Nicholas W. Gentile became hooked on the little-known case of 33 signers of a public farewell letter to Thomas Hutchinson. In May 1774, the signers foolishly wished Hutchinson well as he hotfooted it to London after the destruction of his mansion and his political career. With a notable lack of foresight, they thanked Hutchinson for their “entire Approbation of your publick Conduct” with their “most sincere and hearty Thanks” (30). As he sailed away, those 33 men discovered the hard way how difficult it was to be loyal to the king's cause, or even to hold out for neutrality, in a Massachusetts radicalizing and preparing for war.Gentile's book carefully follows all of the signers (known as the Marblehead Addressers) before, during, and after the Revolution. He has painstakingly dug through the archives to reestablish their lives in all their mundane glory. His microhistory positions these men and their decision-making in the realities of Marblehead and New England in the American Revolution. Marblehead was a wealthy port town; many were merchants and traders of varying affluence. The book explores how they quickly became targets of an organized campaign to publicly recant their statement and affirm support of the new patriot cause. Gentile is clear that they were subject to increasing pressure against their social networks, livelihoods, properties, and lives. Almost all chose to recant and tried to craft statements of community support to placate their townsmen. Often, they used the same template statement word-for-word, which was typical for public oaths and apologies. They also paid to publish them in the local newspaper. Isaac Mansfield said he was “really sorry I ever signed it” (44). That was undoubtedly true!Gentile argues that this need for public mass agreement was driven by and shaped by New England's post-Great Awakening cultural predilection for harmony, concord, and unity—otherwise known as congregationalism. In doing so, he argues for the importance of religion in understanding the behavior of early Americans in what we might see as political spheres. No doubt he is right. Congregationalism helped shape New England's political small-town culture of surface harmony and agreement. So did shared economic activities and fates—something Gentile does not consider despite the larger story of Marblehead's shared, steep economic decline in the 19th century as the port withered. I agree that religion is part of the answer to how New Englanders reacted to the shocks of revolutionary disagreement, but I caution him not to discount the shocks of the period, driving people to new disagreements and new ways of handling them. Loyalists learned the hard way that their patriot neighbors were willing to exclude them over public statements of political belief—all in the name of democracy.Gentile's work shows the consequences of the public address for these 33 men. Some found their way back into harmony—or at least their neighbors’ good graces—by apologizing. In many cases, they were then expected to perform affirmative actions on behalf of the patriot cause. Joseph Lee's apology was accepted, and in January 1775, he found himself a captain of the militia, and by June, he was on the committee of safety (99). Other recanters took up elected office during and after the war. Gentile reads this as evidence of their full acceptance, which it was. It was also the pressure of performance for a cause they had once rejected. Others faced a much tougher road back. Seven refused to recant, and several more had one or more attempts rejected. The town meeting declared them “obstinate” and “Enemies to their Country” (57). Pressure increased. Some made second recantations, which were accepted. Finally, the town ordered the remaining holdouts to leave.Leave they did. The Robie family left in May 1775, grateful when they saw the safety of the British flag in the harbor of Nova Scotia. Joseph Hooper wrote of the discomfort of his ship voyage to Spain, where he spent “42 nights on some dried Fish” (79). He had to walk away from his just-built mansion and a profitable business. Gentile does not seem to realize that the Robie family later returned to Massachusetts several years after the war. Perhaps others did as well. Would this change his and our understanding of the choice of harmony or cleavage? The book does not engage with recent scholarship on loyalists very much. That choice does mean a disjuncture between grand big picture thoughts about the tragedy of political division and the loyalists, and the details of people's lives and how they played out.The answer lies in the book's approach as a political, social, and religious interpretation of one town's experiences in trying to heal division. It is not at its heart a loyalist history. It is a history of real people who argued about politics in an atmosphere where politics began to take over other spheres. Overall, this award-winning microhistory of one New England town's confrontation with its incipient loyalists is a well-told window into the dilemmas of community cohesion, networks of belonging, rising political turmoil, and the dilemmas of manufacturing political unity at the beginning of the war for independence.
Rebecca Brannon (Mon,) studied this question.