The Revolt of the Cities

A Call for a New American Urban Revolution

America’s Revolutionary War began in its cities—and it was almost their undoing.

The Revolution did not begin with war. According to John Adams, a “radical Change in the Principles, Opinions Sentiments and Affection” occurred in the “Minds and Hearts of the People” years before any shots were heard around the world. As Benjamin L. Carp argues in Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, “it is also correct to say that the Revolution took root in Americans’ homes, streets, and public buildings.” 

On the eve of war, no more than 8% of colonists lived in towns larger than 2,500 people, and only five cities counted more than 9,000 residents by 1775: Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston. Philadelphia, with its 32,000 citizens, was by far the largest of the bunch. Though small by modern standards, America’s first cities were densely populated nodes of Britain’s vast global empire that

pulled the empire together as centers of communication and transportation. As entrepôts for transatlantic shipping and coastal trade, as postal distribution points and travel hubs, their taverns and exchanges were conduits for written and oral communication of ideas, news, goods, and cultures from every direction of the compass.

With their density and diversity of people, they became “fertile ground for political consciousness, political persuasion, and political action.” Because America’s cities were the first and most immediately harmed by the British government’s increasingly punitive policies, they became the hotbeds of revolution—a history that Hamilton: An American Musical has helped to revive in recent years.

Revolutionary ideas flowed from the press, the pulpit, and the pub, spilling onto the streets where they made their way from townhomes to the hinterland, seeping into the American mind. Colonists eagerly took up ideas that challenged the notion that an imperious parliament and far-flung king could tax their purses, curtail their liberties, and end their lives and livelihoods with impunity—and those ideas roused them to take up arms. Fiery pamphlets lit fires in the bellies of the people, transforming “peaceful, orderly, obedient” cities into places “filled with active, organized groups” that performed political acts like “mass meetings, petition signings, tea protests, boycotts, bonfires, and riots.”

Urban life required interdependence, which engendered a sense of “civic consciousness, civic responsibility, and civic power” that colonists harnessed in service of the revolutionary cause. The urban revolutionaries learned how to mobilize across lines of religion, class, ethnicity, race, and sex. The cities became the

the generators of revolutionary thought and action—they nurtured the Enlightenment in the New World, they helped unleash the dynamic forces of republicanism, they developed a burgeoning sense of American nationality, and they succeeded in spreading their views to the rural hinterlands.

Before the Revolution, “the colonial cities barely registered” to Britain’s imperial masters. By the early 1770s, especially after colonists dumped cheap tea into Boston Harbor, the British could no longer look away. When Parliament decided to make an example of rebellious Boston in 1774, the colonists sent aid to beleaguered Bostonians and gathered in Philadelphia for the first Continental Congress.

But the cities would pay for their rebellion. 

The British invasion forced patriots to take the war to the countryside “as the seaport towns were abandoned, occupied, and immobilized,” while loyalists flocked to the port cities and the protection of British troops. The populations of the five largest cities collapsed. In the space of a year, as the British occupied the city and one sixth of it burned, New York’s population fell by 80% to 5,000. Boston and Newport fell by similarly devastating numbers, Philadelphia had lost half its residents at its nadir, while Charleston’s population fell by more than a third.

Destruction of the Cities: A Necessary Evil (Source: Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution)

To patriots, destruction of the cities was necessary. As Carp writes:

A willingness to allow the destruction of cities became a badge of honor, the subsuming of self-interest beneath support for the common cause. The destruction of cities served the Patriot cause, ultimately, because British atrocities made great propaganda: every burnt town would convince more Americans to leave the brutal empire for the Patriot side.

As John Adams summed it up, “Cities may be rebuilt. But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever.”

For some, reflecting America’s ingrained Puritan streak, not only was the destruction of the cities necessary for The Cause, it was proper. The cities, “abounding with Vice & Wickedness,” deserved the “Severest Calamities.” They were “stinking dens of commerce and corruption,” ill-befitting a new republic founded on the simple, self-sufficient virtue of the yeoman farmer. Asking “Are we become a Sodom?,” Abigail Adams wondered if the destruction befalling the cities at the hands of the British was a penance for the “Sin of Slavery.” Even Benjamin Franklin, no ascetic himself, called cities places that “generally import only Luxuries and Superfluities.”

