In American Honor, Craig Bruce Smith places morals, virtue, and ethics at the center of the American Revolution. Smith argues that in the late-colonial period, understandings of honor transformed. Instead of something hereditable, honor became based on merit. That “ethical transformation” helped bring about the Revolution. Independence then allowed Americans to realize its potential. In a phrase, you might say the American Revolution was “made on honor, sold on merit.”
American Honor is an ambitious book. It aims to reinvigorate discussion on the causes of the Revolution, and then also to use this new causation narrative to explain the consequences and meaning of the Revolution. In the process, Smith also challenges historians to think of honor as more than something that served white men by undergirding a patriarchal and racialized society. Smith acknowledges that amidst the revolutionary transformation in honor, “hierarchy did not vanish” (9). But it did increase mobility. According to Smith, this cut across not just class, but race and gender too. The “democratized understanding of honor and virtue based on merit, morality, and service to the cause united the American people” (21).
Smith begins his well-written book with brief accounts of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington’s colonial experiences, and a survey of college culture. The chapters show the earliest turn toward merit-based understandings of honor. Chapter 3 reinterprets the Imperial crisis as a test of colonists’ honor and virtue. Of course, men defended their honor publicly. Women, too, upheld American honor through familiar activities like boycotts.
What makes Smith’s book particularly valuable, is that he takes seriously the war itself. Chapter 4 shows how the newfound sense of honor drove the American obsession with ethical warfare. Conduct, not victory, proved the justness of the revolutionary cause. Americans succeeded in living up to their avowed principles during the first years of the war. Cracks in the façade appeared in 1776-1777 amidst early losses. Dueling increased within the Continental ranks. The Continental officers’ pursuit of respectability rankled enlistedmen. Civil-military relations broke down over fears of a standing army. And soldiers looked down on civilians for not fighting.