An “evocatively written examination” of the Americans who fought alongside the British during the American Revolution (American Spectator). The American Revolution was not simply a battle between the independence-minded colonists and the oppressive British. As Thomas B. Allen reminds us, it was also a savage and often deeply personal civil war, in which conflicting visions of America pitted neighbor against neighbor and Patriot against Tory on the battlefield, on the village green, and even in church. In this outstanding and vital history, Allen tells the complete story of the Tories, tracing their lives and experiences throughout the revolutionary period. Based on documents in archives from Nova Scotia to London, Tories adds a fresh perspective to our knowledge of the Revolution and sheds an important new light on the little-known figures whose lives were forever changed when they remained faithful to their mother country.
One difficulty in writing a balanced history of the American Revolution arises in part from its success as a creator of our nation and our nationalistic sentiment. Unlike the Civil War, unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution produced no lingering social trauma in the United Statesit is a historic event widely applauded by Americans today as both necessary and desirable. But one consequence of this happy unanimity is that the chief losers of the War of Independencethe American Loyalistshave fared badly at the hands of historians. This explains, in part, why the account of the Revolution recorded by self-professed Loyalist and Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, Peter Oliver, has heretofore been so routinely overlooked. Oliver's manuscript, entitled "The Origins & Progress of the American Rebellion," written in 1781, challenges the motives of the founding fathers, and depicts the revolution as passion, plotting, and violence. His descriptions of the leaders of the patriot party, of their program and motives, are unforgiving, bitter, and inevitably partisan. But it records the impressions of one who had experienced these events, knew most of the combatants intimately, and saw the collapse of the society he had lived in. His history is a very important contemporary account of the origins of the revolution in Massachusetts, and is now presented here in it entirety for the first time.
Two weeks before General Cornwallis surrendered his army at Yorktown, a Loyalist yeoman farmer who had fought alongside the British for six years was hanged as a spy at Schuylerville, New York before a crowd of his former friends and neighbors. Like the vast majority of the estimated 500,000 Loyalists who gambled on a British victory, Thomas Loveless and his family were ordinary people swept up by social and political forces beyond their control. Tory Spy analyzes this "Loyalist Dilemma," making use of British and American documents of the period and providing useful illustrations, maps, appendices, footnotes, and an index. A few years ago, the movie "The Patriot" starring Mel Gibson graphically portrayed Rebel-Tory warfare in the Carolinas during 1779-1780. The Rebel family in "The Patriot" was a fictional composite, but the trials of the "Loyalist" Thomas Loveless family of Albany County, New York were real. Located astride the principal invasion corridor between Canada and the U.S., and a hotbed of Rebel-Tory conflict, Albany County became a battleground between a cadre of refugee "Tory Spies" based in Canada and their Rebel former neighbors. Tory Spy offers a rare snapshot of the Revolutionary War as a multi-level conflict, in which brother fought brother, neighbor betrayed neighbor, and vague charges of espionage meant a quick route to the gallows. It is a largely untold story which offers new insights into the price paid by many of the Loyalists who were the hidden losers of America's first "civil war." This is a story for our times-it is about people responding to the pressures of revolutionary change. Their world was coming apart, and the outcome was unpredictable. Tory Spy forces the reader to ask: What would my family and I do if our neighborhood became a war zone torn apart by bloody battles and increasingly lethal intelligence warfare, and we were viewed as potential spies or combatants? Contemporary Americans may be surprised by what Tory Spy tells them about the violent social conflict that gave birth to their country. Yet the book's interwoven stories-a Loyalist farm family's struggle to survive amidst the partisan violence in Albany County, the father's British military service and later exploits as an officer in the "Tory Secret Service," and the bizarre circumstances surrounding his capture, trial, and execution-were among the harsh realities of America's Revolution. More than 230 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, these exciting stories remain part of America's revolutionary heritage, and they deserve to be told.
A significant struggle began in the year 1776 over the fate of a continent, and there are those who believe that this struggle ended in the year 1783, with the ancient ways of the Old World being given over entirely to those of a New. Is it true, however, that the end of what has been called 'The First American Civil' saw the complete victory of the republican way, and the banishment of the older Tory tradition from these shores? The North American High Tory Tradition tells another story, one in which a different vision for life in North America emerges from the cold of the True North where its flame has been kept burning until the present day. George Grant (1918-1988), the most influential High Tory intellectual of the 20th century, warned us in his Lament for a Nation of the collision course which lies ahead for these two different 'North Americas'?---that embodied in the Dominion of the North, and that in the Republic to its South. Is the disappearance of the Tory alternative an inevitable fate to our future as 'North Americans'? In The North American High Tory Tradition Ron Dart shines light upon the classical lineage, deep wisdom and enduring nature of the High Tory tradition as it has been planted and grown in the soil of North America, and in doing so reveals how Canada may serve as a north star to lead North Americans to a different destiny than that planned for them by a certain few in 1776.
In Greenmarsh, Massachusetts, in 1774, thirteen-year-old Prudence Emerson keeps a diary of the troubles she and her family face as Tories surrounded by American patriots at the start of the American Revolution.
A bold transatlantic history of American independence revealing that 1776 was about far more than taxation without representation Revolution Against Empire sets the story of American independence within a long and fierce clash over the political and economic future of the British Empire. Justin du Rivage traces this decades-long debate, which pitted neighbors and countrymen against one another, from the War of Austrian Succession to the end of the American Revolution. As people from Boston to Bengal grappled with the growing burdens of imperial rivalry and fantastically expensive warfare, some argued that austerity and new colonial revenue were urgently needed to rescue Britain from unsustainable taxes and debts. Others insisted that Britain ought to treat its colonies as relative equals and promote their prosperity. Drawing from archival research in the United States, Britain, and France, this book shows how disputes over taxation, public debt, and inequality sparked the American Revolution—and reshaped the British Empire.
"A fast-paced, often riveting account of the military and political events leading up to the Declaration of Independence and those that followed during the war ... Brands does his readers a service by reminding them that division, as much as unity, is central to the founding of our nation."—The Washington Post From best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands comes a gripping, page-turning narrative of the American Revolution that shows it to be more than a fight against the British: it was also a violent battle among neighbors forced to choose sides, Loyalist or Patriot. What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels? That is the question H. W. Brands answers in his powerful new history of the American Revolution. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were the unlikeliest of rebels. Washington in the 1770s stood at the apex of Virginia society. Franklin was more successful still, having risen from humble origins to world fame. John Adams might have seemed a more obvious candidate for rebellion, being of cantankerous temperament. Even so, he revered the law. Yet all three men became rebels against the British Empire that fostered their success. Others in the same circle of family and friends chose differently. William Franklin might have been expected to join his father, Benjamin, in rebellion but remained loyal to the British. So did Thomas Hutchinson, a royal governor and friend of the Franklins, and Joseph Galloway, an early challenger to the Crown. They soon heard themselves denounced as traitors--for not having betrayed the country where they grew up. Native Americans and the enslaved were also forced to choose sides as civil war broke out around them. After the Revolution, the Patriots were cast as heroes and founding fathers while the Loyalists were relegated to bit parts best forgotten. Our First Civil War reminds us that before America could win its revolution against Britain, the Patriots had to win a bitter civil war against family, neighbors, and friends.
The revealing, often quaintly written Tory diaries, letters, and journals which animate this fascinating book provide what is probably the most comprehensive picture of Tory acts and attitudes to date.
