Enemies of the people: The Revolutionary War and race in the new American nation

"Enemies of the People" explores how Revolutionary leaders manipulated racial categories in order to create a sense of American nationhood. Throughout the Revolutionary War, patriot leaders faced the challenge of making the colonists think of the British as "foreign." In response, they sponsored the widespread publication of war stories that conflated the British with other "foreigners" that the Crown had allegedly unleashed against the Revolution, including African Americans, Indians, and German mercenaries. This campaign drew on pre-existing racial ideas but deployed them for a new purpose: defining a nation. To understand how these war stories became part of the American fabric, this dissertation examines who produced them, why they did so, and how those images proliferated in the press.; This project brings together three topics in the literature that have yet to be fully connected: war, nation, and race. It builds on excellent work on the larger social and political aspects of war, as well as recent arguments about the social construction of nations and the power of print in buttressing conceptions of national identity. By examining the matrix of race, nation, and war, "Enemies of the People" sheds light on how America officially became a white nation. It is only at the center of these three processes that historians can understand how the Revolutionaries came to their initial decisions about who would and would not be deemed American citizens. In the end, I believe that the well-known discrepancy between the new nation's universalist professions and its exclusionary practices was rooted in the particular ways the Revolutionaries exploited racial stereotypes in order to mobilize a populace for war and create an American "people."...