The Loyalist Problem in Revolutionary New England 1107128617, 9781107128613

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The Loyalist Problem in Revolutionary New England The Loyalist Problem in Revolutionary New England begins with a snapshot of the region on the eve of the Boston Tea Party. The colonists’ republican tradition helped them spark the Revolution, but their special history also threatened the unity of the United States throughout the Revolutionary War. For loyalists tried to discredit New Englanders as a naturally rebellious people. Yet Ingersoll shows that the rebels never sought to drive the dissenters out of the new nation, and accorded them a remarkable degree of liberal toleration, with the great majority of loyalists ultimately becoming citizens of the new states. Thomas N. Ingersoll is Associate Professor at Ohio State University. His first book was Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819 (1999). In To Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removals (2005), he explores the social and political problems created by racial mixture. His guiding interest is how people in early America defined legitimate membership in society, who had rights and who did not.

The Loyalist Problem in Revolutionary New England

THOMAS N. INGERSOLL The Ohio State University

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107128613  C Thomas N. Ingersoll 2016

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-107-12861-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For GBN

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Tables

page ix xi

Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Chronology of the English Revolution in the Seventeenth Century

xiii xv xvii

List of Abbreviations

xix

Introduction: History, Revolutionary Ideology, and the Loyalist Problem

1

part i. new england in december, 1773 1 2 3

4 5

6

The New England People in their Towns on December Sixteenth, 1773: A Historic Mission at Risk Loyalists and Oliver Cromwell’s Ghost: The Problem of the Radical Tradition in 1773 “A Moral Distemper in the British Government”: Loyalists, the Ruling Class, and the Mailed Fist part ii. from the boston tea party to the war and independence Rebels and Loyalists from December Sixteenth, 1773 to September 1774 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America”: The Peace of the Towns Destroyed and the Loyalist Cause, September 1774 to April 19, 1775 “Avoid Blood and Tumult”: Loyalist Policy During the War vii

15 50 84

119

149 181

Contents

viii

7 8 9

part iii. the loyalist problem and ideology after 1776 The Radical Critique of Tory Oligarchy, Slavery, and Patriarchy 215 The “Ugly Question” of Confiscation 247 “A Day of Strict Reckoning” for “a Multitude of Subtil Enemies”? New England Loyalists After 1783 Conclusion

Index

274 302 307

Illustrations

Figures

1.1 Paul Revere, A View of the Year 1765, engraving 2.1 [Anonymous] The Yankie Doodles Intrenchments near Boston, 1776, engraving 4.1 Paul Revere, Mr. Samuel Adams, April, 1774 5.1 Paul Revere, A Warm Place – Hell, engraving, 1768 7.1 Paul Revere, The Wicked Statesman, or the Traitor to his Country, metal cut, 1773 9.1 [William Humphrey, publisher, London] The Savages let loose, or The cruel fate of the Loyalists, etching, 1783

page 33 58 124 162 218 275

Map

i New England in 1773

xx

ix

Tables

1.1 Population of New England, Including Vermont, in 1770 5.1 Distribution of Loyalist Offenders in Massachusetts, 1775–83, Including Exiles and Accused, and Number of Towns Represented 5.2 Distribution of Loyalists in Connecticut by County in Order of Number of Estates Confiscated, 1775–83 8.1 Acts of the Connecticut Legislature Concerning Loyalists and Their Estates, 1775–84

xi

page 24

151 152 256

Acknowledgments

This book began with a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians on March 31, 1995. My thanks to Rosemarie Zaggari, Michael McGiffert, the late Richard E. Ellis, and other members of the audience for their comments. A later version was read and commented upon very helpfully by participants in the Ohio Seminar in Early American History and Culture, Columbus, April 6, 2007. Mere words fail to express sufficient gratitude to colleagues who have saved me from as many errors as possible and provided criticism to improve the book. The entire manuscript was critiqued by Robert M. Calhoon, David D. Hall, John L. Brooke, and an anonymous reader for Cambridge University Press. I owe a large debt to the late William Pencak, who plowed through an early, unrefined version and offered strong support at a point when I needed it most, just before he died. I am one of many scholars who will miss this colleague’s unfailing warm generosity. Over a period of years, one or more chapters improved greatly because of criticism by Joyce Appleby, Ruth H. Bloch, T. H. Breen, Staughton Lynd, Gary B. Nash, Carla Gardina Pestana, J. G. A. Pocock, the late Alfred F. Young, Michael Zuckerman, and various members of the Early American Thesis Seminar in Pacific Palisades. Finally, improbable as it may sound, I remember fondly the late Samuel Eliot Morison. My irrepressible Boston landlady arranged a meeting with him despite my protests, and the Admiral kindly brought me into his home just before he died, patiently ignored the primitive state of my scholarship at that time, and encouraged me to continue studying his beloved Massachusetts. xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

Anyone who works in the local archives of New England must be grateful to the dedicated and kind staff members who manage them. I owe thanks to the archivists and librarians at the Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, New Hampshire State Archives, Concord, and the State Archives of the Connecticut State Library, Hartford. The personnel of the last named, in particular, manage their enormous and complicated holdings with unfailing kindness to researchers. The same can be said of the tireless workers in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, or Public Record Office, Kew Gardens, Surrey, and the British Library, London. I am also grateful to those who labor in the National Library and Archives of Canada, Ottawa, the William Clements Library, Ann Arbor, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, The John Carter Brown Library, Providence, and the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester. I thank the diligent librarians who assisted me and tidied up after my visits, in particular to those posted in the libraries of McGill University, The Ohio State University, University of California–Los Angeles, University of California–Berkeley, Stanford University, Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, University of Massachusetts–Boston, Georgetown University, Trinity College, Brown University, New York University, University of Vermont, University of Michigan, and Universit´e de Montr´eal. Brandon F. Nicholson kindly reproduced the illustrations and created the map. Student researchers who sorted evidence for the book include Christian Alcindor and David Pricer. The research could not have been completed without very generous sabbatical leave from the D´epartement d’histoire, Universit´e de Montr´eal, with financial aid from the McConnell Foundation, as well as sabbatical leave from the Department of History, The Ohio State University.

A Note on Sources

This essay rests on a broad array of primary and secondary sources, and has more breadth than depth on certain subjects. I have canvassed the entire spectrum of primary sources, including all major political sources (state and local records), newspapers, political sermons, private correspondence, including many older neglected collections. My method in casting such a wide net was to capture as truly as possible the domestic conflict as it unfolded from day to day in the wrestling between rebel and loyalist.

xv

Chronology of the English Revolution in the Seventeenth Century

1625–49 1628 1629

1640 1640–9 1649

1649–53

1653–8 1658–9 1659–60

Reign of Charles I Petition of Right by the House of Commons, agreed to by Charles I Repudiation of the Petition of Right by Charles I; his dissolution of Parliament; begins his eleven years of personal rule April: Short Parliament November: Long Parliament Execution of Charles I on January 30; members of the House of Commons then abolish the crown and the House of Lords Republic [“Commonwealth”]: rule by a purged “Rump” Parliament; then by the “Barebones” Parliament (July– December, 1653) Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (with First [1654–5] and Second [1656–8] Parliaments) Protectorate of Richard Cromwell (with one Parliament, January–April, 1659) Republic May–October, 1659: restored Rump; October–December, 1659: army rule; December 1659–February 1660: re-restored Rump;

This chronology is adapted from Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (New York, 1961), 315–16

xvii

xviii

1660–85 1679–81

1685–8

1688–9

Chronology February–March 1660: enlarged Rump with Secluded Members; April–May: Convention Parliament recalls Charles II; House of Lords restored Reign of Charles II Exclusion Crisis, when a formative party of “Whigs,” opposed by the party of “Tories,” attempts and fails to exclude James, Duke of York from the succession after he converted to Roman Catholicism Reign of James II (with one Parliament, 1685–7) Faced with rebellion, he fled into exile in France late in 1688 Glorious Revolution; Interregnum Convention Parliament, January–February 1689, declares William III and Mary II monarchs upon their agreement to the Bill of Rights, an enlarged version of the Petition of Right of 1628, which Parliament subsequently passes as a statute on December 16, 1689, along with several other statutes comprising the English constitution

Abbreviations

Amer. Arch.

American Archives, ed. M. St. Clair Clarke and Peter Force, 4th ser., 6 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1837) CSA Connecticut State Archives Gage Papers The Military Papers of Thomas Gage, American Series, William Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Mich. Hansard [Thomas C. Hansard], The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London, 1813) LDC Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, ed. Paul H. Smith, 26 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1976–2000) NHSA New Hampshire State Archives, Concord, N.H. PRO AO The National Archives, Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, Audit Office PRO CO Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, Colonial Office RG Connecticut State Library, Record Group RIHS Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, R.I., Sibley’s Harvard Clifford K. Shipton, Biographical Sketches of Those Graduates Who Attended Harvard College [Sibley’s Harvard Graduates], 18 vols. (Boston, Mass., 1933–75)

xix

(Maine - Part of Massachusetts)

Penobscot Bay

New Hampshire Portsmouth

Massachusetts

Atlantic Ocean Boston

Connecticut Hartford Newport Providence

Rhode Island map i. New England in 1773

Introduction History, Revolutionary Ideology, and the Loyalist Problem

In 1805, the radical New England historian Mercy Otis Warren reflected on loyalists in the Revolution, and concluded that they “experienced much clemency from the opposite party, yet, perhaps not in the full latitude that policy might have dictated.”1 She admitted that some rebels were inquisitorial and manhandled some of those loyalist colonists who lacked, as she put it sternly, “fixed principles.”2 She lamented the rough treatment as a tactical error because it turned some fence-sitters against The Cause of the Revolution. Overall, she thought most loyalists enjoyed a generous policy at the hands of the rebels, and the victors banished only those exiles who worked with “settled rancor” against their countrymen.3 The argument of the present book is that Warren’s view is a balanced one. The Boston Tea Party made its participants rebels, outlaws, and it made upholders of crown authority their enemies. As the rebels gained legitimacy and the upper hand, the loyalists’ obstinate resistance to their Cause embittered them. Despite that, the rebels did not aim to drive out the opponents, so most loyalists never had to leave the United States. The rebels demonstrated a remarkable degree of toleration. Guided by their historical consciousness, the rebels were determined not to inscribe the story of the Revolution in spite and gore. A rich popular memory structured their ideology and restrained them in dealing with domestic enemies. The loyalists’ historical memory was also strong, one biased against rebellion. They believed that inequality and privilege are natural, monarchy necessary, and stability essential, so rebellion was almost always wrong. That view was prevalent in the colonies, giving the British a great advantage. So loyalism was strong enough to make the revolutionary process grind at a slow pace, even in New England. In 1

2

Introduction: History, Revolutionary Ideology, the Loyalist Problem

the end, the result was to the rebels’ credit: loyalism helped to keep them angry and alert, but carefully restrained by history and principles. Their moderation arose from a deeply rooted ideological imperative: liberty of conscience. Even though loyalists posed an internal security threat by outright or passive collaboration with the British, the rebels’ “Tory” policy was humane. But it was also shrewd, for it did not make sense to scatter bitter political enemies around the Atlantic world. Thus, as T. H. Breen has put it, in a ringing endorsement of Warren, only in “unpleasant exceptions” was the treatment of loyalists cruelly unfair.4 In 1783, the great majority of loyalists remained in the states and died in their beds, after suffering little for their beliefs, which survived with them. That was the ultimate test of the Revolution’s radicalism. Its success was owing to the rebels’ willingness, as historically motivated progressives, to allow for the broadest range of views, in order to lead an unstable array of factions, with as much dignity as war would allow. They were trying to construct a history free of the old regime, replacing it with a legal rule of nearly absolute freedom of speech, which made it an enormous undertaking, of which the resulting written constitutions are pale representations.5 Over the years, despite themselves, the loyalists actually helped the rebels by continually denouncing the Revolution as “religiously blasphemous, aesthetically abhorrent, philosophically bankrupt, and morally indefensible.”6 That opposition helped keep the rebels’ historical consciousness and discipline sharp – because only history could judge if they were on the right side of religion, art, philosophy, and morals. The loyalist problem constantly helped them stay on a path of purpose toward self-rule. The loyalists ingloriously played a key role by ridiculing revolt as unpatriotic, compelling rebels to be clear about what they believed, as they began to repeat the dangerous process of the 1640s. This is a social and cultural history of the birth of a radical ideology of liberty, democracy, and equality, from within the core of English history, by weighing rebel policies to define and control loyalists.7 It has a transatlantic argument that the American Revolution traces back to England in 1628. (See a “Chronology of the English Revolution in the Seventeenth Century” following the Note on Sources.) That was the year the first Puritans began colonizing Massachusetts Bay. The Revolution of 1776 broke out in Massachusetts, with its thriving towns that bred capable leaders, and orderly, informed, self-governing yeomen, artisans, and shopkeepers who could easily organize for defense. Their history gave them a critique of monarchy and misrule going back long before 1628. It provided the

Introduction: History, Revolutionary Ideology, the Loyalist Problem 3 means to stand up to the strongest king and ruling class in the Western World, when the British moved to seize control of their society. They were able to shape history more consciously than all previous rebels. It is hard to imagine an American Revolution beginning in the other sections, which had more rigid “aristocratic” societies (as in New York or Virginia), or where ethnic and sectarian jealousy confused political life (as in Pennsylvania), or where local history was distinctly royalist (as in South Carolina). New Englanders had the requisite components to lead a successful rebellion: wholesome and autonomous communities, historical imagination, and a radical ideological tradition. Moreover, their dispute with the Mother Country fermented in a variety of their own local social crises. After the Tea Party, New Englanders knew how important it was to avoid excess, especially in their region, in the interest of intercolonial unity and the rebels’ long-range goals. The loyalist problem kept them focused, for when the crown’s supporters were combined with the neutrals – those who just did not want to be bothered by “politics” – it made many more than a few. Against that challenge, rebels divided between those who would restrain their opponents strictly and punish them for offenses, and the moderates who disagreed. Thus, loyalist activism incited and shaped the revolutionaries’ debate about rights and equality, keeping the rebels anxious and angry about their ideas. The rebels combined a pragmatic political motive and a progressive spirit in a careful policy, one that aimed to punish by disapprobation and disassociation those loyalists who remained among them, denying them political rights during the war. After the war, the rebels did not adopt strict policies toward those many loyalists who persisted in the towns. The rebels’ willingness to keep unyielding supporters of George III among them meant they felt strong enough to absorb or gradually nullify a significant admixture of people who rejected rebel principles. By this policy, the states retained a significant minority who never became democratic republicans, and formed one extreme camp of voters in the post-war Federalist Party.8 Only perhaps 60,000 of all colonists (or 3 percent of a free population totaling two million) felt they had to leave the United States during the war. They refused to live in republics, and departed of their own volition early in the Revolution or by war’s end, irreconcilable. Only a small number of those people were later banished by the rebels. Using John Adams’s crude estimate that at the beginning, one third of the population was loyalist, the four states of New England had 190,000 loyalists among

4

Introduction: History, Revolutionary Ideology, the Loyalist Problem

them, and most never left.9 All but a few exiles were self-selected, not banished, who numbered in the hundreds, and up to 165,000 loyalists did not flee.10 Those who remained could count on the passive neutrality of another fraction of the population – as there always are, those who hate politics and wish everyone would just calm down. Together, the two groups posed a serious social problem, constantly challenging the rebels’ capacity to tolerate dissent. In the end, the many loyalists who remained in New England became the ungrateful beneficiaries of their opponents’ radical ideology. And, as anxious rebels warned during the war – the loyalists cherished and preserved the old beliefs. To be emphatic, this is not a history of the loyalists: it is a history of the rebels, their attitudes toward loyalism, and policies to manage loyalists. It is an attempt to answer Robert M. Calhoon’s call for historians to see loyalism as “inextricably linked to the whole of the Revolution” and study the conflict as “the shared social space inhabited by the patriots and the loyalists.”11 It also responds to the continuing call for a new democratic synthesis of the Revolution.12 It is informed theoretically by Terry Eagleton’s definition of ideology as the ways social relations are brokered, rationalized, symbolized, and sometimes falsified.13 For Eagleton, ideology is “close to the broader meaning of the term ‘culture’,” which is a “collective symbolic self-expression” that “attends to the promotion and legitimation of the interests” of one group in regard to the interests of another group.14 In the present book, that means the struggle between rebel and loyalist in New England was structured by the ideological contest between republicanism (most recently embodied in seventeenth-century Calvinist Puritanism) and royalism (now developing into absolutism in the eighteenth century). That ideological tradition made it possible for the rebels to prevail over loyalists and neutrals in the region by the spring of 1775. However, once Continental Congress became the locus of power in the Revolution, the historic heritage of New England was too divisive in Philadelphia, and had to go on the shelf. The rebels of all regions had to find a common way to reject British ruling class ideology – oligarchy, militarism, religious orthodoxy – and it meant starting from historical scratch, and a potion they called natural law. A tradition of popular radicalism reawakened after 1760, as Gary B. Nash, Staughton Lynd, and others have shown, and that was especially true in New England.15 For the Yankees, the situation in both 1649 in England and 1776 in America could be described as “rivalry between those who wanted to preserve a static hierarchical society and those who

Introduction: History, Revolutionary Ideology, the Loyalist Problem 5 were busy shaping a more fluid society in which men of ability and means would be able to make their way to the top.”16 In New England, the debate over defining, disciplining, and in some cases banishing loyalists was to relive the history of 1649. It was the same republican moment: a fluid society based on popular sovereignty and the equality of free men, religious freedom from orthodoxy, and civil supremacy over the crown’s mounted and mailed generals. In these terms, the outbreak of the American Revolution was fundamentally structured by New England’s rich historical consciousness going back to the seventeenth century, or even to the English upheaval of 1381. But in Philadelphia, the delegates simply could not appeal to the spirit of 1649, not with the loyalists shrieking at them that they were conjuring up Oliver Cromwell’s awful specter. There are three broad trends in the ideological model of American history. Some historians think colonists shared a consensus or eighteenthcentury Whiggish political sensibility, so the loyalists were innocent moderate Whigs like everybody else, caught in the crossfire between bumbling British bureaucrats and some paranoid radical colonists. A Lockean liberal school of historians sees the Revolution as the result of a pervasive, dynamic, evolutionary idea of the social contract in a world awash in wonderful commodities. It began to reign supreme among Atlantic-oriented entrepreneurs and lawmakers, but its full implications British rulers and American loyalists could not understand or would not embrace, blinkered by their privileged interests. This school believes the Revolution had radical aspects, but was not radical in the wider sense the Progressives describe it.17 By contrast, that Progressive school sees an enduring social struggle, deeply rooted long before 1763. James Franklin Jameson set the terms in 1920, by arguing that the Revolution was a major restructuring of society by democratizing forces, in which the loyalists lost a lot. The common people with their ancient, explosive ideal of popular sovereignty were on one side, and on the other, rich loyalists with their timeless aristocratic disdain for popular power.18 Still, Progressives old and new tend to give ideology a weak role in revolution. The argument here is that an ideological chasm opened between a New England minority who were aristocratic, royalist, and Anglican, and the majority, who dreamed of a meritocratic and moral social system, structured by popular sovereignty and Congregationalist religion. The loyalists may have shared a historical space with other New Englanders, and many liked to think of themselves as liberals in a broad eighteenth-century sense, that is, tolerant of religious pluralism, but their

6

Introduction: History, Revolutionary Ideology, the Loyalist Problem

social views had always been inconsistent with the region’s egalitarian spirit. The generally patriotic British sentiment of New Englanders during the Great Wars for Empire between 1689 and 1763 formed a light glaze over their differences, but the new imperial policies put things in a different light.19 By 1774, loyalists defined themselves openly as inveterate enemies of the historic New England mission, the very mission that would guide the rebels to keep most loyalists in the new republics despite their views. This book explores the development of the rebels’ ideology, which is especially clear in the social policies they adopted toward their domestic enemies. The story of the loyalists-in-exile and their diaspora in Canada, England, and the West Indies is a distinct literature, whereas this book is a contribution to the study of American revolutionary ideology. Loyalists’ beliefs and actions have a role here, but mainly to explore what they rejected. New England loyalist leaders in this book serve primarily as cadet members of the British ruling class.20 Also, the many New Englanders who served on the British side in a military capacity receive only enough attention to remind the reader of that ultimate loyalist commitment. The blood they let on the rebel side also heightens the irony that the states contained so many loyalists in 1783, and even let some exiles return. As John Shy notes, it is only an apparent paradox that the Revolution saw the internecine violence of a terrible civil war on the battlefield, and the integration of the majority of loyalists, “speedily and painlessly,” into American society.21 That was the best expression of the Revolution’s highest goals. Part I describes the founders of the four colonies forming a special cultural and historical region, a “reforming people” with a unique role in the transatlantic saga.22 Chapter 1 depicts New Englanders as a people with a historic potential for rebelliousness, who faced a wide variety of social and political crises at the time of the Boston Tea Party. In that troubled local atmosphere, the new British policies were so provocative that rebel leaders were able to heat up an old radical republican forge, which made it possible for them to justify independence. The colonists had to be independent of Britain in the first instance to localize and rationalize power, in order to address their many social problems as well as the big question of ultimate authority in North America. Yet the colonists had always been divided about nearly everything, so it was no surprise that rebels had a big loyalist problem after the polarizing crime of the Boston Tea Party.

Introduction: History, Revolutionary Ideology, the Loyalist Problem 7 Chapter 2 seeks to explain both how history helped lead New Englanders into the Revolutionary War, and how its region’s special radicalism threatened the prospect of unity with other colonies. The rebellion of 1773 was knit into a historic fabric stretching back to the king-killers and Levellers of 1649. The radicalism of 1649 galvanized similar rebels in all colonies, and it gave loyalists everywhere their argument that the rebels aimed at the supposedly chaotic and destructive conditions of the English Revolution. In 1776, as a result of the potential threat to interregional unity, New England rebels mostly abandoned the language and precedents of 1649, if not its principles, to avoid offending people in other sections. Chapter 3 documents more carefully the argument that loyalists saw a great advantage by upholding the crown and adhering to Britain’s ruling class. Unfortunately, that included support of military coercion. The rebels probably got the rebellion started only because of the sustained military provocation by British armed forces. The Redcoats revived an old ideological distrust of military police power that lies at the core of traditional British rights, and it cost loyalists their basic credibility. Part II covers loyalist policies during the war. Chapter 4 traces events between the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The Coercive Acts helped rebellious colonists became more insistent about an intolerable ideological breach between them (“the country”) and the loyalists, who denounced the Tea Party. They had the comparative freedom to espouse their convictions at will, and only the most important and unyielding few suffered the extreme antagonism of an aroused citizenry. Only a few fled into exile, as tensions produced a brief but sharp war scare in September 1774. Chapter 5 covers the ground from the Suffolk Resolves in September to the Battle of Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775. Over those seven and a half months, the colonists divided more sharply according to their loyalties. Although those siding with the king formed an impressive phalanx, the rebels’ solidarity proved decisive. Rebels adopted more strict attitudes in regard to loyalists, but remained fundamentally moderate out of a republican spirit of tolerating speech, in contrast to the cruel determination by the British ruling class to make the colonists submit. Chapter 6 explores the first battles of the war, the continuing development of policies that culminated in Congress’s Tory Act, and the rest of the war. Loyalism and anti-loyalism were never angrier than they were

8

Introduction: History, Revolutionary Ideology, the Loyalist Problem

in 1776. Then, after independence, the orderly process of silencing and immobilizing the many nonconformists who remained became one of the war’s principal social and ideological features, forcing rebels to refresh their convictions constantly.23 But “Tory” policy was never excessive, and the situation improved when most of the fighting shifted south after 1776. Part III explores in more detail how loyalism radicalized revolutionary ideology. Chapter 7 argues that loyalism exalted prerogative power (against liberty), privilege (against democracy), and lineage and breeding (against natural equality). Against that “Tory” trinity, the rebels sharpened their views. Their antagonism to loyalism helped them become more aware of inequality, opposed to oligarchy, or even slavery, and laws that kept back women. The same sources reveal both the limits of the egalitarian ideal in 1776, and its great potential for enlargement by struggle in the future. Chapter 8 describes the actual dissolution of absentee loyalist estates as a gradual process limited to a very short list of voluntary expatriates, a process delayed until the end of the war. All loyalists had years to make up their minds as to which side they would choose, and the great majority stayed in their New England homes and kept their property. The rebels were guided by the history of retributive confiscations, and sharply limited their reach. Even so, it was deeply subversive for the rebels to dispossess the exiles and restrain those who stayed in the states, for in limiting rights they were acting completely outside the old aristocratic structure of deference. Chapter 9 reveals that nothing shows the basic decency and humanity of loyalist policy better than the list of exiles who returned to the new states after the war, including some who had lost their property to confiscation. The strength of the rebels’ convictions is best represented by the quality of mercy they extended to those people who never accepted the high ideals of 1776. As a result, the loyalists and their ideas persisted, to shape the right wing of the formative Federalist Party.24 The natural inclination of historians to emphasize the Revolution’s decisive break with the past has obscured the challenge the republicans faced in the old regime’s persistent supporters.

Notes 1. Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind., 1988), 1:158.

Notes

9

2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 1:253. See pp. 253–4. For the best recent estimate of the number of exiles, see Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011), 367. She puts the total number, to Canada, Britain, and other places, at about 55,000. For the assertion that loyalists amounted to a quarter of the population, and that 80,000 became emigr´es, see P. J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (New York, 2012), 241. For evidence of how small the exile population was in Britain, see Samuel Peters, List of Connecticut Loyalists, n.d., Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series, CSA, Hartford, Conn., 2:3–4. 4. T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York, 2010), 208. For a contrary argument, see Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic, 66–70, 181–6, 240–4. 5. For the best introduction, see Robert M. Calhoon, Political Moderation in Americaʼs First Two Centuries (New York, 2009); and Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York, 1973). 6. Robert M. Calhoon, Dominion and Liberty: Ideology in the Anglo-American World, 1660–1801 (Arlington Heights, Ill. 1994), 69. He refers to the “radically conservativeˮ wing of a varied body of loyalists. 7. For a general introduction to the interaction of social and cultural models, see Paula Fass, “Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue,ˮ Journal of Social History 37 (2003), 39–46. 8. On the distinction between republican principles of government described in the present work and the concept of “republicanismˮ in the last generation’s historiography, see Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), vii–x. 9. His exact words were that the British had “seduced and deluded nearly one third of the people of the coloniesˮ by 1773. See John Adams to Jedidiah Morse, December 22, 1815, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 10 vols., ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, Mass., 1850–56), 10:193. Because of a negligent citation long ago, there has been controversy about this. While the proportion of loyalists in New England may have been marginally smaller than in other regions, many towns had at least one or more loyalist families, and that was enough to constitute a problem for rebels. The exact size of the loyalist phenomenon, or exactly how much of their wealth they lost, is some future historian’s problem. Two knowledgeable scholars believe that loyalism was a substantial phenomenon in the region. See David E. Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists (New York, 1989); and Colin Nicolson, “The Friends of Government: Loyalism, Ideology, and Politics in Revolutionary Massachusettsˮ (Ph.D. diss, University of Edinburgh, 1988). 10. Paul H. Smith, “The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,ˮ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 25 (1968), 259– 77; Wallace Brown, The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York, 1969), 227. For a slightly more conservative estimate, based on a different definition of the population, see Gordon S. Wood, The

10 Introduction: History, Revolutionary Ideology, the Loyalist Problem Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 176. For a profile of those who applied to the Loyalist Claims Commission, see Wallace Brown, The King’s Friends: The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants (Providence, R.I., 1965), 249–83. 11. Robert M. Calhoon, “The Reintegration of the Loyalists and the Disaffected,ˮ in Robert. M. Calhoon, The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, revd. edn. (Columbia, S.C., 2010), 210. See pp. 195–216. For the historiography of loyalist exiles, see George Athan Billias, “The First Un-Americans: The Loyalists in American Historiography,ˮ in Perspectives in Early American History: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Morris, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and George Athan Billias (New York, 1973), 282–324; Robert M. Calhoon, “Bibliographical Essay,ˮ in Calhoon, The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, 216–27; and Eileen Ka-May Cheng, “American Historical Writers and the Loyalists, 1768–1856: Dissent, Consensus, and American Nationality.ˮ Journal of the Early Republic 23 (2003), 491–519. For a general treatment, see Christopher Moore, The Loyalists: Revolution, Exile, Settlement, 2nd edn. (Toronto, 1994). 12. Randolph Roth, “Is There a Democratic Alternative to Republicanism? The Rhetoric and Politics of Recent Pleas for Synthesis,ˮ in Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History, ed. Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist (Iowa City: Ia., 1998), 210–56. 13. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 2nd edn. (New York, 2007), 1– 31. 14. Ibid., 28, 29. My theoretical position is also informed by the skeptical approach to recent cultural studies by social anthropologist Adam Kuper, in Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). 15. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, 2nd edn. (New York, 2009); Alfred F. Young, “English Plebeian Culture and EighteenthCentury American Radicalism,ˮ in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London, 1984), 197–200. See pp. 185–212. 16. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (New York, 1961), 105. 17. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 5. Wood declares that the American Revolution was “as radical and revolutionary as any in history,ˮ but because of rapid social evolution, not because of ideology. 18. For an introduction, see Morey Rothberg, “John Franklin Jameson and the Creation of The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement,ˮ in The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 1–26. 19. John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Amherst, Mass., 1992), 157.

Notes

11

20. The present book also ignores Vermont, which was still part of New Hampshire as the war broke out. Loyalism was more problematic there, in part because of the contest between Yankees (mostly rebel) and Yorkers (mostly loyalists) – immigrants from New Hampshire and New York, respectively – and in part because of the complex personalities of the state’s leading founders. 21. John Shy, “The Loyalist Problem in the Lower Hudson Valley: The British Perspective,ˮ in The Loyalist Americans: A Focus on Greater New York, ed. Robert A. East and Jacob Judd (Tarrytown, N.Y., 1975), 4. See pp. 3–13. 22. David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York, 2011). 23. This is the useful argument by Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, in “The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation,ˮ Perspectives in American History 6 (1972), 215–27. See pp. 167–306. Leaving aside the writers’ theory of colonial dependency, their key insight is that loyalists remained numerous, and anti-toryism shaped the revolutionary outlook of the rebels. 24. R. R. Palmer regarded the American Revolution as a radical one, but partly because the loyalists carried off with them into exile the conservative ideology of the old regime. See R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1959), 1:189–90. The Revolution’s radicalism lay partly in the fact that the rebels did not drive out the loyalists or their beliefs.

part i NEW ENGLAND IN DECEMBER, 1773

1 The New England People in their Towns on December Sixteenth, 1773 A Historic Mission at Risk

the american revolution’s deep roots The American Revolution traces back to England on June 7, 1628, when a progressive bloc in the House of Commons forced Charles I to agree to the Petition of Right before they would assess taxes. The Petition of Right aimed to fix in the English constitution four basic rights of Englishmen, echoing the Magna Carta of 1215: to be taxed only by authority of the people’s representatives, to be arrested, arraigned and tried only by due process, to be free of a standing army, which always oppresses the people, and to be free of martial law.1 The man who wrote the petition, Sir Edward Coke, was a steady promoter of the Puritan political cause, and his secretary, Roger Williams, would become an important founder of New England. In retrospect, they were defending the same basic rights that would be at stake in America in 1776. The New Englanders went to America to create local commonwealths of Calvinist individuals, who idealized those four basic rights. As Thomas Hutchinson put it, “arbitrary measures” by Charles I drove to New England those who honored “the Constitution” for “the sake of civil & Religious Liberty.”2 They lived under the authority of the town meeting, in parish autonomy free of the crown’s bishops, under the legal rule of a rights-protective code and jurybased, moderate judicial practice, all defended by a citizen militia. For the founders and their descendants in New England, the whole body of rights comprised a “constitution,” their moral and political order.3 On March 10, 1629, King Charles I and his guards rode through Westminster to the House of Lords and repudiated the Petition of Right by dissolving Parliament. He denounced the “vipers” in the Commons 15

16 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773

who had passed “The Three Resolutions,” in a momentous session on March 2, which implied that the king was “a capital enemy to this Kingdom and commonwealth.”4 In 1649, the Commons would try him as a traitor, execute him, and abolish the monarchy and the royalist “Cavalier”-dominated House of Lords. The direct heirs of that English Revolution were the “Mohawks” who destroyed the tea in Boston in 1773. The king-in-Parliament was trying to make the same innovations: exacting taxation without representation, threatening to try political dissenters without a jury of their peers, quartering a standing army on the citizenry, and enforcing martial law. And just as Charles I’s bishops waged war on nonconformity, George III’s bishops hoped to introduce Anglican episcopal sees in America. A vanguard group of colonists founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony at Salem in 1628, and the rest of the Great Migration began pouring into the colony under the authority of a royal charter in 1630.5 Up to 20,000 immigrants founded independent communities and churches, drew up the Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641, and created an impressive culture of Judeo-Christian, legal, and classical education. The scale of their radicalism can be measured by the tragic zealotry into which they could descend: massacres of Indians, the hanging of glory-seeking Quaker missionaries, and the killing of supposed witches in 1692.6 More characteristic was their commitment to reform – to create wholesome, happy communities, in which the individual was free of distractions to work on a personal relationship with God. A few of the more dedicated colonists returned to England after 1640 to participate in the Revolution there, in which many perished bringing down the crown and Lords in 1649.7 A decade later, the Revolution became too radical for the tastes of English conservatives, and in 1660, part of the army overthrew the rebel government and restored the crown and aristocratic house of Parliament. It was a bargain by which the English limited the monarch, generally according to the guidelines of 1628. Charles II and James II agreed to the terms but continued to test their limits over the decades, until the Glorious Revolution in 1688–89. Unrepentant New Englanders grudgingly accepted the Restoration of 1660, and participated in the so-called “revolution” of 1689, but saw it ultimately as an inglorious triumph of force by an ambitious ruling class. Many remained deeply skeptical about royal power, aristocratic privilege, and the settlement of 1689. That was still true in 1763, even if the majority of New Englanders were now conventionally patriotic Britons, that is, Protestant, English-speaking, and free under England’s “constitution,” by contrast to the rest of the world.8

Political Ideology of the Puritan Mission: Moses to Cromwell

17

In 1773, New England radicals were upholding the principles of 1628, whereas loyalists, like Charles I’s Cavaliers, supported royalist prerogative. A new young king came to the throne in 1760, and, with his many paid supporters in Parliament, seemed determined to re-test the “constitutional” or popular limits on power. New Englanders finally stopped them by reasserting 1628’s ideals, but against the will of many loyalists, who sided with a glorious monarchy, a well-spoken young king, and a glittering aristocracy. By some magic in Philadelphia, on July 4, 1776, rebel leaders in the other colonies overcame their suspicions of radical New England. They joined to overthrow George III and his would-be American ruling class, symbolically try and execute the king in the Declaration of Independence, and entrust power to thirteen commonwealths under thirteen constitutions and law codes, in which the supreme military power was the citizens’ democratically governed local militia.9

the political ideology of the puritan mission: from moses to cromwell New Englanders consciously lived in a historical tradition of democratic agitation, mounted most recently by the Lollards from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and the Commonwealth rebels of the seventeenth century. They looked back to the ancient Judaic times described in Exodus, and forward to judgment by their descendants, which gave them a highly charged ideology.10 Historically minded New Englanders were guided by the past to be progressives, determined to pass on to their descendants relations of power that were contractual, based on natural and sacred rights, an order legitimated by common consent, to set an example for the human race.11 They were outwardly loyal to the crown in 1763, even jubilantly so in the year of the Treaty of Paris, and they felt a Protestant affinity with the English and other British in a Christian world overwhelmingly dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. Despite all that, loyalty remained contingent for the majority of New Englanders, who remembered the republican promise of 1649 and the potential for royal tyranny.12 They knew, however vaguely in many cases, that history showed time and again that popular sovereignty had to overtrump kingly power, if there were to be rights and social order. The Massachusetts founders had not fled from England as a persecuted minority with enthusiastic, separatist religious views, like the Pilgrims of Plymouth; nor had they sought to establish an independent “theocracy” cut off from the corrupt Mother Country.13 They set out voluntarily to

18 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773

create “a city on a hill” where there were no unconstitutional taxes, arbitrary justice, established church, or standing army – where crown power remained under a dark cloud of suspicion and little exercised directly in New England.14 They meant to create a true English nation and church in purified form, to set a standard for those back home to emulate. Their ministers prayed for the monarch on Sunday, and the crown could always veto any legislation coming out of any colonial legislature, but otherwise crown and Parliament were little in evidence in New England. Liberty was preserved by the virtuous politics of responsible citizens in their local governing institutions, not doled out by a monarch and ruling class.15 Of course, their history was also personal, proto-national, North American – stained crimson by war with Native Americans and the Catholic colonists in New France, seemingly agents of heathenism and popery. But above all, the universe of the Puritans, like that of their Lollard forbears, was historically structured by the Pentateuch, the Gospels, the Dialogues, and the antimonarchical Anglo-Saxon democratic witanagemot.16 To outsiders, the people of New England looked like they formed a Yankee tribe, known for being doctrinaire about their peculiar belief in predestination, and for cultural distinctions, like speaking with a whining accent, and for being sharp traders bent on getting the best of one.17 Outsiders also thought they were naturally rebellious. In truth, that was a caricature of a people with strenuous social values, a historicized ideology, and a boisterous public sphere. They were also inclusive. They tolerated an important minority of colonists who thought the founders’ belief system was too stringent or just wrong, but were glad to live in an orderly society. The founders even welcomed Jews. In Rhode Island just before the Tea Party, the radical Ezra Stiles welcomed warmly Sephardic missionary Rabbi Raphael Chaim Isaac Carigal. The New Englanders cared for and tried to rehabilitate French Catholics the British Army deported from Acadia in the 1750s. They would ordain a man of color as a minister long before that would happen anywhere else.18 If they were not yet modern, they were well on the way by their toleration of diversity. Outsiders recognized Yankees by the way they looked, spoke, acted, and thought. Culture is defined here as the total tangible behaviors and symbolic actions that reflect and help sustain a social structure, and usually provide the site of struggle for power.19 In terms of historical causation, social historians think culture frames social reality as it changes, but does not change it. Cultural historians think culture is an independent variable, that it “possesses a relative autonomy in shaping actions

Political Ideology of the Puritan Mission: Moses to Cromwell

19

and institutions.”20 By contrast, the social historian relegates culture to a derivative, functional role, and insists instead on the primacy of family, class, community, nation – the people, who produce constantly changing symbolic culture like religious beliefs or gender orthodoxy. People and their interests can be obscured from view by cultural ways, rituals, guises, genders. Yet one might have to yield something to the power of culture in the revolutionary situation – for history did lay deep in the memory of New Englanders, and history is the supreme cultural artifact in our minds. History is the (very imperfect) record of temporal change as it is imprinted on consciousness, connected to a larger meaning at the boundary separating the rational from the mystical. As Terry Eagleton puts it: “Culture is itself the spirit of humanity individuating itself in specific works; and its discourse links the individual and the universal.”21 Thus, history enables a people to define what is right and wrong in critical moments, by their rational evaluation of cause and effect over time. In revolutionary New England, historical culture may have had the tensile strength to act as an independent, creative variable in 1773, one that provided a tonic for a band of rebels with diverse views and interests desperate for any sense of unity. History mobilized an insecure rebel minority in New England in a way nothing else could, by cutting across social boundaries created by class, sex, and race.22 Nevertheless, history never made all New Englanders a tribe, that is, a people who prize cultural consensus over individuality. For their historical consciousness was based on the supreme individual in negotiable accord with neighborly restraints. They were not singleminded. They could not become a homogeneous tribe if only because power and culture were politically diffused throughout the region in 588 towns, with locally crafted codes, in 588 roughly egalitarian political systems.23 Most towns supported Boston when the British invaded in 1774 because they had a shared history that put a high value on individual freedom – not because they were “the same” in some cultural sense. At bottom, holding up the whole system, the New Englanders had developed “a practice, right, obligation and duty” to exercise absolute freedom of speech (parrhesia) about authorities and institutions. To assert that right was the inherently subversive and risk-filled duty of the active citizen.24 They were the same in that they upheld the Petition of Right, Magna Carta, the Sermon on the Mount, and ancient Greek polis or AngloSaxon witanagemot. Rights had arisen from struggles for power, not cultural alchemy.

20 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773

As the townspeople became the central arbiters of revolutionary ideology, their treatment of the loyalists demonstrated their historical engagement. The rebels’ ability to denounce but tolerate loyalists’ views even in a great crisis gave them confidence they were on the right side of history. If loyalists could not see the light of The Cause now, their children might later, so it was worthwhile to keep loyalists in the towns if only for the sake of their children’s right to grow up free. That was history at its best, with roots in English populist politics and East Anglian values. Danelaw Progeny: East Anglians as New Englanders A solid core group of the region’s founding families came from England’s East Anglia, the old Danelaw, which includes the present-day political divisions of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Lincolnshire, and part of Bedfordshire. Vikings from Denmark had invaded and subdued the Anglo-Saxon locals in the ninth century (in 865) and in the tenth. Although the locals no longer spoke Danish in 1628, the special character of the region was still identifiable. Innovation and productivity on its arable land was high, and the region led the country in both of the key early capitalist activities of small shop-keeping and itinerant peddling.25 Its towns were marked by cultural diversity, a high degree of commercial activity, steady population turnover, and evangelical religion – these were not feudal peasant villages. They fostered individual autonomy and class mobility in an atmosphere more fluid than in most Old World towns.26 The Danes had been so successful they had established an imperium over the eastern half of England in the century before the Norman Conquest. The British nation outside East Anglia – the English speakers (AngloSaxons, and later, Normans) and Celtic speakers (Scots, Welsh, Cornish and Irish) – remained more traditionally minded and shared a strong anti-Danish sentiment lingering right into the eighteenth century. Hatred of the “Danish yoke” was one aspect of what Daniel Woolf has called a “national historical master-narrative” in early modern England.27 That is, the supposed “Danish yoke” served as an early version of the libertyversus-power discourse in England. However, seventeenth-century East Anglia was not Danish anymore, and outsiders were simply jealous of its prosperous and well-ordered citizenry.28 Those who detested the American Yankees as militant progressives, moral absolutists, and tireless bargainers still might blast them rhetorically as “Danes,” although it did not mean much now.29 The East Anglians shared with the rest of the “true” English the common libertarian notion that they were descended from the liberty loving

Political Ideology of the Puritan Mission: Moses to Cromwell

21

Anglo-Saxons of the sixth century – they were the heirs of “Gothic” freedom, which had been destroyed for both Anglo-Saxon and Dane by the Viking invaders from Normandy in 1066, who imposed William the Conqueror’s “Norman Yoke.”30 Contemporary English people in 1773 knew something of all that, but were now hazy and skeptical about it – including the Norman yoke – for their living lore had New Englanders descending directly from the political revolutionaries of the 1640s and 50s.31 The Puritan Historical Legacy The lineage from Lollard John Wycliffe of 1381 through Leveller John Lilburne of 1649 to Samuel Adams (“the last Puritan”) was unbroken in a leveling, antimonarchical spirit, even though self-censorship after 1660 silenced much of the radical literature of the 1650s in both England and New England.32 The New England “Roundhead” was steeped in a Judaic ideal of freedom engraved in the Book of Exodus, which informed their hostility to mental darkness, personal irresponsibility, and tyranny. He and she resisted any power that would interfere with the individual’s primary purpose: to find clear evidence of his or her salvation, an elusive quest because a jealous divinity would keep the truth a secret, to mock human pride. That was the sin epitomized by the Cavalier warrior’s beautiful long hair, explaining why the true Christian kept his hair short, his head “round” and plain.33 That code was related to a group of principles concerning the civic responsibility of a person to uphold the “common good,” or commonwealth, and the corresponding “commonwealth” covenant to protect all members.34 Everyone had a covenant with the community, and every community had its own contracts with the individual and God. At the epicenter of that belief system was the free individual, not the organic community.35 The community must make possible high moral standards, provide the most efficient primary political and military unit, promote local economic prosperity by an interdependent network of households, provide essential social services like education, poor relief and judicial arbitration, but above all, give the individual a space to enjoy a close personal relationship with Jehovah, that is, to emulate Jesus and hope to find evidence that one was “justified.”36 The orderly community was a means to an end, not an end in itself.37 If many New Englanders were no longer strict Puritans in religion in 1776, Puritanism still shaped their common heritage.38 In the eighteenth century, the New England Way easily slipped into harness with Lockean contractual theory, so that many individual churchgoers

22 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773

were “post-Puritan” by 1773, but the beliefs of their revered ancestors continued to saturate the atmosphere in sermons, civil rhetoric, newspapers, and the law.39 Predestination had always been intellectually difficult and now seemed convoluted and irrelevant to some, but its central objective – to make the individual responsible for his or her own spiritual condition – lived on in the politics of personal independence.40 That was true even if a few New Englanders were becoming Paineite Deists.41 New England was a tolerant haven for outright freethinking like theirs. Yet most people remained observant Congregationalists, however relaxed many became in the pleasure-loving eighteenth century. Their core belief that all individuals were equally likely predestined to everlasting Hell still led them to love one’s fellow creatures in a Hebraic camaraderie of the damned. By 1773, the New Englanders had much modernized the law and judicial system. They made political participation so broad that about half of all adult men served in some leadership role during their lives and over half of all men could vote. They restricted gubernatorial power; made taxation fair; required public schooling; and minimized corruption. So far from being “puritanical,” they seem to have been remarkably tolerant even of habitual homosexual practice, if not cognizant or accepting of gay identity in the modern sense.42 As David D. Hall puts it, only in the New England colonies “was it possible to sustain a civil state with so limited a version of executive authority . . . over against the customary hierarchies of England’s aristocratic state church and civil society.”43 Only the steely self-discipline incited by predestination’s nerve-wracking logic could sustain the moral redoubt the New Englanders created in the tumultuous, dark seventeenth century. Thus, the New England town “set the gold standard of radicalism” in the era of the English Revolution; nor was it a surprise that such an exacting theology would lose ground in the following century to secular Enlightenment thought and commodity comforts.44

the religious crisis New Englanders enjoyed “more religious freedom than there was in England” or anywhere else in the world, except for Pennsylvania, precisely because they did not tolerate traditional religious authorities: bishops, presbyteries.45 Still, their Puritanism was always embattled. The lack of “church” authority put the region at risk of slipping into anarchy. Total freedom from pope, bishop, priest, and presbytery meant coping with inevitable instability, for a crusading democratic spirit bubbled out

The Crisis of the Towns: Society in New England

23

of Congregational (“Independent”) church polity, by which the church members, not the clergy, ruled. That spirit produced antinomian dissenters on the fringes like Quakers, who were an embarrassment to the colonists’ reputation abroad, but they did not destroy Quakerism.46 The crown’s episcopal church finally abridged the absolute freedom of Congregationalist church polity in Massachusetts in 1692, when that colony had to accept the building of its first Anglican church. It attracted those who were drifting into Arminianism, the belief that free will rather than predestination determines salvation. In practice, it meant that the believer’s mere outward “Christian” behavior sufficed to please God, without the incessant, doubt-ridden or even wretched search of self to which every Calvinist was supposed to commit. In other words, a relaxed belief spread among elites that if one was nice, and abided mostly by the Ten Commandments, one would go to Heaven. That less exigent personal standard also implied a revival of the traditional priestly power to intervene for the sinner, in order to make the believer confident and happy rather than encourage him to live in anxiety about his soul.47 Then the region faced terrible internal schism beginning in the 1730s, the “Great Awakening,” part of a general evangelical upheaval in Western Europe and American colonies between 1730 and 1770.48 Most alarming to old-line New Englanders was the American campaign by missionaries of the Church of England from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which was active in all colonies. By the 1760s, many people of property embraced the crown’s church. One incentive was the convert’s hope of political preferment, since the crown required membership in the Church of England for any appointment in British service. Yet converts also knew that Anglican expansion represented a diffuse cultural war against the Congregational Way. For a worldly convert like Thomas Hutchinson, the more liturgical, less spiritually exigent Anglican worship was more congenial.49 By 1773, the king’s church had made such remarkable progress that the English clergy began pushing for an Anglican bishop on-site in America.50 Nobody was surprised when it became obvious there was a marked degree of overlap between Anglican faith and loyalism. The Church would fall with the crown in 1776, but in 1773 the orthodox Church seemed formidable.51

the crisis of the towns: society in new england in december 1773 The New England population was substantial, about one quarter of the free population in the thirteen colonies. It grew 30 percent in the 1760s

24 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773 table 1.1. Population of New England, Including Vermont, in 1770 Massachusetts Connecticut New Hampshire Rhode Island Vermont

266,565 183,881 62,396 58,196 10,000

Total

581,038

and continued to grow 23 percent more even during the war years of the 1770s (from 581,038 in 1770 to 712,800 in 1780 – see Table 1.152 ). The population’s readily apparent traits were its youth, material comforts, and Atlantic connections. All lived, by law, in towns. The towns all looked the same to outsiders because of their common history and basic infrastructure: the founders of most towns started with an independent Congregationalist religious covenant, a near democracy in the local domain, and a roughly equal distribution of land in the first generation, with plenty of commons in reserve.53 Yet by 1773 there was a hierarchy among them, as Bruce Daniels has shown. In the 4 colonies, at the top were 6 primary urban communities, which were linked to 32 secondary ones, and those were linked to 550 tertiary towns. However, only 2 were first-class seaports – Boston and Newport.54 A highly diversified economic life promoted stability.55 The colonists had social and political values guided by the conviction that an individual’s hard work, however dirty, was honorable rather than shameful, and that the independent freeman’s informed vote was essential.56 It was an ethos in which wealth was not evil or undesirable, but the good Christian regarded money with healthy suspicion for its corrupting potential. A majority of men possessed the traditional English forty-shilling freehold required for the right to vote, and funded the public interest willingly. They set and paid their own town, county, and provincial taxes to fund numerous public services.57 All the towns were marked by democratic governments with regular turnover of office-holders, protection of natural resources, a relatively healthy climate in which they suffered less than other colonists from major epidemic diseases, enjoying high rates of fertility and longevity, and no large and dangerously alienated group who might threaten the social structure – except, at first, the rapidly collapsing, smallpox-ravaged population of Indians, which declined to about 10,000 by 1676.58 There was a broad distribution of wealth, despite increasing

The Crisis of the Towns: Society in New England

25

wealth concentration in the hands of the rich in the biggest towns, where the poor got poorer. On balance, the towns probably had the highest degree of true order on earth, their people the most egalitarian, literate, well-fed, and healthy.59 A German tourist was morally aghast at the high-quality garbage New England pigs ate.60 The region exported products worth at least £439,101 annually just before the Revolution, not counting shipbuilding and substantial carrying services by its merchant marine. That impressive feat was possible because the region’s towns were remarkably good places to raise large families in relative comfort, all living by a code.61 That was despite the fact that the people were usually divided about something – such as the Halfway Covenant in the seventeenth century, immunization in the early eighteenth century, the Land Bank in the 1740s, and then the Great Awakening. After 1776, individual membership in the emergent national political parties of the United States – the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans – would flow out of pre-existing town political divisions.62 But those divisions rested on trust in the basic good faith of the opposite party: those who lost simply prepared responsibly for the next election. Women enjoyed comparatively more gender equality in New England than anywhere else. They had better property rights, were treated by the criminal laws about the same as men, enjoyed some judicial defense from domestic abuse, and entered into civil marriage that could be ended by divorce, although divorce was unusual. In most of the port towns, at least, some women could engage in economically independent activities like shop-keeping and various trades.63 On the other hand, virtually everyone was supposed to marry, most women did, and wives must be uncomplaining bearers of many children, keeping fertility rates high.64 Allowing for that draining responsibility, by 1700, nearly two thirds of women could write their names, so that New England women must have had the highest per capita literacy rates in the world, and after 1763 the region’s women were beginning to reduce family size, freeing up energy to lead the great reform campaign that would get into first gear after 1800.65 By 1773, the African-American population was substantially creolized, meaning the locally born outnumbered those of African birth. The geographic scale in New England was such that blacks were close enough to have an African-American cultural life in common. About forty percent of the black population was free and relatively mobile in Massachusetts by the early 1770s. They clustered in the coastal towns where most of

26 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773

their former masters lived, moreover, free blacks had skills suitable to the urban labor market. Boston and Newport had the largest concentrations. In general, the black population was as industrious and reasonably comfortable as any in North America. Likewise, the minuscule remnants of the Indian nations lived at peace in the region, many of them Christians, more than a few in the free labor market, although most were poor, and, like blacks, off limits to marriage with whites. Thomas Hutchinson was right in declaring of Massachusetts that “in no independent state in the world could the people have been more happy.”66 The Atlantic offered great opportunities for economic development and expansion.67 But growth created high expectations, which were thwarted by the fertility rate, by relatively restricted capital resources, and by the crown’s opposition to expansion beyond the Proclamation Line of 1763. The region’s economic success and the high growth rate masked deep problems in the towns arising from class relations, the land, and sectional jealousy. Above all was the problem of the land. High fertility and low mortality meant a pattern of inheritance that parcelized family estates and caused no end of social problems. The Province of New York and the crown’s Proclamation Line of 1763 blocked immigrants’ direct way west.68 As a result, despite local migration, many young people in the yeomanry remained locked in old towns with nowhere to go, and “conflict appeared in community and family as members competed for scarce resources.”69 An increasing number of potential landowners instead became laborers for entrepreneurs. The land crunch led patriarchs to arrange marriages carefully to forge alliances against the forces threatening family estates.70 The best system of poor relief in the New World tended to give way to degradation of the growing number of poor, who hailed disproportionately from the ranks of women, blacks, and Indians.71 Thus, inequality and poverty grew inexorably along with economic growth and diversification.72 Another aspect of the crisis of the towns was the sectional division between coastal and inland counties. Provincial politics were usually organized around the rivalry between the inland towns, preservers of pristine commonwealth values, and the coastal towns, which were more affected by the cosmopolitan Atlantic world. Both sectionalism and class relations were irritated as seaports developed an urbane milieu, which included external signifiers of class such as wigs, sophisticated entertainments, Spanish and French wines for the rich.73 In these towns,

The Crisis of the Imperial Relation

27

there was a tendency for commercial transactions to erode traditional relations based on mutuality.74 The mercantile elite grew better able to imitate their brethren in England by conspicuous consumption, and also yearned for more deference from the common people. That rubbed raw the egalitarian tradition in New England and would incite the most radical aspects of the Revolution.75 As the number of people who had to work for others grew in the commercial capitalist seaports, they became more assertive. According to Gary B. Nash, that population was large enough in the port towns that “the contractual relationships between rulers and ruled could be breached if the rulers acted irresponsibly . . . [and] deference quickly crumbled under the pressure of an aroused populace” in the 1760s.76 Crowd action against arrogance of power by the mercantile elite became a recurring theme.77 Pope Day (or Guy Fawkes Day) had always been both anti-prelate and anti-ruling class, and included very marked demonstrations of lower-class assertion in 1745, 1747, 1755, 1762, and 1764.78 Provocative behavior by a Britishizing elite constantly refreshed populist suspicions.79 It also served to aggravate regional polarization, for people in the interior saw the coastal towns as nests of overly ambitious men, especially those in the pay of the crown.80

the crisis of the imperial relation The colonists were interrelated with the people of Britain through a complex network of immigration, commerce, debt, and publications. While the relationship between the Stuarts and the New Englanders had been deeply troubled, in 1763, the colonists applauded the treaty that established the outlines of the modern British Empire as deliriously as people in other regions, hopeful about the future.81 They could easily imagine that Britain “promoted order, equity, and stability in civil affairs and therefore reasonably claimed to be an instrument for divine rule,” in the larger, Protestant cause against absolutist misrule and idolatry.82 The new imperial policy by the British to rein in the colonists beginning in 1763 came out of the blue, just when their English patriotism was the strongest it had ever been. As Jack Greene shows, the English never understood that high-minded colonial legislators with a strong sense of their sovereignty governed New England.83 The colonists defined a republic as a “society, where no man is bound by other laws than those to which he gives his own assent.”84

28 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773

They were channeling the populist republicanism of the Levellers of 1649, the Good Old Cause of self-rule, periodically revivified in the eighteenth century by local writers like John Wise, Elisha Williams, and Jonathan Mayhew.85 It is no wonder that the Massachusetts legislature had to defend itself against a royal governor’s charge that it was “too much disposed to a Levelling Spirit.”86 Samuel Adams, Clerk of the House of Representatives, marshaled a spirit of the Good Old Cause in the response by the House to the governor on April 23, 1770: “It cannot be expected, that a people, accustomed to the freedom of the English constitution, will be patient, while they are under the hand of tyranny and arbitrary power.”87 That breathed the world’s most historicized radical ideology. Ultimately, they “clearly expected their posterity to revere them even more than they revered their own ancestors,” for they were engaged in a centuries-old struggle, going back to the pre-imperial Roman republic elite New Englanders studied in Latin schools, and to the Judea of old everyone studied in the Bible.88 In 1773, Boston publishers Edes and Gill put out a new edition of Locke’s An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government, which could be a blueprint for republican government.

local conditions in the four colonies Massachusetts The four New England colonies were all so distinctive that it challenged their ability to organize together politically, especially because Massachusetts somewhat intimidated the others. It was the mother colony for them all, acting like a beehive that threw off swarms, for it always had the largest population.89 Parenthood created some sense of deference to that colony in the others, but also a resentment of its continuing economic and cultural dominance.90 Differences in government existed. Massachusetts (after 1691) and New Hampshire were royal colonies: the crown appointed their top officials. By contrast, Connecticut and Rhode Island had non-royal charters providing for self-rule. The basic reality was that the political lead had to be taken by Massachusetts – without it there was no collective regional force and no Revolution. The others came to the defense of Massachusetts in 1774, and regional cooperation was good for the duration of the war, but their league was always just sufficient, never strong.91

Local Conditions in the Four Colonies

29

Connecticut This colony’s strength was its exceptionally democratic government and “mediocrity” in the distribution of property. Democratic culture was so lively it prohibited any group from obtaining control of the government for long. Since the crown did not appoint the governor, no royal party could organize as well there as in Massachusetts.92 Moreover, certain big political problems cut across class lines in Connecticut, above all, the Susquehanna Company. This private land-development company clandestinely purchased from the chiefs of the Iroquois a 120-mile-wide tract in present-day Pennsylvania, and convinced the Connecticut General Assembly to authorize a settlement on the Susquehanna River in 1755. It conflicted with the claims of the proprietary Penn family, embroiling Connecticut in a border war with Pennsylvania on the eve of the Revolution.93 That divided the colony between those eager for colonial expansion – including the bulk of the land-starved yeomanry – against those in wealthy western and southern towns who saw the expansionists as threatening to drain the home colony of valuable resources, reduce the steady inflation of their own property values, undermine the validity of the charter, and embroil the colony with a neighbor to whom the southern and western counties were most dangerously exposed. The division on this issue roughly matched the party split about British imperial policy: the expansionist counties soon became rebels and the anti-expansionists tended to be dominated by their loyalists. The east was Atlantic-oriented, Congregationalist, pro-paper currency, and expansionist, whereas the west was New York-oriented, often Anglican, anti-paper currency, and anti-expansionist.94 Although eastern leader Jonathan Trumbull won the election of 1774, on occasion in the coming war the sectional division forced the rebel easterners to intervene militarily to support beleaguered rebels in the loyalist-dominated southwest.95 New Hampshire Some antinomian refugees from Massachusetts founded this colony when Governor John Winthrop demolished their movement in Boston in the 1630s; later, Quakers driven out of that same colony joined them. However, the great majority of subsequent immigrants were mainstream Congregationalist farmers from Massachusetts and Connecticut.96 William III set up a royal government in the 1690s. Township issues were more

30 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773

contentious here than elsewhere in New England, since conflicting township grants had been made by three different authorities: original proprietor Robert T. Mason, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.97 That foreshadowed the chaotic founding of Vermont in the disputed New Hampshire Grants. Beginning in 1717, the colony had three generations of rule by a single family – John Wentworth, his son Benning Wentworth, and Benning’s nephew John Wentworth – the only place this occurred in the region, an unusual event for the entire Atlantic world. The three governors were complaisant, open-handed in granting land, and competent administrators.98 The younger John Wentworth appeared able to fend off his weak and divided domestic opponents indefinitely, until the Boston Tea Party made his loyalist position impossible because he faced a colonial assembly controlled by men hostile to British policy. He still thought he could win out late in the day, trying to take over the Assembly by larding it with his own men in June, 1775. But after the Battle of Bunker Hill, a large crowd heaved cannon before his front door in Portsmouth, beat his house with clubs and threatened to bombard it until he gave up his loyalist friend, John Fenton, to public arrest. Not long after, Wentworth fled to Boston, and the rebels were in control.99 The family’s patrician power structure collapsed with John’s sudden and permanent exile.100 The Revolution’s momentum was greater in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire because of the abrupt departure of their long-ruling oligarchs. Rhode Island The independent colonies of Providence and Newport revealed their unique quality in 1641 when, under the (still unexplained) name of Rhode Island, they merged and called themselves a “democracie” [sic], even though that word was under a discursive ban among most English people.101 These towns were founded by ultra-evangelical outcasts from Massachusetts, antinomian Congregationalists in the case of Newport, and Baptists in the case of Providence. After the founding, most towns filled with mainstream Congregationalists from Massachusetts.102 Even so, the people tolerated “a chaos of all Religions,” according to one disapproving observer, one of the few places on earth with genuine liberty of conscience.103 The colony’s commercial export activity was notoriously far-flung. Its people much benefited from the geographic situation of its harbors and their contempt for imperial trade restrictions. Although a

The Loyalists’ Edge

31

few rich people owned slaves or even worked gang labor on plantations, Rhode Island was the site of the first serious discussion of abolition, in the 1650s.104 Rhode Island resembled the other colonies in basic institutional structure, and its system had the good fortune to enjoy the long and stabilizing eighteenth-century career of Governor Samuel Cranston.105 However, the people of Narragansett Bay had a sense of superiority that set them at odds with the rural portion of the colony.106 Joseph Wanton, representing the loyalist-dominated Bay, was re-elected in 1775, but the rebels suddenly deposed him.107 Then, in December, 1776, the British Navy took the excellent port of Newport without opposition and dug in there. They saw it as politically the softest part of the region, strategically perfect on the cusp between New England and New York. Everyone was keenly aware of this British presence for three years. It tended to intimidate and enervate Rhode Island rebels. Although Connecticut and Rhode Island were distinct from Massachusetts and New Hampshire in not having royal government in 1776, officers of the British military expedition in 1776 carried with them the king’s orders to impose upon these two colonies the same royal structure.108 It helped steel rebel nerve.

the loyalists’ edge At the end of the series of imperial wars in 1763, the New England loyalists held most major trump cards in local politics. An urbane Anglican oligarchy ruled in Boston. Congregationalism was weakened by spectacular defections. The colonies were part of an immensely powerful empire, and British leaders got the credit for it. Especially in the upper class, the reign of Georgian manners was so strong that “the dictates of civility could contain political disagreements.”109 To those rules the leaders of the American loyalists adhered, not to the grand scheme of the Puritan errand into the wilderness. The loyalist ideology comprised seven elements: adulation of the muscular English aristocracy and monarchy; adherence to royal authority because it supposedly arose from transcendent impartiality and timeless tradition; absolute defense of private property against any challenge from an abstraction like “the common good”; a conviction that it was the right of the few to use government to promote their own interests, for their accumulation of wealth enabled them to send a sufficiency of it trickling down through the ranks; a political philosophy opposed to organized

32 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773

party activity on the grounds that it was “too low or Mean for any humane Creatures,” as loyalists in Worcester jail put it in 1776; religious beliefs that stressed orthodoxy and liturgical humility before God rather than agonized discourse with him; and a philosophy of human nature that was pessimistic, fearful of change because change is degenerative, dangerous.110 Every element of their belief system was contrary to the essential spirit of evangelical Christianity and leveling republicanism. It was an aristocratic gentleman’s code that “rendered compatible pride of rank and humility of homage, legal fixity of obligations and personal fidelity of allegiance” by the subordinate common man to his lord and master.111 Loyalism was pervaded by a philosophy of history incompatible with all revolutionary tendencies, one that looked back fondly to the orderly regime change of 1688–89, one conservatives believed arose out of organic class “consensus” and ended in a supposedly final bargain with the crown. They hated the Liberty Men at Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern, and were secure in the knowledge they had the support of conservatives in Britain.112 Like the political parties of 1642, a “cavalier” party in 1773 proclaimed that the origin of power lay in the prerogative (the former “divine right”) of kings and time-tested aristocracy, whereas the other party, which would not dare call itself “democracy” until the nineteenth century, believed that the people were the sole legitimate origin of power.113 The radicals knew the odds were against them because the loyalists were so powerfully ensconced in so many principal towns. Historian William Lincoln recorded that in the years between repeal of all but one Townshend duty in 1770 and the Tea Act reinforcing that one remaining duty in 1773, loyalism “radiated from the metropolis [Boston] to every village, and [was] growing day by day more fervid and intense.”114 Loyalists supposedly had the advantage of historical precedent on their side – after all, the republic of 1649 had collapsed in 1660, so all attempts at self-government must fail. They also enjoyed a strong advantage in the widespread historic dread of civil war, for nobody held history’s blood in contempt.115 What loyalists could not see was that they were making their society and culture more British, every day less authentically, locally rooted.116 They gave the British good reason to believe they could rely on loyalist backing to impose imperial rule in America. They also gave the people in the Green Dragon reason to believe that all three crises the colonists faced – in the towns because of the Proclamation of 1763, in religion because of a crusading English church, and in the imperial

The Loyalists’ Edge

33

figure 1.1. Paul Revere, A View of the Year 1765, engraving. (Reproduced with the permission of Brandon Nicholson.) This is the first artwork of the revolutionary era to depict what would become known as a “loyalist.” Revere is attacking the Stamp Act, here depicted as a horrible dragon, a favorite motif in English history going back to the legend of Saint George slaying the dragon. The “Tyrant” is clutching “Magna Charta” disrespectfully in one claw and roaring at his antagonists. At the forefront, with sword ready to thrust, is “Boston brave! unstained by Placemen’s Bribes,” the bribes that corrupt the system in Westminster. The figures backing up that symbol of New England are marked “R-I,” for (politically unpredictable) Rhode Island, “NY” for New York, “H” for Hampden, Lady Liberty for Virginia (with her staff and cap of freedom), and four men representing “U”, the United Provinces, Holland. The dragon has already stomped to death John Pym (1583–1643), the most famous of the Five Members King Charles I had tried to arrest on January 4, 1642, at the beginning of the English Civil War, and Dr. James Scott (1733–1814), who had published his attacks on John Stuart, Earl of Bute, the king’s advisor, in 1765 under the pseudonym “Anti-Sejanus” (in reference to the ambitious prefect, Lucius Aelius Sejanus [20 bce–31 ce]). Further references to the supposedly despotic Scot are in the Scotch bonnet worn by the dragon, the jackboot (always referring to Bute as a pun in the period iconography) worn by one of the flying “harpies” (Spite and Envy) as Revere called them. The other flying figure wears a kilt, Charles Murray, Earl of Mansfield, another Scot who was now Lord Chief Justice and notoriously unfriendly to free speech. He is using a piston syringe to spray some noxious “venom” on those who would rescue Magna Carta. John Hampden (c. 1595–1643) was one of the Five Members,

34 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773

relation because of the revenue acts – had a single cause, a dangerously arrogant British ruling class (see Figure 1.1). In the end, the rebels understood history better than the loyalists and would be inspired by it more effectively. After all, they were the descendants of European common people with a strong “lust for liberty” against the claims of aristocracy going back centuries.117 To that tradition, rebel New Englanders now brought the most historicized convictions ever. They began a rebellion to remake government, in part to create the institutional strength they required to address their local crises. Those ready to rebel had one major advantage – which they shared with some people in other regions – the legacy of 1649, when rebels brought down crown and Cavaliers with essentially the same bill of indictment that would appear in the Declaration of Independence. As the most irreducibly principled people on earth, their Cause led them to Griffin’s Wharf the night of December 16, 1773. Yet their tradition was problematic because at the incipient ‘national’ level of the thirteen colonies, their republican, king-killing history fueled the rhetoric of their opponents. Loyalists harped on the events of 1649 to warn against overthrowing George III. As a result, the New England rebels’ courage lay less in living up to their heroic history, than in leaving it aside to achieve unity with the other colonists. They had to lock up the revolution of 1649 in the innermost recess of their hearts, so that it would not alarm their allies.

figure 1.1 (cont.) who died in battle fighting the king’s forces. Armed Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom and war, is flying to the rescue at left. At right is a hapless hanged man suspended from Liberty Tree, with the date August 14, 1765, the first Day of the Revolution, when crowds took over Boston to defeat implementation of the Stamp Act. Onlookers describe the victim as “that villian [sic] H[us]k[e], who has got a high place.” The reference is to John Huske, a New Hampshire native who had done well enough for himself in England to be elected to the House of Commons. By some bad rumor, he got the reputation in America for being one of the promoters of the Stamp Act, which was not true, for he had opposed it. The truth became known later on, and Huske promptly sank from historical view, but for a time he was the most notorious “Tory” in the colonies. A poem published in the Boston Gazette (January 27, 1766) complemented this engraving. It included the imprecation: “Mounted aloft, perfidious H – -k you see, / Scorn’d by his Country, fits the Rope and Tree: / This be the real Fate! a fittest Place, / For Freedom’s Foes, a selfish scornful Race!.”

Notes

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Notes 1. “The Petition of Right,ˮ 1628, in The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon, 2nd edn. (New York, 1986), 68–71. See Samuel R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642, 10 vols. (London, 1883–4), 6:272–310; Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings 1567–1642 (New York, 2014), 262–78; Charles Carlton, Charles I, The Personal Monarch, 2nd edn. (New York, 1995), 95–121; and Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution (New York, 1961), 52–4. 2. Thomas Hutchinson, [A Brief State of the Claim of the Colonies and the Interest of the Nation with Respect to Them], 1764, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson, vol. 1, 1740–1766, ed. John W. Tyler and Elizabeth Durrulle (Boston, Mass.: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2014), 213. See pp. 208–18. 3. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, Mass., 1958), 166–73. 4. “Protestation of the Commons,ˮ March 2, 1629, Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 71; L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (New York, 1989), 104. See pp. 80–117. 5. For a recent discussion, see Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, The Peopling of North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (New York, 2012), 365–448. On the question of motives, see David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1987), 74–106. On the religious mission, see Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma, 34–44; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1991), 44, 92–100; and Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 1–111. 6. Adrian Chastain Weimer, Martyrsʼ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (New York, 2011). On the Indians, see Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury, ed., Interpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (Boston, Mass., 2003). On Indian depopulation just before the colonists arrived en masse, see Sherburne F. Cook, The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1976). Colonists believed that God had providentially swept away the great mass of Indians. See Sylvanus Conant, An Anniversary Sermon Preached at Plymouth, December 23, 1776. In Grateful Memory of the First Landing of Our Worthy Ancestors in that Place (Boston, Mass., 1776), 14. 7. David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 87–110. 8. John M. Murrin, “England and Colonial America: A Novel Theory of the American Revolution,ˮ in Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic, ed. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman (Philadelphia, Pa., 2015), 9–19.

