Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions by Micah Alpaugh (review)

Abstract

Micah Alpaugh’s Friends of Freedom argues that in their struggle against the Stamp Act of 1765, the Sons of Liberty pioneered important communication and organizational techniques that ignited “social movements” across the “revolutionary Atlantic” (3). According to Alpaugh, the associations, correspondence committees, and coordinated actions the Sons “innovated” (74) had widespread transformative effects. In his account they were directly borrowed by British reformers and Irish nationalists, invigorated abolition movements first in America and then in Britain, and were adopted by French revolutionaries to form the Jacobin Clubs. From France, he continues, the Sons’ practices and ideas recrossed the Atlantic and provoked the Haitian Revolution before finally, in the hands of Citizen Genêt, returning back to the United States as the Democratic Republicans organized against the threat of an “effective Federalist dictatorship” (387). Two broad assertions drive Alpaugh’s analysis: first, that innovations in social technologies formed the sinews of eighteenth-century revolutions, and second, that these movements did not simply influence each other or arise simultaneously but were interconnected and “functioned as a totality” (7). The insistence on a direct connection between all these movements differentiates Alpaugh from other historians of the age of revolutions. Albert Goodwin’s The Friends of Liberty, for example, characterized the American Revolution as influencing British reform and the French Jacobins, but not as causally interconnected by people or practices.1 More recently, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal called in this journal for a cultural contextual approach that both “helps to elucidate the distinctiveness and significance of each [revolution] and the common threads among them” and describes “the period