there would have been no revolution

Who were the real heroes of the American Revolution?

Of course, the Founding Fathers, George Washington in particular, were marvelous leaders and deserve a great deal of credit. But they get a lot of credit. The people that go missing from the story are often anonymous, the kinds of people that showed up in Lexington and Concord, insurgents in little towns. They're just people who were caught up in one of the great events of our history.

How did these people come together?

Without newspapers or weekly journals, there would have been no revolution. Little communities published reports of their own revolutionary activities that were picked up and reprinted in distant places. And the effect of this was to give individuals a sense of solidarity with distant strangers, largely without the help or even the interest of the famous Founding Fathers.

What relationship did these "founding farmers" have with the Founding Fathers?

The Founding Fathers went to the Congress that first met in 1774, and they passed statutes that affected these little communities, the most famous being the [Continental] Association. What this did was to invite every community to create a local Committee of Safety to monitor revolutionary activities, and these were entirely elected. It's estimated that over 15,000 men served on these committees in the first year, and they had never held political office or seen it as their social role to serve in a political office before this. The Congress and the Founding Fathers issued the invitation, but the people took it and ran with it. They created, in their own communities, an infrastructure of revolution that perhaps the Founding Fathers had not anticipated.

What did the founders think of this result?

By and large, the Founding Fathers were a little uneasy that perhaps they had released popular democracy in ways they feared occasionally would get out of control.

Are there any key figures who should be added to the canon of Founding Fathers?

I suspect these people would be embarrassed to be put in the same group as the Founding Fathers, but one was Samuel Thompson, who lived in Brunswick, Maine, which was then Massachusetts. He was a tough-minded, Scotch-Irish person who was a fierce insurgent, and he was ready to start the revolution long before anyone else. He kidnapped British officers; he tried to capturebuy ugg boots Classic Argyle Knit UGG Boots Ugg Stripe Cable Knit Boots a British ship. This was before the Declaration of Independence.