I think we all know about the military history of the American revolution. From Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, to Trenton on Christmas Day 1776 and Princeton two weeks later, to the battles of Saratoga and the defeat of the British strategy in 1777, and the British realization that there was no single city in the United States that they could capture to end the war, and Cornwallis's eventual surrender in 1781. We know about the American Generals, and the one who defected, and we know about the Continental Army and the British Army augmented by German mercenaries.
The way the story is told, we neglect the fact that in many ways, this was a civil war as well. Although John Adams thought the country was 1/3 rebel, 1/3 neutral and 1/3 loyalist, current estimates find it to me more 40% rebel, 40% neutral, and 20% loyalist. 20% of 2,780,400 is still 556,000 people who disliked the idea of independence and came to terms with it in very different ways. Some of the events concerning treatment of loyalists probably contributed to the Bill of Rights as well. Evidence below:
Maybe I should start with a map:
This shows the disadvantages the loyalists worked under. At 20% of the population, they just didn't represent a critical mass within any of the population centers, and the British garrison in New York City was essentially a refugee camp. Initially, the loyalists realized that they were living in patriot communities, where they aroused intense hostility, and as the war progressed, many fled for safety to or stayed within, garrison towns (like New York) controlled by the British.
Recent scholarship has found concentrations in the southern backcountry, in the areas around British garrisons in New York, Norfolk (1775), Philadelphia (1777-1778), Newport, Rhode Island (1776-1778), Savannah and Charleston, and, eventually, in Quebec, and in St. Augustine and Pensacola in what was then British Florida. Some were operating under the sincere belief that British institutions could solve the problems of life on the periphery. Some, like the Pennsylvania Germans and many Quakers, understood the patriot cause but objected to armed rebellion. Many of the Dutch residents of the middle colonies, many newcomers to the Carolina backcountry, and a fair number of Anglican clergy and parishioners in Connecticut and New York were also loyalists. New York, in fact, was known as the "Loyal Province."
Massachusetts had to deal with the loyalist problem first, since many New England loyalists had flocked to the garrison in Boston for refuge (especially since the rebels had passed laws disarming them and barring them from holding public office), and some fought on the British side in the Battle of Bunker Hill. When, on March 17 1776 (a date still celebrated in Boston and some neighboring communities as Evacuation Day), the British decided Boston was a lost cause, the loyalist refugees were the first people to leave for Halifax, in Nova Scotia (you can find a list of them here). As luck would have it, one boat carrying loyalist refugees ran aground on one of the islands in Boston harbor, and the refugees were brought back for trial. The leader spent almost a year in jail, and another loyalist spent four months in solitary confinement and when released on bond good behavior immediately joined the British Army.
Since about half of the Loyalists from Massachusetts returned between 1775 and 1782, a policy for repatriating them was necessary. On February 3 1778, the legislature passed a Test Act, which prohibited the return of any absentee who had joined the British after April 1775 unless he was licensed by the governor or the legislature. On October 16, also 1778, Boston adopted a Banishment Act which named 308 loyalists, forbade their return, and provided that any named absentee who returned a second time could be sentenced to death, just like the Quakers 120 years previously. This time, no one was put to death. In all, nine states passed acts exiling prominent Tories, five states disenfranchised all Tories, and most states expelled them from all offices and levied double or treble taxes on them.
It's estimated that approximately 100,000 loyalist Americans departed the United States by 1784. Most went to Canada and settled either in the Maritime Provinces or on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, others went back to England, or Scotland, or to the West Indies (the residents of "Tory Row" in Cambridge, Anglican sugar growers, went back to Jamaica or Antigua). Significantly, a difficult-to-estimate number of African slaves who had been freed when they crossed British lines also ended up in England, and one group was sent to colonize the utopian African colony of Sierra Leone.
There are, of course, famous loyalists, like the painters John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West, who left for England after Lexington and Concord and never came back. West, in fact, produced an allegorical painting-within-a-painting depicting the reception of the loyalists in England:
(Engraving by H. Moses after Benjamin West. from http://toriesfightingfortheking.com/...)
The painting itself has been lost, but among the people pictured in it are William Franklin, Ben's illegitimate son and Royal Governor of New Jersey, and Benjamin West and his wife. The portrait is of John Eardley Wilmot, who played an important role in Britain’s efforts to compensate Loyalists for losses they had suffered after the war ended.
Special notice should be given to one Indian and one turncoat, an American who didn't defect to the British until 1780. The Indian first: the Mohawk Thayendanegea or Joseph Brant,
(George Romney, 1776, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, painted in London)
who had been deputized by the Mohawks to lay their grievances before the King, and was sent to London with Guy Johnson, the son of the British superintendent of the Indians, as Johnson's secretary. Brant was looking for a quid pro quo: when he complained how hard it was to live with people who only wanted their land, George III’s colonial secretary assured him, “As soon as the troubles were over, every grievance and complaint should be redressed [if the Iroquois] “fulfilled their engagements with government as they had ever done.” He returned to North America June 1776 as a British ally, fighting on the British side. Thayendanegea helped establish the Canadian council fire of the Iroquois, and died in 1807.
You of course know the turncoat, Benedict Arnold.
(Thanks, Wikimedia Commons)
In 1775, he was a genuine war hero because of his leadership in the siege of Quebec, even though the invasion of Canada failed. For the next five years Arnold served the Patriot side with distinction in one battle after another, including a dangerous assault against the center of the British line at Saratoga, where he was wounded in the leg.
No general was more imaginative than Arnold, although in 1777 General Horatio Gates relieved him of his command in the Continental Army. George Washington, despite Gates’s actions, appointed Arnold commandant at Philadelphia in July 1778, after the British evacuation of the city.
There is, however, NO question he sold out to the British while he commanded West Point in 1780. By then Arnold was embittered, disdainful of his fellow officers and resentful toward Congress for not promoting him more quickly and to even higher rank.
A widower, Arnold threw himself into the social life of New York City, but his extravagance drew him into shady financial schemes and into disrepute with Congress, which investigated his accounts and recommended a court-martial. "Having ... become a cripple in the service of my country, I little expected to meet [such] ungrateful returns," he complained to Washington.
Short of funds, he initiated correspondence with Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander, promising to deliver West Point and its 3,000 defenders for £20,000 sterling (about $1 million today), a momentous act that he hoped would spark the collapse of the American cause. Persuading Washington to place the fort under his command, Arnold moved in September 1780 to execute his audacious plan, only to see it fail when his colleague John Andre was captured. As Andre was executed as a spy, Arnold received £6,000 from the British government and appointment as a brigadier general.
Arnold came to represent the worst crimes against virtue for Americans, who were pleased that America was too virtuous to satisfy his greed, and he has been depicted as something that only Britain and Satan could create or repay. This is the cartoon I use to demonstrate how he is portrayed in popular culture:
(Steve Benson, Arizona Republic, July 27, 2005 )
So, the loyalists. Feel free to share the stories of your revolutionary ancestors, patriot or loyalist, in the comments.
FURTHER READING:
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011) - an excellent study of the lives of loyalists between 1784 and 1815.
Thomas Allen, Tories: fighting for the king in America’s first civil war (2010)- a good summary, which also includes an analysis of all the abuses the loyalists were forced to endure at the hands of the patriots.
For abuses, there's also, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux."