14 James Axtell, ed., “The Vengeful Women of Marblehead,” WMQ3 31 (1974), 652.

15 John Adams to Abigail Adams, 7 July 1774, Adams Family Correspondence, ed. Butterfield, I, 131; John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, 1966), 13. This was not Adams’s view alone, nor merely a rationale for revolution. The same conception of “constitutional mobs” was also held by the Massachusetts tory Thomas Hutchinson, who observed that “mobs, a sort of them at least, are constitutional,” even as he fell victim to their violence in Boston. Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” WMQ3 27 (1970), 24; see also idem, From Resistance to Revolution; Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York, 1972), 3-26.

16 A strong regional pattern appears in the frequency of armed rebellions in the thirteen colonies from 1607 to 1763: New Hampshire, 2; Massachusetts, 1; Rhode Island, 2; Connecticut, 0; New York, 4; New Jersey, 3; Pennsylvania, 3; Delaware, 0; Maryland, 9; Virginia, 9; North Carolina, 7; South Carolina, 3; these data will appear in vol. IV, Deep Change, forthcoming.