At first glance, this seems an unlikely subject for a book. Following Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1968), American colonial historians have become used to thinking that prerevolutionary American politics were basically Whig and guided by the theories of John Locke. Conflict took place between “court and country,” ins and outs, and finally between loyalists and patriots, but did not follow the Whig-Tory party division typical of contemporary British politics. The idea that anyone in British North America would have been sympathetic to Jacobitism did not make any sense. This overview of colonial politics has been increasingly challenged, especially for the period before 1750, but it continues to exert a great deal of influence.
David Parrish does not set out to overturn the Whig paradigm of prerevolutionary colonial politics with Jacobitism and Anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World, 1688–1727. His aim is broader, albeit vaguer: to demonstrate the integration of the colonies into a trans-Atlantic British political culture by examining both Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism in colonial politics. That there was a lot of anti-Jacobite rhetoric in the forty years after the Glorious Revolution will not surprise anyone who has read Owen Stanwood's The Empire Reformed (2011), which deals with the impact of 1688 on the mainland colonies and the increasing obsession with the elimination of French Catholicism from North America. What may come as more of a shock is that the targets of anti-Jacobitism were often colonial merchants, officials, and clergymen, some of whom may actually have held the views they were accused of espousing. Anti-Jacobitism in the colonies, in other words, was not just a case of distancing loyal American Protestants from wicked Tory and Catholic plots hatched across the Atlantic. It was a feature of internal colonial politics as well.
Parrish does solid work in documenting this, first by reviewing political patterns that ran through the English (later British) colonies, then by examining three specific cases: South Carolina, the Mid-Atlantic (New York, the Jerseys), and Massachusetts. Perhaps the most fascinating point to emerge from his research concerns the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which sent Church of England ministers out to the colonies. The High Church orientation of the society is well known, but under William and Mary and Queen Anne, the society recruited heavily among Scottish Episcopalian ministers, who had been ordained in a church that refused to accept oaths to the new monarchs and that remained fundamentally loyal to the exiled Stuarts. These clergymen may have been attracted to the colonies because the oaths of allegiance were rarely imposed there, but their immigration could result in explosive political confrontations. When one adds these Nonjurors to Catholics, merchants with French ties, and former officials of James II, the fear of a Jacobite interest in the colonies begins to make more sense. Certainly, the anti-Jacobite rhetoric of colonial governors was often generated as much by internal political conflict as by the situation in Britain.
This is bound to become the standard study of the subject. In terms of presenting an admirably concise, clearly argued, moderate case, and of supporting it with a considerable amount of well-researched documentation, Parrish has produced a work that deserves to be taken seriously by historians of colonial American politics. However, the book bears some signs of its origin as a doctoral dissertation. The central point about political integration is repeated too many times. Evidence from the English Caribbean islands is included without much consideration of their special circumstances—their proximity to French colonies, the extent of smuggling, the struggles between large and small planters, or the ability of some rich colonists, including a few Tories, to find parliamentary seats in Britain. Other historians will no doubt pick up the Caribbean story in more particular detail.
Parrish does not always fully explain the motivations of political actors, especially when they were suspected of bold-faced Jacobitism. Why a Nonjuror would display Jacobite sympathies in a North American environment, where nothing concrete could possibly be done to promote the interests of the Stuart family, remains a bit of a mystery. Religious affiliation and inherited political culture are only partial answers, because British attitudes were not simply transferred across the Atlantic: they were altered in various ways by colonial realities. A Nonjuring minister in England could imagine himself to be in substantial harmony with the views of the Anglican majority, but in most of the colonies, a Nonjuror was a dissenting voice within a minority denomination. He may have been serving what he saw as the true church, but he was not doing much good for the Stuart cause in Boston or Philadelphia or Charleston, which suggests that his motives were at the very least complicated.
In addition, as Parrish acknowledges, every colony had different political conditions, and the interplay of Jacobitism with anti-Jacobitism was not the same in each. Nowhere was the Jacobite threat simply invented, but it was often enhanced for political effect, as in the case of New York under the aggressively Whig governor Robert Hunter. The clamor over the seditious publications of John Checkley in Massachusetts was intensified because he represented an Anglican menace to ruling Congregational authority. In South Carolina under Queen Anne, most strangely of all, a governor who was a former Nonjuror, erstwhile ally of James II, and promoter of Anglican dominance faced off against a Scots Episcopalian clergyman who believed colonial government had no business in laying down rules for religion. Either could have accused the other of Jacobitism, although the governor had more recently avoided the oaths. What effect this and other extraordinary colonial blowups may have had on the ideological origins of the American Revolution is not addressed in this book but remains something future historians might care to consider.