36 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773 9. For an argument about the continuity of New England history, see Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991). See p. 290 on the vitality of Puritanism right through the eighteenth century. Foster thinks the Great Awakening delivered a “fatalˮ blow to “the Puritan movement,ˮ but the region’s core history rejuvenated social and political reform there over and again down to the present day. 10. A revolutionary tradition among English speakers arced from the Rebellion of 1381 down to recent times. See David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (New York, 2010). The New England founders had predecessors in Lollardy, led by John Wycliffe, who aimed to demystify the sacraments (especially by repudiating transubstantiation), to achieve a more effective propagation of the faith (through learned preaching), and to enforce local sovereignty against competing royal or clerical authorities. That foreshadowed the Puritan agenda. A rising in 1381 was led and manned mainly by East Anglians. See Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York, 1972), 232. On the East Anglia-based, ideological Kett’s Rebellion of 1549, see Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 4th edn. (New York, 1997), 64–80; Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Modern England (New York, 2007), 55–69; and David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York, 1985), 87, 135–40. 11. David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York, 2011). 12. The Salem gentlemen who politely memorialized against the Boston Port Act in 1774 proclaimed that Massachusetts had “ever been foremost in loyalty to the kings of Britain – in its efforts to defend their territories & enlarge their dominions.ˮ See Merchants and Freeholders of Salem to Gage, Summer 1774, Gage Papers, vol. 120. 13. For a specific rejection of theocracy, in an election sermon, see Peter Powers, Jesus Christ the True King and Head of Government. A Sermon Preached before the General Assembly of the State of Vermont, on the day of Their First Election, March 12, 1778, at Windsor (Newburyport, Mass., 1778), 13. 14. T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration,ˮ in T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York, 1980), 46–67. Later New Englanders doctored their origins myth to claim that the Puritans had fled “the horrid cruelty and barbarity which was exercised upon our forefathers.ˮ See Timothy Hilliard, The Duty of a People under the Oppression of Man, to Seek Deliverance from God (Boston, Mass., 1774), 23. For a recent study of American royalism, see Brendan McConville, The Kingʼs Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), especially 193–219. He argues that some colonists accepted divine-right monarchism. Most New Englanders did not. 15. See J. G. A Pocock, and Jack P. Greene, “The Concept of Virtue in Late Colonial British America,ˮ in Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest: Political

Notes

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Values in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Richard K. Matthews (Bethlehem, Pa., 1994), 27–54. 16. On the Judaizing of English radicalism, see especially David Nirenberg, AntiJudaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013), 300–24. See also Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756– 1800 (New York, 1985). 17. There are two major dialect regions – Eastern and Western New England – and seven sub-regions: Boston, Lower Connecticut River Valley, Narragansett Bay, Worcester County–Upper Connecticut River Valley, Plymouth, Merrimack Valley–New Hampshire Bay, and Coastal Maine. See Craig M. Carver, American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1987), 25. On the accent, see Anders Orbeck, Early New England Pronunciation, As Reflected in Some Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Eastern Massachusetts (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1927). 18. On Carigal, see Laura Arnold Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (Portland, Ore., 2012), 211–34; and George Alexander Kohut, Ezra Stiles and the Jews (New York, 1902), 78–98. Judah Monis was a Portuguese converso who taught Hebrew at Harvard for decades until 1760, the first such instructor in the New World. See Michael Hoberman, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (Amherst and Boston, Mass., 2011), 103–37. On Carigal’s antiBritish presentation to a distinguished audience just before the Tea Party, see William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005), 97–8. The Cromwellians had instituted unofficial toleration of Jews in England in 1656, and London had growing Sephardic and Ashkenazi populations. See David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485– 1850 (New York, 1994). 19. Or culture is “the actual, grounded terrain of practices, representations, languages and customs of any specific historical society.ˮ See Stuart Hall “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,ˮ in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York, 1996), 411–40. See p. 439. 20. Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (New York, 2003), 11–26. See p. 12. For the argument that New Englanders were not so distinctive from the rest of the British diaspora, see Stephen Nissenbaum, “New England as Region and Nation,ˮ in All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, ed. Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore, Md., 1996), 38–61. 21. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Malden, Mass., 2000), 55. 22. As Brooks Adams put it, no community in the world was “more creditable, more consistent, nor, indeed, more importantˮ so far as “the principles of civil liberty and human rightsˮ are concerned. See Brooks Adams quoted in Wesley Frank Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956), 156. 23. As for the autonomy of towns from county or metropolitan elites, see the excellent discussion of the literature by Barry Alan Shain in The Myth of

38 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773 American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 75–83. 24. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II), Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1983–1984, ed. Fr´ed´eric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York, 2011), 33–55. See p. 33. See also Amanda Porterfield, “The Puritan Legacy in American Religion and Culture,ˮ in Perspectives on American Religion and Culture, ed. Peter W. Williams (Malden, Mass., 1999), 80–91. She is restating for a modern audience the still vibrant, much-debated theory in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. R. H. Tawney (New York, 1958). For the argument that early New Englanders were anti-capitalist, see James A. Henretta, “The Protestant Ethic and the Reality of Capitalism in Colonial America,ˮ in Weberʼs Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (New York, 1993), 327–46. See also David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 135–78. 25. C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500– 1700, vol. 1, People, Land, and Towns (New York, 1984), 2 vols.; 1:137–8, 177–8. 26. See David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989); and Roger Thompson, Mobility and Migration: East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629–1640 (Amherst, Mass., 1994), 3– 169. 27. Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (New York, 2003), 298, 342–9. See also Stephen J. Harris, Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature (New York, 2003), 1–43. 28. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 2009), 359–61. 29. Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England (London, 1983), 7, 26. 30. Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,ˮ in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1964), 50–122; Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (New York, 1999), 250–91; Siobhan Brownlie, Memory and the Myths of the Norman Conquest (Rochester, N.Y., 2013); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 80– 1; Martin Dzelzainis, “History and Ideology: Milton, the Levellers, and the Council of State in 1649,ˮ in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, Calif., 2006), 265–83. 31. For the public sphere, see Philip H. Round, By Nature and By Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620–1660 (Hanover, N.H., 1999); and Carol Sue Humphrey, “This Popular Engineˮ: New England Newspapers during the American Revolution, 1775–1789 (Newark, Del., 1992), 26. On intellectual life, see Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia

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in Puritan Massachusetts (New York, 1998); and Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass., 1935). 32. On official and self-censorship, see David D. Hall, “Readers and Writers in Early New England,ˮ in A History of the Book in America, vol. 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (New York, 2000), 127–31. See pp. 117–51. 33. John M. Murrin, “Religion and Politics in America from the First Settlements to the Civil War,ˮ in Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present, 2nd edn., ed. Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow (New York, 1990), 24. See pp. 23–46. On “the mind,ˮ see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), 45. See also David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 166–212; Michael McGiffert, “Thomas Shepard: The Practice of Piety,ˮ in God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge, ed. Michael McGiffert, 2nd edn. (Amherst, Mass., 1994), 3–33; and Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town, The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636, 2nd edn. (New York, 1985), 19. 34. Shain, The Myth of American Individualism; David Weir, Early New England: A Covenanted Society (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2005). On the town’s social controls, see Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1970), 28–9, 83, 146–7, 220–3. For a study of how English origins shaped the local town, see David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1982). On the increasing ambiguity of a common good for the supposedly “Englishˮ people in the British Empire, see Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in EighteenthCentury Britain (New York, 1994). 35. For a critique, see Darret B. Rutman, “The Mirror of Puritan Authority,ˮ in Law and Authority in Colonial America, ed. George A. Billias (Barre, Mass., 1965), 149–64. 36. Jere R. Daniell, Colonial New Hampshire: A History (Millwood, N.Y., 1981), 165–89, 238–9. 37. See Joy B. and Robert R. Gilsdorf, “Elites and Electorates: Some Plain Truths for Historians of Colonial America,ˮ in Saints and Revolutionaries: Essay on Early American History, ed. David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, and Thad W. Tate (New York, 1984), 243. See pp. 207–44. 38. On those New Englanders who were hostile to Puritanism, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 21–5. On the supposed “glacial ageˮ when the spirit of active reform died after 1691, see Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1966), 25. 39. On the interconnections between Puritanism, natural law, and Locke, see Michael P. Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind. 1996) 148–201. On

40 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773 the typical pattern after a “revolution of the saintsˮ is achieved, and “ordinary men are eager enough to desert the warfare of the Lord,ˮ see Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York, 1969), 319. See pp. 317–20. For the unconvincing argument that Robert Filmer’s patriarchal power informed Puritan thinking, not Locke, see Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996), 290–2. See pp. 281–322. On the role of litigation in New England as an important “agent of orderly social change and economic growth,ˮ see David T. Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629–1692 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), 188. 40. For a clear exposition of the predestination of souls (by God before time), justification (a personal conviction that God probably had selected one to be an “invisible saintˮ in eternity, meanwhile a “visible saintˮ who convinced members of the congregation that he was probably one of the “invisibles,ˮ to be known certainly only at judgment day), and sanctification (evidence here on earth – not proof – of divinely predestined salvation), see Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963), 67–70. See also Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (New York, 2009). 41. The Deists include the loyalist spy, Doctor Edward Bancroft of Westfield, and his political opposite, the rebel Dr. Thomas Young. See Thomas J. Schaeper, Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy (New Haven, Conn., 2011), 11–12, 28–9; and Pauline Maier, “Reason and Revolution: The Radicalism of Dr. Thomas Young,ˮ American Quarterly 28 (1976), 229–49. 42. Richard Godbeer, “‘The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England,ˮ in Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster, afterword John D’Emilio (New York, 2007), 81–113. 43. Hall, A Reforming People, 194, 179. On the suffrage, it appears that about three quarters of adult men qualified to vote in the farm towns, where most people lived, but the figure for the larger towns was in the range of fifty to sixty percent. See Robert J. Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689–1776 (Westport, Conn, 1977), 40–3. See pp. 28–49. On schools, see James Axtell, The School Upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven, Conn., 1974). For skepticism about democratic culture in New England, see Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven, Conn. 1971), 155–79; and Michael Zuckerman, “The Social Context of Democracy in Massachusetts,ˮ in Michael Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1993), 55–76. 44. Hall, A Reforming People, 49. 45. Joseph A. Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (Baltimore, Md., 2006), 67–95; see also 5–32. 46. Emery G. Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1962);

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Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York, 1991). 47. Richard R. Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679–1749 (University Park, Pa, 1994), 211–37. On the Arminian doctrine of works as instrumental in salvation, which old-guard Puritans regarded as a primrose path to perdition, see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd edn., foreword and concluding chapter by David D. Hall (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 214–29. On the general decline of Puritanism, see Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 233. Anglicans could imagine themselves to be “modern,ˮ in sync with a moderate and sensible Enlightenment, whereas radicals viewed them as trimmers and their 1689 “revolutionˮ as incomplete at best. See Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (Boston, Mass., 1981). 48. On disruption by the revival, see Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects in Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 11–39. For an overambitious argument that the revivalists were preparing the way to the Revolution by “undermining confidence in all existing institutions and lessening the people’s respect for all constituted authority,ˮ see Sidney E. Mead, The Old Religion in the Brave New World: Reflections on the Relations Between Christendom and the Republic (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1977), 53. See also Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, Conn., 1984), 326. New England’s Old Lights tended to have East Anglian ancestry, those who formed the region’s central core. However, see also Cedric B. Cowing, Religion and the Settling of New England (Chicago, Ill., 1995). On the resurgent Baptists and restless Presbyterians, see Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 254–72. See also Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D. D., L. L. LD, President of Yale College, 3 vols., ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York, 1901), 1:78. For a cri de coeur from a Presbyterian, see Jonathan Parsons, Freedom from Civil and Ecclesiastical Slavery (Newburyport, Mass., 1774). 49. One ferocious parish split in New London, Connecticut in the 1760s accompanied the Anglican conversion of a great-grandson of Increase Mather. See Mather Byles to Polly Byles, June 26, 1764, and Mather Byles to Katy Byles, December 8, 1765, Byles Family Transcripts, 1728–1835, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass., vol. 1; and Sibleyʼs Harvard Graduates, 13:9– 19. See also Robert J. Taylor, Colonial Connecticut (Millwood, N.Y., 1979), 108–40. Church fission continued through the war years, sometimes involving charges of loyalism. See Petition by Inhabitants of Alsted, September 17, 1778, Petitions, 1778–79, NHSA; Laws of New Hampshire, vol. 4, Revolutionary Period, 1776–1784, ed. Henry H. Metcalf (Bristol, N.H., 1916), 107–8, 615, 819. 50. Frederick V. Mills, Sr., Bishops By Ballot: An Eighteenth-Century Ecclesiastical Revolution (New York, 1978). 51. See James W. Jones, The Shattered Synthesis: New England Puritanism before the Great Wakening (New Haven, Conn., 1973). Christianity as such would

42 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773 be threatened by the rational trend of the Revolution. See Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 343–84. Congregationalism was plagued by another serious schism arising in the 1770s, as a cohort of mercantile New Englanders continued the Arminian drift away from predestinarian doctrine into liberal freewill Unitarianism. See Daniel W. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). For a different approach, see Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York, 1986). 52. U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), 756. See also John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 103. The total for Connecticut is here slightly larger than that provided in Chapter 5 below. Despite disruptions, the region’s economy grew along with the population in the war years. See Robert Abraham East, Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (New York, 1969), 49–100. 53. On the decline of the county in New England, see David Thomas Konig, “English Legal Change and the Origins of Local Government in Northern Massachusetts,ˮ in Town and County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies, ed. Bruce C. Daniels (Middletown, Conn.: 1978), 12–43. 54. Bruce C. Daniels, The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635– 1790 (Middletown, Conn., 1979). 55. Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York, 1995). 64–106. 56. T. H. Breen, “Transfer of Culture: Chance in Design in Shaping Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1660,ˮ in Breen, Puritans and Adventurers, 68–80. 57. Parliament knew the colonists had their own tax structures. See Expert Testimony of Barlow Trecothick, February 11, 1766, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, ed., R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, 6 vols. (New York, 1982–87), 2:191. Parliament also knew about the huge and growing trade imbalance. Trecothick estimated the total debt of Americans to British creditors at no less than £4,450,000. See ibid., 2:193. See pp. 185–276. See also Expert Testimony of William Kelly, et al., March 27, 1766, ibid., 2:359–65. 58. Puritan missionaries had established towns of praying Indians in the seventeenth century that still existed. See Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Neal Salisbury, “‘I Loved the Place of My Dwelling’: Puritan Missionaries and Native Americans in Seventeenth-Century Southern New England,ˮ in Inequality in Early America, ed. Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (Hanover, N.H., 1999), 111–33; and David Jaffee, People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 25–72. Progressives founded a college for them. See Colin G. Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Hanover, N.H., 2010).

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59. On literacy, see Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974); Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York, 1997); David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, Mass., 1996), 36–78. On production, see Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994). On industry, see Conrad E. Wright and Kathryn P. Viens, ed., Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850 (Boston, Mass., 1997). On the prevailing ethic in so many New England households, as opposed to capitalist ideology as such, see Ronald Schultz, “Small-Producer Thought: The Argument about Capitalism,ˮ in Life in Early Philadelphia: Documents from the Revolutionary and Early National Periods, ed. Billy. G. Smith (University Park, Pa., 1995), 265–78. For a comparative view, see Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America, 2nd edn. (New York, 1988), 212–38. 60. Julius F. Wasmus, An Eyewitness Account of the American Revolution and New England Life: The Journal of J. F. Wasmus, German Company Surgeon, 1776–1783, trans. Helga Doblin, ed., Mary C. Lynn (New York, 1990), 91. 61. Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution (Philadelphia, Pa., 2009), 125–206. For general administrative procedure, see pp. 17–121. 62. Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore, Md., 1976), 1–22, 185–92. On divisions between the wealthy court party and the populist country party, see Allan Kulikoff, “The Progress of Inequality in Revolutionary Boston,ˮ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 27 (1971), 375–412; and Steven J. Stewart, “Skimmington in the Middle and New England Colonies,ˮ in Riot and Revelry in Early America, ed. William Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman (University Park, Pa, 2002), 41–86. For a darker view of colonial political culture in North America, see Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York, 1973), 119. 63. The English mother did have some parental authority by the Fifth Commandment, and some of those in the upper classes who were heads of household “necessarily constituted exceptions to the general rule of exclusionˮ of women from civil and political spheres. See Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 291. See also p. 283. 64. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 76–93. On women in commerce, see Ellen HartiganO’Connor, The Ties that Bind: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, Pa., 2009). 65. Decline in family size was most rapid in New England. See Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009), 15. See pp. 1–19. See also Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America (London, 1974), 209. See pp. 187–220. 66. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774, Comprising a Detailed Narrative of the Origin and Early Stages of the American Revolution, ed. John Hutchinson (London, 1828), 351.

44 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773 67. Margaret Ellen Newell, “The Birth of New England in the Atlantic Economy: From the Beginning to 1770,ˮ in Engines of Enterprise: The Economic History of New England, ed., Peter Temin (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 11–68. 68. James Truslow Adams, Revolutionary New England, 1691–1776 (Boston, Mass., 1923), 259–64. On the larger context of the war’s meaning, see William A. Pencak, “‘The Great War for Empire’ Reconsidered as a Cause of the American Revolution,ˮ in William Pencak, Contested Commonwealths: Essays in American History (Lanham, Md., 2011), 313–26. 69. McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 105. See also Kenneth Lockridge, “Social Change and the Meaning of the American Revolution,ˮ Journal of Social History 4 (1973), 403–39; James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalit´e in Preindustrial America,ˮ in James A. Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism: Collected Essays (Boston, Mass., 1991), 71–120; Richard D. Brown, “The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760–1820,ˮ in Urban Migration and the Growth of Cities, ed. Neil L. Shumsky (New York, 1996), 1–23; James E. McWilliams, Building the Bay Colony: Local Economy and Culture in Early Massachusetts (Charlottesville, Va.: 2007); and Bruce C. Daniels, The Fragmentation of New England: Comparative Perspectives on Economic, Political, and Social Divisions in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 1988). 70. Philip J. Greven, Jr. Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), 74–8. See also John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970), 154–6. 71. Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia, Pa., 2001); Lockridge, A New England Town, The First Hundred Years, 165–80; J. Richard Olivas, “‘God Helps Those Who Help Themselves’: Religious Explanations of Poverty in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630–1776,ˮ in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park, Pa., 2004). 262–88. On the New England system of warning out, and the alms house, see Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Philadelphia, Pa., 2014). 72. See Marcus W. Jernegan, Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America, 1607–1783 (New York, 1965), 189–209. 73. Even in the far western town of Deerfield, the physician-in-training, Elihu Ashley, described in his diary a very un-puritanical social whirl, with what seems like a lot of drinking. See Amelia F. Miller and A. R. Riggs, ed., Romance, Remedies, and Revolution: The Journal of Dr. Elihu Ashley of Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1773–1775 (Amherst, Mass., 2007). One historian has described the transition from “Puritanˮ to “Yankeeˮ as epitomized in the multigenerational Winthrop family. See Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630–1717 (Princeton, N.J., 1962). See also Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1993). 74. Bruce H. Mann, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), 162–9.

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75. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 33. For more on social divisions, see Louise A. Breen, Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692 (New York, 2001), 9; and Mark Valeri, “Puritans in the Marketplace,ˮ in The World of John Winthrop: Essays on England and New England, 1588–1649, ed. Francis J. Bremer and Lynn A. Botelho (Boston, Mass., 2005), 147–86. 76. Nash, The Urban Crucible, 37. 77. Ibid., 292–338. 78. Brendan McConville, “Pope’s Day Revisited: ‘Popular’ Culture Reconsidered,ˮ in Explorations in Early American Culture 4 (2000), 258–80; David Cressy, “The Fifth of November Remembered,ˮ in Myths of the English, ed., Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1992), 68–90. The common people of Boston also had established a tradition of confrontation with the rich over the local supplies of grain (with major crowd actions against hoarders in 1710, 1711, and 1713), prostitution (in the destruction of brothels in 1734 and 1737), regulation of the market (in the destruction of a new town market in 1737, which aimed to replace free trade), and in other demonstrations of lowerclass restiveness in 1725, 1743, and 1749. See Jack Tager, Boston Riot: Three Centuries of Social Violence (Boston, Mass., 2001), 13–24. See also William Pencak and John Lax, “The Knowles Riot and the Crisis of the 1740s in Massachusetts,ˮ in Pencak, Contested Commonwealths, 3–52. 79. Michal Jan Rozbicki, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 2011), 56–77. 80. See, for example, Berkshire County Petition to the General Court, August 26, 1778, Revolution Petitions, vol. 184, Massachusetts Archives, Boston, Mass., 196. For the best introduction to the regional division, see Stephen E. Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (Madison, Wis., 1973), 125–52. For the rest of the story, how the east–west rivalry helped delay the state’s Confiscation Act and constitution, not passed until 1779 and 1780, respectively, see ibid., 153–255. 81. See, in particular, Cressy, Coming Over, 130–43, 178–262; Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 157–82; Dunn, Puritans and Yankees, 97–116; Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York, 2008), 271–87. On the religious context, see Thomas S. Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England After Puritanism (New Haven, Conn., 2004); Richard Archer, Fissures in the Rock: New England in the Seventeenth Century (Hanover, N.H.), 155–6; and Andrew C. Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2006). For a related literature, begin with Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn., 1975). On 1763, see Woody Holton, “How the Seven Yearsʼ War Turned Americans into British Patriots,ˮ in Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (New York, 2007), 127–43. 82. Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, Pa., 2009); Francis J. Bremer, The

46 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773 Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards, 2nd edn. (Hanover, N.H., 1995), 209–33; Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandise: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton, N.J., 2012), 176. 83. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (New York, 1986), 7–76; Michael Kammen, Deputyes and Libertyes: The Origins of Representative Government in Colonial America (New York, 1969), 8–9. See pp. 3–51. 84. State of Massachusetts Bay. In the House of Representatives, January 20th, 1777 . . . To the People of Massachusetts-Bay ([Boston], [1777]), broadside. A corollary was that “the prophet Samuel expressly disapproves of government by kings.ˮ See Peter Whitney, American Independence Vindicated. A Sermon Delivered September 12, 1776 (Boston, Mass., 1777), 43. 85. Nigel Smith, “Popular Republicanism in the 1650s: John Streater’s ‘Heroick Mechanicks’,ˮ in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (New York, 1995), 149. See pp. 137–55. See also Stephen C. Arch, Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in Seventeenth-Century New England (DeKalb, Ill., 1994), 124–6. On the eighteenth century, see T. H. Breen, The Character of the Good Ruler, A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630–1730 (New Haven, Conn., 1970), 203–76; Elisha Williams, The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants (Boston, Mass., 1744); Henry Care, English Liberties, or, the FreeBorn Subject’s Inheritance. Containing Magna Charta, Charta de Foresta, the Statute De Tallagio non Concendendo, the Habeas Corpus Act, and Several Other Statutes, with Comments on Each of Them (Providence, R.I., 1774). 86. “A Humble Address to the King,ˮ December 30, 1723, Boston Town Records, 1634–1773, 6 vols., ed. W. H. Whitmore and William S. Appleton (Boston, Mass., 1901), 3:179. Moreover, the New Englanders were in the vanguard of a general world political crisis. See David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: The Age of Revolutions, c. 1760–1840 – Global Causation, Connection, and Comparison,ˮ in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New York, 2010), xxiii–xxiv. See pp. xii–xxxii. 87. “Answer of the House of Representatives to [Message from the Lieutenant Governor of April 7, 1770], April 23, 1770, Alden Bradford, ed., Speeches of the Governors of Massachusetts from 1765 to 1775 and the Answers of the House of Representatives to the Same (Boston, Mass., 1818), 203–04. He later informed the governor that New Englanders believed there was a plot “to reduce this province to the footing of little corporations in England.ˮ See “Message from the House of Representatives to the Lieutenant Governor,ˮ November 15, 1770, ibid., 284. 88. Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), 9. For the best account of social change in the colony, see Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1985).

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89. Intercolonial jealousy was not serious, and divisions within Rhode Island were not violent. See Irwin H. Polishook, Rhode Island and the Union, 1774–1795 (Evanston, Ill., 1969), 3–8. 90. Boston was the economic envy of all other ports, thus the center, and the rest of the region peripheral. On the concept, see Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (New York, 2002). On why Thomas Hooker led the founders of Connecticut out of Massachusetts to Hartford, see S. Scott Rohrer, Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630–1865 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010), 27–33. 91. On the regional leadership by Massachusetts, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts (New York, 1984), 143–82, 330–65. 92. The Council, which was elected, and had never become the bastion of any group, showed significant turnover. See Jackson Turner Main, The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 1763–1788 (Madison, Wis., 1967), 82. 93. Paul B. Moyer, Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence along Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary Frontier (Ithaca, N.Y., 2007), 13–36; Richard T. Warfle, Connecticut’s Western Colony: The Susquehannah Affair (Hartford, Conn., 1979). 94. David M. Roth and Freeman Meyer, From Revolution to Constitution: Connecticut, 1763 to 1818 (Chester, Conn., 1975), 8–16. 95. Oscar Zeichner, Connecticut’s Years of Controversy, 1750–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1949), 159–70; Assembly Resolution, October, 1776, Public Records of the State of Connecticut, ed. Benjamin Hoadly and J. H. Trumbull, 15 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1887), 1:27–8. On democratization in the backcountry over the course of the Revolution, see Mark Williams, The Brittle Thread of Life: Backcountry People Make a Place for Themselves in Early America (New Haven, Conn. 2009). 221–7. However, the author discounts the role of ideology. 96. Michael A. Bellesisles, Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville, Va., 1993). 97. Daniell, Colonial New Hampshire. See 105–31 on the foundation of royal government; see 143–50 on the land claims. 98. Richard F. Upton, Revolutionary New Hampshire: An Account of the Social and Political Forces Underlying the Transition from Royal Province to American Commonwealth (Hanover, N.H., 1936), 1–3, 9. On land, see Paul W. Wilderson, Governor John Wentworth and the American Revolution (Hanover, N.H., 1994); and Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 13:650–81. 99. He obtained the protection of English arms in August 1775, and went to England in 1778, later to become the controversial governor of loyalist Nova Scotia, where he died in 1820. See Wilderson, Governor John Wentworth and the American Revolution, 257–65; and Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 13:669– 81. Remaining New Hampshire loyalists faced crowds demanding recantations of their British loyalty. See Daniell, Colonial New Hampshire, 235–7. See Recantations of P. Bailey, James McMaster, and Thomas Auchincloss of Portsmouth, May 11, 1775, Amer. Arch, 2:552.

48 The New England People in their Towns on December 16, 1773 100. Main, The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 191–215 on the oligarchy, and 217–50 on its fall. See also Upton, Revolutionary New Hampshire, 26–31. 101. Bruce C. Daniels, Dissent and Conformity on Narragansett Bay: The Colonial Rhode Island Town (Middletown, Conn., 1983), 9; Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 282–4. 102. Daniels, Dissent and Conformity on Narragansett Bay, 45. According to Daniels, by contrast to other New England towns, those in Rhode Island were marked by “a lessened sense of obligation and public duty on the part of the electorate, a better paid bureaucracy, a heightened concern with finances, and an absence of involvement with religion.ˮ See ibid., 106. See also The Following is the Account of the Number of Inhabitants in the Colony, of Rhode-Island, taken between the 4th of May and the 14th of June, 1774 (Newport, R.I., 1774), broadside. 103. John Woodbridge to Richard Baxter, March 31, 1671, quoted in Carl Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience: Society in Rhode Island, 1636–1690 (New York, 1976), 4. 104. Louis P. Masur, “Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island: Evidence from the Census of 1774,ˮ Slavery and Abolition 6 (1985), 139–50; John Donoghue, Fire Under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago, Ill., 2013), 263–7. 105. Polishook, Rhode Island and the Union, 22–46; Sydney V. James, Colonial Rhode Island (New York, 1975). 119–55; Main, The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 86–93. 106. Daniel P. Jones, The Economic and Social Transformation of Rural New England, 1780–1850 (Boston, Mass., 1992), 5. 107. James, Colonial Rhode Island, 62–3, 71. 108. Taylor, Colonial Connecticut, 243. 109. Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), 152. 110. For the Tory prisoners’ assertion, see Samuel Smith et al., to [the Provincial Congress?], November 5, 1776, U.S. Revolution Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, Folder 3. The quotation continues, emphatically, “unless they be as Mean as Negros [sic], Thieves and Robbers.ˮ For the best sympathetic exposition of the post-1783 version of this philosophy, see Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion, 2nd edn. (New York, 1962). See also Robert M. Calhoon, Dominion and Liberty: Ideology in the Anglo-American World, 1660–1801 (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1994), 64–70; and Ann Gorman Condon, “Marching to a Different Drummer: The Political Philosophy of the American Loyalists,ˮ in Red, White and True Blue: The Loyalists in the Revolution, ed. Esmond Wright (New York, 1976), 1–18. For the most elaborate local defense of the loyalist position early in the crisis, see “The Querist,ˮ The Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Weekly News-Letter, November 24, 1774. It is mostly sarcasm, ridiculing the idea that the tea duty would “make us Slaves.” 111. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), 409–10.

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112. H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 1995), 255–86. 113. Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (New York, 2006), 250–1. The loyalists identified with the ruling class even if it was true that some, like Thomas Hutchinson, had a wistful, liberal notion that the qualified independence of the colonies could be maintained; see William Pencak, America’s Burke: The Mind of Thomas Hutchinson (Washington, D.C., 1982). On conditions in the public sphere, see O. M. Dickerson, “British Control of American Newspapers on the Eve of the Revolution,ˮ New England Quarterly 24 (1951), 453–66. 114. William Lincoln, History of Worcester, Massachusetts, From its Earliest Settlement to September, 1836 (Worcester, Mass., 1862), 71. 115. As loyalist Ned Winslow put it, “every child born in America at this distracted periodˮ should pass down to his grandchildren a proud heritage. See Edward Winslow to Benning Wentworth, July 9, 1778, Winslow Papers, vol. 1, M-145, mf. copy in National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, #90. 116. If the trend continued unimpeded, Thomas Hutchinson would undoubtedly be proved correct in predicting that the colonists could not be strong enough to achieve independence for at least another century. See Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, 91. 117. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 143–7.

2 Loyalists and Oliver Cromwell’s Ghost The Problem of the Radical Tradition in 1773

Loyalists had three big advantages over rebel colonists. They had the impressive feat of England’s imperial triumph in 1763, plus the colonists’ self-interested desire for a peaceful commercial climate for expansion, and, above all, the backing of contemporary English historical opinion. For loyalists, English history had, as Michal Rozbicki puts it, “potent social and political uses as a tool of constructing and authorizing order, identity, and power.”1 The American Revolution set off a struggle for the control of history, and loyalists began with the ace of trumps: Britain’s glorious recent history, plus their conviction that they could silence critics of Britain’s new American policies by associating them with the failed revolution of 1649. That republican upheaval had come undone in 1660, and conventional wisdom held that it had been a terrible mistake to overthrow the monarchy. Since it was Restoration policy “to command public forgetfulness of the whole republican episode,” loyalists naturally accused New England radicals of yearning to revive the dark and stormy era of the 1640s and 50s.2 Hoping to rub raw class and regional divisions among the colonists and poison British opinion, they depicted the Tea Party Mohawks as Cromwellians. The loyalists conjured a dreadful image of 1649 in order to block the movement toward independence, arguing that rebels were leading the colonies into populist anarchy. Loyalists used the historical hobgoblin of 1649 especially to aggravate jealousy between the sections – North and South – which promised to be a major stumbling block for the rebels. By the beginning of 1776 – when independence loomed – the need for intercolonial and interclass unity led the rebel leaders of all states to ignore the English Revolution of 1649, about which the various colonists 50

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were sharply divided. Rebels had to unite to bring down the monarchy in America, but they could not use the precedents of the seventeenth century as a lamp of experience for the republican experiment of 1776.3 Loyalists demonized the story of 1649 so effectively that they forced the rebels to cut themselves off from their historical roots. It left them culturally adrift, but it also opened the way to write their own history.4

the master narrative(s) of english revolution Some scholars hold that the Glorious Revolution of 1689 alone shaped American revolutionary consciousness; others argue that the spirit of 1649 was the key component in popular culture, and had great radical potential.5 Indeed, hindsight suggests that “1689” simply could not have happened in England without the precedent-setting events of 1649. In 1763, at the end of the Great War for Empire, many New Englanders were so inebriated on the imperial harvest feast that they would have supported the monarchical constitution of 1689 indefinitely. But an important group were still old, “1649” republicans. By 1774, exasperated by threats of British tyranny and an entrenched oligarchy at home, they captured the attention of the other colonists. The potential for a war of independence forced everyone to think of the possibility of a republic, and that meant involuntarily thinking about the radical experiment in 1649. Memory of the overthrow of Charles I was a problem for the rebels because it split them along class, regional, and religious lines. Most leaders in the other colonies embraced a narrative, as described by Daniel Woolf, in which moralistic Roundheads were wild-eyed wreckers in the 1640s.6 As nauseated British customs man Henry Hulton sneered, New England had the “glorious spirit” of 1649, “as well kept as if it had been bottled, corked, and waxed,” but evincing “an increase of ferocity, from the settlement of a wild country in a rude state of society.”7 Yet when New Englanders resorted to the ultimate principle of popular sovereignty in 1776, they found they had to be “too prudent to stress the origin of their ideas in the regicide republic.”8 They had to pull up their anchor in the democratic-republican tradition – the Good Old Cause – and cobble an ad hoc rebel cultural raft in a tempestuous sea of liberty.9 It is essential to distinguish between three revolutions – those of 1649 and 1688–9 originating in England, and the one beginning in America in 1773. The original rebel manifesto was the Commons’ Petition of Right in 1628. It demanded that the people’s representatives must be sovereign, that judges must abide by the common law (that is, no ecclesiastical

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or royal courts), that no standing army exist without approval by the House of Commons, that authorities should not order cruel and unusual punishments of a martial character. Charles I would not comply, and, in 1649, after the armies of Parliament beat those of the king, the English House of Commons tried, convicted and executed the king, abolished the monarchy and House of Lords, and made England a “commonwealth,” or republic, until 1660.10 That Revolution’s leaders turned to a “protector” in 1653, General Oliver Cromwell, because of the dire need for leadership and Cromwell’s manifest fitness to lead, in conjunction with Parliaments elected during his tenure. It was the key republican event in American historical consciousness in 1776, but some historians prefer to dismiss it as “a predictable failure, capped by the tyranny of a dictator.”11 In reality, many New Englanders saw the republic of the 1650s as a high watermark “modern” historical event, not a chaotic and irrelevant epilogue to the Middle Ages.12 The Revolution of 1689 resulted from the unresolved constitutional issues of 1660. Despite their pledge to rule in good faith, Charles II and James II both tried to enhance their power at the expense of Parliament, and both converted to Roman Catholicism. So Protestant members of all classes rose up in rebellion and drove James out of the kingdom at the end of 1688. The main principles articulated in the revolution of 1649 were now embodied in the new Bill of Rights of 1689, capstone of the “Glorious Revolution,” which raised a bar against absolutism in Britain because William of Orange and Mary Stuart pledged to uphold those principles.13 All New Englanders lived in accord with that settlement. But they were divided between those who looked back fondly to the radicals of 1649, on one side, and those who preferred only the liberal, implicitly anti-radical outcome of 1689. The eminent Scotsman David Hume summed up the ruling beliefs about the seventeenth century in his history of England, published in the 1750s. Hume’s hostility to the republicans of 1649 was red hot because of their “murder” of King Charles. The execution of the monarch was based on a principle “that the people are the origin of all just power,” as they had put it, which Hume scorned as an “authority no better founded than that of robbers and pirates.”14 It was primarily a social analysis. His contempt focused on the “mean birth” of the men who overthrew Charles, like Colonel Thomas Pride, “formerly a drayman,” or Colonel Thomas Harrison, “the son of a butcher.”15 Cromwell himself had been born into a good family but sank in status because he was undisciplined.16 He charmed the army “by what was mean, vulgar, and ridiculous in his

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character” in a plot to achieve “his own unlimited authority.”17 Overall, Hume regarded the revolution of 1649 as a tragic era of misrule by the “unsocial and irregular speculative principles” of common people, a view shared by many property owners on both sides of the Atlantic.18 Hume’s view was reinforced in the public sphere by official mourning of Charles I’s death on January 30. Publishers often reprinted the tragic king’s writings, most recently in 1766.19 Hume spoke for the ruling class, but the populist legacy of 1649 survived. Historians Isaac Kimber and John Bancks published popular biographies of Oliver Cromwell (in 1724 and 1739) that were reprinted many times.20 The voice of old republican dissent could be heard in the writings of Catherine Macaulay.21 Her history of England, published in the 1760s, defended 1649 radicalism.22 In 1770, an anonymous hagiographer of Cromwell (“his greatness expired only with his life”) dedicated a huge volume to all “Sons of Liberty” but “the Free-Spirited Bostonians in Particular.”23 It was still possible for two educated Englishmen to have an “altercation” about Cromwell that was “exceedingly warm and violent,” as did Samuel Johnson and James Boswell’s father, driving an anguished James from the room in November 1773.24 In the English elections of 1784, Charles James Fox’s Tory opponents would shriek that he was “attempting to dethrone the King and make himself an Oliver Cromwell.”25 Among those in the educated classes of Georgian England, regardless of party, Hume’s views prevailed. Cromwell worked in the flesh to keep memories alive. After Charles II exhumed and desecrated Cromwell’s remains (still “very fresh embalmed”) in 1660, his head fell into the hands of a series of private parties who exhibited it for profit through the eighteenth century – in the streets of London in the 1770s, and again during the French Revolution!26

the problem of english history in the thirteen colonies In the American War of Independence, the central policy issues were similar to those that caused the English Revolution of 1649: taxation by any power other than the people’s representatives is unconstitutional; the crown must not maintain a standing army in time of peace; and Protestants must be free from both episcopal power and hanging judges. It became a social revolution of radicals against imperial bullies and oligarchs at home. Remarkably, this radicalism was completely delinked from its historical legacy, one with the potential to polarize delegates to

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Congress. A solid majority of those men would not participate in a rebellion rooted in the revolution of 1649, an upheaval that had supposedly turned society “upside down.”27 Because American patriot leaders were British they were, by tradition, anxious about historical precedents. So the biggest challenge to the unity of the thirteen states was their lack of agreement about history. General knowledge of the English Revolution was widespread in the eighteenth century, and American writers routinely assumed that readers knew the basic facts.28 Even if most colonists agreed in upholding the principles of 1689, that revolution simply had not been a republican event. It could not serve as a precedent for what they aimed to do in 1776: overthrow both king and Parliament. As one royalist pamphleteer snarled at the rebels on the eve of independence, the goal of patriots in 1689 “was not to alter their constitution, to change it from a monarchical to a republican [government].”29 He was right, for the commonwealth of 1649 was the only English precedent for the republics of 1776, and logically the rebels of 1776 might have appealed to the spirit of 1649 to bolster their cause – but they could not. The basic problem was that histories of the revolution of 1649 in New England and the other sections were incompatible. A generally proud memory of the rebels who had struggled against Charles I lived on among the New Englanders, whereas a proud memory of opposition to crusading regicides nourished the creed of all royalists in the colonies, especially the southern planters. As a result, history was the main impediment to the Declaration of Independence, and the loyalists exploited it with gusto. The Sectional Division and Independence New England Puritans had established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1628 because of Charles I’s authoritarian political and religious policies. As James Allen sang in 1772: “From realms of bondage and a Tyrant’s reign, / Our Godlike fathers bore no slavish chain.”30 New Englanders regarded the civil war and the radicalism of the 1640s in England as the result of a process they began in America.31 According to New England’s historical tradition, their ancestors had effectively harnessed the radical impulses in their own society that had derailed the rebellion in England.32 Their pride lived on in a literary lineage epitomized by the republicanism of Congregationalist Reverend John Wise, whose published work of the 1720s was reprinted by a group of Massachusetts radicals in 1772, and

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Reverend Jonathan Mayhew, who had carried the tradition into the 1750s and 60s.33 Certainly no consensus prevailed about the regicide and republic even in New England.34 Individual eighteenth-century New Englanders were politically engaged in a coherent way according to their particular interests and personalities. So there was a big spectrum of views, with many moderates who were ambivalent about the events surrounding the death of Charles I. At one extreme were those who were hostile to the radical tradition of the region’s founders, like Connecticut’s Ebenezer Punderson.35 From loyalist exile in Boston in 1775, he exhorted his wife to tell their children to remember “the great rebellion in the reign of king Charles the first,” and to “let them know how many great and good men lost their lives for being loyal to their king.”36 Thomas Hutchinson argued in his History that only “bigotry and cruel zeal prevailed” in Massachusetts in the era of 1649.37 The crusading priest of King’s Chapel in Boston, Henry Caner, denounced the “republican spirit . . . [and] leveling principles” of New England Congregationalists.38 Conservatives in the propertied classes everywhere had been building a demonic image of Cromwell since he died in 1658.39 Rhode Island Governor Stephen Hopkins spoke for them when he opened his famous pamphlet about colonial rights. He began with a broad sneer at the passionate concern about political theory in 1649: “leaving these points to be settled by the descendants of Filmer, Cromwell, and Venner, we will consider the British Constitution as it at present stands, on Revolution principles,” meaning the anti-radical principles of the revolution in 1689.40 Hopkins comically associated Cromwell with the defender of royal absolutism, Robert Filmer (1588–1653), on one hand, and, on the other, with fire-eating antimonarchical Fifth Monarchist Thomas Venner (?–1661), a former New Englander who had returned to London to institute the reign of “King Jesus” by the sword. The Hopkins barb struck home because radicals were defensive about the Protector. Cromwell had preserved the republican revolution by dominating and channeling it after 1653, but he had done so by accepting many powers of a king, and (although his detractors studiously ignored it) he had suppressed ultras like the Fifth Monarchists, and even moderate leftist “Levellers,” to stabilize the revolution.41 From the perspective of 1776, when the complex politics of the 1650s had become obscure, Cromwell could appear to have wrecked a revolutionary commonwealth that crashed in 1660.42 Samuel Williams of Bradford Church epitomized the anti-Cromwellian rebel, in his sermon commemorating the Boston Tea Party, on December 15, 1774. He angrily

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denied that New Englanders today were like the “fanaticks and enthusiasts” whose hypocritical reign began after the death of “that unhappy and misguided prince Charles the First.”43 Many propertied, college-educated New Englanders in 1763 were mainstream “Whigs” (if they did not call themselves that), who were committed simply to the monarchical principles of 1689 and the growth of the English seaborne empire.44 After 1783, they would think of themselves as sensible progressives because they aimed to create a liberal order of plural private interests.45 In their historical imagination, these moderates believed vaguely that it had been right for rebels to resist Charles I, but that his execution in 1649 was wrong.46 The republican experiment of the 1650s made them uncomfortable. Moderates in all the colonies joined their fellows in Britain in admiring John Hampden and Algernon Sidney, their virtues shining brightly by contrast with the supposed villainies of Cromwell. Neither Hampden nor Sidney was a republican, defined strictly as someone who regarded elected government without a king as ideal.47 Both were well-educated gentlemen, both were martyred by Stuart kings (Hampden in battle, Sidney on the block), and neither participated in the execution of Charles I or the founding of the republic. Although Sidney served in Parliament in the 1650s, he was not a regicide and later wrote a book in praise of England’s mixed monarchical government.48 Each man had “immortal reputation and the warmest expressions of gratitude from his countrymen” in New England.49 By contrast, most eighteenth-century Whigs saw Cromwell as an unpolished republican and rabble-rousing regicide who wrote no books and died in his bed. To the center-left of those moderates was Boston’s Jonathan Mayhew, who in 1749 marked the centenary of the execution of Charles I with a popular sermon that revived memory of The Good Old Cause. He wrote to refute the “lofty gentlemen” who solemnized the day of the king’s death (January 30) in Anglican pulpits by heaping abuse on “our ancestors.”50 Mayhew defended the regicide as the natural result of many royal transgressions. Charles I was beheaded “before his own banqueting house” on the principle that when a king makes his subjects “his prey to devour and destroy . . . we are bound to throw off our allegiance to him, and to resist.”51 However, as for Charles I’s trial and the republic, Mayhew thought the regicides “might possibly have been very wicked and designing men” and that Cromwell was culpable of “maladministration,” meaning dictatorship.52 By this analysis, Mayhew had it both

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ways: Charles was dethroned as he deserved, but his punishment was not legally nice and the usurper Cromwell ruined the revolution. Unlike moderates and liberals, some New England patriots adopted a radical, pro-Cromwell position. Beginning with his debut in the colonial press in 1763 as “Humphry Ploughjogger,” whose great-grandfather was “one of Oliver Cromwell’s men,” John Adams would often praise the rebels of 1649.53 As late as 1775, he carried on a major newspaper debate with royalist Daniel Leonard, who warned that English history proved rebellion leads to military tyranny. Adams shot back that “the resistance to Charles the first and the case of Cromwell, no doubt he means. But the people of England, and the cause of liberty, truth, virtue, and humanity, gained infinite advantages by that resistance.”54 When his opponent continued to revile the “odious and arbitrary” rule of Cromwell, Adams became furious (see Figure 2.1).55 Strangely, the man regarded by many as a radical republican, Samuel Adams, seldom referred to the revolution of 1649 in his writings. Although he was the first man who “publickly asserted the independency of the colonies,” as Thomas Hutchinson told George III in 1774, Adams did not couch that claim in the tradition of 1649.56 Someone with Adams’s talent for polemics might be expected to justify his own Revolution the way John Milton defended the revolution of 1649, by bringing history to its cause.57 He did not because, first, once Adams had the reputation of a Cromwellian incendiary, the crown would have had a good excuse to arrest him if he applauded the regicide republic. It was crucial for Adams to roam at large until just before the Battle of Lexington.58 Second, he knew that loyalists would benefit most from any premature talk of a republic. Third, the historical circumstances of the revolution of 1649 made it an awkward subject in a quarrel the colonists carried on with Parliament rather than with the king until late in 1775. As Adams explained, in the seventeenth century, Parliament was the protector of the people’s liberties from the crown, “but by the intervention of that very power, we are taxed, and can appeal for relief, from their final decision, to no power on earth; for there is no power on earth above them.”59 He meant that the emergence of a king-in-Parliament had nullified all checks and balances. Adams must have been frustrated that English liberals of the 1760s like Catherine Macaulay did not seem to understand the revolution of 1649, given their recoil from Cromwell. She and John Wilkes referred to the 1650s as the era when “Cromwell’s power swallowed up every thing.”60 That was common code for a widespread belief that

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figure 2.1. [Anonymous] The Yankie Doodles Intrenchments near Boston, 1776, engraving. (British Museum 1868,0808.4545). This crude English satire appeals to the British reader unsympathetic to the Americans. First, it ridicules them as bumptious, ignorant fools, employing the recent coinage, “Yankee Doodle,” the precise origin of which remains a mystery. The “Yankee” was of uncertain origin but universally understood to refer specifically to New Englanders; and “doodle” was an English word of Germanic origin meaning fool or dolt. All but two of the rather tedious guffaws in the cartoon can be ignored. The tatterdemalion standing figure at left is hoping the British will not attack because it is “plaguy cold Jonathan,” probably the first representation of “Brother Jonathan” in print, presumably based on an American icon already existing in the public sphere. Then there is the dour chap center right, in the antique garb and broadbrimmed hat that were meant to convey the bad old days of the seventeenth century, in which the New Englanders were still presumably stuck. He says: “Tis Old Olivers Cause, no Monarchy, no Laws.” That sums up the views of the contemporary Englishman unsympathetic to the rebels of 1776: they were just going back to the anarchy of 1649, led by ignorant bumpkin Jonathans.

revolutions get out of control and should be avoided. Samuel Adams had to bank on Americans’ ability to recognize the old constitutional issues of 1649 – the power of the purse, courts without legitimate juries, soldiers as police, episcopal “popery” – and accept the risks of rebellion.61

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Once rebellion sparked up, many common people and a significant minority of the upper classes were ready to follow Adams into more explicit radical action. Charles Lee, the irrepressible Englishman who came to America for The Cause, would speak for them when he scoffed at the prevalent British view that American “Country Gentlemen, Citizens, Lawyers, and Farmers” could not produce military men. In fact, America was now just like the 1640s, when “Parliament’s army [was] composed of this class of men.”62 But to moderates, every word Samuel Adams and his crew uttered seemed like “Commonwealth” dragon’s breath billowing out of New England. During their progress to attend the First Continental Congress, the Adamses made it an important symbolic point to stop in New Haven to pay their respects at the grave of regicide John Dixwell (1607–1689).63 Their gesture was primarily for regional consumption, for in a sense, they had to leave behind their regicidal tradition on their way to Philadelphia. At that point, moderates like John Dickinson still had enough influence to persuade the delegates to send a “humble” petition to the king. Almost nobody in Philadelphia was ready for regicide, even the symbolic kind that would finally come in the Declaration of Independence. Samuel Adams presumably stood with those at the extreme end of the spectrum in New England, those who celebrated the resistance to Charles I, his execution, the republic, and Cromwell. Radicals like Adams published tracts urging readers not only to “tell” their children that they were descended “from glorious patriots” who chased Charles Stuart from the throne “and then voted it vacant” but to remember the entire republican era with pride.64 After hearing of the Tea Act, Josiah Quincy, Jr. proclaimed, under a pseudonym from the English Revolution, “Marchmont Nedham,” that “if to appear for my country is treason and to arm for her defense is rebellion, like my fathers, I will glory in the name of rebel and traitor, as they died in that of puritan and enthusiast.”65 Sermonizers and pamphleteers who aimed at the common people, like John Allen, warned George III sternly that “Kings are made for the people, and not the people for them,” and when Charles I forgot that, “he fell into the hands of such men who cut off his head.”66 A Connecticut almanac writer prayed: “May [the tyrant Charles’s] black deeds with all their hideous form / Impress the wise, and teach the fool to learn.”67 Ministers like Connecticut’s Dan Foster brought the radical version to full flower. He defended the republic of 1649 and denied the gloriousness of 1689, proclaiming that “England was never more happy before, nor much more since, than after the head of the first [sic] Stuart was

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severed from his body, and while it was under the protectorship of Oliver Cromwell.”68 To Amos Adams, Cromwell was one of “the great champions of the [B]ritish liberties,” and providence had kept him in England to preserve those liberties instead of settling in New England, as he had planned before the Civil War.69 The Bostonians selectmen chose to give the annual oration to commemorate the Massacre of 1770 were likely to rub the antimonarchical talisman of 1649 and invoke Oliver. “Where a degrading servitude is the detestable alternative,” proclaimed Benjamin Church, “who can shudder at the reluctant ponyard of a Brutus, the crimsoned ax of a Cromwell, or the reeking dagger of a Ravilliac [sic]?” – the latter referring to Franc¸ois Ravaillac, assassin of Henry IV of France in 1610.70 No wonder that a sarcastic Captain Glanville Evelyn of the King’s Own Regiment wrote home from Boston in October, 1774, that “the people of England, in the time of Charles the First, behaved with decency and moderation compared with” the Mohawks of New England.71 So people held views of 1649 along a spectrum from the conventional view represented by Connecticut’s Anglican Tory divine Samuel Peters, who condemned the majority of his fellow New Englanders as “the Oliverian, independent, King-killing Kind;” to Mayhew and probably Hopkins, who approved of events up to January 30, 1649; to John Adams, who privately approved the republic up to the end of 1653; to Dan Foster at the radical end, who regretted only the death of Oliver and the overthrow of the republic in 1660.72 However, among the small farmers, artisans, mechanics, servants, and slaves the radical views of Foster were popular.73 The rich lore of 1649 structured New England’s cultural calendar. While January 30 was a day of mourning for Anglicans, most New Englanders very deliberately did not observe it. They celebrated November 5, Guy Fawkes Day – Pope Day in New England – an occasion for common people to ridicule symbols of popish, despotic authority.74 Beginning in the 1750s, anti-popery got a new impulse from the Church of England’s hope to establish bishops in America. Congregationalists saw the bishops as Stuart-like “ABSOLUTE MONARCHS IN THE CHURCH” who would make “the king the same ABSOLUTE MONARCH in the STATE,” who would in turn create a body of temporal American lords.75 In the ferocious debate on this issue, the pro-episcopal writers attacked their opponents as “factious, seditious, restless, ambitious, hypocritical, enthusiastic, fanatical, rebellious, impudent” Oliverians.76 As for the Congregationalists, they were informed by John Milton’s meticulous republican critique of episcopacy in An Old Looking-Glass for the Laity

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and Clergy of all Denominations (1659), republished in New Haven in 1774.77 The threat of bishops helped incite those who mocked, stoned, and decapitated images of popes on November 5, in the tradition of the militant apprentices and farm boys of Cromwell’s New Model Army, who warred against the princely authority of bishops.78 Even if the popular classes were not uniformly Cromwellian, New England’s radical tradition revived on a grand scale in the 1770s. Many people outside New England believed that the whole Roundhead Yankee nation “down east” in New England were demented fanatics.79 Immigrant Albert Gallatin was marooned in Boston for years during the war, and immediately detested New Englanders as “those who snatched Crown & life from the unfortunate Charles.”80 Outsiders caricatured the New Englander as “Brother Jonathan,” meaning the ultra-democratic, authority-hating farmer with barnyard soil on his boots, or his twin, the sharp and restless trader with pockets full of loot – the Puritan hypocrite.81 One outsider complained that New Englanders’ “grandmothers and maiden aunts” suckled their Jonathans on stories of “what a wicked profane Monster Charles the first was, to let People fetch a Walk, play at Cricket, and go a Skaiting on the Sabbath,” referring to Yankee sabbatarian hatred of Sunday sports.82 After the Tea Party, one correspondent warned friends in England not to bargain in good faith with the New Englanders because they were “the descendants of Cromwell’s elect,” with “the same encroaching jesuitical and hypocritical disposition.”83 The truth was that a dominant majority of New Englanders were pragmatic, and had been willing to uphold the constitution as it existed in 1763, before the king-in-Parliament began innovating.84 Loyalists ignored that and harped on the image of monolithic, wild-eyed republicanism in New England, which frightened the propertied classes of all regions. Outsiders were convinced that the mild Stephen Hopkins types were too few, and the Cromwellians too many. Above all, southern planters had a historical memory of 1649 that was totally at odds with New England’s tradition. The South For the southern slaveholders, the monarchical principles of 1689 were sacrosanct. Monarchism was the key to their political economy of slavery, for sharp “natural” hierarchy was its central pillar. The planters’ allegiance to their king was a model to be imitated by common people toward their masters. Given their personal loyalty to the crown and the crown’s church, most planters were enemies of New England radicalism,

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and expected ordinary Virginians to agree. However, the planters had reason to worry about the common people, white and black, for whom the upside-down upheaval of 1649 had its allure. In Boston, 1649 was the moment when the high had been brought low and liberty expanded, but in purse-proud Williamsburg it was the dark nadir of English history.85 In 1649, the Virginia planters reacted to the beheading of the king by denouncing the regicides, proclaiming the younger Charles Stuart to be their king, and making it treasonable to say otherwise.86 Virginians even marked off a large grant of land for exiled royalist Cavaliers they hoped would come there. Such open defiance led Parliament to suppress the colony’s government by force of arms in 1652. Parliament’s navy conducted a bloodless humiliation of the colonists at Jamestown, which became a central feature of southern historical tradition: Virginians had remained loyal to the Stuarts and resisted rule by fanatics.87 Virginians were in the vanguard of the Restoration in 1659 by proclaiming for a second time that Charles II was their king.88 Immediately after the Restoration, the House of Burgesses set aside January 30 as a day of fasting and prayer to commemorate “that barbarous act” of “that execrable power” that had “massacred” Charles I.89 The planters would later endorse the settlement of 1689 like other propertied Americans, but their view of 1649 was militantly negative. The planters’ descendants forgot Parliament’s relative leniency in the 1650s, preferring to remember the Navy’s threat to incite Virginia’s slaves.90 As an Anglican missionary informed his readers in 1753, Virginians were proud that their colony “was the last of all the American English Plantations that submitted to Oliver’s Yoke; nor was it without a Struggle and Force.”91 It was no surprise, then, that the cause of independence received its key impetus only near the end of 1775, when the royal governors of Virginia and North Carolina made demagogic appeals to slaves to rise against their rebel masters. That “totally changed” the balance of forces in the South, according to one observer, the one thing that could force them into a team with New Englanders.92 For the historical traditions in New England and the South were not just different, they were direct continuations of the English Revolution.93 Over the entire course of the South’s history, “the identification of Puritanism with fanaticism and bigotry became a staple of southern criticism of the North.”94 Thus, the confederation that began calling itself a nation in 1776 would have to begin with a vaguely enunciated republican ideology, framed by a carefully pruned common history.95 Divisions were so deep that when

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congressmen began work in the autumn of 1774, the prospect of confederating sufficiently to achieve independence seemed very uncertain – history was a big problem.96 Three closely related differences separated the New Englanders and the southern planters: the issue of loyalty to the crown, the problem of sectional economic jealousy, and the fear of social “leveling” as it was usually called. The historical traditions of 1649 were bound up with all three and served to jumble them together in the minds of congressmen. Congress and The Cause would have dissolved at any point before 1776 if the New Englanders had provided undeniable evidence of a hankering for independence, that is, an overthrow of the king’s authority. Publicly, Nathan Fiske’s fast-day sermon for July 14, 1774 enunciated the sentiment of many in New England that “we rejoice in being the subjects of King GEORGE: we rejoice in being part of the British dominions.”97 Upholding the crown was essential for New Englanders to reassure moderate congressmen in Philadelphia. For the delegates labored in Congress under a hail of accusations like that of an angry prescriber of “Pills for the Delegates,” who screamed at them that “the bottom of your scheme [is] an independent republic.”98 Loyalists in all colonies cried out, along with British politicians, that the Tea Party was a New England conspiracy in the tradition of 1649, and their yelling definitely limited discussion in Philadelphia.99 Law-and-order enthusiasts in Parliament provided loyalists with plenty of good copy about how dangerous New Englanders were.100 None was pithier than Colonel Thomas More Molyneux, MP for Haslemere, Surrey, who, in the House of Commons debate on repeal of the Stamp Act in February 1766, demanded: “Shall we stay till some Oliver rises up amongst them? Four sorts of people appear among them: hypocrites, agitators, preachers, and levellers, the four sorts of people whom Cromwell used for his purposes.”101 Bishop Charles Moss, son of a Norfolk grazier, preached ferociously in the Lords on January 30, 1769, to commemorate “the Day of the MARTYRDOM of King CHARLES I,” condemning mobs in Old and New England.102 He excoriated the “corrupt lusts” of the men of 1649, the fact that “the lowest of the people thought themselves masters of the science of Legislation and Civil polity,” and warned that republicanism ends in “a scene of rapine, bloodshed and devastation.”103 Even the colonists’ best friends in London might refer to 1649 in order to warn the hardliners in Parliament that they could inspire a great rebellion. Thomas Pownall sharply lectured the Commons in 1769 that “you are upon the point of a civil war.” Although “independence is

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not in their heads” the revenue measures could “raise a fanaticism that no prudence, that no force, that no conduct can resist,” namely the fanaticism of New England’s founders, for “their ancestors left this country on that account.”104 These speeches prompted local writers to harp on 1649 in sulfurous tones to divide rebels. The New England Tory John Mein described his countrymen’s king-hating tradition in detail. “In the days of George the third,” he cried, “the Puritans of New England are exactly the same people as their forefathers were in the days of Charles the first.”105 Joseph Galloway, soon to become a loyalist exile like Mein, noted that the New Englanders were always hostile even to a “mixed” monarchy like that of England: they intended from the beginning to establish an independent commonwealth. He described the coming War of Independence as having “risen from the same source, and been conducted by the same spirit with that which effected the destruction of the English Government in the last century . . . the American republicans had the same design from the beginning,” now orchestrated by a man of “brilliant abilities,” Samuel Adams, at the head of “the Cromwellian faction.”106 With loyalist broadsides announcing in the streets of Philadelphia that the delegates were “conven’d to plan a Republick,” the Massachusetts delegates carefully avoided direct offense to the reigning spirit of loyalty.107 Thomas Gage arrived in Boston in May, 1774 with plans to exploit anti-republican propaganda to inspire loyalty to the crown. His captain of the guard Robert Prescott published a fiery political salute to his troops. According to him, New Englanders were “infatuated” with the bizarre ideas of 1649, “the wildest fanaticism . . . to the utmost possible extreme of Liberty,” ideas which were then “dropt in a Corner of the World, uncontroled for Generations,” and inevitably “ripened into Sedition, as the immediate Word of God.”108 New Englanders were descendants of the men who had “dispersed impiety, bigotry, superstition, hypocrisy, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the empire!”109 The planters and their fellow moderates in the mid-Atlantic colonies certainly did not want that.110 They had to be convinced of the New Englanders’ willingness to compromise with their king.111 There was no hope of unity in Philadelphia if, as Lord North had openly declared on April 22 and Galloway whispered in every ear, Massachusetts was in the hands of a gang of conspirators bent on independence.112 For the planters it was about loyalty to the crown, it was about their honor.113 The prevailing view among colonial leaders in the

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fall of 1774 was that nothing was more horrible to contemplate than the colonies’ independence or disloyalty. Nothing caused delegates more anxiety than the possibility that they disgrace themselves by associating with disloyal New Englanders.114 The loyalist press warned them at every opportunity that “the republican party” had “long been aiming at independency” and was eager to fix “the shackles of a republican commonwealth” on the colonists.115 So it was of major importance as Congress convened in September 1774, that most delegates sighed with relief to discover that the Adamses did not seem to be frenzied anarchists, and were apparently willing to find a way to preserve the constitution of 1689.116 Sectional divisions created a second kind of pressure on the New England delegates to steer clear of 1649: the other delegates’ fears of the great political and economic power of their region. If it was obvious the brace of Adamses were not mobbish men, the larger concern remained, as Samuel Adams reported home, “that we aim at a total independency, not only of the mother-country, but of the colonies too; and that, as we are a hardy and brave people, we shall in time overrun them all.”117 John Adams felt “cruel mortification” at the “prejudices and jealousies” expressed by delegates from the other sections.118 The image New Englanders projected was that of an ethnically and religiously homogeneous tribe of Roundheads in pursuit of a historic cause, one that would give them the strength to exert self-righteous lordship over the diverse and divided peoples of the middle and southern colonies. Neighboring New York colonists felt directly threatened by a jackbooted Yankee regime.119 They dreaded New England’s “deep rooted republicanism, democratic, levelling principles, ever unfriendly to monarchy.”120 In the South, the planters feared that they would be painfully exposed if they lost royal protection, for the “Saxons and Danes” of New England, full of “the Oliverian fire,” could easily gain control of those colonies “having a dangerous enemy within their own bowels,” namely slaves.121 As John Adams expressed it, the Revolution was coming to depend on popular principles, which were “abhorrent to the inclinations of the barons of the South and the proprietary interests in the middle colonies.”122 The New Englanders’ nomination of a Virginia planter to head the Continental Army placated the South to a degree, but fear of Roundhead excess continued to shape the politics of the United Colonies.123 As late as May, 1776, New England’s Joseph Hawley reported that northern loyalists were sure the planters would spurn a

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partnership with Roundheads, for New England despotism would force them eventually to do “as they did in England, after Cromwell’s death, call in Charles the Second.”124 The worst sectional fears were overcome by 1776 only because elites in the middle colonies shared many tendencies and interests with the southern planters. A John Dickinson worried that the “brutal power” of Parliament in 1649 “became an irresistible argument for boundless right” enforced at “the point of a Cromwell’s sword.”125 As Robert Morris of Philadelphia put it in 1775, “I abhor the Name & Idea of a Rebel, I neither want or wish a Change of King or Constitution.”126 Gradually, leaders from the Middle Colonies and the South realized that they formed a majority strong enough to stand up to the imperial Yankees down east.127 A third major problem for Congress was obvious by 1774, which began as a sectional concern but eventually served to unite all delegates from outside New England: their worry that the supposed “leveling” spirit of New England would, in the heat of a war, run amok and spread to the other colonies.128 It was true, as one New Englander argued, that people in his region had “[no] wish to destroy distinctions, where distinctions are necessary,” but it was equally true that the descendants of Roundheads looked back to 1649 as an age when overweening lords were brought low.129 By contrast, the Cavaliers of Virginia looked back upon 1649 as a sorry day when the natural hierarchy of society had crashed to the ground with the severed head of Charles I.130 Given the restless populations of non-slaveholders and slaves in the South, the Washingtons and Jeffersons had an uphill battle against the reactionary bent of their class.131 Common people in general were, one congressman moaned in 1775, “desirous to establish a system of democracy in America, thereby to rise into power & to build up themselves upon the ruin of the British Constitution.”132 Increasing wealth stratification in America meant that a conflict with England might lead to class conflict, as in London in the 1640s.133 Conservative colonists saw the Sons of Liberty as “ignorant men, bred to the lowest occupations . . . unprincipled mobs,” who harbored “a spirit of levelism and fierceness, which, with a blind fiery zeal, pulls down government, rulers, church, state, science, and morals, into one general and common ruin.”134 A clever Philadelphia writer, a patriot named John Leacock, lampooned the widespread concern about New England’s leveling spirit. He began publishing a popular satirical series in the fall of 1774 aimed at New England’s republicanism, imperialism, and levelism. In a superb

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mock-Biblical style he reveals that Boston patriots induced an old witch to raise the ghost of Cromwell so they could stick him on to General Thomas Gage and anyone else who needed a proper scare. A groveling salute to Cromwell by Jedediah the Priest (Samuel Adams) summarizes what was generally known about the 1650s. Cromwell’s foreign policy is referred to by the writer in some detail, as is the general’s refusal of a proffered crown. But all this is couched in sarcasm, ridiculing the man who styles himself (honking through a fisherman’s trumpet) “his HIGHNESS OLIVER CROMWELL, the most Invincible, Puissant, Invulnerable, Magnanimous, and Evangelical, LORD PROTECTOR of the Commonwealth of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England, and the Territories thereunto depending, Generalissimo, Chancellor, and Lord High Admiral of the same.”135 The humor was salutary, but most jibes were more bitter than Leacock’s. The Tory “Americanus” asserted that the War of Independence was being engineered by a “Catilius [Catiline] and his adherents, [who] will persevere with the fanaticism of a Cromwell, without his abilities.”136 The New England delegation in Philadelphia must have been deeply impressed by the need to soften the region’s image as a “hardy” people who would kill kings, overrun the other colonies, and level society. Abandoning the Revolution of 1649 By 1775, all delegates in Philadelphia found it wise for the sake of an orderly alliance to disengage from English history, except in a strictly legal sense. That meant they focused on the principles encoded in the constitution of 1689, which the English had violated in their treatment of the colonists. The congressmen mostly just stopped talking about the chief historical precedent for the American Revolution, the English Revolution of 1649.137 While it was not possible to suppress systematically all discussion of that major event, it was clear to the delegates that nothing threatened unity so much as their mixed and supercharged historical knowledge of 1649. To make democratic-republican states, moderates and radicals had to work out a compromise without appealing to the highly problematic revolution of 1649.138 Ye olde Puritan heritage had to go. The pamphlets written by leading rebel politicians in the last year of the crisis before July 4, 1776, stop mentioning the revolution of 1649. The birth of authentically American history began to fill the resulting empty space in their consciousness. As they convicted and symbolically

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decapitated the monarch in the Declaration of Independence, Americans developed their own litanies of despotic cruelties and honor rolls of patriot heroes.139 Moreover, failed revolutions like that of 1649 just seemed to be a bad omen.140 Any lingering doubts in the delegates’ minds about the wisdom of historical disengagement evaporated early in 1776, when the recent immigrant Thomas Paine made his extraordinary remark in Common Sense that “the fate of Charles the First, hath only made kings more subtle – not more just.”141 This observation inspired a new round of fierce warnings in loyalist pamphlets about what happened in 1649 when “republicanism triumphed over the constitution.”142 Loyalists warned that “independence, or a democratical government, would soon give way to a military system imposed on the colonies, by some Cromwell of our armies.”143 Paine realized his mistake. He did not invoke the revolution of 1649 again. During the war, the shadow of Protector Cromwell continued to linger, invoked at times by those rebels who worried about the threat of military power, but Washington’s integrity eventually allayed that concern.144 Despite the fact that the Leveller manifestos of the 1640s provided a blueprint for liberal reform in the United States, most Americans developed collective amnesia as part of their cultural drift away from Britain, their “unbecoming British.”145 In rebel publications between 1776 and 1783, there are almost no references to the revolution of 1649.146 The first July 4th commemorative orators in Boston appealed to every conceivable, remote historical precedent for the American republic, except that of 1649.147 Rebels were reminded why it was a subject to be avoided whenever loyalists had control of a press, for they loved to trot out a bogey of the “despotism” of “Democratic principles” in 1649.148 Loyalist exiles in England waited with bated breath for the moment when George Washington would declare himself “Lord Protector,” which would signal the beginning of the end for the rebellion.149 As it happened, history served the loyalists well in staving off the Revolution, but it failed them in the end. The rebels were fortunate to have an unsleeping but self-effacing leader in Samuel Adams. Notorious as the very embodiment of 1649, he surprised the other delegates in Philadelphia by not being a manic visionary when he appeared in September, 1774. He was shrewd enough to pull up the New England rebels’ anchor in history, pad the decks stealthily over the next twenty-two months, and let the flimsy bark of “The United Colonies” drift over the shoals of loyalism into blue but uncharted waters, even while his presence in Congress reassured those like him everywhere

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that their historic cause – democratic republicanism – was stowed away discreetly down in the hold. Notes 1. Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville, Va., 1998), 17. 2. Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (New York, 2004), 13. 3. On Patrick Henry’s use of the metaphor of the lamp, see George Morgan, Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, Pa., 1929), 189. 4. For meditations on the “relative autonomyˮ of culture, see Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Malden, Mass., 2000); and Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (New York, 2003). 5. Bernard Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation,ˮ in Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (New York, 1973), 7–9. See pp. 3–31. Compare to Christopher Hill, A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (New York, 1990), 131–2, 220–1. On debate about a previous generation’s “republican synthesis,ˮ see Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992); Robert Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,ˮ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (1982), 334–56; and Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,ˮ Journal of American History 79 (1992), 11–38. On the ways the Whigs and Tories historicized the revolution of 1649 after 1660, see David Cressy, “Remembrancers of the Revolution: Histories and Historiographies of the 1640s,ˮ in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, Calif., 2006), 253–62. On memory of 1649 in New England, see Alfred F. Young, “English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,ˮ in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London, 1984), 197–200; and Alfred F. Young, Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution (New York, 2006), 144–79. One historian who has put special emphasis on the importance of 1649 in loyalist ideology is Janice Potter, in The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 39–83. 6. Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (New York, 2003), 298, 347. Elites had long practice in constructing historical memory to consolidate power. See Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven, Conn., 2003), 59. See pp. 56–62. On the Revolution, see John L. Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic,ˮ in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 207– 50.

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7. Henry Hulton, in Henry Hulton and the American Revolution: An Outsider’s View, ed. Neil Longley York (Boston, Mass., 2010), 229–30. 8. Christopher Hill, “Freethinking and Libertinism: The Legacy of the English Revolution,ˮ in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Roger D. Lund (New York, 1995), 64. See pp. 54– 72. 9. A bitter John Adams described American politics as “tempestuous.ˮ See John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, February 7, 1801, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 10 vols., ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, Mass., 1850–56), 9: 98. See pp. 97–8. 10. Christopher Hill, “A Bourgeois Revolution?ˮ in Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 109–39. See also Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York, 2002). On recent historiography (pp. 63–83), and a unique approach to the upheaval, see Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1991), 63–169. 11. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), 92. See also Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 3. 12. On the debate in England, see Matthew Newfeld, The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2013). 13. The settlement of 1689 was, of course, “genuinely revolutionaryˮ in a constitutional sense. See Tim Harris, Revolution: the Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (New York, 2006), 15; and H. T. Dickinson, “The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the ‘Glorious Revolution’,ˮ History 61 (1976), 28–45. 14. David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second, 1688, 6 vols. (Boston, Mass., 1850), 5:370, 373. 15. Ibid., 5:371, 368, 370. 16. Ibid., 5:436. 17. Ibid., 5:388. Hume does temporize about the Protector later in the book, arguing that his “usurpationˮ was caused as much by the situation as by his personal ambition. See p. 489. 18. Ibid., 5:387. For typical versions of this argument applied to the rebels of 1776 by American writers, see The Patriots of North-America: A Sketch (New York, 1775), 41–2; and [Myles Cooper?], A Strange and Wonderful Indian Dream (Boston, Mass., 1773), 4–5. Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn sneered at the “extravagant absurditiesˮ of the Puritans in his scorching attack on Benjamin Franklin in the Privy Council early in 1774. See “Wedderburn’s Speech before the Privy Council,ˮ January 29, 1774, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 21, January 1, 1774 through March 22, 1775, 41 vols., ed. William B. Willcox et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–2014), 43–68. See p. 63. 19. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien R´egime, 2nd edn. (New York, 2000), 44–6.

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20. Isaac Kimber, The Life of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1724); [John Bancks], A Short Critical Review of the Political Life of Oliver Cromwell (Dublin, 1739). This author’s name also appears as “Banks.” 21. Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York, 2009), 24–7. 22. Catherine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols. (London, 1763–83), vol. 5 on the Commonwealth, in which Cromwell is “the usurper.” 23. The Political Beacon; Or, The Life and Character of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1770), 507, iii. See also Rachel Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns (New York, 2010), 102–7. 24. James Boswell, The Journals of James Boswell, 1762–1795, ed. John Wain (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 273. 25. John Brooke, “Introductory Survey,ˮ in The House of Commons, 1754–1790, ed. Lewis Namier and John Brooke, 3 vols. (New York, 1964), 1:91. 26. Jonathan Fitzgibbons, Cromwell’s Head (Kew, Surrey, 2008), 60–2: Jolene Zigarovich, “Preserved Remains: Embalming Practices in Eighteenth-Century England,ˮ Eighteenth-Century Life 33 (2009), 95–6. See pp. 65–104. Authorities reinterred the head only in 1960. 27. Acts 17:6. See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (New York, 1975), 8. 28. Peter Karsten, Patriot-Heroes in England and America: Political Symbolism and Changing Values Over Three Centuries (Madison, Wis., 1978). 29. [Henry Barry?] Remarks Upon A Discourse Preached December 15th 1774 (New York, 1775), 4. On a Cromwellian “Massinello,ˮ see An Essay Upon Government, Adopted by the Americans, Wherein, the Lawfulness of Revolutions are Demonstrated in a Chain of Consequences from the Fundamental Principles of Society (Philadelphia, Pa., 1775), 112–3, 92–100. 30. [James Allen], The Poem which the Committee of the Town of Boston had Voted Unanimously to be Published (Boston, Mass., 1772), 7. 31. Francis J. Bremer, Puritan Crisis: New England and the English Civil Wars, 1630–1670 (New York, 1989), 101–5, 248–84. New Englanders suppressed sectarians who gave conservatives in England an excuse to bring back the monarchy. See Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 138–74. Upon the restoration, a few regicides escaped to New England, along with all the fugitive dreams of 1649. See Ezra Stiles, A History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I (Hartford, Conn., 1794); John Donoghue, Fire Under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago, Ill., 2013), 286–94; Lemuel A. Welles, The History of the Regicides in New England (New York, 1971); Douglas C. Wilson, “Web of Secrecy: Goffe, Whalley, and the Legend of Hadley,ˮ The New England Quarterly 90 (1987), 515–48; Philip Major, “‘A Poor Exile Stranger’: William Goffe in New England,ˮ in Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640–1690, ed. Philip Major (Burlington, Vt., 2010), 153–66; Jason Peacey, “‘The Good

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Old Cause for Which I Suffer’: The Life of a Regicide in Exile,ˮ in ibid., 167– 80; and Adrian Tinniswood, The Rainborowes: One Family’s Quest to Build a New England (New York, 2013), 306–11. 32. Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, Conn., 1984), 215–328. 33. Clinton L. Rossiter, “John Wise: Colonial Democrat,ˮ New England Quarterly 22 (1949), 3–32; Christine LaHue, “The Resurrection of John Wise: Popular Mobilization and the Opening of the American Revolution, 1771– 1775” (Ohio State University, M.A. thesis, 2006); Charles W. Akers, Called Unto Liberty: A Life of Jonathan Mayhew, 1720–1766 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964). 34. Joseph A. Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (Baltimore, Md., 2006), 98–130. 35. On the divide between royalists and populists over the revolution of 1649, see Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1693–1714 (New York, 1996), 340. 36. Ebenezer Punderson, [Jr.], The Narrative of Mr. Ebenezer Punderson, Merchant: Who was Drove Away by the Rebels in America from his Family and a Very Considerable Fortune in Norwich, in Connecticut (London, 1776). 37. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence S. Mayo, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 1:162. See pp. 162–75. 38. Henry Caner to Richard Terrick, July 22, 1775, in Letter-Book of the Rev. Henry Caner, S.P.G. Missionary in Colonial Connecticut and Massachusetts Until the Revolution: A Review of His Correspondence from 1728 through 1778, ed. Kenneth W. Cameron (Hartford, Conn., 1972), 165. 39. Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (New York, 2001), 215–42. 40. [Stephen Hopkins], The Rights of Colonies Examined (Providence, R.I., 1765), 4. For a bitter retort to Hopkins, expressing anger that he even mentioned 1649, see [Martin Howard], A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, to His Friend in Rhode-Island (Newport, R.I., 1776), 4. 41. For the classic statement that Cromwell and the Levellers had wrecked a revolution started by men of high principles, see Richard Watson, The Principles of the Revolution Vindicated, In a Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge on Wednesday, May 29, 1776 (Cambridge, 1776), 12, 16. For Levellers’ demands, see H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (Stanford, Calif., 1961), 528– 35. 42. Most historians of the eighteenth century condemned Cromwell. See Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Indianapolis, Ind., 1998), 44–5; and Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York, 1972), 265–7. 43. Samuel Williams, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country; Delivered on a Day of Thanksgiving (Salem, Mass., 1775), 16.

