If by Patriot we mean only those who were ready to fight for the new nation, then Adams’ one third is too high; after all, a free population of only 2,000,000 could not put over 25,000 men in the field at once, and a rich and fertile land allowed its soldiers to freeze and to starve. If by Loyalist we mean only those who were actively loyal, and whose loyalty carried them into exile or into British ranks, then again Adams’ estimate is too large. But if the term Loyalist is stretched to cover not only those who were actively loyal but also those who were against independence and war, and tried to hold aloof, then the figure of one third is clearly too small. Two things are apparent: that there was always a substantial portion of the American population which had no enthusiasm for either the rebellion or its suppression, and that the number and zeal of Patriots and Loyalists alike changed constantly with the varying fortunes of the war.30
Adams believed in the importance of finding the records of what he called the “intrigues” perpetrated by the British to “divide the people.” He also wondered how many incriminating records still existed from the proceedings of Patriot committees that ferreted out Tories and punished them. Until those records were discovered, he wrote, “the history of the United States never can be written.”31
Many of those records do exist. They are the Loyalists’ legacy, and, like the Loyalists, they are scattered. I have found them in Canada, Britain, Scotland, Northern Ireland, in the Library of Congress, and in the archives of the original colonies. I have also seen diaries, letters, and other documents collected by American families who discovered, sometimes to their surprise, the Tories in their family trees. Those documents give faces to forgotten Americans who fought on the losing side.
The Loyalists add a dimension to the Revolutionary War, transforming it into a conflict between Americans as well as a struggle for independence. Paddy Fitzgerald, a historian of Irish migration, once told me, “Every country has a Grand Story, and there are always stories under the grand story.” Loyalists lived and died in the Grand Story’s underground, fighting to keep America ruled by the king. But they were nonetheless truly Americans, introducing the nation’s first generation of politicians to a truth that would endure: Woven into the tapestry to be known as We the People, there would always be strands of a defiant, passionate minority.
A note about words and labels. I retain the often peculiar spellings that appear in documents of the era, but I do introduce modern punctuation for clarity. As for labels, people who lived during the Revolution called each other Tories and Whigs, Patriots and Loyalists, Rebels and Friends of the King. “Tory” and “Whig” were political labels.
“Whig” faded away when political disputes evolved into rebellion. But “Tory” endured and became the Rebels’ favorite name for their foes. Some people today, particularly the descendants of Loyalists, find the word “Tory” offensive. They also object to “Patriots” for supporters of the Revolution on the grounds that their ancestors were patriots, too: British patriots. Some people prefer “colonials” as a label for everybody in America in those days. But I think a “colonial” is what someone would have been before Americans began calling themselves Americans, whether or not they supported King George III.
I use “Loyalist,” “Tory,” “Rebel,” and “Patriot” not as labels that disparage or commend but as descriptive terms that fit the events and times described. I don’t use “American army” or “American” for one side or the other because the Revolutionary War was a civil war, and when Loyalists or Tories fought Patriots or Rebels, everyone in the fight was an American.
Thomas B. Allen May 21, 2010 Bethesda, Maryland
1
TWO FLAGS OVER PLYMOUTH
MASSACHUSETTS, 1769–1774
Q. What was the temper of America toward Great Britain before the year 1763?
A. The best in the world. They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid, in their courts, obedience to acts of Parliament. Numerous as the people are in the several old provinces they cost you nothing in forts, citadels, garrisons, or armies, to keep them in subjection… .
Q. And what is their temper now?
A. Oh, very much altered.
—Colonial agent Benjamin Franklin, before Parliament, February 1766
The roar of a cannon resounded through the little Massachusetts town of Plymouth on the morning of December 22, 1769. And up a flagpole went a silk flag bearing the inscription Old Colony 1620. The cannon and flag grandly marked a celebration created by the Old Colony Club.
