Popular Movements
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Popular movements both ignited the fire that led to the Revolution and fanned the flames that kept it going. At first, the crowds were just trying to keep the pseudo-independence they had enjoyed during the period of salutary neglect. According to Countryman, “rioting was often defensive” and the people were looking to “restore or protect something good” (1). This was true with the uprisings surrounding the various “Acts.”
These defensive movements led to the Revolution. The British pushed the colonists and the colonists pushed back, harder than the British had expected. The movements also scared both American and British leaders. They “placed limits on the power of men who ruled” and “provided a set of signals from people to their rulers” (Countrymen 3).
Eventually the uprisings began to focus on British soldiers. Once the colonists were directly acting against their mother countrys military, was their any doubt that a Revolution would transpire?
Countrymans article makes it painfully obvious that he believes in the power of the urban crowds and rural militias and regards then as anything but “disorganized rabble easily led by demagogues.” He repeatedly remarks on the importance of popular uprisings identifying them as “central to the public life” and “to the way that British power in America came to an end” (Countryman 1). Crowd actions was not disorganized or led by demagogues; it “rested on a clear understanding of right and wrong and well-developed ideas about how resistance ought to be carried out” (Countryman 2). It is odd that the elite criticize the crowds for supposedly being led by demagogues when “inflated rhetoricwas a prime social weapon of the elite [and] crowd action was a prime social weapon of the ordinary people” (Countryman 3). The colonial elites may have dismissed popular movements