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44. The party names began as terms of abuse in Parliament in 1679, during debate over the bill to exclude from the throne James, Duke of York (later James II) because he was a crusading Catholic. York’s supporters were Tories, his antagonists Whigs. The eighteenth-century definitions of these terms did not translate well in New England. Congregationalism was legitimate “orthodoxyˮ for most, and virtually everyone agreed that commercial expansion was a good thing, making most people “Whigsˮ in that sense. 45. John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Amherst, Mass., 1992), 61. 46. Old Light leader Charles Chauncy was representative of the group. After repeal of the Stamp Act, he believed that “non-submissionˮ to it had been necessary in 1765, yet he appealed to precedents in “the Revolutionˮ of 1689, not 1649. See Charles Chauncy, A Discourse on “The Good News from a Far Countryˮ (Boston, Mass., 1766), 21. See also William Patten, A Discourse Delivered at Halifax (Boston, Mass., 1766), 10–11. 47. See Caroline Robbins in The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), for a book about people who were committed to constitutional monarchy. 48. Sidney repeatedly defined the best government to be a mixed monarchy – Whig orthodoxy. See his Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis, Ind., 1990), 31, 166–7, 195–202, 478–93. “Republicanˮ was a term of rhetorical abuse on both sides of the Atlantic. 49. Isaac Story, The Love of Our Country Recommended and Enforced, in a Sermon from Psalm CXXII, 7 (Boston, Mass., 1775), 14. 50. Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and NonResistance to the Higher Powers: With Some Reflections on the Resistance made to King Charles I (Boston, Mass., 1750), 53. For mourning of January 30, see Charles Inglis, The Duty of Honouring the King, Explained and Recommended in a Sermon Preached in St. George’s and St. Paul’s Chapels, New York, On Sunday, January 30, 1780; Being the Anniversary of the Martyrdom of King CHARLES I (New York, 1780). 51. Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, 13, 30. The same view animated John Allen. See [John Allen], The American Alarm, or the Bostonian Plea for the Rights, and Liberties, of the People (Boston, Mass., 1773), 19. See also p. 26. On the terrific effect Mayhew’s discourse had on New Englanders, see John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 18, 1818, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams–Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 527. 52. Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, 47. See also Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 92–100. 53. Humphry Ploughjogger to the Publishers, Boston Evening-Post, September 5, 1763.

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54. [John Adams and Daniel Leonard], Novanglus and Massachusettensis, or, Political Essays Published in the Years 1774 and 1775 (Boston, Mass., 1819), 14. 55. Ibid., 185. Leonard made his attack on the English rebels of 1649 on January 30, 1775, the anniversary of the death of Charles I. Adams felt forced by opinion in his circle to defend the Protector, yet he quietly revealed to a friend that he regarded Cromwell as a “great self-deceiver who thought himself sincere,ˮ who shipwrecked the revolution. See John Adams to Unknown Correspondent, April 27, 1777, Papers of John Adams, 18 vols., ed., Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint (Cambridge, Mass., 1977–2016), 5:163. See also Josiah Quincy, Jr., in his Observations on the Act of Parliament Commonly Called the Boston Port-Bill (Boston, Mass., 1774), 36, 70. 56. [Thomas Hutchinson], The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq., 2 vols., comp. Peter Orlando Hutchinson (New York, 1971), 1:167. 57. David Lowenstein, “Milton’s Prose and the Revolution,ˮ The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble (New York, 2001), 87–106. 58. Parliament had ruled in 1721 that comparing contemporary times to those in the 1640s was seditious. See Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, 40. Adams could hardly avoid the subject altogether. He kept resistance alive in the early 1770s by attacking Governor Thomas Hutchinson as a tyrant in the tradition of Charles I. See “Candidusˮ [Samuel Adams], Boston Gazette, December 9, 1771, The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, 4 vols. (New York, 1904–08), 2:292–3. See pp. 287–93. 59. [Samuel Adams], The House of Representatives of Massachusetts to Dennys De Berdt, January 12, 1768, Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 1:139. See pp. 134–52. 60. John Wilkes, The History of England, (New York, 1768), 1:12. 61. For a rare example, see “E. A.ˮ [Samuel Adams] in the Boston Gazette, February 27, 1769, Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 1:316–17. For older views of Adams, see Pauline Maier, “Coming to Terms with Samuel Adams,ˮ American Historical Review 81 (1976), 12–37; and John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer of Propaganda (Stanford, Calif., 1960). For a corrective to the image of Samuel Adams as a master puppeteer, see Ray Raphael, Founding Myths: Stories that Hide Our Patriotic Past (New York, 2004), 45–63. 62. [Charles Lee], Strictures on a Pamphlet, Intituled “A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americansˮ (Providence, R.I., 1775), 13. 63. George Bancroft, History of the United States of America From the Discovery of the Continent, 6 vols. (New York, 1888), 4:51. 64. Joseph Emerson, A Thanksgiving-Sermon Preach’d at Pepperrell, July 24th 1766 (Boston, Mass., 1766), 29–30. 65. Josiah Quincy, Memoirs of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Junior of Massachusetts by his Son, 2nd edn. (Boston, Mass., 1814), 122. 66. [John Allen], An Oration Upon the Beauties of Liberty, or, The Essential Rights of the Americans, 4th edn. (Boston, Mass., 1773), 44. For another vivid

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evocation of the beheading, see Joseph Hewes, A Collection of Occurrences and Facts, Known by Living Evidences ([Providence, R.I.?], 1775), 24. 67. [Nathan Daboll], Freebetter’s New-England Almanack, for 1776 (New London, Conn., 1775), entry for June. 68. Dan Foster, A Short Essay on Civil Government, the Substance of Six Sermons, Preached in Windsor, Second Society, October, 1774 (Hartford, Conn., 1775), 71. Foster’s mistake about Charles’s order in the Stuart line shows that details about the era of 1649 had gone a bit moldy. On the convergence of hostilities to king and church, see Justin Champion, “‘May the Last King Be Strangled in the Bowels of the Last Priest’: Irreligion and the English Enlightenment, 1649–1789,ˮ in Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution, ed. Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (New York, 2002), 29–44 69. Amos Adams, Religious Liberty An Invaluable Blessing (Boston, Mass., 1768), 27. See also Amos Adams, A Concise Historical View of the Perils, Hardships, Difficulties, and Discouragements which have Attended the Planting and Progressive Improvements of New England. . . (Boston, Mass., 1769), 14–15. 70. Benjamin Church, An Oration Delivered March 5th, 1773, 4th edn. (Boston, Mass., 1773), 10. For less direct but unmistakable references to 1649, see James Lovell, An Oration Delivered April 2nd, 1771, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1771), 9; Joseph Warren, An Oration Delivered March 5th, 1772 (Boston, Mass., 1772), 7–8; and Joseph Warren, An Oration Delivered March 6th, 1775 (Boston, Mass., 1775), 6–7. 71. W. Glanville Evelyn to William Evelyn, October 31, 1774, Memoir and Letters of Captain W. Glanville Evelyn of the 4th Regiment (“King’s Own”) from North America, 1774–1776, ed. G. D. Scull (Oxford, 1879), 39. 72. Samuel Peters to Hannah Peters, October, 1774, The Papers of Loyalist Samuel Peters: A Survey of the Contents of His Notebooks-Correspondence During His Flight to England, Exile, and the Last Years of His Life, comp., Kenneth W. Cameron (Hartford, Conn., 1978), 6. See also Carol Berkin, Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist (New York, 1974), 112. 73. By 1776, New England crowds disciplined “prerogativeˮ men and women in the name of “O. C.ˮ or in that of Cornet of Horse George Joyce, the commoner who arrested Charles I. See Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 41–4, 343. See also Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York, 1985), 3, 8, 74–9. 74. Young, “English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,ˮ 196. See also James Sharpe, Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). It is worthy of note that the question as to whether January 30 should be observed as a day of mourning or celebration was debated in the House of Commons in January, 1775. The celebrators lost to the mourners 50 to 138. See Hansard, vol 18, 1774–1777, 183–4.

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75. Charles Chauncy, The Appeal to the Public Answered, In Behalf of the NonEpiscopal Churches in America (Boston, Mass., 1768), 198; [John Allen], The Watchman’s Alarm to Lord N___h; Or, the British Parliamentary Boston Port-Bill Unwraped Being an Oration on the Meridian of Liberty[sic] (Salem, Mass., 1774), 12–13; see also Jonathan Mayhew, Popish Idolatry: A Discourse (Boston, Mass., 1765), 48–51. 76. A Collection of Tracts from the Late News Papers, Volume II (New York, 1769), 34; see also pp. 13, 18, 21. See also Hypocrisy Unmasked; Or, A Short Inquiry into the Religious Complaints of Our American Colonies (London, 1776), 3, on “Cromwell’s hypocritical solicitude for the glory of the Lord.” 77. John Milton, An Old Looking-Glass for the Laity and Clergy of all Denominations (New Haven, Conn., 1774). 78. In other words, the readers of the 1760s and 70s looked less to the writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon than to the seventeenth-century struggle. See Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 212. For the argument that eighteenth-century Whig opposition writers exercised great influence in America, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 22–93. 79. On the most authoritative explanation for the origin of the term “Yankeeˮ for New Englanders as the Algonquians’ pronunciation of “English,ˮ see John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, revd. edn. (Bowie, Md., 1990), 77, 143. 80. Albert Gallatin, quoted in Edwin G. Burrows, “‘Notes on Settling America’: Albert Gallatin, New England, and the American Revolution,ˮ The New England Quarterly 58 (1985), 449. See pp. 442–53. 81. Used in print by those unfriendly to New Englanders during the War, the rebels embraced the sobriquet as part of their lore as they became gradually even more radical after 1783. See Albert Matthews, “Brother Jonathan,ˮ Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 7, Transactions 1900–1902 (Boston, Mass., 1905), 94–119; and Albert Matthews, “Brother Jonathan Once More,ˮ Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 32, Transactions 1933–1937 (Boston, Mass., 1937), 374–86. On the developing New England identity over time, see Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001). 82. The Patriots of North-America: A Sketch, 42. 83. Anonymous correspondent, November 20, 1774, in Margaret Wheeler Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution, 1774–1776 (Boston, Mass., 1925), 12. 84. This is in response to J. G. A. Pocock, in “Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins,ˮ in After the Reformation, ed. Barbara C. Malament (New York, 1980), 333. See also Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (New York, 1999), 262–4.

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85. Danbury’s Ebenezer Baldwin was sure the War of Independence would have to be undertaken by the northern colonists, since the planters were discouraged by “the Number of their Slaves.ˮ See Ebenezer Baldwin, The Duty of Rejoicing under Calamaties and Afflictions, Considered and Improved in a Sermon, Preached at Danbury, November 16, 1775. (New York, 1776), 33. The British agreed. See Paul H. Smith, Loyalists and Redcoats: A Study in British Revolutionary Policy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964), 21–32. On the loyalists, see Wesley F. Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1689 (Baton Rouge, La., 1970), 148–53, 224–7. 86. William W. Hening, The Statutes at Large, 13 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1809), 1:358–61. 87. Ibid., 363–8. See also Ebenezer Hazard, ed., Historical Collections, Consisting of State Papers, and Other Authentic Documents, Intended as Materials for an History of the United States of America, 2 vols. (Freeport, N.Y., 1969 [1792–94]), 1:560–4; Richard Bland, An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (Williamsburg, Va., 1766), 18–20; Edward Bancroft, Remarks on the Review of the Controversy between Great Britain and Her Colonies (New London, Conn., 1771), 54–6; and Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg, Va., 1774), 8–9. In Parliament in 1775, Thomas Pownall would refer to that incident as a precedent to justify coercing all the colonies. See Speech of Thomas Pownall, February 20, 1774, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, ed. R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, 6 vols. (New York, 1982–87), 5:442–3. Parliament allowed Virginians a remarkable degree of autonomy during the Commonwealth. See Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 262–5; Donoghue, Fire Under the Ashes, 220–1. When Parliament voted in 1775 to cut off intercourse with the colonies and go to war, Lord North’s supporters cited “the precedent of O. Cromwell’s Actˮ in invading Virginia. See John Yorke to Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, December 2, 1775, British Library, Hardwicke Papers, Add. Mss. 35, 375. 88. The myth the planters brewed with the fact about 1652 was that the Old Dominion came to be peopled by many royalist Cavalier e´ migr´es in the 1650s. For the classic reference, see Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1947), 63–4. At a crucial moment in the debates about slavery at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Pierce Butler of South Carolina would angrily recall Parliament’s instruction of 1652. See Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 247; and [James Madison], Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (New York, 1987), 504. On the continuing historical relevance of the English Revolution in the South, mixed with a supposed racial conflict between (northern) Saxons and (southern) Normans, see Robert B. Bonner, “Roundheaded Cavaliers?: The Context and Limits of a Confederate Racial Project,ˮ Civil War History 48 (2002), 34–59. 89. Hening, The Statutes At Large, 2:24–5. See also David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1989), 190–206.

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90. W. N. Sainsbury, ed., “Virginia in 1650–1652,ˮ The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 17:3 (1909), 283. The planters harbored a bitter memory of this instruction. The planters denounced Nathaniel Bacon, leader of the uprising of 1675–76, as a “Leveller,ˮ like those of 1649. See Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, Mass., 2000), 137. See pp. 135–9. 91. [James MacSparran], America Dissected, Being a Full and True Account of all the American Colonies (Dublin, 1753), 10. For his attack on “Levelismˮ in the colonies, see p. 9; and on the Cromwellism and “odious Cantˮ of New Englanders, see p. 24. Virginia’s William Byrd II defined New Englanders as a people contemptuous of kings. See William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, ed. William K. Boyd (New York, 1967), 4–6. 92. Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman in North Carolina, April 17, 1776, Amer. Arch, 5:759–60. See Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, 2014), 219–33; Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York, 1971), 103, 110–13; Ronald Hoffman, “The ‘Disaffected’ in the Revolutionary South,ˮ in The American Revolution, ed. Alfred F. Young (Dekalb, Ill., 1976), 273–316; and Daniel S. Coquillette, “Sectionalism, Slavery and the Threat of War in Josiah Quincy Jr.’s 1773 Southern Journal,ˮ The New England Quarterly 79 (2006), 181–201. A disapproving Edmund Burke was the first to discuss openly the tactic of arming the slaves against their masters, on March 22. See Burke’s Resolutions for Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775, in Hansard, vol. 18, 1774– 1777, 502. 93. For an introduction, see Jack P. Greene, “A Fortuitous Convergence: Culture, Circumstance, and Contingency in the Emergence of the American Nation,ˮ in Jack P. Greene, Imperative Behaviors and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 290–309; and Jack P. Greene, “The Constitution of 1787 and the Question of Southern Distinctivenessˮ, ibid., 327–47. 94. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York, 2005), 661. See pp. 649–79. 95. Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation Into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 223. 96. On sectionalism and the weakness of nationalism, see Julie Flavell, “British Perceptions of New England and the Decision for a Coercive Colonial Policy, 1774–1775,ˮ in Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754–1815, ed. Julie Flavell and Stephen Conway (Gainesville, Fla., 2004), 95–115. 97. Nathan Fiske, The Importance of Righteousness to the Happiness, and the Tendency of Oppression to the Misery of a People (Boston, Mass., 1774), 37. 98. Pills for the Delegates, Or the Chairman Chastised (New York, 1775), 31.

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99. Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (New York, 2013), 150–67; William H. Nelson, The American Tory (Oxford, 1961), 180. 100. It was an old tactic. See Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 7, 25–7. 101. Simmons and Thomas, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 2:168. 102. Charles Moss, A Sermon Preached before the House of Lords in the Abbey Church of St. Peter, Westminster, On Monday, January 30, 1769 (London, 1769), 12. 103. Ibid. 104. Simmons and Thomas, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 3:100. See also pp. 105–6; and 272–3, for his cautionary reference to Strafford in regard to the spirit of New England. 105. [John Mein], Sagittarius’s Letters and Political Speculations Extracted from The Public Ledger (Boston, Mass., 1775), especially pp. 22 and 32 on the original intent of disloyal New Englanders to establish “an independent state.ˮ For a different explanation of the loyalists’ motivations, especially their “moral estrangement,ˮ see Robert M. Calhoon, “The Loyalist Perception,ˮ in Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, revd. edn. (Columbia, S.C., 2010), 3–13. 106. Joseph Galloway, History and Political Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Revolution (London, 1780), 110–11, 53–7, 93. See also Galloway’s Speech, LDC, 1976–2000), 1:112–19. Yale grad and proponent of Anglican bishops Thomas Bradbury Chandler also had Adams in mind when he informed his readers that New Englanders had already “nominated the man who is to be their PROTECTOR.ˮ See [Thomas B. Chandler], A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans, On the Subject of Our Political Confusions (New York, 1774), 30. 107. The Address of Liberty, to the Buckskins of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pa., 1775), broadside. 108. [Robert Prescott], A Letter from a Veteran, to the Officers of the Army Encamped at Boston (New York, 1774), 17. 109. [John Lind?], An Englishman’s Answer to the Address from the Delegates to the People of Great Britain (New York, 1775), 23. See also p. 10; and Prescott, A Letter from a Veteran to the Officers of the Army Encamped at Boston, 7–8. 110. The extent of loyalism in New York horrified William Tudor. See Tudor to John Adams, July 7, 1776, Taylor et al., Papers of John Adams, 4:367– 8. See also Henry Knox to [unknown], January 5, 1776, U.S. Revolution Collection, Box 2, Folder 1, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 111. See Julie M. Flavell, “Lord North’s Conciliatory Proposal and the Patriots in London,ˮ The English Historical Review 107 (1992), 302–22, on the desire for peace in 1775. See Lord Drummond’s Minutes, January 5, 1776, LDC, 3:32–3, on southern fears that New Englanders would kill chances for peace.

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112. Simmons and Thomas, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 4:267; John Adams to Abigail Adams, June 17, 1775, LDC, 1:497; Thomas Johnson, Jr. to Horatio Gates, August 18, 1775, LDC, 1:704. As reported by one of Gage’s spies, New England rebels were determined to avoid any act that would lead to “their being censured for their rashness by the other Colonies.ˮ See Intelligence, April 9, 1775, Gage Papers, vol. 127. 113. Even if one planter, Edward Rutledge, was willing to agree with John Adams that George III was a liar, he was still working hard twenty-two months later to prevent a Declaration of Independence written on New England principles. See John Adams’s Diary, August 30, 1774, LDC, 1:43; and Edward Rutledge to John Jay, June 29, 1776, LDC, 4:333–9. 114. Daniel Dulany spoke for all planters when he defined republicans as “Enemies to the Government of England,ˮ in Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, 2nd edn. (Annapolis, Md., 1765), 22. 115. “M to the Printer of the New York Gazetteer,ˮ c. 1774, in English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (New York, 1962), 819. 116. George Washington to Robert Mackenzie, LDC, 1:166–7; Thomas Lynch to Ralph Izard, October 26, 1774, ibid., 247. 117. Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 3:158. 118. John Adams to James Lloyd, January, 1815, Adams, The Works of John Adams, 10: 110. See pp. 108–14. For the classic description of supposed distinct personality types found in “Northˮ and “South,ˮ the New Englanders being the extreme northern type, see Thomas Jefferson to Franc¸ois Jean, Marquis de Chastellux, September 2, 1785, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 8, 25 February to 31 October, 1785, ed. Julian Boyd, Mina R. Bryan, and Elizabeth L. Hutter (Princeton, N.J., 1953), 467–9. See also Ann Fairfax Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics (New York, 1991), 185–216. 119. The Poor Man’s Advice to His Poor Neighbours (New York, 1774), 13–14; At A Meeting of the True Sons of Liberty in the City of New York, July 27, 1774, Properly Convened, Present, John Calvin, John Knox, Roger Rumpus, etc. (New York, 1774); [Samuel Seabury], The Congress Canvassed: Or, An Examination into the Conduct of the Delegates, At Their Grand Convention (New York, 1774), 25–6. 120. [Charles Inglis], The Letters of Papinian: In Which the Conduct, Present State and Prospects of the American Congress are Examined (New York, 1779), 76. Ambrose Serle especially blamed the Congregationalist clergy for the rebellion because of their “Oliverian Style & Spirit.ˮ See The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, Secretary to Lord Howe, 1776–1778, ed. and intro. Edward H. Tatum, Jr. (San Marino, Calif., 1940), 90. 121. An Address to the Merchants, Freeholders, and All Other the Inhabitants of the Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pa., 1768); [B. Nicoll], A Wonderful Dream (New York, 1770); [Joseph Galloway], A Candid

Notes

122. 123.

124. 125.

126. 127.

128.

129. 130.

131.

132.

133.

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Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great-Britain and the Colonies (New York, 1775), 46–7. John Adams quoted in Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics,142. On the appointment of George Washington see Connecticut’s Eliphalet Dyer to Joseph Trumbull, June 17, 1775, LDC, 1:499. On the political manipulation of southerners’ fears, see Eliphalet Dyer to William Judd, July 23, 1775, ibid., 654–5. Joseph Hawley to Elbridge Gerry, May 1, 1776, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 5:1169. [John Dickinson], An Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great Britain Over the Colonies in America (Philadelphia, Pa., 1774), 108. See also p. 107. Robert Morris to Unknown Correspondent, December 9, 1775, LDC, 2:470. For a description of the sectional basis of national politics after 1776, see H. James Henderson, “The Structure of Politics in the Continental Congress,ˮ in Kurtz and Hutson, Essays on the American Revolution, 157–96. On the traditional “red-baitingˮ of “levelingˮ radicals by their opponents in New England, see Thomas N. Ingersoll, “‘Riches and Honour Were Rejected by Them as Loathsome Vomit’: The Fear of Leveling in New England,ˮ in Inequality in Early America, ed. Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (Hanover, N.H., 1999), 46–66. For Josiah Quincy’s extended angry attack on the “scoffersˮ who belittled “partisans of Libertyˮ by calling them “Levellers,ˮ see his “Political Commonplace Book,ˮ 1770, in Portrait of a Patriot: The Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior, 6 vols., ed. Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York (Boston, Mass., 2005–14), 1:111. See pp. 100–93. Samuel Stillman, Good News from a Far Country: A Sermon Preached at Boston, May 17, 1766 (Boston, Mass., 1766), 33. As Robert R. Livingston, Jr. warned congressmen in October 1775, “[the] case nearest ours [was the] commotion [in the] year 1640,ˮ the year Charles called a Parliament that would lead the country to war. See his Notes for a Speech in Congress, October 27, 1775, LDC, 2:266. See John Adams on Livingston’s frank expressions of fear of New England leveling in Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 2:106. On “The Old Republican Spiritˮ that stalked freely among Scots–Irish Presbyterian yeomen in the southern backcountry, see Charles Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution, ed. Richard J. Hooker (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953), 199. North Carolina Delegates to the Presbyterian Ministers of Philadelphia, July 3, 1775, LDC, 1:575. See also [Rednap Howell], A Fan for the Fanning and a Touch-Stone to Tryon (Boston, Mass., 1771), 19–20. Gary B. Nash, “Social Change and the Growth of Prerevolutionary Urban Radicalism,ˮ in Gary B. Nash, Race, Class, and Politics: Essays on American

82

134.

135. 136.

137.

138.

139.

140.

141. 142.

143. 144.

145.

Loyalists and Oliver Cromwell’s Ghost Colonial and Revolutionary Society, foreword by Richard S. Dunn (Urbana, Ill., 1986), 211–42. [Thomas B. Chandler], The American Querist (New York, 1774), 24–5; Williams, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, 14. See also Fiske, The Importance of Righteousness, 20. [John Leacock], The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times, Chapter IV (Philadelphia, Pa., 1775), 43. “To the Inhabitants of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay,ˮ Boston PostBoy, February 13, 1775. Loyalist poets continued to make dark references to the English Revolution throughout the war. See Winthrop Sargent, ed., The Loyalist Poetry of the Revolution (Philadelphia, Pa., 1857), 10, 42, 73, 106–7. John Adams’s last approving reference to 1649 came in a letter to James Warren, October 13, 1775, in LDC, 2:178, in which he called for the courage of “Cromwell’s soldiers and sailors.” Alfred F. Young, “Afterword: How Radical Was the American Revolution?ˮ in Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb, Ill., 1993), 334. See pp. 317–64. One can see the process at work in Whig iconography in Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s The Battle of Bunker’s-Hill (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), 29, where, in his dying speech, Joseph Warren rejoices that “I go to mingle with the dead,/Great Brutus, Hampden, Sidney, and the rest.” Americans’ selective memory is strikingly similar to that of the Scots and English at the Union of 1707, when they had to abandon Scotland’s “unusable past,ˮ according to Colin Kidd. Its “distinctive whig-Presbyterian ideologyˮ of the seventeenth century had to go because there was no “sense of common Britishness or shared whig valuesˮ if the two peoples remembered 1649. It was the same kind of forgetting in 1774. See Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (New York, 1993), 129. See also pp. 7, 49. [Thomas Paine], Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), 11. [Charles Inglis], The True Interest of America Impartially Stated in Certain Strictures on a Pamphlet Intitled Common Sense (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), 52. See also pp. 43, 53. [James Chalmers], Plain Truth; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America . . . With Additions (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), 126. See Jim Piecuch, “Washington and the Specter of Cromwell,ˮ in George Washington, Foundation of Presidential Leadership and Character, ed. Ethan Fishman, William D. Pederson, and Mark J. Rozell (Westport, Conn., 2001), 193–208. For example, compare the American Bill of Rights to “Certaine Articles for the Good of the Commonwealth,ˮ in Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, ed. Don M. Wolfe, foreword Charles A. Beard (New York,

Notes

146.

147.

148. 149.

83

1967), 189–95. On “unbecoming,ˮ see Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America became a Postcolonial Nation (New York, 2011.) For a rare exception, see Samuel Cooke, The Violent Destroyed and Oppressed Delivered. A Sermon Preached at Lexington, April 19, 1777. For a memorial of the Bloody Tragedy, Barbarously Acted by a Party of British Troops, in that Town and the Adjacent, April 19, 1775 (Boston, Mass., 1777), 22–3. John Warren, An Oration Delivered July 4th, 1783 (Boston, Mass., 1783); Benjamin Hichbo[u]rn, An Oration Delivered July 5th, 1784 (Boston, Mass., 1784). Of course, “the priest-led, uxorious, dissembling, execrable tyrant Charles Iˮ continued to play his role in history. See John Gardiner, An Oration Delivered July 4, 1785 (Boston, Mass., 1785), 19. [Inglis], The Letters of Papinian, 75. See also p. 26. Diary of Edward Oxnard, March 17, 1777, in The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings from the Revolutionary Era, ed. Catherine Crary (New York,1973), 296. Cromwell continued to haunt the new republics. See Rock Brynner, “Cromwell’s Shadow over the Confederation: The Dread of Cyclical History in Revolutionary America,ˮ Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 106 (1994), 35–50. See pp. 38–40.

3 “A Moral Distemper in the British Government” Loyalists, the Ruling Class, and the Mailed Fist

Chastened by Stuart despotism and sobered by Cromwellian populism, the English ruling class emerged stronger than ever in 1689. The Glorious Revolution limited the crown’s powers by cementing the curbs first outlined in the Petition of Right. The English nation was supposedly inoculated against radical and authoritarian extremes, committed instead to Protestant toleration and economic empire. Whigs and Tories created a stable political system by sparring about who were the real heirs of 1689, but they shared more than enough to form a ruling class. Above all, both parties were hostile to anyone who questioned the settlement of 1689, or, worse, hankered after the republic of 1649. In the ebullient era of the complaisant Hanoverian Georges, members of the ruling class remembered the lesson of 1649 – the potential strength of popular rule – while they developed heavily fortified management in their new party system. Beginning in 1721, the ultimate pragmatic fixer, Sir Robert Walpole managed it. His Whigs concocted a liberal political economy framed in a fat-trimmed aristocratic shell, which, as it emerged into the light after 1760, Edmund Burke would dub the “New Toryism.”1 The legitimacy of the ruling class seemed to be confirmed by the outcome of the Great War for Empire. After 1763, Britain was, as Continental Congress acknowledged in the Olive Branch Petition to George III in 1775, “a power, the most extraordinary the world had ever known.”2 However, that power was so thoroughly militarized by 1763, it had the potential to heat traditional English suspicions to the boiling point, and to ruin the loyalists. In 1763, loyalists had good reason to expect the benign imperial relation to strengthen, and they adhered uncritically to the social attitudes 84

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of the ruling class. They diligently pursued their own special interests, exploited their “connections,” and believed their monopoly of wealth and privilege would benefit the other classes by some magical process of trickling down. They were too self-satisfied to understand their precarious situation. They saw only that upholding the British government was the smart, correct way to pursue one’s interest. They would not see that collectively they were violating something so intangible but profoundly real as “the common good of the country.” It would cost some of their leading families everything.

the ruling class The British landowners, traders, manufacturers, artisans, and commercial farmers felt triumphant across the globe as a class in 1763. Imperial fruits of the military victory were immense – in America, Africa, Asia. Only excessive zeal on the part of the nation’s rulers could spoil the opportunity to profit from the Treaty of Paris. Unfortunately, as Montreal fell in 1760, George II died and a new Hanoverian king took the throne. He began a reign of bureaucratic innovation that would rock his class and empire. The British ruling class was an unprecedented social formation. By attrition, it had shrunk to a small, lean group, free of powerful and ambitious magnates.3 So the class structure of eighteenth-century England was strong because it was less sharply stratified than those of Europe – with few peasants – under a more socially diversified leadership, thriving politically on the settlement of 1689. Queen Anne was the last monarch who dared exercise a veto over legislation, and the Lords and Commons gained even more control over the crown by recruiting monarchs among second-level foreign princes. The nobles in the House of Lords and their junior relations in the House of Commons enjoyed great advantages of organization over their continental cousins, especially as the traditional distinction between landed and commercial interests, anchored in the Lords and Commons, respectively, declined.4 In a population of 5.5 million English in 1689, at the top were 160 hereditary lords, along with 26 lords spiritual (bishops) appointed by the crown. Collectively they had huge wealth. Associated with them were 15,000 families in the gentry, who looked to the lords for models and leaders. The nobles could depend on their emulators to vote appropriately, for many dutiful people still honored aristocratic privilege. Yet English politics were relatively rational, interest-based, crudely effective, as opposed to, say, French politics, which had no base in an electorate,

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and went aground in the 1780s. In England, the aristocracy began in 1689 with 15 to 20 percent of the country’s wealth, but increased it to 25 percent by 1800, and spent part of the difference on conspicuous consumption. Over the century, Parliament orchestrated a major tax increase – by 100 percent per capita – and a shift in the locus of taxation from land to consumption, which fell heaviest on the common people. The burden of taxation on landowners declined from 38 percent of the total revenue in 1710, to 18 percent by 1790, and the consumers paid the difference, mainly with excise taxes, especially on alcohol and other drugs.5 The bulk of the revenues went into imperial wars, and the common people also had to carry the personal burden of soldiering. The landowners’ success at enclosure – intensifying production by dispossessing peasants – meant that up to 50 percent of English families now formed a wagedependent class out of necessity. It is hardly surprising that the victorious imperialists felt a new surge of appetite when they looked upon the vast resources in America. Leaders of the English ruling class quietly modernized their institutional apparatus. They gradually absorbed into the bureaucracy the East India Company, the last antediluvian monopoly, created in 1600, the one Adam Smith detested and Edmund Burke scourged rhetorically for its brutal ways. When Parliament began siphoning off the Company’s revenues in the 1760s, it epitomized the success of British imperial strategy, by contrast to the colossal failure of French colonization. The English ruling class would hold back the expansive power of the French, including the republicans of the 1790s, by being able to create or borrow and spend huge amounts of money. However, in the 1760s, growing inequality at home began causing serious domestic turbulence.6 In reaction, under the guidance of a grimly determined George III, the executive and legislative branches began to unify the ruling class as the king-inParliament.

the ideology of the ruling class Debate about power in Britain has long been spirited. The leading exponent of the critical school is Edward P. Thompson, who describes the rich as a “patrician banditti” who preyed on the other classes while idolizing the crown.7 They were so well organized that George III’s throne would totter but remain in place in the 1790s, when the French throne fell.8 The common people were too diverse to unify, settling instead to mount a theater of sedition, gradually developing the foundations of class-consciousness. Meanwhile, many of them numbed themselves with

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alcohol, sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and opiates. Despite the self-medication, popular attacks on George III in the early 1770s were beginning to look less like theater and more like the real thing. The popularity of John Wilkes among the lower orders – most of whom could not vote – was a barometer of their resentment of the king.9 John Wesley reported that the English masses “heartily despise his majesty; and hate him with a perfect hatred.” It reminded Wesley of that moment just before “the Great Rebellion” of 1649.10 Although the ruling class would come out on the other side in the nineteenth century still remarkably strong, it was not a sure thing in 1773. Still, Thompson’s exploration of ideology is unsatisfying. So is Paul Langford’s, with a similar predatory thesis, describing a class devoted to the sanctity of property as if to a religion, insistent upon slavish deference by inferiors, and frankly contemptuous of the clergy’s moral authority.11 The typical English gent combined dutiful parliamentary service with fearful regard for the democratic voice (if not respect for democracy), plus the country squire’s exercise of reasonably just authority (according to ever more ferocious laws) in the counties. A less critical, even celebratory view of the ruling class is that it masterfully created an efficient political system that kept society together through an age of rapid economic growth, rising expectations, and popular rebelliousness. The aristocracy ruled by “the carrot rather than the stick,” by paternalism, electoral bribery, and competent management rather than by force and class exploitation.12 A similar challenge to Thompson’s image of brigands attributes the success of the ruling class to old regime values – deference from below and noblesse oblige from above – to hegemonic consent engineered by a skillful aristocracy, not to brute force.13 But here there is no role for ideology. A liberal school has worked most diligently on ideology. Joyce Appleby describes post-1689 political leaders seeking to strengthen monarchy by providing it with a set of rational economic rules, the Bill of Rights, and John Locke. As she puts it, while the social attitudes of the English ruling class remained ideologically old-regime, Locke’s ideas promoted the market behavior of many individuals who were inexorably destroying the foundations of static feudalism. Locke’s epistemology and psychology would gradually overthrow the reign of nobility’s mythic ethos.14 Appleby shows that Lockean liberalism became increasingly popular in the eighteenth century – and developed an American version – for it “offered an openness to change to a society that was changing without a supportive ideology,” by which she means to invoke the evolving commercial values of the eighteenth century.15 However, the liberalism she describes had its roots in 1689, not 1649, and the radicalism of

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1649 has no role in her analysis. At least she accords ideology a serious role, whereas the exponents of a so-called “republicanism” model depict American revolutionaries reaching back to the opposition political language of George I’s day, that is, to a static past devoid of liberalism or radicalism.16 The classical rationale for aristocracy could not be swept away merely by a rhetorical Lockean broom. Most European aristocracies held out until crashing in the cataclysm of their own making in 1914 – although Britain’s survived even that. In fact, both the old regime and Locke agreed on the need for a strong central government manned by privileged gentlemen. If Adam Smith worked Locke’s logic to advocate free market relations, he knew such a system could succeed only under a big catalogue of parliamentary statutes backed by many regiments. Moreover, Smith did not attack privilege itself, only the monopoly of privilege by birth. Improving on Locke’s assertion that government’s main objective was to preserve private property, he frankly acknowledged that “civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor.”17 He was embarrassed and angry about “corruption,” but not about the systemic entwining of government and the capitalist class. Appleby describes an evolution of values, which took centuries, finally perfected by Smith.18 Most of these studies are not interested in the populist dissenting tradition. Its idealistic principles of 1649 were still very lively in New England in 1773, salted away in a great fund of Biblical citations and the Petition of Right, in creative tension with the values of Locke’s liberal individualism. The ultra-Lockean self-interest of a frustrated John Hancock or James Bowdoin may have been required for a rebellion, but the Revolution could not have happened except for the determination of the radicals in all classes to uphold the Good Old Cause of self-rule for the collective common good. Yet the rebels cannot have been surprised that so many leading colonists embraced and identified with one of the most spectacularly successful ruling classes of all time.

the politics of whig and tory Under Walpole’s management, the differences between Whig and Tory declined to the vanishing point insofar as the landowners (mainly Tories) became more capitalistic in their pursuits, and the mercantile classes (mostly Whigs) acquired country estates if they could afford it.19 Walpole

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combined “Whig” parliamentary rule with a “Tory” adulation of the king as a symbol of unity. The gentle classes recruited from below, cautiously, by contrast with the Continent, where the noblesse was more finicky about the blue color of their marital partners’ blood. Tory and Whig gentlemen came to have most things in common – property, snobbery, imperial expansion.20 In effect, when “Country Party” leader William Pitt seized the helm in 1757 – single handedly, without a true party – the emergent New Toryism was a kind of amphibious anti-party ideology for the stable plutocracy to which Pitt belonged.21 According to Brian W. Hill, in reality a veritable Tory Party came to power under Pitt’s wing – a combination of a few true Tories and many paid royal placemen who carefully avoided the “Tory” label – a party that ruled with only brief “Whig” lapses until the death of George III’s son, George IV, in 1830.22 By the 1760s, Parliament included only a few “commonwealthmen” – men like Isaac Barr´e – who worried about an ambitious king with a big army.23 The Elder Pitt gave up all pretense to “country” independence by accepting the title of Chatham and moving to the Lords, losing his populist cachet. When a radical upsurge began and lasted into the 1790s, the ruling class held together by competent management in the prime minister’s office, without very refined Whig or Tory ideas, but with many regiments.24 One of the most deliciously absurd moments in English political history came in the House of Commons in October, 1775, on the subject of America. Charles James Fox, leader of the Whigs, attacked Lord North’s ministry “as enemies to freedom, [and he] declared they were Tories.”25 The imperturbable North replied that he believed “it was the characteristick of Whiggism to gain as much for the people as possible, while the aim of Toryism was to increase the prerogative. That, in the present case, Administration contended for the right of Parliament, while the Americans talked of their belonging to the Crown [that is, beyond the reach of Parliament’s statutes]. Their language, therefore, was that of Toryism.”26 The Americans – or at least the moderates among them who still hoped for reconciliation in 1775 – must have been dumbfounded by this exchange. The English terms “Whig” and “Tory” were not useful in New England before the 1760s; after 1773, the term “Whig” declined into disgrace and disuse, while rebels redefined “Tory” to mean disloyal, like the Jacobite “Tories” of 1745.27 Through the political fog, what had become clear by 1774 was that the British government was trying to sew up the land in America, against the common good, indeed. George III finally got his own personal prime

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minister in Lord North in 1770, in defiance of the spirit if not the letter of the Bill of Rights. He was able to push his own program because the twoparty system could no longer operate competitively, given the number of the crown’s placemen.28 To nurture that pool of bought-and-paid-for MPs, the king had to develop new bureaucratic rewards abroad. The king-in-Parliament now ruled with the obvious agenda to make America a honeypot of land grants for gentlemen loyal to the crown. As an angry New Englander put it after the Battle of Bunker Hill, although Parliament had once been famous “for defending the liberties of the nation, and humbling tyrants, and opposing popery,” it was now “a corrupt and venal body” of men who imagined themselves “omnipotent.”29 What New Englanders still did not fully grasp, was that the whole rudderless English political system was taken over by an ambitious and imaginative young king in 1760, who meant to consolidate his rule at home by provoking America, after he had “bludgeoned his way through his first decade of rule.”30 He embodied, according to William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, Marquess of Rockingham, “the Quintessence of Toryism,” whose gang in Parliament was the same bunch who would have ruled supremely “if any of their attempts to reinstate a Stuart had succeeded.”31 William Gordon finally dared say it frankly in 1777, before the Massachusetts General Court: George III’s party was chock full of “not only violent tories, but known Jacobites.”32 The House of Commons would finally find the nerve and the votes to stand up to the king in 1779, passing an angry but ultimately futile resolution by 233 to 215 that “the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.”33

the troubles in britain Britain’s was a war economy in the eighteenth century, as John Brewer describes it, enabling the ruling class to centralize the government.34 It became “a fiscal-military state, one dominated by the task of waging war.”35 Remarkably, the development of an expansive, liberal ideology of freedom in Enlightenment Europe was inextricably linked to “the deployment of apparatuses of security” – discursive, political, military – on an unprecedented scale.36 The British prevailed in 1763 in part because they created a large army and navy to fight Louis XIV after 1689. Enormous as the Bourbon armies of France and Spain became, the monarchs of both countries found themselves prostrate before Britannia’s throne in 1763, and in the Americas either ruined (France) or humiliated and undermined (Spain).

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Yet British historical memory was informed by great distrust of military power. Key dates were associated with threats of a military coup d’´etat to establish absolutism: 1642 by Charles I, 1688 by James II, then 1715 and 1745 by the Stuart pretenders.37 In only a few years on the throne (1685–88), James II had created great armed might in both the army and navy, which enabled him to enforce “a very modern surveillance state.”38 After 1689, Tories and Whigs alike recruited large numbers of soldiers and sailors, who were subject to iron, bloody-back corporal punishment, and, in turn, they kept the civilians in awe.39 In the late 1760s, the jurist William Blackstone reasserted the anti-military principle of the English constitution in his Commentaries on the Laws of England: it is “extremely dangerous in a land of liberty, to make a distinct order in the profession of arms; that such an order is an object of jealousy,” so “the laws and constitution of England are strangers to it.”40 Nevertheless, as Blackstone knew very well, the armed forces were deployed at home and in the colonies, apparently on a permanent basis, in part to serve as a domestic police force. British soldiers moderated popular antagonism to themselves in important ways. They provided a strong market for local produce; they maintained a fairly exemplary, if cruel, code of service, to keep soldiers from bullying the citizenry too much; officers kept the expenses of administration small. The crown recruited particularly in the peripheral Celtic parts of the kingdom, which helped to unify the country and minimize expensive social unrest in the periphery. Moreover, the crown stationed many of those Celtic troops closest to the Home Counties.41 That policy bears emphasis. Celtic recruits served just about everywhere outside Scotland, including America, in what must have been a deliberate ethnic policy backed up by incipiently racial popular wisdom.42 The government relied on dour Scots for muscle against non-Scots troublemakers.43 The Secretary of War could deploy soldiers in Britain for domestic purposes when Justices of the Peace requested them, usually to oppose rural economic rioters, and it happened with increasing frequency in the 1750s and 60s. The army began systematically intimidating the citizenry in the Home Counties long before the regiments arrived in Boston in 1768. That year was climactic in London, when the mass Wilkite demonstrations alternated with various groups of striking laborers, in a season of harsh weather and bad harvests. The turbulence led William Samuel Johnson to report from England to New England: “To one observ[ing] the violence of Faction & Party here what has happen’d with you scarcely

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seems an object & is like the light ruffle of the Fish Pond compared with the rough raging of the Tempestuous Ocean.”44 Charles Chauncy echoed him indignantly: “commotions and insurrections” occurred in England “to a much greater and more dangerous height than they ever were at Boston.”45 Ultimately, the army kept the English citizenry in check. After 1763, as Charles Tilly has shown, the people of England began to demand a long list of basic rights in regard to taxation, military service, political representation, treatment of the poor, the religious establishment, and political corruption; it was no less than the creation of modern citizenship.46 In England, there were 159 major disturbances between 1740 and 1775, from labor conflicts to hunger riots to anti-enclosure movements. There was a new intensity in the 1760s, with struggles by weavers, tin miners, coalheavers, and then a big wave of hunger rioters in 1766, but most dramatically the huge London Wilkite demonstrations in the late 1760s and early 1770s to persuade the Commons to seat John Wilkes. The American unrest in the 1760s was not coincidental, for it was part of one big struggle caused by an ambitious king with a big voting bloc in Parliament.47 The atmosphere of impending chaos in England was capped in 1771 by a sudden spate of virulent anti-Semitism directed at all Jews, when a gang of Dutch Jewish robbers killed some victims in the course of breaking into a London mansion.48 Throughout it all, the army and navy were always the government’s last resort against popular action, even if the crown tried to avoid direct military intervention in the capital.49 When not on inland duty, soldiers and sailors could be kept in training by fighting smugglers on the coasts.50 The ability of government to field substantial numbers of Redcoats in the capital or the shires on short notice was the ultimate pillar of the regime, for in the end “rioting could only be checked by gun and sabre.”51 In the tumultuous year 1768, on May 10, at the prison in St. George’s Fields, mounted soldiers suddenly charged a crowd of 20,000 angry Wilkites, firing indiscriminately, killing up to six and wounding perhaps fifteen.52 The government had recently made a similar point in Ireland in 1763, by using the army to gun down a crowd of “Hearts of Oak” Protestants demonstrating against rates of tax and tithe.53 The crown was able to hang Spitalfields strike leaders in 1769 only because soldiers surrounded the gallows with their bayonets bristling at angry crowds.54 Then came the Boston Massacre of 1770. In his speech in Parliament in April, 1770, William Beckford, Mayor of London, made the essential link between St. George’s Fields and the angry crowds in

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Boston. “Everything,” he declared, “tends to a military government here.”55 The expense of this military machine in time of war can be imagined. The origin of the national debt (£133,000,000 in 1763) was no mystery.56 At its wartime peak in 1762, the total number of men under arms in the regular forces reached 209,694 (120,633 soldiers and 89,061 sailors) at an annual cost of £14,788,374, including over £1 million in foreign subsidies paid just to German allied forces. British Regulars were first introduced in North America in 1755, and by 1761, 23,000 of them were on duty there. Even though the crown cut down this American force to 8,000 in 1763, and continued to draw it down, it was big enough to serve as a budgetary hobgoblin for English politicians, who had to blame someone for the debt. They exploited the cost of the Redcoats in America to justify the revenue measures that began with the Molasses Act. Even though the number of men declined to about 5,250 in 1768, they lived in a far-flung network of forts in the interior, and still cost £332,000. In 1782, the total regular armed forces would again reach the astonishing total of 231,989 (131,989 soldiers and 100,000 sailors), at a cost of £16,539,016, with 60,000 soldiers stationed in America from Canada to the West Indies.57 This is not counting the armed forces maintained by the East India Company.58 (England and Scotland had a total population of about seven million in 1770; England alone had that by 1781.)59 As a result, the English national debt would rise over the course of the Revolutionary War from £127 million to £232 million.60 The officer corps created a new crowd of place-hungry retirees; 287 officers of the army and navy sat in the House of Commons between 1754 and 1790.61 Meanwhile, the landed taxpayers kept trying to shift as much of the expense of the military as possible to the other classes. Thus, common ratepayers had to pay for the defense of the realm, that is, to pay soldiers and sailors who also served to police the ratepayers and carry off their sons by press gangs. It is no wonder that willingness to tolerate military authority was correlated to class. John Adams reported that anger about the British occupation of Boston in 1768 was strongest among “the inhabitants of the lower class.”62 After 1763, radicals on both sides of the Atlantic came to believe there was a master plan to overthrow freedom by military force. Principled opposition to a standing army was visceral because of its recent association with James II’s military despotism, a spirit encapsulated in John Trenchard’s famous pamphlet of 1697.63 The independent Edmund Burke

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echoed Mayor Beckford in Parliament following news of the Boston Tea Party. Carefully resorting to the vague passive voice, he charged that “a scheme of government new in many things seemed to have been adopted,” one that began by “keeping up no less than twenty new regiments, with twenty colonels capable of seats” in Parliament, which had become a “new colony system,” one in which laws would be “obeyed solely from respect to the bayonet.”64 Safely anonymous behind a pseudonym, “Junius” smoldered in the press about “the odious abuse and prostitution of the prerogative at home . . . [above all, by] the unconstitutional employment of the military.”65 When the crown mobilized the militia in 1775, Charles James Fox reminded everyone that the new militia helped “create a standing army,” for “the king could call out [the militia] whenever he pleased,” and “there would always, in some part or other, be a riot, which the minister might think proper to call a rebellion.”66 That was it in a nutshell. In practice, regular troops rather than militia usually suppressed riot and rebellion. In the colonies, the correspondence of the War Office and British generals clearly proves that the primary purpose of maintaining a big force of Redcoats there was not to patrol the Proclamation Line of 1763 or discourage insurgent French colonists. The Redcoats were under orders to “assist the British government against any American opposition” put up by colonists.67 Radicals and liberals in Britain and America saw an ill-disguised plot to create a royal military supremacy.68

“a government absolutely and entirely military” and the origin of the american revolution in new england British militarization of the colonies was as important as taxes in sparking the American Revolutionary War. Although the Bill of Rights of 1689 required Parliament’s authorization to keep up a standing army in peace, Parliament authorized a virtually continuous standing army in the British Isles thereafter, just as Congress would do in the United States after 1945, defying a tradition going back to 1783.69 The contested role of the Royal Army and Navy in New England had come to a head in the press-gang disturbances of 1747; then, during the war in the 1750s, the arrogant behavior of British officers toward American troops caused lasting hard feelings.70 Both British officers and their Redcoats refreshed American skepticism about the military’s respect for civilians.71 The royal Proclamation of 1763 implied that Redcoats would man the border it established between colonists and Indians, indefinitely.

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With their historic suspicion of military power, New Englanders believed that a standing army in time of peace was prohibited by the Bill of Rights of 1689.72 The colonists knew very well from their newspapers in 1763 that there were large numbers of British troops in the South (in Mobile in 1764), West (Fort Cavendish, the old French Fort Chartres in Illinois, others), and especially in the North throughout the area of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Valley.73 It explains why James Otis, Jr. repeatedly scored standing armies in his tract of 1764 attacking the recent imperial innovations. Citizens had to hold tightly to the standing-army principle, he warned, because “the best army and the best men . . . may be led into temptation” by despots and their generals.74 Usually, the forces of the Royal Navy were more visible than the army to the general public, its vessels frequently appearing in colonial ports. Memory of Boston’s press-gang riots in 1747 was still fresh in 1764, when the crown gave the navy a free hand to stop smugglers on the high seas, take contraband into a new vice-admiralty court at Halifax, turn over half the cargo to the king, and keep the other half.75 Then, on May 17, 1768, in response to protests of the Townshend duties, the fifty gun HMS Romney swept into Boston Harbor and anchored off John Hancock’s wharf. It began impressing local sailors from commercial ships, and carried orders to support the commissioners of the customs in America, sparking the angry demonstrations the crown probably hoped for. The Boston Town Meeting instructed its representative to declare that “every such Person, who shall solicit or promote the importation of Troops at this time, is an enemy to this Town and Province, and a disturber of the peace and good order of both.”76 In retrospect, this moment may be defined as the beginning of the Revolutionary War, by this formal definition of a loyalist. Then a ship arrived with Lord Hillsborough’s demand that the legislature rescind their Circular Letter to other colonial legislatures on the Townshend Acts. In a fury, the House of Representatives on June 30 voted 92 to 17 not to rescind. The people who voted against these measures thereby defined themselves as loyalists. Then the arrival in Boston of four regiments in September, 1768, stung colonial consciousness. Tension built to the breaking point on March 5, 1770, when soldiers killed five civilians and injured others in the Boston Massacre.77 Following that bloody mess in King Street, Thomas Hutchinson turned over to Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple his colony’s fort in the harbor, “Castle William”: the region’s principal fortification became the

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home of the Redcoats.78 The street patrols ended, but General Gage systematically refreshed the Castle garrison by frequent troop rotations, and also sent out recruiting parties among the American colonists, making clear that the army and navy intended to tap that human resource systematically.79 Thus, Bostonians were constantly reminded that the town was still occupied. When Governor Hutchinson called for a company of grenadiers from the Castle in early November, 1773, to help him disperse crowds protesting the Tea Act, the press reported the event with profound solemnity. He had ordered up the soldiers “under a pretence that his own person was in danger,” and everyone knew that was not true, that the people posed no threat to his person.80 The Council wisely refused to support his order, but that little stench of militarism was lightning in a volatile atmosphere. When Benjamin Franklin finally declared himself a rebel in 1774, he announced that George III was trying to establish “a Government absolutely and entirely Military” that would be paid for by unconstitutional taxes “extorted . . . with an armed Force.”81 Although some historians think Franklin exaggerated the king’s special role, “the American colonists, the Rockingham connection and the Wilkite radicals were all convinced that there was a sinister plot [by George III] to undermine the constitution and to subvert the liberties of the subject.”82 The standing army had obviously led to a huge expansion of the bureaucracy, royal patronage, and national debt – all to the aggrandizement of royal power.83 Rebels could see that George III’s government intended, as stated in a secret meeting of the Privy Council, “to retain the Inhabitants of our antient Provinces in a State of Constitutional Dependance [sic] upon Great Britain.”84 The king would rely on the support of many allies in the colonies, those who agreed with him that the American colonies should be “digested into the state of subordination and improvement [within the empire],” as one loyal New Englander advised Lord Bute even before 1763.85 The loyalists’ support of military coercion was their cardinal error, and any doubt about it was put to rest when the crown’s provincial servants began crowding into Boston in 1774 to seek protection of the British Army. Throughout the wars with the French, the colonists had always carried the weight of defense and offense in North America, financing it with their own taxes.86 Redcoats never appeared before 1755. The notion that the colonists somehow “owed” the British exchequer to support the frontier garrisons after 1763 seemed absurd to the colonists, who had not

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requested the troops. The New Englanders had spent enormous sums of their own money and sacrificed many lives advancing empire in North America since the 1630s, without help from the crown until the final battles. Massachusetts remained in debt for the war through the 1760s.87 The peace-time Redcoat establishment after 1763 was unprecedented, and an insult.88 Latin-schooled Americans knew the Roman classics, which described how armed forces had the inherent tendency to introduce dangerous social tendencies by armed bands of unmarried young men, above all to intimidate citizens from exercising their rights. The anti-military principle was a central feature of the constitution.89 Yet loyalists saw the British imperial design as a benign, wise and generous policy, too long delayed, to stimulate and regulate the growth of the American economy. If it required military force to keep “order,” so be it. Thomas Hutchinson wrote but did not publish a pamphlet in 1768, in which a hypothetical British spokesman threatened to station “one ship of war in each of your principal [American] ports . . . [to] reduce every colony in a very few months.”90 While Hutchinson showed no enthusiasm for that, he admitted that if “disorder” persisted, it might be necessary, for rather than stay in mob-ruled Boston, “any rational man would choose to live in France or Spain” under an absolutist.91 Moreover, loyalists knew that British soldiery boosted local consumption and contributed to the casual labor market when off duty.92 Thus, the military acted as a kind of intravenous drip for the local economy, and leading loyalists regarded the benefits of a standing army as outweighing any imagined threats to rights. Men like Thomas Hutchinson regarded armed force as essential to protect their lawful Atlantic trade (against competition with anti-mercantilist free traders like John Hancock), to promote a systematic exploitation of the interior (by privileged access to trade licenses and land grants), to provide an establishment in which younger sons might obtain various royal commissions (to rise in the British system of patronage).93 The loyalists of 1776 shared the fundamental ethos of the British ruling class that it must rule, for the sake of moral order, national strength, and orderly economic relations, and scoffed at rebels as thoughtless men who could understand only a mailed fist.94 In 1773, Massachusetts radicals published some letters proving Hutchinson’s cooperation with the British Army and Navy in 1768, when he suggested “an abridgment of what are called English liberties.”95 When General Thomas Gage arrived in 1774, that danger was even more real. At that moment, the crown ordered officials in America to stop making land grants in the West, and

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the full implications of the Proclamation of 1763 as a permanent policy became clear.96 Gage enunciated the crown’s master plan for North America: for his regiments “to keep the settlers within reach of the seacoast as long as we can; and to cramp their trade as far as it can be done prudentially.”97 It hardly helped the military’s image that the East India Company’s own private army had gained a sanguinary reputation in the takeover of Bengal. One writer proclaimed that the company had obtained its monopoly “by the most vile and pernicious Arts,” and tortured those Indians who got in its way by crucifying them and setting mastiffs and jungle cats on them.98 In Mercy Otis Warren’s poem on the Boston Tea Party, she pictured an India under the control “of base, monopolizing men, combin’d / To plunder millions, and enslave mankind.”99 Moreover, Americans could see that British armed forces backed up transatlantic slave traders, and the West Indian sugar planters, who would have had difficulty restraining their slaves if the navy’s mighty warships had not called regularly in the islands.100 By 1774, the colonists could easily imagine that the primary objective of the king’s armed forces was to assist him in bottling up eastern North America and laying claim to the West.101 The colonists were keenly aware of what was happening in England at that moment, and populists on both sides were outraged by repression at home and abroad.102 There was a “transatlantic” rising. Bostonians knew the king was heckled menacingly in the streets of London: his handlers could not take his safety for granted.103 As it happened, English crowds dared not go all the way to rebellion. As Ezra Stiles put it, aristocratic game laws had “insidiously disarmed the people of England,” so they lacked all means of effective defense against soldiers.104 Most rebel Americans agreed with Stiles: it was too late for the English. As Peter Thacher put it in his March Fifth oration in 1776: the landed class had reduced the British common people to “the most contemptible of animals, [who] bow the shoulder to bear and become servants unto tribute.”105 The upper class had gained control of the English people by military police power, and the American loyalists seemed to welcome that kind of power in America.106 The rising New England firebrand Josiah Quincy Jr. published a learned essay after the Tea Party, devoting its central core of thirtythree pages to a fierce attack on the standing army. He reviewed the whole history of the military subjugation of the English since the days of Charles II, warning Americans that “you are to be wasted with taxes

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and impositions in order to satisfy the charges of those armaments which are to blast your country with the most terrible of all evils – universal corruption, and a military government.”107 He brazenly compared “the wisest and the best of Kings” (as some called George III), to James II, who would have “reigned an applauded tyrant” if he had George III’s regiments.108 Every educated colonist knew that the Roman army had “led the cars of OCTAVIUS, ANTHONY, and LEPIDUS through seas of Roman blood, and bad [sic] the cursed triumvirate divide an enslaved world.”109 Quincy provided a class analysis: “In the lower class of life, STANDING ARMIES have introduced brutal debauchery, and real cowardice; in the higher orders of state, venal haughtiness and extravagant dissipation.”110 Other New Englanders agreed. Simeon Howard claimed that when soldiers ate the king’s bread, it tended “to make them consider him as their only master, and prefer his personal interest to that of the people.”111 Another radical, Oliver Noble, quoted David Hume on the army, to the effect that it had become “a moral distemper in the British government, of which at last, it must inevitably perish.”112 The crown’s ministers had “to mount the Red Horse of Tyranny and Despotism” in America, otherwise freedom there would encourage “emigrations from them to us [and] soon go near to depopulate their own country.”113 When John Lathrop considered the possibility of a British military victory in the coming war, he predicted that the colonists would then be taxed unmercifully “to support a large standing army to hold the country in subjection.”114 As William Tudor put it a few years later: the crown created a power able to “maintain an infamous majority in each House of Parliament to legalize, and a standing army to enforce its projects, however imperious, inhuman or unjust.”115 Meanwhile, Robert Henley, Earl of Northington, Lord Chancellor, provided new support for the Quincy thesis when he called in Parliament for “a Metropolitan Police in America.”116 John Hancock’s fiery oration on March Fifth, 1774, dwelled at length on the moral corruption of society caused by a standing army. Before the regiments retreated to Castle William in 1770, “our streets nightly resounded with the noise of riot and debauchery; our peaceful citizens were hourly exposed to shameful insults, and often felt the effects of their violence and outrage.”117 The soldiers took a special pleasure in going on noisy parade in a “rude din of arms which broke in upon your solemn devotions in your temples,” meaning those of the local Congregationalists, dissenters the soldiers despised; and “impious oaths and

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blasphemies so often tortur’d your unaccustomed ear.”118 “Moreover,” Hancock charged, “all the arts which idleness and luxury could invent, were used, to betray our youth of one sex into extravagance and effeminacy, and of the other to infamy and ruin.” What he has in mind here is the soldiers’ gambling, prostitution, drinking, cursing, and dueling, on one hand, and, on the other, their frivolous lovemaking to susceptible local girls. He worried that many of “our youth forget they were Americans, . . . [and] servilely copy from their tyrants those vices which finally must overthrow the empire of Great Britain.”119 Hancock had a structural or social argument about why a standing army was dangerous. Its huge size reflected a cruel system that forced many young men to choose the armed forces for economic reasons. Standing armies were “composed of persons who have rendered themselves unfit to live in civil society; who have no other motives of conduct than those which a desire of the present gratification of their passions suggests; who have no property in any country.” In short, they were “men who have lost or given up their own liberties, and envy those who enjoy liberty.”120 They were all brainwashed king’s men, “who, for the addition of one peny [sic] a day to their wages, would desert from the Christian cross, and fight under the crescent of the Turkish Sultan.”121 Hancock went on to argue that the colonial militia was sufficient to keep order: citizens must manage themselves. Obviously, the loyalists did not agree, for those “serpents . . . whilst cherished in your bosoms [as natives], were darting their invenom’d stings into the vitals of the constitution.”122 Hancock could not have been more provocative toward the loyalists. “The troops of George the Third,” he intoned, “have cros’d the wide atlantick, not to engage an enemy, but to assist a band of Traitors in trampling on the rights and liberties of his most loyal subjects in America.”123 Benjamin Franklin agreed, charging that the loyalists encouraged the ministry to be bloody-minded, and that the loyalists would put down the rebellion “if there was in this Country an Army sufficient” to support them.124 The second occupation of Boston in 1774 severely discredited loyalists and gave rebels a decisive advantage in the court of public opinion. One of the most eloquent of all Boston Massacre orations, Jonathan Williams Austin’s in 1778, would be world historical. The ancient republics of Greece and Rome had fallen because they allowed generals to strong-arm the citizenry. Today, there was not a “kingdom that does not groan under the calamities of military tyranny.”125 “In our day,” he argued, “these measures have become systematical,” meaning that soldiers everywhere worked as national police more than as

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guardians against foreign threats.126 He pointed with horror to Russia, France, Poland, but especially to England. He jeered at Parliament for keeping up the fiction that the standing army was only a temporary measure, “which is nothing but an insult on the sense of that Nation.”127 Moreover, he echoed Hancock in charging moral corruption. Soldiers introduced “depravity of manners – a dislike of virtue and manly sentiment – effeminacy, and those grosser vices, too indelicate to be mentioned,” that is, prostitution and homosexuality.128 Austin also has in mind slack, civic unmanliness, the infantilizing of citizens who were routinely intimidated by armed men. As the old soldier Isaac Barr´e warned in Parliament, “a soldier feels himself so much above the rest of mankind,” that only a “strict hand of the civil power” could “controul the haughtiness of disposition which such superiority inspires,” or else “every passion that is pernicious to society will be let loose.”129 When Benjamin Franklin returned to America from England to serve as a rebel leader, he finally dared describe what he had seen in the Mother Country: it had become a military camp. The Americans must break with the British because “they will drag us after them in all the plundering wars which their desperate circumstances, injustice, and rapacity may prompt them to undertake.”130 When the colonies published their declaration of the “Causes and Necessity” of going to war, it is no surprise that the central sentence denounced the army. The British had planned to extort a ransom from them “at the point of a bayonet.”131 Later on, the Declaration of Independence was akin to an indictment in a court martial of George III and his armed forces.132 The March Fifth orations long remained the occasion for condemning any imperial army, which always, throughout history, “turned vulture on her own vitals.”133 The role of the British armed forces in alienating the people of New England cannot be exaggerated. By the end of 1774, loyalist Daniel Leonard of Taunton seemed to know that his cause was lost. According to him, a few Boston incendiaries had tapped the “hereditary” New England fear of power and told the people “that the ministry had formed a plan to enslave them,” that the duty upon tea was only “a prelude to the window-tax, hearth-tax, landtax, and poll tax, and these were only paving the way for reducing the country to lordships” by a well-armed nobility.134 Leonard and other loyalists did not believe the British could possibly aim at such a thing. It was paranoid nonsense, and committee-men were just seditious bullies who did not believe in freedom of speech. But he could not explain away the regiments of Redcoats piling into Boston Common.

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The loyalists could not reap the full benefits of the British Empire because of the combined blows to their credibility inflicted by the Tea Act, Coercive Acts, and Quebec Act, all of them enforced by many regiments. If it had not been for that military intimidation, all else might have been negotiated by a peace-minded majority of Americans.135 Loyalists agreed with His Majesty’s Sixteenth Regiment of Foot, who published a lengthy broadside in New York attacking the Sons of Liberty. The soldiers denounced the lies circulating about their mistreatment of the citizenry: critics had “no right to throw an aspersion on the army, since it is out of the power of military discipline, to deprive them of their freedom.”136 That was always the soldiers’ impatient argument: they were simply not capable of carrying out a coup d’´etat because no one in a free country would obey the orders of a tyrant. But how would they know if the king had become a tyrant? Many loyalists would join Provincial Corps attached to the British Army, upholding the role of armed force at the foundation of their ideology.137 Unfortunately for them, “the suspension of civil rule undermined loyalist ideals and frustrated loyalist potential” because the military threat violated one of New England’s most ancient and compelling constitutional principles.138 Notes 1. Ulrich Niggemann, “‘You Will See Who They are that Revile and Lessen Your . . . Glorious Deliverance’: The ‘Memory War’ about the Glorious Revolution,ˮ in Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Muller, Jasper ¨ van der Steen (Boston, Mass., 2013), 63–75. For a penetrating description of American members of the English ruling class, see Robert Shalhope, The Roots of Democracy: American Thought and Culture, 1760–1800 (Lanham, Md., 1990), 1–26. On the long interlude when the Walpole–Pelham ministries did not tamper with the relationship with the colonies, see James A. Henretta, Salutary Neglect: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton, N.J., 1972). 2. The Humble Petition of the Twelve United Colonies, by Their Delegates in Congress, to the King (Philadelphia, Pa., 1775), 2. 3. John Cannon, “The British Nobility, 1660–1800,ˮ in The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. H. M. Scott (New York, 1995), 53–81. 4. For a qualification of this broad conventional wisdom, see G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), 264–6.

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5. Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth-Century England (Harlow, 1982), 340, 359. 6. Edward P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York, 1975); Peter Mathias, The Transformation of England: Essays in the Economics and Social History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1979); Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969). 7. Edward P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York, 1991), 16–96. They enlarged the criminal laws of property to protect themselves from the consequences of their own greed. See Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 21–4, 264–5. 8. James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (New York, 1990), 415. 9. John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1832, 2nd edn. (New York, 1992), 93. 10. John Wesley to [the Earl of Dartmouth], August 23, 1775, in Great Britain, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Fifteenth Report, Appendix, Part I, The Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, 3 vols. (London, 1887–96), 3: 220. See also Steve Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects (New York, 2000), 34–9. 11. Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (New York, 1991), 9, 90, 151. 12. J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (New York, 1986), 443. On parties, see Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 118–38, 153, 305–15. 13. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien R´egime, 2nd edn. (New York, 2000), 24–6. See pp. 1–123. For the argument that all classes shared the benefits of ruling class ambition, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 55–100. 14. Joyce Appleby, “Ideology and the History of Political Thought,ˮ in Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 138. See pp. 124–39. See also Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J., 1978). 15. Appleby, “Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination,ˮ in Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, 32. See pp. 1– 33. On the historiographical formulation to which she is responding, see The Republican Synthesis Revisited: Essays in Honor of George Athan Billias, ed. Milton M. Klein, Richard D. Brown, and John Hench (Worcester, Mass., 1992). For a recent attempt to reshape the subject, see Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (New York, 2004). 16. For the founding text, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution enlarged edn., (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). A recent addition to this school’s corpus takes its conservative essence to the logical extreme, arguing that the American rebels included a group who effected a “royalist revolutionˮ from within the republican rebellion, and succeeded in “investing the chief magistrate [the president] with the very same prerogative

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powers that Charles I had defended.ˮ See Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), 8, 232. 17. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago, Ill., 1976), 2:236. 18. Appleby, “Ideology and the History of Political Thought,ˮ 127. 19. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Making of Modern English Society, vol. 2, 1750 to the Present Day (New York, 1968). 20. Even if “gross inequalities were landscaped in a gentle slope rather than in steps,ˮ in contrast to France, class rule in Britain was enforced by “supercharged snobbery.ˮ See Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1982), 64. See also Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (New York, 1995), 84–136. On the moribund condition of the Tory Party, see Keith Feiling, A History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714 (Oxford, 1925), 455. 21. Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (New York, 1997), 188–208; J. A. W. Dunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston, Ont. and Montreal, Que., 1983), 120–93; Robert K. Webb, Modern England, From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (New York, 1968), 5–13, 61–71; Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 63, 423–31; Archibald S. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714–1830 (Oxford, 1964), 301–21. 22. Brian W. Hill, British Parliamentary Parties, 1742–1832, From the Fall of Walpole to the First Reform Act (Boston, Mass., 1985), 3. See also James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (New York, 1993), 46–63. 23. J. G. A. Pocock, “Radical Criticisms of the Whig Order in the Age between Revolutions,ˮ in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and James R. Jacob (London, 1984), 37–8. See pp. 33–60. 24. See Pocock, ibid., 51–5, on British divisions during the 1790s. For a scorching description of Chatham’s ministry as full of reactionary Tories, see George Grenville to John Hobart, Earl of Buckinghamshire, June 23, 1766, Great Britain, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Lothian Preserved at Blickling Hall, Norfolk (London, 1905), 261. See pp. 261–2. 25. Debate in the House of Commons, October 26, 1775, Amer. Arch , 6: 44. 26. Ibid., 45. 27. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774, Comprising a Detailed Narrative of the Origin and Early Stages of the American Revolution, ed. John Hutchinson (London, 1828), 103. 28. For a searching examination of George III’s ambition, see Curtis P. Nettels, George Washington and American Independence (Boston, Mass., 1951), 24– 46. On the debate between those who condemn George III as a monster and those who see him as a dutiful public servant, see Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians, 2nd edn. (London, 1988).

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29. Enoch Huntington, A Sermon Delivered at Middletown (Hartford, Conn., 1775), 19. One historian blames the breach with the colonists on Chatham for not persuading Parliament to settle the American problem. See Marie Peters, The Elder Pitt (New York, 1998), 172–208. 30. Paul Kl´eber Monod, Imperial Island: A History of Britain and its Empire, 1660–1837 (Malden, Mass., 2009), 210. See pp. 207–21. 31. Rockingham is quoted in Frank O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975), 341. This king also exercised extraordinary control over the Lords. See Michael W. McCahill, The House of Lords in the Age of George III, 1760–1811 (Malden, Mass., 2009), 170– 1. For a similar attack, that “Kings being always worse educated than other men, the race of them may be expected to degenerate, till they be little better than idiots,ˮ see [Joseph Priestley], An Address to Protestant Dissenters of all Denominations, on the Approaching Election of Members of Parliament, with Respect to the State of Public Liberty in General, and of American Affairs in Particular (Boston, Mass., 1774), 9. 32. William Gordon, The Separation of the Jewish Tribes, after the Death of Solomon, Accounted For, and Applied to the Present Day. In a Sermon Preached before the General Court on Friday, July the 4th, 1777 (Boston, Mass., 1777), 9. On the king’s party being full of “converted Jacobites and soldiers,ˮ see Edmond George Petty-Fitzmaurice, Baron Fitzmaurice, Life of William Earl of Shelburne, Afterwards First Marquess of Lansdowne With Extracts from His Papers and Correspondence, 2 vols., 2nd edn. (London, 1912), 1:211. 33. Herbert Butterfield, George III, Lord North, and the People, 1779–1780 (New York, 1968), 315. See pp. 309–24. For a restatement of Lewis Namier’s argument, acknowledging the king’s power at the head of the armed forces, the Church, and a weak Parliament, but admiring him and the English monarchy for it, see G. M Ditchfield, George III: An Essay in Monarchy (New York, 2002), 166–71. 34. John Brewer, “The Eighteenth-Century British State: Context and Issues,ˮ in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (New York, 1994), 52–71. 35. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688– 1783 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 26. See also Anthony Page, Britain and the Seventy Years War, 1744–1815: Enlightenment, Revolution and Empire (New York, 2015), 99–137; Roger Morriss, The Foundations of British Maritime Ascendancy: Resources, Logistics and the State, 1755–1815 (New York, 2011); J. R. Jones, Britain and the World, 1649–1815 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1980), 30–7; and Peter Jupp, The Governing of Britain: The Executive, Parliament and the People (New York, 2006), 163–5. On the military as a dreaded “fourth estate,ˮ see Dunn, Beyond Liberty and Property, 53–7. Gigantic armies were created by the continental absolutist states after 1689. See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), 51– 2; and Isser Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress, 1715–1789 (New York, 1982), 51–9.

