How two people react to a situation can bring about startling changes in their lives.
Abby Chandler, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, considers British colonists in the 1700s.
Abby Chandler is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her second book, “Seized with the Temper of the Times”: Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America, was published by Westholme in 2023. She has also published articles on eighteenth-century political movements in Early American Studies, Protest in the Long Eighteenth Century, and the North Carolina Historical Review.
A Tale of Two Colonists
The story of Rhode Island colonists Martin Howard and Stephen Hopkins began in the same place. Both men had legal careers, supported libraries, were involved with local politics, and were deeply committed to their shared sense of identity as British subjects. Then the world shifted around them as the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763. Britain was now a triumphant empire with massive debts after years of borrowing money to fight the war. Two years later, Parliament passed the Sugar and Stamp Acts, taxes on British colonists intended to help pay down the war debt and to defray the cost of an expanding British imperial infrastucture.
Martin Howard and Stephen Hopkins’ responses to these laws marked a key turning point in their lives. Howard thought that because he was a British subject, he was entitled to all the relevant rights and privileges. In his eyes, this did not include a right to vote in Parliamentary elections: Not all British people could vote, even if they lived in Britain. Hopkins also thought that because he was a British subject, he was entitled to all the relevant rights and privileges, but he believed this should include the right to vote in Parliamentary elections.
Loyalists like Howard continued to believe that their rights were untrammeled through the end of the American Revolution. By contrast, Hopkins and the other proponents of revolution would come to believe that the only way to preserve their rights was to break away completely from Britain. This was a revolution, yes, but it was one envisioned as a way of preserving their British identity. This seeming contradiction helps illustrate why people who shared a common Anglo-American identity and heritage could fight on opposite sides of a violent war to preserve their divergent views of that same identity and heritage.
