Recentering the “War” in the War for Independence
The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence by Lauren Duval (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2025)
Reviewed by Matthew J. Sparacio
From April 16-20, 2026, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) met in Philadelphia for its annual meeting. The largest professional organization for historians of the United States, OAH members descended on the City of Brotherly Love to contemplate the meaning of national memory and anniversaries. No less than twenty-two panels on the program dealt with the American Revolution and the War for Independence. The New York Times characterized the meeting as full of “anxious” historians trying to answer two questions: “What do Americans want and need from the anniversary? And are historians able — or willing — to give it to them?” Absent from this general “doom-and-gloom” report, however, is any mention of how a new wave of scholarship can help answer those questions about what the meaning and lessons of the American Revolution should be.
On April 17, a packed room--historians were standing along the walls, and some were even sitting in the aisles--gathered to listen to the “state of the field” of American Revolutionary studies. In the Q&A session, one senior scholar got up and, in typical “more of a comment than a question” style, rhetorically asked: “Is the war back in the War for Independence?”
The short answer is: yes! The war is back! And perhaps no work better encapsulates this interpretive turn (perhaps we should call it a return?) than Lauren Duval’s The Home Front.
Duval examines the wartime experiences of residents in six major cities: Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Newport, Charleston, and Savannah. Ironically, these cities had "overwhelmingly female” populations as men either voluntarily left their homes to protect their families or were exiled because they refused to take loyalty oaths to the Crown (83). Here is interdisciplinary scholarship at its best: blending military and legal history with gender studies to recast the American Revolution and the War for Independence as a threat to both patriarchy and property. By focusing on ideas about, and what unfolded within, the home in British-occupied America, Duval claims, “the war looks messier, more complex, and more human” (24). People acted pragmatically, strategically, and emotionally as circumstances shifted and cities became garrisons.
The presence of British military forces was nothing new. As Serena Zabin outlined in her family history of the Boston Massacre, the British Army was ubiquitous in North America after 1763. But after 1775 and the shift to martial law, the army took on a new role: occupying force that treated most urban dwellers as potential enemies instead of fellow subjects. Occupied cities saw houses sacked, orchards picked clean, animals slaughtered, and buildings (and their materials) repurposed to fortify occupying forces. People experienced the threat of physical and sexual violence, felt the pangs of hunger and starvation, sidestepped filth, and tried to navigate intrusive levels of surveillance. These disruptions were immediate, “visceral,” and “invasive” (33).
Highlighting occupation is a compelling response to recent work that has somewhat downplayed the consequences of the Quartering Act of 1774. For example, in 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (Knopf, 2020), Mary Beth Norton persuasively argued that the Administration of Justice Act proved top of mind for paranoid colonists, resulting in that specific Coercive Act getting a new nickname: the “Death Act.” In contrast, Duval’s work explains how the consequences of the Quartering Act provided an almost universal experience for colonists that required each person--enslaved or free--to respond to the upheaval of household politics. Her conclusions stem from a recentering of Castle Doctrine, or the common law notion that every man’s house was their castle, in the revolutionary context.
But the home represented so much more. “Propertied manhood, patriarchal power, and masculine honor were deeply entwined” in British Atlantic definitions of elite and middling definitions of masculinity. As such, British occupation presented an overt threat to domestic law and order, in both the gendered and political sense of the word. When British officers billeted in elite or middling homes, they therefore created “two heads” of the house--one based on empire, the other on kinship--that undercut colonial men’s status and authority (132). Time after time, colonial men were shown that their homes were not their castles.
The Home Front is organized in chapters profiling different members of colonial homes: men and the women who assumed responsibilities as heads of households in their absence; their daughters; and the free laboring and enslaved people (again, mostly women) working to keep these homes functional during the disruption of occupation. While colonial men felt besieged in their houses, Duval notes that women and laborers used military occupation to leverage their own sense of control over their lives. Elite women obstructed British aims but also sometimes befriended British billeters to protect their homes and family, at times fostering a sense of kinship based on status and respectability; Duval notes that officers “frequently acceded” to elite women’s “domestic authority” (94).
Perhaps out of a generational sense of rebellion--or sheer boredom--colonial daughters in occupied cities looked for companionship and distractions from what were sometimes outright miserable conditions. Some accepted invitations to balls and receptions. They vied for the attention of British officers at these ostentatious events, such as the Meschianza in Philadelphia held in honor of General Sir William Howe in 1778.
While elite and middling white colonial men and women tried to keep a low profile by practicing “domestic seclusion,” or worse, felt trapped in their homes with (to them) insufferable roommates they ideologically disagreed with, laborers near universally took advantage of their mobility under occupation to improve their lot (50). Outside of the nuclear family but still an essential component of a household, free laboring women left to seek more lucrative employment. Some were hired by British officers; others were never compensated for their labor. Like colonial daughters, some found marriage and stability in their new relationships. Others, still, found themselves in sexually exploitative circumstances. But in these situations, despite their pursuit of liberty, free laboring women instead found “not independence" but "almost always dependence on a soldier” (170).
The same could be said of enslaved women, who faced similar but more pronounced risks of exploitation due to their race. The real potential freedom offered by the emancipation extended by British occupiers, however, made these risks worth it. Some 20,000 enslaved Africans and African Americans found the freedom to establish and nurture their own households after successfully fleeing to British lines. When laboring women or enslaved people demonstrated their agency and decided to leave colonial households--decisions facilitated by British military occupation--they, like British billeters, undermined white colonial men's claims to patriarchal authority.
What is so captivating about this book is how clearly Duval shows that politics mattered less than class, gender, and race when the war literally came home. I think many will find her conclusion that “the Revolution looks different when viewed from the household,” finding the tug-of-war over household power much more relatable than evoking the traditional timeline of battlefield victories or defeats (30). Duval demonstrates how there are more meanings and lessons from studying the war from this vantage point: protecting access to one’s home explains both the popular gendered imagery of the early republic and the rise of the yeoman farmer, as well as the presumption of territorial expansion after Independence.
This is a story about the deep retrenchment of patriarchy in early America, and one that bears noteworthy parallels to the country now as it celebrates its semiquincentennial. Duval’s rich research will be required reading for the next generation of scholars of the Revolution, and I foresee her closing remarks, that after Independence “none could make them (meaning, male heads of households) afraid,” spurring debate in the coming years (309). Were these men truly unafraid? Perhaps not of women. But they were certainly afraid of the democratic forces unleashed by the Revolution, as profiled in Dennis Rasmussen’s Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders (2021), to say nothing about the fear of rebellions by the enslaved. Regardless, this work shows that the meanings and lessons of the Revolution are myriad, began at home, and will remain unsettled for generations to come.
Matthew Sparacio is a lecturer of colonial and Native American history at Georgia State University. He mostly posts about dogs and pizza on instagram @calumetsncrowns .
