Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution [Paperback]

Runner-up, 2025Journal of the American RevolutionBook of the Year Award

Complicating the American Revolution through a microhistory of one Massachusetts town

In 1774, a group of elite men in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, just outside Salem, wrote an address to the royal governor thanking him for his service to the colony, even as town residents began demanding independence from Great Britain. Town meeting records reveal how the towns patriot majority pressured the signers to withdraw their support for the governor and demanded public recantations and issued damning reports, even forcing some of the signers into exile.

Enemies to Their Countrytells the story of the year following the Address, chronicling the towns struggle to achieve consensus even as the war for American independence started. This microhistory of one vitally important town, the second largest in Massachusetts at the time, with a thriving local economy based on fishing and a robust community of religious and civically engaged citizens, complicates simplistic ideas of the American Revolution. Through compelling stories of neighboring individuals and families, many of which have not been told, it also provides an example of a politically polarized constituency struggling to find consensus at a time of great conflict.

NICHOLAS W. GENTILEis an independent historian.

This award-winning microhistory of one New England town's confrontation with its incipient loyalists is a well-told window into the dilemmas of community cohesion, networks of belonging, rising political turmoil, and the dilemmas of manufacturing political unity at the beginning of the war for independence.New England Quarterly

Enemies to Their Countryis an excellent example of how viewing local events can help one understand those on the national level. Gentile remain[s] entirely focused on his narrative of MarbleheadlSŠ