Making Revolution Work: Law and Politics in New York, 1776--1783

This project invites a thorough reconsideration of both the American Revolution and of revolutionary law more generally. The insurgents who founded America's independent states managed to overcome the anarchy of a popular uprising and rebuild working legal systems. American historians have overlooked this challenge of reestablishing legal order in the middle of a war. They have instead seen the legal history of the revolutionary era as a smooth transition to independence, a time when Americans simply wrote new constitutions that allowed states to emerge. However, that view cannot explain how legal order emerged from an insurgency. This dissertation analyzes one state to understand that extraordinary transformation from popular uprising to stable legal order. It argues that the critical element in that change was property redistribution. By seizing property from British sympathizers and selling it to supporters of independence, New Yorkers made their revolution work—they rebuilt their legal system in a way that ordinary people accepted.;Large-scale redistribution reveals a remarkable paradox at the heart of the revolutionary era. One might presume that expropriation would undermine legal order and heighten revolutionary turmoil. However, as this project demonstrates, redistribution had paradoxical effects that stabilized society and helped a revolutionary state consolidate its legal authority. This process appears in the local manuscript sources that form the basis of the dissertation. Rather than rely on abstract doctrines or constitutions, I examine how ordinary people encountered law in daily life. This perspective reveals how redistribution settled a volatile environment and helped insurgents rebuild legal institutions on the ground. Moreover, this approach reminds historians that radicals in many times and places have struggled to recreate legal order. Indeed, movements continue to face that challenge today. New York's experience therefore illuminates a general, comparative historical process in which radicals in different contexts have tried to develop viable legal systems during their movements. Examining the actual implementation of law on the ground not only invites historians to reconsider America's revolutionary era. It also sheds light on issues that transcend America's experience, and address broad questions about the nature of law during times of political upheaval.