History

'Government Totally Annihilated': How Americans Governed Themselves as British Rule Crumbled

America in the mid-1770s was a jumble of spontaneous formations amid the ruins of an empire.

Jesse Walker | From the July 2026 issue

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson; Source images: iStock, Wikimedia)

In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country's founding people and ideas. Read more here.

"For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American War, and to a longer period in several of the American States, there were no established forms of government," Tom Paine declared in The Rights of Man. "The old governments had been abolished, and the country was too much occupied in defence to employ its attention in establishing new governments; yet during this interval order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe."

Well, sort of. It wasn't a period of no governing structures so much as a time when different structures competed for Americans' loyalty. From 1774 through 1776, the old colonial regimes shriveled away. What replaced them was not, to yank a phrase from its original context, what the conservative historian Forrest McDonald sardonically called "the taxless, shiftless Utopia which most Americans cherished as a secret dream, and for which 'republicanism' and 'unalienable rights' were merely euphemisms." Nor were new states formed instantly. Instead, vigorously active associations emerged from below.

Pieces of the previous governments held on, surviving by shifting their loyalty to the new order. (In Georgia in 1775, rebels surrounded a fort and compelled the king's rangers to surrender—but soon asked them to assume their posts again, working now for the revolutionary Council of Safety.) The rest of the old authorities found themselves facing a population that was increasingly unwilling to obey them, taking their cues instead from institutions jerry-rigged by improvising insurgents.

Georgia's royal governor summed up the results in a letter sent in September 1775. "Government totally Annihilated," he reported. In its place, "Congresses, Councils and Committees" were assuming the old Leviathan's functions.

Those grassroots groups stood somewhere on the spectrum between a state and something less rigid and more voluntary. First they coexisted with the prior regimes, and then they displaced them. Gene Sharp, one of the great theorists of civic resistance, described such situations as moments of "dual sovereignty and parallel government." While these alternative institutions might sometimes act violently, he argued in The Politics of Nonviolent Action, their success "depends almost entirely on the voluntary withdrawal of authority, support and obedience from the old regime and their award to the new body."

Consider the Continental Association, a charter adopted at the First Continental Congress to enact a boycott of British goods. (It also featured several other measures meant to foster unity during the crisis, including an effort to discourage plays, cockfights, "the giving of scarves at funerals," and any other "species of extravagance and dissipation.") The Continental Congress would eventually evolve into a government, but when it first met in 1774 it saw itself as a group of English........

© Reason.com