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Rarely is it possible to hear the voice of the people in a
revolution except as it filters through the writings of articulate
individuals who may not really be representative. But on several
occasions during the effort to draft a constitution for
Massachusetts after 1776, the citizens of the Commonwealth were
asked to convene in their 300 town meetings to debate and convey to
the legislators their political theories, needs, and aspirations.
This book presents the transcribed debates and the replies returned
to Boston which constitute a unique body of material documenting
the political thought of the ordinary citizen. In an important,
extended introduction, the editors, interpreting the American
Revolution and its sustaining political framework in light of this
material, analyze the forces that were singular and those that were
universal in the shaping of American democracy. Comparisons are
made with popular uprisings in other parts of the world and at
other times, and the whole is integrated into a general discussion
of the nature of revolution and its relationship to constitutional
authority.
Commonwealth, when first published in 1947, was a pioneer effort to
investigate the historical role of government in the American
economy. It revealed for the first time the importance of political
action in the development of the American free enterprise system.
The present edition has been revised by the authors to take into
account the research of the past two decades. Focusing on
Massachusetts as a key state, Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin describe
the changes in the ways the government dealt with the economy from
the period of independence to the Civil War, and they analyze the
social groups whose interests and ideas influenced the character of
those changes. The Handlins have re-examined both their original
conclusions and the procedures by which they arrived at their
formulation of the problem. They have not found it necessary to
make substantial textual revisions, for both their research methods
and their conclusions have stood the test of time, and their basic
concepts have already been incorporated into the literature.
However, they have made stylistic changes and have drastically
altered their documentation, rigorously pruning the old footnotes
and incorporating into the new notes important recent books and
articles which treat the political and economic history of the
period and the local history of the stale. There are two
significant additions to the book: a new preface and a new appendix
that explain the theoretical framework through a description and
demonstration of the change in the authors' attitude and focus
during the course of their original research. This revision of
Commonwealth is as cogent as the original edition, more useful to
scholars because of its incorporation of the latest scholarly
literature, and, as a result of the reduction in documentation,
more attractive to the general reader.
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