same goal. Instead, what usually happens is this: a few groups unite around a certain issue to form a movement, then a few other disagreeing groups form their own counter-movement, splitting the public in two. The two movements fight, exhaust themselves, and neither ends up having enough power to challenge the establishment.

 

This was the story of colonial activism prior to the 1760s: colonial activists would come up with a plan, only to fight with other activists who disagreed. Small colonies versus big colonies, merchants versus landowners, North versus South… heading into the 1760s, there was no reason to expect this time to be any different.

 

Opportunity: Imperial Reform

But this time was different. In previous videos, we’ve said that reform periods represent an ‘extended window of opportunity’ for movements, because they weaken the ties that keep establishments strongly united against opposition. And now, the British imperial establishment wanted reform.

 

When the colonies were still young, Britain’s goal was to have them grow at minimal public expense. As such, it established a policy of ‘salutary neglect’, where colonial elites were granted broader economic and political freedom to manage their affairs. By the 1760s, this had produced a freewheeling set of societies, at least for white Anglos, that collectively was becoming a demographic and economic equal to their home country.

 

Seeing this, the British began to fear that the Americans would overshadow them and take over their Empire. These fears increased, even as Britain annexed France’s North American colonies: almost immediately, the colonists dragged Britain into another expensive fight against Native Americans, while they themselves pocketed the war profits and used them to undercut the home country’s trade and manufacturing.

 

So Parliament decided to end salutary neglect. Economically, the colonists would come back under Britain’s economic regulation, which not only included the infamous taxes, but also new restrictions on immigration and industry. Politically, the colonists would be kept to the Eastern Seaboard, their influence diluted by the new non-Anglo territories of Canada, Ohio and Florida. Last but not least, these changes signaled that Britain would now interfere more frequently and directly in colonial affairs.

 

For the Anglo colonial elite, imperial reform threatened their growth, wealth, and power. Many, as members of the imperial establishment, had helped the British manage colonial discontent. Now they began to defect, using their influence to fuel and lead this same discontent against their former partners.

 

Issue: Locke, Moderates and Patriots

So a few colonial elites were upset, but that wasn’t enough to make them work together as a movement. They needed an issue – something that outlines the problem with establishment policy, and offers a solution to fix it. The point of an issue is to encourage people to participate in the movement, so ideally the problem should be relevant and the solution popular. Again, we need to remember that the colonists were very fragmented, so what was a serious problem to some might have been barely relevant to others.

 

Ultimately, activists decided to base their issue ‘problem’ on the political theory of John Locke. Writing in the late 17^th Century, Locke argued that government’s purpose was to protect people’s rights to “Life, Liberty and Property”, and a serious societal problem emerged whenever the government failed to protect or acted against these rights. Unsurprisingly, movement activists now denounced imperial reform as a violation of Lockean rights.

 

We’re not concerned with whether Locke was right or not; we’re only concerned with whether framing the problem like this helped the movement attract participants. And it did, in two main ways:

 

First, “Life, Liberty and Property” were broad and vague enough to accommodate a whole slew of colonial complaints with imperial reform, ranging from higher taxes to limits on land settlement to a potential state Church.

 

Second, within the context of 18^th Century Anglo politics, Locke was part of the ‘Whig’ political tradition that aimed to restrain central governments. Having come to America precisely to escape London’s diktat, most Anglo colonists were unsurprisingly Whigs, and so the issue instinctively tapped into one of the few identities they all shared.

 

In short, using Locke to frame the issue problem meant that the movement could attract a broad range of colonial groups, avoiding the group infighting that had plagued previous movements. But this would come at a huge moral cost: the movement couldn’t possibly define the problem beyond the vague slogan of “Life, Liberty and Property”, because doing so would have condemned key groups and perhaps driven them into the arms of the British establishment. The result was, as many have noted, a movement based around liberty and yet, hypocritically, with little to say on Southern slavery or New England religious intolerance. In the end, movement activists made the collective decision to prioritize colonial unity above all else.

