mperament, environment and tradition. Furthermore, the degree to which his wealth was removable was an important factor in his decision, for his business and the good will of his customers were not commodities to be packed up and carried bodily into British lines. These facts caused many a merchant to follow the line of least resistance when independence was promulgated (Schlesinger, 603; emphasis is mine). It is the italicized sentence that gives the essence of Schlesinger’s book. The point that he makes is that there was a great deal of Loyalist sympathy among the merchant class, despite the myth of united and universal opposition to British tyranny that had come to exist by 1900. Nevertheless, these traders were no traitors; but it was pragmatism, not sudden philosophical enlightenment, that caused them to modify or mitigate their true attitudes. How many times have we heard it said? “You’ve got to go along to get along.” So must it have been for the colonial merchants. This realization goes a long way to explain the on-again, off-again support for non-importation and later for independence that Schlesinger describes in such detail in his book. And at the root of it lies the influence of the masses, or at any rate the influence of what is nowadays called “public opinion.” There is, a single reason for mentioning the works of these two writers in this paper, and a single reason only: to demonstrate that American historiography in the Progressive Era was hardly unified in its interpretation. Just as “diversity” is a buzzword on today’s college and university campuses, so was genuine diversity a feature of American historiography. And, perhaps fittingly enough, this same diversity symbolizes one of the themes that progressive historians stress almost to a fault: that the views of the people during the war itself were far from universal. And so it was with historians as they wrote the...