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36. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: 2004), 48. 37. The soldiers of Parliament’s regiments had very carefully explained in 1647 that they “were not a mere mercenary Army hired to serve any Arbitrary power of a State,ˮ but formed only to protect “the people’s just rights and liberties.ˮ See The Declaration of the Army, June 14, 1647, in A Radical Reader: The Struggle for Change in England, 1381–1914, ed. Christopher Hampton (New York, 1984), 181–2. See p. 181. 38. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 2009), 153. 39. Ibid., 146–9, 181–3, 254–77. See also Adrian Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (New York, 2006), 38–42. 40. Quoted in James Lovell, An Oration Delivered April 2nd, 1771, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1771), 6. 41. Jeremy Black, A Subject for Taste: Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 2005), 25–40. On the disproportionate representation of Scots in North America, including ex-Jacobites, see Bruce P. Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars, 1688–1783 (New York, 2001), 114–64. 42. J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (New York, 1997), 13. See pp. 148–91 on the Scots. Stephen Brumwell believes that the advent of John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute as first minister explains “Scottophobiaˮ in America and England as much as, or more than, the Highland troops. See his Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (New York, 2002), 264–89. The soldier’s jackboot as a symbol associating Bute with military despotism served as a pun in satirical artwork after 1761. The outpouring of rage in England against Bute defies adequate description. See Frederick George Stephens, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol. 4, 1761–1770 (London, 1978), 3 passim to 385. 43. With that in mind, Benjamin Franklin urged Chatham to understand American bitterness by inquiring of the British: “if the King should raise Armies in America, would Britain like their being brought hither[?]ˮ See “Notes for Discourse with Ld. C. on his Plan,ˮ January 31, 1775, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 21, January 1, 1774 through March 22, 1775, 41 vols., ed. William B. Willcox, et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–2014), 461. See pp. 459–62. Scots were a special object of suspicion everywhere in the colonies. See Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D. D., L. L. LD, President of Yale College, 3 vols., ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York, 1901), 2:10, 41, 184–5, 227–8. He believed families in Scotland had gained control of two thirds of the wealth in Jamaica, Virginia, and Maryland. 44. William Samuel Johnson to Jared Ingersoll, June 9, 1767, quoted in Elizabeth B. McCaughey, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson (New York, 1980), 80. 45. [Charles Chauncy], A Letter to a Friend. Giving a Concise, but Just, Representation of the Hardships and Sufferings the Town of Boston is Exposed To,

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By T. W., A Bostonian (Boston, Mass., 1774), 14. The English ruling class knew how the two problems were linked. As a nervous George Lyttelton, First Baron Lyttleton, put it in the Stamp Act repeal debate in the Lords in 1766, if Parliament proved unable to tax the colonists, “many thousands [in England] who have no vote in electing representatives, will follow their brethren in America, in refusing submission to any taxes,ˮ and even “Cromwell himselfˮ would agree about the danger of such a precedent. See Speech of Lord Lyttleton on the Conway Resolutions, February 10, 1766, in Hansard, vol. 16, 1765–1771, 168. 46. Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995) 13–17, 383–5. See also John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976). For the apparent argument that aristocratic ideology was triumphantly hegemonic, see Ian Gilmour, Riot, Risings, and Revolution: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1992), 182. 47. Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1989). England maintained a strong military police in Ireland for obvious historic reasons. See Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, eds., A Military History of Ireland (New York, 1996); and J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795 (Oxford, 1981), 51–2, 410–13. In America, the situation in Ireland was proverbial. See, for example, “Address to the People of Massachusetts,ˮ Resolves of the General Assembly of the State of Massachusetts, December 25, 1776 to February 8, 1777 (Boston, Mass., 1778), 24–5. See p. 25. See also John Philip Reid, In Defiance of the Law: The Standing-Army Controversy, The Two Constitutions, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1981), 56–79. 48. David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (New York, 1994), 262–5. 49. Houlding, Fit for Service, 57–74; Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (New York, 2006), 126–43. 50. Houlding, Fit for Service, 75–89. He argues that the army was often in poor battle condition because it was too preoccupied with domestic disorders to train for foreign wars. See ibid., vii–x, 151–2, 388–95. 51. Ian R. Christie, Wars and Revolutions: Britain, 1760–1815 (London, 1982), 76. 52. George Rud´e, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century: Studies in Popular Protest (New York, 1973), 233–42. See pp. 222–67 on Wilkes. See also Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 85–6. 53. Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, 128. 54. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1991), 282–3. On the proletarian nature of the eighteenth-century army, see ibid., 298–300. 55. Speech of William Beckford, April 26, 1770, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, ed. R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, 6 vols. (New York, 1982–87), 3:260. See also Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York, 1970); Neil L. York,

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The Boston Massacre: A History with Documents (New York, 2010). The tendency of troops to discourage popular politics was unmistakable. See Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (Totowa, N.J., 1978), 20–35. 56. Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 229; Walter S. Dunn, Jr., Opening New Markets: The British Army and the Old Northwest (Westport, Conn., 2002), 147–57. 57. James Gregory and John Stevenson, The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 2007), 162–6; Dunn, Opening New Markets, 148; Jeremy Black, War for America: The Fight for Independence, 1775–1783 (New York, 1991), 28. See pp. 27–9. For somewhat different numbers, see H. C. B. Rogers, The British Army of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1977), 29. On government’s direct subsidies to European princes like Frederick II, see Lawrence H. Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution: Provincial Characteristics and Sectional Tendencies in the Era Preceding the American Crisis, 12 vols. (Caldwell, Idaho, 1936–65), 8:29. On the Navy, see Nicholas Tracy, Navies, Deterrence, and American Independence: Britain and Seapower in the 1760s and 1770s (Vancouver, BC, 1988), 31–41. 58. H. V. Bowen, “Mobilising Resources for Global Warfare: The British State and The East India Company, 1756–1815,ˮ in H. V. Bowen and A. Gonzalez ´ Enciso, eds., Mobilising Resources for War: Britain and Spain at Work During the Early Modern Period (Pamplona, 2006), 81–110. 59. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (New York, 2006), 6. 60. Stephen Conway, “British Governments and the Conduct of the American War,ˮ in Britain and the American Revolution, ed. H. T. Dickinson (New York, 1998), 155–79. See pp. 175–8. According to Rogers, the army was reduced to 30,000 in 1763. See Rogers, The British Army of the Eighteenth Century, 23. 61. Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 41. See pp. 29–63. The crowd of retired military officers grew so large, George III had to expand the peerage to find proper rewards for them. See John Brooke, King George III (New York, 1972), 494–5; and John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of EighteenthCentury England (New York, 1984), 118–23. 62. John Adams, quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York, 1966), 23. The propertied classes in England may well have tolerated a big, permanent military establishment not only for policing the lower orders, but as an institution to absorb and discipline all disorderly young men. See Nicholas Rogers, Mayhem: Post-War Crime and Violence in Britain, 1748–53 (New Haven, Conn., 2012), 184–7. 63. [John Trenchard and/or Walter Moyle], An Argument Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government and Absolutely Destructive to the Constitution of the British Monarchy (London, 1697); and [Trenchard and/or Moyle], The Second Part of an Argument Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government and Absolutely Destructive to

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the Constitution of the British Monarchy (London, 1697). See also Lois G. Schwoerer, “No Standing Armies!ˮ: The Anti-army Ideology in SeventeenthCentury England (Baltimore, Md., 1974), 188–200; and H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), 184–7. 64. Edmund Burke, Speech on the Coercive Acts, April 19, 1774, in Hansard, vol. 17, 1771–1774, 1229, 1238. See also Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), 12. 65. “Letter XXXIX, To the Printer of the Public Advertiser,ˮ May 28, 1770, The Letters of Junius, 2 vols. (London, 1772), 2:107. Debate on the identity of the writer continues. For the persuasive argument that Isaac Barr´e was Junius, see John Britton, The Authorship of the Letters of Junius Elucidated (London, 1848). 66. Charles James Fox, Speech of November 2, 1775, in The Speeches of the Right Honourable Charles James Fox in the House of Commons, 6 vols., ed. J. Wright (London, 1815), 1:48. 67. William Wildman, Viscount Barrington, to Thomas Gage, July 6, 1767, in Howard H. Peckham, ed., Sources of American Independence: Selected Manuscripts from the Collections of the William L. Clements Library, 2 vols. (Chicago, Ill., 1978), 1:30. See also Barrington to Gage, May 7, 1766, ibid., 1:23; Gage to Barrington, January 17, 1767, ibid., 1:28; and William Knox to the Earl of Shelburne, 1763, ibid., 1:155. 68. On the question of whether George III was an ideological tyrant, see G. H. Guttridge, English Whiggism and the American Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1963); and Ian R. Christie, “Was There a ‘New Toryism’ in the Earlier Part of George III’s Reign?ˮ Journal of British Studies 5 (1965–66), 60–76. 69. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York, 2000), 143–5. 70. Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 44–6. See also Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 167. 71. On bullying by Generals Edward Braddock, John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun, and Jeffery, First Baron Amherst, see Douglas E. Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 24; and Douglas E. Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 504–8. 72. On the constitutional issue, see Reid, In Defiance of the Law, especially 101– 7; Lawrence Delbert Cress, “Radical Whiggery on the Role of the Military: Ideological Roots of the American Revolutionary Militia,ˮ Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979), 43–60; Reginald C. Stuart, “‘Enemies of Tyranny’: Recent Historiography on Standing Armies During the Era of the American Revolution,ˮ Canadian Journal of History 19 (1984); 183–99; and John Childs, “The Army and the State in Britain and Germany during the Eighteenth Century,ˮ in Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in

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Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (New York, 1999), 53–70. 73. For distribution of the garrisons, see Michael N. McConnell, Army and Empire: British Soldiers on the American Frontier, 1758–1775 (Lincoln, Nebr., 2004), 30–1. 74. James Otis, Jr., The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, Mass., 1764), 64. See also pp. 18–19, 35, 51–2, 57. See also Bernhard Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution, 1759–1766 (New York, 1960), 87–98. For the later, tragic history of Otis after a British official beat him, see John J. Waters, The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (New York, 1968). 75. Leach, Roots of Conflict, 155–7. See also Neil R. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760–1775: A Study of Enforcement of British Colonial Policy in the Era of the American Revolution (Annapolis, Md., 1973), 53. 76. Quoted in Zobel, The Boston Massacre, 80. See pp. 78–95. The size of a typical regiment varied, but 1,000 men was the norm. See John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 98n; and Houlding, Fit for Service, 49– 50. 77. [James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren and Samuel Pemberton], A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, Perpetrated in the Evening of the Fifth Day of March, 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1770), 11. See also O. M. Dickerson, ed., 1768–1769, As Revealed in a Journal of the Times (Westport, Conn., 1971); and John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution(Stanford, Calif., 1959), 293–8. On England, especially on rising crime rates following demobilization, see H. V. Bowen, War and British Society, 1688–1815 (New York, 1998), 34–9. On the question of the degree to which British society was militarized, see pp. 40–7. 78. Zobel, The Boston Massacre, 238–40. On the trials of the soldiers, see also, Robert Blair St. George, “Massacred Language: Courtroom Performance in Eighteenth-Century Boston,ˮ in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 327–56. 79. Thomas Gage to Hillsborough, April 2, 1771; and Thomas Gage to Dartmouth May 19, 1774, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, 2 vols., comp. and ed. Clarence Edwin Carter, (New Haven, Conn., 1931), 1:278. 80. “Thursday, November 4. Boston,ˮ Massachusetts Spy, Nov. 4, 1773. 81. “An Open Letter to Lord North,ˮ Public Advertiser, April 15, 1774; and Benjamin Franklin to William Franklin, September 7, 1774, in Willcox et al., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 21, January 1, 1774 through March 22, 1775, 184, 287. See pp. 183–7, 285–9. 82. H. T. Dickinson, “‘The Friends of America’: British Sympathy with the American Revolution,ˮ in Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis, ed. Michael T. Davis (New York, 2000), 7. See pp. 1–29. See also J. H. Plumb, In the Light of History (London, 1972), 70–87.

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83. H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 1995), 190–221. 84. Quoted in Shy, Toward Lexington, 66, 418–24. Shy’s mature view is that “the prospect as well as the reality of war became the catalysts of revolution.ˮ See John Shy, “The American Colonies in War and Revolution, 1748–1783,ˮ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall and Alaine Low (New York, 1998), 307. See pp. 300–24. 85. Shy, Toward Lexington, 23. Shy quotes a letter by Nathaniel Weare (Ware) of New Hampshire, crown official and father of a governor. 86. By the 1750s, New England militia in particular were all volunteer, highly motivated forces that allowed upwardly mobile common men to obtain land bounties and military equipment in time of war, and to farm in time of peace. See Kyle F. Zelner, A Rabble in Arms: Massachusetts Towns and Militiamen during King Philip’s War (New York, 2009), 213–17. 87. For the best description, in the soldier-rich colony of Connecticut, see Harold E. Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990). 88. Although the colonists did not know it, to support the Proclamation of 1763, the king had demanded 10,000 men, whereas the American command asked for only 7,000. According to one estimate, 2,000 soldiers could have managed trade at the frontier. See Walter S. Dunn, Jr., The New Imperial Economy: The British Army and the American Frontier, 1764–1768 (Westport, Conn., 2001), 5. According to Shy, Toward Lexington, 269, there were only about 5,250 Redcoat effectives in North America in 1768. That does not include naval forces. For their distribution, see Shy, Toward Lexington, pp. 267–77. On their true purpose, see Ben Baack, “British versus American Interests in Land and the War of American Independence,ˮ Journal of European Economic History 33 (2004), 519–54. 89. The radicals had a solid exegetical basis for substituting “colonial legislatureˮ in place of the word “Parliamentˮ in the Bill of Rights. See Reid, In Defiance of the Law, 165–77. 90. [Thomas Hutchinson], “A Dialogue between an American and a European Englishman,ˮ in Perspectives in American History, ed. Bernard Bailyn, (1975), 9: 408. See pp. 341–410. 91. Ibid., 409. 92. Dunn, The New Imperial Economy, 185–91. On England, see Gordon E. Bannerman, Merchants and the Military in Eighteenth-Century Britain: British Army Contracts and Domestic Supply, 1739–1763 (London, 2008), 121–37. 93. Dunn, Opening New Markets, 148; John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, Mass., 1986). 94. For the best introduction, see Janice Potter, The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). For a more skeptical view about a consistent loyalist ideology, see Mary Beth Norton, The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (London, 1974). See also Wilson, The Sense of the People, 237–84.

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95. Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 227. See pp. 223–9. Bailyn downplays the wording in these letters as not implying military coercion, but it is hard to imagine how liberties were to be abridged by other means. According to Miller, in Origins of the American Revolution, 333, the Hutchinson–Oliver letters “destroyed the last shreds of reputation the two men possessed in New England.” 96. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution, 74–8; Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York, 2006), 88–91; Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution, 99– 126. South Carolinians also were glad to have the British Army around, to awe the Cherokees. See Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York, 2005), 14–17; and Leach, Arms for Empire, 487–92. 97. Thomas Gage to William Wildman, Viscount Barrington, August 5, 1772, Peckham, Sources of American Independence, 1:106. He also advocated that the British sharply curb immigration to the colonies. See Gage to Barrington, December 2, 1772, ibid., 1:110. Extension of the Mutiny Act to America in 1765 mainly affected New Yorkers, but it set all colonists’ teeth on edge. See Frederick B. Wiener, Civilians Under Military Justice: The British Practice since 1689, Especially in North America (Chicago, Ill., 1967), 8, 68. See also Richard Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution (New York, 2010). 98. [Alexander McDougall], The Alarm Number III, by Hampden (New York, 1773), [1]; and The Alarm Number II, by Hampden (New York, 1773), [1]. 99. [Mercy Otis Warren], “A Political Reverie,ˮ reprinted in Mercy Otis Warren, Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous (Boston, Mass., 1790), 194. See also Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 2010), 92–184; and Jack P. Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 2013), 120–55. 100. Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (London, 1963). For a description of the army in America, see McConnell, Army and Empire, 27–8. 101. Carl Ubbelohde, The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960). The officer corps of the battalions stationed in America after 1763 used their muscle to obtain personal land grants in several colonies. See Shy, Toward Lexington, 355–8. More to the point of the present chapter, see H. T. Dickinson, “Britain’s Imperial Sovereignty: The Ideological Case against the American Colonists,ˮ in Dickinson, Britain and the American Revolution, 64–96. 102. On the king’s personal attention to the Wilkes affair, see George III to Lord Bute April 30, 1763, in Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766, ed. Romney Sedgwick (London, 1939), 232–33; and Jeremy Black, George III: America’s Last King (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 77–8. 103. Hayter, The Army and the Crowd, 36 ff.; Rogers, The British Army of the Eighteenth Century, 21–2.

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104. Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory. A Sermon, Preached before His Excellency Jonathan Trumbull, Esq., L.L.D., Governour and Commander in Chief, and the Honourable General Assembly, of the State of Connecticut, Convened at Hartford, at the Anniversary Election [May 8, 1783], 2nd edn. (Worcester, Mass., 1785), 54. 105. Peter Thacher, An Oration Delivered at Watertown, March 5, 1776, To Commemorate the Bloody Massacre at Boston (Boston, Mass., 1776), 14. 106. The Ruggles loyalist circle agitated for the creation of loyalist militia long before Lexington and Concord. See Timothy Ruggles to the Printers of the Boston Newspapers, December 29, 1774, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:1057. See also An Association Proposed to the Loyal Citizens [Boston, Mass., 1775], broadside; and Jackson T. Main, ed., Rebel versus Tory: The Crises of the Revolution, 1773–1776 (Chicago, Ill., 1963), 33–5. 107. Josiah Quincy Jr., Observations on the Act of Parliament Commonly Called the Boston Port-Bill (Boston, Mass., 1774), 68. 108. Ibid., 51. 109. William Tudor, An Oration Delivered March 5th, 1779 (Boston, Mass., 1779), 10. 110. Quincy, Observations on the Act of Parliament Commonly Called the Boston Port-Bill, 33. 111. Simeon Howard, A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery-Company in Boston, New England, June 7th, 1772 (Boston, Mass., 1773), 27. 112. Oliver Noble, Some Strictures upon the Sacred Story Recorded in the Book of Esther, Shewing the Power and Oppression of State Ministers Tending to the Ruin and Destruction of God’s People (Newburyport, Mass., 1775), 30. 113. Ibid., 28. 114. John Lathrop, A Discourse, Preached on March the Fifth, 1778 (Boston, Mass., 1778), 21. As soon as the rebels deployed an army, Samuel Adams began fretting that “soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a Body distinct from the rest of the Citizens,ˮ so civilians should watch them carefully. See Samuel Adams to James Warren, January 7, 1776, The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, 4 vols. (New York, 1904–08), 3:250. See pp. 250–4. 115. Tudor, An Oration Delivered March 5th, 1779, 16. For similar language, see David S. Rowland, Historical Remarks, with Moral Reflections. A Sermon, Preached at Providence, June 6, 1779 (Providence, R.I., 1779), 16–17; Isaac Morrill, Faith in Divine Providence, the Great Support of God’s People in Perilous Times. A Sermon, Preached at Lexington, April 19, 1780 (Boston, Mass., 1780), 25; and Thomas Dawes, An Oration Delivered March 5th 1781 at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1781), 15–17. 116. Speech of the Lord Chancellor, March, 1766, Simmons and Thomas, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America,

114

117.

118. 119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125.

126. 127. 128.

129. 130.

131.

132.

“A Moral Distemper in the British Government” 2:340. Jack Sosin impatiently dismisses the idea that British army units in America were there to cow the colonists, in Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall in the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1961), 38. John Hancock, An Oration; Delivered March 5, 1774, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston: to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1774), 8. This speech was written by a committee probably headed by Samuel Adams. Ibid. Ibid. See also John E. Ferling, A Wilderness of Miseries: War and Warriors in Early America (Westport, Conn., 1980), 86–7. The people of England perceived soldiers to be disorderly, a threat to women, and to individual liberty – tools of overweening power. See Stanley D. M. Carpenter, “The British Army,ˮ in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Malden, Mass., 2002), 473–6. On dueling, see V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (New York, 1988), 102–15. Hancock, An Oration, 13. Ibid. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 7. Franklin to Charles Thomson, February 5, 1775, Willcox et al., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 21, January 1, 1774 through March 22, 1775, 477. See pp. 475–9. Jonathan Williams Austin, An Oration, Delivered March 5th, 1778, at the Request of the Inhabitants of Boston: To Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1778), 8. Ibid. See Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 126–34, for a comparative approach to internal police in England and France. Austin, An Oration, 9. Ibid., 6. On homosexuality, see Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the EighteenthCentury Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston, Mass., 2006), 155–74. Isaac Barr´e’s Speech on the Coercive Acts, April 15, 1774, in Hansard, vol. 17, 1771–1774, 1204. Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Galloway, February 25, 1775, Willcox et al. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 21, January 1, 1774 through March 22, 1775, 509. See pp. 508–10. United States Continental Congress, Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North-America, Now Met in General Congress at Philadelphia, Setting Forth the Causes and Necessity of Their Taking up Arms. (Newburyport, Mass., 1775), broadside. For another sustained attack on soldiery, see Antidespot, No Standing Army in the British Colonies; Or, An Address to the Inhabitants of the Colony of New York Against Unlawful Standing Armies (New York, 1775). Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789 (Bloomington, Ind., 1971), 115– 19.

Notes

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133. Dawes, An Oration Delivered March 5th 1781, 14. See also Thomas Welsh, An Oration, Delivered March 5th, 1783. At the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, Mass., [1783]), 6–14. 134. [John Adams and Daniel Leonard], Novanglus and Massachusettensis, or, Political Essays Published in the Years 1774 and 1775 (Boston, Mass., 1819), 150. 135. By contrast, the Consensus School and loyalist apologists argue the opposite: only “violence and extra-legal actionˮ by rebels turned moderates into outright loyalists. See Leonard W. Labaree, “The Nature of American Loyalism,ˮ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 54 (1944),56. See pp. 15–58. 136. Sixteenth Regiment of Foot, God and a Soldier All Men Doth Adore (New York, 1770), broadside. 137. Robert S. Allen, ed., The Loyal Americans: The Military Role of the Loyalist Provincial Corps and their Settlement in British North America, 1775–1784 (Ottawa, Ont., 1983); Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Paul H. Smith, “The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,ˮ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 25 (1968), 259–77. 138. Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 2011), 224. If it is true, as Robert M. Calhoon argues, that rebel policies against loyalists helped “protect an initially fragile republican polity,ˮ the loyalists themselves provoked those policies by adhering to privilege and militarized police power. See Robert. M. Calhoon, “The Reintegration of the Loyalists and the Disaffected,ˮ in Robert. M. Calhoon, The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, revd. edn. (Columbia, S.C., 1989), 363. See pp. 350–69.

part ii FROM THE BOSTON TEA PARTY TO THE WAR AND INDEPENDENCE

4 Rebels and Loyalists from December Sixteenth, 1773 to September 1774

Come swallow your Bumpers, ye Tories! and roar, That the Sons of fair FREEDOM are hamper’d once more; But know that no Cut-throats our spirits can tame Nor Host of Oppressors shall smother the flame. [Mercy Otis Warren? October, 1768]

december sixteenth: the tea party On December 16, 1773, Samuel Adams cried out to the people gathered in Old South Church that they could do “nothing more to save the Country.”1 The huge crowd then flowed down to Griffin’s Wharf to stand watch late into the night, while a few score young men calling themselves “Mohawks” destroyed £10,000 worth of the East India Company’s tea. It was a grave crime. They knew how grave: Josiah Quincy Jr. told them in Old South that their action “must bring on the most trying and terrific struggle this country ever saw.”2 “December Sixteenth” was the third Day of the Revolution.3 The first “Day” had been August Fourteenth, 1765, when the Sons of Liberty organized and attacked Stampman Andrew Oliver’s property to persuade him to resign. Annual celebration of the day had become a radical organizing event in Massachusetts. Later, the second, more serious day was March Fifth, Massacre Day, observed solemnly every year. Although December Sixteenth was the third “Day,” it would be remembered, but not celebrated.4 The rebels historicized the Revolution from the beginning to give events meaningful roots in the long revolutionary tradition. They crafted 119

120 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774

their resistance – petitioning for constitutional rule, boycotting imported goods, and performing ritual violence against the property of loyalists – in vernacular New England politics tracing back to antiquity.5 They worked to keep the great “crimes” of rebellion (the Tea Party, the revolutionary provincial congress, the loyalist policies) in the light of past revolutions, or even to surpass them in dignified order. They knew their ideals were very high, and that the weak-minded might be unable to grasp them except possibly as melodrama. However, besides tradition, the rebels had no grand plan to guide them, any more than Cromwell and his comrades had in the 1640s. Independence from England remained unthinkable for many people in the region, to say nothing of the other, more conservative regions. But a small group of people in Samuel Adams’s orbit now very deliberately gave their acts proto-national meaning, determined not to be “tamed” by Tory “cut-throats,” as Mercy Otis Warren put it.6 Adams could never know how many Americans would support him until it was over, but in the end there were enough committed republicans to “make” the Revolution happen. The destruction of the tea was political protest similar to the day in 1630 when those in the Winthrop fleet spirited the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter with them to America in the Arabella.7 Although technically not against any law, they knew the king would see it as a criminal act, for carrying away the charter hindered the crown from controlling Massachusetts in the English courts. The insurgent rebels of 1773 were gambling at even higher stakes by destroying the tea, passing beyond the pale of mere remonstrance into that critically uncertain moment every revolution faces. They were lucky: the crown and Parliament played into their hands by overreacting and imposing drastic sanctions. George III seemed eager to play the part of Charles I. His rough treatment of Massachusetts encouraged intercolonial unity, inspiring the sympathy of even those outsiders who distrusted New Englanders. Thus, the Mohawks’ raid helped convince other colonists there was a conspiracy to subordinate the colonists utterly, to make them, as it were, truly English, or “venal slaves,” as one of them put it.8 The rebels hated the commodity from China on five counts: the unconstitutional and lucrative Townshend duty of 1767 remained on the tea; the Townshend revenue helped the crown pay the salaries of soldiers and crown officials in America; the Tea Act would create an official monopoly on the sale of the stuff, the goal of old privileged corporations, of which the East India Company was the oldest and largest; the favored tea consignees under the Tea Act were members of the local Hutchinson–Oliver

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oligarchy who engrossed so many provincial offices; and the tax on tea was a moral humiliation because of the colonists’ weakness for caffeine and the other drugs with which tea formed a constellation of dependency. There was a direct connection between the substantial quantity of alcohol the colonists consumed in their taverns, and the tea they drank to recover the next day.9 Moreover, it had become a question of honor because so many loyalist and neutral citizens had proved willing to pay the small duty on legally imported tea. The drug had become irresistible, as heavily consumed in North America as in Britain, and deeply entrenched in popular culture.10 By 1775, Americans were paying Townshend duties on hundreds of thousands of pounds of tea every year. Since 1767, protesters had maintained their constitutional rectitude, upholding the principle of “no taxation without representation,” by drinking smuggled, untaxed Dutch tea, while lawabiding loyalists more likely drank taxed tea.11 Now the British hoped to cash in on the colonists’ shameful caffeine addiction, by eliminating the Dutch competition.12 Thomas Hutchinson jeered that the local consumption of taxed tea by a large minority was an embarrassment to the radicals.13 A typical eighteenth-century placeman, Hutchinson saw no conflict of interest between his public trust as governor and his promotion of the Tea Act’s tea, and no problem with the fact that his son was a tea consignee.14 Yet he certainly understood that destruction of the Company’s tea was an invitation to war. For, as Abigail Adams put it to Mercy Otis Warren just days before the event, New England radicals were now saying, with ancient Rome’s Cato, “what a pity it is, that we can dye but once to save our country.”15

birth of a revolutionary “country” The crime of December Sixteenth shocked and incited: everyone had to choose sides. In Parliament, sympathizers were few. Lord North denounced the act by which the Bostonians had made a “Declaration of their own Independence.”16 The great Chatham was among those who demanded the colonists’ “full and entire submission.”17 The ruling sentiment in the House of Commons was that the “the Americans were a strange set of people, and that it was vain to expect any degree of reasoning from them”; as for the Tea Party, it was “the proceedings of a tumultuous and riotous rabble.”18 The colonists’ best friend in the Commons, Isaac Barr´e, son of an Irish Protestant grocer, supported the closing of Boston’s port.19 The king inquired with undisguised

122 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774

delight if any of the perpetrators could be brought up on charges of high treason.20 Soon after the Tea Party, an awful incident in the street served to keep the spirit of December Sixteenth on the boil through the winter – the John Malcolm affair. A determined and hated English customs official, he stirred up popular anger when he took his cane to the head of feisty rebel tradesman George Robert Twelves Hewes on January 25, 1774. It was reminiscent of the beating of James Otis Jr. in 1769 by a British official. A crowd formed, tried to get into Malcolm’s house, and he injured one of the men with his sword, further inflaming the people. They pressed in, disarmed and arrested him, carted him, bound, to Liberty Tree, exposed him in the cold, tarred and feathered him, and made him stand on a gallows with a noose around his neck, threatening him with death if he persisted in ridiculing the rebels.21 All of this was old English/New England culture at work, although it was one time Bostonians did approach the dangerous intensity of a mob. Cooler heads prevailed, but it was the extreme case of abuse in this period. Malcolm was healthy enough after his ordeal to sail for England, appeal to the king, and act as the highly symbolic but unsuccessful competitor to John Wilkes for a seat in the House of Commons from Middlesex County. Malcolm’s ordeal generated the exaggerated lore of tarring and feathering.22 Meanwhile, the Bostonians resolved that no tea could be traded after January 20, 1774.23 They ceremoniously destroyed several quantities of tea, including twenty-eight and a half chests “Mohawks” dumped on March 7 that arrived in Boston belatedly on the Fortune.24 They advanced the impeachment of Chief Justice Peter Oliver; considered suing the British customs houses for theft; tried to set up regular means of communication with radicals in other towns and colonies; and floated the idea of an intercolonial congress, while awaiting the ministry’s response. They began routinely calling The Cause “the country,” an old, nonspecific rhetorical term meaning the body of a free people. It was a collection of ideals going back to 1628, thence to Magna Carta, to Jesus, Catiline, Socrates, and the Israelites of Exodus – the natural right of a (self-)chosen people to govern themselves, not to be slaves. The term had floated in public discourse at least since 1769, when enforcers of boycotts had condemned violators as “obstinate and inveterate Enemies to their Country.”25 Now, it was indistinguishable from a murky body of natural law, based on “that power which originally belongs to the people,” as the plain folk of tiny Harvard, Massachusetts put it, something older than George III’s Britain and having a higher, even sacred claim to their loyalty.26 It was primal

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citizenship, the witanagemot of the Anglo-Saxons held under an old oak tree, and before that the Ark of the Covenant with Yahweh.27 Henceforth, to be loyal to the “country” as “patriots” was to accept the great violation of property rights on December Sixteenth as the best tactic to defy corrupt authority and assert the supremacy of popular will. The radicals’ understanding of what they were doing can be seen in Paul Revere’s heroic engraving of Samuel Adams at this time. A portrait of Adams crushes a mitred boy king with the viper of despotism snaking round the boy’s right wrist. Adams is backed by America, Minerva, and an angel (see Figure 4.1). This cartoon was a clarion call for rebellion. Thus, the “country” was an open spirit of republicanism, with a fully developed antimonarchical ideology.28 Benjamin Rush described the thrill he experienced in 1765 when he first heard a king-hating republican in England. He suddenly “suspected error in everything [he] had been taught, or believed and thought anything was possible.”29 Just so, a great frisson of rebel e´ lan swept out of 1649 up New England’s backbone. When official news of the Tea Party arrived in London on January 27, the Privy Council summoned the perfectly innocent Benjamin Franklin and vehemently harangued him because he was the highest-ranking New Englander available.30 Government bluster was met with a great blast of warlike words from the interior of New England, where even the sleepiest farm town was declaring, like the people of Little Compton, Rhode Island, on February 3, 1774, that they would “stand ready, With our Lives, & fourtains, Not only to Assist this Colony, But, Like wise ye Patriotick Governments, of Massachusetts-Bay, New York, Philadelphia, or any other of our Sister Colonys, in all Laudable Measures.”31 Over the next few months it would become clear that the Little Comptons formed an unshakeable league, and loyalists were a beleaguered minority, too few in the interior to back up royal authority. But for now, most loyalists believed they were finally going to get the assistance from the crown they longed for. Chief loyalist Thomas Hutchinson was under no such illusion, knowing before the Tea Party that he had lost control of the situation.32 Since early November, the town’s committee of correspondence had been ordering the tea consignees to Liberty Tree in truculent terms signed by “O. C.” – Oliver Cromwell.33 Loyalists were now subject to plenty of verbal abuse. Merchant George Deblois claimed that in the weeks prior to December Sixteenth in the normally placid town of Salem, he “could seldom walk the streets in open day without meeting insult from the violent republicans.”34 When tea consignee Jonathan Clarke – son of Richard –

124 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774

figure 4.1. Paul Revere, Mr. Samuel Adams, April, 1774. (Reproduced with the permission of Brandon Nicholson). In this very significant cartoon, the portrait of Adams, based on the John Singleton Copley portrait of Adams (c. 1772), crushes a terrified boy, identified as George III by the “G[eorge] R[ex]” on his cap. The king is here being ridiculed as “the boy king,” as he had been known by word of mouth, given the fact that he had come to the throne at the tender age of twenty-

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D GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG figure 4.1 (cont.) two years. By this device, Revere is ridiculing the dynastic principle for its arbitrary character, so impractical as to put an untried youth at the head of a great nation. He wears a Redcoat grenadier’s mitre cap, which may serve a dual purpose. First, it emphasizes the king’s inclination to use military power, reinforced by the fact that he is dressed in a military jacket, and has a serpent, traditional symbol of despotism, coiled round his arm. Second, the mitre may also serve as a symbol of his support for a missionizing Church of England in the colonies, and a bishop to rule over them, since bishops wear a mitre cap or crown similar to a grenadier’s. The number on the cap in this version (as republished in William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams (Boston, 1865), vol. 2, frontispiece) appears to be “XXI,” and this poses a problem of interpretation. The fact is that Revere was adapting one of his own adaptations: an earlier version of this cartoon appeared in the short-lived Boston Royal American Magazine in March, 1774, featuring John Hancock’s portrait, to coincide with Hancock’s March Fifth oration. (The Adams version appeared in the next number, April.) In the Hancock version, the number on the cap is clearly “XXIX,” to refer to the soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot who had killed and wounded civilians in the Boston Massacre. The version reproduced by Wells shows several technical refinements. It looks as if Revere was deliberately trying to change the number in this later version to “XXI,” but why? Is he trying to reinforce further George III’s youth by suggesting he took the throne at age twenty-one years? That would be off by a year, but it would not be inexplicable in an age when the English were still a bit confused by their adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1751. Or is it just a sign of hurry, of a man working feverishly to keep up, in between his long rides to maintain inter-colonial communications? Adams is flanked by two imposing females, a bare-breasted, bare-footed, racially ambiguous image of America, who bears the staff and cap of liberty. (In ancient Rome, when a master brought a slave before a magistrate to emancipate him or her, the judge’s lictor (or bailiff) tapped the slave on the head with his vindicta, or rod to mark the moment of freedom. Thereafter, the freedman was supposed to wear the brimless Greek pileus or cap of liberty, so that everyone would be able to tell his status, given the fact that the person would still be dressed and coiffed much like a slave. Americans adopted these symbols to stand for liberty and used them in common iconography deep into the nineteenth century.) She has a confident, knowing expression, and she stamps on “Laws to Enslave America.” On the other side stands a stern Minerva, Roman Goddess of Wisdom and War, with a threatening mask on her shield, and her spear aimed at “GR”. An angel heralds Adams with a trumpet, signaling Heaven’s support for The Cause. This ensemble of symbols is clearly an eighteenth-century expression of anti-monarchical or republican ideology, the opposite of the loyalists’ valorization of George III and constitutional monarchy more generally. It was an absolutely intolerable affront to George III, reminding him of the fate of his deposed political ancestors, Charles I and James II. This engraving was a major turning point in American politics, for even New Englanders with a limited education understood the treasonous implications of the symbols. To the loyalists of New and Old England, this was a sharp warning of a trial by arms, and it implicitly recast loyalists as the disloyal.

126 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774

arrived in Boston from London on November 17, the subsequent homecoming party in his family mansion was interrupted by a large crowd and a hullabaloo of horns, whistles, and shouting. The crowd demanded entry to convince Clarke to resign his commission. When one of the besieged fired a gun in the air to intimidate the crowd, the people beset the house for two hours, stoning it and wrecking its windows and window frames before retiring.35 The trained bands of militia in most towns were ready to follow the Boston radicals’ lead, so the governor was helpless to do much more than moan, “there never was greater tyranny in Constantinople than has been lately at Boston.”36 In the January session of the legislature, Hutchinson jubilantly reported a debt-free treasury and his successful negotiation of the Massachusetts– New York border, but it was to no avail.37 The House of Representatives culminated the royal salaries controversy, which had been stirring anger since 1772, by insisting that superior court judges accept their salaries from the province or regret it. When Peter Oliver declared that he would take his salary from the crown, the delegates in the House voted to impeach him on February 24. Governor Hutchinson dutifully declared their procedure “unconstitutional” in a royal colony, but both the governor and Oliver were finished.38 Their first loyalty was to the British ruling class, so they could not take seriously some old notion of “country.” As the perfect colonial embodiments of New Toryism, they had become exiles in their own homeland. However, for the moment, most of their colleagues continued to imagine they would reap all the benefits of their British loyalty, and the king would force the rebels to submit.

defining and excluding loyalists The word “country” became a mandate, one derived from the “ancient” English constitution, which was in turn rooted in natural or pre-Adamite law. The word “Tories” now came to encapsulate the opposite of all that, vaguely evoking its original political meaning – Catholic persecutors of Protestants in seventeenth-century Ireland – combined with its recent association with the counter-revolutionary rebels of 1745 (the Jacobites), and the despotism into which George III and his supporters seemed to be driving, with all its stink of the Stuarts. Calling loyalists “Tories” – those who always uphold the king’s prerogative – helped the rebels at this crucial moment to refocus colonists’ resentment of Parliament onto George III and the crown.39

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Loyalists defended the antithesis of “country.” William Pencak explains the difference between loyalists and rebels from a social scientific perspective using the Dictionary of National Biography. He finds that the loyalists tended to be from the older generations, rebels from the younger; the loyalists to be from the upper ranks of society and political power, the rebels to be more likely political “outs.” Well-to-do loyalists tended to migrate out of fractious Boston over the generation prior to 1773 to roomy country seats, whence they returned to the town after the British Army arrived in 1774 to make it a “government” stronghold. At bottom, Pencak sees the loyalists as inductive thinkers who did not think critically about the social structure that permitted them to prosper. They were materialists who believed their success must be owing to British rule, good breeding, and personal superiority. They attributed their power to natural and cultural vigor rather than to special economic advantages in a class structure. By contrast, rebels were deductive thinkers who appealed to the abstract ideal of liberty. They prized individualism, skepticism of power, and suspicion of concentrated material wealth because it tended to be a source of corruption, even while most of them enjoyed the opportunity of the capitalist market place. They were disciplined by communal values and hostile to ambitious outside forces.40 Now these profound social and ideological differences were politicized as never before. Boston’s March Fifth oration in 1774 was unprecedented in its fiery rhetoric. The town fathers invited the wealthy and ambitious John Hancock to give the now regular speech to mourn the day. A committee headed by Samuel Adams wrote the speech. Hancock lacerated those who “boast of being friends to government” as “a band of TRAITORS,” and “a knot of treacherous knaves,” who built their “hopes of safety on the low arts of cunning, chicanery, and falshood [sic],” for whose “dark deeds . . . the people have fixed a mark on those ungrateful monsters” for all time.41 It appealed to “country” repeatedly. At this moment, the Black Regiment of Congregationalist rebel ministers also began to hit their stride. Enoch Huntington argued that loyalists were “self-interested placemen” who acted “upon principles of Machiavilian or diabolical policy” without regard for “the best interest of the people, but avowedly calculated to support the designs of the governing party, by any means whatever.”42 They tried to cover up the truth so that the colonists would be in “abject slavery to the crown, court-parasites, minions and placemen of Great-Britain.”43 Samuel Webster chimed in: loyalists hoped to become “placemen and pensioners here, who are to be our task-masters to afflict us, and riot on our spoils!”44 The

128 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774

crown would make the colonists pay taxes to pay off loyalists: “these men are by this means to be attach’d hereby to their interest,” imitating the Egyptians’ policy to set task masters over the Jews, who “made their lives bitter with hard bondage – And rigorous service.”45 The pastor of Northborough, Peter Whitney, charged that loyalists were greedy “inhuman and barbarous miscreants who have been plotting their country’s ruin[, and] those sordid wretches, who preferring their own private interest, to the salvation of their country” would surely be punished by Heaven.46 The public should abhor, detest, and “neglect” or shun them.47 Even the archRoyalist Ann Hulton seemed to agree with these sermons, complaining that her associates in New England were loyal “more from interest than principle it’s to be feard [sic].”48 Explanations of loyalists’ motives grew more angry by 1775. For Oliver Noble it was simply about men who were “voracious” for “power and wealth,” of which “they can never have enough,” a type found throughout history.49 The vampire Tories “sculk [sic] behind the king’s authority” in order “to suck the blood and treasure of their fellowsubjects.”50 By early 1776, public rage would hit a zenith as widespread loyalism still delayed independence. By then, Andrew Lee could not forgive the opponents, who “are unworthy to breathe the air of a free country, and should be treated as creatures never dignified with humanity.”51 A more moderate, cultural explanation could be heard in some quarters: loyalists lacked the capacity to support the Cause because they identified too closely with the British as a people, who had become, according to Samuel West, “perfect strangers” to Americans.52 Nevertheless, after sixty-six pages of temperate sociological explanation, West threw up his hands and agreed with Enoch Huntington, that after the Battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill, loyalists could only be seen as “worshippers of the prince of darkness.”53 In the spring of 1774, Mercy Otis Warren brilliantly assaulted Governor Hutchinson and his circle in her epic satire on the Tea Party. Its mockheroic tone perfectly captured the gravity of the moment. She called it “The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs; or the Sacrifice of the Tuscararoes.”54 Neptune learns that the gods have run out of nectar for their parties, and musters a convocation to decide what to do about it. The Titans (the British) wish to go to Columbia (America) and despoil it of its nectar (“Nor leave untouch’d the peasant’s little store”), but Neptune’s wives disagree about this plan.55 Wife Salacia harkens to the Nereids, symbols of truth and justice, who call for an aquatic sacrifice of tea, and encourage the “heroes of the Tuscararo tribe” of New Englanders to cast tea down

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before the sea gods.56 In the end, that rite succeeds in the teeth of opposition from Neptune’s other lady, Amphitrite (loyalists), who encourages the Titans to rampage against the Tuscararoes. Salacia’s strategy “spread confusion” in the “N[eponsit] hills,” that is, in Milton, where Thomas Hutchinson had his summer retreat, now his refuge from the Boston crowd.57 Circulated privately, it went well beyond Warren’s published attack on the Hutchinson Junto in 1772. It had a higher tone, now raised to the Olympian realm, and its anger at the plundering mentality of the British and their local henchmen was hot. Gad Hitchcock restated Warren’s assessment more darkly on May 25, 1774, in an election-day sermon before Governor Gage and the colony’s legislature. Loyalists were of “a rank, arbitrary, popish complexion,” who looked upon the people as an ignorant mob led by a clique of sanctimonious rabble-rousers.58

thomas gage and the coercive acts Commander of His Majesty’s Forces in America General Thomas Gage hove into Boston Harbor on May 13 bearing a commission as governor of Massachusetts. He swayed in the wind at anchor a few days, to give the townspeople time to cool down. He had long experience, good abilities, and a light touch, but he was also from an old converted Catholic family now fanatically loyal to the crown and its Church, so naturally he despised what he called the “Republican Spirit” in New England.59 The British, Spanish and French sent some of their best generals to the New World in the 1760s and 70s, and Gage was one of them, competent and incorruptible.60 Upon arrival, he expressed a spirit of moderation and meant to enforce his royal instructions with a generous spirit, but after the Massachusetts elections on May 25, he polarized the situation by rejecting thirteen councilors elected by the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Moreover, he lost his best ally, Hutchinson, to London, and made an attempt to buy off Samuel Adams.61 Despite the fact that Gage had been in America since 1754 and was somewhat Americanized by his New Jersey-born wife, Margaret Kemble, he sent her packing to England when he suspected she was in communication with rebel leaders prior to the Battle of Lexington.62 News of the Boston Port Act preceded Gage’s arrival by a few days, and on May 12 Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren had organized a convention of eight towns in Faneuil Hall to prepare a plan of resistance.63 Nevertheless, the loyalists and moderates prevailed for now: on May 17, the colony’s officials escorted Gage from Long Wharf to

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the Council chamber to swear him in, a big crowd watching in ominous silence.64 Several new regiments of Regulars began arriving. By the time of the Cambridge Crisis, Gage had six regiments in Boston, and expected two to three more from Canada and two from Ireland.65 Loyalist officials who had been cooped up through the winter in the Castle returned to Boston, although Benjamin Faneuil dared go home only in August.66 As the Coercive Acts dribbled out of Parliament, they helped set off the Powder Alarm and Cambridge Crisis described below. The government’s harsh measures were everything Samuel Adams could ask for to demonstrate Westminster’s contempt for rights. Parliament would rule the colonies according to the sweeping provisions in its Declaratory Act of 1766, and resort to military force if necessary.67 In addition to the principles they violated, the Acts set off historic alarm in New England. The Government Act swept aside the 1691 charter (or “constitution”) of Massachusetts to give the crown a preponderance of power. The charter of 1691 had been a royal affliction even then, but now, worse yet, the royal governor would nominate members of the Council in the king’s name and have control over most major officers in the colony. It was patently autocratic by contrast to the colony’s longstanding government, and it would create a source of offshore patronage for the crown.68 According to John Trumbull, it opened the way to “knaves” to gain “Lordships, Pensions, Posts, Commissions,” heralding a return to the bad days of 1629 in England.69 The Quartering Act reminded everyone of the Stuarts’ armies. The Administration of Justice Act reawakened memory of Charles I’s Star Chamber. The Quebec Act was a deep offense to those New Englanders who had made military sacrifices in the conquest of New France since the 1630s. It was also an affront to the region’s powerful antiepiscopal convictions. Loyalists noisily denounced the Tea Party.70 In Boston, 128 “Merchants and Traders” signed an appeal to General Thomas Gage that he tell the king they had nothing to do with “the outrage of rash and inconsiderate Men” who had dumped the tea.71 However, they now lost their leader, for Thomas Hutchinson was going on leave in England and had delayed his departure only because of the sudden death of Andrew Oliver. When he sailed on June 1 – Gage closing the harbor behind him – one hundred and twenty-seven leading men in the mercantile community addressed him in a sympathetic farewell, a majority of them loyalists, from Amory to Winslow. Signers of the addresses to Gage and Hutchinson must have understood that the rebels would use this gesture

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as a benchmark of grand loyalism. The rebels denounced Hutchinson’s address as “servile, fallacious, and adulatory.”72 They focused popular animosity on the shortlist of government officials who were unquestionably “inimical” to the “country.”73 “Inimical” was now the euphemism for sworn “Tory” – meaning one who ate the king’s bread, directly or indirectly, and was therefore incorrigible. John Adams exulted that those people seemed to be overwhelmed. “The Tories were never, since I was born,” he rejoiced, “in such a state of humiliation, as at this Moment.”74

organizing a revolutionary government From the rebels’ perspective, the loyalists simply refused to see that by the summer of 1774, the king-in-Parliament had breached every single major bar to despotism in the English constitution. By the Bill of Rights of 1689, the Tea Act was taxation without representation; the Boston Port Act and Massachusetts Government Act were undeniably a suspension of laws by fiat; the Quartering Act imposed a standing army in time of peace without the people’s consent; the Administration of Justice Act would deny patriot leaders their right to trial by their peers; the Quebec Act left a Catholic bishop on the backside of New England, contrary to a basic constitutional ban on such Catholic offices, in effect for two centuries on both sides of the English Atlantic. Hostility to the Church among all English Protestants remained strong, fed by contemporary news from the Catholic world that its clergy still burned heretics at the stake.75 The Quebec Act was very bad news for the loyalists because it officially established Roman Catholic episcopacy in Quebec, a church “the most SANGUINARY of any amongst Christians, and one of its cardinal tenets [is] absolution, [which] is totally inconsistent with all civil government.”76 Certainly, New Englanders had always expected the French Catholic colonists would stay in Quebec and continue to worship in their faith, but the bishop was another matter. It seemed to herald Anglican episcopacy in the colonies, now with an autocratic Roman model in Quebec to imitate. A majority of leading loyalists were Church of England, making them potential indirect beneficiaries of the Act’s episcopal tilt.77 As for the crown’s land grab by the boundary change in the Quebec Act, seemingly nobody in England heard John Dunning denounce it in the House of Commons as “monstrous” because it eliminated “by one stroke, the charter properties confirmed by act of parliament” to the colonists who had invested huge sums in western development

132 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774

companies.78 Finally, if the New Englanders were not sufficiently alarmed by the terms of the Quebec Act, it was suggested in the Lords that the Quebeckers would happily get under arms to quell the “fierce fanatic spirits” of the “round-heads” in Boston.79 The rebels were keenly aware that the other side had a historicized ideology based on the English constitution, although a loyalist was likely to deny having such a bad thing as a system of thought. The loyalists looked upon the rebels’ “country” with contempt, as a nation without a king, one that must inevitably descend into chaos by the fickle tastes of majority rule. They regarded monarchy as essential in a world where everyone lived under monarchs. So the rebels still could not discuss independence openly because that meant treason, for many people agreed with the loyalists on the dangers inherent in democratic republicanism. Samuel Adams knew that a majority of all Americans were reluctant to overthrow George III and throw over the crown; even in July, 1776, a large portion of the population was horrified by it. New England rebels had long openly debated in vague terms when it was necessary to check arbitrary power. The subject of Samuel Adams’s masters’ thesis at Harvard in 1743 was: “Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved?”80 The most recent local precedent was the overthrow of James II’s Governor Edmund Andros in 1689.81 The loyalists believed correctly that the radicals would conduct the colonists into an ideological contest to end monarchy and aristocracy. Again, the importance of George III’s role is still not fully appreciated by historians. His activist policy was an abrupt departure from that of his more detached Hanoverian predecessors, and it provoked New Englanders and Britons in England to assert natural law, or the right to overthrow a monarch if he overreached. This law was supra-constitutional and absolutely inalterable – the great promise of Zion. By contrast, it was the sure mark of a loyalist that he did not believe there was an authority higher than the crown’s. The English and New Englanders had spectacularly overthrown two monarchs in recent memory, Charles I and James II, but loyalists approved only the latter rebellion, with regret. And, after all, the English Protestant gentleman George was no Franco-Scottish bully, like James. Moreover, there had been a clear alternative to James – his daughter – whereas it was understood by everyone that there was no ermined American candidate who could replace George III. Most people understood that the Mohawks of December Sixteenth were inaugurating a do-or-die scenario: the result of war with the Mother Country would be

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no king, no crown, rather, republics by default. Everyone understood that the thirteen colonies would never be able to choose a monarch agreeable to them all. However, the rebels dared not say kingship must die. After all, George III had greatly refurbished the image of monarchy, by his dedicated administrative zeal, and his impeccable domestic morality and abstemious habits, in an age when that was rare in a European royal. As a result, he was a big stumbling block for the rebels, as the heavy chain of their own logic was dragging them into eliminating monarchy. John Allen’s oration at Boston’s Second Baptist Church at the end of 1772 laid out the basic problem. After a short tour of Biblical kings, he denounced at length the ambition of the current “absolute prince” of England. “Was not this the cause of almost all the distress, deaths, and bloodshed,” he demanded, “that have happened in England since the conquest of Julius Caesar? the King’s ruling . . . by a despotic power.”82 Then he took aim at the loyalists, condemning those who tried to “make the name of the King sacred, [for] he is no more sacred than the people have made him, by investing him with the sacred trust of their rights.”83 That could not be brokered by mere politics. And yet, even as late as July 1776, in the Declaration of Independence, the rebels tried to reassure moderates: the Declaration condemns George III, not monarchy. The loyalists’ strongest suit was their staunch monarchism, with a king who was a diligent, square-toed squire, no dim fool like Louis XVI, who fiddled with clocks while his wife partied.84 The idea that the monarch’s relationship with the people was a contingent one had long since become offensive to the British ruling class. The Whigs had entwined loyalty to the Revolution of 1689 with a distinctly “Tory” conception of the crown as sacred and untouchable. For both the major parties, 1689 was a final contract with the crown. But that seemed contrary to the primordial Lockean principle at the heart of the Revolution of 1689 – a contract is limited in time because of changing circumstances or bad faith. The loyalists ignored the contradictions. Only New Englanders and their allies in the other colonies and England believed that the king was violating a strict contractual relation, so that the people must overthrow him.85 Parliament’s order closed the port of Boston on June 1 because the town had not paid for the tea. Gage ordered the legislature to reconvene at Salem in neighboring Essex County. He rejected thirteen of the councilors chosen by the House, James Bowdoin’s name at the head of the list. He asked the crown for more soldiers.86 In response, towns became angrier.

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The fathers of Farmington, Connecticut, declared that the royal ministers were “pimps and parasites” who were “instigated by the devil, and led on by their wicked and corrupt hearts.”87 The upsurge of radicalism went hand in hand with a conservative backlash. Moderates called for a general colonial congress, where they hoped cool heads would prevail. Samuel Adams and other radicals hated that idea, for the inexorable result would be that “a congress of the merchants . . . would effectually do the business.”88 That meant the merchants – including many conservative colonists from outside New England – would act primarily in their own mercantile interests, and would temporize their way through the crisis to avoid costly war. Adams aimed to consolidate the rebellion in New England before gentlemen from other regions got involved, but knowing that intercolonial unity had to come at some point. Adams yielded to public pressure and organized legislators in Salem to support a congress. On June 17, 129 delegates locked the doors of the legislature so that Gage’s officers could not interrupt. The representatives then decided they had “long been struggling under the heavy Hand of Power [that now tried to] reduce the Inhabitants to Slavery.”89 They resolved to organize to fight the Coercive Acts, and selected five delegates to a Continental Congress to assemble September 1 in Philadelphia, a town not dominated by the British Army.90 When Gage heard what the representatives were up to, he sent an envoy to Salem who tried to force the locked doors to get at the “demagogues.”91 It recalled that time in March, 1629, when the House of Commons locked its doors against Charles I’s herald. Instead, the messenger read a decree of dissolution outside, ending an institution founded almost a century and a half earlier. Meanwhile, Gage encouraged the loyal element as much as he could. He tried to rally “gentlemen, who thro’ Fear of the Tyranny under which they have lived, dared not to act or stand up for government.”92 Then Samuel Adams organized a mass meeting in Boston on June 27 and gave Gage’s supporters a long, heated but decent hearing.93 It is remarkable that such an exchange could occur at this late stage.94 In the end, Gage reported, all efforts by “the better Sort of People” at the meeting to avert catastrophe failed because they were outvoted by “a great Majority of the lower Class.”95 Samuel Adams persuaded other New England leaders to support an agreement on nonconsumption of British merchandise and non-exportation of American produce, in protest at the Boston Port Act. Gage promptly dubbed it a “Solemn League and Covenant”

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because those words were artfully blended in the text, words that invoked the rebel English–Scots coalition of 1643 against Charles I, a phrase specifically illegal since 1661.96 The governor took what may have been the decisive step and denounced it in a proclamation as “traitorous,” ordering sheriffs to arrest anyone distributing it as “Enemies of the King.”97 His action virtually guaranteed the success of the Covenant’s purpose – to create a clear distinction between British loyalty and the superior loyalty to “country.” By midsummer, Gage and his officers could only moan “that this immense continent from New England to Georgia is moved and directed by one man,” namely Adams, but the truth was the man responsible for the turmoil was George III.98 The loyalists remained bravely vocal. From Pownalborough at the cultural extreme of northern New England, Samuel Goodwin and six other loyalists condemned the “outrageous zeal” of the tea destroyers, warning that they “only wate an opportunity to serve their Privet Intrest even at the Distruction of their Countary.”99 This deeply divided town would also produce the obstreperous Anglican missionary, Reverend Jacob Bailey, who would finally go into exile in Canada.100 Bedford, New Hampshire’s busy diarist, Justice of the Peace Matthew Patten, recorded on the politically charged fast day of July 14, that Presbyterian Reverend John Houston showed his loyalism contemptuously by refusing to observe the day.101 His Majesty’s Receiver of Customs for the Port of Boston, Nathaniel Coffin, took a leading role in trying to organize resistance to the rebels, and denounced those who were herding “this poor deluded people . . . into the very Jaws of Hell.”102 The willingness of loyalists to be outspoken made it necessary for rebels to discredit them. Gage helped focus popular resentment by appointing the most distinguished loyalists as his twenty-four Mandamus Councilors under authority of the coercive Government Act. It helped spread unrest throughout the colony, as the rebels organized a campaign to persuade the appointees to refuse to serve in this new body. The Committees of Correspondence of Suffolk, Middlesex, Essex, and Worcester Counties met in Faneuil Hall August 26–27 to decide how to stay organized. As a result, General Gage finally had to admit that “the Phrenzy had spread in a greater or less Degree thro’ all” the region.103 When the other colonies agreed to send delegates to Philadelphia, the loyalists’ spirit began to sink. As Richard D. Brown has suggested, the entire structure of Massachusetts politics was transformed in the summer of 1774, as Committees of Correspondence appeared in the towns, which

136 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774

also sent delegates to county conventions, outraged by the Coercive Acts and the occupation.104 The only thing that might have saved the loyalists’ cause was exceptionally charismatic leadership, so the loss of their headmen – Thomas Hutchinson, John Wentworth, and Joseph Wanton – was costly. Leadership now fell to elderly, clumsy extremists like Peter Oliver and Timothy Ruggles, who advocated passive obedience to the crown and disdain for rebellion. Oliver was unable in his long denunciation of the rebels to be any more sophisticated than to label them as a gang of demagogues: “Jews, a head strong, moody, murmuring race,” a metaphor Samuel Adams would have treasured.105

the powder alarm and cambridge crisis, september 1774 By August, 1774, Redcoat-occupied Boston had become the refuge of those who signed denunciations of the Tea Party, Mandamus Councilors, judges of the Superior Court, generally those who addressed Gage on his arrival or Hutchinson on his departure.106 In the last days of August, the campaign to make all Mandamus Councilors resign rose to a pitch of excitement. A crowd of no less than 2,000 yeomen made Worcester’s Timothy Paine resign with his hat in hand.107 On August 30, the justices of the Superior Court attempted to sit, but had to adjourn when jurors refused to be sworn, supported by a large crowd.108 An apparently surprised Gage now warned his commanders they faced not “a Boston Rabble but the Freeholders and Farmers of the Country,” who were preparing to resist any attempt by the general to deploy troops into the interior.109 They had “closed the courts and disempowered the council,” all the while making “a mockery of the restrictions against town meetings” set by the Massachusetts Government Act, an act they were systematically nullifying.110 Secretly, he adopted a policy to disarm New England over coming months by a series of small surgical operations, to prevent war.111 News from England helped keep the atmosphere roiling. As the Cambridge Crisis began on September 1, the Boston press published news of anti-popery demonstrations in Westminster, when an angry crowd engulfed the king’s carriage on his way to sign the Quebec Act. Ominously, the crowd was dominated by people “much above the common level,” who shouted at the king “No popery! No French laws! No protestant popish King! Remember Charles I!”112 Although the king “was observed several times to change color,” he “showed as much contempt for the rabble as James II when he took water to escape their fury.”113

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This was, perhaps, the most important moment of Anglo-American unity in the entire century, in reaction to the Quebec Act. When Gage’s agents told him that Minute Men were organizing across the colony, before dawn on September 1 he sent soldiers to Charlestown and Cambridge to seize a large store of powder and some artillery and secure them in Castle William. His success incited angry crowds to begin gathering in Cambridge, and that night a crowd of “mostly boys and negroes” commenced a violent demonstration outside the home of Attorney General and Admiralty Judge Jonathan Sewall, boyhood friend of John Adams. Mrs. Sewall addressed them from a balcony and demanded consideration for her feminine sex, as they burst through the front door. Several male friends in the house drove back the intruders, but then one of the loyalist party accidentally fired a gun from a window. The crowd then smashed the first-story windows of the house.114 That was the end of it, but rumor of what had happened spread and became amplified by a false report that Gage’s soldiers had killed civilians and opened fire on the mainland from his ships. In response, thousands of Minute Men suddenly descended on Cambridge in a fine display of coordination early on September 2. When they found the rumor of battle to be false, they specifically resolved in a rally “to signify their abhorrence of mobs, riots, and the destruction of private property.”115 But they also demanded that loyalist officeholders conform to the popular will. Under the joint authority of the Committees of Correspondence of Boston and Cambridge, they convinced Lieutenant Governor Thomas Oliver to promise to resign his office. He agreed, with the stipulation that he was surrounded by 4,000 people. The crowd did not like that response, but allowed him to go to Boston and inform Gage that the militia would now return to their homes, requesting that he not send troops into the countryside. At this point, the rebels’ old nemesis Benjamin Hallowell, His Majesty’s Collector of Customs, tried to get to the capital from the interior, but was recognized in Cambridge. Like Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford in 1641, he had the misfortune to make a convenient whipping boy to stand in for his master, the king. He was greeted with: “Dam you how doe you like us now, you Tory Son of a Bitch, and other language as abusive, [and as] an Enemy to the Country.”116 Hallowell whipped on his chaise and 150 men mounted to pursue him. He brandished his pistols at them but they surrounded him screaming, “stop the Murderer the Tory murderer he has killed a man [and] this Hue and Cry occasioned a Sallying forth of the people from the Houses, which were many.” When his chaise horse

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gave out, he jumped on his servant’s nag. “Holding a pistol in each hand,” he reported, he “thus run the gauntlet” to Boston.117 Notes 1. William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, 3 vols. (Boston, Mass., 1865), 2:122. See also Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, Mass., 1999), 43. 2. Benjamin W. Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (Boston, Mass., 1979), 140. See also Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven, Conn., 2010); Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York, 2007), 23– 62; Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 149–77; Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York, 1977), 247–70; Ian R. Christie and Benjamin W. Labaree, Empire or Independence, 1760–1776: A British–American Dialogue on the Coming of the American Revolution (New York, 1976), 163– 82; and George Bancroft, History of the United States of America From the Discovery of the Continent, 6 vols. (New York, 1888), 3:443–58. 3. Christopher Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution (London, 1980). 4. John C. Miller, Sam Adams, Pioneer in Propaganda (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 112–13. 5. John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1832, 2nd edn. (New York, 1992), 63–5; Robert B. Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 2004), 122–6. 6. The epigraph for this chapter may have been written by Benjamin Church, but a case is made for Warren’s authorship by Nancy Rubin Stuart, in The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation (Boston, Mass., 2008), 37. The original “Massachusetts Song of Libertyˮ was published in the Boston Gazette, Oct. 3, 1768. 7. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, Mass., 1958), 45–8. 8. “The American Liberty Song,ˮ in Two Favorite New Songs at the American Camp [Salem, [1776?], broadside. Were the rebels of December Sixteenth aware of the Tory “Mohawks,ˮ and, thus, recapturing control of the symbol? See Calhoun Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre (Lexington, Ky., 1993), 11–25. 9. On colonial tavern life, and its connection to political culture, see David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), and Sharon V. Salinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Baltimore, Md., 2002). 10. John J. McCusker, ed. and intro, Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, vol. 5, Part E, (New York, 2006), table

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Eg1151–59, S-762–3; Peter D. G. Thomas, The Townshend Duties Crisis: The Second Phase of the American Revolution, 1767–1773 (Oxford. 1987), 246–57. 11. [John Adams and Daniel Leonard], Novanglus and Massachusettensis, or, Political Essays Published in the Years 1774 and 1775 (Boston, Mass., 1819), 160–2. 12. This only skims the surface of a much more complicated subject laid out by Philip Lawson in “Tea, Vice, and the English State, 1660–1784,ˮ in Philip Lawson, A Taste for Empire and Glory, Studies in British Overseas Expansion, 1660–1800 (Brookfield, Vt., 1997), xiv, 1–21. 13. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Uprising Against the East India Company,ˮ Political Science Quarterly 32 (1917), 60–79. 14. Jack M. Sosin, Agents and Merchants: British Colonial Policy and the Origins of the American Revolution, 1763–1775 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1965), 163. 15. Abigail Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, December 5, 1773, Warren–Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 1743–1814, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), 1:18. 16. Speech of Lord North, March 23, 1774, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, ed., R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, 6 vols. (New York, 1982–87), 4:132. See this volume for the debates on the Coercive Acts. 17. Speech of Lord Chatham, June 26, 1774, Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Weekly News-Letter, August 18, 1774. Chatham put it more strongly in private, referring to the Bostonians’ “wild pretensionsˮ and violation of “the most indispensable ties of civil society.ˮ See Lord Chatham to William Petty, Lord Shelburne, March 20, 1774, in Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, ed. William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle, 4 vols. (London: John Murray 1838–40), 4:336. See pp. 336–8. There is no hint that liberals in Parliament were willing to do the one thing that could conciliate the colonists: repeal the Declaratory Act and stop trying to tax the Americans. See Jack P. Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 2013), 84– 119. 18. Thomas Herbert, Speech in Support of the Boston Port Act, March 23, 1774, in Hansard, vol. 17, 1771–1774, 1171; and Lord George Germain, Speech in Support of the Massachusetts Government Act, March 29, 1774, in ibid., 1196. 19. Isaac Barr´e, Speech in Support of the Boston Port Act, March 23, 1774, in Hansard, vol. 17, 1771–1774, 1169. See also ibid., 1183–4. See also P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c.1750–1783 (New York, 2005), 331–33. The English common people were more sympathetic to the Americans than was once thought. See George Rud´e, Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Aristocracy and the Bourgeois Challenge (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 175–206; and James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (Mercer, Ga., 1986).

140 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774 20. Dartmouth to Attorney and Solicitor General, February 5, 1774, PRO CO 5 /160, 1–2. See also Neil Longley York, “Imperial Impotence: Treason in 1774 Massachusetts,ˮ Law and History Review 29 (2011), 657–701. 21. Benjamin H. Irvin, “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776,ˮ New England Quarterly 76 (2003), 197–238. 22. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, 47–50; Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (eds.), Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (Stanford, Calif., 1967), 93. Tarring and feathering was rare. See Mary Beth Norton, The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (London, 1974), 28. 23. The suppression of tea continued to play an important symbolic role in the discipline of loyalists. For example, see Stamford, Connecticut Committee of Observation, June 6, 1775, Amer. Arch., 2:920. 24. Labaree, The Boston Tea Party, 164–7. 25. Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972), 121. 26. Resolutions of the Committee of Correspondence for the Town of Harvard, December 30, 1774, in Henry S. Nourse, History of the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, 1732–1893 (Harvard, Mass., 1894), 308. See also Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, 2nd edn. (New York, 2009), 17–63. 27. Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville, Va., 2009), 3–8. 28. The engraving is reproduced as the frontispiece to Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, vol. 2. On the incorporation of 1649 images into New England iconography more generally, see David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas (New York, 2005), 34–8. 29. Benjamin Rush, The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His “Travels through Lifeˮ Together with his Commonplace Book for 1789–1813, ed. George W. Corner (Princeton, N.J., 1948), 46. 30. Sheila L. Skemp, The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit (New York, 2013). 31. Committee of Correspondence, February 3, 1774, Little Compton Town Records, 1697–1779, mf. copy in RIHS. 32. According to John Adams, Hutchinson had lost control early in 1773, over the salaries controversy. See Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 2:77–8. Essential reading on the governor includes Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974); Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York, 1973), 50–67; Miller, Sam Adams, Pioneer in Propaganda, 276–83; and James K. Hosmer, Samuel Adams, intro. Pauline Maier (New York, 1980), 98–231. 33. Emergent leaders of the Revolution were now intent on maintaining crowd discipline. See Labaree, The Boston Tea Party, Chapter 6.

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34. Claim of George Deblois, December 3, 1785, PRO AO, 12/10, 5v. On this and many other applicants to the Loyalist Claims Commission from Massachusetts mentioned in this and subsequent chapters, see E. Alfred Jones, The Loyalists of Massachusetts: Their Memorials, Petitions and Claims (London, 1930). 35. “Accounts of the Attack Upon Richard Clarke, November 17, 1773,ˮ in The Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1815, 2 vols., ed. Robert E. Moody (Boston, Mass., 1972), 1:459–63. 36. Hutchinson to Israel Williams, December 23, 1773, quoted in J. K. Hosmer, The Life of Thomas Hutchinson: Royal Governor of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay (Boston, Mass., 1896), 303. 37. Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives of Massachusetts-Bay [January 26 to March 9, 1774] (Boston, Mass., 1773 [sic: 1774]), 102–3. 38. Ibid., 205. See also pp. 194–201, 211–17, 241; Ray Raphael, Before Lexington and Concord (New York, 2002), 32–8. 39. Curtis P. Nettels, George Washington and American Independence (Boston, Mass., 1951), 185. 40. William Pencak, War, Politics and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, Mass., 1981), 212–14. See pp. 212–39. What cannot be dismissed is “the role which unalloyed hatred played in defining ideologyˮ – hatred of liberals, infidels, Jews. See James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (New York, 1993), 38. 41. John Hancock, An Oration Delivered March 5, 1774, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston: to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1774), 6, 7, 9, 11, 15. 42. Enoch Huntington, A Sermon Delivered at Middletown (Hartford, Conn., 1775), 13, 18. 43. Ibid., 19. 44. Samuel Webster, The Misery and Duty of an Oppressed People, Represented in a Sermon Delivered at Salisbury, July 14, 1774. On a Day Set Apart for Fasting and Prayer, on Account of Approaching Public Calamities (Boston, Mass., 1774), 24. 45. Ibid. See also Israel Holly, God Brings About His Holy and Wise Purpose or Decree (Hartford, Conn., 1774), 18; and “Lucius,ˮ March 17, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 2:158. 46. Peter Whitney, The Transgression of a Land Punished by a Multitude of Rulers (Boston, Mass., 1774), 67. 47. Ibid. 48. Ann Hulton to Lady Lightbody, July 8, 1774, in Ann Hulton, Letters of a Loyalist Lady (New York, 1971), 74. 49. Oliver Noble, Some Strictures upon the Sacred Story Recorded in the Book of Esther, Shewing the Power and Oppression of State Ministers Tending to the Ruin and Destruction of God’s People (Newburyport, Mass., 1775), 5. 50. Ibid., 6.

142 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774 51. Andrew Lee, Sin Destructive of Temporal and Eternal Happiness: And Repentance, Trust in God, and a Vigorous, Harmonious, and Persevering Opposition, the Duty of People, when Wicked and Unreasonable Men are Attempting to Enslave Them (Norwich, Conn., 1776), 26. 52. Samuel West, A Sermon Preached before the Honorable Council, and the Honorable House of Representatives, of the Colony of the MassachusettsBay (Boston, Mass., 1776), 52. 53. Ibid., 66. 54. Mercy Otis Warren, Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous (Boston, Mass., 1790), 202–5. See also Jeffrey H. Richards, Mercy Otis Warren (New York, 1995), 53–5; and Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York, 1987), 212–13. 55. Warren, Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, 203. 56. Ibid., 202. 57. Ibid., 205. 58. Gad Hitchcock, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Thomas Gage, Esq., Governor, the Honorable His Majesty’s Council, the Honorable House of Representatives (Boston, Mass., 1774), 53. 59. Thomas Gage to Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough, April 13, 1772, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, 2 vols., comp. and ed., Clarence Edwin Carter (New Haven, Conn., 1931), 1:321. Joseph Priestley chastised Parliament for coming down so hard on the Americans because of their prejudice against New Englanders. See [Joseph Priestley], An Address to Protestant Dissenters of All Denominations, on the Approaching Election of Members of Parliament, with Respect to the State of Public Liberty in General, and of American Affairs in Particular (Boston, Mass., 1774), 5. 60. Since 1770, he had maintained Britain’s military visibility by rotating troops through Castle William and sending recruiting parties among the American colonists up and down the coast. See Thomas Gage to Hillsborough October 6, 1770, Carter, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:271, 274. 61. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, 2:193. 62. David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York, 1994), 95–7, 290. When Gage finally returned to England in 1787, the couple was estranged. 63. Bancroft, History of the United States of America, 4:5–7. 64. Thomas Gage to Dartmouth May 19, 1774, Carter, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:355. See also John R. Alden, General Gage in America: Being Principally A History of His Role in the American Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1948). 65. The Fourth, or the King’s Own Regiment, marched up Long Wharf on June 14. Five more regiments arrived in Boston by early July, and one in Salem. The Welsh Fusileers arrived on August 9. See “Extracts from an Original Diary of Thomas Newell, Boston, Mass., 1773, 1774,ˮ Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., 4 (1858–60), 220–1. See pp. 216– 24. 66. Claim of Benjamin Faneuil, March 23, 1784, PRO AO 13/45, 75–6.

Notes

143

67. David L. Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (Charlottesville, Va., 1974), 12. 68. Leonard W. Labaree, Royal Government in America: A Study of the British Colonial System before 1783 (New York, 1958), 102–8. 69. [John Trumbull], A New Proclamation by Thomas Gage [Hartford, Conn., 1775], 2. The Duke of Manchester thought the act too extreme, but memory of 1649 bound him to vote in the Lords to “pass it as it is, [rather] than leave the people of Boston in such a state of democratic anarchy.ˮ See George Montagu, Duke of Manchester to Charles Watson-Wentworth, Marquess of Rockingham, April 20, 1774, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and His Contemporaries, With Original Letters and Documents Now First Published, 2 vols., ed., George Thomas, Earl of Albemarle (London, 1852), 2:242–33. See p. 243. 70. A List of the Addressers to the Late Gov. Hutchinson, Taken from the London Gazetteer, and New Daily Advertiser, of Saturday September 24th 1774. To the Printer of the Gazetteer. The 8th of June Last, a Most Servile Fallacious, and Adulatory Address was presented to Thomas Gage, Esq. at Boston. By Alius et Idem. [Boston, Mass., 1774], broadside. For the best printed attack on the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, the Congress in Philadelphia and the Tea Party, see [Harrison Gray], The Two Congresses Cut Up: Or a Few Remarks upon Some of the Votes and Resolutions of the Continental Congress. By a Friend to Peace and Good Order (Boston, n.d.), 1–7v. 71. Merchants and Traders of Boston to Gage, June 1774, in Gage Papers, vol. 120. See also Merchants and Freeholders of Salem to Gage, Summer, 1774, in ibid. 72. A List of the Addressers to the Late Gov. Hutchinson. In England, authorities accused Hutchinson of failing to warn the British of the impending rebellion. See Hutchinson to James Murray, March 3, 1777, in James Murray, Letters of James Murray, Loyalist, ed. Nina Moore Tiffany and Susan I. Lesley, intro. George A. Billias (Boston, Mass., 1972), 257–8. On his disillusionment with the English, see [Thomas Hutchinson], Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, 2 vols., comp. Peter Orlando Hutchinson (New York, 1971), 2:216. See pp. 271 and 335, for his bitterness at confiscation and dream of returning home to lay “my bones in the land of my forefathersˮ just before he died. For a description of the hardening attitude toward the addressers of Gage and Hutchinson, see Ronald N. Tagney, The World Turned Upside Down: Essex County During America’s Turbulent Years, 1763–1790 (W. Newbury, Mass., 1989), 85–6, 93–102. 73. For an early appearance of “inimicalˮ, see Timothy Hilliard, The Duty of a People under the Oppression of Man, to Seek Deliverance from God (Boston, Mass., 1774), 26. See also Gregory H. Nobles, Divisions Throughout the Whole: Politics and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1740–1775 (New York, 1983), 179. 74. John [and Abigail] Adams to James Warren, April 9, 1774, Papers of John Adams, 18 vols., ed. Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint (Cambridge, Mass., 1977–2016), 2:83.