 

Even with that, the movement’s issue still managed to divide the colonists in a totally new way. For while most agreed that British imperial reform violated Lockean rights and that was an important societal problem, there was still the question of fixing said problem – and two camps soon sprung up around very different solutions.

 

For Moderates, anarchy was just as bad for “Life, Liberty and Property” as government failure, so resistance needed to accept and work with the establishment. Specifically, Moderates believed they could convince the establishment to respect Lockean rights.

 

They planned to do this with a strategy of cooptation. Moderates would take the movement’s power and use it as political capital within the establishment: attracting new friends, reinforcing existing allies, and dishing out rewards and punishments based on faithfulness to Locke. Ultimately, Moderates hoped to create a political environment where the only establishment members who could succeed would be those who rejected imperial reform.

 

In contrast, Radicals – better known as Patriots – refused to rely on the establishment to defend Locke. They wanted to ensure that, whatever the establishment’s intentions, no anti-Lockean policy could ever be implemented in the colonies.

 

They planned to do this with a strategy of disruption. Patriots would take the movement’s power and use it as political and physical capital outside of the establishment. If the establishment ever issued an anti-Lockean order, Patriot elites in government would obstruct and override them, and if that wasn’t possible, ordinary Patriots would use physical violence to stop the government from carrying those orders out.

 

In earlier videos, we’ve argued that issue solutions that attract the most participation usually offer moderate change compared with the status quo, because radical change threatens the benefits people already have under said status quo. Here, the Moderates proposed a large lobbying campaign, while the Patriots proposed riots. Naturally, most colonists started out backing the Moderates over what they saw as ‘mob rule’.

 

All in all, the colonial movement’s choice of issue was pretty sound. By using Locke to outline the problem with establishment policy, they paved the way for a continent-wide coalition, and while there was a split when it came to finding a solution, most colonists were unified around the Moderate proposal. The stage was set for the most powerful colonial movement yet to challenge the British Empire.

 

Moderate Cooptation: Quebec, 1763-6

Even as the movement was taking shape, the first clash between British imperial reform and colonial groups was already underway. And the battleground wasn’t actually in the Thirteen Colonies, but in newly-conquered Quebec.

 

Under the old salutary neglect, the British would have given the province over for local elites to run. But this wasn’t possible in Quebec, whose French and Catholic elite were barred from British Anglican government. Most colonists expected the British to simply disenfranchise the former, and promote the few Anglo traders living in the province as the new elite.

 

Obviously, the prospect of a few hundred Anglos lording over 70,000 Quebecois was not a recipe for stability. So in 1763, the London-appointed Governor came up with a new policy: instead of handing power over to the Anglo traders, he himself would run Quebec, and grant a limited tolerance for Catholicism and French law that the Anglo colonists would never have given.

 

The colonists were furious. Not only did the Governor sabotage their attempt to dominate Quebec, he did so by violating the principle of colonial self-governance. The Lockean problem was soon deployed against the Governor: his policy violated English liberty; his taxes did not have the people’s consent; the soldiers he sent to enforce tax collection were agents of royal tyranny.

 

This was enough to unite the Anglo traders, but what could they actually do? Despite the occasional brawl with the Montreal garrison, the Anglos knew they were too few to stop the Governor from implementing his policy. They could, however, follow the Moderate strategy of cooptation, and convince other members of the establishment to stop the Governor.

 

The traders quickly realized that they were well-suited for cooptation. Most of them were already business partners with London’s influential merchants, and by weaponizing this relationship, they got said merchants to lobby for their cause in Parliament, the very core of the imperial establishment. Soon, Parliament was being bombarded with petitions, planted press stories, and protests, all denouncing Quebec’s Governor and his superiors for being tyrannical, pro-Catholic, and un-British. After three years of this, the Government fell, the opposition came into power and, recognizing the benefits of a pro-Lockean stance, replaced the Governor.

 

Quebec showcased how Moderate cooptation would work. By weaponizing existing relationships with London’s merchants, Moderates could appropriate the power and resources of the merchant lobby for their own use, eliminating the need to build their own power from the ground up. In the short-run, this was a very efficient way to win.

