As consumers and producers, women sustained boycotts and armies, helping to win the revolution for the Patriots.
To resist British taxes and fight British troops, Patriots needed support from women as well as men. The revolution also spawned new contradictions over gender relations. In sum, the revolution generated clashing contagions, of slavery and liberty, and pitted them against one another. Those masters also demanded clauses in the Federal Constitution, which made the union contingent upon protecting slavery in the South. Obliged to defend slavery, masters, in turn, created new justifications rooted in biological notions of racial inequality. The revolution encouraged more people to oppose slavery as unjust and immoral. Save for Quakers, colonists had accepted slavery as timeless and immutable. Rather than generate clear resolutions, the revolution created powerful new contradictions. The greatest transformation came in the terms of political debate. Acceleration and intensification combined continuity with change. The revolution intensified trends already underway, including political assertion by common men, territorial expansion at native expense, and the westward spread of slavery. Both views convey only part of the story. Other scholars emphasize expanding economic opportunities and increased political participation by common white men as radical consequences of the revolution. Some find little substantive change and focus on continuities from the colonial era. Historians debate how revolutionary the revolution was in its consequences. Taken from the final chapter, the following excerpt succinctly summarizes many of the book's main threads. In extending the timeframe and geographic boundaries in his book, Taylor broadens the narrative to include the "multiple and clashing visions" of the Revolution and its legacies by tracing the role of European empires, slavery, and Native American communities and westward expansion. A sequel to American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Alan Taylor's latest book, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1802 strips away some of the rosy veneer associated with the American Revolution to reveal a violent civil war and a fragile new nation.
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