The Spirit of 74: How the American Revolution Began

by Ray Raphael, Marie Raphael

Overview

How ordinary people went from resistance to revolution: “[A] concise, lively narrative . . . the authors expertly build tension.” —Publishers Weekly
 
Americans know about the Boston Tea Party and “the shot heard ’round the world,” but sixteen months divided these two iconic events, a period that has nearly been lost to history. The Spirit of ’74 fills in this gap in our nation’s founding narrative, showing how in these mislaid months, step by step, real people made a revolution.
 
After the Tea Party, Parliament not only shut down a port but also revoked the sacred Massachusetts charter. Completely disenfranchised, citizens rose up as a body and cast off British rule everywhere except in Boston, where British forces were stationed. A “Spirit of ’74” initiated the American Revolution, much as the better-known “Spirit of ’76” sparked independence. Redcoats marched on Lexington and Concord to take back a lost province, but they encountered Massachusetts militiamen who had trained for months to protect the revolution they had already made.
 
The Spirit of ’74 places our founding moment in a rich new historical context, both changing and deepening its meaning for all Americans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620971260
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ray Raphael’s seventeen books include A People’s History of the American Revolution, The First American Revolution, Founders, Constitutional Myths, and Founding Myths. He is a senior research fellow at Humboldt State University. Marie Raphael, author of two historical novels, has taught literature and writing at Boston University, College of the Redwoods, and Humboldt State University. They live in Northern California.

Editorial Reviews

06/22/2015
In this concise, lively narrative, spouses Ray (Constitutional Myths) and Marie Raphael (A Boy from Ireland) identify Massachusetts as the cradle of the colonial rebellion against England. The authors persuasively argue that between December 1773 and April 1775, the organized resistance to British authority that developed throughout the former Puritan stronghold amounted to revolution. They open with a smart retelling of the dumping of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor, an action carefully planned by city inhabitants fed up with British taxation policies and their political implications. The authors expertly build tension by layering colonial action and British reaction over subsequent events in Massachusetts, weaving in well-chosen anecdotes to illustrate their points. Both well- and lesser-known colonials appear, including John and Abigail Adams, workingman George Robert Twelves Hewes, and councilman Joshua Loring. The touchstone character, however, is not one of the Founding Fathers, but “Captain General and Governor-in-Chief” Thomas Gage, the Englishman tasked with subduing Massachusetts. Neither a buffoon nor a devil, he was ultimately outmaneuvered by colonists devoted to revolution. The Raphaels expertly contextualize how the outbreak of a shooting war at Lexington and Concord marked a crucial “turning point” in, rather than the beginning of, the American Revolution. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Most people understand that the American Revolution began in Massachusetts. What they may not know is that the revolution actually began well over a year before the gunfire at Lexington and Concord. . . . This revolution in Massachusetts was not brought about by the well-known 'names' associated with the revolutionary period but rather by little known locals supported by many thousands of ordinary people. . . . In a very real sense what became the American Revolution joined the revolution that had already taken place in Massachusetts in 1774. The Raphaels tell this dramatic story in a fascinating and very readable manner. Even knowing that the events of April 19th are just over the horizon, the unfolding of the tale makes for exciting reading. . . . This book thoroughly explains what took place in Massachusetts between the Boston Tea Party and Lexington/Concord. Without this background of revolution the march to Concord doesn't make sense. The Spirit of 74 ties it all together."
—Journal of the American Revolution

"Ray and Marie Raphael provide readers with the lively story of how, starting with the Boston Tea Party, Massachusetts turned from resistance to revolution in a single year. Using well-chosen quotations from participants, as well as revealing anecdotes, their masterful narrative brings to life the human drama of this grassroots transformation."
—Richard Brown, Distinguished Professor of History emeritus, University of Connecticut

"A well-conceived work of popular history that fills a gap in the chronology of the American Revolution."
—Kirkus

From the Publisher

2015-06-30
A well-conceived work of popular history that fills a gap in the chronology of the American Revolution. The period between the Boston Tea Party, which took place at the end of 1773, and the first revolutionary battles at Lexington and Concord, which took place in April 1775, is unknown to most general readers and often overlooked even by professional historians' accounts of the Revolutionary War. Yet they were crucial, as Ray (Founding Myths, 2014, etc.) and Marie Raphael (A Boy from Ireland, 2007, etc.) ably document. Tea, write the authors, was but one of five goods on which Parliament levied taxes, but while it backed off on the other four, it held to tea as a more-than-symbolic gesture of imperial power that "became the symbol of its oppressive policies." While Parliament debated what to do about the upstarts in Boston, colonial committees and militias formed in more or less open rebellion. More important, during the 16-month gap, the rebels formed the basis of independent government. As the Raphaels write, when their rejection of British suzerainty placed the people of Worcester County, Massachusetts, in a so-called state of nature or mere anarchy, they stepped up and figured out how to rule themselves: "That the Worcester County Convention presumed it could appoint men to government posts, although it possessed no legal claim to do so, was in and of itself revolutionary." The period also revealed divisions in Colonial society. In Massachusetts, loyalists tended to cluster near fall-line cities while revolutionaries abounded in the western counties. Radicals and moderates argued about what to do with the newly formed militias even as formerly restrained British garrisons began to itch with punitive desire and Colonial governor Thomas Gage came to regard the colonists "for what they now were, near enemies"—and enemies who were better prepared for war than the British authorities imagined. The authors shine a light on a dark corner of the struggle for American independence.

Kirkus Reviews