 

But in the long-run, this tied Moderate power to the power of the London merchant lobby. To be sure, this lobby was very strong, and if the only point of imperial reform was to raise a few taxes, Parliament wouldn’t have bothered risking their wrath.

 

But this wasn’t the only point of imperial reform. Fundamentally, Moderates failed to fully appreciate the non-economic aspects of this contest. For the British imperial establishment, failing to pass imperial reform would mean being gradually sidelined by their growing subjects, which was something they were willing to commit a lot of power to avoid. And once their committed power grew beyond even what the merchant lobby could handle, the Moderates would be left in a very bad position indeed.

 

Quebec was already looking like a temporary victory. The new Governor quickly returned to his predecessor’s policy, rendering the past three years of Moderate cooptation moot.

 

Patriot Disruption 1: Sugar & Stamp Acts, 1764-6

Even as the political struggle in Quebec was underway, a new one was developing further south. Between 1764 and 5, Parliament passed taxes on American sugar and official stamp documentation, intending to have the colonies shoulder some imperial expenses. This was seen as another violation of colonial self-government.

 

The Stamp Act, in particular, upset a large swathe of the colonial elite whose businesses relied on official documents – printers, lawyers, clergy and the like. From Halifax to Savannah, they protested and petitioned in another attempt at cooptation: Virginia gentlemen would even suspend debt payments to get their London creditors to lobby Parliament harder. But this time, the establishment was determined to overpower the merchant lobby.

 

Moderate cooptation failed to reverse the taxes; but the colonists could still stop them from being collected. The stage was set for the Patriots and their strategy of disruption.

 

In the cities, particularly Boston, angry Patriot elites began mobilizing whatever physical power they could muster. Like in Quebec, they again tapped into their personal networks – business clients for the merchant John Hancock; political clients for the politician Sam Adams. They were organized into what were essentially personal mobs, ready to riot on their patron’s command.

 

In an age before modern policing, it wasn’t so difficult for riots to stop government policy execution. Mobs barred people from paying taxes, attacked tax collectors and officers, and even burnt down the house of the Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor. As a result, nobody paid or collected the taxes, rendering the Parliamentary decision completely impotent. After a year, the establishment bowed to reality and repealed both taxes.

 

The Stamp Act Riots showcased how Patriot disruption would work. Through extra-ordinary political action and physical violence, colonists demonstrated that they could prevent establishment policy from being executed. That said, the Patriots won only because the British were completely unprepared – and the stakes were too high for them to surrender after one failure. Like the Moderates, the Patriots had to ask themselves: what would they do to resist the next, inevitably more powerful attack?

 

Patriot Disruption 2: Vanguardism

Unlike the Moderates, the Patriots would develop a response to the problem of growing establishment power. And in doing so, they would become an early example for a new social movement grand strategy – Mass Agitation or Vanguardism.

 

To understand vanguardism, we should first review what the colonists had been doing so far. Earlier, we said that social movements revolve around two things: issues, which drive public participation, and organization, which converts this participation into power. From this, we can derive three grand strategies: one focusing on issues, one on organization, and one balanced between the two.

 

Let’s first look at the issue-heavy grand strategy, or ‘Spontaneous Uprising’. In a Spontaneous Uprising, activists focus on finding and deploying a hot-button issue that gets as many people as possible participating in the movement. Nobody forces people to participate in the movement; nobody instructs participants what to do once in the movement. The whole movement is supported by pure amateurish enthusiasm, and one can’t expect enthusiastic amateurs to have the discipline or coordination required for effective work. So while Spontaneous Uprisings are extremely easy to set up, they tend to be very ineffective at producing power, and only win if they can attract a massive number of participants, or are facing a very weak establishment.

 

The colonial resistance in Quebec and during the Stamp Act were examples of Spontaneous Uprisings. In both cases, the movement successfully got colonists so angry that they began resisting the imperial establishment in whatever way they saw fit: lobbying in Quebec, riots in Boston. Both prevailed over an unprepared imperial establishment, but there was every indication that this grand strategy was reaching its limits.

