46 pages • 1 hour read
The Minutemen and Their World
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Environment and Society
From the earliest pages of the book, the author takes care to demonstrate how the environment influenced the life of Concord. Naturally, the proximity of a river “rich in shad, salmon and alewives” and the “thick pine woods” made the area an especially good one for a town (4). The author demonstrates how well-established the town already was by the start of his book by describing how, by the point where his narrative starts, earlier generations had already depleted some of the area’s most attractive resources, and attempts had been made to preserve what was left:
If a ne’er-do-well woodsman could still trap an occasional fox for its fur or shoot a rare wolf for the bounty, the ordinary farmer found little but squirrels, woodchucks, and raccoons for target practice. The salmon had long ago stopped running; as a conservation measure, the town made a monopoly of the shad fishery(5).
The town’s reliance on agriculture as a primary source of income up until the end of the war made favorable environmental conditions a still more important prerequisite for prosperity. One of the primary drivers of the land crisis that spanned the 18th century was the depletion of nutrients from the soil by overfarming, making it even harder to earn a living from smaller and smaller plots that men received as part of their inheritances. A drought in the summer of 1775 further stretched Concord’s resources as it was required to provide food supplies for the war effort.
Though the book tells the story of Concord, the presence of the frontier as an available resource for its citizens is a key part of the town’s prosperity. Trade was an important part of New England society, and its role would increase after the Revolution. But without agriculturally-productive land, New England life as it was would be impossible. Outside of key strategic moments, the importance of the environment as an integral part of human life is easy to forget. But, naturally, it is always there.
What Makes a Good Leader
Concordians and their brethren throughout New England demanded a great deal of their leaders. The ideal leader of the mid-18th century was “[...]another Moses, a model of wisdom and righteousness, a lover of justice and a champion of the people’s rights. Like a good father, he was patient and gentle in guiding his subjects, but he could also be stern when necessary” (11). This model of leadership was explicitly anti-democratic: “The people of Concord sought such leaders among the well-born and the rich. Democracy and equality played no part in their view of the world” (11). But that was not all. Selflessness and industriousness were two key elements of the ideal leader’s character: “[...]the community desired leaders in their prime, not after retirement from active life. Ideally, a potential leader neither sought nor clung to office; were he to campaign openly, he would simply demonstrate his unfitness for public trust” (11). While these may have been impossibly-large shoes to fill, many of the selectmen and other local officials did meet these rough qualifications.
Over the 1760s and 1770s, ideas about leadership gradually changed. By 1774, though the majority of leaders were the same men that had led the town in earlier decades, commitment to the revolutionary cause became a meaningful qualification for leadership. Increased reliance on consent of the governed was also a qualification for leadership.
Slavery
Though slavery was a very real institution in 18th-century Massachusetts, most of the uses of the word in the book are metaphorical. Colonists, enraged by the imposition of new taxes that they saw as impinging on their freedoms, frequently described their relationship with Britain in terms of “slavery.” But it is not until the very end of the book that this “slavery” is explicitly connected with the institution of slavery in the minds of white Americans. Concord’s black slaves, according to the author, served as “living embodiments of what British ‘slavery’ could mean—models that the whites of Concord anxiously struggled to avoid” (94).
Though slave labor was relatively unimportant to the local economy, the slave trade had “helped to make New England’s fortunes,” and many of the most prominent slave traders had been based in Massachusetts (94). About a dozen of Concord’s prominent families owned slaves, including the Barretts. Slaves in Massachusetts had a few limited rights, including the right to hold property, to testify in court, and to sue for their freedom. When not needed by their masters, they sometimes worked as hired laborers and kept what they earned. This allowed a few to buy their freedom.
Abolition movements in the colonies began with the Quakers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the mid-1700s, and the Massachusetts leaders of the Revolution were denouncing the institution of slavery by the early 1700s. And, as the war wore on and white recruits were few, slaves, along with poor whites, filled the ranks. Military service was “tantamount to a grant of freedom, although not always formally so” (151). 8% of Concord’s troop quotas was filled by blacks, including some slaves.
There were no slaves in Massachusetts by 1790. However, those free blacks that remained in town existed on the margins of society, and many freed slaves made arrangements to work for their previous masters much as they had before in exchange for the support that Concord only offered its white citizens.
Fathers and Sons
The theme of fatherhood is perhaps the most important of all for understanding the book’s argument. Within the family and in the larger community, leadership was synonymous with fatherhood: a magistrate was “not a hired agent but a ‘father’ to his people” (11). The conventions of inheritance of land by sons from fathers both allow Concord society to sustain itself and lead to the demographic and land crisis that drove settlement of the western frontier.
The importance of father-son relationships to the book’s argument persists through the war. The creation of the Minutemen brigades in early 1775 is described as “almost a family reunion,” where soldiers “were joined together not so much by a chain of command as by a complex network of kinship” (70). It is easy to see how, at least at the beginning of the war, the close family ties that held together the Minuteman brigades would have provided ample encouragement for a soldier whose resolve was faltering in the face of the enemy: “Filial duty and family loyalty thus reinforced a soldier’s obligations to follow orders” (71).
The breakdown of existing social hierarchies is paralleled by the shifting family dynamics that gave young men more freedom earlier. Few were able to attain the “enviable status of a true patriarch,” as did Colonel Barrett, who was able to settle his children nearby (81). Limited resources prevented all but the wealthiest and most fortunate from attaining this level of success, and a shift in preferred models of authority was the result. Partially as a result of the historical evidence that has been preserved over the past two centuries, and partially as a result of the nature of society in the time and place in question, the history that the author writes is almost exclusively a history of fathers and sons.
Unlock all 46 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: