BOOK REVIEWS 567 the time that women were the nurturers and healers, assignments of the highest order in nature and society. Although their roles were different from their husbands’, women deserved to be treated as equals before the law, which stipulated that only those who were not dependent on others had rights. Abigail did not seek women’s rights to equal participation in politics or the economy; she merely argued for a legal system that would help women find maximum fulfillment in their ascribed roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. She recognized the possibilities as well as the limits of her position as a woman in a man’s world. Throughout their lives John and Abigail were constantly faced with the dilemma of deciding between public duty and private happiness. Invariably, public duty won. But Abigail made it happen. When he was a very young man, John Adams had written in his diary that he wanted to do something that would surprise the world. Abigail made it possible for him to accomplish that goal. Woody Holton shows us how. I have always felt that the life of a biography is in the details, for it is the details that give the past a pulse and allow biography to become a prism of history. As Holton sets his portrait of Abigail Adams against the canvas of mid-eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century history and the forming of a new nation, he provides a great amount of detail, but at times that detail overwhelms the narrative and hinders its flow. That said, Woody Holton’s meticulous research and documentation, his sympathetic and nuanced portrait of this bright, passionate, and resilient woman, and his thoughtful rendering of a turbulent time in our history give us a fuller and richer understanding than has heretofore been realized of the role that Abigail Adams played in the founding of our country and as a lifelong advocate of women’s rights. Natalie Bober is a biographer/historian who has written extensively on the colonial period in American history. Her biography of Abigail Adams (Atheneum, 1995) won the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Nonfiction. As If an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution. By Richard Archer. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xx, 284.$24.95.) On 5 March 1770, shoemaker George R. T. Hewes stood in an unruly crowd on Boston’s King Street facing a squad of grenadiers. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00037 by guest on 02 October 2021 568 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY As Alfred F. Young observed in The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (1999), the poor workingman was not there because of strong ideas about tariffs and legislative sovereignty; in his old age, Hewes told in- terviewers nothing of protesting the Sugar Act, Stamp Act, or Town- shend duties. Rather, the shoemaker had been politicized by bumping up against soldiers in his hometown. And when those grenadiers fired into the crowd, killing five people, Hewes and his neighbors became convinced that they had to resist tyranny directed from London. Richard Archer’s As If an Enemy’s Country is a well-written book about that pivotal confrontation, soon dubbed the Boston Massacre. The book traces political conflict in pre-Revolutionary Boston and fo- cuses on the twenty-six months between the arrival of army regiments in October 1768 and the trials that followed the massacre. Archer’s book thus covers the same territory explored in Hiller B. Zobel’s The Boston Massacre, published in 1970. The political divisions of that year, particularly after the killings at Kent State, fed criticism that Zobel tilted against the protesting crowds and toward the royal authorities, but no one could deny how thoroughly he had mined the sources. This new study does not unearth as much. Archer does include some recent books in his cited works, but only one article later than 1990 and only two unpublished manuscript collections. Because so many sources are published, however, this proves a serious problem only when Archer describes the mass protests of January 1770 without the dramatic details to be found in the Jared Sparks collection of American manuscripts in Harvard’s Houghton Library. The massacre itself was so furiously documented that the real challenge is to fit all the surviving accounts into a coherent picture. The picture Archer assembles is far more critical of the royal gov- ernment than Zobel’s. Archer begins by saying that Royal Navy ships enforcing trade laws were “behaving like buccaneers” (p. 5) and that the Stamp Act was shaped by “deceit” and “spite” (p. 20). Archer generally voices the American Whigs’ interpretation of events, agree- ing that “British officials viewed colonists as less than full citizens” (p. 115). He stops short only of supporting their