 

For one, the imperial establishment was getting prepared. Parliament laid the legal groundwork by declaring its authority over the colonies, and eventually, it would enforce this by sending troops over, particularly to Boston. By mustering more of the state’s political and physical powers, the British hoped to set the bar for victory beyond what the colonists had been able to achieve so far.

 

Even without these measures, colonial power was already weakening. This is typical of Spontaneous Uprisings: since their success relies on using issues to whip up public enthusiasm, they tend to suffer massive attrition in the medium and long runs, as participants calm down, get exhausted or bored, and drop out.

 

Attrition was a particularly pressing problem for the Patriots, since their strategy of disruption, which carried serious physical and legal risks, demanded exceptionally high enthusiasm from participants. The initial shock of the Stamp Act helped get people up in arms, but now that the British were dragging things out, there was every chance that their intrusions would become ‘normalized’, and colonists would lose their enthusiasm for high-risk rioting.

 

But in a way, attrition was only a serious problem because so far, the colonial resistance had let people freely decide when to participate in the movement, and what to do once in it. But what if the Patriots could change that, just a little? What if they could artificially encourage people to participate, or artificially raise the amount of power each participant contributed with their work? Then the Patriots would be able to sustain their power and hold their ground in a long-term contest against the imperial establishment.

 

This is where vanguardism, as a grand strategy, comes in. In it, a movement establishes specialist organizations, known as ‘vanguards’, to structure and coordinate work in a way that boosts and sustains movement power. They can do this in three ways: first, vanguards can better refine, target and broadcast issues to the general public – also known as propaganda; second, they can impose structure on participants, increasing the efficiency of all aspects of work from recruitment to action; and finally, they can serve as a centralized command, observing the establishment and directing movement power to where it would be most impactful.

 

Unlike the famous Leninist vanguards, the Patriots didn’t need to organize from the ground up. Instead, Patriot activists exploited their position as local elites to hijack colonial institutions and repurpose them as vanguards. All in all, the Patriots would end up relying on three major organizations: the Sons of Liberty, the Colonial Assemblies, and the Press.

 

The Sons of Liberty were one of the few organizations that the Patriots created from scratch, having started out as a way to organize the private mobs in Boston. By inducting the elites who headed these mobs into a ‘secret society’ with set goals and codes of conduct, the Sons incentivized elites to deploy their power in ways that helped the movement, rather than for personal gain.

 

On the other end of society, the Sons increased the efficiency of Patriot recruitment by lowering the risks or costs of participation. They offered an anonymous identity, which shielded Patriots from legal or social reprisals. They also offered a basic organizational template, which Patriots in other colonies could easily copy to set up their own local cells. These templates also standardized Patriot ideology and action across the various cells, minimizing disputes that could have arisen out of group differences.

 

Next were the Colonial Assemblies, chief among them the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and the Boston Town Meeting. Patriots in these colonial institutions could both politically disrupt the Royal Governor and support the work of other Patriots as vanguards. They set up Committees of Correspondence to communicate, coordinate and share resistance intel with Patriots in other colonies. They provided political and legal cover for Patriot disruption and obstructed establishment crackdowns. And they also lent their political skills and influence to Patriot propaganda – most notably in creating slogans such as “No Taxation without Representation”.

 

Finally, we have the Press, which had been alienated from the imperial establishment ever since the Stamp Act. The Patriots further cemented this alliance by exploiting the media’s eternal desire for sensational and breaking news, which Patriots such as Benjamin Franklin and especially Sam Adams did to great effect. By taking over a local paper and converting it into a Patriot newswire, Adams could furnish the media with timely and dramatic propaganda, further enhanced with illustrations from Paul Revere. With this lure, the Patriots easily got the media to always broadcast the Patriot side of the story first, inevitably driving the public to sympathize with their movement.

 

All three vanguards – the Sons of Liberty, the Colonial Assemblies, and the Press – were in place by the time the Stamp Act was repealed, and the Patriots would soon see the benefit from their contributions. But if Patriot vanguardism was so helpful, why didn’t the Moderates create their own versions?

 

The simple answer is that vanguards, like any organization, requires resources. The Moderates, blinkered by their optimistic assessment of the struggle, simply didn’t want to spend more on their movement, especially when they already had the London merchants to generate power.