144 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774 75. Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–80: A Political and Social Study (New York, 1993), 22–75. The demonization of George III and his ministers virtually supplanted anti-popery, according to Francis D. Cogliano, in No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport., Conn., 1995), 154. 76. “From the Pennsylvania Journal to Lord North,ˮ The Massachusetts Spy, Worcester, October 20, 1774. See also Joseph Perry, A Sermon, Preached before the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford, Conn., 1775), 8–9. James Bowdoin reported that the Quebec Act made popular “enthusiasmˮ suddenly “universally prevalent.ˮ See James Bowdoin to Benjamin Franklin, September 6, 1774, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 21, January 1, 1774 through March 22, 1775, 41 vols., ed. William B. Willcox, et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–2014), 283. See pp. 281–4. 77. Ned Landsman, “The Episcopate, the British Union, and the Failure of Religious Settlement in Colonial British America,ˮ in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, ed. Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia, Pa., 2011), 75–97. In 1787, the British established an episcopal see in Canada, its seat in Nova Scotia. See Robert M. Calhoon and Ruma Chopra, “Religion and the Loyalists,ˮ in Faith and the Founders of the American Republic, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (New York, 2014), 115. See pp. 101–19. 78. John Dunning, Speech to Oppose the Quebec Act, May 26, 1774, in Hansard, vol. 17, 1771–1774, 1360. The religious issue aside, the extension of Quebec’s boundaries was the big problem, given its infringement on land claims by elites in all the major colonies. “Have they not wrapped up a great part of the lands of America?ˮ cried the furious John Allen. See [John Allen], The Watchman’s Alarm to Lord N___h; Or, the British Parliamentary Boston Port-Bill Unwraped Being an Oration on the Meridian of Liberty[sic] (Salem, Mass., 1774), 12. See also “Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman of Distinction,ˮ The Boston Gazette and Country Journal, Aug. 22, 1774; and John Lathrop, A Discourse Preached December 15th, 1774, Being the Day Recommended by the Provincial Congress, To be Observed in Thanksgiving to God for the Blessings Enjoyed, and Humiliation on Account of Public Calamities (Boston, Mass., 1774), 24. For Isaac Barr´e’s revealing commentary on the boundary issue, see Debates of the House of Commons in the year 1774 on the Bill for Making More Effectual Provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec, Drawn Up from the Notes of Sir Henry Cavendish, Bart., ed. J Wright (London, 1839), 41–2. See also Daniel M. Friedenberg, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America (Buffalo, N.Y., 1992). 79. Speech of Thomas Lord Lyttleton in Support of the Quebec Act, June 17, 1774, in Hansard, vol. 17, 1771–1774, 1406. 80. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, 1:10. “An supremo Maigistratui resistere liceat, si aliter servari Respublica nequit? Affirmat respondens Samuel Adams.ˮ Apparently, no copy exists. 81. See The Glorious Revolution in America: Documents on the Colonial Crisis of 1689, ed. Michael G. Hall, Lawrence H. Leder, and Michael G. Kammen

Notes

145

(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964); and Mary Lou Lustig, The Imperial Executive in America: Sir Edmund Andros, 1637–1714 (Cranbury, N.J., 2002). 82. [John Allen], An Oration Upon the Beauties of Liberty, or the Essential Rights of the Americans (Boston, Mass., 1773), 17. 83. Ibid., 20. See also Dan Foster, A Short Essay on Civil Government, the Substance of Six Sermons, Preached in Windsor, Second Society, October, 1774 (Hartford, Conn., 1775), 70. 84. On George III, see Marilyn Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British Politics (New Haven, Conn., 2014), 59 passim to 134. 85. See Samuel Williams, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country; Delivered on a Day of Thanksgiving (Salem, Mass., 1775), 9. He defined a nation in the ancient terms of “the common good.ˮ So the first step in the American Revolution was not to proclaim a nation but to enunciate the basic rights of the free citizen according to a “lawˮ that was prior to kingly law. See also Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, “The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation,ˮ Perspectives in American History 6 (1972), 299–302. See pp. 167–306. 86. Gage to Dartmouth May 30, 1774, and Gage to Dartmouth May 19, 1774, in Carter, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:355–6; Massachusetts Bay, Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives of His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England [May 25, 1774 to June 17, 1774] (Boston, Mass., 1774), 7. Eventually, he argued that there had been a deep-laid plot by a cadre devoted to independence long before 1774. See Gage to Dartmouth, October 15, 1775, in Carter, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:421–2. 87. Quoted in Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1775 (London, 1968), 465. 88. Ibid., 466. Charles Chauncy denounced the “poor mercenary wretchesˮ who were trying to hold up the Revolution. See [Charles Chauncy], A Letter to a Friend. Giving a Concise, but Just, Representation of the Hardships and Sufferings the Town of Boston is Exposed To, By T. W., A Bostonian (Boston, Mass., 1774), 32. In the aftermath of December Sixteenth, the determination of Samuel Adams was crucial, a man the British now realized was “as great a conspirator as ever subverted a state.ˮ See General Burgoyne to Lord George Germain, August 20, 1775, in Great Britain, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Ninth Report, Appendix III, Report on the Manuscripts of Mrs. Stopford-Sackville of Drayton House, Northamptonshire, 2 vols., ed. Mrs. S. C. Loman (London, 1910), 2:6–8. See p. 6. On the relationship between the modern politician Adams and the wealthy John Hancock, see Gregory H. Nobles, “‘Yet the Old Republicans Persevere’: Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and the Crisis of Popular Leadership in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1775–1790,ˮ in The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 258–85; and Stephen E. Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (Madison, Wis., 1973), 33–90.

146 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774 89. Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives [May 25, 1774 to June 17, 1774], 46. Someone republished the Massachusetts charter of 1691. See The Charter Granted by Their Majesties King William and Queen Mary to the Inhabitants of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay in New-England (N.p., 1775). See also The Revolution in New-England Justified, repr. 1691 (Boston, Mass., 1773). 90. Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives [May 25, 1774 to June 17, 1774], 44–7; The Following Resolves Passed the House of Representatives [Salem, Mass., 1774), broadside. 91. Gage to Dartmouth May 30, 1774, Carter, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:357. Bancroft, History of the United States of America From the Discovery of the Continent, 4:22–4. 92. Gage to Dartmouth, June 26, 1774, Carter, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:357. 93. Loyalist merchants were answered by the rebel leaders of the North End Caucus Club, Dr. Joseph Warren, William Mollineux, Josiah Quincy, Jr., Dr. Thomas Young, and Benjamin Kent. See Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 83–5. 94. Only in early 1775 did authorities begin urging the boycott of loyalist newspapers published in Boston and New York that “incessantly assist [the British] in their Endeavours.ˮ See [Worcester Committee of Correspondence], The CONVENTION of COMMITTEES for the County of WORCESTER, Convened in the Courthouse in Worcester, January 13, 1775, the following RESOLVES (among others) passed., viz. (Worcester, 1775), broadside. On the loyalist press, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York, 1966), 214–17, 291, 295; and Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763– 1783 (New York, 1973), 270–337. See p. 337. 95. Gage to Dartmouth July 5, 1774, Carter, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:358. 96. Boston Committee of Correspondence, Gentlemen, the Evils Which we Have Long Foreseen . . . [Boston, Mass., 1774], broadside. For the original Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, see The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, ed., J. P. Kenyon, 2nd edn. (New York, 1986), 239–42. On Parliament’s banning of the phrase, see “The Corporation Act,ˮ 1661, ibid., 352. See pp. 351–3. See also Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 357–9. 97. Thomas Gage, “Proclamation for Discouraging Certain Illegal Combinations,ˮ The Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Weekly News-Letter, June 30, 1774. The other colonies recoiled from its radicalism for the time being, for the Covenant was a provisional loyalty oath to a new polity. See Miller, Sam Adams, Pioneer in Propaganda, 302–8. Harold M. Hyman, To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1960), 61–8. 98. W. Glanville Evelyn to William Evelyn. February 18, 1775, Memoir and Letters of Captain W. Glanville Evelyn of the 4th Regiment ("King’s Own") from North America, 1774–1776, ed. G. D. Scull (Oxford: 1879), 46.

Notes

147

99. Loyal Subjects of Pownalborough, July 24, 1774 to Gage, Gage Papers, vol. 121. 100. James S. Leamon, The Reverend Jacob Bailey, Maine Loyalist: For God, King, Country, and for Self (Amherst and Boston, Mass., 2012). 101. Matthew Patten, The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, New Hampshire (Concord, N.H., 1903), 325. 102. Nathaniel Coffin quoted in Ammerman, In the Common Cause, 27. 103. Gage to Dartmouth August 27, 1774, Carter, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:366. A distraught Andrew Oliver wrote Gage from Salem to explain that he could not accept the post of Mandamus Councilor because to do so would destroy his “peace of mind,ˮ and that he dared not travel, “being a reputed Tory.ˮ See Andrew Oliver to Gage August 25, 1774, Gage Papers, vol. 122. On the Olivers, see Claim of Peter Oliver, March 11, 1784, PRO AO 13/48, 62–3; Claim of Peter Oliver, Jr., January 21, 1784, PRO AO 13/48, 51–90; Claim of Daniel Oliver, February 2, 1784, PRO AO 13/48, 13–14. Stout Timothy Paine held out until August 27, when a small army of men besieged his house, and he renounced his appointment. See Paine to Hutchinson August 27, 1774, Gage Papers, vol. 122. 104. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts, 210–36. 105. Adair and Schutz, Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, 150. See also William Pencak, “Peter Oliver (1713–1791): Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court,ˮ in William Pencak, Contested Commonwealths: Essays in American History (Lanham, Md., 2011), 373–97; and Janice Potter-McKinnon and Robert M. Calhoon, “The Character and Coherence of the Loyalist Press,ˮ in The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, revd. edn. (Columbia, S.C., 1989), 109–46. 106. On William Sparhawk Pepperrell, see “Extract of a Letter Dated Boston,ˮ August 29, 1774, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:744. Timothy Ruggles would be the last to go, holding out until May, 1775. See Massachusetts Archives, Town Meeting, April 24, and May 15, 1775, Town of Hardwick, Mass., Worcester County, Town Records, 2:348–9. 107. Timothy Paine to Thomas Gage, August 27, 1774, “Documents Relating to the Last Meetings of the Massachusetts Royal Council, 1774–1776,ˮ Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 32 (1937), 476–8. See pp. 460–93. On the Cambridge Crisis, beginning with the Worcester showdown, see T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York, 2010), 89–97, 132–51. 108. “Boston,ˮ September 1, 1774, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:747; Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 91–124. 109. Gage to Dartmouth September 2, 1774, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:371. See also “Extracts from an Original Diary of Thomas Newell, Boston, Mass., 1773, 1774,ˮ 221. For a careful compilation of the facts by a contemporary, see Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D. D., L. L. LD, President of Yale College, 3 vols., ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York, 1901), 1:477–85. 110. Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York, 2001), 44. See pp. 41–6.

148 Rebels and Loyalists December 16, 1773 to September 1774 111. Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 43. 112. “The Act of Parliament,ˮ Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly NewsLetter, September 1, 1774. 113. Ibid. See also Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, 196. See pp. 164–203. In 1795, George III would be at even greater risk when an angry crowd nearly tore him from his carriage. See Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 215–16. 114. “Tea Notes 1774,ˮ in Revolutionary Versus Loyalist: The First American Civil War, 1774–1784, ed. Leslie F. S. Upton (Waltham, Mass., 1968), 4–6. 115. “Boston,ˮ Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:762–3; Thomas Oliver, Boston Gazette, September 7, 1774, ibid., 1:764–6. For more detail, with the key documents reproduced, see Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord, 112–38. See also Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts, 226–7. 116. Benjamin Hallowell to Thomas Gage September 8, 1774, Gage Papers, vol. 123. 117. Benjamin Hallowell to Grey Cooper, September 5, 1774, PRO CO 5/175, 53v. See 52–7.

5 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America” The Peace of the Towns Destroyed and the Loyalist Cause, September 1774 to April 19, 1775

Ebenezer Punderson Jr. claimed the War of Independence began on September 2 with the Cambridge Crisis.1 Gage stationed a twenty-gun frigate in the river between Boston and Charlestown; had the field artillery on Boston Common dragged to the neck to train it on the town’s principal entrance; and continued to anchor armed frigates and encamp soldiers sent by the crown in coming months.2 From September to the Battle of Lexington and Concord the following April, authority in the towns was constantly renegotiated by rebels, loyalists, and neutrals. Men with a stake in the establishment had absconded, but the great majority of loyalists remained in the towns. Only one persisting loyal family could disturb or destroy the peace of a town. To manage persisters, rebel leaders adopted a general policy: shunning. As rebels in Providence announced, just before the 1774 elections, “we will not vote for a TORY, nor for any Man whom we have Reason to think will vote for a TORY” or have anything to do with one.3 That was the ultimate expression of an old communal village practice, going back at least to Matthew 18: 15–17. Paul refined the rules: not to “associate with any who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber – not even to eat with such a one.” (1 Corinthians 5: 11) An earlier, more elaborate rationale for political ostracism is in Aristotle’s Politics, Book iii, Chapter 13: 13–19. Before that, in the Old Testament, since the people of Meroz “preferred their present ease, or some court favors, with chains and slavery, to the glorious freedom they were born to enjoy,” the other Jews had to shun them, as Salem’s Presbyterian Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker instructed his flock.4 149

150 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America”

Everywhere, adherents of the standing order forced rebels to adopt a policy to mark and shame them as “Tories,” associating them with the nastiness of the Stuart pretenders in 1715 and 1745.5 The local strength of loyalists depended on the local balance of power in a town, a family’s influence, the situation of a town in a specific region in a colony, and the relative strength of the local loyalist network. It depended on a host of specific local economic, ethnocultural, and generational considerations that shaped power.

the distribution of loyalists in september 1774 Massachusetts The widely networked loyalist element in Massachusetts presented a formidable obstacle to rebel unity, so this colony dominates the story of the American Revolution in its first stage.6 From earliest days a contingent of colonists in the Bay Colony were not Puritans, and anti-Puritanism now gave loyalists a common, rebellion-hating identity. At the beginning, some fled to Boston not because they faced mobs with torches and pitchforks, but rather, at worst, implacable crowds demanding recantation and resignation of royal offices. The most important of them set up in the town’s island military heart, Castle William. It was not the first time for Commissioner of the Customs Henry Hulton, an English officer who had been the target of “the fanatic rage of independent levellers” in the past.7 Still, despite the initial flight of leading loyalists, more impressive was the number of those who did not flee.8 Their wide distribution in the largest colony is clear in the following chart, which shows that a loyalist presence existed in all counties, and in many towns, after the absconders left (see Table 5.1).9 This measure of strength counts only those civilians who were active enough in towns to attract attention by committees, not the men who joined loyalist corps. The east–west division is visible in the subtotals of loyalists of certain origin for the two regions: 980 known accused loyalists were in the coastal counties, and only 560 in the interior where the majority of the population lived. Yet the wide distribution of the Revolution’s opponents meant that a majority of rebel citizens had to be involved in the problem of managing loyalist neighbors. Few sizable towns like Newburyport in Essex County were “virtually without Tories.”10 Given that loyalism could be found almost anywhere throughout the war, it played a key role in shaping rebel consciousness. The rebels defined

The Distribution of Loyalists in September 1774

151

table 5.1. Distribution of Loyalist Offenders in Massachusetts, 1775–83, Including Exiles and Accused, and Number of Towns Represented County Suffolk Essex Plymouth Barnstable Bristol Middlesex Worcester Hampshire Berkshire York Cumberland Lincoln Unknown Total

Number of Accused

Number of Towns

614 91 165 50 60 97 157 67 100 11 38 69 156

12 11 11 7 11 20 30 18 11 4 4 12

1,675

151

patriotism by contrast to its deficit in loyalists, a complex political and moral task that could run amok. Of that danger, in a colony where zealots had hanged George Burroughs and other innocent “witchesˮ in 1692, everyone was acutely aware. For the sake of posterity, the Revolution must avoid cruel retribution. The rebel side must expand its collective force without driving out a multitude of nonconformists. Those the legislatures would finally banish had long since outlawed themselves by flight in 1774 and 1775. However, the persisters presented a serious problem of management, and Massachusetts set a high standard for responsible loyalist policy. Connecticut Connecticut was unique in having an unimpeachably rebel-elected leader, Governor Jonathan Trumbull, Sr., a merchant with a long career of public service. He was to prove the crucial man in supplying Washington’s army in the North, and had three sons who served. Nevertheless, there was a strong disposition to loyalism and Anglicanism in his colony’s prosperous southern and western regions, which were under neighboring New York’s influence, and Trumbull’s forces began to prevail only in the elections of 1774. Loyalists continued to produce impressive shows of

152 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America” table 5.2. Distribution of Loyalists in Connecticut by County in Order of Number of Estates Confiscated, 1775–83

County

Number of Estates Confiscated

Population in 1774

Number of Accused

Number of Towns With Accused

Fairfield New Haven Litchfield Hartford New London Windham Unknown

211 40 23 14 8 4 176

30,150 26,821 27,285 31,375 33,578 28,128

334 100 51 51 18 10 293

10 10 8 12 5 5

Total

476

177,337

857

50

solidarity in the region dominated by Fairfield County, which produced 200 signers of the Loyalist Association in Ridgefield alone at the beginning of 1775.11 Newtown’s barely ruling rebels marched scheming Ridgefield Tories out of town through a large hissing crowd of citizens, “beating a dead march.”12 Rebel leaders resolved to shun both loyalist-rich towns, “that they may feel the weight of the resentment of their country.”13 These loyalist hotbeds the rebels eventually bested after a long struggle.14 Despite the existence of a loyalist stronghold, active dissenters remained distributed widely, found in at least fifty towns in all six of the colony’s counties (see Table 5.215 ). The Anglican leaders of Connecticut were so well organized that they refused to celebrate the fast day set by the rebels for August 31, 1774, held a convention in Norwalk on September 20 to thumb their noses in the direction of Philadelphia, and issued a manifesto insisting on their rights of conscience. It was a last stand: Anglicanism began a steep decline throughout the region, its lingering stench of royalism serving mainly to invigor Congregationalists’ patriotism.16 Still, because of Connecticut’s vulnerability to Tory, Anglican-dominated New York, it long remained an uncertain military lynchpin of the Revolution.17 New Hampshire New Hampshire had the makings of a paralyzing political schism, but the rebels had the upper hand after September 1774. Royal Governor John Wentworth was the scion of an old and prestigious family. Whiggish, he opposed the revenue acts and admired the speeches of William Pitt

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the Elder against the Stamp Act in Parliament, which he attended during a long sojourn in England (1763 to 1767). His easy terms for land grants in New Hampshire made him so popular that he defeated a factional uprising against him led by a wealthy rival. The governor remained understandably confident that his family’s name and his genial manners would prevail against the rebels.18 What Wentworth did not grasp was that after December Sixteenth he was just as liable to be accused of aristocracy as any other rich loyalist. He was a royal official who lived in a palatial estate and traveled in an immense carriage. British up to his ears, he challenged the entire Puritan value system. In the end, his network of personal obligations proved too thin, and in June 1775, he cried helplessly over his shoulder that New Hampshire’s “atrocious Contempt” for George III was a grave error, as he fled to British protection in the capital’s fort. He sailed to London on August 23.19 Loyalist forces nosedived, as the yeomanry was of mostly old stock Massachusetts ancestry who took their cues from Boston. Many people in this colony were somewhat unified by their dispute with New York over the western “New Hampshire Grants,” which was leading to the angry foundation of Vermont.20 Rhode Island Rhode Island’s religious multiplicity, pacifism, and proverbial obstinacy threatened to render it useless, the region’s politically soft underbelly. Providence was Roger Williams’s old town at the head of Narragansett Bay, on the land he bought from the Pokanokets in 1636, a refuge for dissenters from Massachusetts. By the 1770s, the upper portion of the colony was full of Congregationalist migrants from Massachusetts, and Providence was the colony’s stronghold of rebel sentiment. Newport, on Aquidneck Island at the head of the Bay, was settled by a remarkable collection of Baptists, Jews, Huguenots, recent English immigrants, plus a large group of African Americans, slave and free. Under their king’s protective wing, they shared a sense of safety from the Congregationalist imperium. Newport was more diversified and sophisticated economically than Providence, which remained a rural provincial capital. David S. Lovejoy describes a colony divided by two sets of business interests in the two port towns, lately embodied in the Ward–Hopkins factional dispute. The Newport Tory Junto was fierce, not merely supporting the king’s administration against the Ward faction but assaulting the colony charter because it made Rhode Island too independent of Britain. Local crowds in

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interior towns pressed loyalists. In January, 1775, after refusing to sign a recantation, Samuel Goldsbury of Grantham was besieged by a crowd of 300 who conducted him sixteen miles with rough music and, according to him, death threats, until he finally fled to refuge in Boston.21 Moreover, Rhode Island was the only colony where a loyalist is documented as so severely abused by a crowd that he died, Charles Slocum in 1778.22 But the Bay was the main theatre, where the geographic split and the prickly religious heterogeneity weakened the colony’s ability to defend itself, much less northern New England.23 Then the British began a nearly three-year occupation of Newport at the end of 1776, bottling up a good portion of the infant Continental Navy at Providence. Rhode Island was all but neutered by the occupation.24 Governor Joseph Wanton, Jr. was an elderly loyalist unsuited to the heroic role John Wentworth hoped to play. A wobbly rebel majority in the General Assembly finally branded the governor “as rank a loyalist as Hutchinson, Oliver, or any of that Sett,” and overthrew him bloodlessly in June 1775, installing Deputy-Governor Nicholas Cooke in his stead.25 Wanton’s home continued to be the center of loyalist activity in a neighborhood full of his friends. When a militia detachment tried to arrest a collaborator in his house in February 1776, Wanton set up a hue and cry that immediately produced a crowd of supporters and a shoving match. Wanton shouted at the leader of the detachment that he was a “Damned Dutch Son of a Bitch,” and the militiaman retorted that Wanton was a “damned Tory Bugere” who had never been “a Friend to the Country.”26 The rebels appeared to have the upper hand so far as to restrict collaboration by Rhode Island loyalists outside the Newport stronghold.

the suffolk resolves, and continental congress The Cambridge Crisis forced the county towns of Suffolk and Worcester to hold large conventions on September 6 because their many loyalists demanded attention. In extremely divided Worcester, under the leadership of the American Political Society, 4,600 militiamen descended upon the town armed with staves or guns to prevent the courts from opening under Gage’s new charter. The would-be judges and their fellow loyalists – attorneys and the sheriff – were forced to file hat-in-hand down the main street between two walls of well-disciplined rebels, briefly recant any intent to abide by the new legal dispensation, “and Subscribe to a very Treasonable League and Covenant,” as it was described by one of

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them, presumably the one published earlier that summer.27 Although the rebels could never take anything for granted in this county, they now had the upper hand. The delegates at the Suffolk County convention passed several vehement declarations on September ninth, the “Suffolk Resolvesˮ. Beginning with a terse expression of loyalty to the king, they denounced the Coercive Acts and Gage’s troops in sulfurous tones, and exhorted New Englanders to prepare for war. The Coercive Acts should not be obeyed because they were “the Attempts of a wicked Administration to enslave America.”28 Diplomatically, they muted direct appeal to the spirit of the 1640s, only mentioning arbitrary power, “which of old persecuted, scourged, and expelled our fugitive parents from their native shores, [and] now pursues us their guiltless children with unrelenting severity.”29 In Article 9, they advised towns to remove militia officers who were not “inflexible Friends to the Rights of the people,” and that if Gage’s henchmen arrested any rebel leaders on the strength of the Transportation Act, the people would arrest and hold “every Servant of the present tyrannical and unconstitutional Government” as hostages for their release.30 The delegates claimed to have “sacred obligations” to “transmit” their “inestimable inheritance” in New England – which they derived “from nature, the constitution of Britain, and the privileges” of their charter – to their “innocent” offspring “unfettered,” and they specifically denied the assertion in the Declaratory Act of 1766 that Parliament could frame laws for them.31 As John Adams emphasized, the ultimate source of their authority now was neither Parliament nor royal charter, but the “law of nature.”32 With surprising enthusiasm, the delegates to the Continental Congress immediately adopted the resolves when Boston’s tireless courier Paul Revere delivered them, and then adopted provisional non-importation and non-exportation agreements that marked the economic independence of the colonies.33 On the 27th, the Suffolk town committees declared that all who supplied the British troops would “be deemed the most inveterate enemies of this people.”34 Conventions in several other counties met on the day when courts were scheduled to open, and prevented the judges from sitting, often by a show of armed force.35 The rebels showed a remarkable degree of organization. When Gage refused to call the legislature into session as usual in October, they set up at Salem a convention that transformed itself into the completely illegal Massachusetts-Bay Provincial Congress on October 7. It moved from town to town to keep Gage guessing, elected John Hancock president,

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sent delegates to gain an alliance with the Canadians, chose a Committee of Safety, collected munitions, and made other warlike preparations.36 Very fortunately, Connecticut now stabilized under a rebel government. Its governor prepared to control the colony’s own loyalists, provide a massive number of recruits for the American army, maintain a regional prison system for the region’s most dangerous loyalists, and form a military bulwark against invasion of New England from loyalist-plagued New York City after the Battle of Long Island.37 Gage’s Powder Alarms (Charlestown, Portsmouth, Salem) kept all towns on high alert, as powder’s limited supply made it the key to military leverage.38 The yeoman interior came alive with literate, shrewd, economically frustrated, and historically inspired farm boys with guns who trusted their elected rebel leaders. Gage now expressed surprise to his superiors that “the Country People would have been raised to such a pitch of Phrenzy as to be ready for any mad attempt they are put upon,” and called for a much bigger army to suppress them.39 Gage even hoped the rebels would “carry matters farther without delaying,” prematurely, and thereby alienate many moderates and render a grand rebel union less likely.40

loyalist policy after the suffolk resolves While urging the citizenry to make warlike preparations, the Suffolk Resolves warned any “unthinking persons . . . [not] to engage in any routs, riots, or licentious attacks upon the properties of any person whatsoever, as being subversive of all order and government.”41 The message was clear: do not treat loyalists with gross unfairness or violent harm. Rebel leaders were careful to protect loyalists to make sure crowds did not discredit the cause. Shunning remained the typical punishment for loyalists who refused to support the Continental Association. According to Article 11 of the Association, the voters in every “county, city, and town” were to choose a committee to enforce the rules, and when a majority suspected an enemy of “American liberty,” the committee should publish the person’s name so that everyone could “break off all dealings with him or her.”42 Thus, Ebenezer Baldwin exhorted rebels “to treat with deserved neglect and abhorrence the wretch,” who “meanly seeks his own emolument upon the ruins of his country’s liberties,” and to make loyalists “rue the day they ever suffered a selfish spirit to banish all love to their country from their breasts.”43 Joseph Hooper of Marblehead described how effective shunning could be, for it “effectually destroyed

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my business, as no one even my Friends dared act” against the town’s resolution to shun him.44 The Town of Hardwick specified that shunning did not include denying the basics to dissenters: loyalists could use the town mill to make their flour.45 Even so, in practice shunning provided a populist platform with the broadest social implications. For example, the blacksmiths of Worcester drew up their own manifesto to go into effect December 1, 1774, declaring they would have no business of any kind with “Tories,” nor with any “mechanic, tradesman, laborer, or others” who had connections with “enemies to this country” and would refuse to take orders from anyone who did not abide by the Continental Association.46 At a meeting of representatives of the main eastern counties of Connecticut on September 15, they denounced violators as “such mercenary wretches, whose avarice can seek for gratification in the distress and ruin of their country, [that they] are wholly unworthy of our confidence, friendship, or support.”47 Suffolk County town committees reiterated that anyone who supplied Gage’s troops would “be held in the highest detestation . . . the most inveterate enemies of this people.”48 Still, everyone understood that these policies aimed to persuade loyalists to recant or at least conform, not to flee. Rare was the nonconformist who was in immediate danger of bodily harm or loss of estate.49 Meanwhile, the deputies to the Provincial Congress goaded Gage. They lodged an angry protest that: “keeping a standing army in the province in time of peace without consent of the Representatives is against the law . . . sanctified by the British Nation at the Revolution,” and they denounced the Mandamus Councilors “as REBELS AGAINST THE STATE,” promising that the people would “send them down to Posterity with the Infamy they deserve.”50 Gage condemned the Provincial Congress for taking control of the militia and the treasury, ordered citizens to ignore it as an illegal body, and sent patrols out of Boston. But he refused to deploy forces to invade the countryside, rally loyalist persisters, and fight the rebels.51 He did not feel strong enough. Meanwhile, so far from whipping up excitement against loyalists, Samuel Adams invoked “the Spirit of Rome and Sparta,” and counseled that “patience” must be the prime “characteristick of the Patriot.”52

violence Revolutions are destructive, and there were several ugly incidents, none murderous, although crowd pressure always had the potential to get out

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of control. Rebels sought to avoid strong measures against anyone other than prominent government men, but there was loud and dangerously rough music in some places, from which several men named Dunbar suffered. In the town of Halifax, Plymouth County, David Dunbar was ensign of his militia company, but because he was a loyalist the local committee demanded he give up the unit’s colors. When he refused, they pulled him out of his house, secured his crotch tightly to a rail, and rode him hard until he gave up the colors. In December, it was Jesse Dunbar’s turn. An “honest Drover,” he got into trouble by purchasing an ox from a Mandamus Councilor. That was probably one of numerous bad acts. The crowd stuffed him in the partly butchered ox, and carted him (another centuries-old English ritual) for four miles, periodically exacting small fines from him in “Dollars,” or silver Spanish pesos. They turned him over to another town’s committee, and this time the crowd threw dirt and offal “in his Face & endeavoring to cover him with it, to the endangering his Life.”53 He kept making trouble, undergoing another crowd action in Plymouth when he tried to market there, and suffered a bad equestrian accident in a crowd.54 Moses Dunbar of Wallingford, Connecticut, was another stoutly vocal loyalist, who claimed to be willing to live in peace on parole on his farm, but the local committee distrusted him and jailed him for a few days. He then fled to Long Island, accepted a captain’s commission from the British commander there in 1776, and returned to Connecticut as a recruiter. The rebels captured him and convicted him of treason. He escaped briefly with outside help, but the rebels recaptured him and the state hanged him near Hartford, March 19, 1777. It was one of the region’s few executions, which the rebels warranted only because of his direct and persistent military aid to the enemy.55 Peter Oliver described the worst cases, but they were not typical. Naturally, all targeted loyalists regarded the situation as terrible. As James Ketcham claimed, it was merely because of his openly “detesting the thoughts of Republicanism” that he was “persecuted by mobs and Committees” in Connecticut.56 However, as a student of the treason laws puts it, contrary to loyalists’ claims that the rebels denied them procedural rights, the great majority of serious cases were tried before supreme courts or at the regular circuit. “The terror of the gallows and the hangman’s noose” did not loom over the Revolution: “there was no reign of terror.”57 The case of Samuel Peters, Anglican divine at Hebron, Connecticut, was exceptional. Voluble in his disapproval of rebel actions, he lived like a lord, in a palatial rural home, attended by slaves, and he frankly

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adored the English monarchy.58 In August, 1774, a crowd of 300 defaced his home, threatened him with tarring and feathering, and carried him “to one of their Liberty Poles, & afterwards drove him from his parish” because he would not recant.59 Governor Trumbull was “as relentless as the Mob,” deaf to his pleas for protection. Peters had the bad judgment, in intercepted correspondence, to heap scorn on the “villainy of the saints” and their “Oliverian” malice, confirming rebels’ worst suspicions, and so began his torment as an outcast.60 He fled to New York, but in an intercepted letter to his mother he looked forward eagerly to the day the British regained control and commenced the “hanging work.”61 Peters now went to England, where he was one of the most active loyalists. He would lodge a huge and not very successful £22,500 claim with the English commission, waste years hoping for preferment, and return home to New England in 1805 to continue a life of disappointment. Certain other leading loyalists who stayed in their homes now felt the public’s hostility. Key western Massachusetts loyalist Israel Williams endured furious intimidation. Neighbors conducted him for miles one night, and let him return to his home only after he had been “forced to sign a Paper which they drafted, & a guard [was] set over him to prevent his going from Home.”62 Williams finally endured a long prison stay, from which he emerged disgraced, and too old to fight anymore.63 Also in the Berkshires, a large crowd seized another magnate activist in his home and forced him to sign a statement that “he had manifested an inclination to inforce the late Acts of Parliament . . . that he had voted against a Committee of Congress, that he had signed an Address to the late Governor Hutchinson . . . that he had opposed the Berkshire covenant . . . and that he had spoken contumaciously of the Peoples being concerned in erecting a Liberty pole in Great Barrington,” so they drove him out of the area.64 The Pittsfield Committee complained that the Berkshires remained “infected with Toriestical Disorders.”65 If the ordinary rules of civility were suspended, still, the worst incidents Peter Oliver could cite made a short list. That was because rebel leaders were effective in keeping the public’s anger focused and restrained. The typical crowd was autonomous, not acting under any central direction, but willing to be restrained by community leaders calling for calm, patience, and grudging toleration of nonconformists.66 The violence of crowds against estates was of a symbolic kind designed to warn and shame, especially the stoning, clubbing, and tarring of houses. Crowds were usually not mobbish or juvenile: they would often allow a loyalist to argue his case for hours, before melting away to give him a second think

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overnight. Both sides used informants against one another, but the rebels did not have a secret police.67 A few towns did apply to the provincial government for help, and by the end they would all acknowledge general directives from above, but locals mostly decided what happened to their loyalists.68 Excesses were few, and no crowd became a mob and deliberately killed or maimed a suspect. Loyalists did endure much harmless jeering. One of Joshua Atherton’s neighbors caught him in his garden, and “expressed his joy to see him digging, and wished every Tory in the country was obliged to dig for a living.”69 If “Tory” certainly did not become “a name as dangerous to the person so aspersed, as mad dog to the canine species in England,” nevertheless, John Hancock’s Boston Massacre oration on March 5, 1774, painted a dark picture of the local “Cabal.”70 He deployed a rattlesnake metaphor all New Englanders understood. Tories were “serpents who, whilst cherished in your bosoms, were darting their invenom’d stings into the vitals of the constitution.”71 As Josiah Quincy, Jr. put it, “attachment to the dignity of Government, and the King’s service, hath often flowed from the mouths of men who harboured the darkest machinations against the true end of the former, and were destitute of every right principle of loyalty to the latter.”72 Yet Quincy seemed most worried about secret loyalists, the “superlative knaves and parricides [who] will assume the vesture of the man of virtue and patriotism.”73 It was the kind of thinking that could lead to crusading self-righteousness. The story of Norwich’s Ebenezer Punderson Jr., reveals how one ordinary man could keep his entire community in an uproar. He was the son of a notorious New England Congregationalist divine – Ebenezer Sr. – who had embraced the Church of England in 1734.74 The younger Ebenezer also labored in the ministry of that Church before switching to commerce in the 1750s and gaining a fortune he claimed was worth £10,000. After the Boston Tea Party, his mouth made him a lightning rod for anti-loyalist sentiment.75 In July, a friend informed him he was slated for tarring and feathering. So he circulated a fearless letter among his neighbors announcing that he and his family would “resent any undue, disorderly, or riotous conduct,” and got eighty sympathetic signatures.76 He also convinced a captain of militia to promise to come to his aid if attacked. That worked through the winter. He remained in his home by bravado, by the community’s loyalty to a local family, and by a supportive neighborhood full of other loyalists. Then, after the September alarms, an angry crowd summoned Punderson to Preston, where, he reported, “they passed a decree that no man should trade or deal with me.”77 Daring

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to travel, he fell into the hands of rebels in another town, who verbally abused him for some time. Cowed, he lowered his profile, until popping up again later in the archives.

harvard graduates as loyalists All the peculiarities of divided loyalty are displayed by the behavior of Harvard graduates. Students of the college came from elite families who could afford it, and up until the 1750s, the freshmen were ranked in numerical order according to their social standing, not academic merit. Students studied classics, theology, and natural philosophy, but Harvard instilled values more than critical thinking. The school bred clergymen, professionals, and some scholars.78 In a study of 204 graduates in the years 1771 to 1774, Conrad E. Wright shows that they would prove to be a fairly patriotic group: half would bear arms in the Revolutionary War.79 The subversive role of Harvard’s “Black Regiment” of clergy is well known; the best had a progressive sacred and secular engagement with the Revolution.80 Yet the other half of students covered the entire political spectrum. The Olivers represent the unregenerate type, headed by Andrew Oliver (class of 1724). After suffering the public’s anger as a Stamp Man in 1765, when a crowd trashed his home and hanged him in effigy, he had become a committed reactionary.81 He begged the crown to establish an American “order of Patricians or Esquires” who could produce social order.82 That was the highest toryism. Most loyalists were willing or eager to accept a provincial peerage if the king would be so gracious as to create one, even though it would be unpopular with the unwashed. Oliver was lieutenant governor under Hutchinson. He died of a heart attack not long after the Tea Party. His brother, Chief Justice Peter Oliver (class of 1730) tried to sit as a judge of the Superior Court on August 30, but outside a spirited crowd of 1,000 supported the jurors, who refused to be sworn. He was a Mandamus Councilor and a leader of the Loyalist Association, and stuck it out until he left Boston in 1776; he kissed the king’s hand on August 7. He lost his estate to confiscation in 1779, and for years townswomen wore in their hair on patriotic occasions bits of the gilt stripped from the woodwork of his house. He died in Birmingham in 1791.83 Timothy Dwight Ruggles (class of 1732) was a Worcester County magnate, who advanced to the rank of Brigadier General in 1758 in the French and Indian War, and carried so much prestige that delegates to Stamp Act Congress elected him their president in 1765. He and other

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figure 5.1. Paul Revere, A Warm Place – Hell, engraving, 1768. Reproduced with the permission of Brandon Nicholson. This cartoon shows a group of loyalists being herded into the jaws of Hell. The background was the fiasco of the Townshend Acts, the various duties imposed by Parliament on certain specific British exports to America, in 1767. On February 11, 1768, Samuel Adams engineered a vote in the Massachusetts House of Representatives to send a Circular Letter to the other colonies to coordinate their opposition to the duties. The British Crown and Parliament were furious about it (as Adams must have expected), and the royal governor, Francis Bernard, received orders from Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough, Colonial Secretary, to demand the House rescind the letter or else he should dissolve the General Court and call for new elections. Hillsborough also sent the man-o’-war HMS Romney into Boston Harbor to intimidate the locals, partly by conducting violent press-gang raids in town. In defiance of that military coercion, on June 30 the Massachusetts House voted 92 to 17 not to rescind the letter. Bernard’s dutiful response was to dissolve the legislature, which created a cause c´el`ebre that spurred the non-importation movement against the new duties. Moreover, in the subsequent elections, the seventeen rescinders were so vilified as “Tories” by the non-rescinders that a number of them failed of re-election. In Revere’s cartoon, the rescinders are headed for the flames in the “mouth of Hell,” a very old symbol. The Devil exults “Now I’ve got you, a fine hawl [sic] by Jove.” His flying helper exhorts “Push on Tim,” referring to Timothy

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Worcester loyalists seemed to have the upper hand at first, but the rebels managed to make Worcester one central motor of the Revolution by September, 1774.84 Under constant pressure, Ruggles finally decamped to Boston to become the leader of its loyalist community, to serve with Howe in New York in 1776, and subsequently to lose all and spend his last years in Nova Scotia (see Figure 5.1).85 There were some surprises, even among the oldest grads. Ebenezer Gay (class of 1714) an early father of Unitarianism, the most latitudinarian of all sects, seemed likely to be a liberal, but his Hingham parishioners got increasingly impatient with his loyalist exhortations from the pulpit, until they searched his house for incriminating correspondence. They never did force out the old inimical.86 By contrast, Old Light Charles Chauncy (class of 1721) had seemed likely to be a conservative because he opposed the Great Awakening’s New Light enthusiasts, but he was even more hostile to the Church of England’s plans to create a colonial episcopal see. Siding with the radicals, by 1775 he felt so vulnerable to British arrest that he joined other rebel leaders in burning his papers.87 A few changed sides suddenly. Major General William Brattle (class of 1722) is perhaps the best example of a moderate siding with the loyalists. A failure at Christian ministry, medicine, and law, he had proved a success as a military recruiter and served on the Provincial Council from 1755 to 1769. Because he objected to Hutchinson’s plural office-holding by accepting appointment as chief justice, the governor disallowed Brattle for the Council. Despite that, in 1772 he argued in favor of a royal salaried judiciary, stunning Samuel Adams. After December Sixteenth, the general became a handwringing pleader for law and order. When Thomas Gage arrived, Brattle performed his last public service, presiding over the Artillery Company’s election on June 6, 1774, dressed “in a D GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG figure 5.1 (cont.) Ruggles, the man who had been president of the Stamp Act Congress but had since then accepted the Chief Justiceship of the Court of Common Pleas, thus, now presumed to be a shameless creature of Governor Bernard, head of the “Court” party in the legislature. At the upper right is the cupola of the state house crowned by a statue of a Native American with an arrow notched and ready to let fly – adapted from the colony’s seal and having the same menacing purpose as Minerva in Revere’s A View of the Year 1765 engraving. A caption at the bottom poses the very dark question: “Whether Those, who consent to be Slaves to usurping Tyrants of the Earth, are fit to enjoy the glorious Liberty of the Sons of God in Heaven?” That uncertainty animated debates about loyalist policies throughout the Revolutionary War.

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superb suit of scarlet, trimmed with broad gold lace, with a campaign wig, gold laced hat, and a very handsome sword.”88 Then he fled to Halifax, where he died in 1776, broken and insolvent.89 Daniel Leonard (class of 1760) turned loyalist more dramatically than Brattle. A member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and supporter of all the leading resistance measures, he abruptly drew the line at the Boston Tea Party. He was among the solid majority of the province’s lawyers who were loyalists because they “owed their growing prestige to the support of the crown.”90 He became a Mandamus Councilor and loyalist polemicist. One night, 500 men surrounded his home and fired off some guns, so he took refuge in Boston. He went to London in 1777, and took appointments as chief justice and council member in Bermuda.91 Very different from Leonard or Brattle, Samuel Curwen (class of 1735) was a garden-variety passive loyalist, but became one of a few New Englanders in London whose sympathy for the rebels grew quickly, once he got a closer look at the English. Thus, a rational New Englander might slip from the tether of the New Toryism.92 Ideology is powerful, but it is always open to logical arguments, new facts, or emotionally subversive factors. An even more interesting change of sides truly measures the Revolution’s fluidity. Attorney Joshua Atherton (class of 1762) of Amherst, New Hampshire was an arch-loyalist, but was so agreeable that the rebels tolerated him until 1777. Then he spent a year in prison, where he was converted to the rebel cause, and, a kind of Talleyrand chameleon, he rose later to be a leading Anti-Federalist in the 1780s, then a Federalist politician in the 1790s.93 His case proves that loyalty could remain totally negotiable.94 Ideology and family can lead but not force an individual to behave in a certain way, so it is no surprise that even the most loyalist milieu could produce rebels. A key man was James Bowdoin (class of 1744), one of the richest merchants in America.95 His sympathies long remained unclear, a lone “Whig” in a circle of loyalists, with whom he shared conservative social views. His political position became clear only during the tea crisis, when he agreed that the Company’s chests must not be landed. Gage’s refusal to seat him on the new Council marked an end of legitimate government in the eyes of many citizens. He was one rich rebel who certainly appeared to be acting on principle against his own immediate economic and personal interests. Of Huguenot stock, Bowdoin could tap into the Good Old Cause ideology of 1649. Future state Governor

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Bowdoin remained in Massachusetts and looked on sadly as friends sailed into exile.96

the loyalist cause By December, 1774, the loyalist absconders in Boston were convinced that the rebels had “evidently a design to form a Republic.”97 In response to that terror plot, Timothy Ruggles of Hardwick, Daniel Leonard of Taunton, and Harrison Gray of Boston led the loyalists into a brave countercharge.98 Ruggles wrote a manifesto denouncing the rebels as “a banditti, whose cruelties surpass those of savages,” and circulated it for loyalist signatures.99 It proposed six resolutions: (1) to assist one another “for the defence of our persons and property,” (2) to exercise their “right to liberty, in eating, drinking, buying, selling, communing, and acting what, with whom, and as we please,” (3) to refuse recognition to “unconstitutional assemblies of men,” (4) to “enforce obedience” to the king, (5) to rush to each other’s defense “properly armed,” and (6) to demand reparations from anyone who harmed another signer.100 It was all solidly Protestant English: property, human rights, crown. There was no need to spell out in detail the underlying ideology to which the signers subscribed; it was well understood emphatically not to be “popular.” When General Howe arrived in 1775, Ruggles urged the formation of both militia and regular corps of loyalist soldiers.101 Ruggles gave delighted radicals like James Warren the opportunity to reaffirm that loyalists were “more Assiduous than Satan was with our first Parents and equal [to] him in deceit and Falshood [sic].”102 In the last accounting, the American loyalists never enjoyed the entrenched oligarchic leadership that would make church-and-king organization such a success in England in the 1790s, helping the crown to put down “Jacobin” radicalism there.103 And once confined to Boston, the crown’s most influential friends could provide no more than loud invective. Their cause was finished when they left their towns.104 On December 10, 1774, the Provincial Congress promised to publish the names of all those who signed the Ruggles Association. Those named would be “treated with that neglect, and their memories transmitted to posterity with that ignominy, which such unnatural conduct must deserve.”105 History would judge them. The Provincial Congress also proclaimed “the American Bill of Rights” (an echo of 1628 and 1689), in calling for the appointment of Committees of Inspection to enforce the Continental Association.106 That meant more pressure on loyalists than

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ever, both ideologically and commercially because of their involvement in trade with the British.107 Inland towns tended to be more angry than the legislature. Cumberland County rebels officially denounced anybody helping “to introduce despotick monarchy.”108 The Provincial Congress set December 15 as a day of thanksgiving to mark the anniversary of the Tea Party, and many ministers gave special sermons.109 Daniel Leonard began a series of relentless attacks on the rebels in the Massachusetts Gazette in December that drew the line between loyalist and rebel as sharply as possible. The rebels were tyrannical, “mobbing this or the other man, because he acts, speaks, or is suspected of thinking different from the prevailing sentiment.”110 Theirs was a “despotism” that was “more incompatible with the rights of mankind, than the enormous monarchies of the East.”111 Their objections to supposed constitutional violations were bogus, for the terms of political debate were long established before 1763. “If the [New England] tories were suspected of pursuing their private interest through the medium of court favor,” he argued, “there was equal reason to suspect the whigs of pursuing their private interest by the means of popularity.”112 That basic assumption in the conservative mind – that popular power and court power were primordial and equally legitimate forces – conflicted with the rebels’ basic abstract principle that popular power is genuine and supreme, and that court power’s legitimacy is derivative, contingent, and inherently suspect. Leonard appealed to his loyalist readers by his notion that privilege and populism were both mere instruments of self-interest.113 Like uncritical ideologues in all eras, he held all ideologies in contempt for he was above ideology, and was instead purely commonsensical, unbiased, humane, modern. Leonard ridiculed rebels who ignored the plain fact that “our land is not disgraced by the wooden shoes of France, or the uncombed hair of Poland.”114 He meant the wretched peasant was unknown in Massachusetts. Although true, that was pure economic reductionism. Since Leonard believed in nothing but established power and the pound sterling, and insisted on measuring conditions against those in backward Europe instead of by historicized English standards, he could not imagine that the other side truly believed their hot-air principles. As it was confessed frankly by Jared Ingersoll, the stubborn Connecticut Stampmaster of 1765, he was truly “void of all Puritanism.”115 Both men were proud to be incapable of taking seriously the rebels’ mawkish rhetoric. Leonard kept up the attack against the “persecution” of loyalists by “disappointed, ambitious and envious men,” their “inhuman treatment

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of persons guilty of no crime,” and their tactic “feloniously to stab reputations.”116 In the end, since he snobbishly ridiculed the typical Minute Man as a bumpkin “puffed up with his own opinion,” Leonard, like Ruggles, did loyalists more harm than good.117 Leonard’s work was soon followed by a pamphlet published by Harrison Gray, long-time colonial treasurer and now a notorious Mandamus Councilor, in which he attacked the Tea Party as “gross,” “immoral,” and “atrocious.”118 John Adams answered Leonard and Gray with a great blast in his Letters of Novanglus, hinting darkly that the loyalists had a “wicked policy” that “has been much longer in contemplation, than is generally known.”119 Thomas Gage reported to his superiors hopefully that “the Towns in this province have become more divided, notwithstanding the Endeavours used to keep up their Enthousiasm [sic],” for the loyalists were finally opposing “the Tyranny and Oppressive Acts” of the rebels.120 He was whistling in the dark. Gage sent out columns of soldiers on regular patrol a few miles into the interior throughout the winter.121 It made rebels “extremely jealous.”122 Gage knew that if he marched into the interior in full force, it would mean many more persisting loyalists might leave their communities, where they could better serve his purpose, so he delayed through the winter.123 He probably hoped cold weather would cure the fever – but it was a warm winter.124

the approach of battle George III could not allow “the country” to persist unchallenged, and in the first months of 1775 there was a steady build-up of anxiety in New England about an impending military campaign.125 Meanwhile, in case anyone still wondered what was at stake, a Boston press republished Increase Mather’s justification for the overthrow of James II by Boston rebels eighty-six years earlier.126 The rising state of alarm was particularly disruptive in Salem. The founding community of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1628, it was a prosperous and contented one with a Hebrew name that means “peace,” where forty-eight major local loyalists felt little pressure at first.127 But then Gage acted on faulty intelligence and sent a regiment to the town on February 26 to seize a hoard of cannon that did not exist. Militia swarmed to the town’s defense.128 The town committee, finally egged on by “the threats and insults of the rabble,” allowed the common people to conduct

168 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America”

a campaign of “sneering and hissing at [loyalist] people in the streets, and other more secret abuses, as daubing and painting doors and windows, tarring houses, etc.,” according to one victim.129 Some loyalists were “seized, yoked, and driven like cattle,” and committee members bound one as an indentured servant until he recanted.130 A number now fled to Boston, where they could console themselves only by fuming about the “reforming fanatics and HOLY MEN” of Massachusetts and their “illegal Congresses and Committees.”131 The Boston Massacre Day oration ended in a riot caused by Redcoats. Since March 5, 1775 was a Sunday, the oration was postponed to the following morning. The army “conceived it was a great insult, under the present circumstances, to deliver an Oration on the occasion,” so a “great number” of officers attended the meeting in Old South Church to make a show of force.132 A delighted Samuel Adams reserved front row seats for them. Many of the civilian men in attendance carried clubs or sticks to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Warren finally spoke an hour after the “immense concourse” of people began gathering at 10 o’clock.133 Attending him around the black-cloaked pulpit were “the most violent fellows in town,” according to one British officer: Adams, Hancock and the town selectmen. Thomas Hutchinson later reported that if the speaker laid into the king, the officers “would have massacred Hancock Adams & hundreds more.”134 The officers let fly some hissing but did not heckle Warren. He had the crowd’s rapt attention, “severe on the conduct of the Military,” but to the officers’ surprise, his speech “contained nothing so violent as was expected.”135 Then, however, Samuel Adams rose to ask the crowd to express their appreciation, and to look forward to next year’s commemoration of “the Bloody Massacre,” and the officers erupted. They had come to see Adams as a Savonarola, and now jumped up in a fury, some shouting “Oh! Fie! Oh Fie!” and creating “a great bustle.”136 Some people mistook the Britishism “fie” for “fire,” and began streaming out of the overcrowded church, making “a good deal of noise;” a few women began screaming, producing “a Scene of the greatest confusion imaginable.”137 Then the fife and drum corps of the 43rd Regiment (coincidentally?) piped on the scene, adding to the excitement.138 Adams and Hancock now went into hiding in the interior, as committees and loyalists all over the region became more confrontational.139 Loyalist Dr. Thomas Bolton submitted the rebels to a tirade of imprecations, including one on the “quack” Warren for his “tough, or true puritanic whine.”140 On April 4, 1775, the Norwich Committee went

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after a noisy Ebenezer Punderson, who ignored the summons. On the 18th, just hours before the British attack on Lexington, the committee proscribed Ebenezer, forbidding all townspeople to have “any intercourse or commerce whatever” with him because he had “denied their authority and had drank tea since March 1st and had said – The congress was an illegal body.”141 Meanwhile, a defiant Second Provincial Congress met in Cambridge until April 15.142 It was not the point of no return for loyalists. When Thomas Wheeler of Worcester County denounced the loyalists who had “perverted” him, declaring it was now his “real opinion that the people’s cause is good,” that was all it took to put himself on the right side.143 That was just before the night of April 18, when Gage ordered his Redcoats to invade the interior, causing a battle that sparked the formation of the Continental Army around Boston. Notes 1. John C. Miller, Sam Adams, Pioneer in Propaganda (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 326–7. A later Boston town meeting moderated by Samuel Adams declared that September 2 marked the beginning of a war. See Boston Town Meeting December 30, 1774, Amer. Arch., 1:1077–9. On events between the Cambridge Crisis and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, see David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York, 1994), 44–112. 2. “Extracts from an Original Diary of Thomas Newell, Boston, Mass., 1773, 1774,ˮ Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., vol. 4 (1858–60), 222–4. See pp. 216–24. On the provocative behavior by Redcoats toward the citizenry, see Delegates of Suffolk County to Gage, September 10, 1774, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:787. 3. Andrew Lee, Sin Destructive of Temporal and Eternal Happiness: And Repentance, Trust in God, and a Vigorous, Harmonious, and Persevering Opposition, the Duty of People, when Wicked and Unreasonable Men are Attempting to Enslave Them (Norwich, Conn., 1776), 18; We, a Part of the Electors of the General Officers and Deputies of the Colony of Rhode-Island [Providence, R.I., 1774], broadside. 4. Nathaniel Whitaker, An Antidote against Toryism, Or the Curse of Meroz, In a Discourse on Judges 5th, 25 (Newburyport, Mass., 1777), 9. See also Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn., 2013), 34–41. 5. Both James Francis Edward Stuart (“James III,” or “The Old Pretender”) and Charles Edward Stuart (“Charles III,” or “The Young Pretender”), who invaded Britain in 1715 and 1745 respectively to claim the throne as James II’s heirs, were Roman Catholic, and their supporters were forever tarnished by that religious association. The epithet “Toryˮ itself traced back (in most recent history) to the Irish Catholic rebels of the 1640s.

170 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America” 6. The rebel and loyalist populations became better defined in July, when several thousand refugees Thomas Gage allowed to leave Boston filed into the interior. See Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay [July 19 to August 24, 1775] (Watertown, [1775]), 10. For a general overview of the Massachusetts loyalists, see Wallace Brown, The King’s Friends: The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants (Providence, R.I., 1965), 19–42. 7. Henry Hulton to Robert Nicholson, May 4, 1770, in Wallace Brown, “An Englishman Views the American Revolution: The Letters of Henry Hulton, 1769–1776,ˮ Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (1972), 16. See pp. 1–26 and 139–51, especially pp. 145–7 for his horrified description of the Battle of Bunker Hill. 8. On the island loyalist community of Nantucket, dependent on a whale oil market protected by England from foreign competitors, see Edward Byers, The Nation of Nantucket: Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Center, 1660–1820 (Boston, Mass., 1987). 9. Based on Gregory Palmer, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution (Westport, Conn., 1984). This and similar tables are the result of a simple sorting program by which every loyalist active enough to incite community action was recorded, with duplicates systematically eliminated. 10. Benjamin W. Labaree, Patriots and Partisans: The Merchants of Newburyport, 1764–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 16. 11. Ridgefield, Connecticut Town Meeting January 30, 1775, Amer. Arch., 1:1202–3. For an introduction, see Richard Buel, Jr., Dear Liberty: Connecticut’s Mobilization for the Revolutionary War (Middlesex, Conn., 1980). 12. “Weathersfield, Connecticut, February 14, 1775,ˮ Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:1236. 13. “Fairfield County Resolutions, February 14, 1775,ˮ ibid., 1:1238. 14. Chester M. Destler, “Newtown and the American Revolution,ˮ Connecticut History 20 (1979), 6–26; Oscar Zeichner, “The Rehabilitation of Loyalists in Connecticut,ˮ New England Quarterly 11 (1938), 309. See pp. 308–30. See Brown, The King’s Friends, 59–74, on this colony’s loyalist exiles. 15. Based on an item-by-item account in all primary sources for the state, beginning with The Public Records of the State of Connecticut, 7 vols., ed. Charles J. Hoadly and Leonard Woods (Hartford, Conn., 1894–1948), corrected for duplicates by alphabetization. There is a slight discrepancy between the total population here and the total for this colony in 1770 (183,887) given in Chapter 1. 16. “At a Convention of the Clergy of the Church of England at Norwalk, September 21, 1774,ˮ in The Church of England in Pre-Revolutionary Connecticut: New Documents and Letters Concerning the Loyalist Clergy and the Plight of Their Surviving Church, ed. Kenneth W. Cameron (Hartford, Conn., 1976), 191–2. See also Oscar Zeichner, Connecticut’s Years of Controversy, 1750– 1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1949), 171–87; and James B. Bell, A War of Religion: Dissenters, Anglicans, and the American Revolution (New York, 2008). 17. On the strength of loyalism in New York City in the winter of 1774–75, see Joseph S. Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and

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the Road to Independence, 1763–1776 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), 198–219. On the incessantly irritated region bounded by Long Island and southern Connecticut, see Harry M. Ward, Between the Lines: Banditti of the American Revolution (Westport, Conn., 2002), 33–49. 18. For a typical attack on loyalists who decried the revenue acts, “yet find fault with every step we take,ˮ see Peter Whitney, American Independence Vindicated. A Sermon Delivered September 12, 1776 (Boston, Mass., 1777), 41. For an introduction, see Jere R. Daniell, Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolution, 1741–1794 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). 19. John Wentworth, Province of New Hampshire. A Proclamation by the Governor ([Portsmouth], 1774), broadside; John Wentworth to Thomas Gage, [1774], enclosed in Gage to Dartmouth, December 15, 1774, PRO CO 5/92, 48–9; Richard F. Upton, Revolutionary New Hampshire: An Account of the Social and Political Forces Underlying the Transition from Royal Province to American Commonwealth (Hanover, N.H., 1936), 17–31. See also Claim of John Wentworth, December 23, 1785, PRO AO] 12/12, 1–11. He claimed losses of £47,116. See also Claim of John Fenton and John Fisher, PRO AO 13/52, 142–232. See also Jere R. Daniell, Colonial New Hampshire: A History (Millwood, N.Y., 1981), 191–250. 20. Claremont, New Hampshire was full of recent Anglican immigrants who remained troublesome throughout the war. See Otis F. R. Waite, History of the Town of Claremont, New Hampshire (Manchester, N.H., 1895), 219–34. 21. Goldsbury to Gage, January 24, 1775, Gage Papers, vol. 125. See also Joel A. Cohen, “Rhode Island Loyalism and the American Revolution,ˮ Rhode Island History 27 (1968), 97–112. 22. Brown, The King’s Friends, 48. 23. David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 1760– 1776 (Providence, R.I., 1958), 194. For a comparison of Providence and Newport, see Lynne Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island: Newport and Providence in the Eighteenth Century (Albany, N.Y., 1984), 1–12. 24. For a good description of the tension between the two sides before the British arrived, see William Ellery to Henry Marchant, November 6, 1775, William Ellery Papers, RIHS, Manuscripts. See also Henry Babcock to Governor Nicholas Cooke, April, 1776, Henry Babcock Papers, RIHS, Manuscripts. On the first U.S. Navy and the British occupation, see William M. Fowler, Jr., William Ellery: A Rhode Island Politico and Lord of Admiralty (Metuchen, N.J., 1973), 26–55, 82–109. 25. Dialogue between a Renowned Rhode-Island Colonel and One of His New Converted Lackeys, J–R–n (Newport, [1774?]), 1. See also Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 179–84; Edward B. Welsh, “Joseph Wanton, Jr., an Eighteenth-Century Newport Tragedy,ˮ Newport History 61 (1988), 17–35. 26. Depositions of John Halliburton, Augustus Newman, et al., February 10– 11, 1776, General Assembly Papers, C-00251: Revolutionary War, Suspected Persons, 1775–1783, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, R.I.

172 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America” 27. Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord (New York, 2002), 136. See pp. 130–8. 28. At a Meeting of the Delegates of Every Town and District in the County of Suffolk (Boston, Mass., 1774), broadside. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Quoted in Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 (New York, 2011), 258. See pp. 252– 70. 33. U.S. Continental Congress, Extracts from the Votes and Proceedings of the American Continental Congress held at Philadelphia, September 5, 1774 (New York, 1774), 30–6. See Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,ˮ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 68 (2011), 597–630; Jerrilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress: The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774–1776 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 84–6; and David L. Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (Charlottesville, Va., 1974), 73–5. For the transatlantic perspective, see Peter D. G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773–1776 (Oxford, 1991), 118–75. 34. [William Cooper], “Boston Committee of Correspondence,ˮ Boston, September 27, 1774, broadside (Boston, Mass., 1774). 35. Raphael, The First American Revolution, 151–6. 36. William Lincoln, ed., The Journals of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1774 and 1775, and of the Committee of Safety (Boston, Mass., 1838), 1–74, on the Congress from October 7 to December 10, 1774. It was probably no coincidence that October 7 was the 83rd anniversary of the date of issuance for the Charter of 1691. 37. Agnes Hunt, The Provincial Committees of Safety of the American Revolution (New York, 1968), 6–61. 38. See Peter Charles Hoffer, Prelude to Revolution: The Salem Gunpowder Raid of 1775 (Baltimore, Md., 2013). 39. Thomas Gage to Lord Dartmouth, October 30, 1774, PRO CO 5/92, 15. See Lord Dartmouth to Thomas Gage, January 27, 1775, PRO CO 5/92, 54– 64, for acknowledgment that the British deluded themselves “that this was not a widespread rebellionˮ and Gage would receive more troops and should suppress the “rude rabbleˮ (58). 40. Gage to Dartmouth, December 15, 1774, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, 2 vols., comp. and edn., Clarence Edwin Carter (New Haven, Conn., 1931), 1:387. 41. U.S. Continental Congress, Extracts from the Votes and Proceedings, 34. For a general description of unfolding loyalist policy, which she characterizes as moderate in all colonies, see Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972), 278–87.

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42. “The Association,ˮ in Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, ed. Worthington C. Ford, 34 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1904), 1:79. On the committees’ work, see T. H. Breen, “Where Have all the People Gone? Reflections on Popular Mobilization on the Eve of American Independence,ˮ in War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815, ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Forster (New ¨ York, 2010), 263–83. 43. Ebenezer Baldwin, “An Appendix, Stating the Heavy Grievances the Colonies Labour Under,ˮ in Samuel Sherwood, A Sermon, Containing Scriptural Instructions to Civil Rulers, and All Free-born Subjects, In which the Principles of Sound Policy and Good Government are Established and Vindicated, and Some Doctrines Advanced and Zealously Propagated by NewEngland Tories, Are Considered and Refuted (New Haven, Conn., 1774), 80. 44. Claim of Joseph Hooper, c. 1780, PRO AO 13/46, 409–10. See f. 409. For similar stories, see Claim of Thomas Robie, c. 1785, PRO AO 13/51, 333– 34v; and Claim of Matthew Lymburner, March 28, 1786, PRO AO 13/51, 131–2. 45. “Resolution, January 2, 1775,ˮ Town of Hardwick, Mass., Worcester County, Town Records, 2:1723–1812, mf. copy in Massachusetts Archives, 342. 46. “We the Subscribers,ˮ c. 1774, in Jonathan Smith, “Toryism in Worcester County during the War for Independence,ˮ in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 48 (1914–15), 19. See pp. 15–35. 47. At a Meeting of Delegates, September 15, 1774, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:788. See also Worcester County Resolutions August 29, 1774, ibid., 1:795–7. 48. Meeting of Committees of Towns of Suffolk, September 27, 1774, ibid., 1:807. 49. Gage to Dartmouth, September 3, 1774, ibid., 1:709. 50. October 29, 1774, Provincial Congress to Gage, Gage Papers, vol. 124; Massachusetts Provincial Congress Press Clipping, PRO CO 5/92, 13. On December 13, the Boston rebels encouraged the Committee of Portsmouth to overwhelm the guard at Royal Castle William and Mary and raid its magazine. See Wentworth to Gage, December 14, 1774, Gage Papers, vol. 124. 51. Thomas Gage, A Proclamation (Boston, Mass., 1774). See Nathan Aldis to Edmund Quincy and Benjamin Gridley, February 22, 1775, Gage Papers, vol. 126. 52. Samuel Adams to Thomas Young, October 17, 1774, in The Writings of Samuel Adams, 4 vols., ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing (Philadelphia, Pa., 1904– 08), 3:163. See pp. 162–3. 53. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (eds.), Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (Stanford, Calif., 1967), 155. See pp. 154–6. 54. Plymouth County was the site of numerous incidents, also true of neighboring Norfolk County. For an example, Samuel Goldsbury of Wrentham, who made himself so odious he had to flee to Boston in January 1775, see Claim of Samuel Goldsbury, October 16, 1789, PRO AO 13/45, 347–48b.

174 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America” 55. See Nathan Strong, The Reasons and Design of Public Punishments: A Sermon, Delivered before the People Who were Collected to the Execution of Moses Dunbar, Who was Condemned for High Treason against the State of Connecticut, and Executed March 19th, A. D. 1777 (Hartford, Conn., 1777), 15, 17; Epaphroditus Peck, The Loyalists of Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1934), 23–7; and Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, With Historical Essay, 2 vols., intro. Ralph Adams Brown (Port Washington, N.Y., 1966), 1:398–9. The latter source, originally published in 1846, was written by a vehement pro-loyalist American who knew many loyalists or their offspring. It is a useful source for the present work to a limited extent. On Noah Sabin, see Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 2:251–2. 56. Claim of James Ketcham, January 18, 1787, PRO AO 12/1, 91. See ff. 91– 93v. 57. Bradley Chapin, The American Law of Treason: Revolutionary and Early National Origins (Seattle, Wash., 1964), 71. See pp. 63–80. 58. Sheldon S. Cohen, Connecticut’s Loyalist Gadfly: The Reverend Samuel Andrew Peters (Hartford, Conn., 1977), 14–16. On the later career of Peters, see pp. 37–51. See also Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists, 2:177– 83. 59. Adair and Schutz, Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, 154. 60. “Copy of an Intercepted Letter [Samuel Peters to Samuel Auchmuty, February 25, 1775],ˮ Connecticut Journal, May 31, 1775. On Samuel Peters’s brother, Bemslee, see Claim of Bemslee Peters, March 1, 1784, PRO AO 13/42, 256– 59v. 61. Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 2:180. For a different version of events, see Jonathan Trumbull, Jonathan Trumbull, Governor of Connecticut, 1769– 1784, By His Great-Great-Grandson (Boston, Mass., 1919), 125–32. 62. Adair and Schutz, Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, 156. 63. Gregory H. Nobles, “Shays’s Neighbors: The Context of Rebellion in Pelham, Massachusetts,ˮ In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion, ed. Robert A. Gross (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 195–6. See pp. 185–203. See also Richard R. Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in EighteenthCentury America (Philadelphia, Pa., 2004), 69–94. 64. Deposition of David Ingersoll, August 1774, Gage Papers, vol. 122. See also Raphael, The First American Revolution, 64–7. David was only distantly related to leading loyalist Jared Ingersoll. Later, they made him take an oath of allegiance too. On oaths, see Charles Evans, “Oaths of Allegiance in Colonial New England,ˮ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 31, pt. 2 (1922), 377–438. 65. See David E. Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists (New York, 1989), 231. 66. Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York, 1977), 271–94. That author concludes that loyalists lived under

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a reign of terror. See pp. 335–52. See also Dirk Hoerder, “Boston Leaders and Boston Towns, 1765–1776,ˮ in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb, 1976), 261. See pp. 233–71. For the counter-argument, see Wallace Brown, The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York, 1969), 126–46. 67. See Petition of Simeon Newell, January 14, 1782, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 3, CSA, 4:163. See ff. 163–5. On Gage’s spies, see Allen French, The Siege of Boston (New York, 1911), 108–10. 68. John A. Schutz, “Those Who Became Tories: Town Loyalty and Revolution in New England,ˮ New England Historical and Genealogical Register 129 (1975), 94–105. The writer stresses that treatment of loyalists was generally not harsh. 69. Charles H. Atherton, Memoir of the Hon. Joshua Atherton (Boston, Mass., 1852), 12. 70. Unknown Correspondent from Boston, Feb. 20, 1775, in The American Revolution through British Eyes: A Documentary Collection, 2 vols., ed. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (Kent, Ohio, 2013), 1:18; John Hancock, An Oration, Delivered on March 5, 1774 at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston: to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1774), 15. 71. Ibid., 13, 15. See also W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, Mass., 1724–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1945); and Herbert S. Allan, John Hancock: Patriot in Purple (New York, 1948). 72. Josiah Quincy, Jr. Observations on the Act of Parliament Commonly Called the Boston Port-Bill (Boston, Mass., 1774), 80. 73. This was unprecedented language, at a tense moment, when Quincy was on a shortlist of men the royal authorities might try to arrest and transport to England for trial. See Benjamin W. Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (Boston, Mass., 1979), 149–50. 74. Ebenezer Punderson, [Jr.], The Narrative of Mr. Ebenezer Punderson, Merchant: Who was Drove Away by the Rebels in America from his Family and a Very Considerable Fortune in Norwich, in Connecticut (London, 1776). 75. Ibid., 3. 76. Ibid., 4. 77. Ibid. See also T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York, 2010), 177–84. 78. Conrad E. Wright, Revolutionary Generation: Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence (Boston, Mass., 2005), 43. 79. Ibid., 5, 30, 77–8. 80. Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York, 1988), 149. The link from this point in New England evangelical development to the next era can be followed in Ronald Schultz, “Alternative Communities: American Artisans and the Evangelical Appeal, 1780–1830,ˮ in American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750–1850, ed. Howard B. Rock, Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher (Baltimore, Md., 1995), 65–76.

176 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America” 81. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 7:383–413. 82. Andrew Oliver to [Benjamin Franklin], February 13, 1769, The Letters of Governor Hutchinson and Lieut. Governor Oliver Printed at Boston, Mass., 2nd edn. (London, 1774), 34. See pp. 29–37. See also Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), 210. 83. Thomas Oliver, a West Indian connected with Andrew and Peter, took Andrew’s place briefly as lieutenant governor, then followed Peter into exile See Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 8:737–63. 84. William Lincoln, History of Worcester, Massachusetts, From Its Earliest Settlement to September, 1836 (Worcester, Mass., 1862), 71–91. See John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Amherst, Mass., 1992), 97– 128. 85. Extract of a Letter from Taunton, Massachusetts, August 25, 1774, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:732; Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 9:199–23. On his flight to Boston, see Claim of Timothy Ruggles, PRO AO 12/10, 42. See ff. 38–42. 86. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 6:59–66. 87. Ibid., 6:439–67. 88. Ibid., 7:20. 89. Ibid., 7:10–23. 90. John M. Murrin, “The Legal Transformation: The Bench and Bar of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,ˮ in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 3rd edn., ed. Stanley N. Katz and John M. Murrin (New York, 1983), 567. See pp. 540–72. 91. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 14:640–7. 92. Ibid., 9:511–29. 93. Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, 1:190–2. 94. Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York, 1973), 191–265. 95. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 11:514–50. 96. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774, Comprising a Detailed Narrative of the Origin and Early Stages of the American Revolution, ed. John Hutchinson (London, 1828), 131. On the problem of allowing Bowdoin’s loyalist son-in-law to re-enter the United States in 1778, see Samuel Adams to James Bowdoin, September 3, 1778, Winthrop Papers, Bowdoin-Temple Collection, PN 350, Reel 48, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.; and James Bowdoin to Samuel Adams, September 21, 1778, ibid. See also F. G. Wallett, “James Bowdoin, Patriot Propagandist,ˮ New England Quarterly 23 (1950), 320– 38. 97. Henry Caner to John Breynton, December 27, 1774, in Letter-Book of the Rev. Henry Caner, S.P.G. Missionary in Colonial Connecticut and Massachusetts Until the Revolution: A Review of His Correspondence from 1728 through 1778, ed. Kenneth W. Cameron (Hartford, Conn., 1972), 161.

