Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. By Woody Holton. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xxi, 231. $39.95, cloth; $14.95, paper.

Abstract

Professor Woody Holton makes two important points in this fine study of rebellion: the elite gentlemen of Virginia did not always lead the Revolution, but were sometimes pushed from below, and the Chesapeake is not New England. Those of us who live and teach below the Mason-Dixon Line are often painfully aware that the general outlines of U.S. history are not the history of our region. As this detailed study of Virginia's path to Revolution makes clear, many of the generalizations about the origins of the American Revolution only hold for the northern colonies. But this work's greatest contribution is its carefully researched and documented argument that race and class mattered in creating a Revolution.