 

As a result, Moderate action throughout this period remained uncoordinated, dependent on individual enthusiasm, and often self-canceling. As such, the one major Moderate attempt at a united front, the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, predictably failed, as powerful New York and South Carolina Moderates refused to share their establishment connections, prioritizing their own gains over the welfare of the colonists as a whole.

 

Patriots vs Moderates: Townshend and Coercive Acts, 1767-1774

Despite the imperial establishment’s failure in Quebec and now the Stamp Act, the stakes over imperial reform were still too high for them to give up. So, after a brief interval, which the British hoped would reduce colonial enthusiasm for resistance, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts in 1767, placing taxes on a new set of goods ranging from paper to glass to tea.

 

Contrary to British hopes, the Patriots responded by resuming their campaign of political and physical disruption. With their vanguards acting in support, the Patriots were not only able to sustain their resistance, but more importantly, they were able to keep up even as the British committed more power to the fight. The British sent troops into Boston; the Patriots sent mobs to fight them, leading to events such as the Boston Massacre and New York’s Battle of Golden Hill. The British dissolved the Massachusetts House; the Patriots established a Convention of Towns and ran the colony from there. Years of vanguard work had created an expansive and powerful Patriot movement that the British, yet again, did not have the local resources to handle. And in being at the forefront of colonial resistance, the Patriots captured the imagination of other colonists.

 

The time was ripe for the Patriots to further expand their movement, and it made sense to start with fellow Moderates, who shared similar attitudes towards British imperial reform. If the Patriots could get enough Moderates to join them, not only would their numbers increase, but they would also become the main voice for the entire colonial resistance, and the ones best positioned to impose change across the colonies.

 

But was it even possible for Patriots to convert Moderates? After all, most Moderates could admit that Patriot disruption was effective, especially compared to their own efforts. Nevertheless, their main concern was on the principles behind Patriot disruption, and its potential consequences to society. Moderates worried that Patriot disruption would encourage political violence, force a break with the mother country, and ultimately leave the colonies as isolated, unstable communities vulnerable to domestic and foreign threats.

 

Simply doing more disruption wasn’t going to make Moderates any less wary of the Patriots. In response, some Patriots promoted a new disruption tactic: one without political violence and minimal rebelliousness, while still ensuring that imperial reform would be rendered unworkable. This was the boycott.

 

Boycotts seemed like a great Patriot answer to Moderate worries. Aside from solving said worries, they would again render the Townshend taxes un-collectable. Boycotting was also a familiar practice across the colonies: Northern merchants did it to keep out foreign imports, while Southern landowners used it to manage crop prices. What’s more, boycotting for the colonial cause also gave indebted elites a convenient reason to cut expenses without losing face!

 

But if the idea was good, the Patriots failed in the execution. Moderate traders wouldn’t accept Patriot supervision over the boycotts, so the Patriots couldn’t use their vanguards to organize the action. Instead, they would have to trust that Moderate traders would be enthusiastic enough to self-police and sustain the action for as long as needed.

 

The results were disappointing. The boycott was only effective in Massachusetts, where strong Patriot vanguards could enforce the boycott. Elsewhere, Moderate merchants immediately accused each other of cheating, and smaller landholders and traders ignored the boycott entirely. Group disputes grew so disruptive that, had Parliament not again repealed most of the Townshend taxes in 1770, the boycott might well have collapsed from colonial infighting.

 

To a few Patriots, the Townshend boycotts seemed to confirm that the Patriots and Moderates simply didn’t mix: there was no way the Patriots could accommodate Moderate sensibilities without compromising their own effectiveness as a movement. Therefore, they returned to tried-and-tested methods of physical disruption, in particular against the only major Townshend tax remaining by 1773 – the tax on tea.

 

Most Patriots and Moderates had, in fact, already planned another continent-wide boycott of the incoming tea ships; but to a few Boston Patriots, the only real guarantee lay in destroying the product. So, in a surprise and surgical strike, the Bostonians boarded the ships, disposed of the tea, and left without triggering any further confrontation or collateral damage. As a tactical action, the Boston Tea Party represented the apex of Patriot disruption.