As a new country was forging a new identity for itself in the midst of battle, its founders were already expunging its old one from the national memory. With the cities went something of the spirit of early American urbanism.

Already, during the war, we can see emerging that familiar tension in American politics between a Hamiltonian-commercial-urban worldview and the Jeffersonian-agrarian-rural one. “Following Jefferson’s lead, most Americans located the nation’s soul in the countryside”—where the war was won, but incidentally, also where the contradiction at the heart of the American founding, slavery, was most rooted.

After the war, as if to underscore the permanent loss of political mobilization and relevance of the cities, the states moved their capitals from New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Newport. Only Boston would remain as both the political and economic center of its state. Even the founding of Washington DC, laid out on the marshy banks of a rural river, revealed an anti-urban bias:

The new capital city kept urban values, urban vices, and urban commercial ventures at arm’s length, and remained moribund as a city for a hundred years. The founders of the nation’s capital sought to escape from cities rather than engage with their disorderly bustle and intrigue.

Perhaps removing them from the center of state politics allowed the cities to reemerge as economic powerhouses in the 19th Century. Though Newport and Charleston would never return to their former glory, they would continue to grow in the years after the war, albeit not nearly as fast as their former peers. New York would of course go on to eclipse all the rest, while new cities would emerge on the prairies, on the coasts, and eventually in the South.

And they would also retain something of their pre-revolutionary fervor.

In the following century, “[s]lavery, labor, foreign policy, race, government, taxation, vice, and immigration all continued to make the cities fertile ground for political action.” Indeed, the abolitionist movement would emerge in Northern cities, of course in opposition to plantation slavery in the South. Later on, cities would become the focal points of women’s suffrage, of the labor movement, of Civils Rights, of Gay Rights. The modern-day Tea Party movement was kicked off on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—while protesters of the Occupy Wall Street countermovement took to city streets (and parks).

Modern cities continue to be the cultural, economic, and often political engines of America, even if Americans continue to have a love-hate relationship with them.

Though we are no longer a mostly agrarian people, we are not quite an urban one, either. The Census Bureau counts some 80% of Americans as living in urban areas, but in reality, the majority of us—some 55%, per Pew—live in much less dense suburbs, while only 31% of Americans live in “urban core counties.” 

This in-betweenness, this ambivalent place between the city and country, is in part an enduring legacy of the Revolution. 

The urban/rural divide remains a fault line in modern American politics. City dwellers view the rural, red hinterland as uneducated, repressive, closed-minded, and jingoistic—while non-urbanites view the blue cities as decadent, libertine, woefully misgoverned, and unpatriotic. 

They may each have a point.

Revolutionary ideas took place within the cities because they were the most inclusive, pluralistic places in America. Today, our cities are trapped in a state of self-induced sclerosis, hampered by arcane land-use restrictions, hostile to entrepreneurialism, and throttled by a process-fetishized NIMBYism of the soul. Altogether, this has made them increasingly exclusive places, playgrounds for the rich and child-free or quicksand for the poor and dispossessed. Indeed, it is our suburbs that are looking more and more like “the real” America.

The state of our modern cities is not reflective of American urban history, nor must it be our destiny.

If our ailing cities are to experience urban revival, it will take no less than a full-fledged urban revolution—one that rediscovers the civic-minded, liberal, and originally urban republicanism of the founding era. Perhaps then, if our cities can reorient themselves to a broad-based, inclusive Americanism, one that draws on their pre-revolutionary roots, they might not only rise to solve the myriad challenges that now befall them, but bridge the divisive fault lines of the zero-sum culture war. As ever, we must be able to envision and desire something better than the status quo.

The republican impulse first beat in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia before it was carried into the countryside by the drummers of Washington’s Continental Army. It’s incumbent on those who live in and love America’s cities to take up the drumbeat, to remind the rest of the country of the essential role that cities have played in American history and continue to play in American life, despite the many problems besetting them today. Perhaps then, we’d recognize that there would be no United States of America without them.

As with the first American Revolution, the hearts and minds of city people must change first.

Happy Independence Day!