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Before reading Pauline Maier’s “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America” I was a little skeptical about mob legitimacy in this era. From today’s perspective, mob’s carry too many negative connotations to be considered good in any sense. Yet, Maier does a magnificent job of portraying how mob action was an accepted and necessary social tool of the era. She goes even further, by shockingly breaking down the negatively viewed ideas of mobs and rebuilding the term in a way that grants sympathy for those involved. Maier does this by providing explicit details that exemplifies how North American Colonial mobs were truly not violent and uncontrolled like their British counterparts. Instead, they were the efforts of an abused people who fell to mob action as a last hope in their efforts to secure their liberties as a people.
One statement from Maier’s work that struck me was Thomas Jefferson’s statement regarding mob usage. His statement was; “What country can preserve it’s (sic) liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance” (Maier 26). After mulling over the idea of mob action for a little, I realized that this statement is the epitome of what a mob was for Colonial British America. It was not an effort to create mayhem or chaos, which are ideas that are normally associated with mobs. Rather, it was the colonist’s last ditch effort to show their rulers the effects of unruly and unfair laws placed upon them. When impressment reached the point of potentially crippling a society or acts like the sugar act could destroy an entire colony’s economy, the colonists fell to mob action. This was not their first course of action though, as colonists from the poorest of the poor to even the magistrates followed all legal steps before turning to extralegal actions.
In Wayne E. Lee’s “Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina” the legal procedures that colonists tried before arriving at mob action are laid out in a clear cut manner. In elaborating on the Enfeild Riots, Lee does a great job of depicting how the colonists took every legal step from a petition, to speaking with the attorney general, and finally to the raising their notion with the Assembly before arriving at mob action (Lee 24). By reading these steps, it only legitimized the “legality” of the colonist’s actions. In my opinion, the colonists followed every step of the law and it was their fault they had to resort to this action, but their government which forced them into this desperation. Their only hope was preserving their liberties under an oppressive government, which any American citizen can sympathize with no matter their class in society.
After reading through Ben Hartshorn’s post regarding mob action I would have to agree with him on every point but one. He states that “the shape and rules of mob violence had not changed very much” in comparison to the mobs of England, Germany, and Scotland (Benjamin Hartshorn Philadelphia, PA). In this juncture, I would say based on both Maier’s and Lee’s pieces that we can see a clear cut difference between the mobs of the colonies and those of Western Europe. The clearest and most distinct difference rests with the organization and lack of violence between the groups. It is stated in Maier’s piece how the English at times were excessively violent and destroyed numerous pieces of property that had no relation to their target. Following that, Maier mentions how the colonists rarely destroyed anything that was not their target and rarely, if ever, turned to violence that was not ultimately necessary, which helped them avoid significant deaths. If anything, this difference alludes to the superior organization of the colonists compared to western Europeans when it comes to their extralegal activities. With this in mind, I would have to respectfully disagree with my friend on the similarities between the mobs of North America and Western Europe.