While the Continental Congress debated the issue of independence from Britain, laboring people were already fighting for their rights in the fields and the streets. It did not take long for the wealthier and more conservative members of the Congress—a coalition of merchants, lawyers, and slave-holding Southern planters—to express alarm at the outspoken and often clamorous participation of the less prosperous segments of society in the revolutionary process.

John Adams, James Madison, and others expressed their fears of what they called “riff raff,” “the rabble,” and “the mob.” They believed that the “lower orders,” once they had mobilized, could bring forward a type of “excessive democracy” that would disrupt the previously “stable” and “balanced” political system that wealthy men with property had always dominated.

And yet, it was the less wealthy sectors of American life—small farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, journeymen, apprentices, mariners, laborers, and Black people (both slave and free)—who were the mainspring of the Revolution. The men met in local assemblies, fought in the militias or at sea, and marched the length of the Eastern seaboard, while the women furnished the American army with supplies while continuing to keep civil life humming.

In this illustrated lecture at Gloria Dei (Old Swedes’) Church, history researcher and writer Michael Schreiber will describe how many “lower-class” and laboring people contributed in exciting ways to the American Revolution. He will show how recent research has uncovered the activity during the Revolution of a number of people who were members of the Gloria Dei congregation and subsequently buried or memorialized in the churchyard.