These articles on law and the American Revolution teach us that the study of legal change at local levels adds valuable insight to our understanding of state-building and rebuilding during the revolution and its immediate aftermath. Governments and individuals learned as soon as the war was underway that the legal standing of rebellious activity shifted dramatically. Only moments before, such behavior would have been considered traitorous. Participation in this drastic change empowered some actors to restructure governments and redefine treason. For others, the capacity to choose their political futures was understood as an outgrowth of liberty of conscience. And over time, delicate and gradual adjudication of boundary disputes between states, especially when paired with cessions of western territory to the union, invested the Confederation with an aura that reflected the beginnings of national law and citizenship. The focus on law in these various settings adds a most welcome perspective to work in local history: the deployment of legal ideas and practices at ground level reveals much about government as well as individual understandings of public and private life.

Scholars have produced outstanding military, political, economic, social, and constitutional histories of the American Revolution. Yet, as these essays demonstrate, there is plenty of space for new insights. The Revolution is in some ways too studied, and in other ways not studied enough, given the trickle of new monographs over the past decade or so. Disagreements have been thick on the ground.Footnote ¹ Did the origins of the war lie in radical democratic aspirations that upended a society based on hierarchy and deference, or distrust of power in all its many guises?Footnote ² Did independence entrench the abusive power of slaveholders, despite the language of freedom?Footnote ³ Did the revolution protect elite fortunes, or redistribute that wealth?Footnote ⁴ Was the war a reflection of the increasingly “English” nature of colonial society and culture, especially colonists’ understanding of the British constitution,Footnote ⁵ or was diversity and distance from the metropole key to the formation of a sense of outraged difference?Footnote ⁶ Was religion central to revolutionary thinking,Footnote ⁷ or irrelevant?Footnote ⁸ Many aspects of each of these broad claims may have been important in distinct locations and at different times—after all, political, military, religious, and economic interests and ideas varied and changed greatly over time and in distinct locations. The localism of politics, war, religion, and state-building is backlit by careful studies of legal change and/or continuity in the revolutionary era.

These articles illustrate how much we can learn from this vantage point: productive attention to legal history, especially deep dives into legal questions in discrete spaces and limited time frames, recovers key information on how these questions were understood and acted upon. By focusing on more granular issues and arguments, the articles published here are enlightening, often in unexpected ways. By studying frequently surprising attitudes and actions, these articles teach us that deep, focused research and analysis of legal history yields new questions to ask about the past.Footnote ⁹ Taken together, they also suggest that legal history in particular needs more of what they are doing.Footnote ¹⁰

The Confederation Congress, provincial congresses, and Committees of Safety, as well as individual supporters of independence, all strove to serve and strengthen the rebellion in ways that respected legal standards and (on one notable occasion) even protected the individual interests and property rights of those who had sympathized with the British. The value of law was evident in multiple ways, if sometimes invoked in the service of legally dubious enterprises. Given the chaotic and fratricidal qualities of the revolution, widespread invocation of legal principles conveyed aspirations more than solid legal grounds. Yet, the gradual development of new legal structures put meat on the bones of a new legal system. For example, Bill Novak and Don Johnson both study Committees of Safety in the early years of the war, recovering a more nuanced view of committee action and influence. Given the broad (and often inconsistent) instructions to such committees, both studies conclude that prior scholarship, which had dismissed committeemen as “dictators,” for example, has overlooked the value and accomplishments of these ephemeral groups. Novak, moreover, finds that Committees of Safety, like elected assemblies in those early years, engaged in sweeping regulation designed to do more than just finance the revolution: they also aimed at producing wider regulatory mandates for fair dealing and reliable pricing.

In the process, each political branch did a lot of governing, much of it tied to what we think of now as standard approaches to regulation of economic and labor practices. In addition, they engaged the police power of state governments to requisition war materiel and supplies, navigated disagreements at the local, state, and national level, and confiscated the property of loyalists. Novak tracks regulatory legislation, finding that elected assemblies were active and even thoroughgoing in their sculpting of laws to support the war and ensure fair practices at home. Novak and Johnson focus especially on the mid-1770s, when county-level Committees of Safety were appointed by provincial assemblies and were frequently forced to confront elite residents, some of whom were armed and many of whom described committee members as the rabble of a doomed rebellion, at best, and dreaded thugs, at worst. In fact, as both authors point out, such committees were not uniformly menacing or even violent, at least at the outset. They and others strove to stay within the bounds of the law, even though colonial legal systems were themselves in the midst of traumatic and unpredictable change.

Jessica Roney deftly builds on such governance at the other end of the spectrum: she captures the subtlety of shifts in the Confederation, as individual states gradually compromised and ceded land to the union, expanding the geographic scope of the Congress and its jurisdictional authority incrementally. Border disputes, moreover, quietly but inevitably pushed the ball further down the national field. A growing “federal” body of decisions and directives pre-dated the federal constitution of 1787. As Roney shows, sovereignty and concerted influence were two distinct political conditions. Yet, petitions and conflicts that threatened the alliance also motivated states to preserve the treaty alliance. The resulting “robust state governments” traveled alongside the growing authority of the alliance. Equally telling, the trans-Appalachian West also triggered new power for the Confederation, especially after the Treaty of Paris took effect. As Roney puts it: “Congress’s powers [over the Old Northwest] became federal over the marchlands.” In that process, Congress generated a central understanding of U.S. belonging—even citizenship. This gradual and cumulative process of negotiation, compromise, and adjudication happened piece by piece in multiple local jurisdictions, delicately and almost noiselessly.

Mark Valeri shifts our gaze to religion, especially to continuity in local religious life among New England elites. He focuses on the work of author Hannah Adams on “moral liberty”—a religious concept that she understood as essential to political liberty, particularly relevant in support of independence. In her telling, liberties—of conscience, toleration, and religious pluralism—were etched into Massachusetts culture and politics during the American Revolution. The 1780 constitution protected both religious worship and denominational equality; it also allowed towns to choose a “public protestant teacher,” whose salary would be paid by the town. Townsfolk could also be required to attend religious worship weekly, although they were free to choose services other than the town teacher’s. Adams praised these constitutional provisions as a “most liberal and tolerant plan.” Valeri sets out to explain such “paradoxical” notions of liberty, which endorsed such an establishment, however mild. The key element, he argues, was the freedom to choose a religious identity, a development that unfolded across the eighteenth century. This language of conversion and choice underlay individual rights to choose as well as support for rebellion as a political matter. Neither of these liberties challenged established social patterns, including the privileges accorded to local elites and their decision to embrace a plural establishment. The right to choose, they concluded, was consistent with the commands of the constitution.

These articles track the evolution of law, generally in incremental and local ways and through temporal and/or geographic limitations. Committees of Safety, for example, had a limited shelf life. But they and other early structures were decidedly governmental and regulatory, whether or not all their actions complied with legal standards. Equally telling, the gradual expansion of jurisdiction to resolve disputes between state governments and to manage ceded territory meant that key aspects of the federal constitution of 1787—versus the foederal period of the early Confederation—had been anticipated in practice. Moreover, the more liberal establishment in the 1780 Massachusetts constitution was sufficient protection for individual freedom of conscience, championed by elite New England Protestants’ blended religious and political theory. Such measured change and governing structures were part of the revolution and its effects on law and society. They have become legible through the focus on local experience and careful analysis of law and legal arguments that we see on display in this issue.

Thanks to this fine work, we are seeing valuable innovation in the field—new (and local) legal histories of the revolutionary era.