At lunchtime the members gathered at an inn not far from the rock where the Pilgrims were said to have landed.2 Their meal included whortleberry pudding, succotash, venison, clams, oysters, codfish, eels, seafowl, apple pie, cranberry tarts, and cheese, all “dressed in theplainest manner … in imitation of our ancestors.” The club president sat in a chair that had belonged to William Bradford, who had become governor of the Plymouth Colony in 1621.
The members raised a toast to Bradford and their ancestors in what they hoped to be an annual celebration of Forefathers’ Day, commemorating the landing of the shallop that had carried the passengers of the Mayflower to shore.3 As the clock struck eleven that evening, the cannon was fired again; the members gave three lusty cheers and went home.
The Old Colony Club had been founded eleven months before by seven Plymouth men who wished to avoid “the many disadvantages and inconveniences that arise from intermixing with the company at the taverns in this town of Plymouth.” They also wished to increase their “pleasure and happiness” along with their “edification and instruction.” Five more members, including the owner of the inn, were admitted shortly later.
The club, modeled on gentlemen’s clubs in London, became a place where the members, most of them Mayflower descendants and many of them Harvard graduates, argued the policies of Tories and Whigs. Tories supported the Crown, the role of the king as head of the church, and the traditional structure of a parliamentary monarchy; Whigs, while certainly not Rebels, sought limited political and social reform. They mischievously noted that “Tory” sounded like the Irish word for “outlaw.” The Whigs’ name could probably be traced to “whiggamore,” the label for seventeenth-century Scottish rebels. Both sides could sometimes agree on such matters as property rights and excessive taxes.
Colonists followed in the steps of the motherland’s Whigs, who believed that the Crown, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons should share power. In the colonies a governor was likened to the king, a council to the House of Lords, and a local assembly to the House of Commons. (In Massachusetts the legislature was formally known as the Great and General Court.) But by 1769, in the club and throughout the colonies, the debate was moving toward a sharp division between the Tory champions of the king and the Whig champions of what was politely called “opposition to ministerial measures,” a phrase that placed the blame for perceived ill rule on the king’s ministers, not on King George III.
“Loyalist” was emerging as the word for an opponent of a “Patriot.” There would have been no need to be labeled loyal to the king if the Rebels had not dared to challenge royal authority. And, as violent rebellion neared, Plymouth men and women who called themselves Loyalists saw themselves as the real Americans, the people who descended from the original Americans—the Mayflower‘s passengers. Here in Plymouth the Loyalists began the tradition that, as descendants of the Mayflower voyagers, they had been called by fate, or more likely God, to preserve what the Mayflower immigrants had begun. Americans of future centuries would continue the idea that being a Mayflower descendant was the ultimate American pedigree. Yet Plymouth’s Mayflower descendants were British subjects who believed that the future of America lay in royal rule rather than in rebellion.4
One club member, Edward Winslow, was the great-grandson of Edward Winslow, who had arrived on the Mayflower and later served as a governor of the Plymouth Colony. The Edward Winslow of 1769 had inherited the belief that the rebellion, brewing mo
stly in Boston, was rooted in the trial and beheading of King Charles I in 1649. After the restoration of the monarchy with the coronation of Charles II in 1660, two of the judges who condemned his father—regicides, as they were known—had fled to America. Puritans in Connecticut and Massachusetts had hidden the judges, thwarting royal pursuers. “The seeds of rebellion were thus sown,” wrote a Loyalist historian. “… . The Pilgrim fathers of Plymouth were as a rule tolerant, non-persecuting and loyal to the king; but the Puritans … were intolerant of all religionists who did not conform to their mode of worship.”5 Religion remained an issue as colonists took sides in the 1770s, when virtually every Anglican clergyman in America became a Loyalist, and Presbyterians were labeled Rebels.