 

In reality, the Tea Party turned out to be a Patriot own goal. The furious British responded with a dramatic escalation of power: under the Coercive Acts, the port of Boston was closed, the Massachusetts constitution was suspended, and colonial judicial rights were restricted – and the British would back this up with another troop reinforcement. The Patriots defiantly set up their own Massachusetts Provincial Government in response, but the reality was that establishment power had now far outstripped the Patriots’ capabilities, and to keep up, the movement needed the participation and help of the Moderates.

 

There was no help. There were a few private donations, demonstrations of support, and other symbolic gestures. Fear of what Britain might do to the other colonies also drove local elites to set up vanguard institutions in the Patriot style, mostly permanent Committees of Correspondence that could act as an alternative government should colonial legislatures be dissolved. But most of the colonies refused to act with Massachusetts against the Coercive Acts, not even in a general boycott. In the eyes of the Moderates who led these colonies, the Boston Patriots pretty much brought this on themselves.

 

Instead, Moderates proposed to invite all the North American colonies to a Continental Congress to discuss the potential for a joint boycott against the Coercive Acts. This idea was, in fact, a political poison pill – the Moderates knew that they still outnumbered the Patriots, and so intended to use the Congress to force the Patriots to accept and follow the Moderate lead from here on out. The Patriots couldn’t reject the Congress – after all, they were the ones asking for Moderate help.

 

And so the Massachusetts Patriots, having just reached their apex a short while ago, traveled to the Congress in Philadelphia half-expecting to be completely defeated – not by the British, but by the Moderates.

 

Patriotism Dominant: The 1^st Continental Congress, 1774

The First Continental Congress that opened in September 1774 was meant to be an overwhelmingly Moderate institution. Most of the delegates from the 12 participating colonies were wealthy elites with strong desires for social stability and continued trade with Britain, and some states, notably New York, had deliberately diluted the Patriot influence within their delegation. Philadelphia, the hosting city of the Congress, was a bastion of Moderate traders.

 

So it speaks to the power of the Patriot movement that they still got the Congress to endorse and even go beyond the Patriot version of the boycott. In short, the Congress became a mini-demonstration of effective Patriot Vanguardism.

 

First, the Patriots established a special message service between Boston and Philadelphia, ensuring that they, again, had the first take on developing events. Immediately after the Congress began, Sam Adams used this service to spread propaganda regarding a British attack on Boston, coupled with news of brave colonial resistance. Unsurprisingly, this ‘Powder Alarm’ helped generate a more pro-Patriot attitude amongst the delegates.

 

The Patriots then hijacked the Congress by infiltrating the subcommittees responsible for reviewing the various boycott proposals. Shrewdly, John Adams and his Massachusetts Patriots gave these tasks to allies from other colonies, avoiding Moderate suspicion in the process. As a result, the subcommittee ultimately recommended the Patriot version of the boycott, which proposed an immediate boycott on all British goods. The rest of the Congress accepted their decisions.

 

With this subcommittee vanguard effectively setting the Congress’ agenda, the tables were turned, and the Patriots now forced Moderates to follow Patriot policy. Delegates agreed to additionally ban American exports to Britain in a year’s time; they also endorsed community resolutions that took a hard-line stance towards British rule.

 

But most importantly, the Congress agreed with Patriots that effective boycotts needed supervision and, as a result, created the ‘Continental Association’, where each local community would establish a committee to ensure compliance with the boycott. And here, not even the Patriots themselves could have fully appreciated what they had unleashed onto the colonists.

 

Compulsory Patriotism: The Continental Association, 1774-5

The establishment of the Continental Association marks the second transition in Patriot grand strategy, from the balanced strategy of Vanguardism to the organization-focused one of ‘Ideological Mobilization’.

