AMERICANS remember their revolution as an event both epochal and clean. Richard Nixon famously argued that it was not a revolution at all. Some historians, such as Charles and Mary Beard and Howard Zinn, stress its conservative character; others, like Gordon Wood, have insisted on its radicalism. The revolution Thomas Allen presents, in an original and copiously sourced history of the war’s losers, the Loyalists, called Tories by their victorious opponents, is very different.
Mr Allen sees it as “a revolution that was also a civil war”. Men fought to the death, he says, “American against American, kin against kin”. At the decisive fight at King’s Mountain, there was only one British subject. “Everyone else was an American, and those who chose to fight for King George III had chosen the wrong side.”
History is written by the victors. Mr Allen points out that although Loyalists were a minority—in the end perhaps no more than one-fifth of the colonists—in many places they were a very substantial proportion of the population of the colonies. In the end, some 80,000 quit the new republic for Britain, the British colonies in the Caribbean and especially for Canada, where their influence has been lasting. One tragic group were the black freedmen, in danger of being re-enslaved on the orders of George Washington. (At least one of them had belonged to Thomas Jefferson.) They were eventually allowed to emigrate to Nova Scotia, but were so badly treated there that they moved on to West Africa, where they became Sierra Leone’s elite, founding the capital, Freetown.
The Loyalists were of many kinds and conditions. There was a religious dimension. Presbyterians were apt to be Patriots, Anglicans often Tories. Many slaves, tempted by freedom, joined Loyalist units, such as Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment; so did many, though not all, of the Native American tribes on the frontier. Quakers and Catholics sided with the king, and so did many settlers of German and Dutch origin, as well as most Scots Highlanders, who had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Hanoverian crown in defeat and were not about to go back on it. Some tenant farmers fought alongside their Tory landlords, while others were Loyalists out of hostility to Patriot landlords. Some were tempted by promises of land, others by the fact that the king’s armies paid in a gold-backed currency, not paper dollars.
Like other civil wars, the American revolution was marked by brutality on a sickening scale. Both sides shot and hanged prisoners without mercy, and on at least two occasions Patriots enforced the gruesome punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering. While the Native American braves recruited to fight for the crown by the Johnson and Butler chieftains of the Mohawk valley scalped, tortured and sometimes burned their prisoners alive, the Patriots tarred and feathered Loyalists, or forced them to ride on a sharpened rail, and many Loyalist houses were looted and burned. Patriotic legend remembers the violence of British officers, but rebel officers, including General Washington himself, could be ruthless when policy recommended it. The future father of his country once proposed shooting a few Tories to “strike terror into the others”. In real life, civil wars are not Tea Parties.