Notes

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98. For profiles by the antiquarian, see Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 2:10– 12, 242–6. Just prior to the “Rugglesˮ association, ninety-eight leading loyalist families signed a public petition to Governor Gage deploring their countrymen’s continued misbehavior, despite his “humane Exertions.ˮ See An Address of the Gentlemen and Principal Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, To His Excellency Governor Gage, October 6th, 1775 ([Boston], 1775), broadside. 99. Timothy Ruggles to the Printers of the Boston Newspapers, December 29, 1774, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:1057; An Association Proposed to the Loyal Citizens [Boston, Mass., 1775], broadside. 100. The Association, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:1057–8. On a large, regular meeting of loyalists in Worcester in 1774, see Deposition by Abraham Smith, July 19, 1776, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., U.S. Revolution Collection, Folder 2. 101. An Association Proposed to the Loyal Citizens. 102. James Warren to John Adams, January 15, 1775, Papers of John Adams, 18 vols., ed., Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint (Cambridge, Mass., 1977–2016), 2:213. 103. For a recent review of the literature, see Chris Evans, Debating the Revolution: Britain in the 1790s (New York, 2006), 53–63. 104. The Ruggles Association had some chance of success in Plymouth County, where the situation remained volatile. On the night before the Boston Tea Party, the Old Colony Club, founder and guardian of the annual Founders’ Day to celebrate the landing at Plymouth Rock, had exploded into two factions, rebel and loyalist, never to meet again. In October, 1774, 2,000 rebels had to take over the Plymouth courthouse. See Wesley Frank Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956), 35–6. Marshfield was another hotbed in that county. On the relief Redcoats sent there, see Thomas Gage to Lord Dartmouth, January 27, 1775, PRO CO 5/92, 79; and Petition of Charles Stockbridge and Abijah White to Gage, January 27, 1775, ibid., 81. No fewer than 73 heads of household were listed as refugees from Marshfield after the Battle of Lexington, out of 89 refugees for all Plymouth County. See List of Refugees from Plymouth County, 1775, Winslow Papers, vol. 1, mf. copy in National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, reel M-145, #37. 105. Lincoln, The Journals of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, 69. 106. Massachusetts Bay, In Provincial Congress, Cambridge, December 5, 1774 [Boston, Mass., 1774), broadside. 107. For one moderate’s bitter complaint that people like him were tormented by “the very dregs of the committees of correspondence in our lesser townsˮ for trading with the British through Long Island Sound, see [Benjamin Gale], Brief, Decent, but Free Remarks, and Observations, on Several Laws Passed by the Honorable Legislature in the State of Connecticut, Since the Year 1776. [By] A Friend to His Country (Hartford, Conn., 1782), 52. 108. Cumberland County Resolves, September 27, 1774, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:800. See pp. 798–802.

178 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America” 109. Joseph Lyman, A Sermon Preached at Hatfield December 15th, 1774, Being the Day Recommended by the Late Provincial Congress to be Observed as a Day of Thanksgiving (Boston, Mass., 1775). 110. [John Adams and Daniel Leonard], Novanglus and Massachusettensis, or, Political Essays Published in the Years 1774 and 1775 (Boston, Mass., 1819), 143. 111. Ibid., 158. 112. Ibid., 149. 113. For a similar analysis, see Carol Berkin, Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist (New York, 1974), 75–6. 114. [Adams and Leonard], Novanglus and Massachusettensis, 216. For a similar reductionist argument, see [Jonathan Sewall], A Cure for the Spleen ([Boston], 1775), 9. 115. [Jared Ingersoll, Sr.], Mr. Ingersoll’s Letters Relating to the Stamp Act (New Haven, Conn., 1766), 8. See also the classic loyalist study by Lawrence H. Gipson, Jared Ingersoll: A Study of American Loyalism in Relation to British Colonial Government (New Haven, Conn., 1920). 116. [Adams and Leonard], Novanglus and Massachusettensis, 166, 195, 185, 208. 117. Ibid., 144. These men shared with those in the southern planter class a profound disdain for common people. See Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville, Va., 1998). 38–49. 118. Samuel Eliot Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray, Loyalist,ˮ Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 14, Transactions, 1911–1913 (Boston, Mass., 1913), 325. See pp. 319–50. 119. [Adams and Leonard], Novanglus and Massachusettensis, 10, 120. See Gage to Dartmouth, January 27, 1775, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1:391. 121. Frederick Mackenzie, A British Fusilier in Revolutionary Boston: Being the Diary of Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie, Adjutant of the Royal Welch [sic] Fusiliers, January 5–April 30, 1775, ed. Allen French (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), 32. 122. Ibid., 33. 123. As William Tyng of Falmouth wrote to him in March, loyalists who remained there were “obliged to disguise their intentions,ˮ although, he promised forlornly, “whenever calld to arms they will be ready to show their Loyalty to the best of kings.ˮ See Tyng to Gage, March 18 1775, Gage Papers, vol. 126. Mandamus councilors claimed unconvincingly that they lived in fear of assassination in Boston. See Memorial of Harrison Gray, Thomas Flucker, John Murray, John Erving, Nathaniel Hatch, George Erving, James Boutineau, and Joshua Loring to Lord Germain, December 10, 1776, PRO AO 13/46, 20–21v. The only Indians who might have assisted Gage in the region were the Mohegans, but they wished merely to escape to take refuge with the Oneidas. See Extract of the Proceedings with the Mohegans, April 7, 1775, Gage Papers, vol. 127.

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124. A careful recorder of weather mentions only two New England snowstorms – November 21–22 and December 28–29 – a two inch snowfall March 1, and one true “tediousˮ storm on April 12, the only one “we have had this long time if any to equal it all winter,ˮ a highly unusual remark by this writer. See Matthew Patten, The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, New Hampshire (Concord, N.H., 1903), 333, 225, 338, 341. 125. Thomas Gage to Lord Dartmouth, January 18, 1775, PRO CO 5/92, 70. By January, Gage knew there were at least 15,000 armed Minute Men in Massachusetts, and 19 companies of artillery in control of 38 field pieces, materiel stored at Worcester and Concord. See Gage to Dartmouth, January 27, 1775, PRO CO 5/92, 117–20. 126. [Increase Mather], A Narrative of the Miseries of New-England, by Reason of an Arbitrary Government Erected Here. Printed in the Tyranic [sic] Reign of Sir Edmund Andros (Boston, Mass., 1775). 127. It was the site of the momentous transformation of the General Court into the Provincial Congress, amid the smoking ruins of the town’s worst fire in its history. See James D. Phillips, Salem in the Eighteenth Century (Boston, Mass., 1937), 321–35. 128. Kenneth A. Daigler, Spies, Patriots, and Traitors: American Intelligence in the Revolutionary War (Washington, D.C., 2014), 44–5. 129. [William Pynchon], The Diary of William Pynchon of Salem, ed. Fitch Edward Oliver (Boston, Mass., 1890), 42. 130. Ibid. 131. Whereas It is the Prevailing Rage of the Present Times, for People of all Ranks, Orders, and Professions, to Form Associations, and Erect Themselves into What They Call Congresses and Committees of Various Denominations . . . [Boston, Mass., 1775], broadside. See also Phillips, Salem in the Eighteenth Century, 380–91. 132. Mackenzie, A British Fusilier in Revolutionary Boston, 37. 133. Ibid. 134. See Samuel Adams to Unknown Correspondent, March 12, 1775, editorial note, Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 3:199. See pp. 198–9. 135. Mackenzie, A British Fusilier in Revolutionary Boston, 37. 136. Ibid., 38. 137. Ibid. 138. John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer of Propaganda (Stanford, Calif., 1960), 329–31. A few hours later, the ordinary soldiers (who must have been under orders not to attend the event), responded to the oration by tarring and feathering “a country fellow,ˮ keeping an infuriated crowd of citizens at bay by leveling loaded guns at them. See Deposition of Thomas Ditson of Billerica, March 9, 1775, Gage Papers, vol. 126; Deposition of Husbandman Thomas, Jr. March 13, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:93–4; Samuel Adams to Richard Henry Lee, March 21, 1775, Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 3:205–9; Thomas Ditson, “Extract of a Letter from Boston to a Gentleman in New York, March 12, 1775,ˮ Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 2:121; Mackenzie, A British Fusilier in Revolutionary Boston, 39–40. Mackenzie

180 “The Attempts of a Wicked Administration to Enslave America”

139.

140.

141. 142. 143.

claimed tarring and feathering went back to the twelfth century, when Richard I used it to discipline soldiers. His last letter from Boston is Samuel Adams to Jonathan Augustine Washington, March 21, 1775, Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 3:210– 11. Thomas Bolton, An Oration Delivered March Fifteenth, 1775, at the Request of a Number of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston (Boston, Mass., 1775), 6. Punderson, The Narrative of Mr. Ebenezer Punderson, 4. Lincoln, The Journals of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, 77–147. Thomas Wheeler to the Massachusetts Gazette, March 24, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 2:229.

6 “Avoid Blood and Tumult” Loyalist Policy During the War

Tories shall fall, each one and all. We value none of those, Tho’ they ’trench deep, themselves to keep, Secure from Country Foes. [Anon.], Gage’s Folly, Or the Tall Fox Outwitted (Boston, 1776)

from april nineteenth to the battle of bunker hill On Lexington Green in the early dawn of April Nineteenth, 1775, either a rebel or a Redcoat fired the first shot of the war.1 The Battle of Lexington and Concord became the fourth “Day” of the Revolution, after August Fourteenth, March Fifth, and December Sixteenth.2 Leading New England loyalists who had remained in their communities now fled into exile in Boston, joining those who left earlier, usually leaving their families in the interior. In Boston, where the two sides now appeared to be about equal in number, Henry Hulton claimed 2,000 rebel Bostonians planned to seize the town by taking advantage of snoring British officers after their St. George’s Day revels. At the last minute, the rebels decided they were too weak; the loyalists disarmed them and kept the capital almost another year.3 The rest of the region was protected by what would be called the Continental Army, which Minute Men soon formed to besiege the capital. Jonathan Trumbull expressed the region’s prevailing sentiment in a broadside of his letter to Thomas Gage: the general’s “unprovoked attack . . . would disgrace even barbarians.”4 General Gage justified his action by officially proclaiming that New Englanders had “suffered themselves to be conducted by certain well known incendiaries and traitors, in a fatal progression of crimes.”5 181

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A contingent of wealthy loyalists now fled in the direction of London.6 It meant the permanent sundering of community ties, and for some, family ties. Rebel Josiah Quincy, Jr. and his brother Samuel parted, tearfully, forever.7 Everyone knew that the British invasion of the countryside meant rebels had to scrutinize neighbors more closely, since the great majority of loyalists remained in their homes.8 The departures helped intensify feeling against the loyalists who persisted, but rebel leaders continued to exercise restraint. The persisters lost the full set of their civil rights and faced enraged outcry, but harm to person or property was rare.9 The rebels knew the history of rebellion well enough to know that unfairness and cruelty did not change minds and always stained ideals. For even those who admired Oliver Cromwell wished he came down to them with less blood on his hands. The ability of rebels to contain domestic hostilities was one of the most convincing aspects of the Revolution. They showed pity for those they saw as weak-minded people, those who lacked the courage or sense to make the historically correct choice to maintain New England sovereignty, for abstractions were beyond them. The policy was to shun them, or, for the noisiest offenders, scold and threaten them, jail for a few. Some radical leaders feared that “to suffer these wealthy disaffected men to remain among us, will be dangerous to our liberties; enemies to our government, they will be always endeavoring to undermine it and bring us back to the subjection of Great-Britain.”10 It was a perfectly rational fear. But despite calls for stricter rules, a middle way prevailed over the years. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress sent Hancock and Adams back to the Congress at Philadelphia, where they were received in a large and solemn procession, in respect for the dead in the Battle of Lexington and Concord.11 Meanwhile, the Provincial Congress took a major step in redefining loyalty on May 5, 1775, by proclaiming that good citizens should not obey General Gage’s writs because his aim was “to enslave this people.”12 Then the legislature began to discriminate carefully between those “friendly to their Country” and those who were “Enemies to the Rights of Mankind” – an unprecedented use of this phrase – and recommended (but did not order) the disarming of “suspected Persons” who refused to promise to serve in “Defence of the Rights and Liberties of America.”13 A week later, the provincial delegates were higher yet, attacking for the first time those who were “inimical to the Constitution.” Those who were fleeing the province with their property were trying to escape “their Proportion of the Burthens” of defense, so authorities should prevent them from leaving without written permission of town

From Bunker Hill to the Evacuation of Boston in March, 1776 183 committee or Congress. The legislature enjoined local committees “to be very vigilant, in observing the Motions” of all suspect persons.14 On May 22, 1775, with major generals on their way to Boston in a flotilla, the delegates declared a strict policy to shun inimicals who operated “merely on principles of avarice.”15 They ordered that no person “shall take any deed, lease, or conveyance whatever, of the lands, houses, or estates of such persons.”16 They condemned absconders as men who intended “to escape the Trouble and Expence of a manly Opposition to our wicked Adversaries.”17 They broadsided Samuel Auchmuty’s letter of April 19 lamenting his misfortune to be born “among the saints and rebels,” now become a “rascally Whig mob”18 The representatives still generously offered full amnesty to anyone who recanted and wished to join rebel forces, even any absconders.19 The loyalist cause suffered a new blow by the arrival, May 26, 1775, of Generals William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne, who brought many troops. It would be only a matter of time before the crown’s forces would try to lift the rebel siege of Boston. On June 12, Governor Gage declared martial law, promising pardon to any rebels who would lay down their arms, even providing a ready-made rationale for their bad behavior on April Nineteenth. The people must have had been incited by “the animated Language of ancient and Virtuous times,” that is, they were corrupted by their history and misled by subversive exhortations from black-robed fanatics in the clergy, and they must come to their senses.20 The governor’s offer of a general pardon was poisoned, since it declared that loyalists who fled their homes must be permitted to return, and after the British regained control they would “stand distinct and separate from the Parricides of the Constitution.”21 Clearly, if the rebellion failed, the loyalists stood to gain great privilege in their chastened communities, which helped strengthen rebel resolve.22

from bunker hill to the evacuation of boston in march, 1776 On June 17, 1775, in the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British attempted to break the rebel stranglehold on Suffolk County. It was a victory for the rebels simply because they were not easily put to rout, and the British remained cooped up in Boston. Governor Gage informed superiors the battle proved “that the Rebels are not the despicable Rabble too many have supposed them to be.”23 The battle was a public-relations disaster for him, by the killing of charismatic leader Joseph Warren, and the

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burning of the heart of Charlestown.24 The radicals now openly prepared for war. James Warren fretted to Samuel Adams that “I now fear the repeal of the [revenue] Acts which I have heretofore wished for,” given that the British might become conciliatory at the last minute.25 Historians know today that George III had no intention to negotiate: “the colonies must either submit or triumph,” he announced privately on September 11, “but we must not retreat.”26 The year between Bunker Hill and the Declaration of Independence was filled with great uncertainty, as rebels groped for a common goal. The Massachusetts legislators had reverted to the illegal old charter, to which Gage responded by reporting to London that “there is no kind of Tyranny and Cruelty that these Pretenders to Freedom and Liberty don’t exercise over those in their Power, who oppose the Schemes tho only by words.”27 Rebel leaders proclaimed a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer on June 22, to contemplate the fact that God had permitted “evil Men, on both sides of the Atlantick, to ripen their plots against the Liberties of America into Violence.”28 The public outrage was refreshed by the little Battle of Gloucester in August, and the British attack on Falmouth in October, which left the town in ashes, both events arising from rebel attempts to interrupt British supplies to Boston.29 Moreover, between April, 1775, and March, 1776, the British would wreck Boston’s buildings to withstand the rebel siege. In short, it was a total military crisis for survival of New England’s independence and commercial infrastructure.30 Meanwhile, the colonists were comforted by the knowledge that radicals everywhere favored the cause of self-government all the more because of the military bullying in Massachusetts.31

debate about loyalist policy The rebels’ policy toward loyalists grew out of four main considerations: security against internal subversion; a strategic interest not to encourage loyalists to disperse throughout the Atlantic world; the need to forge an alliance with the other, more divided colonies; and, above all, their historical consciousness, which told them that posterity would judge their Revolution by the quality of its mercy.32 The local committee became the central engine of the Revolution, for its members formed the first line of defense to watch and restrain a town’s loyalists. Whenever military alert was high, committees got tough. Yet Samuel Adams wrote urgently to James Warren to do everything in his power “to avoid Blood &

Debate about Loyalist Policy

185

Tumult” so that the Massachusetts delegates in Philadelphia could gently encourage a majority of colonists to consider independence.33 His plea captures the delicate balance the rebels had to maintain between internal security and their ultimate goal. Rebel policies about the many persisting loyalists developed in four major bodies: local committees, state legislatures, the army, and Congress, but in practice the committees made the key decisions. In general, rebels were patient with and deferential to even the most incorrigible loyalists. When the irreconcilable Governor Joseph Wanton and ten others refused to sign the “Declaration or Test,” Wanton spouting that “he would have nothing to do with it,” the Assembly merely ordered the gentlemen to disperse to six small inland towns away from Providence, a policy called “rustication.”34 While Congress was expressing furious indignation at the crown for having “incite[d] domestic enemies against us,” Tory policy remained negotiable in the towns.35 The Continental Army was least tolerant: it had to fight loyalist units on the battlefield, and had to worry about the persisters’ collaboration with the enemy in battle areas. During the siege of Boston and the Battle of New York several lasting loyalist units formed: the Loyal Associated Volunteers under Worcester’s James Putnam, the North British Volunteers for Scots, Crean Brush’s corps of Loyal [Scots-] Irish Volunteers, the Queen’s Rangers under New Hampshire’s sadly unlucky Robert Rogers, and the Prince of Wales American Volunteers, mostly men of southern Connecticut at first. For these loyalists in arms, it was no gentleman’s war. Loyalist Connecticut farmer Elijah Mead survived, but he ended up “one of the most melancholy objects that ever was seen . . . without a whole Bone in his skin or a single Feature in his Face that is not shocking to look at.”36 So the Continental Army had to have a strict policy to discourage men like Mead and the collaborators who would supply them. George Washington hectored Governor Trumbull of Connecticut to be more rigorous with nonconformists. “Would it not be prudence,” he demanded, “to seize on those Tories who have been, are, and that we know will be active against us?” He meant those who were “preying upon the vitals of their Country . . . [and] do us every mischief in their power?”37 By the general’s standard, even mild “mischief” would become intolerable.38 Judging by his actual policy of nonintervention, that threat was meant to incite and back up civil authority. Washington knew there was strong anti-loyalism in his own ranks if he had to use it, but he was not keen to take up the endless and risky

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trouble of managing collaborators in the towns.39 Thus, as policy evolved from day to day, town fathers were responsible for loyalists, although they turned to legislatures for help with hard cases, occasionally to Congress.40

local authorities and loyalists The root sources of policy can be seen in Pownalborough on the Maine frontier, where the townspeople finally concluded they could not handle the prominent and cantankerous Abiel Wood. The specific charges against him by the town’s Committee of Inspection provide an interesting window onto loyalist fortitude. Wood had (1) denounced the Continental Association of Congress as something passed after “the members of said Congress drank thirty bumpers of wine a piece;” (2) traded in naval stores in violation of the Association; (3) denounced the Provincial Congress as “rebels and traitors” who should hang; (4) disseminated a pamphlet, “An Address to All Reasonable Americans,” and ridiculed “Considerations on Measures Now Carrying on in America;” (5) refused in 1774 (as a selectman) to call a town meeting after Gage declared them illegal (probably his original offense); (6) spread the lie that several towns had refused to abide by the Association; (7) declared that all acts of Parliament should be obeyed, and that the only reason New England was in disorder was from the efforts of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Josiah Quincy, Jr.; (8) again condemned the members of the Provincial Congress as “damned villains”; (9) encouraged traders who carried lumber to the British troops; and (10) contended that John Hancock and Samuel Adams had led the tea destroyers on December Sixteenth, for “the devil had made them believe that one of them should be a King, another a governour.”41 The rebels felt that a man like this must shut up, but the town was not strong enough to make him. He divided the town so badly that the House of Representatives finally ordered Wood to be examined by the Council.42 The Council found that Wood was inimical and must post bond and promise to have no correspondence with the enemy.43 All rebels in positions of responsibility urged decorum and forbearance, strict avoidance of civil bloodshed. When the Cambridge Committee absolved some penitent Hutchinson Addressers, it warned sternly that “they be protected, from all Injuries or Insults whatsoever, so long as they adhere to their several Recantations.”44 In other words, there was not to be strict suppression of nonconformity. On May 5, the same committee

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posted a broadside listing those who had disavowed their loyalism and warned the public not to molest them so long as they “continue to assist and abide by their Country.”45 Congregationalist ministers like Thaddeus Maccarty of Worcester backed up authorities by exhorting citizens to remain “good neighbors and friends, however they may be of different opinions,” for “brotherly kindness” was the “glory of societies.”46 The committee of Tewkesbury in Massachusetts investigated a charge of loyalism – that of Timothy Brown – and found him “a friend to the liberties of his Country,” ordering the public not to treat him otherwise.47 The rebels were alert to the possibility of false accusations, and that was when higher officials might intervene. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress investigated Waltham’s denunciation of Major Abijah Brown, and found him “injuriously treated by the secret resentments of designing persons.”48 Yet false accusations were rare. The neighbors of a few irrepressible loyalists finally expelled them after prolonged contests. Following Lexington, Connecticut’s Ebenezer Punderson had the temerity to go abroad in Stonington on April 21 and attract a jeering crowd. The local militia came out and swore “that I should be instantly drawn in quarters before the Liberty Pole,” which everyone understood to be hyperbole, but not a joke.49 His interrogation went on three hours at the center of a large assembly, with local justices of the peace barely managing to control the crowd. These big confrontations provided the basic domestic theatre of the Revolution. Frightened, Punderson galloped to Lebanon the next day to appeal to Governor Trumbull, who rebuffed him. He then fled overland in the direction of New York. At Colchester, a forewarned crowd stopped him and demanded he sign the Covenant. He appealed desperately to the highest gentleman present, an assemblyman, which only increased the anger of the crowd. So after nine hours of heated negotiation, he persuaded them to come up with “the most moderate confession that they would receive,” which he signed. Then the committee escorted him back to Norwich, where the town’s rebels gathered en masse for his arrival and badgered him into altering slightly the wording of his confession. They placed him under house arrest until they could publish his recantation in the press. Then, he claimed, he only barely evaded an assassin on the way home. He stayed inside his house thirty days, while his “aged mother was frightened almost into fits,” and his wife and children were “in perpetual fears.”50 In the run-up to Bunker Hill, a friend told him that rebel soldiers intended to hang him, so he made for the sea in a rowboat, and was picked up by a

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coasting vessel that took him to a British battleship, which carried him to London November 19, 1775. Punderson would return to America in 1776 in the Commissary Department of the British Army, apparently a thorough Englishman.

legislatures, courts and loyalists The king’s Proclamation of Rebellion on August 23, 1775, clarified the atmosphere. George III ordered all loyal subjects in his realm to unite “in suppression of such rebellion.”51 Privately, Samuel Adams exulted, congratulating George III as a man who “will necessarily produce the grandest Revolutions the World has ever yet seen.”52 Until now, loyalists had continued to believe the king might save the situation, but the decree ended those hopes. When it arrived in America, a split was developing in rebel ranks between those who wanted a tough policy toward “inimicals,” that is, more pressure to conform or leave, and on the other side those who preferred to retain remaining loyalists safely in the towns on parole. It began to structure the legislatures. To some extent, it was a class split. Moderate rebels like merchant and aspiring politician John Hancock were eager to retain as many New Englanders as possible, whereas angry local committees whose members were yeomen and artisans were more likely to demand expulsion of obstreperous loyalists. James Warren spoke for radicals in urging prison for loyalists and a policy “to confiscate their goods and estates.”53 Warren, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, infuriated by news that Falmouth lay in ashes, and cursed with several Tory cousins, led those who thought the anti-Tory laws were too weak.54 House and Council split over the issue through the Revolution, reflecting a similar split in the larger community. It mirrored the old competition between yeoman interior and east coast, but it also represented rivalry between popular and elite forces in large towns.55 James Warren’s speeches articulated popular sentiment, but were probably never intended to force the issue. A spirit of witch-hunting did not appear, for most people agreed on the need for restraint. The king’s proclamation led rebels to jail the most recalcitrant loyalists, but not thousands.56 Moreover, judges were reluctant to permit the lengthy confinement of unarmed loyalists.57 Even in bitterly divided Worcester, after the military crisis of 1776, the town released jailed loyalists and restored their “privileges of Englishmen” because “forgiveness, and friendship, . . . are equally christian [sic] and political duties.”58 The liberal spirit of the Revolution worked

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to salvage any loyalist who would merely accept, if not endorse, the “country.” Exact enforcement of a provincial government’s mandate varied. Hezekiah Brown of Waterbury had gotten away for some time with proclaiming things like Congress “did no more good than a Parsel of Squaws,” and that the Connecticut General Assembly “acted as Arbitrary as the Pope of Rome,” but in October, 1775, he signed a humble recantation and promised to defend “this colony and America in general.”59 The neighbors of Benjamin Stiles of Woodbury ordered him to stop declaring that the congressmen “were no more fit for our Representatives than his Negro Jeff,” or that “if some part of the Ministers and some part of Congress were beheaded both Countries would be at peace.”60 Shunning was the main tactic. It was unfair in a strict sense, and a painful rent in the community fabric, but it was far from the rack and gallows. The king’s Proclamation of Rebellion, and Benjamin Church’s sudden betrayal of a cause he had so long served, encouraged a swelling tide of loyalism by 1776.61 So the Continental Congress gingerly resolved that the state assemblies should “arrest and secure every person . . . whose going at large may, in their opinion, endanger the safety of the colony, or the liberties of America.”62 On January 2, 1776 (just before Common Sense), Congress finally published “The Tory Act.” The language was moderate, and it was still not a true oath of allegiance. It was necessary because “divers honest and well meaning, but uninformed people in these colonies, have by the art and address of ministerial agents, been deceived and drawn into erroneous opinions, respecting the American cause, and the probable issue of the present contest.”63 That allowed for recantation: one could still plead that one had been deluded. Townspeople should strive to “explain” the “present controversy” to their loyalist neighbors. Towns should encourage the reading “of the great patriots in both houses of parliament relative to American grievances” – the speeches of Chatham and Burke.64 The Act was a kind of preliminary Declaration of Independence, describing the “execrable barbarity” of British arms. However, the delegates still counseled moderation, hoping emphatically “that cruelty should find no admission among a free people.”65 Revolutions must be measured by their generosity, by the survivors rather than the victims. Only in the spring of 1776 did a slight majority gain an uneasy edge in favor of independence, steadied by their certainty of being targets of revenge if the British prevailed. As the people of Exeter, New Hampshire

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would note in their congratulations to Congress on the Declaration in July, up to that moment “many Persons in this Colony were greatly averse to anything that looked like Independence.”66 Against the tide of moderation, the radicals gradually forged the “country,” working a loosely knit collection of historic ideals. Meanwhile, loyalists had enjoyed two full years of open debate before Independence. It was a long horse race between the ancient monarchical ideal and an uncertain republican future. In fact, many towns still had a big loyalist problem through the war. In the end, the republicans’ principal advantage was George III’s overweening will to power, which united the rebel coalition headed for independence. Even so, by July Fourth, loyalism remained in a hardcore, unreconstructed form among perhaps one-fifth of the population, and in a murky version among as many others, yielding a substantial number of royalist “citizens” in the new states. Yet the prevailing policy was to keep these people in their homes, inactive, not to drive them away.67

the british evacuation of boston in march, 1776 Instead of a big campaign against New England in 1776, in March General Howe abruptly fled the smallpox-haunted region and took his forces to New York.68 Most absconded loyalists in Boston left with him, having believed until then that Howe would restore “order.” Rebel leaders must have been sorry to see so many loyalists leave with Howe for four reasons. It was bad for rebel morale, bad for The Cause, to see so many New Englanders sailing out of the harbor. Second, to say the same thing a different way, a great display of rebel unity would make history more glorious and uplifting. Third, they needed as many warm bodies on their side of the battle lines as possible, out of sheer practical necessity. Finally, there was no point in scattering loyalists around the Atlantic, where they would be the new republics’ political opponents and economic competitors. The story of the evacuation is told with a chilling economy of words in his diary by one of those civilians who never left Boston, aging John Rowe, who had no stomach for rebellion, so he just stayed put.69 He described a rising crescendo of cannonading, smashing, looting, and firing of buildings in the last days. The Redcoats finally withdrew from their post on Bunker Hill, after setting up hay effigies dressed like sentries, labeled “Welcome Brother Jonathan.”70 This is the first appearance – a taunt – of that symbol of the New England democrat who would finally morph into Uncle Sam. The troops and loyalist auxiliaries boarded their

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transports – 270 vessels – on March 17. On the 20th, as the fleet sailed out of the harbor, the British exploded the ancient fortifications of Castle William in one last spectacular gesture. It was a little surprising the British had not reduced the town to ashes.71 As the rebels returned to Boston, they discovered immense destruction, even the Congregationalist meeting houses in ruins, “an indescribable scene of desolation and gloominess.”72 So they performed rituals of purification. The General Court feasted at the old Whig establishment, the Bunch of Grapes, on March 28.73 The British had buried the corpse of beloved Joseph Warren where he fell at the Battle of Bunker Hill. So the rebels disinterred his remains and raised him to the level of a national hero in the only intact meeting house, King’s Chapel, on April 8, where fellow Masons staged a Masonic funeral for him. The young radical Perez Morton gave the sermon, in which he cut New England off from the Mother Country. They must “by a timely amputation of that rotten limb of the empire, prevent the mortification of the whole.”74 Indeed, once the war began, some rebels could proclaim openly the world historical significance of their struggle as “the grand cause of the whole human race.”75 The United States would be an asylum for “the oppressed and distressed of the human race in all quarters.”76 The Warren funeral marked the emergence of Americans’ visionary role. Given the desolation of the capital, the returning rebels might have been hard on the loyalists who remained, but generally they were not. Boston’s prewar population of 17,000 had been reduced to perhaps 3,500 residents before the evacuation; of those, 927 civilians left with the British, about half of them adult male loyalists.77 But 627 officially declared male loyalists remained.78 These persisting loyalists and their families included many common people who could not afford to move elsewhere, and a minority of the remaining wealthy merchants and professionals, forming a skeletal population of the once-mighty town. Only a few of them would suffer serious retribution, and some people got off quite lightly because rebels valued their special services.79 The legislature ordered a court of inquiry, which issued warrants of arrest for only sixteen of the Boston persisters, of whom a number then fled the province. Sandemanian shopkeeper Hopestill Capen had to go to jail for many months, insisting that he was a pacifist, angrily denying “the base, unkind, diabolical interpretations of some, that I only wait to see which will be the strongest side.”80 At the other extreme, Dr. Mather Byles continued to make himself so obnoxious that in 1777 a jury ordered him banished, but he brazenly scorned the ruling and never departed.81

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A few men were so notorious that their fate was uncontroversial. Crean Brush was chief among them. An immigrant attorney who had amassed a huge number of acres in the disputed territory that would become Vermont, his crew alone looted at least £25,000 worth of goods in the last days before the evacuation.82 Since he could not get it all out of the province, he hung back and hid out as the fleet departed, but in April, the rebels captured and jailed him for nineteen months, until he escaped. He tried to recover “his” property only to find it confiscated and secured, so he committed suicide with a pistol in May, 1778.83 Or there was the case of the well-to-do Englishman, Jolley Allen, who settled in Boston in 1755 and made a small fortune as a shopkeeper. A stout loyalist, he and his large family tried to evacuate with the British troops, but the sea threw up their vessel on Provincetown. He returned to Boston in May, hoping to recover his house, but it was “now possessed by his barber, and [Allen] had to beg to sleep there two nights for 8 shill[ings].”84 Since his attitude had not improved, he was “insulted by almost everyone,” until he fled through Connecticut to take refuge on a British ship in 1777. He died in England in 1782, insolvent.85 The type represented by Brush and Allen justified those who thought loyalists should be sharply restricted, jailed, or exiled. More typical was the John Rowe type, who disapproved the Tea Party. The rebels now hurt him deeply by snubbing him; he protested weakly that he had never done “anything prejudicial to the cause of America,” and he genuinely believed himself a “Whig” – but that term just did not count for much anymore.86 Whoever the Whigs in England were, they had voted for the Boston Port Bill or other Coercive Acts.87 They had not prevented the crown’s war against America, even though they were convinced that if the king did beat the colonists it would “give the completest triumph to Toryism [on both sides of the Atlantic] that it ever had.”88 The rebels knew little about the populist sympathy in England for their cause, like that of one Kentish yeoman who condemned in his diary “this unnatural War against our best allies or friends the Americans.”89 He probably thought of himself as more radical than a “Whig,” and that term lapsed into disuse in America, until the party of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster dredged it out of the basement and adopted it in the 1830s.

“the test” and independence Over the course of 1776, the Massachusetts House of Representatives responded to pressure to become more insistent on a strict test act, the

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disarming of loyalist men, and careful sequestration of abandoned property.90 On March 14, 1776, Congress recommended that all rebel governments “cause all Persons to be disarmed within their respective Colonies, who are notoriously disaffected to the cause of America, or who have not associated” for military service.91 It is notable that mere neutrals were classed with true loyalists. Nevertheless, Massachusetts proceeded gradually, slowly compiling lists of the disloyal sent up from local committees. The General Court continued to welcome any loyalist to stay in revolutionary Massachusetts who expressed “sincere Contrition.”92 The rebel majority still hoped they or their children would seek redemption. In the first half of 1776, authorities at all levels tried to persuade as many loyalists as possible to support the rebellion. However, Thomas Paine now raised the bar by his ferocious condemnation of monarchy – “How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm” – and aristocracy (an “armed banditti”).93 He made the difference between rebel and loyalist ideology simple enough to make independence seem rational, and opposition mere stubbornness. On May 1, 1776, the Massachusetts legislature finally adopted a formal Test Act, to be enacted by the towns to qualify voters, requiring all males sixteen years old and older to sign an explicit pledge to fight for freedom, and declaring refusers to be “Enemies of the Rights and Liberties of America” who should feel “the just Resentment of their injured Countrymen.” Thus, the loyalists were still not traitors to a nation as such. Recantations were still possible.94 Similar oaths in other colonies led to local action against a few loyalists. The Committee of Stamford, Connecticut rode Seth Seely on a rail, then bound him in the stocks, pelted him with eggs, and sentenced him to pay tribute. He remained in his home until that fall before seeking British protection. When he tried to come back in 1777, locals confined him to prison, whence he escaped to Nova Scotia.95 An unfortunate few innocents were just caught in the middle. Walter Bates, also of Connecticut, sixteen years old, had the misfortune to have collaborating brothers. When he refused to reveal their whereabouts, the town committee jailed him, threatened to stake him out on the beach at low tide, bound him naked to a tree at night to let the mosquitoes feast on him, condemned him to one hundred stripes and administered twenty of them, threatened to hang him, bound him to a log in train for the saw at the sawmill, but finally gave up. The head of the militia decided he had endured enough and ordered him home.96 Very few civilian loyalists suffered as much as poor Bates. Most truly destructive acts were directed not at persons but at the trim of homes: windows, shutters, fences, gates,

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shrubbery.97 Most loyalists had to put up with mere verbal abuse.98 The situation did not degenerate into an awful Hobbesian war of tooth and nail, as suggested by some historians; it was never as bitter as deeply divided New York.99 Even so, pervasive legitimate concern about treachery now led the Massachusetts legislature to adopt a bizarre omnibus law, full of loopholes, to govern loyalists.100 That body was angry at those who hoped “to recommend themselves to the bounty of [British] administration by misrepresenting and traducing the conduct and principles of the friends of American liberty,” and committees should continue to keep their arms and deny them any public office.101

the “country” of july fourth The language of the Declaration of Independence did little to change basic thinking. Framed as an indictment of George III, it is a masterpiece of legalistic evasion, carefully avoiding attacks on monarchy, the English people, Parliament, or loyalists. Nevertheless, the problem of loyalism became more urgent, for a royalist reaction was to be expected. Meanwhile, the weakness of the rebels’ nation-mindedness can scarcely be exaggerated. The country remained eerily nonspecific in public discourse until the all-but-meaningless term, “The United States” appeared out of the blue, apparently originating in George Washington’s camp at Boston.102 The appearance of the Tory Act and the country’s new name on the same day, January 2, is more than just interesting. National identity remained only potential: the rebels felt primary loyalty to their colonies-becoming-republics, which hardly dared call themselves that, so they were one people in part by knowing certainly what they were not – Tories.103 The rebel states all had a loyalist problem throughout the war. On July 4, the representatives of a new “Commonwealth” of Massachusetts (echoing 1649) voted their first order, the establishment of a state-level court to try actively inimical persisting loyalists, authorizing judges to require bonds to be posted by “obnoxious” individuals, and to jail them if they could not pay.104 The Continental Congress declared that direct aid of the enemy was treason, and the Massachusetts legislature passed a similar law in February, 1777.105 It was not the same as criminalizing loyalism itself, but it was close, the first defining moment of the new state. The many loyalists who scorned July Fourth felt strictly confined to their property for a while.106 In places, the problem was barely manageable: rebels in deeply divided Worcester fretted that summer that loyalists

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were still so numerous they had “frequent meetings in large bodies” and seemed to be stockpiling arms.107 Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence frankly revealed to Silas Deane their “uneasiness” because of “the number of Tories we find in every State,” all enraged by the Declaration.108 They seemed “more numerous than formerly, and speak more openly.”109 The Boston Committee of Correspondence blasted the “false reports spread daily by the Tory Party” to poison relations among the rebels.110 As a result, some rebels called for greater severity. “Justice” wrote in a Fairfield paper that mere denunciation, shunning, and disarming were ineffectual. Since loyalists now “sinned with their eyes open, and don’t mean to be convinced,” the only thing that would reform them would be a threat of “the halter, and the gibbet.”111 As it turned out, after 1776, persisters quieted down a lot when the war’s center shifted out of New England. Despite the intensity of feeling, bodily harm to civilian loyalists remained rare. The case of Congregationalist minister Eleazar Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth College for the uplift of Native Americans, is revealing. He was completely befuddled by political reality, and local rebel leaders threatened to cart him to the congress at Exeter “as a tory,” he reported, and he would “not fail to be judged an enemy to my country” because he had the bad judgment to express his acid disapproval of the “undigested opinions of an ignorant, giddy, stupid, unprincipled multitude, who would carry all before them by their scoffs, derision, and furious clamours.”112 He was so shocked by the resulting public outcry that he immediately fell silent, lapsed into obscurity, and died of natural causes in 1779. Neither his person nor property was ever in danger. Another clergyman suffered a little more. Bedford, New Hampshire’s only loyalist was its Presbyterian minister, John Houston, whose salary was withheld after April Nineteenth by the votes of fifty-two parishioners he had long since alienated. The warning did not work, for “he shows himself a horrid Tory / Gods Laws & Mans he does pervert / with a most base & vile Intent.”113 So one night they took him from his house and rode him on a rail for six miles. But he continued contumacious, and after the Battle of Bunker Hill, they barred him from the pulpit. He refused to sign the Test in 1776, and they finally dismissed him only in 1778. Their patience apparently worked, for he was now sufficiently impressed as to swear allegiance to New Hampshire, achieve reinstatement by the synod, go on to other pulpits, and enjoy his very substantial landholdings. Nelson, New Hampshire’s Breed Batcheller affords another example of the great forbearance of loyalists’ neighbors. He had been barely old enough at sixteen years to fight at Crown Point in 1756, and after the war

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became a land speculator, tavern keeper, trader, and militia officer. He was such an angry loyalist, in December, 1775, the Nelson Committee of Safety had summoned him, and Batcheller damned the committee “and threatened to kill the first man that should come to take him.”114 In a report written in the vernacular, he “mad much distorbance in the contere by bying a larg quanety [of] Tea and paddeling it out thru the contere.”115 So general clamor against him led the committee to jail him September 17, 1776, where he continuously assaulted his captors with profane threats, declaring he would rather he hanged than join rebels, until they tired of that and released him. But he continued to spout offensive opinions, so the town finally drove him to ground in the forest; he lived in a cave for a time until he reached Burgoyne’s army. He became a captain in the Queen’s Rangers and served until he was wounded and decommissioned in Nova Scotia, where he may have been overcome by drink and drowned in 1785.116 Batcheller had so much sway in the little town he helped found, it took a very long time to subdue him, but unlike the majority of loyalists in New Hampshire, he chose exile. Immediately following the Declaration of Independence, the Rhode Island Assembly ruled that all men had to take a loyalty test, and those sixty-four who refused to take the oath had to give their reasons before the Assembly.117 Unsurprisingly for this colony, many of them invoked a religious motive of “conscience.” Reverend Erasmus Kelly waffled; he was “not sure any war was right,” although “if any is the Present War is so.”118 John Overing, John Ruggles, and Ezekiel Lewis declared that they had property in the West Indies, which the British would seize if they signed a test. One Jewish merchant declared war to be “contrary to the Custom of Jews.” Another, Moses Hays, provided a long statement of principle. He was for the American cause, but hated the test because Jews lacked the right to vote, and all governments had refused to “countenance” his religion. (That is, when naturalized, even in liberal Rhode Island, Jews had no political rights to vote or hold office, true the world over.) Hays also criticized the test because it targeted suspected loyalists instead of being general.119 This is one of the most articulate and pro-rebel Jews, one of the builders of the new Boston after the war. By contrast, many in the Hart family of Newport Jewry were loyalists who followed the British Army out of New England. When the British suddenly created a refuge for loyalists in Newport by investing it with 5,000 Redcoats late in 1776, many Tories living in the hinterland moved to Newport, including Jewish loyalists.120 But seventeen Jews signed the test at this hearing in Providence. In the end, Rhode Island’s Jews split

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about the same as other Rhode Islanders, and the group included radicals like Hays, who wanted more than just independence.121 The region’s most volatile group of towns lay in the southwestern portion of Connecticut, especially in Fairfield County and New Haven.122 The Assembly sent a force of 200 rebels into Fairfield County in 1776, took the major leaders by surprise in the middle of the night, and obtained capitulations from them.123 The region remained a contested no-man’s land. New York’s royalist Governor Tryon would strike Ridgefield in April, 1777, in an effort to support local resistance to rebels.124 Fairfield County continued to be a security risk throughout the war.125 In areas like this, rebel committees could expect no more from the many resident loyalists than neutral behavior.126

new england loyalism after 1776 How often did the confusion of war lead to injustices? There was a renewed sense of urgency in the battle seasons, especially true in 1777, when two British armies were drilling into New England’s hindquarters, John Burgoyne out of Quebec and Sir Henry Clinton out of New York, accompanied by loyalist corps. For even if loyalist bravado in the towns was largely subdued by 1777, loyalist families kept sending forth young men to fight in the corps. Suspected collaborators Jonathan Gove and his fellows in Exeter, New Hampshire, jail during that campaign season claimed they were victims of “the inhuman Tongues of malicious persons” and those who would “cover their own Crimes by falsely and wickedly exclaiming against others.”127 However, committees, legislatures, and courts punished only those who collaborated. As late as 1779, the fathers of Danvers (site of the witchcraft hysteria of 1692) had to warn any convicted collaborator the town would “transport him or them to the Enemy,” but would protect any accused from “unmerited Sufferings” that arose from “Prejudices” and “private Resentment.”128 Most loyalists enjoyed general freedom of movement once the locus of battle seemed to shift out of the region. Boston’s loyalist population soon flourished again. By October, 1778, when John Hancock threw a big party for 200 guests, one count showed a quarter of them were loyalists.129 As a result, Mercy Otis Warren complained bitterly that Hancock (“the Guilded puppet”) was the object of “idolitry [sic].”130 An actual party system appears to be in place by 1778: radicals headed by James Warren on the left, liberals headed by Hancock in the center, and a formative Federalist Party headed by James Bowdoin.131 There

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was intermittent debate between moderates and those who would have been more strict with loyalists. James Warren claimed the Council was too “ambitious of Excelling in Charity, and tenderness” for loyalists, but popular actions could still be severe.132 Even in Boston, a crowd leader under the significant “1649” name, “Joyce, Jr.” (the commoner who had arrested Charles I), carted six loyalists out of the town limits and warned them not to return.133 There were some sad tragedies. Benjamin Hallowell, Comptroller of the Customs in Boston, claimed that the harassment of his family so upset his fourteen-year-old daughter that she “was deprived of her reason, and after languishing more than a year died.”134 Sarah Troutbeck, widow of Anglican priest John Troutbeck of Boston, claimed he died of malnutrition caused by the siege of Boston, when some inhabitants went hungry.135 Some families were torn in pieces over politics. Marshfield’s grandee, Nathaniel Ray Thomas, who left in 1774, tearfully reported to the Loyalist Claims Commission that the ten-year-old son he left behind, John, became an ardent patriot, married in New England, and became “an Alien.”136 No rebel could have convinced New Hampshire’s John Sheperd in 1778 that it was a fair revolution, because he had been in a series of jails for two years, and “several months of that time loaded with Fetters & Manacles.”137 In 1779, James Jones somehow antagonized his town of Lebanon. They dragged him out of bed one night, tied him backwards on a horse and rode him five miles to a tavern, accompanied by the rough music of bells and horns, and then abused him with words and blows and threatened him with death.138 By that late date, it was unusual. A century ago, Claude Van Tyne described the American rebels as excessively cruel to the loyalists, and greedy for their confiscated estates.139 It is true there was rebel bitterness. Samuel Woodward was hard hearted in his 1779 memorial sermon on April Nineteenth. He was glad the absconders were gone, and wished that the many “designing men . . . of the same general principles” who remained in the country would join them in exile.140 A man with the venerable regicide name of John Goffe in New Hampshire claimed in 1779 that loyalists remained “in almost every town in this State” of New Hampshire, and that they should be purged from the juries lest they harm “the good people.”141 However, when all the terrible episodes are added together, most loyalists were spared exile, jail, or confiscation, and few lost everything. The total number of cruel acts during the entire Revolution was small, and most loyalists could complain of little beyond hard language from neighbors and the normal inconveniences of war everyone suffered.142

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The rebels’ standard appeared to be: “The arms of America has spread terrors thro the world – so that their mercy might not be confined or limited,” as it was put by Prudence Baxter, the patriotic wife of an absconder pleading for his absolution in 1778.143 As Mercy Otis Warren explained in commenting on the loyalist exodus from Boston in 1776, she pitied them, yet “we have had too many proofs of their inhumanity to be at any loss [for their departure]; but this is not our rule of action” – we do not drive them out, which would degrade the high principles of our cause.144 However inhumanely the British behaved, it was essential that the loyalists could not claim later – as the “witches” of 1692 certainly could – that they had suffered merely for believing they were innocent. Rebels harried loyalists but usually did not torment them, ridiculed them but almost never inflicted bodily harm. They were glad to see loyalist leaders go, but did not prick the rest with bayonets to flee, and actually hoped they would stay. Rebels were restrained in part by the troubling contradiction that they had to treat neighbors as enemies. Above all, they knew their ideology was abstract and hard for limited people to grasp. So they were liberal in fashioning loyalist policies, all the while debating, sometimes angrily, as to how exigent they should be. They thought inexorably as English post-Puritans, that is, historically, which led them to think of their legacy in the future, for the more conscious of history a people are, the more respect they have for posterity’s judgment. The gradual silencing of lifelong neighbors was a very disagreeable business, indeed, a wound on the heart of the Revolution, but an inescapable one, and, as seen in the next chapter, a source of creative progressive change.145 Notes 1. Both sides took very seriously the issue of who fired the first shot. See Thomas Gage to Lord Dartmouth, A Circumstantial Account of an Attack, April 19, 1775, PRO CO 5/92, 152; “A Narrative,ˮ appended to Jonas Clarke, The Fate of Blood-Thirsty Oppressors and God’s Tender Care of His Distressed People (Boston, Mass., 1776), 1–8; Isaac Mansfield, A Sermon, Preached in the Camp at Roxbury, November 23, 1775; Being the Day Appointed by Authority for Thanksgiving through the Province (Boston, Mass., 1776), 18; Narrative of the Excursion and Ravages of the King’s Troops under the Command of General Gage, on the Nineteenth of April, 1775 . . . Published by Authority (Worcester, Mass., [1775]). See also David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York, 1994), 113–260. 2. See for example, Jacob Cushing, Divine Judgments upon Tyrants: and Compassion to the Impressed. A Sermon, Preached at Lexington, April 20, 1778 (Boston, Mass., 1778).

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3. [Henry Hulton] to [Robert Nicholson], May 7, 1775, in Henry Hulton and the American Revolution: An Outsider’s View, ed. Neil Longley York (Boston, Mass., 2010), 320–2. 4. Jonathan Trumbull, Copy of a Letter to His Excellency Gen. Gage, April 28, 1775 [Hartford, Conn., 1775], broadside. 5. Thomas Gage, A Proclamation, June 12, 1775 [Boston, Mass., 1775], broadside. 6. Joseph Warren wrote Gage that loyalists who wished to leave would have safe passage to move to Boston. See Warren to Gage April 20, 1775, Amer. Arch., 2:370–1. 7. Neil Longley York, “A Life Cut Short,ˮ in Portrait of a Patriot: The Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior, 6 vols., ed. Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York (Boston, Mass., 2005–14), 1:45. See pp. 15–46. 8. Belief that loyalist pilots had guided the Redcoats over the river to Charlestown caused outrage. See “Worcester, May 3, Americans!ˮ Connecticut Courant, May 8, 1775. 9. [Nathaniel Bolton], Poems Upon Several Occasions (Boston, Mass., 1779), 7. 10. [Alexander Hamilton] “A Letter from Phocion to the Considerate Citizens of New-York on the Policies of the Dayˮ (New York, 1784), in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 3, 1782–1786, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (New York, 1962), 494. The original division between moderates and radicals can be traced to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress even before Lexington and Concord. See Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord (New York, 2002), 188–96. 11. Samuel Curwen, The Journal of Samuel Curwen: Loyalist, 2 vols., ed. Andrew Oliver (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 1:8. 12. In Provincial Congress, Watertown, May 1st, 1775 ([Watertown], 1775), broadside. 13. In Provincial Congress, Watertown, May 8th, 1775 ([Watertown], 1775), broadside. 14. Ibid. 15. Provincial Congress Resolution, May 22, 1775, Massachusetts Bay, Resolves and Orders of the Congress, Council, and General Court of the State of Massachusetts-Bay, Collected for the Use of the Committees of Correspondence, Inspection, and Safety, of the Several Towns in Said State (Boston, [1778]), 4. This volume includes much material about the handling of the absentees’ property. 16. Ibid. In June, the Provincial Congress ordered towns not to use sequestration to coerce persisting loyalists, that is, to sequester only the estates of absconders. See Provincial Congress Resolution, May 22, 1775, Massachusetts Bay, Resolves and Orders of the Congress, Council, and General Court, 5. On June 24, 1776, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress carefully ruled that the remnant families of absconded loyalists could improve their estates “for their comfortable Support.ˮ See Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay

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[May 29, 1776 to April 3, 1777] [Boston, Mass., 1777], 125. Yet committees were authorized to “bind out the Children of such Tories, in like Manner, as they are by Law impowered to bind out the Poor of their Towns.ˮ See ibid. 17. Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, July 19 to November 29, 1775 [November 29, 1775 to May 10, 1776] ([Watertown, 1776]), 293. 18. Samuel Auchmuty, Letter to Capt. Montresor, Chief Engineer, at Boston, New York, April 19, 1775 [Boston? 1775]. 19. Resolution by Provincial Congress, June 21, 1775, Massachusetts Bay, Resolves and Orders of the Congress, Council, and General Court, 4–5. See also Andrew McFarland Davis, “The Confiscation Laws of Massachusetts,ˮ in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 8, Transactions (1902–04), 50–72. 20. Thomas Gage, By His Excellency the Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq. (Boston, Mass., 1775), broadside. 21. Ibid. Gage also irritated popular sentiment by exempting Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who must endure “condign Punishment.” 22. Loyalists in England confirmed their bad reputation by egging on government to smash the rebellion, as late as 1782. See John Adams to Samuel Adams, August 29, 1782, Papers of John Adams, 18 vols., ed. Robert J. Taylor, Gregg L. Lint, et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1977–2016), 13: 403. See pp. 402–3. 23. Gage to Dartmouth, June 25, 1776, PRO CO 5/92, 187. 24. An Elegiac Poem, Composed on the Never-to-be-Forgotten Terrible and Bloody Battle Fought at an Intrenchment on Bunker Hill (Salem, Mass., 1775), broadside. “Posterityˮ would “forever curseˮ Thomas Gage. See also Samuel A. Forman, Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty (Gretna, La., 2012), 290–305. Joseph was only distantly related to James Warren. 25. James Warren to Samuel Adams, July 9, 1775, Warren–Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 1743–1814, ed., Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), 2:414. 26. Quoted in John Brooke, “Introductory Survey,ˮ in The House of Commons, 1754–1790, ed. Lewis Namier and John Brooke, 3 vols. (New York, 1964), 1:74. 27. Thomas Gage to Lord Dartmouth, July 24, 1775, PRO CO 5/92, 214v. 28. In Provincial Congress, Exeter, June 6, 1775 ([Exeter], 1775), broadside. 29. See T. H. Breen, “Samuel Thompson’s War: The Career of an American Insurgent,ˮ in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, ed. Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael (New York, 2011), 53–66; and James S. Leamon, “Falmouth, the American Revolution, and the Price of Moderation,ˮ in Creating Portland: History and Place in Northern New England, ed. Joseph A. Conforti (Durham, N.H., 2005), 44–71. 30. The crown used force in England too, clapping Long Island New Englander Stephen Sayre in the Tower and indicting him on a charge that he plotted to kidnap George III. See John Alden, Stephen Sayre: American Revolutionary

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Adventurer (Baton Rouge, La., 1983), 67–86; and Steve Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects (New York, 2000), 39–40. 31. On Scotland, see Ned C. Landsman, “Religion and Revolution: The Two Worlds of John Witherspoon,ˮ in Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 29–43. 32. On a post-war Atlantic loyalist commercial network, the kind of thing the rebels wished to avoid creating, see Daniel L. Schafer, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World: Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator (Gainesville, Fla., 2013), 35–52. 33. Samuel Adams to James Warren, May 21, 1774 [sic: 1775], Warren–Adams Letters, 1:26. 34. Resolution of the House of Deputies, June 13, 1776, General Assembly Papers, C-00251, Revolutionary War: Suspected Persons, 1775–1783, Rhode Island State Archives, 2. For their earlier oath promising not to aid the British, see Oath of Joseph Wanton et al, December 30, 1775, ibid., 1. On rustication see Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D. D., L. L. LD, President of Yale College, 3 vols., ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York, 1901), 2:28. They would go to jail if they violated parole. See Examinations by the Rhode Island Assembly, July 18, 1776, Records of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, ed. Russell Bartlett, 10 vols. (Providence, R.I., 1856–65), 7:593–4. See also General Assembly of Connecticut, Report of the Committee on Prisoners of War and Inimicals, October, 1776, in Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, CSA, Hartford, Conn., 5: 414. 35. United States Continental Congress, Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North-America, Now Met in General Congress at Philadelphia, Setting Forth the Causes and Necessity of Their Taking Up Arms. (Newburyport, Mass., 1775), broadside. 36. Claim of Elijah Mead, April 29, 1784, PRO AO 12/100, 232. See ff. 231v–2. For an introduction to the loyalist corps, see John R. Cuneo, Robert Rogers of the Rangers (New York, 1959). On Robert Rogers, see Donald J. Gara, The Queen’s American Rangers (Yardley, Pa., 2015), 1–7, 40–5. 37. Washington to Trumbull, November 15, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 3:1563. 38. For example, see William Potter of South Kingstown, June 27, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 2:1158–9. On the potential for a witch-hunt see John Pancake, in 1777: The Year of the Hangman (University, Ala., 1977), 105. See pp. 102– 33. 39. For example, the Worcester Company of Foot in September sent the legislature a long petition against permitting the return of absconded loyalists. See “Dorchester,ˮ September 27, 1775, Am. Arch., 4th ser., 3:824. Washington was willing to use strong measures. See Thomas Jones, History of New York During the Revolutionary War, 2 vols., ed. Edward Floyd DeLancey (New York, 1879), 1:101–11, 150–2, 293–5. 40. Many cases were straightforward matters of collaboration. Tolerated for years, Jacob Rogers of Charlestown finally had to go for military reasons,

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not for what he believed. See Claim of Jacob Rogers, December 23, 1783, PRO AO 13/48, 403–4. 41. Committee of Inspection of Pownalborough, East Precinct, August 17, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 3:151–2. 42. In Council, December 15, 1775, Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives [July 19, 1775 through February 20, 1776] [Watertown, 1776], 45. 43. Ibid. In Council, December 23, 1775, 67; In Council, December 25, 1775, ibid., 72–3. See also David E. Maas, The Return of The Massachusetts Loyalists (New York, 1989), 233–5. 44. In Committee of Safety (Cambridge, Mass., 1775), broadside. 45. Ibid. 46. Thaddeus Maccarty, Reformation of Manners, of Absolute Necessity in Order to Conciliate the Divine Favour (Boston, Mass., 1774), 34. 47. Tewkesbury, Massachusetts Committee of Inspection, May 23, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 2:695, in the case of Timothy Brown. 48. Committee of Safety of Cambridge and Provincial Congress, May 27, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 2:721. 49. Ebenezer Punderson, [Jr.], The Narrative of Mr. Ebenezer Punderson, Merchant: Who was Drove Away by the Rebels in America from his Family and a Very Considerable Fortune in Norwich, in Connecticut (London, 1776), 5. 50. Ibid., 7. For a similar case of a loyalist who divided his community for years before being driven out, see Claim of Reuben Tucker, October 24, 1786, PRO AO. 12/10, 188–90. 51. By His Excellency William Tryon, Esquire, Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over the Province of New York, A Proclamation . . . By the King, August 23, 1775 [New York, 1775], broadside. 52. Samuel Adams to James Warren, November 4, 1775, Warren–Adams Letters, 1:171. For a good description of the fall of George III in the colonies, precisely at the moment he seemed to be inspiring a stronger adherence to royalism, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 281–311. 53. Quoted in Clifford K. Shipton, New England Life in the Eighteenth Century: Representative Biographies from Sibley’s Harvard Graduates (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 519. 54. Ibid., 519–22. See pp. 511–34. For a heckler of Warren, whom he claims would kill anybody who “has ever been guilty of violating the Association,ˮ see Allyn Mather, The Character of a Well Accomplished Ruler (New Haven, Conn., 1776), 16. Meanwhile, on October 3, 1775, Harvard College typified what was happening in all institutions, by purging its faculty of anyone who appeared “to be unfriendly to the Liberties and Privileges of the Colonies.ˮ See Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, July 19 to September 20, 1775 [sic: September 20 to November 11, 1775] [Watertown, 1775], 136. The Massachusetts Council tangled with the House in particular over the case of Dr. Samuel Gelston of Nantucket for “many infamous practices,ˮ especially trading with the enemy. See Massachusetts Council, December 11, 1775, ibid., 4th ser., 3:1237; Massachusetts Bay,

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A Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, July 19 to September 20, 1775, 250–1, 261–4; Massachusetts Council on Joshua Young, January 11, 1776, ibid., 4th ser., 3:1259; Massachusetts Council and House, January 4 to February 3, 1776, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 4:1372–3, 1378, 1397–8, 1414, 1417, 1421, 1429, 1431–2; 1287–8. 55. Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (New York, 2010), 199–201; Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York, 1977), 311. 56. Counterfeiters were regarded as dastardly twice over as criminals and loyalists, and were likely to go to prison. See Josiah Bartlett to William Whipple, April 21, 1777, The Papers of Josiah Bartlett, ed. Frank C. Mevers (Hanover, N.H., 1979), 157; Josiah Bartlett to William Whipple, May 9, 1777, ibid., 162–3. See also Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America, foreword by David R. Johnson (Philadelphia, Pa., 2000), 253–63. On prisons, see Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (New York, 2008), 14–52; Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War (New York, 2008); Larry G. Bowman, Captive Americans: Prisoners During the American Revolution (Athens, Ohio, 1976), 123–33. No loyalist described prison conditions like the deprivation and outright torture of American prisoners by their Tory keepers in Montreal. See Zadock Steele, The Indian Captive, Or a Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Zadock Steele (Montpelier, Vt., 1818), 66 ff. 57. Officials ignored the law of habeas corpus for some individuals. On the wealthy Boston merchant Benjamin Davis, Jr., see Benjamin Davis., Jr. to James Bowdoin, October 10, 1776, Amer. Arch., 5th ser., 2:985; and ibid., 5th ser., 2:984–6. It was people like Davis who drove writers like William Whipple to advocate exiling loyalists to Scotland, or at least driving them into the arms of General Howe. See William Whipple to Josiah Bartlett, November 16, 1776, The Papers of Josiah Bartlett, 134. 58. [Worcester Committee of Correspondence], In Committee Chamber, Worcester, Nov. 18, 1776. As Expedients are No Longer Wise, Prudent, and Politic, than the Reasons on which They are Founded Exist (Worcester, [1776]), broadside. 59. Waterbury v. Hezekiah Brown, October 3, 1775, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, CSA, 1:427. See 421–7. For other interesting cases, see Sheffield, Massachusetts Committee, May 9, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 2:545; and New Milford Connecticut Committee, May 29, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 2:730. 60. Woodbury Committee of Inspection v. Benjamin Stiles, October, 1775, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, CSA, 1:428; General Assembly to the Sheriff of Litchfield, December 16, 1775, ibid., 5:375–85. For the same even-handed policy in New Hampshire, see General Sullivan to the Committee, November 16, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 3:19, 18. 61. On the embarrassing Church, see Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, July 19 to September 20, 1775 [to November 11, 1775], 201–6, 226, 268–9; Allen French, General Gage’s Informers:

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New Material on Lexington and Concord, Benjamin Thompson as Loyalist, and the Treachery of Benjamin Church, Jr. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1932), 147– 201; and Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 13:380–98. On another embarrassment, see Sanford C. Brown, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); and Otis G. Hammond, Tories of New Hampshire in the War of the Revolution (Concord, N.H., 1917), 32–8. 62. Resolution of October 6, 1775, Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774– 1789, ed., Worthington C. Ford, 34 vols. (Washington, 1904), 3:280. 63. U.S. Continental Congress, The Tory Act, Published by Order of the Continental Congress (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), broadside. 64. Ibid. Burke’s “Speech on Conciliation with America, 22 March 1775ˮ was regarded as one of the greatest speeches in Parliament ever, and remains a brilliant read today. See The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 3, Party, Parliament, and the American War, 1774–1780, ed. W. M. Elofson. John A. Woods, and William B. Todd (New York, 1996), 102–69. 65. U.S. Continental Congress, The Tory Act. The Massachusetts House instructed town committees how to manage abandoned estates. See Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, July 19 to September 20, 1775 [to November 11, 1775], 254. Of course, on the other side, General Howe was preventing rebels from spiriting any of their wealth out of Boston. See Howe to Lord Dartmouth, December 26, 1775, PRO CO 5/93, 26. 66. Committee of Safety to John Hancock, July 16, 1776, General Court Records, Committee of Safety, NHSA, Box 1. A majority of the colony’s towns did vote for independence in early 1776, but eleven scattered towns set their faces firmly against it. See New Hampshire House of Representatives, January 10, 1776, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 5:6–9. See also Wilbur H. Siebert, The Loyalist Refugees of New Hampshire (Columbus, Ohio, 1916). 67. Events in this period can be followed in William Lincoln, ed., The Journals of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1774 and 1775, and of the Committee of Safety (Boston, Mass., 1838), 147–271, and 273–598 from May 31 to July 11, 1775. 68. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York, 2001), 45–81. 69. He claimed in his diary to have asked General Howe for permission to leave Boston after April 19, but was refused. See John Rowe, Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant, 1759–1762, 1764–1779, ed. Anne Rowe Cunningham, intro. Edward Lillie Pierce (Boston, Mass., 1903), 294. 70. Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 2:2. See pp. 1–3 on the evacuation. 71. For a summary, see Jacqueline B. Carr, After the Siege: A Social History of Boston, Mass., 1775–1800 (Boston, Mass., 2005), 35–41. For the systematic destruction of an absentee loyalist’s estate by inebriated Redcoats, and a reference to a belief the town would be burned entirely, see Thomas Brown to John Troutbeck, May 11, 1776, PRO AO 13/49, 556–57v. 72. An unidentified eyewitness is quoted in Hamilton Andrews Hill, History of the Old South Church, Boston, Mass., 1669–1884, 2 vols. (Boston, Mass., 1890), 2:185. See also John Lathrop, A Discourse, Preached on March the

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Fifth, 1778 (Boston, Mass., 1778), 13. On the rebuilding, see Carr, After the Siege. 73. Cunningham, Letters and Diary of John Rowe, 290–1. 74. Perez Morton, An Oration, Delivered at the King’s Chapel in Boston, April the Eighth, 1776 (New York, 1776), 11. See also William Foster, True Fortitude Delineated: A Sermon, Preached at Fags Manor, to Captain Taylor’s Company of Recruits, on the Lord’s Day, February 18th, 1776 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), 16; and on Joseph Warren see Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed With Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, Pa., 2002), 11–48. Morton’s surgical wording made the emergent United States the seat of the British Empire, in which Britain itself was an awful peripheral remnant. Some Englishmen agreed; see Jonathan Shipley, The Whole of the Celebrated Speech of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Shipley, Lord Bishop of Asaph, Intended to Have Been Spoken on the Bill for Altering the Charter of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay (Newport, R.I., 1774), 16. 75. Abraham Keteltas, God Arising and Pleading His People’s Cause: Or, the American War in Favor of Liberty, against the Measures and Arms of Great Britain (Newburyport, Mass., 1777), 19. 76. Henry Cumings, A Sermon Preached in Billerica, December 11, 1783, the Day Recommended by Congress to all The States, to be Observed as a Day of Public Thanksgiving (Boston, Mass., 1784), 30. 77. Most of the rest of the 1,086 men who appear on lists of loyalists in Massachusetts had already left. See Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists, 108, 123 n. 154. Maas counts 1,489 total men treated by rebel officials as loyalists. See p. 125. Note: this is not a list of the banished. 78. Ibid., 178. Eleven hundred loyalists left with the British. 79. One example was Doctor Samuel Danforth, president of the Medical Society in the Federalist 1790s. See Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, With Historical Essay, 2 vols., intro. Ralph Adams Brown (Port Washington, N.Y., 1966), 1:358–9. 80. Hopestill Capen, To the Court of Enquiry, August 29, 1776, [Boston, Mass., 1776], broadside. 81. Charles W. Akers, The Divine Politician: Samuel Cooper and the American Revolution in Boston (Boston, Mass., 1982), 238. See pp. 236–9 on the aftermath of the evacuation. This refers to the senior Byles, who neither converted to Anglicanism nor departed into exile, as did his son Mather Byles Jr., grandson and great-grandson, respectively, of Increase Mather. 82. Anne Rowe Cunningham, Letters and Diary of John Rowe, 306. See pp. 300–6 on the evacuation, from March 6 to the 27th. 83. Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists, 178–90. See also Henry Cumings, A Sermon Preached in Billerica on the 23rd of November, 1775; Being the Day Appointed by Civil Authority for Public Thanksgiving (Worcester, Mass., [1776]), 9. From a lower class than Brush came laborer Jeremiah Hatch, Jr., of Marshfield, whom the State of Massachusetts declared to be so inimical that he must be transported “out of the continentˮ for the sake of public peace. See Massachusetts Legislature to Constable Gershom Ewell, August 6, 1977, Massachusetts Archives, 154:142a.

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84. Minute Book of Jolley Allen, c. 1779, Allen Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., vol. 36: ff. 41–7. See f. 43. 85. Ibid. See also Robert J. Cormier, “The Ordeal of Jolley Allen: A Tory Merchant of Boston,ˮ The New England Journal of History 61 (2004–05), 1–26. 86. Anne Rowe Cunningham, Letters and Diary of John Rowe, 307. 87. Brooke, “Introductory Survey,ˮ in Namier and Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–1790, 1:75. 88. Charles James Fox to John Fitzpatrick, Earl of Upper Ossory, June 24, 1776, Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, 3 vols., ed. Lord John Russell (London, 1853), 1:143. Russell describes the debilitating divisions among the Whig leaders. See ibid., pp. 130–4. 89. Richard Hayes is quoted in G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), 261. 90. Everywhere the public was concerned about absconded loyalists and those who planned to leave who were “clandestinelyˮ siphoning off the wealth of their estates, “under pretence of gift, sale, or attachment,ˮ so the legislature now sternly ordered local committees to hold tightly all absconders’ property. See Massachusetts Council, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 5:1249, 1255, 1261, 1264; Massachusetts Bay, House Journal [Watertown, 1776], 188, 197, 254. In February, Massachusetts enjoined towns to streamline their control over loyalists by consolidating committees in one Committee of Correspondence, Inspection, and Safety. See Resolution of February 13, 1776, Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, July 19 to November 29, 1775 [November 29, 1775 to May 10, 1776], 281–2. 91. U.S. Continental Congress, A Journal of the Proceedings of Congress. Held at Philadelphia from January to May, 1776, The Journals of Congress for February [and March], 1776 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), 99–100. See p. 99. 92. Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, July 19 to November 29, 1775 [in Watertown from November 29, 1775, to May 10, 1776], 282. 93. [Thomas Paine], Common Sense, Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (Philadelphia, Pa, 1776), 14, 23. 94. An Act for the Executing . . . One Resolve of the American Congress, May 1, 1776, Massachusetts, Acts and Laws Passed by the Great and General Court or Assembly . . . at Watertown [July 19 to November 29, 1775] [Watertown, 1776], 31–6. Note that the printer simply repeated the title of the “Acts and Lawsˮ of 1775 and continued the pagination. 95. Claim of Seth Seely, December 27, 1786, PRO AO 12/1, 72–75v. 96. Catherine S. Crary, ed., The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings from the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1973), 81–2. 97. On the history of colonial lawmakers drawing a line between lawful and unlawful destruction by crowds, see Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 76–84. 98. The Massachusetts Committee of Safety was painstaking about all referrals by local committees They found no evidence against an African American, Thomas Nicols, and sent him back to his home town. See Provincial Congress, May 20, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 2:761–3, 818–19.

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99. Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 335–52. 100. See Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, [May 29, 1776 to April 3, 1777] [Watertown, 1776], 19. They later prescribed jailing for any of the absconded who returned, but that was as far as they were willing to go. See ibid., 93. 101. Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives [May 29, 1776 to April 3, 1777] [Boston, Mass., 1777], 125. 102. According to archivists at the New York Historical Society, the name “United Statesˮ first appears in a letter from George Washington’s aidede-camp Stephen Moylan to Joseph Reed, January 2, 1776. See http://blog .nyhistory.org/coined-phrase-united-states-america-may-never-guess/ (last accessed July 5, 2016). 103. Resolves of the General Assembly of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, May 29 to July 13, 1776 (Boston, Mass., 1776), 44. 104. Ibid., 47. 105. Massachusetts Bay, In the Year of Our Lord, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy Seven. An Act Against Treason, and Misprision of Treason, and for Regulating Trials in Such Cases [Boston, Mass., 1777], broadside. 106. Northborough, Massachusetts confined five men to their farms and barred all “commercial intercourseˮ with them. See Northborough, Massachusetts Committee, On Thomas and Sylvanus Billings, John Taylor, James and John Eager, July 10, 1776, Amer. Arch., 5th ser., 1:179. 107. Spencer, Massachusetts Committee to the General Court, July 11, 1776, Amer. Arch., 5th ser., 1:801. 108. Committee of Secret Correspondence to Silas Deane, October 1, 1776, ibid., 5th ser., 1:821. 109. Ibid. 110. Boston Committee of Correspondence, Boston, February 27, 1777. Gentlemen, At a Time when Degenerate Britons are with Brutal Rage, and the Greatest Injustice . . . [Boston, Mass., 1777]. 111. Justice to Mr. Watson, September 9, 1776, Amer. Arch., 5th ser., 2:485. 112. Eleazar Wheelock, Liberty of Conscience; Or, No King but Christ, in His Church (Hartford, Conn., 1776), vi–vii, 29. See also James Dow McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock: Founder of Dartmouth College (Hanover, N.H., 1939), 191–205. 113. Anonymous doggerel quoted in Kenneth Scott, “John Houston, Tory Minister of Bedford,ˮ Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 22 (1944), 188. See pp. 172–97. 114. Quoted in Hammond, Tories of New Hampshire in the War of the Revolution, 44. 115. Report of Packersfield Committee, March 19, 1776, Committee of Safety Papers, NHSA, Petitions, 1776–77. 116. Hammond, Tories of New Hampshire, 43–6. See Petition of Ruth Batcheller, October 26, 1778, Committee of Safety Papers, NHSA, Petitions, 1778– 79.

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117. Rhode Island kept a few leading loyalists rusticated throughout the war. For example, see Petition of Sylvester Robinson, September 17, 1779, Petitions to the Rhode Island Assembly, vol. 17, Rhode Island State Archives, 89; Petition of John Read, December, 1778, ibid., 40; Petition of James Hull, December 18, 1778, ibid., 105; Petition of Thomas Cranston, June 14, 1779, ibid., 71; Petition of Stephen Potter, September 17, 1779, ibid., 88; Petition of Christopher Robinson, September 16, 1779, ibid., 91; Petition of Nathaniel Smith [and Eight Others], February, 1780, ibid., 130. Volume 18 in this same series is full of similar petitions. 118. Examination Before the General Assembly, July 11–12, 1776, Committee of Safety Papers, NHSA, Petitions, 1776–77. Joseph Nichols declared simply that he “did not know wheather [sic] the cause was Right or Wrong.ˮ See ibid. 119. Ibid. See William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005), 83–116; William Pencak, “Anti-Semitism, Toleration, and Appreciation: The Changing Relations of Jews and Gentiles in Early America,ˮ in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, ed. Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia, Pa., 2011), 241–62; and Cecil Roth, “Some Jewish Loyalists in the War of American Independence,ˮ in American Jewish History: The Colonial and Early National Periods, 1654–1840, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock (New York, 1998), 21–47. The Newport synagog (c. 1658) was the first in North America. 120. To identify the state’s loyalists, the following lists should be combined: Resolution of the House of Deputies, June 13, 1776, Examinations before the General Assembly, July 11, 1776, 14; General Assembly Papers, C00251, Revolutionary War: Suspected Persons, 1775–1783, Rhode Island State Archives; “A List of Suspected persons inhabitants of this Colony,ˮ ibid., 8; Headquarters, “List of Suspects,ˮ July 10, 1776, ibid., 10. At the end of the occupation, the Loyal Associated Refugees in Newport in 1779 comprised no less than 466 collaborators. See Wilbur H. Siebert, “Loyalist Troops of New England,ˮ New England Quarterly 4 (1931), 108–47. See also Lynne Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island: Newport and Providence in the Eighteenth Century (Albany, N.Y., 1984), 87–9, 109–12. 121. For the argument that elite Newport Jews were mainly loyalist and hinterland Jews rebels, see Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 108. For the argument that the Iberian Sephardim, who had appeared early on and set up Atlantic networks, became mostly rebel, and the Ashkenazim, or German speakers, who came later and were more economically marginal and dependent on protection by the English crown, were mostly loyalists, see Michael Hoberman, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (Amherst and Boston, Mass., 2011), 213–14. See pp. 202–36 on Moses Hays. 122. See Committee of Fairfield, Connecticut, August 15, 1775, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 3:142, on the test. They demanded that all males sixteen years

210

123.

