Patriotism at the Local Level
Committees of correspondence, of public safety, and of inspection dominated the political landscape in patriot communities. These committees took on more than customary local governance; they enforced boycotts, picked army draftees, and policed suspected traitors. They sometimes invaded homes to search for contraband goods such as British tea or textiles.
Loyalists were dismayed by the increasing show of power by patriots. A man in Westchester, New York, described his response to intrusions by committees: “Choose your committee or suffer it to be chosen by a half dozen fools in your neighbor-hood—open your doors to them—let them examine your tea-cannisters and molasses-jugs, and your wives’ and daughters’ petty coats—bow and cringe and tremble and quake—fall down and worship our sovereign lord the mob. . . . Should any pragmatical committee-gentleman come to my house and give himself airs, I shall show him the door.” Oppressive or not, the local committees were rarely challenged. Their persuasive powers convinced many middle-of-the-road citizens that neutrality was not a comfortable option.
Another group new to political life—white women—increasingly demonstrated a capacity for patriotism as wartime hardships dramatically altered their work routines. Many wives whose husbands were away on military or political service took on masculine duties. Their competence to manage farms and make business decisions encouraged some to assert interest in politics as well, as Abigail Adams did while John Adams served in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Eliza Wilkinson managed a South Carolina plantation and talked revolutionary politics with women friends. “None were greater politicians than the several knots of ladies who met together,” she remarked, alert to the unusual turn female conversations had taken.
Abigail Adams Abigail Smith Adams, twenty-two, wears feminine pearls and a lace collar along with a facial expression projecting confidence and maturity not often credited to young women of the 1760s. A decade later, she was running the family’s Massachusetts farm while her husband, John, attended the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Her frequent letters gave him the benefit of her sage advice on politics and the war.
© Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA, USA/Bridgeman Images.
Women from prominent Philadelphia families took more direct action, forming the Ladies Association to collect money for Continental soldiers. Mrs. Esther DeBerdt Reed, wife of Pennsylvania’s governor, published a broadside in 1780 titled “The Sentiments of an American Woman” to defend their female activism: “The time is arrived to display the same sentiments which animated us at the beginning of the Revolution, when we renounced the use of teas [and] when our republican and laborious hands spun the flax.”