In August 2015, Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word “hangry” had entered our common vocabulary. Surely most people living in the twenty-first century have experienced the sense of being simultaneously hungry and angry. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hunger was also everywhere. A recent NPR essay examines how slaveholders withheld food from enslaved people, such as Frederick Douglass, because hunger gave them greater control over people of African descent. Historian Alan Taylor has written about periods of famine after the American Revolution. During some of these years of food shortages that Taylor describes, Iroquois clan mothers pressured other Native Americans into ceding land because they wanted “peace and food relief,” as they did in 1785 at Fort Herkimer.1 Hunger has been, and continues to be, a key facet of power relations.
Hangriness implies that being hungry should engender rage. But historians also know better; they know that for a long time, hunger did not make early modern people angry because they expected it. Carla Cevasco demonstrates that New England colonists could cope with hunger throughout the eighteenth century, but did not do much to stop it.2 Historians half a century ago used to think that people started food riots just because they were hungry, but we now know that rioting was one of many organized, political forms of behavior related to periods of scarcity — particularly from 1740 to 1820, or what John Bohstedt has called the “golden age” of food riots.3
People rioted to critique a government’s failure to prevent hunger — but only sometimes to demand the right to prevent their own hunger.4 James Vernon has suggested that only in the nineteenth century did hunger become avoidable.5 Nick Cullather has argued that it was the twentieth-century quantification of food in the form of calories that enabled the United States to make the state responsible for forestalling food insecurity.6
So yes, hunger was a problem in the early modern period; crops failed, famine ensued, and people died of starvation as their bodies consumed themselves. But hunger was also unexceptional, and rarely was it a cause for anger. During the American Revolutionary War, hunger meant different things at different times, and lots of people — enslaved people, Native Americans, and ordinary soldiers — had to deal with hunger, ignore it, prevent it, and create it.
In November 1775, Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation of freedom to slaves of rebel masters. In the short-term, some enslaved people liberated themselves, but the long-term consequences were still more electrifying.7 Historians estimate that some 15,000 to 20,000 people ran away from masters to join the British cause.8 Almost a fourth of the pre-Revolutionary slave population migrated out of South Carolina and Georgia.9 Women and men also fled from Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia.10