n his interpretation of history through economic eyes is Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (But in many places Schlesinger sounds much more like Turner and Jameson than he sounds like Beard.) What is perhaps Schlesinger’s most important work on the subject of the American Revolution first appeared in 1918, with a new edition in 1939. In the preface to the second edition, Schlesinger submitted that the assertions of the first edition had been “generally accepted by historians.” And that seems exactly to be the case more than fifty years later. Schlesinger’s view was sectional: he saw “two revolutions,” one in the North and one in the South (Schlesinger, 6). He argued that the non-importation policies of the colonies were far from universally successful. Nor were they universally accepted. Schlesinger’s view is that the non-importation zeal tended to be greater in the small towns rather than in the “great trading towns.” He notes, for example, that the leading merchants had gained a fair amount of relief from Parliament by 1770, and that their fever for non-importation, which they had happily supported in 1768, had rather more than subsided by 1770. The problem remained whether they could cease their non-importation practices without the consent of the general populace, which was largely composed of propertyless people of lesser means who still burned for the elimination of taxes entirely (Schlesinger, 218). The crux of the view is that this business of the “consent of the people” was not philosophical or even truly political: it was strictly an economic consideration. Schlesinger puts it even more bluntly near the end of the book: ... the choice, which every merchant had to make, was not, and could not be, a mere mechanical one, premised upon strict considerations of an informed class interest. Like other human beings, his mind was affected or controlled by powerful influences of te...
