The ‘why’ behind this seeming anomaly is found in McDonnell’s exhaustive entry into ‘the small politics of war’. County court records, war office and executive papers, and militia petitions allow him to play a searchlight over the conspicuous inequities of pre-war Virginia’s notably hierarchical society. They also illuminate resistance to that structure as the increasing demands of wartime defence and recruitment gave non-élite Virginians the political leverage to resist unpopular legislation and (late in the war) consciously assert their rights as citizens. Specifically, the lower classes learned how to withdraw their labour as militia or conscripts; or they put a high price on enlisting. Small-holding middling farmers also refused to fall in behind a patriotic élite leadership. Instead, they left a record of militia quotas unfilled and taxes evaded.

As McDonnell quickly points out, ordinary Virginians enacted frequent and often violent signs of disaffection despite the presence of a large enslaved population that, putatively, could have observed such fissures and consequently raised its own rebellion, in this case, against whites. A significant number of students of Southern history have argued that fear of a race war repeatedly precluded political alignment along class lines. In contrast, McDonnell’s close analysis of the local records shows that the war caused individuals and groups of lower-class men and women, both enslaved and free, not to make decisions on the basis of race but according to their own personal, family and small-community needs – and with the knowledge that black and white neighbours were doing the same. One of the outstanding merits of McDonnell’s study is his refusal to differentiate between the wartime politics adopted by enslaved and ordinary free Virginians. Within both groups, some men opted to be Tories; others fought as patriots (but some because independence meant free trade with France or the chance to move west). Many were more desperate at the wartime shortage of salt than at the British forces cruising directly off the coast. Many of them tried to hide from the whole affair.

Particularly by following the politics of wartime mobilisation, McDonnell retrieves a society at war ‘as much with itself as with Britain’. He cites a number of the ‘new military’ historians who, like himself, have tried to sort out the men who served as soldiers during the war and those who did not. His data correlates with their findings. As in earlier colonial conflicts, it was Virginia’s poor, indentured and otherwise vulnerable whom the élites intended to coerce into service after 1775. Many lower-class men expected to be pressed into carrying arms. They would often be forced to obey unskilled officers who could nonetheless expect to be richly rewarded, while they received promises of paltry pay and land bounties that seldom materialised. Soon, however, they were ignoring the laws governing militia enrolment and regular training. Delegates to the annual Virginia Convention blamed a diminution of patriotism. Certainly, the anticipated number of minutemen, militia and volunteers for the Continental army volunteers never eventuated. In 1781, for example, recruitment officers for the Continental army reported 775 men drafted. Of these, forty-nine would not leave their counties; 118 absconded en route to their rendezvous points; and forty-eight were refused for service. Virginia reached only twenty-four per cent of its Continental quota.

Causes of non-enlistment ranged from a popular perception in early 1775 that Virginia was nowhere near the centre of the war, to the equally popular conviction in 1780 that, yes, the invasion of Virginia was probable but peace was possible, too. Elsewhere, ordinary Virginians were arguing that the gentry class should shoulder the colony’s defence. Militia training was too long, and meant lost crops and undefended families. Besides, militia officers should be elected. Open resistance to a draft seen as socially inequitable settled in as irreversible. The near-empty parade grounds signified a clash of economic and political interests repeatedly splitting white ranks. Inexorably, ordinary black and white Virginians were driving leaders toward independence from Britain, but also creating a revolutionary situation that demanded the redefinition of authority at home. By 1778, colonial officials were ‘fearful of our final success’ and forced to make concessions. Yet even two years later, Britain’s southern campaign and a series of inland raids that put the colony directly under siege did little to inflect enlistments.

The Politics of War is comprehensive in ways that I have scarcely managed to describe. Specialists will appreciate McDonnell’s mastery of the historiography of Virginia. But they and others will also recognise and applaud his determination to recall from the past individual people forced to cope with the experience of war. McDonnell is retrieving slaves, not a slave system or slavery; he is retrieving men of military age, not a revolutionary movement. His sympathetic treatment of lower- and middle-class Virginians is best displayed in his writing about enslaved blacks. Here were men whose hopes of freedom led them to join the army, either army. By 1778 they comprised a ‘significant minority in the Continental army’. They joined as volunteers or as substitutes for whites. Recruiting officers were happy to take them on. When the British opened the southern campaign in 1780–81, many escaped servitude and headed for their lines. McDonnell writes: ‘In the end, the only Virginians who participated in the siege of Yorktown with any great enthusiasm were the hundreds of black Virginians who had joined the British.’ Adopting the tone of Rhys Isaac and Cassandra Pybus, both Australian historians writing on Virginia, he continues: ‘Many blacks died defending their freedom while whites stayed at home to protect theirs.’

In a strong final chapter, McDonnell follows ordinary Virginians into the postwar period. Lower-class Virginians gained increased political leverage on the local level, but little else; middling farmers cited exaggerated wartime sacrifices and by that retained their property, including enslaved property. Soon, Virginia’s slave population had nearly doubled. Meanwhile, élites such as Virginia’s struggled to reclaim the hold on governance that the internal contestations of war had so seriously challenged. Together with other like-minded conservative state leaders, they helped create the United States Constitution of 1787.

This is McDonnell’s story, and it is wonderfully told.