124.

125.

126.

“Avoid Blood and Tumult”: Loyalist Policy during the War and older sign it, and 855 complied, while 70 refused, virtually all bearing old Connecticut names. The preamble denounced refusers as “enemiesˮ of “their Country,ˮ but for the time being there was still no general loyalist policy beyond this test. It took until just before the Declaration of Independence for the Connecticut Assembly to gain some degree of control over remaining loyalist enclaves. See Oscar Zeichner, Connecticut’s Years of Controversy, 1750–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1949), 198–218; Christopher Collier, Roger Sherman’s Connecticut: Yankee Politics and the American Revolution (Middletown, Conn., 1971), 108, 122. On individuals of special concern, see Lambreton Smith to Jonathan Trumbull, September 17, 1776, PRO AO 13/41, 325–6; Claim of Abiathar Camp, April 3, 1786, PRO AO 12/1, 99; Claim of Abiathar Camp, February 2, 1788, PRO AO 13/41, 107–v, 110v; New Haven Committee, On Abiathar Camp, et al., September 17, 1776, Amer. Arch., 5th ser., 2:374–5; Memorial of Camp to the General Assembly, December 25, 1776, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, CSA, 5:466; Claim of Abiathar Camp, August 29, 1785, PRO AO 13/76, 128–40; Claim of James Curgenwen, February 12, 1788, PRO AO 13/41, 112. Rebels on the South coast of Connecticut had the serious practical goal of stopping large numbers of loyalists from fleeing to nearby Long Island or to loyalist strongholds in New York’s eastern mainland counties. For one interesting incident, see Richard Mansfield to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, August 16, 1782, in Rena Vassar, ed., “The Aftermath of the Revolution: Letters of Anglican Clergymen in Connecticut, 1781–1785,ˮ Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 41 (1972), 447. See pp. 429–61. Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789 (Bloomington, Ind., 1971), 273– 5. See also Stephen P. McGrath, “Connecticut’s Tory Towns: The Loyalty Struggle in Newtown, Redding, and Ridgefield, 1774–1783,ˮ The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 44 (1979), 88–96; and Rebecca D. Beach, “The Redding Loyalists,ˮ Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 7 (1908), 218–36. See Fairfield Committee, May 13, 1776, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 6:439; Captain Seth Harding to Governor Trumbull, May 15, 1776, ibid., 6:470–1; and Committee of Stamford to the General Assembly, October, 1776, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, CSA, 5:434; Ridgefield Committee re: Josiah Stibbins, May 13, 1776, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 6:439. See also John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago, Ill., 1980), 71–7. The area was a major recruiting ground for British provincial corps. See Philip R. N. Katcher, Encyclopedia of British Provincial and German Units, 1775–1783 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1973), 79–102. Even a little jailing could work, as illustrated in a petition of September, 1776. See Petition of Benjamin Stockbridge, et al. to the Council and the Honourable the House of Representatives of the State of MassachusettsBay, September 16, 1776, Amer. Arch., 5th ser., 3:392. On the moment of

Notes

127.

128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

141. 142.

211

July Fourth, see John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Amherst, Mass., 1992), 143–52. Petition of Jonathan Gove et al., September 17, 1777, Committee of Safety Papers, NHSA, Petitions, 1776–77. See also Petition of Joshua Atherton et al., July 19, 1777, Petitions, 1776–77, ibid.; and Petition of Jonathan Gove, Petitions, 1778–79, ibid. “Whereas the State Convention in their Fifth Resolve, recommended to the Inhabitants of the Several Towns, to keep a Watchful Eye over each other,ˮ in Declaring Independence: The Origin and Influence of America’s Founding Document, ed. Christian Y. Dupont and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, Va., 2008), 14. Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists, 209. Mercy Otis Warren to John Adams, November 15, 1780, Taylor et al., Papers of John Adams, 10:349. See pp. 348–50. Anson Ely Morse, The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1909), 19. See pp. 18–23. Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists, 196. Ibid., 195. Claim of Benjamin Hallowell, March 19, 1784, PRO AO 13/46, 29v. See ff. 29–163. Claim of Sarah Troutbeck, March 10, 1784, PRO AO 13/49, 539. Claim of Nathaniel Ray Thomas, September 10, 1787, PRO AO 13/51, 499. See ff. 495–99v. Petition of John Sheperd [sic], August 18, 1778, Petitions, 1778–79, New Hampshire Archives. Petition of Jesse Heath and the Lebanon Committee, July 27, 1779, Petitions, 1778–79, New Hampshire Archives. Claude H. Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution (Gloucester, Mass., 1959), 129–285. Samuel Woodward, The Help of the Lord, in Signal Deliverances and Special Salvations, to be Acknowledged and Remembered. A Sermon, Preached at Lexington, April 19, 1779 (Boston, Mass., 1779), 21. See also John Murray, Nehemiah, or the Struggle for Liberty Never in Vain (Newburyport, Mass., 1779), 28. Petition of John Goffe, March 8, 1779, Petitions, 1778–79, Committee of Safety Papers, New Hampshire Archives, Concord, N.H. It must be acknowledged that excessive hostility to loyalists may have spurred on the execution of Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner in 1778, in Worcester. Her father, loyalist Timothy Ruggles, had married her off to a man she hated, to the point that she plotted the man’s murder with some escaped British prisoners. This horrendous scandal was unique. See Deborah Navas, Murdered by His Wife: A History with Documentation of the Joshua Spooner Murder and Execution of His Wife, Bathsheba, Who was Hanged in Worcester, Massachusetts, 2 July 1778 (Amherst, Mass., 1999). A few loyalists succumbed to harassment. David Nichols of Waterbury claimed that his father’s death in 1783 “was occasioned by his being ill used.ˮ See

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Claim of Sarah Nichols, October 13, 1786, PRO AO 12/1, 25. As noted earlier in the present work, Charles Slocum of North Kingston, Rhode Island, did die at the hands of an enraged crowd. See Claim of Ebenezer Slocum, PRO AO 12/45, 30v. Rhode Island’s Jacob Hart claimed his brother was “murdered at Long Island with great Cruelty by the Rebels for his attachment to Great Britain.ˮ See Claim of Jacob Hart, AO 12/100, 22v. See also Jolley Allen to Germaine, March 26, 1777, PRO AO 13/43, 64–5. The circumstances are open to question. 143. Petition of Prudence Baxter, December 14, 1778, Committee of Safety Papers, NHSA, Petitions, 1778–79. 144. Mercy Otis Warren to John Adams, April 3, 1776, Taylor et al., Papers of John Adams, 4:109. 145. Michael Kammen, “The American Revolution as a Crise de Conscience,ˮ in Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The American Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, ed. Richard M. Jellison (New York, 1976), 125–89.

part iii THE LOYALIST PROBLEM AND IDEOLOGY AFTER 1776

7 The Radical Critique of Tory Oligarchy, Slavery, and Patriarchy

Ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you, And the cries of them which have been oppressed, are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Timothy Stone, 1778

A radical ideology of liberty, democracy, and equality fueled the American Revolution. All three elements had long histories, but the rebels refashioned them into something new. The final product was shaped by the need to deny equal rights to the loyalists during the war. Rebels became increasingly anti-aristocratic the more stubbornly loyalists clung to their place in the English ruling class. To contain loyalism they had to break up entrenched elites, democratize office-holding, reduce the relative rule of wealth, and increase the number of political leaders from the middle and lower ranks. Class antagonism to loyalists also helped enlarge the principle of equality beyond the bare political implications for white men, making them think about the status of slaves and women. A genuinely American revolutionary ideology crystallized, its dimensions shaped by the shaming of loyalists. Surprisingly, although loyalists were free to expound their beliefs in detail, they never did. Even the most voluble one in New England, Daniel Leonard, evinced a typical loyalist temperament, satisfied to heap scorn on the radicals without going into detail about his core beliefs. There was no point, for everyone knew them: he could not accept the emergent antimonarchical doctrine of the Revolution, and absolutely not its deeper leveling implications. As everyone knew, the loyalists adhered to aristocratic social values. That helped sharpen the ideological divide and make 215

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the rebels constantly rethink and revalidate their emergent ideology – to be sure they were right.

the egalitarian ideal The egalitarian ideal that began to structure the Revolution had several roots: original sin, the Puritan community of probably damned souls, and the citizen’s responsibility in the Greek polis or the Anglo-Saxon witanagemot – the assembly held by all free men under a venerable oak tree.1 Ezra Stiles declared the witanagemot to be “the most equitable, liberal, and perfect” form of government.2 In English history, oak tree equality followed an ancient lineage back to the resistance of Britons to Julius Caesar’s imperial despotism, down through their resistance to the Danish and later Norman nobility, then Lollard resistance to imperial Roman Catholicism beginning in the fourteenth century. The long struggle to achieve programmatic rights intensified in the revolution of the seventeenth century, and was becoming the ideology of liberty, democracy and equality of 1776. “Liberty” meant that any executive authority – especially the crown – had reasonable limits, as stated in Magna Carta. “Democracy” meant some constantly renegotiated level of “equal” voters’ rights to speak freely and choose representatives, as claimed in the Petition of Right of 1628. The Roundheads had a wonderfully uncensored discussion about all that, which would be recapitulated in the United States over time.3 The radicalism of 1649 had huge potential and came down to the rebels of 1776 ready to be reignited. It appeared to the rebels that British lords were bent on becoming supreme in America, and the loyalist aspired to be a “liv’ried Lord,” as John Trumbull put it.4 As an anonymous writer growled with angry sarcasm in Boston in 1774, the loyalist believed that the king had to tax not only the “superfluities and conveniences” but “the necessaries of life,” otherwise, “those who are placed above the common level of mankind, could not be supported in that splendor and magnificence which are so necessary to the wellbeing of the state.”5 This association of the loyalist with a ruthless aristocracy in England was fatal for the loyalist cause, for American elites emulated the British nobility in their ambition for “land, leisure, and ostentation, to assume the style of gentlemen,” and the king seemed to egg them on.6 It offended the labor theory of value and made rebels summon a primordial, iron-plated egalitarian principle.7 John Adams was being only a little rhetorical when he told a Dutch correspondent that the Revolution was “the War of the Common

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People.”8 According to a German observer in the states, by 1783, “rank of birth is not recognized, is resisted with a total force.”9 The Old Testament root of the “equality” principle was important, and a typical sermon absorbed the New Englanders into Jewish history. Jehovah had instituted the government of Israel, and, like the new United States, it was a confederacy of independent states. In none of them were public trusts hereditary, and “equality of condition was provided for, and the means of corruption prevented, by the agrarian law, prohibition of money on usury, release of servants and debtors, and return of estates in the jubilee.”10 If Reverend James Dana was not advocating that radical program – which classical writers summarized as the “agrarian law” – he was presenting it as Biblically legitimate, an eighteenth-century version of socialism. New Englanders had an opportunity, Dana proclaimed, to establish a society in which “a spirit of love and union is promoted by mediocrity of circumstances.”11 He was idealistic, for Jackson Turner Main and other historians have shown that poor Americans “ended poorer than they had begun,” by 1783.12 Even so, the vision counted over the coming decades. To put it in religious terms, traditional Puritans (who suffered the equality of the damned) were open to fusion with other evangelical heretics, those (like Baptists) who asked “if men were equal in their liability under the law [by their sin in Eden], why not [also] in their title to grace [by a God of love]?”13 When it came to equality, spiritual perception counted more than mere wealth distribution. New England was to be the great laboratory of equality for white yeomen, one informed by the Nazarene social radical, a man who was no friend of the rich and powerful, a man little known to those in the liturgical Christian sects but still living in New England, the Jewish Jesus. As he told the sons of Zebedee, “whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave.”14 That ideal would later reach full flower in the symbolic elevation of Brother Jonathan – the plain countryman with barnyard soil on his boots – to the level of American national hero. The common people were reformulating the language and practice of class, putting an end to aristocratic rules discredited by loyalists.15 The Revolution gave them the opportunity to restructure political relations by ending the rule of privilege, to eliminate deference in public discourse by prohibiting the humiliation of “servants” by “masters,” and finally to establish a right to the equality of personal regard.16 According to Gordon Wood, the Revolution “brought respectability and even dominance to ordinary people long held in contempt.”17 By contrast, loyalists believed that leveling

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figure 7.1. Paul Revere, The Wicked Statesman, or the Traitor to his Country, metal cut, 1773. (Reproduced with the permission of Brandon Nicholson.)

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would lead the poor to “plunder the Rich” and then cut their throats, as James Murray warned.18

puritanism and equality Puritans upheld class mediocrity as an ideal, and from the outset they surrounded commercial practices in New England with restrictions, to protect the seeker of wealth from himself and the community from him, that is, from an excess of greed. But the founders also created dynamic external and internal markets, and many people in the coastal communities became wealthy or comfortable. By the 1760s, the latter were increasingly visible: people like Hutchinson or Elizabeth Inman (see Figure 7.1). If the crown ever decided to create a colonial titled peerage, men like Hutchinson would be at the head of the line with the resources to gain influence. His estate in Boston fetched the handsome sum of £33,500 at auction, and proceeds of his homes in Milton and Rhode Island also went into public coffers, along with £98,121 worth of undeveloped real estate.19 That was a huge fortune by any measure. Boston physician and Maine landowner Sylvester Gardiner laid claim to a fine house in Boston, and no less than 120,780 acres in Lincoln County.20 Daniel Leonard of Taunton was especially offensive in his refusal to yield to the communitarian ideal. The spirited author of Massachusettensis hated the Revolution and would become a permanent exile. A rich attorney, he lived at a level many thought to be excessive, adorning himself in gold lace and avidly working card tables. He was the only lawyer who traveled in an D GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG figure 7.1. (cont.) In this crude but vivid cartoon for the cover of Ezra Gleason’s almanac for 1774, Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts, in an aristocratic wig, is being threatened by a horrifying angel of death, who rides in on a toothy reptilian creature of Hell, while the Devil or his minion points out Hutchinson’s “List of Crimes.” The governor has the proverbial serpent of despotism coiled round one leg, and a pot of ill-gotten loot on his desk, presumably the £1,500 royal salary he accepted from George III over the vociferous objections of the colony’s House of Representatives. An extended invocation on the inside of the almanac makes the point, in case the reader missed it: one can hardly imagine “the Horrors that Man must endure [after death] who owes his Greatness to his Country’s Ruin.” In other words, the loyalist who escapes punishment for his misdoings in this life will reap his reward in eternity, or at least in history books. As usual, Revere is copying – rather poorly – an engraving that appeared in England just before this, designed to ridicule Lord North as a sneak who plunders the coffers of the East India Company to pay off his minions.

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expensive imported carriage. Mercy Otis Warren mocked him in her play, The Group, as Beau Trumps.21 The concentration of so much wealth in so few hands caused class jealousy, and resplendent consumption by these rich individuals – carriages, wigs, gold trim – openly mocked the values of all devout evangelicals.22 Puritans always debated the right way to acquire and employ wealth, worrying because wealth endangered the soul (through pride), and because it threatened community peace with social division. Christians and Jews believe that wealth makes salvation more difficult. The Bible bristles with warnings. Quoting James, 5: 1, Timothy Stone followed an old tradition when in 1777 he exhorted “ye rich men, [to] weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.”23 The Old Testament had its own exhortations, like the one in Deuteronomy 8:13–14: when “your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God.” Every schoolchild had heard Jesus’s stern parable that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). Yet the New Englanders were certainly not hostile to wealth or the rich. Historian R. H. Tawney and sociologist Max Weber even argued that Protestants were the founders of capitalism, especially the Puritans. Their desire for proof of salvation made them diligent, their sobriety made them productive, and their minority status vis-a-vis Europe’s Catholic majority made them nervous and shrewd. All those qualities and good luck made some of the colonists in America wealthy, many middling, although bad luck or bad habits made others poor. That meant classes with competing interests, but all sharing a strong doctrinal distaste for the rule of wealth. It was the spirit that informed a perfectly serious John Hancock, a wealthy, often scofflaw merchant, when he condemned the loyalists because they believed “that wealth, however it may be acquired, is, in their esteem, to be preferr’d to virtue.”24 Wealth was not as concentrated in New England as in England. Whereas in England the top 10 percent of the population owned 82 percent of the wealth, in the mainland colonies the top 10 percent owned only 51 percent of the wealth, and the top 1 percent only 13 percent.25 (Today, Americans in the top 1 percent own 35.4 percent of the net wealth; the top 20 percent own 88.9 percent.26 ) However, even if New England society was substantially less unequal than England, the Americans measured things by their own aspirations, and it was obvious that society was becoming more and more sharply stratified after 1763.27 For radicals, wealth concentration went hand in hand with oligarchy,

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which had been creeping over time in all colonies. It was extensive in Massachusetts because loyalist patriarchs knitted their families together by marriage, the crown enabling the process with lucrative bureaucratic plums. Mercy Otis Warren skewered the Hutchinson–Oliver axis in 1772, in “The Adulateur: The Tragedy, As it is Now Acted in Upper Servia.”28 Next to Massachusetts, oligarchy was probably most brazen in New Hampshire, where Wentworths held sway like dukes.29 Oligarchs prize the stability they believe results from consistent, supposedly disinterested rule by patricians. As Sir John Dalrymple put it, “men of property are, from interest, enemies to confusion.”30 General John Burgoyne expressed the consensus of his class: rebel leaders were “tarbarrell’d Lawgivers, yankified Prigs,” arrogant commoners who set themselves up as wrecking “Tyrants,” jealous of the well-to-do.31 All those on the other side, those not in Gentleman Johnny’s patrician circle, saw instability resulting from lordly, sclerotic, anti-democratic constrictions on wealth’s flow, sidetracking it into the pockets of a select few, leading to dangerous social rancor. New Englanders certainly accepted the Lockean idea of private property, but also the ancient ideal that private property must be limited by the principle of the common good, the inverse of the force symbolized by the demonic Mammon. So wealth concentration incited a restless historic spirit. Even a socially conservative rebel like John Adams was increasingly skeptical that the truly rich could act in the interest of the community. “The rich are seldom remarkable for Modesty, Ingenuity, or Humanity,” he claimed, for “their wealth has rather a tendency to make them penurious and selfish” in regard to the commonwealth.32 They indulged in immodest display and waste: “elegance in dress, Furniture, Equipage, & so much Musick & Dancing, so much Fencing & Skating, so much Cards & Backgammons; so much Horse Racing & Cockfighting, so many Balls & Assemblies, so many Plays & Concerts,” in short, conspicuous consumption and exclusive venues, just like the ruling class in Burgoyne’s Old World.33 It came as no surprise that the very rich would tend to become loyalists. A growing privileged oligarchy existed in all of the New England colonies, where elites had been intermarrying assiduously, each becoming “a more closed corporation of monopolists” of economic and political privileges.34 In Massachusetts, by the beginning of the 1770s, Hutchinson was governor of Massachusetts, his brother-in-law Andrew Oliver (by Oliver’s marriage to a sister of Hutchinson’s wife) was lieutenant governor, Oliver’s brother Peter was Chief Justice of the Massachusetts

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Superior Court, Hutchinson’s own brother was Justice of the Common Pleas, and his son Thomas was Judge of Probate and would become the Tea Act’s local consignee. They had already provoked popular disapproval by their oligarchy, epitomized by the trashing of Hutchinson’s home in 1765.35 Another knot of intermarried families lived in Cambridge – Phipps, Lechmere, Royall, Vassall, and Oliver – the last name connecting this group to Boston’s.36 Populist New Englanders had always been vigilant to keep public servants within certain limits by traditional “rough music,” administered by disciplined crowds, not anarchic mobs.37 The Tea Party’s Mohawks were such a crowd, enraged in part because a Hutchinson received the tea monopoly for Massachusetts. By favoring local royalist elites, the British challenged a powerful New England tradition opposed to privilege and the purchase of power. Boston’s Dr. John Warren (younger brother of Joseph) summarized the political critique at the end of the war in his July Fourth oration. While trade was a good thing that preferred peace to war, it also concentrated wealth in a few hands. That made it possible for governors “to assume the reins of absolute control . . . and finally to extort by violence, what formerly they were obliged to purchase.”38 John Collins of Rhode Island was bitterly proud that “it is the honest yeomen of the land we must finally depend on for the salvation of our Libertys” because rich merchants could not be trusted, given that “their Religion is trade, & their God is gain.”39 Thus, when loyalist Mather Byles, Jr. complained angrily that the Revolution “levelled all Distinction,” he was describing a very real phenomenon, if it was not so violent as he imagined.40 When the English-born but long Boston-acclimated Henry Hulton toured the New England interior counties in 1771, he was astonished by the militant egalitarian spirit that “prevails throughout the country, and they have no notion of rank or distinction in society.”41 The country people were notorious for submitting the outsider to “a thousand strange impertinent questions,” and insisted Hulton’s servant dine at his table with him.42 They were not hostile but were determined to drive the gentleman out of him. As for property, the rebels intended to show “that the People, are, at least, as likely to make an advantageous improvement of republican liberty, as the great men of the earth are,” but not to despoil the rich of their property.43 It was a “glorious cause,” according to Abraham Keteltas, of “benevolence against barbarity,” of “the oppressed against the oppressor.”44 The degree to which the colonists remained under the sway of British attitudes is revealed in the experience of Paul Revere. For all his work in The Cause, forty-year-old Revere had not gone to

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Harvard, so he was not a gentleman, and therefore could not qualify even for a minor officer’s appointment in the Continental Army when it formed.45 But that was about to change dramatically, and Revere would eventually serve as a lieutenant colonel. The truth was that a majority of New Englanders ultimately worried about poverty as a more likely threat to society than wealth. The towns gave relief to the poor, but not with a generous attitude. Selectmen who thought poverty was usually the fruit of sin doled out relief.46 At the outset of the war, the radical William Gordon could think of little the poor should expect from the Revolution except “that if they cannot have riches, [at least] they will not wear chains.”47 Few were the advanced sons of the Enlightenment like that quintessential New Englander, exindentured servant Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard.”48 Allowing for exceptions, comfortable Americans were little troubled by the growing problem of poverty in capitalist society. Yet everyone agreed that the loyalists were disproportionately rich, even if some common individuals cleaved to them as sycophants hopeful for patronage. As rebels like James Dana put it with brutal simplicity, rich loyalists depended “on great inequality in a community,” so that they could “pursue the interests of a few by the misery of many,” wasting the earnings of honest men on their own “pride and vanity . . . sloth[,] dissipation and luxury.”49 Dana’s critique was reaffirmed at the beginning of 1776 by Thomas Paine’s savage attack on the nobility in Common Sense. He painted the English monarch’s ultimate descent from “the principal Ruffian of some restless Gang” of medieval thugs.50 That moment defines the boundary between the early modern and the modern. As for the loyalists, they constantly “red-baited” their opponents as levelers – that is, communists – an old tactic.51 When confiscations finally began, radicals assailed the aristocracy more methodically than ever. Simeon Howard’s election-day sermon before the Massachusetts General Court in 1780 did not mince words. He explained how Britain had followed a tragically well-worn path through history. George III and his aristocracy had resorted to “that deceit, and hypocrisy, that falsehood and insincerity, that dissimulation and craftiness, which have so often dictated the measures of government in most of the nations of the earth.”52 These were not personal failings, but the way of the king’s class. Their practices were “inculcated among other immoralities, as necessary parts of a good education,” demonstrated in the recent “celebrated and much admired letters of a late British Whig nobleman to his son,” namely Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield.53 Howard

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condemned Chesterfield because he brazenly addressed his letters in public to his illegitimate son, so lordly he had no moral shame. Aristocrats were base sycophants toward rulers, dissembling their solidarity with the crown to dominate and exploit the people. Allow them to conquer America, and they would use American resources to conquer Ireland, France and Spain, “wherever there was wealth to tempt the enterprize.”54 They would seek “the banishment of liberty from among mankind” for the sake of their fortunes.55 Thomas Dawes suggested that it seemed to be intrinsic to “the vile oeconomy of depraved man” for the aristocracy to seek absolute power.56 Once “the majority being slaves, the remains of freedom are shared among the great.”57 Even the populist Nova Scotia loyalist John Day (of probable New England origin) warned rich colonists they would not be satisfied “until a nobility or distinctions are established in America, and voting by ballot for the members of assembly abolished.”58 Class antagonism to the loyalists gave rebels a means to paper over their own social diversity, for the rebels ranged from James Bowdoin at the top of the ladder to Ebenezer McIntosh near the bottom. It also helped obscure the split between coastal and inland towns, for loyalism was a social problem in all areas, revealed in statistics on the leading loyalists. Of the 307 men banished from Massachusetts in 1778, the social status or occupation is known for 263, and the marked upper-class character of the group as a whole is obvious. No fewer than 165 (63 percent) had high stations: esquires, gentlemen, officials, merchants, and doctors. They were listed for 49 major towns in all 11 counties. An impressive number of communities in all counties lost gentlemen.59 The picture is somewhat different in the Canadian settlements after the war. In the list of the founding New England loyalist family heads of New Brunswick (287 names), the callings of 214 are known. Of these, 32 percent were well-to-do: official, cleric, magistrate or judge, esquire or lawyer, gentleman, shipmaster, surgeon or doctor.60 The group has a pronounced upper-class appearance, but 68 percent were farmers, artisans, and laborers.61 Rebels had good reason to believe that loyalism implied wealth along with its privileges, even if statistically it was not so simple as that, and they grew daily more hostile to traditional social ranks. Unfortunately, as Pauline Maier suggests, that led them to put more emphasis on presumptively “natural social distinctions founded on physical differences,” like color or sex, which “became invidious, and so more demeaning than in less self-consciously egalitarian nations.”62 Leading rebels of 1776

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remained mostly untroubled that their progressive vision was founded on the exclusion of women, the poor, and people of color. They were far from the modern concept of equality of persons, despite individual exceptions.

the new egalitarian ideal and slavery Slavery proved surprisingly important in energizing egalitarian principle against the old order. African Americans formed one-fifth of the population in the thirteen colonies – although only three percent in New England – and they were restive and ambitious. Soon after James Somerset brought down slavery in England by his famous case in 1772, New England blacks began the Civil Rights Movement in the United States with a petitioning campaign in Massachusetts in 1773, by their simple request for the right to buy freedom.63 People of color were disproportionately poor and unlikely to change the system; nevertheless, they did.64 They had to fight the stigma reinforced by every occasional vile black criminal, even though most criminals were white.65 The idea of abolition was definitely in the air by 1776, for even some white people were able to grasp the moral imperative to abolish slavery because it was inconsistent with “liberty.”66 Although the blacks’ petition of 1773 fell through the cracks, the House of Representatives did pass and send to the Council a “Bill to Prevent the Importation of Negroes and Others as Slaves into this Province” on March 3, 1774, which commenced a decade of change in Massachusetts.67 The black community was undoubtedly among the most Anglicized in the colonies, owing in part to the fact that many learned to read and write in public schools. It was a society where Lemuel Haynes, of recognizably mixed ancestry, could begin preaching as an ordained minister to a white congregation in 1783. That could happen only in New England or Philadelphia. A white New England family raised a young African girl to become the thoroughly Anglicized Phillis Wheatley, celebrated for her literary promise, just as the Revolution began.68 Also unique was “negro election day,” when a parallel government of African Americans installed itself in a theatrical ceremony, which the organizers persuaded their masters to sponsor.69 The relatively humane treatment of blacks should not be exaggerated. Venture Smith was suffering a variety of torments as a slave in Rhode Island, until he laboriously obtained a wildly inflated price for his freedom, and then spent the rest of his life working slavishly to earn the money to buy his wife and children. His freedom, he concluded

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bitterly, was “a privilege which nothing else can equal,” and probably no man in New England understood the word better.70 The bones of another slave – Mark – still rattled in the wind, suspended at Boston’s public gallows since 1755, when the town hanged him for procuring poison to kill his master. That could have happened to a white murderer, but Phillis, his accomplice and the actual poisoner, had burned alive at the stake for her crime. Still, that was the last time such a barbaric sentence was meted out in Massachusetts, whereas mobs in the South burned blacks at the stake right into the twentieth century.71 Perhaps only in New England could it have happened that a rowdy runaway slave, a sailor of AfricanAmerican and Native-American ancestry, was the first to die in the Revolution, in the Boston Massacre: Crispus Attucks. His funeral was attended by thousands of people of all colors, a subject of acid disapproval by loyalists.72 Much has been made of the fact that a few New England African Americans would side with the British, or perhaps merely follow their loyalist owners, and be among the exiles who left New York for Canada in 1783.73 Much more numerous, however, were those blacks who stayed and contributed to the founding, some ardently fighting for equality at home. That was the key to the success of the abolition movement, that and the fact that no loyalist advocated abolition. The black merchant Paul Cuffe pushed for equality and became unofficial head of the Civil Rights Movement. The actions of a Caesar Sarter (1774) or a Prince Hall (1777) demanding abolition in Massachusetts, or a Nero Brewster and nineteen other slaves appealing for the same in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1779, were momentous.74 Rhode Island took the first big step. In the fall of 1775, its General Assembly considered and published a bill (urged by the Providence Town Meeting) to abolish the slave trade and declare all people born in the colony henceforth as free, with equal rights at the age of twenty-one years. The Newport slave trade interest proved to be too strong, and a gradual abolition act had to wait until 1784.75 Black and white activists forced a bill to abolish slavery before the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1777, but the legislators consigned it to oblivion. James Warren explained sheepishly in a letter to John Adams – and Adams did not have to be told – that enacting the law would “have a bad effect on the Union of the Colonies,” meaning it would make it difficult for southern planters to trust New Englanders.76 After all, the white South was still in shock over Lord Dunmore’s 1775 appeal to Virginia slaves to rise up.77 It was not the last time that New Englanders’ progressive impulse would be stymied by their need for an alliance with the planter class.

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Instead, in Massachusetts, slaves freed themselves. In the last days of the war, slaves Quok Walker and Elizabeth Freeman lodged constitutionally based suits in court against their masters, and brought slavery tumbling down. Slave Belinda sued loyalist Isaac Royall for restitution for having kept her in slavery. It all happened only because blacks demanded it and gained moral and political credit by fighting in the Continental Army. Connecticut passed a gradual abolition act in 1784, and about that same time New Hampshire slaves successfully challenged the system in the courts.78 Racial prejudice remained prevalent throughout the North, but there is no underestimating the gains black abolitionist petitioners and many black soldiers in the Continental Army gained for their cause.79 Racial ideas could be as unsophisticated and mean in New England as they were elsewhere. James Bowdoin asserted that there was a clear “difference between EUROPE and AFRICA, between the most improved and best accommodated of mankind, and the Hottentots.”80 The “gentle Puritan,” Ezra Stiles, apparently did not disagree with him, giving a sermon before the Connecticut government in 1783 celebrating “the glory and honor” of the United States, in part because its white population was growing disproportionately as that of Indians and blacks declined.81 He advised South Americans to prevent race mixture more carefully, so their population would also become whiter.82 As the free black population grew, whites sought to police the color line. After 1783, both Massachusetts and Rhode Island would adopt laws to punish anyone who performed a marriage between a white person and a person of color.83 White New Englanders were inclined by self-love to color prejudice, such that most would not imagine perfect racial equality. In his book after the war, Thomas Jefferson spoke for the majority of white Americans in describing blacks as an inferior race.84 It was a prejudice refreshed by every shipload of white passengers arriving from Europe, who found that their whiteness was a valuable resource in the New World. Historians have recently begun to untangle the tragic connection between the development of democracy and white solidarity in early America.85 The color of enslaved African Americans and “savage” Native Americans reinforced the old anti-Semitic prejudice against the supposed devilishly swarthy, which helped idealize whiteness. A few Indian laborers and artisans lived in the towns in a separate caste, but white people did not intermarry with them either.86 All tribes were remnants and appeared to be withering away. Colonists had whittled down the reservations by various means, justifying the process by defining the Indians as rootless, people who wandered like Jews and were thereby unworthy of claiming the land.87 Eleazar Wheelock’s Mohegan student, Samson Occom, was

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the ordained, articulate missionary who had raised money in England for the funding of Dartmouth College. Now disillusioned by racism, he was organizing a Mohegan union with the Oneidas early in 1773, and would migrate along with so many other Indians to Ontario. Thus, good examples of the full educability of Native Americans were lost to view in New England.88 Moreover, the awful fighting on the frontier during the war embittered rebels against all Indians. According to the common lament, the British “hired and let loose upon us the Indians, to scalp and butcher of every age and sex, to plunder and lay waste wherever they came.”89 The full extent of white New Englanders’ racial attitude is shown by the disastrous marriage in 1826 of the refined Cherokee Elias Boudinot and Harriet Ruggles Gold of Connecticut. It caused a tumult, resolved only when the couple fled into Cherokee country.90 As for the Revolutionary War, Occom claimed it was “the most Destructive to Poor Indians of any wars that have happened in my Day.”91 Despite color prejudice, the moral problem of slavery suddenly did find an audience in New England.92 It was partly because the Continental Association halted the Atlantic slave trade to the colonies, drawing attention to the larger problem.93 Abolitionism suddenly appeared, with numerous attacks on slavery roaring out of pulpits. Yale graduate Samuel Hopkins has the reputation for being the first Congregationalist minister to attack slavery with energy, but he was not alone.94 Ebenezer Baldwin cut to the heart of the matter by demanding in 1774: “And is it not easy to see there is something retributive in the present judgment of heaven [on New England]? We keep our fellow men in slavery – heaven is suffering others to enslave us.”95 This was not just loose “slavery” imagery derived from John Locke’s work, it was the ultimate jeremiad. John Allen made much the same charge, that slave-owning by some had brought British pestilence on all the colonists. Slavery was an “iniquitous and disgraceful practice” that was “evidently contradictory to the laws of God, and in direct violation of the charter of this province, and the natural and inalienable rights of mankind.”96 With relish, Allen quoted Charles I’s language in the original Massachusetts-Bay Colony charter guaranteeing to his colonists “all liberties and immunities of free and natural subjects.”97 Levi Hart warned that the rest of the world would not be able to “count us the true friends of liberty as long as we deal in, or publicly connive at slavery.”98 Henry Cumings pounded at a sociological analysis in his Thanksgiving Day sermon of 1775 in Billerica. “Slavery tends directly to increase the degeneracy of human nature,” he argued,

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“and to extinguish every spark of genius.”99 He meant both masters and slaves. “It is the prolific source of ignorance, gross superstition, and savage barbarism,” so “it is the bane of all social virtues, a mortal enemy to the liberal arts and sciences, and to pure and undefiled religion,” and as everyone knew, only rich people like loyalists owned slaves.100 Abolitionists would bear down hard on the public when the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 was under debate. As John Murray put it, slavery was “a state of war against all mankind,” and warned that if the slave trade was permitted under the new Massachusetts Constitution, “that leaven will soon corrupt the whole lump,” and bring “the curse of heaven” on the Revolution.101 The most thorough indictment of slavery by a white New Englander in this period was by Stafford, Connecticut’s humble Reverend Isaac Foster. His pamphlet appeared amid a flurry of charges against farmers and middlemen for forestalling the market during the crisis of war. So Foster exploited the theme to attack slavery as “the worst kind of extortion.”102 He denounced it as a “fashionable sin” and “horrid wickedness,” and he scoffed at the notion that Africans were the cursed descendants of Ham.103 His key argument was to ridicule the racial argument that emancipation would be “no benefit” to blacks since they were “a low, dastardly, mean-spirited, foolish people” who would be “undone” by freedom.104 Foster had grown up in a town where he saw black people every day, and he was “quite sure that they want nothing but the advantages that we have, to equal us in any art whatsoever,” nay, he had even seen the occasional slave “in wit, vivacity and sound judgment greatly excel his pretended master,” despite living in slavery.105 For white people in the eighteenth century, or even in the next century, common sense about color did not get more clear-eyed than that. No single argument did so much to expand egalitarian ideology than this, that blacks were equal to whites in ambition and intellect, and were proving it by serving in the army and demanding civil rights.106 A few civilians became outright abolitionists too, like Rhode Island’s old Governor Stephen Hopkins and Connecticut’s Joel Barlow.107 By participating mostly on the side of the rebels and helping to enlarge the Revolution’s ideological claims, blacks validated their claims and won important concessions.108 In response to Paul Cuffe’s agitation against a clause in the Massachusetts Constitution in 1778 barring voting by “Negroes, Indians and molattoes [sic],” legislators dropped it in the final version of 1780.109 An inexorable logic of equality began subverting race, and, in a like way, gender.110

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women’s consciousness American women eventually made the Revolution theirs, but it would take a very long time, for the rule of gender was as strong as race and reinforced by it. As summed up by Elaine Forman Crane, New England’s “legal system . . . prevented most women from maximizing their opportunities and achieving anything more than a minimal standard of living in the absence of husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons.”111 On the other hand, women benefited from the strong Calvinist conviction that grace was utterly unaffected by “human determinants such as gender.”112 Over the eighteenth century, if men dominated the economic and political spheres, “women increasingly gained ascendancy in the sacred, moral, and emotional spheres of life: as in religious benevolence, sentimental fiction, and the family.”113 The churchgoers of all classes became disproportionately female by 1773, and by that means women gained increasing sway over everything from church discipline to the choice of ministers.114 It was even possible for an extreme pietist like Newport’s Sarah Osborn to draw larger crowds than any of the town’s ordained ministers in the 1760s.115 New England’s middling sort of women were also involved in a broad transatlantic movement to establish a new ideal of domestic morality, that is, to reform men in particular, epitomized by their afternoon tea.116 That increasing spiritual and moral responsibility opened the way to Republican Motherhood and later to true feminism.117 Perhaps the single most important event of modern times is the gradual reduction of family size since the eighteenth century, in which New England women were foremost leaders. By enlarging their power over reproduction, they released energies that flowed into every kind of social criticism and reform activism in the nineteenth century. Patriarchy was ever so gradually breaking down, undermined by demographic decline and female assertion.118 In defiance of patriarchal limits, some women participated directly in the Revolutionary War.119 Deborah Sampson of Middleborough, Massachusetts, was the first recorded regular female soldier to serve in the Continental Army disguised as a man.120 In addition, thousands of women served as auxiliaries with the army during the War of Independence, nursing, cooking, hauling and washing for the troops. Nevertheless, the hyper-masculinity of war tended to reduce male toleration of female assertiveness, and pacifists like Ann Lee’s Shakers or the Quaker mystic Jemima Wilkinson incited suspicion that they were disloyal.121 Rebels tended to group them with notable loyalist women, doing the cause of women no good.

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Wives of the absconded loyalists who remained behind were vulnerable. Many were loyalists, some not. New England rebels behaved very traditionally in assuming that women were apolitical because they lacked rights. So authorities were usually disinclined to treat the loyalist woman as severely as the man. If a wife approached a committee to argue that her absconded husband deserved clemency, she had merely to regret his loyalism to escape all consequences of his misdoings – she did not have to declare her patriotism.122 And naturally, rebel women could expect to be protected from Tory husbands by their communities. The patriotic Elizabeth Hamilton of North Kingston, Rhode Island, refused her husband Joseph’s summons to join him in British-occupied Newport. When he barged into the house in the night and picked her up bodily to carry her to Newport “Dead or Alive,” neighbors intervened to stop him.123 A few loyalist women fearlessly espoused their cause. Margaret Draper of Boston was the widow of Richard Draper, who had just taken over The Massachusetts Gazette and made it Gage’s mouthpiece, when he died; so she became the publisher. As a result, she was “more the object of the rancour and Malice of the Rebels than most others.”124 In defending General Gage’s government, she made herself subject to “severe Animadversions and continual Menaces,” until she fled, first to Nova Scotia, then to England.125 Some loyalist women truly suffered. Rebecca Callahan of Pownalborough, Massachusetts claimed rebels turned her out of her house in 1777, when her husband left to serve with the British forces. She “was pursued with warrants for Imprisonment from place to place;” she hid in barns and bushes until she could get away to Nova Scotia.126 Rebel authorities tried to keep angry crowds from mistreating women. One case illustrates the extremes to which they might go. Lady Agnes Surriage Frankland was a teenaged barmaid in Marblehead whose looks enchanted Sir Charles Frankland, collector for the Port of Boston. He educated her and refined her manners, but would not marry her because of her common status, so he kept her in grand style as his mistress in Hopkinton until he died, a scandalously uncommon arrangement in New England. When she decided to move into loyalist Boston, agents of the Provincial Congress conducted her to safety rather than trust her fate to a morally outraged crowd.127 The more active loyalist women could fare worse. The committee of Northborough dealt sharply with Miriam Eager and her husband for having made numerous speeches against the rebels.128 As Janice Potter-MacKinnon has shown, loyalist and rebel women shared the same

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legal condition, but rebels enjoyed the right to open organizing, while committees neutralized loyalist women. With exceptions like Miriam Eager, they mostly had to remain subordinate and quiet. In some cases they would lose everything, reduced from comfort to pioneer poverty upon arrival in Canada.129 In New England, however, most departures by women were voluntary. And the wife of an absconder could expect at least the wife’s third of an estate.130 If their civil and political rights were little affected by the egalitarian ideal at the time, restless rebel women lit a slow fuse. Oligarchy, slaveholding, and patriarchy had so much in common in their disrespect for individual rights, that the egalitarian spirit flowing out of the contest between rebel and loyalist would destabilize the whole system. Demands for rights by African Americans and a few women began to open the eyes of some white men. The more subversive behavior of a few women, like Mercy Otis Warren, is well known.131 As Holly Brewer argues so well, the Revolution’s logic excluded women and blacks from political rights because they did not reason independently, but by that logic, if they could somehow prove their ability to reason, even if only as caregivers, “they could provide a powerful claim for political and civil rights.”132 Some white men could see the gaping disjunction between the limited ideal of Jeffersonian equality (that is, parity among them), and the absolute equality of persons. It was a genie that would not get back in the bottle. In the end, the class arrogance of rich loyalists strengthened the hands of radicals. Loyalists’ collective identity was shaped at bottom by contempt for the lowly.133 Edward Winslow sneered at those Boston rebels who had the effrontery to strut in pride, elected deputies like “Hitchborn the Boat-builder” or “Bruce the Butcher,” for now “forsooth assemblies were like operas, everybody that could pay was admitted,” meaning selfmade, ignorant and uncouth men puffed up with their importance.134 If the loyalists’ wealth had been an asset in 1763, as Judith N. Shklar argues, by 1776 radicals viewed aristocratic wealth with dark skepticism, as “un-American, with the potential for conspiracy to deprive the people of their political rights.”135 The many persisting loyalists helped to keep the choice clear for the rebels by representing the potential for aristocratic class values to regain hegemony at any moment. As the townspeople of Gloucester put it on the eve of December Sixteenth, they despised all tyrants “dignified by splendid Titles or any Character that bears the Sacred Pride of humane [sic] Virtue.”136 For their “splendid” image, the loyalists had themselves to thank.

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Notes 1. For a direct appeal to restore the old Anglo-Saxon “DEMOCRATICAL ARISTOCRACY,ˮ one selected by annual elections, see Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory. A Sermon, Preached before His Excellency Jonathan Trumbull, Esq., L.L.D., Governour and Commander in Chief, and the Honourable General Assembly, of the State of Connecticut, Convened at Hartford, at the Anniversary Election [May 8, 1783], 2nd edn. (Worcester, Mass., 1785), 32, 29. 2. Ibid., 32. 3. Puritanism and Liberty, Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, 3rd edn., ed. and intro. A. S. P. Woodhouse, preface by Ivan Roots (London, 1986). 4. [John Trumbull], An Elegy on the Times (New Haven, Conn., 1775), 6. 5. The Wonderful Appearance of an Angel, Devil & Ghost, to a Gentleman in the Town of Boston, in the Nights of the 14th, 15th, and 16th of October, 1774 (Boston, Mass., 1774), 19. 6. William Doyle, Aristocracy and Its Enemies in the Age of Revolution (New York, 2009), 88. On the conviction of many Americans that the colonies were “turning Britishˮ in their class structure, see David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York, 1999), 54–5. Charles Inglis typified loyalist attitudes by heaping scorn on the Continental Congress because it had few rich delegates. See [Charles Inglis], The Letters of Papinian: In Which the Conduct, Present State and Prospects of the American Congress are Examined (New York, 1779), iv. 7. James L. Hutson, “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765– 1900,ˮ American Historical Review 98 (1993), 1079–1105. 8. John Adams to Hendrik Calkoen, October 10, 1780, Papers of John Adams, 18 vols., ed. Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint (Cambridge, Mass., 1977–2016), 10:220. See pp. 220–2. 9. Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783–1784, 2 vols., trans. and edn. Alfred J. Morrison (Philadelphia, Pa., 1911), 1:99. 10. James Dana, A Sermon, Preached before the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut, at Hartford, on the Day of the Anniversary Election, May 13, 1779 (Hartford, Conn., 1779), 17. 11. Ibid., 19. For an echoing statement, see John Murray, Nehemiah, or the Struggle for Liberty Never in Vain (Newburyport, Mass., 1779), 7. 12. Jackson Turner Main, The Sovereign States, 1775–1783 (New York, 1973), 441. See also Gary B. Nash, “Poverty and Politics in Early American History,ˮ in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park, Pa., 2004), 1–37; and Ruth Wallis Herndon, “‘Who Died an Expence to This Town’: Poor Relief in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,ˮ in ibid., 135–62. 13. William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1963), 164. See pp. 143–88. 14. Matthew 20: 26–7.

234 The Radical Critique of Tory Oligarchy, Slavery, and Patriarchy 15. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 229–369. 16. As Barbara Clark Smith puts it, they “disputed the pretensions of many of their society’s leading men,ˮ loyalist and patriot. See Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (New York, 2010), 82. 17. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 8. 18. [James Murray], Letters of James Murray, Loyalist, ed. Nina Moore Tiffany and Susan I. Lesley, intro. George A. Billias (Boston, Mass., 1972), 132. 19. James H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution (Boston, Mass., 1910), 144–74. On other losses by Hutchinsons and Olivers, see ibid., pp. 175–91. 20. Claim of Sylvester Gardiner, November 10, 1783, PRO AO 13/45, 288–91. John Atkinson of Boston claimed £34,409 lawful or £25,807 sterling in cash in 1784. See Claim of John Atkinson, PRO AO 13/43, 181. George Erving of Boston claimed £27,760 for his Massachusetts estate. See Claim of George Erving, PRO AO 13/44, 528–30v. William Pepperrell claimed £35,701. See Claim of William Pepperrell, PRO AO 13/48, 127–8. William Browne of Salem put in a claim for £33,256. See Claim of William Browne, PRO AO 13/50, 68–79v. On the wealthy Chandler clan, see Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, With Historical Essay, 2 vols., intro. Ralph Adams Brown (Port Washington, N.Y., 1966), 1:303–9. 21. Amelia Howe Kritzer, ed., “Introduction,ˮ in Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995), 6. For Warren’s other major political plays, see The Adulateur (Boston, Mass., 1773); The Group, A Farce ([Boston], 1773); and The Blockheads: Or, The Affrighted Officers (Boston, Mass., 1776). 22. For a good profile of wealth, see Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1985), 53–6. A Northampton man naively appealed to the governor that “in any civilized nationˮ he would be treated according to his rank, as “the only son of the heir to one of the first earldoms in the British realm,ˮ that is, the English Whig leader, the Earl of Stanhope. See Henry E. Stanhope to John Hancock, May 11, 1776, Amer. Arch., 6:487. 23. Timothy Stone, The Nature and Evil, of Selfishness Considered and Elustrated [sic] (Norwich, Conn., 1778), 29. 24. John Hancock, An Oration Delivered March 5, 1774, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston: to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1774), 18. 25. Gary J. Kornblith and John M. Murrin, “The Dilemmas of the Ruling Elites in Revolutionary America,ˮ in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 29. See pp. 27–63. See also Gary J. Kornblith and John M. Murrin, “The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class,ˮ in Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb, Ill., 1993), 43. See pp. 27–79.

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26. W. William Domhoff, “Wealth, Income, Power,ˮ Table 2, Who Rules America [online], http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html. Last accessed July 5, 2016. 27. Not all loyalists were rich. The far-flung Leach family of farmers in Fairfield County, Connecticut, had only £3,400 worth of property when confiscators evaluated it in 1779. See Cases of Simeon Leach and Ebenezer Leach, February 27, 1779, and James Leach, April 24, 1779; Connecticut State Library, CSA, RG 1, Confiscated Estates: Probate Records, file #378. 28. Jeffrey H. Richards, Mercy Otis Warren (New York, 1995), 86–7. 29. Moreover, the Wentworths had family connections that gave them the backing of a hard core of seven members of the colony’s Council before the Revolution. See Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 2:22. 30. [John Dalrymple], The Rights of Great Britain Asserted Against the Claims of America (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), 74. 31. [John Burgoyne?], A Vaudevil, Sung by the Characters at the Conclusion of a New Farce, Called The Boston Blockade [Boston, Mass., 1776], broadside. 32. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 2:62. Joseph Huntington summarized the offended organic community ideal, paraphrasing Ezekiel: “a commonwealth should be as a living creature, every part acting in concert.ˮ See Joseph Huntington, A Discourse, Adapted to the Present Day, On the Health and Happiness, or Misery and Ruin, of the Body Politic, in Similitude to the Natural Body (Hartford, Conn., 1781), 25. 33. John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, January 8, 1776, Warren–Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 1743–1814, ed., Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), 1:201. See also Stephanie Kermes, Creating an American Identity: New England, 1789–1825 (New York, 2008), 87–116. 34. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 50. For a comparative view, see Leonard W. Labaree, Conservatism in Early American History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1948), 1–31. For an introduction to the land-bank era, see Margaret E. Newell, From Dependence to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998). 35. James K. Hosmer, The Life of Thomas Hutchinson: Royal Governor of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay (Boston, Mass., 1896), 92. For essential background on Hutchinson, see Gary B. Nash, “Social Change and the Growth of Prerevolutionary Urban Radicalism,ˮ in Gary B. Nash, Race, Class, and Politics: Essays on American Colonial and Revolutionary Society, foreword by Richard S. Dunn (Urbana, Ill., 1986), 220–33. See pp. 211–42. 36. Arthur Gilman, Theatrum Majorum: The Cambridge of 1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1876), 50–1. 37. Edward P. Thompson, “Rough Music,ˮ in Edward P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York, 1991), 467–538; Brendan McConville, “The Rise of Rough Music: Reflections on an Ancient New Custom in Eighteenth-Century New Jersey,ˮ in Riot and Revelry in Early America, ed. William Pencak,

236 The Radical Critique of Tory Oligarchy, Slavery, and Patriarchy Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman (University Park, Pa, 2002), 87– 106. 38. John Warren, An Oration, Delivered July 4th, 1783, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, in Celebration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Boston, Mass., 1783), 12. 39. John Collins to Samuel Ward, July 17, 1774, Samuel Ward Papers, RIHS, Manuscripts, Box II, folder 9. 40. Mather Byles to the Lords of the Treasury, c. 1784, PRO AO 13/43, 599. On eastern cosmopolitans and western localists and their differing attitudes toward allowing loyalists to return, see Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties Before the Constitution (New York, 1973), 351–3. 41. Henry Hulton to Robert Nicholson, August 3, 1771, in Wallace Brown, “An Englishman Views the American Revolution: The Letters of Henry Hulton, 1769–1776,ˮ Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (1972), 23. See pp. 1–26. 42. Ibid., 24. 43. Charles Turner, Due Glory to be Given to God. A Discourse Containing Two Sermons Preached in Cambridge May 15, 1783. Being a Day Appointed by Government for Public Fasting and Prayer (Boston, Mass., 1783), 27. For a different interpretation of class in the Revolution, see Bruce G. Merritt, “Loyalism and Social Conflict in Revolutionary Deerfield, Massachusetts,ˮ Journal of American History 57 (1970–71), 277–89. 44. Abraham Keteltas, God Arising and Pleading His People’s Cause: Or, the American War in Favor of Liberty, against the Measures and Arms of Great Britain (Newburyport, Mass., 1777), 30. 45. Robert Martello, Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn: Paul Revere and the Growth of American Enterprise (Baltimore, Md., 2010), 78–81. 46. The idea of correcting social problems appeared only in brief, bad experiments, like a workhouse for the poor in Boston. See Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 188–93. 47. William Gordon, A Sermon Preached before the Honorable House of Representatives, on the Day Intended for the Choice of Counsellors, Agreeable to the Advice of the Continental Congress (Watertown, Mass., 1775), 28. 48. Boston Committee of Donations, The Committee . . . to Receive Donations for the Charitable Purpose of Relieving and Employing the Poor, Suffering by Means of the Act of Parliament, Commonly called the Boston Port-Bill (Boston, Mass., 1774); [Charles Chauncy], A Letter to a Friend. Giving a Concise, but Just, Representation of the Hardships and Sufferings the Town of Boston is Exposed To, By T. W., A Bostonian (Boston, Mass., 1774), 9–10; and Charles Chauncy, The Accursed Thing Must Be Taken Away from Among the People, if They Would Reasonably Hope to Stand before their Enemies (Boston, Mass., 1778), 16–17. 49. Dana, A Sermon, Preached before the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut, 21.

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50. [Thomas Paine], Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, (Philadelphia, Pa., 1776), 21. On the loyalist response, see Philip Gould, “Loyalists Respond to Common Sense: The Politics of Authorship in Revolutionary America,ˮ in The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era, ed. Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan (Toronto, 2012), 105–27. 51. Thomas N. Ingersoll, “‘Riches and Honour were Rejected by Them as Loathsome Vomit’: The Fear of Leveling in New England,ˮ in Inequality in Early America, ed. Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (Hanover, N.H., 1999), 46–66. 52. Simeon Howard, A Sermon Preached before the Honorable Council, and the Honorable House of Representatives of the State of Massachusetts-Bay, in New England, May 31, 1780. Being the Anniversary of the Election of the Honorable Council (Boston, Mass., 1780), 29. For an early American edition of Chesterfield, one of many to come, see Letters Written by the late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, to his Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq. 4 vols. (New York, 1775). 53. Howard, A Sermon, 29. 54. Ibid., 41. 55. Ibid., 41. 56. Thomas Dawes, An Oration Delivered March 5th 1781 at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March 1770 (Boston, Mass., 1781), 14. 57. Ibid. 58. John Day, Remarks on American Affairs (London, 1774), 4. See also Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago, Ill., 1995), 8–10. 59. Massachusetts Bay, An Act to Prevent the Return to this State of Certain Persons therein Named, and Others Who have Left this State, or Either of the United States, and Joined the Enemies Thereof [Boston, Mass., 1778], broadside. Note that the reproduction of this act in Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts, 137–40, contains errors of transcription from the original. 60. Sharon Dubeau, New Brunswick Loyalists: A Bicentennial Tribute (Agincourt, Ont., 1983). These are my own statistics drawn from Dubeau’s lists. Her work should be supplemented by the 287 additional New England families listed in Esther Clark Wright, The Loyalists of New Brunswick (Fredericton, N.B., 1955). 61. As for those who actually fought in arms against the rebels, the class distribution was much different, dominated by the lower classes. See Muster Roll by Lieutenant Colonel George Wightman, October 9, 1780, Loyalist Regiment Muster Rolls, RG 8, D18, vol. 1892: Loyal New Englanders, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ont. A well-documented group of 64 confiscated estates in Fairfield County, Connecticut, provides another measure of the class profile of loyalists. Collectively, their estates were valued at £40,636, or £635 average value per estate. Yet no fewer than 22, or nearly

238 The Radical Critique of Tory Oligarchy, Slavery, and Patriarchy one third, had estates of very modest value: £69 or less, so the number of common people among the loyalists cannot be dismissed as trivial. What is more impressive, however, is that no fewer than 11 (or 17 percent) of the estates were worth over £1,000, indicating a definite bias to the wealthy end of the spectrum in that county. See Estates of Edward Arnold, et al., Fairfield Probate District, File 8, 1779, Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Conn., folders 1–3. 62. Pauline Maier, “The Transforming Impact of Independence, Reaffirmed: 1776 and the Definition of American Social Structure,ˮ in The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology, ed. James A. Henretta, Michael Kammen and Stanley N. Katz (New York, 1991), 216. See pp. 194–217. 63. Francis Hargrave, An Argument in the Case of James Somersett a Negro (Boston, Mass., 1774); Steven M. Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial that Led to the End of Human Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Thomas J. Davis, “Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777,ˮ New England Quarterly 62 (1989), 248–63. 64. A Return of the Number of Inhabitants in the State of Connecticut ([Hartford, Conn.?], 1782), broadside. 65. Robert E. Desrochers, Jr., “Periphery as Center: Slavery, Identity, and the Commercial Press in the British Atlantic, 1704–1765,ˮ in British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Stephen Foster (New York, 2013), 185–6. See pp. 170–94. 66. Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 69–122; T. H. Breen, “Making History: The Force of Public Opinion and the Last Years of Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts,ˮ in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 67–95; Richard A. Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (New York, 2011), 123–33. 67. The Continental Association would ban the mostly English-controlled African trade to all colonies that fall, and that was the end of the trade to New England. A few months later, a group of blacks appealed to Thomas Gage for freedom. See Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, N.J., 2010), 93. See also pp. 75–6. 68. See Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. and intro., Vincent Carretta (New York, 2001); Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, Ga, 2011); David Waldstreicher, “Phillis Wheatley: The Poet Who Challenged the American Revolutionaries,ˮ in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, ed. Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael (New York, 2011), 97–113; and Frank Shuffleton, “On Her Own Footing: Phillis Wheatley in Freedom,ˮ in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington, Ky., 2001), 175–89.

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69. William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, Mass., 1988), 3– 36. 70. Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, But Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America (New London, Conn., 1798), 31. See also Philip Gould, “‘Remarkable Liberty’: Language and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Black Autobiography,ˮ in Carretta and Gould, Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, 116–29. 71. “The Trial and Execution of Mark and Phillis in 1755,ˮ in Free Blacks, Slaves, and Slaveowners in Civil and Criminal Courts: The Pamphlet Literature, series 6, vol. 1, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York, 1988), 3–39. 72. Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton, The Famous Mather Byles: The Noted Boston Tory Preacher, Poet, and Wit, 1707–1788 (Boston, Mass., 1914), 146. 73. They included people like Prince Baker, aged thirty-nine years, who “leftˮ his master, Nathaniel Baker of Boston, seven years earlier. See The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution, ed. Graham Russell Hodges (New York, 1996), 204. See also Petition of Nero Brewster et al., November 12, 1779, Committee of Safety Papers, NHSA, Petitions, October, 1779–September, 1780; and Petition of Peter Hanson, February 12, 1778, NHSA, Committee of Safety Papers, Petitions, 1778–79. For the wide perspective, see Gary J. Kornblith, Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776–1821 (Lanham, Md., 2010). 74. Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, Wis., 1990), 167–76. See also Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, Ill., 1967), 98–108; James O. Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York, 1997); Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York, 2010); Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York, 2005), 223– 32; Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation (New York, 2008). For interesting cases, see Depositions of David Sutton, et al., re: Cezar, January 5, 1789, CSA, RG 1, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 37:358; and Petition of Pomp a Negro Man Slave, October 20, 1779, CSA, RG 1, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 37:236. 75. An Act for Prohibiting the Importation of Negroes into this Colony, and Asserting the Right of Freedom of all those Hereafter Born or Manumitted within the Same, Providence Gazette, September 9, 1775. See Zilversmit, The First Emancipation, 106–7, 120–2. 76. James Warren to John Adams, June 22, 1777, Warren–Adams Letters, 1:335. On the muffling of the slavery issue in the interest of intersectional unity, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United

240 The Radical Critique of Tory Oligarchy, Slavery, and Patriarchy States Government’s Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001), 15–28. 77. On a slave rebellion plot uncovered in the Hudson Valley – on New England’s backside – in early 1775, see Michael E. Groth, “Black Loyalists and African American Allegiance in the Mid-Hudson Valley,ˮ in The Other Loyalists: Ordinary People, Royalism, and the Revolution in the Middle Colonies, 1763–1787, ed. Joseph S. Tiedemann, Eugene R. Fingerhut and Robert W. Venables (Albany, N.Y., 2009), 85–6. See pp. 81–104. For the argument that the majority of blacks were rationally inclined to favor the British as probable emancipators, see Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, 2014), 209–33. 78. Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York, 2009), 93–121; 169–93; Joyce Malcolm, Peter’s War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 2010); Christopher Cameron, To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement (Kent, Ohio, 2014), 84–99; Zilversmit, The First Emancipation, 117, 123–4; Sharon M. Harris, Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law (Columbus, Ohio, 2005), 69–79. 79. Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial And Revolutionary New England (New York, 2010), 165–95; William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (Athens, Ga., 1994), 101–2. For a radical demand that slaves and indentured servants who fought in the Continental Army should enjoy a general emancipation, see Observations on the Slaves and the Indentured Servants, Inlisted [sic] in the Army, and in the Navy of the United States, by “Antibiastesˮ (Philadelphia, Pa., 1777), broadside. Rebel authorities also freed a few as punishment of their loyalist owners. See Claim of Benjamin Marston, May 2, 1786, PRO AO 12/10, 88. See also Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago, Ill., 2012). 80. James Bowdoin, A Philosophical Discourse Addressed to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston, Mass., 1780), 15. 81. Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory, 11, 20. 82. Ibid., 12–13. 83. Massachusetts Bay, Acts and Laws Passed by the General Court of Massachusetts (Boston, Mass., 1786), 439. John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore, Md., 2003), 179–82. On the entire era, see Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Raceˮ in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998). 84. Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on Virginia,ˮ The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York, 1944), 255–62. 85. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 2007). African Americans who became

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loyalists discovered that the British were no less prejudiced than the Americans. See Claim of Alexander Maurice, Decision, November 17, 1783, PRO AO 12/100, 79; and Claim of London, September 29, 1783, PRO AO 12/99, 86v–7. A few applicants to the Claims Commission received small amounts. See Claim of James Strong, July 4, 1783, PRO AO 12/99, 347v–8, on a cooper and farmer who lost all in Connecticut; and Claim of Jeremiah Williams, September 1, 1783, PRO CO 12/99, 353v–4, a Rhode Islander who claimed to have lost 35 acres and two homes. See also Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 402–7; and Todd W. Braisted, “The Black Pioneers and Others: The Military Role of Black Loyalists in the American War for Independence,ˮ in John W. Pulis, ed. Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World (New York, 1999), 3–37. 86. See Peter Powers, Tyranny and Toryism Exposed: Being the Substance of Two Sermons, Preached at Newbury, Lord’s Day, September 10th, 1780 (Westminster, Vt., 1781), 7. 87. Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (New York, 1997). Just before the Tea Party, in 1773, the Mohegans lost a court case on their land claims against the colonists of Connecticut. See Amy E. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (Lincoln, Nebr., 2005), 195. 88. Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, ed., Joanna Brooks (New York, 2006); 274, passim; Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775 (Norman, Okla., 2009), 168–98. 89. See Eliphalet Wright, The Difference Between those Called Standing Churches, and those Called Strict Congregationalists (Norwich, Conn., 1778), 26; David Avery, The Lord is to Be Praised for the Triumphs of His Power. A Sermon, Preached at Greenwich, in Connecticut, on the 18th of December, 1777. being a General Thanksgiving through the United American States (Norwich, Conn., 1778), 18, 19. The association of Indians with loyalists was strengthened in the popular mind as a few white loyalist auxiliaries ended up not only fighting alongside Indians but living among them. See Zadock Steele, The Indian Captive, Or a Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Zadock Steele (Montpelier, Vt., 1818), 66. That fulfilled their worst stereotype of all dark peoples, despite the fact that a few Iroquois towns supported the United States through the war. See Peter Marshall, “First Americans and Last Loyalists: An Indian Dilemma in War and Peace,ˮ in Red, White and True Blue: The Loyalists in the Revolution, ed. Esmond Wright (New York, 1976), 33–53. 90. See Theresa Strouth Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriet Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823–1839 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005); and Thomas N. Ingersoll, To Intermix with our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removals (Albuquerque, NM, 2005), 221. 91. Samson Occom is quoted in David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2010), 108.

242 The Radical Critique of Tory Oligarchy, Slavery, and Patriarchy 92. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 232–6. 93. First came the American ban on the British slave trade by the Continental Association, and in 1774 Connecticut became the first to pass a law against the entire trade. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, foreword by John Hope Franklin (Baton Rouge, La., 1969), 27–38. 94. John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York, 2003); Joseph Conforti, “Samuel Hopkins and the Revolutionary Antislavery Movement,ˮ Rhode Island History 38:2 (1979), 38–49. 95. Ebenezer Baldwin, “An Appendix, Stating the Heavy Grievances the Colonies Labour Under,ˮ in Samuel Sherwood, A Sermon, Containing Scriptural Instructions to Civil Rulers, and All Free-born Subjects, In which the Principles of Sound Policy and Good Government are Established and Vindicated, and Some Doctrines Advanced and Zealously Propagated by NewEngland Tories, Are Considered and Refuted (New Haven, Conn., 1774). For similar assertions that the sufferings of the War for Independence were God’s curse for the sin of slavery, see Avery, The Lord is to Be Praised for the Triumphs of His Power, 12; Nathaniel Niles, Two Discourses on Liberty (Newburyport, Mass., 1774), 37–8; and [Jabez Huntington?], A Discourse on the Times (Norwich, Conn., 1776), 4–5. The Methodists also began attacking the institution at this time. See John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (Philadelphia, Pa., 1774). 96. [John Allen], The Watchman’s Alarm to Lord N___h; Or, the British Parliamentary Boston Port-Bill Unwraped Being an Oration on the Meridian of Liberty [sic] (Salem, Mass., 1774), 25. 97. Ibid. 98. Levi Hart, Liberty Described and Recommended in a Sermon Preached to the Corporation of Freemen in Farmington, at Their Meeting on Tuesday, September 20, 1774 (Hartford, Conn., 1775), 20. 99. Henry Cumings, A Sermon, Preached in Billerica on the 23rd of November, 1775. Being the Day Appointed by Civil Authority for Public Thanksgiving (Worcester, Mass., [1776]), 23. 100. Ibid. 101. Murray, Nehemiah, or the Struggle for Liberty Never in Vain, 9. For a strong challenge directly before the legislature in an election day sermon, see Samuel Stillman, A Sermon Preached before the Honorable Council, and the Honorable House of Representatives of Massachusetts-Bay, in NewEngland, at Boston, May 26, 1779. Being the Anniversary for the Election of the Honorable Council (Boston, Mass., 1779), 35. 102. Isaac Foster, A Discourse upon Extortion; Wherein it is Shewn, I. What Extortion Is. II. How Extortion is Practiced. III. That Enslaving of FellowCreatures is the Worst Kind of Extortion. IV. That By Enslaving the Negroes, the American States are Become Guilty of the Worst Kind of Extortion. . . . (Hartford, Conn., 1777), 8. 103. Ibid., 4, 11.

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104. Ibid., 13. 105. Ibid. 106. It may be an indication of Foster’s limited influence that this superb statement apparently exists today only in one fragmentary copy in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society. 107. The Rhode Island governor set an example when he freed his own slaves in 1773, and began agitating against the slave trade. He planned to train black clergymen to send to Africa. He was not directly related to Samuel Hopkins. See Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D. D., L. L. LD, President of Yale College, 3 vols., ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York, 1901), 1:363–4. For the Yale graduate’s poetic plea, see Joel Barlow, The Prospect of Peace (New Haven, Conn., 1778), 6. The Massachusetts government adopted the policy to forbid sale into slavery of any black prisoners of war. See Resolution of September 14, 1776, Massachusetts Bay, Resolves of the General Assembly of the State of Massachusetts-Bay ([Boston], [1776]), 14. Likewise, Connecticut forbade the sale of slaves owned by absentees’ estates, and Massachusetts eventually adopted a similar de facto policy. See Assembly Resolution, October, 1779, Public Records of the [Colony and] State of Connecticut, ed. Benjamin Hoadly and J. H. Trumbull, 15 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1887), 2:427–8. 108. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro and the American Revolution (New York, 1973), 51–93; David O. White, Connecticut’s Black Soldiers, 1775–1783 (Chester, Conn., 1973); James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (London, 1976). 109. Massachusetts Bay, A Constitution and Form of Government for the State of Massachusetts-Bay (Boston, Mass., 1778), 7; A Constitution of Frame of Government, Agreed upon by the Delegates of the People of the State of Massachusetts-Bay (Boston, Mass., 1780), 25. It would still require suits by Walker and Freeman against their masters to bring down the institution. See John Wood Sweet, “‘More than Tears’: The Ordeal of Abolition in Revolutionary New England,ˮ Explorations in Early American Culture 5 (2001) 118–72; and Zilversmit, The First Emancipation, 114. 110. Jonathan D. Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York, 2001). 111. Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston, Mass., 1998), 203. See also Anne S. Lombard, Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England (Cambridge Mass., 2003); and Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, Pa., 2007), 19–30. Poor women could receive harsh punishments in criminal courts. For an example, see sentences of Susannah Lamb et al., September 1775, Newport County Superior Court Record Book, vol. F, 1779–1795, Rhode Island State Supreme Court Judicial Records Center, Pawtucket, R.I., 121–2. 112. Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism (New York, 1992), 155.

244 The Radical Critique of Tory Oligarchy, Slavery, and Patriarchy 113. Ruth H. Bloch, “Untangling the Roots of Modern Sex Roles: A Survey of Four Centuries of Change,ˮ in Ruth H. Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 2003), 49. See pp. 42–54. See also Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, Md., 2002), 227–98. 114. Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 205. See pp. 185–224. 115. Catherine Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven, Conn., 2013). 116. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, Ill., 1992). The ultramasculine practice of dueling, which was becoming ever more common in the Old World over the eighteenth century, did not exist in New England. See Stephen Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman (Rochester, N.Y., 2010). 117. On the transition of “virtueˮ from republican ideal to female moral mandate, smoothing the way to the straitjacket of the Republican Mother, see Ruth H. Bloch, “Republican Virtue: The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,ˮ in Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 136–53. See also Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 285–328. For a darker evaluation of women’s increasing responsibility in the era – blaming the victim – see Joan R. Gundersen, To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740–1790 (New York, 1996), 113–31. 118. For the suggestion that population growth undermined paternal control and that individuals free of patriarchs became more likely to marry in exogamous fashion, to be attracted to evangelical enthusiasm, and to be drawn into the independence movement of 1776, see Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), 276–82. For an anonymous feminist harbinger of the future, see Sentiments of an American Woman (Boston, Mass., 1780), broadside. 119. Alfred F. Young, “The Women of Boston: ‘Persons of Consequence’ in the Making of the American Revolution, 1765–76,ˮ in Harriet Applewhite and Darlene G. Levy, ed., Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), 181–226. 120. Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson (New York, 2004). 121. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, Mass., 1980); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980); Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, ed. Women in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1989). Some of the most remarkable women of the period did the cause no good, striving to bring the believer “out of all commotions, and noises, and parties, and tumults.ˮ See [Jemima Wilkinson], Some Considerations, Propounded to

Notes

122.

123. 124. 125.

126. 127.

128.

129.

130.

131. 132.

245

the Several Sorts and Sects of Professors of this Age ([Providence, R.I.], 1779), 89. See also Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994). Committees were humane if possible. See Petition of Mary Brightman, August, 1779, RIHS, Petitions to the Rhode Island Assembly, vol. 17, 76; Petition of Elizabeth Whitman, February, 1780, RIHS, Petitions to the Rhode Island Assembly, vol. 17:131. Deposition of Elizabeth Hamilton, August 9, 1779, RIHS, General Assembly Papers, C-00251, Revolutionary War: Suspected Persons, 1775–83, 118. Claim of Margaret Draper, c. 1784, PRO AO 13/44, 339v. See ff. 339–40. Claim of Margaret Draper, March 19, 1784, ibid., 341v. See also Petition by Margaret Draper to the Lords of the Treasury, October 15, 1782, PRO AO 13/44, 349–50. Patience and Eunice Northrup of North Milford present another example of activism. See Assembly Resolution, February 1778, Public Records of the State of Connecticut, 1:554. See also Petition of Mandy Stark and Elizabeth Stinson, November 16, 1779, Petitions, October 1779 to September 1780, NHSA. Claim of Rebecca Callahan, January 17, 1784, PRO AO 13/50, 1. Gail M. Potter, “Maid of Marblehead,ˮ New-England Galaxy 16 (1975), 34–40; Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 1:436–8. For other examples, see Claim of Thomas Wyer, March 25, 1784, PRO AO 13/5, 651–4; and Petition of Elizabeth Rogers, January 26, 1778, Petitions, 1778–79, NHSA. Northborough Justices of the Peace to the Sheriff of Worcester County, July 11, 1777, U.S. Revolution Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., Folder 5. Janice Potter-MacKinnon, While the Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women (Montreal, Que., 1993), 58, 142. For an example of an absconded woman who had not been able to obtain any support from her estate in New Hampshire, see Claim of Isabella Nevin, PRO AO 13/53, 193–93v. The government awarded the traditional one-third to a woman in the form of an annuity even though the absconder’s estate was completely liquidated. See Commonwealth of Massachusetts, In Senate, re: Love Adams, November 12, 1782, PRO AO 13/43, 12. Of course, some women exiles in Britain faced destitution. See Mary Asby to John Robinson, October 5, 1776, PRO AO 13/43, 141; Claim of Ann Asby, April 14, 1788, PRO AO 13/43, 147–47v; Sarah Baker to the Lords of the Treasury, October 15, 1784, PRO AO 13/43, 345–6; Bathsheba Rogers to Samuel Rogers, January 22, 1784, PRO AO 13/48, 395–6. Kate Davies, Catherine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (New York, 2005). Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), 364. See pp. 359–67. On the subversive implications of a loyalist suit to reverse one of the confiscations, see Linda K. Kerber, “The Paradox of Women’s Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805,ˮ in Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays by Linda K. Kerber (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 261–302.

