The British Army is at your door. They need a room.
What do you do?
For thousands of civilians living in cities occupied during the American War for Independence — Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah — that question wasn’t hypothetical. It was a reality that reshaped daily life, upended household hierarchies, and revealed a side of the Revolution that battlefields alone can never show us.
Lauren Duval, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and author of The Home Font: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence, joins us to explore what the War for American Independence looked like from inside the household, and why the home front may be the most revealing lens we have for understanding the Revolution.
This episode was made possible with support from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first historical society in the United States.
About the Show
Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.
It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.
Episode Summary
Lauren Duval is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. Her award-winning scholarship has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly and been supported by numerous fellowships, including a long-term fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Laruen’s book, The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence, examines how civilians in six occupied American port cities experienced the War for Independence from within their own households.
During our exploration of civilian life in Revolutionary War occupied cities, Lauren reveals:
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- How women like Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Drinker negotiated quartering arrangements on their own terms: setting rules, invoking military hierarchies, and holding their ground against British officers
- How class shaped every quartering dispute, from South Carolina elites resolving conflicts through the rituals of honor to a Newport apothecary beaten by an officer who argued a tradesman couldn’t qualify as a gentleman
- How British occupation created dangerous but real openings for enslaved people, including the unexpected surge of family flight to British lines, and how enslaved people forced the British Army to protect their families in ways the military had never planned for
What You’ll Discover
- Philadelphia Quaker Phoebe Pemberton’s letters chastising a British officer quartered on her family’s estate
- Why Lauren focused on six occupied urban port cities: Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah
- How colonial port cities functioned as vibrant, interdependent communities before the war arrived
- How British occupation transformed city life
- How the Philadelphia State House became a prison under British occupation
- The story of Elizabeth Drinker, a Philadelphia Quaker
- How Scottish officer James Cramond negotiated his way into the Drinker household
- Why Elizabeth Drinker’s diary and her letters to her exiled husband Henry tell very different stories about her relationship with Cramond
- How the British Army’s strategy of martial chivalry shaped quartering interactions in female-headed households
- Why quartering in male-headed households was far more contentious
- How class determined whether disputes ended in gentlemanly accommodation or outright violence
- Why only officers were quartered on civilians
- How laboring-class city dwellers experienced occupation differently from the elite
- How the British Army’s hard currency upended urban labor markets
- How Dunmore’s Proclamation and the Phillipsburg Proclamation spread through enslaved communities
- Why British-occupied cities became beacons of hope for self-emancipated families
- Why enslaved people insisted on fleeing to British lines together as families
- How enslaved people forced the British Army to accommodate people it had never planned to protect
- How the shared domestic trauma of occupation became a touchstone for American national identity after the war
Links to People, Places, and Publications
Time Warp Question
What might have happened if the British had spent most of their resources fighting the war in what the colonists called the backcountry? If problems of supply had not largely restricted the British Army to the Eastern Seaboard, how might the experience of the American War for Independence have been different for civilians?
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 050: Betsy Ross & the Making of America
🎧 Episode 175: The War in Ben Franklin’s House
🎧 Episode 237: Motherhood in Early America
🎧 Episode 306: The Horse’s Tail
🎧 Episode 332: Experiences of Revolution: Occupied Philadelphia
🎧 Episode 333: Experiences of Revolution: Occupied Yorktown
🎧 Episode 380: The Tory’s Wife
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