 

Let’s quickly review the grand strategies again. In the issue-focused ‘Spontaneous Uprising’, the movement’s power comes entirely from the issue, and the enthusiasm it whips up amongst the public. In the balanced grand strategy of Vanguardism, the movement’s power still requires an issue and some public enthusiasm, but the effect of the two is enhanced by organizational work. Now, in the organization-heavy strategy of Ideological Mobilization, the movement’s power comes entirely from organizational work: participants don’t choose what to do in a movement, and often can’t even choose whether to join or not. Instead, the movement’s organizations assign work to the participant, much like a mini-bureaucracy or state, and it is this compulsory work that generates movement power.

 

Ideological Mobilization is most relevant when the movement is built around a fringe issue that can’t attract the public participation needed for victory. This was essentially where the Patriot movement had been ever since the Townshend Acts: to match the surging power of the British, the Patriots had asked for Moderate help, but that help either wasn’t coming or came with too many strings attached. But now, with the establishment of the Continental Association, the Patriots no longer needed to ask.

 

The Association was the perfect vehicle for Patriot Ideological Mobilization. Because the decision came from the Continental Congress, which claimed to represent the collective will of all colonists, every community had to set up a local Association branch. Because the Patriots, thanks to their vanguards, were powerful and organized, they easily dominated most of the local branches. And because the Association had a mandate to supervise the boycott and stop any colonist from using British goods, this gave the local Associations immense power over public behavior and private life. In short, the Patriots, through the Associations, now enjoyed unprecedented power over the colonists living in the Thirteen Colonies.

 

The Patriots soon abused this power to force colonists into their movement. They circled official petitions where all colonists had to publicly declare their support of the Patriot boycott. They set up supervising committees and town meetings which all colonists had to attend. They granted themselves huge powers to spy, search, and bully all suspected opponents. And at all points of this process, they made sure that the colonists were subject to an unrelenting stream of Patriot propaganda.

 

By doing all this, the Patriots weren’t really trying to turn Moderates into enthusiastic Patriots. Instead, what they wanted was for the colonists, whatever their real beliefs, to publicly act and work as if they were Patriots, and in doing so contribute positively to the Patriot movement.

 

We can see this in action, when we briefly look at how the Patriots suppressed a major rival – the Loyalists. Contrary to popular image, most Loyalists were actually ‘ultra-Moderates’, as in people who also disliked British imperial reform; in fact, many Loyalists were Moderate leaders. Ultimately, however, Loyalists chose distant British rule over what they saw as local Patriot tyranny. Stung by the Continental Congress and the shock defeat of the Moderates, Loyalists began setting up their own vanguardist counter-movement, intending to use Patriot methods against their own creators.

 

A Loyalist movement could have been a strong force. Modern scholars estimate that 15% of colonists within the Thirteen Colonies were Loyalists, among them elites who had extensive networks and resources. They had enthusiastic allies in the press, the legislatures, and amongst the Highland Scottish colonists. The British establishment did what it could to support them.

 

Yet the Loyalists would not be given the chance to live up to their potential. Immediately, the Patriots launched a continent-wide crackdown against Loyalists. Local Associations set up loyalty tests and spy networks to create an atmosphere of constant surveillance. They rooted out and punished anybody who was suspected of anti-Patriot behavior, sometimes through physical or psychological torture, but mostly through ‘Civil Excommunication’, in which other colonists were banned from interacting with them. Patriot propaganda encouraged colonists to view Loyalists as slaves and traitors to their neighbors.

 

These Patriot actions made a mockery out of their supposed devotion to Locke, but they effectively neutered the Loyalist movement. Known Loyalist elites and vanguards were harassed out of their communities and lost the ability to organize movements. Hidden Loyalists were forced to act in secret and on a small scale, which greatly limited their ability to generate significant power. And Loyalist sympathizers amongst the public would, out of fear of punishment, disguise themselves as Patriots and work to destroy what they actually believed in. As a result, the Loyalist movement never posed a major challenge to the Patriots, and oftentimes would exist only when large British forces were nearby.

