This September, the University of Massachusetts Press will publish Nicholas W. Gentile’s “Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution,” a book that sheds fresh light on a little-known but revealing episode in Marblehead, Massachusetts’s Revolutionary past.
Enemies to Their Country uncovers how political turmoil gripped the town in 1774 when a group of prominent local men publicly supported the royal governor, just as calls for independence were beginning to take hold among their neighbors.
Drawing from town meeting records, personal accounts, and historical documents, the book paints a vivid portrait of a divided community wrestling with questions of loyalty, identity, and political pressure.
As the second-largest town in Massachusetts at the time, Marblehead was a thriving center of commerce and civic life. But when elite residents signed a controversial address thanking Governor Thomas Hutchinson for his service, they quickly became the targets of public outrage, recantation demands, and even exile.
Rather than simplifying the narrative of patriotic unity, Enemies to Their Country highlights the fractures and factionalism that marked the American Revolution at the local level. Through compelling individual and family stories — many never before told — it reveals a community
navigating the pressures of political dissent, social cohesion, and shifting definitions of loyalty.
This book is especially resonant today, as communities continue to grapple with political polarization and the meaning of dissent. Historians, educators, and local residents interested in the rich past of the North Shore will find in Enemies to Their Country a nuanced and thought-provoking contribution to Revolutionary-era scholarship.
