Advisor(s)

Brian Steele

Committee Member(s)

Amy Watson
Stephen Miller

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

6-1-2026

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

School

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Arts & Humanities

Abstract

This thesis reinterprets the American Revolution by examining it not solely as a colonial rebellion against British authority but as a conflict that unfolded within American society itself. Long before independence was declared, political authority in British North America had already begun to fracture. Imperial institutions weakened, while revolutionary committees, militias, and local associations asserted competing claims to legitimacy. Rather than emerging from a unified population rising together in common purpose, the Revolution developed within communities already strained by suspicion, surveillance, and contested allegiance. Drawing on soldiers’ diaries and memoirs, including those of John Adlum, Jeremiah Greenman, Joseph Plumb Martin, Alexander Chesney, and Solomon Nash, this study reconstructs the lived experience of the war from the ground level. These accounts reveal a revolution experienced less through lofty declarations of decisive battlefield triumphs than through the grinding realities of hunger, imprisonment, desertion, confiscation, and the constant pressure to declare one’s political loyalty. Soldiers guarded bridges, monitored civilian movement, and enforced other rules that transformed private belief into public declaration. Civilians, in turn, navigated a landscape shaped by competing Patriot and Loyalist regimes, each claiming authority over the same towns, farms, and households. As authority fractured, revolutionary governance increasingly relied on surveillance, coercion, and internal enforcement. The result was a conflict that often resembled a civil war within American society, as neighbors judged one another’s loyalties and competing institutions struggled to define who truly belonged to the emerging political community. By situating soldiers’ experiences within this broader framework of internal conflict, this thesis argues that American unity was not the cause of the Revolution but one of its most significant outcomes, and that identity forged unevenly through conflict, coercion, and endurance.

Keywords

American Revolution;Civil War within the Revolution;Community Conflict;Continental Army;Loyalists;Patriots

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