 

If Patriot Ideological Mobilization was strong enough to effectively silence the Loyalist segment of the colonial population, then there really was no hope for the miniscule and beleaguered representatives of the British imperial establishment. By early 1775, the American Revolution was essentially complete in the Thirteen Colonies: now with the willing and unwilling support of most colonists, the Patriots easily overpowered whatever imperial power remained. The colonial militia and government stopped obeying British orders. Royal Governors fled to nearby warships and Royal forts were taken by storm. The Patriots were now free to impose whatever change they wanted, and after the Battle of Lexington and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, that change would turn out to be full independence. The only way the British could possibly overpower the movement now was by sending over a massive military force, and their decision to do that set the stage for the American Revolutionary War.

 

Movement Failure: Canada

How could the British imperial establishment let a colonial dispute spiral so catastrophically out of control? Well, as we have seen, the British repeatedly committed the cardinal sin of movement suppression: they responded to each strengthening of colonial power with proportionate, rather than overwhelming force. Even on the eve of Lexington, when the colonies were basically independent, General Gage in Boston still only had 3 thousand troops to suppress the Patriots, rather than the 20 thousand he had requested. And if those 20 thousand troops had arrived in Boston immediately after the Stamp Act Riots, the Patriot movement would have been squashed as soon as it had begun.

 

These failures occurred because the British establishment did not want to pay for so many troops, and – surprise! – they genuinely believed that such actions would have been tyrannical. The Patriots rarely fell victim to such concerns, especially when suppressing the Loyalists, and that gave them an advantage over their enemies.

 

There was another way to defeat the colonial movement that didn’t involve force. Local elites were by far the most valuable supporters of the colonial resistance, providing the resources, networks, and social acceptance that the movement would otherwise have taken years to build up. That’s why autocrats have often placed local elites under close establishment watch, like how the French moved their nobility to Versailles. A few establishment figures proposed something similar for American elites, but this was always seen as a fringe and un-British policy.

 

Which brings us to Canada. The British establishment largely failed to keep the colonial Anglo elite on their side, but with Quebec, the sheer cultural differences between ruler and ruled made it obvious that the British needed to adopt a strategy of cooptation, and convince the locals to stick with British rule. The Quebec Act of 1774, which granted religious tolerance and some acceptance of French law within the province, made British rule far more agreeable to the Quebecois elite, especially compared with the alternative, which was rule by the Anglo colonists that had so recently tried to destroy them. And so, despite repeated appeals by the Continental Congresses and even military invasion, Quebec stuck with the British.

 

Nova Scotia showcased another form of elite cooptation. The colony was about the same size as Georgia, and furthermore, half its population was from rebellious New England. Throughout the period of the American Revolution, the colony also suffered from major political instability, largely caused by the royal Governor’s attempt to take over nearby Prince Edward Island and sell it to the Nova Scotian elite. But such corruption kept the elite close to the imperial establishment, which meant that unlike Georgia, Nova Scotia would reject the Continental Association, even at the risk of being boycotted by the other colonies.

 

These elite cooptation tactics were not perfect or foolproof: attempts to bribe elites in Virginia and New York generally just drove the losing side to support the colonial resistance. But given the importance of elites to the colonial movement, anything that could temporarily reduce their anger towards Britain was helpful, at least until the establishment position could be shored up by the two ultimate guarantors of stability, which were British troops and Loyalist refugees.

 

Conclusion

In terms of the strategy of protest and revolution, the American Revolution was extremely innovative, even compared to its more influential peers like the French Revolution. In the attempt to overcome colonial division and match the power of the British, the colonial resistance, especially its radical Patriot wing, moved from a Spontaneous Uprising based on pure enthusiasm, to a balanced strategy of Vanguardism and finally, to the proto-government of Ideological Mobilization. In doing so, the Patriots demonstrated that revolutions could be ‘made’, and that even fringe radical ideologies had a shot at seizing power.

 

However, we must also acknowledge that the colonial movement was playing on ‘Very Easy’ mode. Its activists and leaders were colonial elites, who had the resources, networks, and social status to build a movement at a comparatively low cost. Its opponent was the British establishment, who, rather than being the ‘tyrants’ of Patriot propaganda, actually responded extremely complacently to colonial unrest. Nevertheless, the American Revolution was in many ways an organizational triumph, and many future movements would spend much blood and treasure trying to replicate its effects.

 

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