Interesting to note that there were a couple of different revolutions going on for very different reasons. Some of it was regional, some of it was class, some of it was based on the cultural origins of the people ( the Scots-Irish who immigrated and settled the western frontier after the Treaty of Paris in 1763 for example were a very different bunch from New Englanders or Virginians.) After the revolution, incidents like Shay's rebellion the 1780s and the Whisky Rebellion in the 1790s were very grass-roots. The grass-roots part of the 1776 revolutions was very much the product of the period following the French and Indian War ( but then, so was a lot of the top-down part as well - that's what created the tax issue )


>>>Good point, Charles
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>>>To reiterate - in the 18th C. a militia was a band of concerned citizens banding together under a local leader. The infamous Green Mountain Boys of the Revolution are a classic example of what a militia was then.
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>>Kind of Ye Olde Street Gang <g>
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>Check out this book: Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past
>http://www.amazon.com/Founding-Myths-Stories-That-Patriotic/dp/1565849213/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214833957&sr=8-1
>
>I thought it was going to be a typical "debunk the old stories" thing, but it turned out to have a much deeper agenda: prove that the American Revolution really was a people's revolution coming up from the bottom, not the creation of a handful of great thinkers. It's well-documented and pretty interesting. Talks about how we got from what really happened to the stories we tell today.
>
>Tamar