conclusion that con- spirators in London wished to force colonists into political slavery. Zobel’s and Archer’s different approaches produce striking con- trasts. Zobel called the “Journal of the Times” dispatches “fanciful . propaganda”; Archer refers to them as a “news source” that offers “valuable eyewitness,” albeit one sided (pp. 126–27). Zobel devoted five pages to the “Neck Riot” of 24 October 1769 and emphasized Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00037 by guest on 02 October 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 569 injured soldiers, enraged inhabitants, and hostile magistrates; Archer covers the event in a paragraph and highlights the shot from one sol- dier’s gun. Reviewers complained that Zobel gave Samuel Adams too much credit for manipulating Boston crowds. Archer argues, “These were not mindless mobs; they were people with a purpose” (p. 45). At a few points, As If an Enemy’s Country omits detail unfavorable to the Whigs. For example, Archer cites the Boston News-Letter report on the death of young Christopher Seider, which states that the boy happened upon a rock-throwing riot while walking home from school. Archer doesn’t mention court testimony that Seider was shot while “stooping to take up a Stone.” In the end, Archer concludes that the soldiers on King Street “were not in danger of their lives” when they fired into the crowd (p. 198). Not only does he reject the self-defense argument that Zobel supports, but he suggests that some soldiers may have shot at particular men in the crowd and thus may have been guilty of murder rather than manslaughter. This book’s perspective is especially important because so many popular depictions of the massacre start with youths assaulting an armed soldier for no good reason rather than with that sentry clubbing an apprentice for saucy speech. There are different ways to interpret the evidence, but it’s useful to see all the major facts laid out. As If an Enemy’s Country is well illustrated, with two helpful new maps of the massacre scene. One marks the approximate locations of sixty-eight individuals, including the soldiers. That image must nonetheless be viewed with care; nearby text notes that the crowd “probably numbered around 125,” so the soldier dots should be sur- rounded by twice as many crowd dots as actually appear (pp. 198–99). At times Archer, whose previous book is a study of sixteenth- century Massachusetts, trips over details of this later period. He inter- prets criticism that the Boston Chronicle was a “Jacobite” newspaper as “basically meaning it favored the ministry” in London (p. 148), when in fact the term implied that the Chronicle printers, both of whom were from Scotland, supported the Stuart Pretenders. The book refers to one ship as “the Snow Pitt” (pp. 150–53), but a snow was a type of ship. Most important, Archer’s analysis draws no distinc- tion between the elite merchants’ association and the larger “Body” meetings beyond the merchants’ control. As If an Enemy’s Country does not supplant Zobel’s Boston Mas- sacre as a study of the conflict on the streets of Boston between 1765 and 1770; it does not come close to the older book’s detail. But Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00037 by guest on 02 October 2021 570 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Archer’s work is valuable in prompting readers to reconsider what they might have heard about those events. With American soldiers patrolling foreign cities, experiencing sullen welcomes or worse, the Boston Massacre resonates today as much as ever. J. L. Bell maintains the website Boston1775.net, devoted to “History, analysis, and unabashed gossip” about Revolutionary New England. He has published articles on the roles of town watchmen and saucy boys in the Boston Massacre. Commodore Abraham Whipple of the Continental Navy: Privateer, Patriot, Pioneer. By Sheldon S. Cohen. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010. Pp. xxii, 232.$69.95.) Of the twenty-seven men who were commissioned as captains in the Continental Navy, only two are famous today: John Paul Jones and Benedict Arnold. (Although remembered for his army exploits and treason, Arnold also commanded the American naval forces at the Battle of Lake Champlain.) A few of those twenty-seven are rea- sonably well known, such as John Barry, Joshua Barney, and Silas Talbot, but most of the men who made substantive contributions to the Revolutionary War’s maritime cause have largely been forgotten. Sheldon Cohen’s biography of Captain Abraham Whipple is thus a welcome literary tapestry, a vivid depiction of events woven together with threads of strong scholarship and attention to detail. There are occasional cross-stitches of supposition, but these are both fully ac- knowledged and judiciously chosen to put the biography in context.