46 pages • 1 hour read
Robert A. GrossThe Minutemen and Their World
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Bridge to the Future”
The final chapter surveys the three decades after the Revolution, as Concord entered the 19th century with the rest of the world. In the 1790s, the economy recovered as the outbreak of war in Europe made America a trading hub for goods from the Caribbean. With the windfalls from this new era of prosperity, the town undertook significant (and long overdue) infrastructure improvements. Roads were straightened and relaid, farmers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the exhausted land, and new social organizations sprang up to supplement the town’s long-term religious and governmental institutions.
The most important of these was the Social Circle, a group of the town’s political and social leaders. While the existence of this and other social organizations in theory benefited the whole town, in practice they strengthened the divide between the elite and the rest of the town, in the process “weakening the old colonial community” (174). As this group led the community in imagining their town as a potential urban center of the region, Concord strengthened its ties with Boston. Concord was attracting the attention of tourists as the birthplace of the Revolution, and it tried, without success, to parlay this higher-profile status into a position as the governmental center of Middlesex County.
The structure of Concord society was changing: “only a third of the men who paid taxes just before the Revolution were still in town by 1795” (177). Most of the town’s prominent families became less prominent as their younger generations left to settle on the frontier and the Revolution-era town leaders died out. The author attributes much of the change undergone by the town as a result of changing family dynamics. A favorable economic system allowed young men to become independent from their parents earlier, and to establish themselves by working from a relatively early age: “[the] tensions between the generations were resolved in a free and rational economic exchange” (182).
By 1790, there were no slaves in Massachusetts. However, as was the case in the rest of the North, black Concordians had very limited prospects for advancement, and many lived on the periphery of society. Some former slaves made agreements with their former masters to trade a lifetime of support for a lifetime of servitude outside the formal institution of slavery, but outside of this arrangement, with its obvious drawbacks, Concord did not offer the same kind of social and financial safety net to its black residents as it did its white residents. The attitudes that drove this persistent inequality were slow to change: “[racism] remained the last stand of tradition and unreason” (187).
Afterword Summary
In the Afterword, the author discusses his inspiration for writing the book and the details of his methodology. The Afterword picks up where the Preface leaves off, supplementing the basic description of the author’s use of archival materials and computer-aided statistical analysis to shed light on why he chose to analyze the information he found in this way. Inspiration for the book grew out of the “new social history,” a trend in American historical studies of the 1960s and 1970s that produced several famous works examining the life of “ordinary people”—that is, not the richest or the most politically powerful—in New England towns during the colonial and Revolutionary periods of American history. An interest in contributing to this sub-field led him to explore the history of New England.
The author describes how his own experiences shaped his work as a historian. He identifies himself as a member of the countercultural movement of the 1960s, and he explains that many of the values of historians writing the new social history appealed to him personally: their work was engaged in “[exposing] the empty promises of the American dream, documenting the racism, sexism, and class exploitation of the reality behind the myth, revealing the resistance of the subordinate classes to injustice and oppression” (194). With this in mind, he then set out to write a history of the decline of New England towns between the Revolution and the Civil War, as a way of questioning popular narratives of progress.
The enduring importance of Concord in American history also contributed to his interest. The town is as famous as the home of Transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as it is for the fight at the North Bridge. The work of both of these authors, which deals with the importance of independent thought, self-knowledge, and individual morality, seemed to contradict the narrative of economic and social decline that his research suggested would be fitting. This contradiction made him consider the possibility of using the techniques of social history to understand the lives of these writers; however, this project was “derailed by the Minutemen at the Old North Bridge” (195).
Though he admits that military history was not an innate passion, he was drawn to the topic’s enduring relevance by its surprising similarities to contemporary events. Gross was writing during the Vietnam War, and was an opponent of the conflict. As such, the American Revolution appealed to him as a more just if also very costly conflict. The bicentennial of the Revolution was also approaching, adding to the impetus to write about the conflict. From there, he recounts, the complex lives and social contexts of the Minutemen “drew me ever more deeply into their world” (200). The Afterword, which was written in 2000, ends by considering the arguments of more recent works of history that highlight the cosmopolitan nature of Concord life, in contrast to Gross’ focus on localism. The author, like all historians, drew on his own experience to enrich his analysis of the historical material he found.
Chapter 7-Afterword Analysis
Concord emerges from the war in the book’s final chapter as a prosperous if somewhat wary community. The new emphasis on trade as a source of income had the additional effect of allowing farmers to modify the use of their land so it could recover from long years of overuse. As Concord’s sons continued to move further and further away in search of a prosperous future, the town was gradually repopulated by others who moved in, mostly from the surrounding area.
The immediate period after the war saw old wounds and new alike healed. Perhaps partially as a result of the rapid rate of population turnover, the religious frictions of earlier ages eased and were gradually forgotten, and the young people of Concord who travelled outside the city had the opportunity to experience different forms of religious practice (within Protestant Christianity, that is). The sense that Concord had made disproportionate sacrifices for the war effort was presumably lessened by the prosperous post-war period, and this prosperity in turn allowed for deep changes in intergenerational dynamics within local families, where tensions lessened as young men were increasingly capable of making their way in the world on their own labor.
The changes brought by the Revolution did not extend much further than the lives of white men of some means, however. The author connects falling rates of premarital pregnancy in the early nineteenth century with the fact that young men were increasingly capable of expanding their prospects through work, and thus delaying marriage; a new moral emphasis on chastity, he claims, followed from this development. It can be divined from this that, much as in the pre-Revolutionary period, women’s primary means of affecting their own destinies and participating in the public space was their choice of who and when to marry. Similarly, while slavery ended in Massachusetts with a wave of pro-abolition sentiment, black Concordians did not have access to the same social safety net as did whites, and many remained in the service of their former masters.
Though the author’s intentions are not necessarily the most important factor in understanding a work of history, the Afterword provides valuable insight into the author’s priorities which can help draw out the book’s underlying themes. The author’s stated commitment to including information about women and blacks shows the extent to which documentation of their lives is lacking: despite his intentions, the book still contains relatively little about these groups. It is also useful to understand how he formulated his approach to history-writing as a corrective to earlier trends. In the face of many challenges, he is attempting to fuse traditional military history with new trends in social history.