Winslow’s leadership, like that of his great-grandfather, would focus on Plymouth. But eventually he would become an important leader of Loyalists beyond his native town. In 1769 he was four years past hisplayboy days at Harvard and was destined to inherit the posts that had been held by his father: registrar of wills, clerk of the Court of General Sessions, and naval officer of the port (a civil, not a military, post). As a friend of Chief Justice Peter Oliver and Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Winslow would join the Loyalist inner circle in Boston.6
Like so many colonists, the Old Colony Club members were changing from Britons who happened to live overseas to Americans who were choosing sides or wondering whether sides really had to be chosen. Tories hailed Britain’s imperial power while Whigs argued against what they saw as the excesses of British power: the royal proclamation forbidding settlements west of the Appalachians; increased duties on sugar, textiles, and coffee; the outlawing of colonial currency. As criticism of the Crown and Parliament kindled suspicions of disloyalty, many Tories declared themselves to be Loyalists. Some radical Whigs began calling themselves Patriots.
Among the dozen toasts made at the club on that first Forefathers’ Day, the looming crisis was only mildly acknowledged. One wished for a “speedy and lasting union between Great Britain and her colonies.” Records of the meal and the toasts survive, but there is no mention of what the twelve members and their guests had to say about the troubles that were clouding their little world of Plymouth, about thirty-five miles from the tumult in Boston.7 Other records—military muster rolls of Tories and Patriots, Tory petitions to the Crown, proclamations of Tory banishment, land records for exiles in Nova Scotia, pension appeals from Continental Army veterans—show that the futures of these men and tens of thousands of others were caught up in a revolution that was also a civil war.
Winslow and the other Tories in the club aspired to take advantage of their birth and station by gaining posts in the royal colonial government or benefiting from its largesse. This was the core of Tory power—the governors, the judges, the customs officials, and the bureaucrats who served the Crown. Radiating out from that core were Anglican clergymen and their leading parishioners—merchants, shipowners, landed gentry—who supported the idea of a British Empire that drew its supremacy from the Crown and dispensed its benefits upon the chosen in the colonies. They believed most of all in a well-ordered society; they abhorred and, in the 1760s, were beginning to fear a challenging class: the radical Whigs, or the Patriots, as they became known, who envisioned a new kind of society, rooted in America and only loosely tied to Britain.
The Old Colony Club was founded at a crossroads in a revolutionary time. Four years before had come the Stamp Act, so called because colonists had to pay for stamps when buying a newspaper, calendar, marriage license, deck of playing cards, or pair of dice. (Such stamps were in use in Britain; some still are.) Parliament had justified this new tax as a way to finance the maintenance of soldiers sent to the colonies to defend their frontiers against hostile Indians—and to defend British interests in North America. The French and Indian War had ended in 1763 with victory for Britain and the addition of French Canada to British colonial territory. But the war had been costly and worldwide, ranging across the globe from Europe and North America to India. The expanded British Empire needed to pay for its upkeep, and the money would come from taxes paid by colonists.
Since 1675 the colonies had been ultimately governed by a standing committee of the King’s Privy Council—the Lords of the Committee of Trade and Plantations, familiarly known as the Lords of Trade. Royal governors reported to the Lords of Trade, and ever since the Stamp Act crisis, accounts of unrest filled the reports. The governors were expected to rule their colonies with the aid of their legislatures. If the legislatures began to veer away from the policies that originated in Britain, governors could dissolve them and assume dictatorial power.
Demands for repeal of the Stamp Act swept through the colonies. Officials were hanged in effigy in British colonies from Nova Scotia to the West Indies. In the Virginia House of Burgesses, twenty-nine-year-old Patrick Henry made his “if this be treason” speech, bringing to life a Patriot doctrine: Only colonial legislatures should havethe right to levy taxes on their citizens.8 A Stamp Act Congress met in New York City, producing a united front, not only to protest the stamps and boycott British imports but also to send a reminder to the king and Parliament in the form of a Declaration of Rights, which declared: “It is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted right of Englishmen, that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives.”9 In Boston and New York City, a secret organization called the Sons of Liberty emerged to fight the Stamp Act through a boycott of British imports.
Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766. Merchants began selling British goods again, and American tempers cooled. But in 1767 Parliament struck again, this time passing the Townshend Acts, named after Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The new laws tightened the Crown’s grip on the colonies by setting up a board of customs commissioners in Boston and admiralty courts in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, South Carolina. The courts began to crack down on shipowners and importers who had evaded taxes by smuggling goods into secret harbors or ports manned by corrupt officials.
Honest customs officials searching for contraband were given the specific right to wield writs of assistance, powerful search warrants used in contraband searches even of private homes. The new writs aggravated Americans. Added to long-standing taxes on such imports as wine and clothing were new taxes on imported paint, paper, glass, lead, and tea. The new revenues would be used to pay the salaries of royal colonial officials, taking that power of the purse away from the colonies. Parliament also suspended the New York assembly in punishment for that colony’s objection to feeding and housing British soldiers.
In June 1768 enforcement of the Townshend Acts led to the seizure of John Hancock’s sloop Liberty, which carried a smuggled cargo of Madeira wine into Boston Harbor. Hancock, reputedly the wealthiest man in New England, was a Boston selectman and a leading Patriot with solid connections to the Sons of Liberty. Boston’s wharves became a stage for the Sons to tread. They stirred up a small-scale riot, bullied the customs men, and celebrated when the charges against Hancock were dropped.10 Colonists, reprising their moves against the Stamp Act, again started boycotting British imports. Gangs threatened Tory merchants who defied the ban. Rumors spread that Royal Governor Francis Bernard would be assassinated.11
People showed their support for the Liberty by singing the “Liberty Song” (to the rollicking tune of “Hearts of Oak,” a well-known Royal Navy air):
Come join hand in hand, brave Americans all, And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty’s call; No tyrannous acts shall suppress your just claim, Or stain with dishonor America’s name.
The last verse told anyone who wondered that “Liberty’s call” certainly did not mean independence from Britain or disloyalty toward King George III:
This bumper* I crown for our sovereign’s health, And this for Britannia’s glory and wealth; That wealth, and that glory immortal may be, If she is but just, and we are but free.12
The
song was written by John Dickinson, a onetime conservative Pennsylvanian who had attended the Stamp Act Congress and become a Patriot. He sent the song to his friend James Otis, Jr., in Boston, who saw that it was printed in the Boston Gazette; newspapers throughout the colonies republished it.
Otis, a Tory in a long family line of influential Tories, married the Tory daughter of a Boston merchant. His sister Mercy Otis was married to James Warren, a member of the Old Colony Club. Warren, previously a royal sheriff, became a Patriot and was destined to be aleader in the Revolution. Mercy Otis Warren would become a playwright whose works skewered royal officials, especially future governor Thomas Hutchinson.
James Otis set up a legal practice in Boston and became what Patriots called a “placeman,” a royal appointee given his job as a political reward. Otis had been advocate general of the vice admiralty court when his conversion to Patriot began. Believing that writs of assistance violated basic British rights, he quit his royal post to represent merchants complaining about the injustice of the writs. Otis’s eloquent but unsuccessful plea—” A man’s house is his castle” was his phrase—impressed young John Adams, who was in the courtroom. Otis’s conversion haunted his marriage. His wife remained a Tory. One daughter married a British officer; the other married the son of a Continental Army general.13
John Adams’s cousin, Samuel Adams, was a radical leader in the Massachusetts legislature. He and Otis composed a circular letter protesting the Townshend Acts, sent from the Massachusetts legislature to other colonies. In response the British government ordered the legislature to rescind the letter and told Governor Bernard to dismiss the legislature if its members refused. Hancock called a protest meeting with a proclamation that lamented “this dark and difficult Season” and asserted the right of “American Subjects” to petition “their gracious Sovereign.”14 Representatives from ninety-six Massachusetts towns attended the meeting and urged the legislators to uphold the defiant act. They did, by a vote of 92 to 17.
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