American Rebels: How The Hancock, Adams, And Quincy Families Fanned The Flames Of Revolution, by Nina Sankovitch

I am not sure if the author is trying to make a larger point that is relevant to our own days in looking at the period before the American Revolution, but taken as it is, this book is deeply interesting. As a reader, I was struck by several aspects of this book’s contents. For one, it is instructive to know that the figures we associate with the American Revolution in Massachusetts like John and Samuel Adams (cousins) and John Hancock, and others more obscure, were connected by ties of blood and marriage, making politics in the region a family affair. Additionally, the author explores the importance of the Quincy family not only in tying the other families together, but in siring notable and important people within the community who were vital on both sides of the Patriot-Loyalist divide, along with tying together more obscure people who nonetheless were connected by blood and marriage and whose activities reflected their own personal and political ambitions. In showing how it is that the personal and the political intersected (and sometimes ran at cross-purposes), and how rivalries and misunderstandings could alienate friends and create implacable enemies, the author does a great job in telling the very human story of how it was that Massachusetts became the leading colony of the American Revolution.

That tale is worth telling, because revolutions are intensely personal affairs, and the feelings and behavior of individuals is vital in providing the spark and push that turns a dangerous situation into one that is positively catastrophic, as the Revolution was for Imperial Britain. While the unsung hero of the tale is the consumptive Josiah Quincy Jr., who writes eloquently and labors devotedly for the cause of freedom while aware that his time is ticking away due to tuberculosis, before dying just after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, unable to be put onshore to pass along secret information gathered in England to trusted allies and unable to see his wife and son before passing into death, there are other compelling characters here as well. Some of them are familiar, such as the somewhat radical Abigail Adams, searching for freedom for women as her more conventional husband (John Adams) seeks to make his way in business and politics. John Hancock shows up as a son of a preacher raised to be the heir of a childless aunt and uncle and inheritor of great wealth who finds himself somewhat tardy in marrying and connected with a decidedly questionable set of women before a long engagement eventually leads to marriage during the heady days of the Summer of ’76. Meanwhile, other members of the extended Quincy clan find themselves married to abusive drunk husbands or find themselves struggling with the divide between loyalty to England and to their own local community, increasingly radicalized by the realization that England did not view them as fellow Englishmen at all, but rather imperial subjects of no political importance to them whatsoever.

In terms of its contents, this book is made up of about 350 pages of material divided into 33 numbered chapters in three parts. The book begins with maps–of Bostin and its environs, of the city of Boston before the Revolution, of Philadelphia at the beginning of the Revolution, and of the village of Braintree, home of the Quincy family, during the time of the book, while also looking at the families of Braintree that play an important role in the book. The first part of the book discusses the immediate context of the leadup to the American Revolution, discussing the contentious history of Braintree and the childhood and family life of the Quincy, Hancock, and Adams families in the period of 1744-1764, in six chapters, which end up showing where Massachusetts and its leading families were at in the immediate aftermath of the French & Indian War. The second part of the book is longer and covers, in considerable detail, the goings on of the families of this book as they found their way in business and politics during the period from 1765 and the beginning of the Stamp Act crisis to the Boston Tea Party of 1773. We see in these chapters how the presence of English troops in the midst of a tumultuous town with a set of rowdy and mischief-prone citizens led by independent-minded political elites created an atmosphere in which violence and trouble was a certainty. The last part of the book, which again is provided in extensive detail through the writings of the participants, discusses how it is that the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party and England’s attempts to crush Boston and Massachusetts only set the colonies from Canada to Florida ablaze in rebellion that eventually flowered, with the Declaration of Independence, into the larger American Revolution. The book then ends wiht acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, and an index.