Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence

Robert G. Parkinson describes his sophomore effort as “sort of” an abridgment of his influential 2016 monograph The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (vii). Indeed, Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence offers students a concise, readable entry into the main arguments and takeaways from Parkinson’s 700-page debut. However, by reconsidering The Common Cause’s themes in a new chronology, Parkinson also makes a fresh contribution to the field. Homing in on the fifteen months between the “shot heard ’round the world” and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this book shows that, yes, ideas united the North American British colonies at that critical juncture. But those ideas, Parkinson argues, were not enlightened notions of liberty and republicanism but instead were about the exclusion of Indigenous and Black people. In the wake of the fighting at Lexington and Concord, patriot leaders used newspapers to propagate stories of British alliances with enslaved people and Native Americans to unite colonists and “hammer home the idea that the British were treacherous and dangerous enemies” (2).A key premise of Thirteen Clocks is that nothing was particularly foreordained about intercolonial unity in the years and months leading up to the Declaration of Independence. The divisions that cut through the colonies were numerous. No camaraderie existed between easterners and backcountry localists, Quakers and the descendants of Puritans, “Regulators” and elites, enslavers and a growing but “largely inconsequential” cadre of antislavery dissidents, and, of course, patriots and the persistent bloc of colonists who supported the crown (52). Where historians have identified economic and cultural continuities across British North America in recent decades, Parkinson carefully demonstrates that the perception of difference among colonists remained present and powerful.1 The author does not deny that patriot leaders had some success papering over these divisions with appeals to heady Enlightenment values. But those sorts of arguments—which held purchase in the 1760s and early 1770s—rang hollow when the gun smoke settled after the Lexington and Concord. Fearful stories of British-fomented slave rebellions and Native American raiders, Parkinson explains, represented a site of consensus for colonists and helped sever dearly held feelings of British national identity.Parkinson sets out to show that these racist, exclusionary ideas did not just float organically through the colonies, but instead were the product of an intentional, carefully calculated patriot messaging campaign. A great service of this book is showing students and specialists exactly how that operation worked. Parkinson has mastered the confusing, intersected world of colonial newspapers, which included four competing titles all named Virginia Gazette and no fewer than eight different Pennsylvania organs. Parkinson provides an engaging tour of the colonial newspaper lifecycle from layout to printing to the critical “exchange system” through which patriot messaging was syndicated (28). The patriots became experts at selectively reprinting consensus-building materials and sometimes passing outright falsehoods as sober news reporting through that exchange. Access to intercolonial information, experience, and drama through the exchange system shrunk the world for North American colonists and helped foster a communal identity. The specific information and drama that met the moment, patriot leaders deduced, revolved around fears that Britain would mobilize enslaved people and Native Americans for war.The Second Continental Congress, crafting messaging to keep the public up to date, focused on Black people and Native Americans as “proxies” of the British (123). The reader is struck that many of the “conspiracies” they propagated were not exactly conspiracies. As Parkinson shows, British military officials and political leaders did see Native Americans and enslaved people as part of a coalition that could defeat the rebellion. While British officials who plotted the role these proxies could play in war did indeed “unite the American colonies,” Parkinson asserts that real credit belongs to patriot leaders who proactively collected, amplified, politicized, and disseminated these stories to justify colonial unity and, eventually, revolution (99). This campaign, over the course of fifteen months, shaped American independence and the document that declared it. The Declaration’s charges against the king, which Parkinson says “started slowly and gained emotional speed,” culminated in an accusation that he had incited “merciless savages,” “domestic insurrections,” and “foreign mercenaries” (155). These groups were, according to that document and the statesmen who framed it, just as inimical to the new American national community as the king himself.Thirteen Clocks concludes with a look at the legacy of patriot propaganda. Parkinson draws a line from the stories patriots told to the limits of northern state abolition. For example, critics of Pennsylvania’s 1780 gradual abolition law invoked the king’s proxies, as did New Jerseyans who defeated a Quaker push for abolition during the war. In sum, Parkinson argues, “the proxy stories foreclosed alternatives after the war was over” (178). This is perhaps an overstatement. A countervailing legacy emerged from the same revolution, one that does not fit into Parkinson’s account. African American activists and their allies, in the Revolution’s wake, used tools like citizenship and nationalism—fundamentally exclusionary in Thirteen Clocks—to stake a claim to freedom in the new United States. They faced long odds at every turn, to be sure. But the early abolition movement’s embrace of the Revolution’s legacy shows that while fear of British proxies may have created a moment of consensus in those liminal fifteen months, it did not last. Still, Thirteen Clocks proves with verve and clarity that understanding patriot leaders as the wartime political operators that they were—rather than the ageless universalist philosophers our national myths have made them—sheds light on why the Revolution unfolded and how it set the stage for a troubled new nation.