Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America.

Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America. By Peter C. Messer. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, c. 2005. Pp. x, 258. $39.00, ISBN 978-0-87580-350-0.)

Peter C. Messer's book examines American historiography in an attempt to divine the effect of indigenous works of history on Americans' self-conception--in the colonial period, during the American Revolution (from both Patriot and Loyalist perspectives), and after the Revolution. He identifies significant changes in the way that Americans understood their communities during that period, but the project suffers from several significant shortcomings.

Messer divides his study into three parts: "Colonial Precedents" (two chapters), "Revolutionary Implications" (one chapter), and "Early National Consequences" (two chapters). He says in Part 1 that Patriot historians saw America as prospering because of colonists' own pursuit of lucre and the natural growth of families, which God, nature, or both encouraged. The Loyalist point of view, however, held that the self-serving nature of colonial society demonstrated the ongoing need of the colonists for British governmental institutions, which alone could rein in the selfish acquisitiveness of people in the boondocks. Part 2 finds Americans rebelling in the name of the natural processes that had already made them prosperous, while Part 3 explores the working out of these ideas.

Of particular interest to Messer in Part 3 is the way that the anti-British ideas underlying the Revolution spawned an imperial outlook among Americans. If history had mandated that they be independent, so it also mandated that Indians be subsumed by white culture; if natural forces had produced societies worthy of independence, those same forces could be referenced in explanation of the spread of slavery westward.

Yet one might ask why Messer restricts his study to books. This question is more than the common "Why didn't Messer write a different book?" because historiography and pamphlets were the stuff of much American writing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as students of Bernard Bailyn have long known. Messer's failure to consider works of historiography that appeared in pamphlet form, such as those written by Virginians at the dawn of the imperial crisis in the 1760s, causes him to miss the ways in which topical historiography contributed the highly particularist outlook that shaped American politics in the first several decades after the Declaration of Independence.

Because he takes up only history books, thus omitting historians such as Richard Bland from his work completely, Messer's book is marked by the assumption that colonists saw first their society and then their struggle with the mother country as one. If he had consulted the works of Bland, Thomson Mason, Landon Carter, Thomas Jefferson, and others in Virginia, however, he would have come to a far different conclusion--at least in regard to the Old Dominion and, I suspect, in regard to other colonies-cum-states as well.

KEVIN R. C. GUTZMAN

Western Connecticut State University