“Important and lucidly written...The American Revolution involved not simply the wisdom of a few great men but the passions, fears, and religiosity of ordinary people.” —Gordon S. Wood In this boldly innovative work, T. H. Breen spotlights a crucial missing piece in the stories we tell about the American Revolution. From New Hampshire to Georgia, it was ordinary people who became the face of resistance. Without them the Revolution would have failed. They sustained the commitment to independence when victory seemed in doubt and chose law over vengeance when their communities teetered on the brink of anarchy. The Will of the People offers a vivid account of how, across the thirteen colonies, men and women negotiated the revolutionary experience, accepting huge personal sacrifice, setting up daring experiments in self-government, and going to extraordinary lengths to preserve the rule of law. After the war they avoided the violence and extremism that have compromised so many other revolutions since. A masterful storyteller, Breen recovers the forgotten history of our nation’s true founders. “The American Revolution was made not just on the battlefields or in the minds of intellectuals, Breen argues in this elegant and persuasive work. Communities of ordinary men and women—farmers, workers, and artisans who kept the revolutionary faith until victory was achieved—were essential to the effort.” —Annette Gordon-Reed “Breen traces the many ways in which exercising authority made local committees pragmatic...acting as a brake on the kind of violent excess into which revolutions so easily devolve.” —Wall Street Journal

The three essays and the collection of documents focus on the nature of the revolutionary process in North America between 1774 and 1776. Both suggest that this process was the work of Committees of Inspection and Observation founded in 1774/75 in all colonies and dissolved after the passing of the Declaration of Independence. These committees were founded as a result of associations in which colonists pledged their acceptance of the resolves of the Continental Congress. Associations defi ned revolutionary values as well as pre-national concepts, the committees supervised the trade boycott as well as the adherence to these revolutionary values. Those who broke the boycott or rejected the values were declared [alpha]enemies of liberty± or [alpha]enemies of the American cause±. As a result, American colonial society was divided into Revolutionaries and "enemies of liberty". The documents - texts of associations and resolutions of the committees of inspection and observations all published in colonial newspapers - illustrate this new interpretation of the nature of revolutionary process of the American Revolution.

As cultural authority was reconstituted in the Revolutionary era, knowledge reconceived in the age of Enlightenment, and the means of communication radically altered by the proliferation of print, speakers and writers in eighteenth-century America began to describe themselves and their world in new ways. Drawing on hundreds of sermons, essays, speeches, letters, journals, plays, poems, and newspaper articles, Christopher Grasso explores how intellectuals, preachers, and polemicists transformed both the forms and the substance of public discussion in eighteenth-century Connecticut. In New England through the first half of the century, only learned clergymen regularly addressed the public. After midcentury, however, newspapers, essays, and eventually lay orations introduced new rhetorical strategies to persuade or instruct an audience. With the rise of a print culture in the early Republic, the intellectual elite had to compete with other voices and address multiple audiences. By the end of the century, concludes Grasso, public discourse came to be understood not as the words of an authoritative few to the people but rather as a civic conversation of the people.