Radicals, Rebels, and Riff Raff in the American Revolution

While the Continental Congress debated the issue of independence from
Britain, laboring people were already fighting for their rights in the
fields and the streets. It did not take long for the wealthier and
more conservative members of the Congress—a coalition of merchants,
lawyers, and slave-holding Southern planters—to express alarm at the
outspoken and often clamorous participation of the less prosperous
segments of society in the revolutionary process.

John Adams, James Madison, and others expressed their fears of what
they called “riff raff,” “the rabble,” and “the mob.” They believed
that the “lower orders,” once they had mobilized, could bring forward
a type of “excessive democracy” that would disrupt the previously
“stable” and “balanced” political system that wealthy men with
property had always dominated.

And yet, it was the less wealthy sectors of American life—small
farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, journeymen, apprentices, mariners,
laborers, and Black people (both slave and free)—who were the
mainspring of the Revolution. The men met in local assemblies, fought
in the militias or at sea, and marched the length of the Eastern
seaboard, while the women furnished the American army with supplies
while continuing to keep civil life humming.

In this illustrated lecture at Gloria Dei (Old Swedes’) Church,
history researcher and writer Michael Schreiber will describe how many
“lower-class” and laboring people contributed in exciting ways to the
American Revolution. He will show how recent research has uncovered
the activity during the Revolution of a number of people who were
members of the Gloria Dei congregation and subsequently buried or
memorialized in the churchyard.