The power of oaths was put to the ultimate test in the constitutional crisis beginning in the 1760s, when political legitimacy truly began to erode. In many respects, these oaths maintained a coherent, disciplined, and quasi-legitimate means of resistance. The resignation of Stamp Distributors such as Boston’s Andrew Oliver were often confirmed by a sworn promise to keep to their resignation, administered by a Justice of the Peace, and published in colonial newspapers. “Patriots” formed “associations,” whose frequently sworn commitments were putatively “voluntary” but strictly enforced as law. In these ways, so-called patriots laid the foundations of sovereignty which they could fully assert when they were determined to. As Pearl describes, patriots made forceful use of oaths of loyalty to solidify their claims to sovereignty. In this way, oaths went a long way in mitigating the political crisis produced in the 1760s and 1770s. However, they produced crises of their own.

The Crisis of Authority

The fundamental power of oaths lay in the individual’s invocation of divine power, a supreme resource intended to confirm authority but in realty available to any person. The military and political chaos of the war created problems and opportunities for various people, expanding the number of those making public oaths. The experience of women offers one such example. Denied a formal political identity, women often strove to establish one for self-defense in the absence of their husbands. The misogyny of the period meant that the active political consent of women was often discounted as both impossible and unnecessary. Consequently, women were seldom asked to take an oath of allegiance. However, women nonetheless made important political decisions based—or even despite—those made by their husbands. They represented themselves in petitions and pled their own political dispositions as a matter of self-defense, and, sometimes, they took oaths. Massachusetts took the extraordinary step of allowing women to maintain their dowry rights if they remained in the state and personally swore allegiance it, something women attempted elsewhere. These cases of limited autonomy had no basis in enlightened attitudes towards women. They were solely caused by the dislocations, uncertainties, and open political contestations of war. Still, they offered otherwise unheard-of opportunities for female self-assertion.