246 The Radical Critique of Tory Oligarchy, Slavery, and Patriarchy 133. Keith Mason, “The American Loyalist Problem of Identity in the Revolutionary Atlantic World,ˮ in Bannister and Riordan, The Loyal Atlantic, 47. See pp. 39–74. 134. Edward Winslow to Jonathan Sewall, December 13, 1778, in W. O. Raymond, ed., Winslow Papers, 1776–1826 (St. John, N.B., 1901), 35. 135. Judith N. Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago, Ill., 1998), 155. 136. Committee Report, December 15, 1773, Town of Gloucester, Mass., Town Records, 1753–1820, mf. copy in the Massachusetts Archives, Boston, Mass., 3:147.

8 The “Ugly Question” of Confiscation

Americans attend to Freedom’s cry! Who scorns her voice deserves to die . . . Base slaves you’ll live, like malefactors die! Phillis Wheatley, “The Voice of Freedom,” 1773

According to Wallace Brown, echoing Progressive historians like J. Franklin Jameson, “a huge amount of property” changed hands as a result of the loyalists’ exile, an amount impossible to quantify precisely.1 By contrast, Richard D. Brown finds that the sale of Massachusetts loyalist estates brought little to state coffers, if one calculates the depreciation of currency. His research suggests that the people who purchased loyalist property were already well-to-do, not the common people. So by his measure, confiscation was not on a large scale and did not lead to a restructuring of society.2 In the debate over the size of the confiscations and who got what, historians have neglected the role of ideology. It is more useful to weigh the decision-making by which rebels managed and disciplined the loyalists, a deeply subversive course of action, whatever the economic results. Phillis Wheatley’s fierce warning to loyalists after the Boston Tea Party was rhetorically overheated, marking the beginning of a long process that ended in generosity and reconciliation. Confiscation of the absconders’ property became politically inescapable as the war wound down.3 It was very painful for the rebels, for it was contrary to the social ideal that every individual deserved the community’s defense, and it violated the right to free speech. Way down deep in the hearts of the revolutionaries, it was contrary to the belief that 247

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every individual has the right to hold independent views even at odds with those of everyone else. A radical revolution has to cope with the shame of this basic unfairness: one’s property must be forfeit if necessary to preserve internal security against social disorder and military invasion, and to recompense a wounded community. Thus, confiscation was a profoundly unsettling sacrifice for the common good that must be called leveling.

the decision to banish absconded loyalists The Historical Background of Confiscation “Tories,” as John Adams put it in 1781, were one of the “Ugly Questions” to be settled after the war.4 From the outset, everyone knew that the winning side would conduct reprisals against the losers. As one writer put it in February 1775, to explain the strength of loyalism, “all moneyed men are convinced that acts of rebellion will be punished with confiscation of their estates” by the British.5 Ebenezer Baldwin predicted from his pulpit in Danbury that if the British won, the rebellion’s leaders would be executed and “estates will be generally confiscated.”6 John Trumbull warned: “Such spoils our Tory friends shall bless! / While confiscation at command / Shall stalk in horror thro’ the land, / Shall give your Whigestates away.”7 Dispossession of those with the wrong loyalties was as old a practice as private property itself. Just as the Norman Conquest had been about the land, every conquest in Britain had been about the same thing. It was no surprise that in 1651–2, the Commonwealth seized 780 Royalist estates in England. The act fell hardest on the untitled gentry, for nobles often had the influence and money to recover their estates later.8 It does not appear that the republicans were very vindictive toward the crown’s leading supporters. By contrast, the men of the Restoration in 1660 were more animated by revenge, and their policy would have been terrible if Charles II had been permitted to make his father’s “murderers” truly pay. As it was, according to the settlement, Charles could only target the judges at his father’s trial, although he also regained crown and church lands lost in 1649.9 The king’s treatment of the regicides was a crimson pageant of cruelty, and it was well remembered in New England. The influential Jonas Clarke sermonized the Massachusetts General Court in 1781: Charles II, that “flattering tyrant,” had set up a “scene of

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blood” in 1660, in which he had “attainted and proscribed . . . many of the worthiest characters,” and sacrificed “the best blood of the nation.”10 Most recently, after each of two Stuart rebellions in 1715 and 1745, the English had seized and sold the estates of leading rebels.11 For centuries, rebellions in Catholic Ireland had resulted in the sweeping seizures of Irish land for English or Scots Protestant colonists. Confiscation was an ancient custom but it seemed hard to reconcile with the revolutionary ideology of 1776. As a result, the rebels came to the final step with great hesitation. Radicals like James Warren protested the delay because certain politicians, out of “their own Ambition and popular Applause, will Contend with violence for the Principle [of confiscation,] and then reduce it to Nothing by the small Number [of loyalist estates actually condemned] . . . for all are to be pleased.”12 The truth was that radicals like Warren varied along a spectrum in their attitude toward confiscation. As Richard D. Brown discovered, Continental Congress first suggested confiscation to the states in November 1777, but only in late spring, 1779 did the legislature move in Massachusetts, somewhat earlier in Connecticut, and only in 1781 did governments begin liquidating some estates to satisfy debtors.13 Radicals were well represented in those legislatures, and might have moved the confiscation process along if they were as committed to it as their rhetoric suggested. Down deep, rebels in all colonies knew that premature confiscation could come back to haunt them if they lost the war. Rebel confiscations might stiffen British resolve, and would help the British rationalize extensive retaliation if they won. As for how much the legislatures ultimately confiscated, it is probably beyond arithmetic calculation, and almost beside the point. When it was over, the distribution of wealth may not have changed much, but the long revolutionary process involved most local common people in the “loyalist problem,” and enabled them to create a new settled legal order.14 The rebels of 1776 had good reason to assume from the beginning that George III would imitate Charles II: he would be without pity if the Mother Country won the war. “From the barbarous cruelties which have marked her steps in the prosecution of the present war,” one could easily imagine “what would be our unhappy fate, should her wrath prevail.”15 Mary Champlin of South Kingston reported a conversation between loyalist Joseph Hazard and Thomas Champlin in 1779, which clearly indicated that everyone knew the rebel would pay by “loosing his Estat” if the British won.16 As John Lathrop intoned, the rebels knew “the

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dreadful vengeance which will be inflicted on the Americans, if GreatBritain should prevail.”17 Thus, the new governments conducted confiscation in a historically informed frame of mind, but such that only absconders eventually paid the full price. Even in their case, the rebels gave the exiles years to recant. Although some common people might have been better satisfied to see more loyalist property redistributed, most people understood the real potential danger to everyone if the state could seize a person’s property merely for political nonconformity.18 The Long and Winding Road to Confiscation On November 27, 1777, after the Battle of Saratoga, Continental Congress voted a resolution to sell absentees’ estates and invest the proceeds in Continental loan certificates. That was to facilitate what rebels had long known they must do if the absentees did not return.19 It marked no major turning point, merely a state of impending foreclosure. Given the possibility that the British would give up on the war after Saratoga, it was a decision that should be made before negotiations began. Then, on April 23, 1778, Congress made a remarkable final proclamation of amnesty for absconded loyalists, still displaying a generous spirit. Anyone who had aided the enemies of America, but now “anxiously wishing to be received and reunited to their Country,” and “returning to their Duty,” should be received by their states with pardons.20 They had until June 10 to surrender to a civil or military officer, who should receive them “with Compassion and Mercy, and to forgive and bury in Oblivion their past Failings and Transgressions.”21 Radical John Lathrop had extended an invitation to loyalists in his March Fifth oration in 1778: “We esteem converts to the true interest of our country, and rejoice to see any come in even at the eleventh hour.”22 If Thomas Hutchinson himself had sailed to Boston in 1778 and made the necessary, abject declarations, he could have come home, if not to enjoy all his extensive property. Sadly informed by history, the rebels broke with the barbarous past to display the humanity of their rule. That is the reason the ultras like James Warren continued to pump up the rhetoric but did not pursue total confiscation and banishment in earnest. Their ringing speeches served mainly to shame and cow “Tories.ˮ They believed that mercy was the true test of greatness in victors, and, obviously, every repentant loyalist made the Revolution that much more benign.23 In fact, all the New England states delayed passing laws to confiscate, and then dragged out the execution of the laws. They

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long avoided the final act of liquidating property because it was unkind and divisive, a last resort in the public interest, an embarrassment to their high ideals. As John Adams put it so famously, the real Revolution of 1776 was “in the Minds of the People.”24 By 1783 they had taken actions against loyalists in many ways and infringed on their property rights. They had done so with good reasons – the domestic security problem raised by the many loyalists who remained in New England and the irresponsible absenteeism of the absconded, who had broken the law by abandoning their property. Yet, cautious rebels fretted that the takings might make the dispossessors reckless. As William Whiting put it, he was afraid the yeomen were drunk with power over the loyalists. He wagged a finger at the rebels that they “unluckily found,” at the beginning of the war, that “the greater number of those gentlemen, whom you had been wont to revere as the makers of the law, the judges of law, the pleaders of law, and the executors of the law,” were on the loyalist side. As a result, the rebels had come to have “an undue jealousy and hatred” of all men who were their betters.25 Since Whiting was a philosophic skeptic, he could not imagine the rebels were on the right track. Because he was a moral skeptic, Whiting could not believe the rebels could act in a rational manner without the virtuous ballast provided by the old conservatives, whereas the rebels were optimists about human nature, believing that society would be more rational without the basic unfairness of traditional hierarchy and upper-class domination. After all, they had not made the absconders leave in the first place. And their flight helped rebels become deeply suspicious that “Great Generals and Lords strut and spurn,” and were too “fond of having room enough to turn.”26 When loyalist William Pynchon of Essex County ventured into Boston after the British evacuation, he found the contempt barbers and tailors showed his wig “to border on malevolence.”27 Wigs symbolized everything wrong about the old regime, and were done for. In the rebels’ view, the principles of property and political authority were separate and equally important spheres, whereas men like Whiting or Pynchon believed that legitimate power arose only from property and birth. They regarded the common good as an airy philosophical abstraction, rather than a naturally mandated popular authority prior to that of the king. Loyalists believed egalitarian rebels would be savage about confiscation, for if Pynchon and his friends had won the war they would have punished the rebels severely to teach them a lesson.

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the dissolution of loyalist estates Massachusetts Confiscation became a little more politically complicated in Massachusetts in 1778, when James Warren, the Plymouth County radical, charged that there was a counter-revolution occurring under Governor Hancock’s leadership. The governor’s faction wished to confiscate only a handful of estates and permit the easy re-entry of exiles. Hancock’s plan obviously aimed to keep as many of the loyalists in the state as possible. Some local committees were allowing returnees to take a simple oath to regain rights, while the Council refused to deport even the short list of persisting activist loyalists targeted by their towns.28 Warren spoke for those who opposed the easy return of absconders and demanded exile for those obstinate persisters who opposed the Revolution. However, the majority outnumbered the minority of ultras and moderated policy. The same situation would arise during the Civil War of the 1860s, when radicals in Congress thought confiscation should be a programmatic means of reconstructing southern society, but could not convince a majority of fellow Republicans.29 On April 30, 1779, the Massachusetts legislature finally took the big step of passing two acts to end uncertainty about loyalist property. It represented a compromise measure between moderates and radicals, driven partly by the embarrassment of failing to write a successful Constitution in 1778. The question of what to do about loyalists structured the two incipient political parties, and laid the political groundwork for Shays’s Rebellion in the 1780s. On balance, the final Confiscation Act was emphatic – a few rich men forfeited much property because they had put themselves on the wrong side of history. But in the end, a better measure of the rebels’ ideology is the large number of loyalists who never left the region and kept their property.30 The language justifying this public taking was legalistic, constitutionalist, that is, historically oriented, temperate. The first act dissolved the sequestered estates of twenty-nine “notorious Conspirators against the Government and Liberties of the Inhabitants of the late Province, now State, of Massachusetts-Bay.”31 The names comprised the core of crown officialdom in the state, from Governor Hutchinson to the customs men. These men had “wickedly conspired to overthrow and destroy the Constitution of Government” of 1691, and they helped to reduce the New Englanders “under the absolute Power and Domination of the present

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king, and of the Parliament of Great-Britain.”32 As a result, they were aliens, who had not attempted to return to Massachusetts, humbly or otherwise. The second act, addressing non-officeholders, was more evasively titled “An Act for Confiscating the Estates of Certain Persons Commonly Called Absentees,” but also asserted a traditional legal argument. An enemy had invaded Massachusetts, and when society is in that kind of crisis, “no Member thereof can then withdraw himself from the jurisdiction of the Government,” and “deprive” society of his services, as the absconders had done.33 To do so necessarily meant one forfeited all rights “derived from the constitution,” meaning the one of 1649 and 1689. Both acts continued to protect local wives and children of the absentees, given that they were not active loyalists. Also, the law guaranteed an absentee’s right to appeal the decision of an inferior court to the Superior Court.34 If the losses of a few men were big, altogether the takings of personal and developed real estate were not immense, by contrast to the huge western acreage they lost. For every loyalist like Robert Auchmuty, former advocate general in Boston, who could claim he “lost everything he had to lose in the World,” there were many others who could not say that.35 Only 307 were banished by this state. The process came under intense fire by the contemporary historian of the Revolution from South Carolina, David Ramsay. He argued that the policy of Congress to freeze prices and wages and to sell confiscated estates were big errors, which “wrecked private property, and injured the morals of the people without answering the end proposed.”36 Ultimately, the proceeds from sales of loyalist estates brought very little of value to the treasury because of the progressive depreciation of the currency, so that “what was dear at the time of the purchase, was very cheap at the time of payment.”37 What Ramsay did not understand was that monetary return to coffers was not the main point.38 Confiscation’s stated purpose was to restore the vitality of lands neglected by absconders, to heal the gaping wound in the community, and to reward the deserving, especially rebel soldiers who had not been paid. Confiscations can never be “fair,” but in the last analysis this one was quite orderly, and carried out at a slow pace, over several years, and it unlocked a lot of land.39 It is impossible to prove exactly the degree to which confiscations helped refloat the economy in the 1780s, but it must have played a role.40 However, the seizure of private property by committees of humble townsmen helped corrode ancient rules of deference, confirming the revolutionary role of the common man, and ending the traditional privileged acquisition of huge tracts by political leverage.

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The long ordeal reveals no class warfare as such. David E. Maas shows how the rebels plundered absentee estates in Massachusetts for wartime necessities, morselizing them by maintenance fees and military appropriations, milking them for the common good. Still, Maas emphasizes a plodding legal process. Despite the whittling away of this property, He shows that the core absentee holdings were still in the hands of the government before the final dissolution. In the end, the creditors of the absentees’ estates, especially the taxpayers, could not wait indefinitely to be paid.41 Nevertheless, Stephen Patterson thinks there was some truth in William Gordon’s contemporary criticism that mainly western radicals and those who held Continental currency demanded confiscations, exchanging that increasingly worthless paper for real loyalist property.42 For numerous westerners, the unimproved acreage lost by the loyalists was the great reward of the Revolution. As for Gordon, his attack on confiscation was unwise. In response, the radicals drove him out of the chaplaincy of the Massachusetts House of Representatives.43 Clearly, society’s general profile remained stratified, even while the confiscations did cause churn on the frontier by giving poor farmers an outlet, and in the seaports the exile of a number of the elite created places to be filled by others from the same stratum. For example, a group of leading Essex County families – including Lowells, Higginsons, Jacksons, Cabots – established themselves through cadets in Boston to help fill the void left by exiles.44 Thus, wealthy elites quickly re-knit themselves, in the United States after 1776 as in France after 1795. Even during the last years of the war, elites advanced well along the path to reconsolidation. So the basic structure of socio-economic class changed less than the old Progressive historians thought. Despite that, the common people, especially in the rural towns, were better off with free institutions, as they faced a reinvigorated capitalist class in the seaports after 1783, and as the lure of the West drew their children away from the older towns.45 Now, the members of all classes at least subscribed to democratic-republican ideology. Samuel Adams exemplifies the political radical who believed it necessary to overthrow the ruling class and its army, but not the basic structure of private property. With sweet irony, he leased the comfortable home of one of his former chief antagonists, Benjamin Hallowell.46 And in 1778, Adams wrote a wrathful letter to James Warren in Massachusetts that he could not bear to think that “traiters” who “basely forsook their Country in Distress” and constantly worked against the Revolution, might not have their estates confiscated.47 “Shall these wretches have their Estates

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reserved for them and restored at the Conclusion of this glorious struggle” just because they had “Money in England” to sustain them?48 Adams knew the Warrens agreed with him on the question, but it does not appear that he hoped to purge the loyalists root and branch, just the absconders. He knew the Warren types preferred moderation on the issue of the persisters.49 After all, the Warrens were a far cry from plain farmers. Moreover, public opinion in England was also a consideration: popular discontent with the war there might be dampened by large confiscations in America. In the end, the ultras accepted a formula that left most loyalists with their property and their rights intact. Connecticut The colony is an ideal candidate for special emphasis, for its archives contain a wealth of documents on the subject of confiscation. Any historian who wishes to take up this difficult subject should start here. The colony had very great human and natural resources. When the Revolution began, it boasted one of the most healthful demographic profiles in the world, including an almost equal number of males and females, a naturally graduated age profile, and a prevalence of independent yeomen. In 1774, this population enjoyed a growth of 52 percent in only 18 years, since the census of 1756, mainly by reproduction!50 In general, the Revolution would be good for the state’s land-hungry common people, whose upward social mobility Jackson T. Main measures, even if it did little for the poorest.51 Overall, Main believes the loyalists seriously threatened the Revolution’s success, and treatment of loyalists by the rebels was “lenient and justifiable,” when measured against that threat.52 This persuasive argument can be generalized to most of New England. To describe better the gradualness of dispossession, it might be useful to provide a list of the major loyalist laws and their dates in this state (see Table 8.1).53 The legislature obviously had great difficulty with the loyalist problem, forced to act many times. The table also bears out the argument that rebels long remained willing to accept any recanting loyalist. Connecticut was different from Massachusetts in certain ways. Its executive, legislative, and judicial branches were not as strictly separate as in the Bay Colony, especially in that all three branches exercised judicial powers at times. Moreover, the towns appear to have been slightly less independent than those of Massachusetts, deferring more often to the colonial government for assistance in solving some local problems. This

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table 8.1. Acts of the Connecticut Legislature Concerning Loyalists and Their Estates, 1775–84 December, 1775 December, 1775 June, 1776

July, 1776 October, 1776

May, 1777 May, 1777 May, 1777 May, 1777 October, 1777 October, 1777 May, 1778

May, 1779

November, 1780 November, 1780 February, 1781 February, 1781

May, 1781 May, 1784

Act to Restrain and Punish Inimicals Act . . . Relating to Escheats and Other Estates Act . . . Punishing Persons who are Inimical to the Liberties of this and the Rest of the United Colonies Resolution to Stop Suspected Persons Act for Apprehending and Securing such Inimical Persons as Shall be Deemed and Adjudged Dangerous to the State Act Prescribing and Enjoining an Oath of Fidelity to this State [or, Test Act] Act to Prevent Traiterous Conspiracies against this and the United States of America Act in Addition to an Act [to Allow Collections for Debt against Estates of the Absconded] Resolution of the Assembly that the Governor Pardon Absconded Inimicals who Return Act in Addition to a Law [to Enlarge the Test Act] Act Concerning the Real Estates of Aliens and Persons Inimical to the United States of America Act for Confiscating the Estates of Persons Inimical to the Independence and Liberties of the United States within this State, and for payment of their Debts Resolution of the Assembly that General Amnesty be Accorded Absconded Inimicals who Return by October and Submit to Local Authorities Act for Assessing Certain Inimical Persons [whose Sons are with the Enemy] Act More Effectually to Prevent Robberies and Plunders from Our Open and Secret Enemies Act for the Punishment of High Treason and Other Atrocious Crimes against the State Act for the More Effectually Preventing [by Court Martial] Inimical Persons in Executing their Traiterous Designs Act for Raising Supplies [by the Sale of Confiscated Estates] Act Relative to Debts due to Persons who have been and Remained within the Enemies Power, or Lines during the War

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may have been a function of the smaller geographic size of the colony and the greater proximity to the capital of many towns, but it also seems to have been a matter of taste for outside arbitration.54 One should not mistake all that as a mark of greater harmony, for politics were highly competitive. The Great Awakening had caused sharp division in this colony, with New Lights reacting to Old Lights’ political purges of them from office by making a concerted and successful effort to forge a majority in the General Assembly in the 1750s, where they attempted to purge the Council, the upper house of the General Assembly, of its Old Lights. Thus, in the 1760s, the colony divided into the anti-Susquehanna, western, predominantly Old-Light and Anglican faction headed by Governor Thomas Fitch, and the pro-Susquehanna, eastern faction containing many New Lights, headed by future Governor Jonathan Trumbull.55 A conservative, more commercial New York-oriented west and southwest were ranged against the restless yeomanry of the east. This was all connected to the astonishing success of the Church of England in the colony, including many spectacular individual and parish conversions, especially in the anti-Susquehanna region. Only the Stamp Act and subsequent British measures gave the Trumbull group the edge they needed. A majority of voters had turned Governor Fitch out of office in 1766, replacing him with a non-allied long-time administrator. After the latter’s death, Trumbull captured the governorship in 1770, and the Susquehanna faction gradually gained control. The geographic factionalism became interwoven with the imperial crisis.56 However, the two sides did not hate each other like the up-country farmers and low-country planters of North Carolina. When Samuel and John Adams passed through conservative New Haven in August, 1774 on their way to Congress, they were a little surprised by the cordial politeness from Jared Ingersoll and his loyalist friends. Ingersoll had been the focus of intense crowd hostility back in 1765, and was now a stalwart in the loyalist community, but extended a hand to the Congressional delegates.57 Despite Tory sway in New Haven, Benedict Arnold managed to put that town on the rebel side by persuading its militia to march to the siege of Boston in April, 1775. Even so, as Governor Trumbull privately moaned to George Washington, the geographic fissure put his state at as much risk from domestic subversion by “our internal malignants” as from British soldiers.58 It may reflect a special internal tension that Connecticut’s Confiscation Act of May, 1778 was the earliest in the region, and a number of

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absentees’ estates had already been confiscated in the interest of order. The legislature’s movement toward the final act was measured, even stately rather than excited. As late as May, 1779, the legislature declared amnesty for anyone who wished to return.59 The Assembly passed resolutions to allow veterans and civilians who had lost property in the war to make their claims against yields from the sales.60 The Assembly had to order a sale of absentee estates in five towns in January, 1781, to enable General Washington to pay his troops something on the spot.61 The Confiscation Act argued that the absconded loyalists and those who had aided the enemy had “forfeited” their property and the right to the protection of their respective states.62 But there were numerous careful restrictions. All seized estates had to be administered in the local court of probate, which would appoint two “judicious, disinterested persons” as commissioners to oversee the process. Only the town selectmen could inventory the loyalists’ property and initiate action against them. Judges should manage sales. One could go to a court and show cause why the estate should not be liquidated. The probate court was also responsible for making humane allowances for wives and children of exiles.63 That was particularly true of women like Mary Hoyt, who proclaimed that from the beginning of the imperial crisis she “had very Different Princaples & Sentiments from her Husband.”64 Every effort was made to protect the exiles’ rights, but by remaining with the enemy, absconded loyalists had self-selected themselves as people liable to pay the penultimate price short of execution: banishment and confiscation. They had encouraged the enemy in a bloody civil war, and they had to help pay the cost of American freedom, unless they could bring themselves to be abjectly sorry. The final word came a year after the Confiscation Act, when the legislature passed one last resolution that the towns should welcome any exiles who wished to return to the state, if they were “convinced of their error and great misconduct to the satisfaction of selectmen.”65 If a town would not accept an applicant, he could apply directly to the governor, who would help him find accommodations in the interior counties. As for their property, there was a vague promise that returnees “may expect further favour as their conduct shall merit.”66 When the American Army began to disband in 1781, much loyalist property remained intact, and only then did the desperate financial condition of the new treasury lead the legislature to take the final step. The legislators ordered that local authorities should break up any large tracts owned by absentees into small plots suitable for farms, the most democratizing moment of the war.67 According to one careful analysis, only 150 loyalists were

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banished in Connecticut, although that is not including an indeterminate number of completely abandoned estates liquidated earlier. The sheer volume of documentation suggests confiscation was an important phase of Connecticut history. New Hampshire On November 19, 1778, the New Hampshire legislature banished forever 77 people as irreconcilable absentees who had joined the enemy. Of these, 50 of them (65 percent) were denominated as gentlemen, esquires, doctors, or traders, and only 27 of them (35 percent) were commoners (18 yeomen, 5 mariners, 3 artisans, and a clerk). That was a fair indication of the degree to which men of wealth and influence were disproportionately represented in the list of exiles. They must never return, and on the second attempt to return would suffer a sentence of death.68 The accompanying confiscation acts only condemned the estates of 28 of the absentees, including those of the richest absconders, and left it up to the probate judges to make allowance for exiles’ family members who remained in the state.69 That was hardly the end of it. Confiscation dragged out so long the legislature had to craft a much more detailed supplementary administrative act in 1782. The legislators also had to attend to a host of lesser bills dealing with individual estates, especially those in the disputed New Hampshire Grants.70 The historian who has studied the question most closely concludes that as few as one hundred families went into permanent exile from the state.71 New Hampshire exiles’ claims before the Loyalist Claims Commission amounted to only £185,787, so most loyalists had stayed in the state and lost little.72 Rhode Island The outcome in this state was unique, as historians often must say about Rhode Island. The rebels had to be especially cautious about confiscations because the state remained vulnerable to maritime assault and occupation for a long time. As the governor explained late in 1779, the state would benefit by quick sale of loyalist property while the currency’s value was so low, but then if the British regained their footing somewhere in the extensive Narragansett Bay, the exposed property of leading rebels “might suffer greatly” by retaliation.73 The state finally got around to passing a banishment act in the middle of 1780, when the front line of battle seemed unlikely to return to New England. It listed only 36 men,

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of which no fewer than 25 were denominated as “Esquire,” Gentleman" or “Merchant.”74 The rest were mariners and yeomen. The usual penalty of death was included for any who tried to return. In May, 1778, the legislature had declared a general amnesty for anyone wishing to sign the test who had not done so. This policy was still in effect in 1782, when a group totaling 27 began a series of quiet formal conversions all over the state.75 Nevertheless, the net worth and social weight of banished loyalists was impressive, and the effects rippled across the state, so the Rhode Islanders were no less involved in the loyalist takings than rebels in other colonies. Yet, clearly this state banished the fewest and appeared to yearn for rapid closure. That was in tune with the pacifist spirit of the Quaker and Baptist minorities for which this state was long (in)famous. Thus, adding all those for Massachusetts (307), Connecticut (150), New Hampshire (77), and Rhode Island (36), only 570 New Englanders were banished and lost their estates by the confiscation acts. Vermont While the records of this state were not studied for the present book, it is worth noting that, allowing for some peculiarities, the process of sequestration, banishment and confiscation seems much the same there as in Massachusetts or New Hampshire. The main difference was that the Yankees (people holding their land by grant from New Hampshire), tried to gain advantage over the Yorkers by treating them as loyalists at the beginning of the war. Yet the rebels played a delicate game of flirtation with the British, and adopted contradictory and confusing policies, for the Yankees were divided among themselves, causing something like a stalemate in politics. By 1783, confiscations were not large.76 Most loyalists remained in the state and suffered only symbolic losses.77

britain’s claims commission and loyalist losses The rebels assumed the British government would do something to compensate displaced loyalists at the war’s end. From the beginning, the crown put the leading absconders in England on part or full salary or stipends, amounting to £68,000 annually by 1781.78 When the rebels failed to hold on to Canada, it seemed likely that the government would plant refugees there. Parliament set up a claims commission to make cash

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awards, pensioned off crown officials, put military inactives on half pay, absorbed most of the exiled clergy in the English Church, and established temporary annual allowances to a class of 588 claimants who could not prove they had lost property but had served the government in some way. The government granted 3,000,000 acres in the Canadian provinces to exiles and provided them with rations, fuel, and clothing for a period, at significant expense.79 However, the minority of exiles who were able to make post-war claims for the British government’s cash compensation were only moderately successful. Only 3,225 filed claims.80 Altogether, they put in claims for £10,358,413; but the commission heard only 2,291 applicants, who claimed £8,216,126, of which the judges awarded only £2,096,326 and left up to Parliament £936,764, most of which was awarded, which included £500,000 to the Penn family for the loss of their proprietorship.81 Esmond Wright has estimated the total outlay by the British for the loyalists by 1789 at £7.5 million sterling, not a negligible sum. It would come to £125 per capita if there were 60,000 exiles.82 The claims from New England were fewer than for other regions. Massachusetts (226 claims) accounted for 10 percent of all claims heard, but the two states where refugees tended to accumulate – New York (941) and South Carolina (321) – accounted for many more.83 How much a claimant received depended on his socio-economic status, and degree of personal sacrifice. Generally speaking, the typical banished loyalist received only a portion of what he claimed to have lost. In general, the rich got disproportionately more, ordinary people less. Those of Scots and Irish birth figured disproportionately among those examined, in part because those groups were disproportionately loyalist, and in part because they were more likely to get to England and file.84 The 468 women who made claims received rewards less generous than those received by men, despite the fact that the overall tone of their memorials was more desperate, their expressions of humility more gendered and deferential.85 The Claims Commission figures are misleading, for the loyalists as a whole lost a great deal more than is found in its records, especially immeasurable valuables like dignity. Moreover, the claims provide a biased view because men’s voices are predominant even though women suffered like the men from deprivation, communal shunning, and the disruptions of war.86 So the figures do not measure suffering very accurately. For one basis of comparison, consider those who fought the war. The war cost 25,000 American citizens their lives (or one percent of the whole),

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and 20,000 veterans took the pauper’s oath between 1818 and 1820 to get pensions from the federal government.87 The loyalists suffered substantially less overall. It is true that the loyalists’ organization complained that the Commission was not generous enough, and demanded more compensatory annuities. In response, the Privy Council harrumped that “the recovery of the Estates of the loyalists was among the Reasons for continuing the War whilst there was the least prospect of Success,” so the loyalists should feel lucky they received as much as they did.88 Still, even just obtaining land in New Brunswick was not a snap. Despite Moses Akerley’s appeal that he had been a prosperous farmer and had a son “most barbarously murder’d by a Banditti of Assasins” in “the late ungrateful and cruel Rebellion,” the authorities sent him to the poor relief lines rather than award him anything.89 To their credit, the British long paid loyalist soldiers to serve at the disputed Great Lakes posts, keeping their bellies full and giving them the satisfaction of annoying the people of the United States for many years.90 Still, only a handful of the richest loyalists who went into exile ended up in nearly the same circumstances in life as they began in 1775. If it is true that the ordinary exiles in Canada soon enjoyed comfort similar to what they had known before the war, on average, the least unfortunate loyalists were those who remained in the new states, bit their tongues, and took advantage of the rebels’ generosity.

how radical? Other statistics give some sense of confiscation’s magnitude. Liquidated absentees’ estates reached over £1 million in Massachusetts.91 However, again, the true upheaval in property ownership is best measured by the hundreds of townships established on big loyalist-owned speculative tracts, and in the much larger interior of the continent where the crown tried to take over land granting just before the Revolution broke out. Numerous landless colonists enjoyed extraordinary geographical mobility and obtained land in the West – no longer hampered by the crown in acquiring it, along with those wealthier rebels who got most of the loyalists’ developed property.92 Still, only the process of banishing neighbors and seizing their property can gauge the true social revolution, that is, what it meant to the consciousness and political philosophy of the rebels. The Revolution was radical because the great majority of rebels had to participate in humbling gentlemen and ladies, in shunning persisters and despoiling absconders, a duty fraught with the moral perils of self-interest

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and pride. Radicalism’s measure is not in the exact quantity of wealth that changed hands, but in actual stories of disciplining loyalists, of leveling persons if not society. The New England rebels were reluctant to despoil loyalists of their personal wealth for compelling reasons, especially historic political liberalism. That same impulse made them enthusiastic about breaking up the oligarchic nodes created by wealthy families, and releasing to the free market large expanses of acreage, which was formerly monopolized by speculators with privileged access to influence, beginning with royal governors.93 The rebels liberated for republican farming families millions of acres in New York and the valleys of the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers from privileged intriguers in Westminster and Boston.94 Just three loyalists of Connecticut – Samuel Peters, Justus Sherwood, and James Rogers – lost 116,000 undeveloped acres, the equivalent of hundreds of family farms.95 A rather obscure loyalist like Newport’s long-time Indian trader and British soldier Edward Cole suffered not just exile and loss of his businesses in Rhode Island, but his claims to enormous acreage in the West.96 As for developed property, most changed hands in legitimate court actions for debt – punitive takings were unusual.97 Nevertheless, the whole process was quite radicalizing for the people in all four colonies because the exiles’ property represented the tangible value of the ideals the exiles hated, and it unleashed the great land rush beyond the Proclamation Line of 1763, which guaranteed popular democratic power in the new states for generations. So the Revolution was very radical, as Bruce G. Merritt demonstrated in his sterling local study of Deerfield, Massachusetts. The town saw “a revolt against the last vestiges of a once influential local commercial elite which had monopolized both elective and appointive offices.”98 The rebels permanently barred these people from power, even while they allowed many other loyalists to stay in their homes, most of them to become active citizens. The rebels utterly discredited Tory monarchical ideology, banned short lists of absconders and finally seized their property, and moved pell-mell into the lands of unlucky speculators. But they did not try to wipe out the loyalists or outlaw their beliefs. Notes 1. Wallace Brown, The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York, 1969), 246; J. Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement, intro. Arthur M. Schlesinger (Boston, Mass., 1956).

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2. Richard D. Brown, “The Confiscation and Disposition of Loyalists’ Estates in Suffolk County, Massachusetts,ˮ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21 (1964), 534–50. 3. Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. and intro., Vincent Carretta (New York, 2001), 198. 4. John Adams to James Warren, August 19, 1781, Papers of John Adams, 18 vols., ed. Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint (Cambridge, Mass., 1977–2016), 13:255. 5. Extract from a letter from Boston, To a Gentleman of New York, February 19, 1775, Amer. Arch., 1:1248. On the Claims Commission, see Wallace Brown, The King’s Friends: The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants (Providence, R.I., 1965), 45–55. 6. Ebenezer Baldwin, The Duty of Rejoicing under Calamities and Afflictions, Considered and Improved in a Sermon, Preached at Danbury, November 16, 1775 (New York, 1776), 27. The earliest speculation that the British would execute large-scale confiscations was in December, 1774. See Joseph Lyman, A Sermon Preached at Hatfield December 15th, 1774, Being the Day Recommended by the Late Provincial Congress to be Observed as a Day of Thanksgiving (Boston, Mass., 1775), 25. 7. John Trumbull, The Satiric Poems of John Trumbull: The Progress of Dulness and M’Fingal, ed. Edwin T. Bowden (Austin, Tx., 1962), 145. For an explanation of how the work of an apparently radical Trumbull could make him a reactionary praetorian in the 1780s and 90s, see Christopher Grasso, “Print, Poetry, and Politics: John Trumbull and the Transformation of Public Discourse in Revolutionary America,ˮ Early American Literature 30 (1995), 5–31. 8. David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven, Conn., 1960), 7–8; Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (New York, 1988), 196–214. 9. A grand jury indicted the twenty-nine living regicides, and the crown executed ten of them in October. The executioner hanged them, then cut off their genitals, disemboweled them, excised their hearts and cast all those parts in a fire; then horses dragged what remained of the corpses into quarters. The heads went up on spikes on Tower and London Bridges, as well as on the city gates, until they disintegrated over the decades. Fifteen radicals called Fifth Monarchists followed them to the gallows in January 1661. On January 26, Parliament disinterred Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, Thomas Pride and John Bradshaw, and, for their part in the regicide, had carters take their remains to Tyburn to hang there in their coffins. The executioner then decapitated and buried them under the gallows, and mounted their heads on poles at the top of Westminster Hall, although someone retrieved Oliver’s, to enjoy its long afterlife of public display. See N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Malden, Mass., 2002), 55–7, 81–4; Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658– 1667 (New York, 1985), 132–7. By contrast, the confiscations following 1689 were not very extensive. See J. G. Simms, The Williamite Confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 (London, 1956).

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10. Jonas Clarke, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency John Hancock, Esq., Governor; His Honor Thomas Cushing, Esq., Lieutenant-Governor; the Honorable the Council, and the Honorable the Senate and House of Representatives, of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, May 30, 1781. Being the First Day of General Election, after the Commencement of the Present Constitution, and Inauguration of the New Government (Boston, Mass., 1781), 71, 73. 11. On the ’15, see Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 230–50; Margaret Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion: Preventing and Punishing Insurrection in Early Hanoverian Britain (Burlington, Vt., 2005), 130–49. The Forfeited Estates Commission collected no less than £411,082. On the ’45, see Geoffrey G. Plank, Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire (Philadelphia, Pa., 2008). 12. Brown, “The Confiscation and Disposition of Loyalists’ Estates in Suffolk County, Massachusetts,ˮ 536. 13. Ibid., 544–5. 14. For this thesis, see Howard Pashman, “The People’s Property Law: a Step Toward Building a New Legal Order in Revolutionary New York,ˮ Law and History Review 31 (2013), 587–626. 15. Henry Cumings, A Sermon Preached at Lexington, on the 19th of April, 1781. Being the Anniversary of the Commencement of Hostilities between Great-Britain and America, which Took Place in that Town, on the 19th of April, 1775 (Boston, Mass., 1781). 16. Deposition of Mary Champlin, July, 1779, RIHS, General Assembly Papers, C-00251, Revolutionary War: Suspected Persons, 1775–1783, 88. 17. John Lathrop, A Discourse, Preached on March the Fifth, 1778 (Boston, Mass., 1778), 19. 18. That is not the same thing as arguing that there was no unfairness. There is a ring of truth to loyalist William Matson’s claim that the auction of his confiscated estate was secretly rigged at a low price (thirty-six shillings per acre) to favor one buyer. See Petition of William Matson to the General Assembly, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 29:237. But the general character of the confiscations was not like that. 19. Resolution of Congress, November 27, 1777, Taylor et al., Papers of John Adams, 5:337. One can see this merely as an expedient response to the financial crisis. See Elbridge Gerry to John Adams, January 25, 1778, ibid., 395, for a feverish proposal to make the loyalist estates the basis of the Continental currency. For the classic study, see Andrew McFarland Davis, “The Confiscation Laws of Massachusetts,ˮ in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 8, Transactions (1902–04), 50–72. 20. U.S. Congress, In Congress, Whereas Persuasion and Influence, the Example of the Deluded or Wicked, the Fear of Danger, or the Calamities of War, May have Induced Some of the Subjects of these States to Join, Aid or Abet the British Forces in America (Philadelphia, Pa., 1778), broadside. 21. Ibid. 22. Lathrop, A Discourse, Preached on March the Fifth, 1778, 16.

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23. For a sustained argument to the contrary, that a cruel “king mobˮ destroyed basic civility in the land of steady habits, see David H. Villers, “King Mob and the Rule of Law: Revolutionary Justice in Connecticut, 1774–1783,ˮ in Loyalists and Community in North America, ed. Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and George Rawlyk (Westport, Conn., 1994), 17– 30. 24. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson August 14, 1815, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams–Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 455. See pp. 454–6. 25. [William Whiting], An Address to the Inhabitants of the County of Berkshire, Respecting their Present Opposition to Civil Government (Hartford, Conn., [1778]), 7. 26. [Wheeler Case], Poems, Occasioned by Several Circumstances and Occurrencies [sic], In the Present Grand Struggle of America for Liberty (New Haven, Conn., 1778), 11. 27. [William Pynchon], The Diary of William Pynchon of Salem, ed. Fitch Edward Oliver (Boston, Mass., 1890), 11–12. 28. James Warren to John Adams, October 7, 1778, Taylor et al., Papers of John Adams, 7:111–12. 29. Daniel W. Hamilton, The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War (Chicago, Ill., 2007); Silvana R. Siddali, From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge, La., 2005), 122–44. 30. Stephen E. Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (Madison, Wis., 1973), 201–8. 31. Act of the General Court, April 30, 1779, Massachusetts Bay, Acts and Laws Passed by the Great and General Court (Boston, Mass., 1779), 21. 32. Ibid. See pp. 21–3. 33. Act of the General Court, April 30, 1779, ibid., 233–6. See also Resolution of the General Court, May 1, 1779, ibid., 169, ordering the state treasurer to visit all agents of estates and committees of confiscation and obtain the proceeds from the lease of sequestered estates, to fund the army. 34. A classic gem of historical sleuthing concerns an exile loyalist and his estate, that of John Chandler of Worcester, who lived as a great country gentleman, with property valued at over £10,000 sterling. See Andrew McFarland Davis, The Confiscation of John Chandler’s Estate (Boston, Mass., 1903), 61. Davis describes the very gradual process of liquidation: even though Chandler left New England forever in March, 1776, the process was not completed until the end of the war. 35. Decision, Claim of Robert Auchmuty, May 9, 1873, PRO AO, 12/99, 240v– 41. 36. David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, 2 vols., ed., Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis, Ind., 1989), 459–60. 37. Ibid. For a clear example of the devaluation of the dollar against the pound – 75 to 1 – see State Treasurer’s Receipts, April 6, 1781, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, CSA, Hartford, Conn., 34:74.

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38. For rare anecdotal evidence of unfairness, see John Wheeler to John Chandler, and David Smith, March 28, 1781, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 34:23. 39. In 1782, the legislature ordered its agents to sell remaining loyalist property to officers and troops coming home with US government scrip in their pockets. See Davis, “The Confiscation Laws of Massachusetts.ˮ All of the costs were paid by the estates. For a typical schedule of costs for the liquidation of an absentee’s estate, see John Lyon’s Administration, March 25, 1782, Fairfield Probate District, File 8, 1779, Connecticut State Library, folder 6. It includes fees for appraisers, bondsmen, surveyors, commissioners, chainbearers, courts and scribes. 40. The story of confiscation in Rhode Island can be followed in Confiscated Estates, 1780–1784, Rhode Island State Archives, Manuscripts, Box C #1259. The most useful tool is the auction of leases for loyalist estates in 1780–81, found in the folder marked “Confiscated Estates – Inventories.” 41. David E. Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists (New York, 1989), 270–337. 42. Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 212. An example of how this could occur is found in the Claim of Thomas Swan, June 22, 1787, PRO AO 12/11, 102–4. By 1780, the State of Massachusetts was borrowing cash against the value of confiscated estates. See Indenture between Caleb Davis et al., and James Fallass, July 1, 1780, Massachusetts Archives, Royalists, 155:78–9. The currency conversion used by the state at that time was that $3,500 Continental currency equaled £50 “lawful money in coined silver specie, reckoning silver at six shillings, eight pence per ounce.” 43. The English-born Congregationalist Reverend Gordon also criticized Connecticut’s confiscation act, insisting doggedly on a legal argument that only those who took up arms against the United States after July Fourth should suffer confiscation. See William Gordon to John Adams, May 8, 1779, Taylor et al., Papers of John Adams, 8:56–7. See also Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 13:71. See pp. 60–72. 44. Tamara Plakins Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785–1860 (New Haven, Conn., 1989), 15–20; James A. Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington, Mass., 1973), 167. In a related act passed in 1780, all persons who had anything to do with the “taking or destroying any property, or apprehending and confining any Personˮ in an official rebel capacity, between January 1, 1766 and July 4, 1776, was absolved and any civil or criminal action against him was void. See An Act to Indemnify and Secure from Prosecutions in Law Persons, who, by their Laudable Exertions . . . , April 10, 1780, Massachusetts Bay, Acts and Laws, March 8 to October 4, 1780 (Boston, Mass., 1780), 279–80. One comparison of property confiscations makes the American Revolution appear at least as radical as the French Revolution, although the arithmetic is open to question. See R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1959), 1:188–9.

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45. Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), 280–8. 46. Resolution of the General Court, March 23, 1780, Massachusetts Bay, Acts and Laws, March 8 to October 4, 1780, 212. James and Mercy Otis Warren obtained Thomas Hutchinson’s home in Milton. See Andrew Stephen Walmsley, Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution (New York, 1999), 155–8. 47. Samuel Adams to James Warren, October 17, 1778, LDC, 11: 66. See pp. 66–7. 48. Ibid., 67. For the single most vehement attack on those loyalists remaining in the United States during the war, on account of their many violations of public trust, see “Among the many errors,ˮ Pennsylvania Packet, August 5, 1779, transcribed in Albert B. Hart, ed., American History Told by Contemporaries (New York, 1912). 49. Some towns were more militant than others. Worcester’s committee pleaded with the Provincial Congress in July 1775, to force all families of loyalist absconders to remove to Boston with them, so “that their estates be appropriated to the publick use,ˮ for “the law of retaliation and self-preservation suggests it.ˮ See Nathan Baldwin, David Bigelo [sic], Asa Moore, and John Nazro [sic] to David Bancroft, Representative for the Town of Worcester, U.S. Revolution Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., Box 1, folder 8. The Massachusetts House adopted the policy that the Board of War could strip sequestered estates of anything it required for the defense of the United States. See House Resolution, January 31, 1777, Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives of the Colony of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England from May 29, 1776 to April 3, 1777 (Boston, Mass., 1777), 243. An additional measure in June made it possible for the Committee of Sequestration to sell movable goods in any way it saw fit. See House Resolution, June 17, 1777, Massachusetts Bay, A Journal of the Honorable House of Representatives of the Colony of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England from May 28 to July 8, 1777 (Boston, Mass., 1777), 27. That was later clarified: small movables should be divided in lots as close to £30 in value as possible, and “no one person, nor any for, by, or under him, shall be suffered to purchase more than one lott [sic].ˮ See House Resolution, October 21, 1777, Resolves of the General Assembly of the State of Massachusetts, May 28 to July 8, 1777 (Boston, Mass., 1777), 35. The policy was abandoned a few months later, as too “dilatory,ˮ for the Massachusetts Assembly was in a hurry by March 1778. See House Resolution, February 25, 1778, ibid., 38. For related actions, see House Resolution, March 12, 1778, ibid., 54; House Resolution, March 13, 1778, ibid., 55; House Resolution, April 6, 1778, Resolves of the General Assembly of the State of Massachusetts, April 1 to May 1, 1778 (Boston, Mass., 1777), 3. 50. “An Account of the Number of Inhabitants in the Colony of Connecticut, January 1, 1774: Together with An Account of the Number of Inhabitants, taken January 1, 1756,ˮ Benjamin Hoadly and J. H. Trumbull, ed. Public Records of the State of Connecticut, 15 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1887), 14:482–93.

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51. Jackson Turner Main, Connecticut Society in the Era of the American Revolution (Hartford, Conn., 1977), 62–8. 52. Jackson Turner Main, The Sovereign States, 1775–1783 (New York, 1973). 53. The acts in this table are itemized from Hoadly and Trumbull, Public Records of the State of Connecticut. 54. Robert J. Taylor, Colonial Connecticut (Millwood, N.Y., 1979), 39–40. 55. Anyone who doubts the democratizing nature of the Revolution has only to examine the rich Connecticut and Massachusetts Archives, which document the extraordinary number of individuals who benefited from loyalist lands. See, for example, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 34–6; Robert Treat Paine Papers, mf. reels #4 and #18; Worcester County Commissioners of Absentee Estates, 1781–1782, Massachusetts Archives, 155:204–96; and various documents in the U.S. Revolution Collection, AAS, Box 2, folder 1. 56. Taylor, Colonial Connecticut, 59–61, 230–7. 57. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 2:99–100. 58. Jonathan Trumbull to George Washington, August 5, 1776, Amer. Arch., 4th ser., 1:776. 59. Resolution by the Connecticut Assembly, May, 1779, The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 2:279–80. 60. There are many special resolutions in The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, vols. 5 and 6. 61. Resolution of the Governor and Council, January 13, 1781, Hoadly and Trumbull, Public Records of the State of Connecticut, 3:291. 62. “An Act for Confiscating the Estates of Persons Inimical to the Independence and Liberties of the United States within this State, and for Payment of Their Debts, and Directing Proceedings Therein,ˮ May, 1778, Hoadly and Trumbull, Public Records of the State of Connecticut, 2:9–12. 63. Ibid., 10. On the situation in a typical town, Sandwich, see Joseph Nye to Robert Treat Paine, January 29, 1780, Robert Treat Paine Papers, 1659– 1862, Massachusetts Historical Society. 64. Petition of Mary Hoyt to the General Assembly, May 20, 1777, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 8:146. 65. Assembly Resolution, May, 1779, in ibid., 3:279. 66. Ibid., 3:280. 67. Instructions to the Committee Appointed to Sell Confiscated Estates, July, 1781, ibid., 3:472–3. For the record of officers claiming loyalist property, see ibid., 3:442–56. 68. “An Act to Prevent the Return to this State of Certain Persons therein Named, and of Others Who Have Left or Shall Leave this State, or Either of the United States of America & Have Joined or Shall Join the Enemies Thereof,ˮ November 19, 1778, in Laws of New Hampshire, vol. 4, Revolutionary Period, 1776–1784, ed. Henry H. Metcalf (Bristol, N.H., 1916), 177–80. 69. “An Act to Confiscate the Estates of Sundry Persons Therein Named,ˮ Nov. 28, 1778, ibid., 191–3; “An Act in Addition to an Act Intituled [sic] “An

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Act to Confiscate the Estates of Sundry Persons therein Named,ˮ ibid., 216– 18. 70. “An Act for Confiscating the Estates of Sundry Subjects of this State, and of Other United States of America, Who have, Since the Commencement of Hostilities between Great Brittain [sic] & the United States, Gone Over to the Enemy, also the Estates of the Subjects of Great Brittain [sic] Lying within this State,ˮ March 25, 1782, ibid., 456–9. For other laws, see pp. 233–6, 286–8, 292–3, 322–3, 330–1, 377, 427–9, 449–51, 498–9. A law which probably had an impact on the exiles was that of 1781, proclaiming that contracts made henceforth shall be in Spanish milled dollars, and that Continental currency be rated now at £12,000 for every $100 in cash. See “An Act for making Gold and Silver a Tender for All Debts and For Settling the Depreciation of the Paper Currency; and for the Future Regulation of the Courts of Justice in this State,ˮ September 1, 1781, ibid., 420–1. The degree to which absconders’ estates absorbed the shock of currency depreciation is incalculable. 71. Richard F. Upton, Revolutionary New Hampshire: An Account of the Social and Political Forces Underlying the Transition from Royal Province to American Commonwealth (Hanover, N.H., 1936), 118–31, 202–6. 72. Ibid., 205. 73. William Greene to Nathanael Greene, November 14, 1779, in The Papers of Nathanael Greene, 13 vols., ed., Richard K. Showman (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1976–2005), 1:65. 74. Rhode Island, State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in General Assembly, July Session, 1780, An Act to Prevent Certain Persons therein named, and Others, Who have Left this State, or Either of the United States of America, and Joined the Enemy, or Who have Joined the Enemy in this State, from Being Admitted within this State (Providence, 1780), broadside. On the small number of those who were permanently banished, see Jesse Lenore Fry, “The Loyalists of Rhode Island during the American Revolution,” M.A. thesis, The Ohio State University, 1928, 55–72; and Gertrude Lawrence, The Loyalists of Rhode Island, M.A. thesis, The Ohio State University, 1920, 51–61. 75. Resolution of the General Assembly, May, 1778, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, 10 vols., ed. John R. Bartlett (Providence, 1862), 8:405–6. 76. Claim of Timothy Lovell, April 10, 1786, PRO AO 12/53, 7–12v. 77. Sarah Verret Kalinoski, “Property Confiscation in Vermont during the American Revolution,” M.A. Thesis, University of Vermont, 1975, 81–91. 78. Mary Beth Norton, The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (London, 1974), 49–51. 79. Esmond Wright, “The Loyalists in Britain,ˮ in A Tug of Loyalties: AngloAmerican Relations 1765–85, ed. Esmond Wright (New York, 1975), 19. For a bitter assessment of the British policy on loyalists before the Claims Commission was established, written by a loyalist in exile, see Simeon [Simon] Baxter, Tyrannicide Proved Lawful, From the Practice and Writings of the Jews, Heathens and Christians: A Discourse Delivered in the Mines at Symsbury, In the Colony of Connecticut to the Loyalists Confined there by

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Order of Congress, On September 19, 1781, “Printed in America, Reprintedˮ (London, 1782), 26–8. 80. John Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission for Enquiring into the Losses, Services, and Claims of the American Loyalists, at the Close of the War between Great Britain and Her Colonies in 1783: With an Account of the Compensation Granted to Them by Parliament in 1785 and 1788, ed. George Billias (Boston, Mass., 1972), 90–2; Hugh E., Egerton, ed., The Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American Loyalists, 1783 to 1785, Being the Notes of Mr. Daniel Parker Coke. M. P., One of the Commissioners during that Period, repr. 1915 (New York, 1969), xl–xlii. Claimants were allowed losses only for property, for offices held before the war, or lost professional income. The commission met in London until it moved to Nova Scotia for the convenience of the Canadians from 1785 to 1789. The claimants were heard in six classes, from those who had lost most from direct service to the crown, to those who had become loyalists only belatedly. The numbers at both extremes were few. See Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York, 1973), 500–6. 81. For a case study, see L. F. S. Upton, “The Claims: The Mission of John Anstey,ˮ in Red, White and True Blue: The Loyalists in the Revolution, ed. Esmond Wright (New York, 1976), 135–47. For somewhat different calculations, see Claude H. Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution (Gloucester, Mass., 1959), 303. For a critique, see Eugene R. Fingerhut, “Use and Abuses of the American Loyalists’ Claims: A Critique of Quantitative Analyses,ˮ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 25 (1968), 245–58. 82. Wright, “The Loyalists in Britain,ˮ 57. See p. 63 for Wright’s larger thesis that “It was then, not the Loyalists who used British policy [for selfish ends]; [in reality] the makers of British policy used the Loyalists.ˮ On the loyalists’ disgust at the government’s foot-dragging, arguing that to compensate them for their losses it would cost only one-fifth of what was required to fight one year in America (or £20 million), see Joseph Galloway, The Claim of the American Loyalists Reviewed and Maintained Upon Incontrovertible Principles of Law and Justice, intro. George A. Billias (Boston, Mass., 1972). 83. Wright, “The Loyalists in Britain,ˮ 19. 84. When the war ended, there were 5–6,000 loyalists in Britain, the majority of whom began leaving, especially for Upper Canada or New Brunswick. See R. O. MacFarlane, “The Loyalist Migrations: A Social and Economic Movement,ˮ in Manitoba Essays, ed. R. C. Lodge (Toronto, 1937), 114. See pp. 106–21. 85. Mary Beth Norton, “Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists,ˮ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 33 (1976), 386–409. 86. Wright, “The Loyalists in Britain,ˮ 17. 87. Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: from the Revolution Through the Civil War (Chicago, Ill., 2006), 37–121. 88. [William Pitt the Younger], “Observations on a Letter from the Agents of the American Loyalists to Mr. Pitt, 30 Jan. 1787,ˮ Pitt/Chatham Papers, MG

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23 A2, vol. 9: Chatham Mss. Bundle 343: States of North America, 1782– 92, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ont., mf copies, 135–7. See f 135. Prime Minister Pitt relentlessly spelled out the details: if loyalist exiles pursued private debt claims in America, then the British had to allow Americans to pursue loyalists in England; the loyalist exiles’ idea of “permanent provisionˮ for lost crown offices in America was ridiculous; finally, strict government limits on loyalist claims would apply. See ibid., pp. 138–41. See also Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 17:369–74. 89. Moses Akerley to Thomas Carleton, January 28, 1785, New Brunswick Provincial Archives, Fredericton, N.B., Land Petitions, RG 10, RS 108, F1024, 1783–85. These petitions contain much evidence of the difficulties faced by the newcomers. 90. John Jay to the President of Congress, September 5, 1785, Worthington C. Ford, ed. Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, 34 vols. (Washington, 1904), 29:680. In the run-up to the Jay Treaty, negotiators were preoccupied with the posts, loyalists’ debts in the United States, and loyalists’ meddling among the Indians. See Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1970), 91–100. 91. Absentees, 1776–1780, Massachusetts Archives, Boston, Mass., 280:31; Absentees, 1781–1784, Massachusetts Archives, 281:1–92. See also Revolution, Miscellaneous, 1782–1783, Massachusetts Archives, 139:328–469. 92. Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 164–96. Property loss by loyalists has always been a major point of debate about the radicalism of the Revolution, and particularly since the argument by J. Franklin Jameson. Solid statistical evidence of this position is meager. John W. Tyler examined Connecticut’s Fairfield County, and found that those who lost property were disproportionately from the middling classes, not the rich, that the purchasers of confiscated property were somewhat better off than the losers, and that as a net result, there was no democratization of the Revolution by this means in that county. See John W. Tyler, Connecticut Loyalists: An Analysis of Loyalist Land Confiscations in Greenwich, Stamford, and Norwalk (New Orleans, La., 1977), 1–31. Tyler’s statistics do not adequately weigh great interior tracts claimed by the loyalists and the British. On this debate, see also Lee Soltow, Distribution of Wealth and Income in the United States in 1798 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1989), 7, 240, 241, 300. For a close study of confiscation in New York, showing that it was not very democratizing except for the huge tracts owned by loyalist speculators opened up to small farmers, see Harry B. Yoshpe, The Disposition of Loyalist Estates in the Southern District of the State of New York (New York, 1939). For an older, Progressive study of the same state arguing that the process was very democratizing, see Alexander C. Flick, Loyalism in New York during the American Revolution (New York, 1901). 93. Curtis P. Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York, 1962), 138–46. 94. For New Englanders’ liberation of a huge mass of “Toryˮ acreage in New York after 1783, see Thomas Summerhill, Harvest of Dissent: Agrarianism in Nineteenth-Century New York (Urbana and Chicago, Ill, 2005), 7–29.

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95. Michael A. Bellesisles, Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 167. See pp. 166–79. 96. Richard C. Cole, “An Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island Adventurer,ˮ Rhode Island History 53 (1995), 102–19. 97. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 280. See pp. 267–349 on New England, and pp. 306–11 in particular on the operation of the court system. On other northern states, see Philip Ranlet, The New York Loyalists (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986); and Steven R. Boyd, “Political Choice – Political Justice: The Case of the Pennsylvania Loyalists,ˮ in American Political Trials, ed. Michael R. Belknap 2nd edn., (Westwood, Conn., 1974), 45–56. 98. Bruce G. Merritt, “Loyalism and Social Conflict in Revolutionary Deerfield, Massachusetts,ˮ Journal of American History 57 (1970–71), 288. See pp. 277–89.

9 “A Day of Strict Reckoning” for “a Multitude of Subtil Enemies”? New England Loyalists After 1783

The rebels did not harry loyalists out of the land: the liberal spirit ruled. Even some of the exiles who went to Britain, Canada or the West Indies dared return after 1783. Of course, no absconding loyalist could expect to recover confiscated property. Returnees had to know that the Revolution was a fact to accept, if not approve. But there was never a “day of strict reckoning.”1 New Englanders began the great democraticrepublican experiment with a large body of unbelievers in their midst who had no choice but to follow the rebels into the new states.

the peace of paris and loyalists In the Treaty of Paris, September 3, 1783, the British obtained two loyalist articles. By Article V, Congress must “earnestly recommend” to the states the restoration of confiscated loyalist property, and exiles would have one year to attempt recovery in the courts. By Article VI, Congress must declare an end to arrests and judicial proceedings aimed at loyalists. Neither provision included means of enforcement, and the English negotiators faced indignant speeches in the House of Commons about how little they had done for the loyalists (see Figure 9.1). According to historian Charles R. Ritcheson, the rebels were disinclined to honor the two articles because “American hatred for the loyalists, traitors within the gates, exceeded the feeling against even the British.”2 In his view, the treaty created “great bitterness and wounded sensibilities.”3 Ritcheson quotes a South Carolinian to support his point, but bitterness was considerable and lasting in states like South Carolina. In most states, the rebels did not drive out masses of helpless loyalists. There was no 274

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figure 9.1 [William Humphrey, publisher, London] The Savages let loose, or The cruel Fate of the Loyalists, etching, 1783. (British Museum 1868,0612.4933). This cartoon shows three dark-skinned savages, representing America, murdering six loyalists: four are hanged, one is about to be scalped, and the last is about to be killed by an ax-wielding Indian. All the victims are gentlemen, indicated by their apparel and wigs. The victim on the ground at right cries “Oh Cruel Fate! Is this the Return for Our Loyalty?” The Indian cries: “I’ll tomahawk the Dog.” The victim in the middle of the cartoon is about to lose his hair. The reference is to the Articles of Peace at Paris, strongly criticized by the opposition in Parliament for being too weak in regard to protections for the loyalists. The representation of the Indians accurately reflects the racial attitudes of the British, not only in regard to Native Americans, but, by implication, to Americans in general as a mongrel lot, their behavior all the worse because of their butchery of men obviously superior to them in every way.

river of blood. Of those New Englanders who chose to become permanent exiles, some were able to salvage part of their property; the British compensated some others. American courts were open to them for legitimate causes. Exile Harrison Gray’s local relatives pursued John Hancock for a small debt even after the governor died.4 It is true that some American rebels soaked loyalists and British merchants by walking away from debts to them or paying them off in nearly worthless Continental currency. According to one count, that may have cost victims £5 million

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in all, but over £4 million of that debt liberation was carried out by the yeomanry of the southern states, very little by New Englanders.5 The essential truth is that, by contrast to the few who abandoned the region, there were far more loyalists who never left the comfort of their homes, effortlessly regained their political rights, and reaped the fruits of a cause they hated. It is true, as Ritcheson charges, that the rebels “flagrantly ignored” loyalist treaty provisions about the recovery of property. According to Abigail Adams, the banished loyalists could come back to New England in quest of their property only “at the risk of their lives.”6 So it seemed at the time of the treaty. Ward Chipman (Harvard class of 1770) was a young Marblehead loyalist lawyer who had absconded, then returned to take a short tour of the Massachusetts interior after the war, only stopping off on his way to settle in Canada, sniffing out the prospects of recovering his patrimony.7 Terrified of being recognized by rebels one day, he and a traveling companion panicked, jumped into their phaeton, sped off, and felt safe only when they arrived in Boston. The interior towns were seldom truly friendly to returnees. Even so, when one historian compared the loyalists to other despised minorities, he found that the American loyalists were “the least subject to exclusion, probation, and (probably) prejudice.”8 The historian who has studied the issue most carefully in Massachusetts, David E. Maas, argues persuasively that this state, the site of so much conflict and bitterness, showed a remarkable spirit of accommodation after the war.9

the context of continuing violence Even if New England suffered less violence over loyalism than, say, South Carolina, there was violence enough. Allan Kulikoff applies to the American Revolution a general model suggested by Arno Mayer, stressing the role of violence in fomenting revolution. Reactionary violence increases the friction between the common people and elites, which typically leads “ordinary citizens to push the Revolution in a more democratic direction.”10 In its last stage, it was a loyalist “war of expedition,” or guerilla warfare, terrorism.11 The British invasion of Penobscot Bay in Maine began years of intermittent battles that inflamed opinion against loyalism. General Henry Clinton ordered an expedition to seize that key spot in New England’s northern reaches, to found a colony for loyalist refugees to be called New Ireland, masterminded by Cambridge loyalist John Nutting. When the British set up a fort at Majabigwaduce (or

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“Bagaduce”) the former capital of Acadia, today’s Castine, Congress ordered a flotilla of rebel New Englanders to dislodge the intruders. The Battle of Penobscot Bay on August 11, 1779 was possibly the most humiliating naval disaster of the war for the Americans. British and loyalist units inflicted hundreds of casualties and captures and drove the Americans up the Penobscot River in full rout. The Americans’ fleet went up in flames as their crews fled overland back toward Boston.12 At the end of the war, 1,787 loyalists had settled in the new colony, coming from all directions but especially crowded Nova Scotia. Then the British sacrificed the land of the New Irelanders at the peace table, and the colonists scattered in 1784.13 It had been one long tale of violent disruption on a grand scale, which had kept opinion hardened against loyalism. There were spectacular episodes of violence in Connecticut. Royalist Governor William Tryon of New York assaulted New Haven, Fairfield, and Norwalk in the Tory-rich south side of the state, burning parts of the latter two towns. The rebels of Norwalk were so frustrated, they threatened the General Assembly that if it could not protect the town they had a “right to retalliate [sic] upon such [resident] Tories so far as to make themselves whole for their losses.”14 More embittering yet was traitor Benedict Arnold’s violent assault on New London, his own hometown, the state’s principal port, on September 4, 1781. He had 1,732 regulars and loyalist auxiliaries, many of them New Englanders. He burned the shipping in the harbor and, accidentally, an adjacent portion of the town. His men took little Fort Griswold in a savage battle that left 113 dead or wounded of the 140 defenders. Then Arnold torched 151 dwellings of rebels. It was little consolation to the rebels that Arnold’s forces also suffered heavy losses.15 These loyalist depredations helped this state get the Western Reserve in Ohio after the war. Prisons in New England provided a constant threat of internal violence. The colony of Connecticut had opened a new prison in 1773 – Symsbury – using an old copper mine to incarcerate common felons. It was a gloomy dungeon deep in Talcott Mountain with the appearance of “a prison of the Inquisition.”16 The few loyalist convicts there immediately began trying to escape, with several awful melees between 1776 and 1782, as desperate prisoners tried to get out.17 Finally, at the very end of the war, in 1783, up to 30,000 refugees from all colonies awaited evacuation from New York in five British fleets, headed to Canada and the West Indies. These were true believers convinced the British would win, accumulating in British flag-protected ports over the years. Waiting months for their fate to be decided in Paris,

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brigades of free corps among them raided along New England’s lower coast in a last show of rancor.18 The rebels saw these men as pirates.19 In New York City itself, American soldiers had to rove the streets in gangs ready to “flogg the Refugees” to keep that huge group in order.20 With incidents like these constantly fresh to mind, the bitterness on both sides can be imagined. Rebels charged the British and loyalists with acts “more awful and savage than ever was found among Cannabals, Savages, Turks, or even the Inquisition.”21 Richard Slotkin’s sepulchral comment comes to mind: “Physical combat with and captivity to the dark forces . . . infects the mind itself with darkness.”22 The story of how loyalists and loyalism shaped the special character of American republican demonology remains little known.

continuing rebel divisions about loyalist policy Violence kept alive the split between the rebels who would be tougher with loyalists, and those who inclined to be mild. Radicals tried to resist a “taming of the Revolution,” both in Congress and the states.23 The town fathers of Norwalk expressed the prevalent radical view that “Tory Villains” who had combined against the rebels “in the most vigorous and savage like manner, possible to be invented,” had better not be allowed to return there, for the town would “war against those Villains the instant they set foot on this shore.”24 By contrast, the group around John Hancock were more sympathetic to loyalists, and helped moderate anti-loyalist policy.25 Nathaniel Whitaker, whose sermon of 1777 likened the loyalists to the bad Jews of Meroz who had failed to support Israel, returned to the theme in 1783.26 This time he fiercely demanded the exclusion of all loyalists: those who chose exile and those who persisted. He acknowledged the great logical problem that confiscation and banishment posed, for rebels believed that “love, forgiveness of enemies, and compassion [as preached by Jesus], are most amiable virtues,” but he warned that such virtues could “degenerate into criminal weakness” in regard to bad citizens like loyalists.27 Those apostates who wished to remain in New England now ought to prove that “their principles are changed, and their whole man renewed,” and if not, at least they ought “forever to be excluded from our councils,” perhaps from the franchise too.28 To allow loyalists to recover confiscated property would rouse the just passion of the rebels; it would lead to “internal discontents, broils and commotions.”29 It would be a source of “constant dangers” to have “in our bowels, a multitude

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of subtil enemies,” especially if the banished grandees returned, for they would “probably soon engross the chief wealth of these states [and] easily possess themselves of the chief seats of government.”30 The exiles’ return would mean that freedom could be “snatched from us by the haughty and insolent threats, or the money and wheedling arts of those who pique themselves on their riches.”31 For loyalists were motivated only by their self-interest, in estates, offices, influence – not principles and rights.32 Allowing banished loyalists to return would restore the prewar strength of the wealthy at the expense of everybody else. John Murray worried about a frothy land market in the interior, a problem compounded “when inveterate and persisting tories are suffered to mix with its free citizens, or to rise to places of power among them.”33 Ezra Stiles voiced a general concern about the “large territorial property vested in individuals” already by 1783, which was “pernicious” and would threaten the yeoman society of New England, which must be based on “an equable distribution of property.”34 During 1783 and 1784, disquiet about returning loyalists also revived the old split between the yeoman interior and the capitalist coast.35 According to John L. Brooke, by 1786, the Shaysite regulators could “see themselves, in Harringtonian terms, defending the people from the renewed efforts of the old Court Party gentry to reduce them to ‘lordships’ and ‘slavery.’ ”36 An important exchange on the loyalist problem appeared in New York, in the debate between Alexander Hamilton and a writer who called himself “Mentor,” possibly Isaac Ledyard. It illustrates how loyalist policy continued to develop based on debates about sheer political interest. Writing as “Phocion,” Hamilton warned against the general outlawing or disfranchisement of loyalists, for if a government could do that, it could soon “confine all the votes to a small number of partizans [sic], and establish an aristocracy or an oligarchy.”37 That argument appealed to basic beliefs liberals and radicals shared. But he particularly warned against fear-fueled torment of “wealthy disaffected men,” for British efforts to forge alliances with them were “chimerical,” that is, of no concern.38 Hamilton was an aristocratically minded man who bragged of being descended from a laird, living in ostentatious luxury after the war. He wanted as many loyalists in the polity as possible, for they were his natural allies against the democratic tendencies he knew the war had set loose. In Mentor’s sharp retort, he argued that “the number of those who are in reality mal-contents in America, are not so small as may be imagined,” and those rich persisting loyalists posed a serious threat; moreover,

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so many loyalists were merchants, and “that part of our community is already too numerous.”39 Hamilton replied in another pamphlet, now with more historically minded arguments. In a carefully veiled reference to Cromwellism, he warned that “putting men out of the protection of the law is calculated to transfer the scepter from the hands of government to those of individuals [or] to enact a civil war.”40 Men like Hamilton who thought of themselves as “nationalists” were eager to recruit allies. As a result, even arch-absconders felt suction pulling them into the states after the war. Their re-entry was facilitated as bitterness declined rapidly after the evacuation of exiles from New York.41

loyalists who never left The best measure of the Revolution’s progressive principle is the great number of loyalists who never left New England. As Ezra Stiles observed, most of them remained in their homes until they died of natural causes.42 As seen earlier, Harvard graduates ran the full political gamut. The classic passive loyalist sought the middle and avoided the war, remaining in his community, keeping on the fringe of the troubles.43 Aging Edmund Trowbridge (Harvard class of 1728) represents the type.44 Although he was a stolid moderate who broke with Hutchinson in 1770 when the latter made his own son probate judge, and Trowbridge renounced the crown’s salary as Superior Court judge in 1774, he was never in sympathy with the Tea Party or the war and kept a low profile. He was one of the many loyalists who never left. Certainly one of the most remarkable cases of a persisting loyalist is John Williams, scion of the Williams-Pynchon family of Deerfield, inheritor of the Corner Store – a central entrepot for the region’s commerce – the local agent of New Hampshire’s Governor Wentworth, and a stout loyalist. After he loudly denounced Deerfield for supporting Congress, he read the law of treason in public, but a large crowd confronted him at his home February 18, 1775. When he remained hostile, the town shunned him and referred his case to Congress. But his commercial network was indispensable in the inland community, and he remained at large. Williams avoided serious trouble until 1781, when he began openly encouraging his neighbors to give up the war and agree to terms with Great Britain. So the state legislature at last confined him in Boston’s jail for several weeks. However, when he posted bond and returned to Deerfield, his faction got control of the town and elected him to the state’s House of Representatives! That body repeatedly refused to seat him as a contumacious loyalist, but by increasingly close votes

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until he actually took his seat in 1784. Having made his point, he retired from the General Court in 1785 to become an entrepreneur on a grand scale. He became a justice of the peace in 1788, a presidential elector in 1792. He returned to the legislature for a term in 1806. An inimical who did not change his views one jot, he went straight into the right wing of the Federalist Party.45 There is no better example of New England’s capacity for ideological inclusiveness, including outright enemies of the Revolution.46 Other Harvard loyalists escaped serious difficulty, either because they possessed powerful connections or because, like Theophilus Parsons (class of 1769), they possessed charming personalities and were at least willing, unlike Williams, not to make speeches. Parsons disapproved of the way the Revolution started, but by 1776 he went with the flow. As a result, he was a major early Federalist, with a frank dislike of anti-federalist radicals; he was a leading supporter of the Constitution of 1789, and for many years head of the Massachusetts Bar.47 Jonathan Gove (class of 1768) was a doctor in New Boston, New Hampshire, who seemed to be a rebel as late as 1776. Then he was convicted of passing counterfeit money in a plot to undermine the state’s new currency. Jailed for months, he surfaced in New Boston’s records after the war. The town’s fathers petitioned the General Court repeatedly for amnesty for Gove, and in 1787 that body relented. New Bostonians promptly elected him as their representative to the General Court; in 1789 he became a Justice of the Peace at Goffstown; and in 1791 he helped found the New Hampshire Medical Society.48 Even many Anglican divines blended in. Edward Bass (class of 1744) was one of those famous apostates who converted to the king’s faith in 1752, to become rector of St. Paul’s Church in Newburyport for over half a century. He became the first bishop of Massachusetts in 1797, and his see would include New Hampshire and Rhode Island as well.49 Another persister with powerful connections was Asa Porter (class of 1762), a merchant and Anglican missionary in Coos County, New Hampshire. He was so royalist he had the king’s coat of arms stenciled on his sleigh, until he visited Boston and had to deface the arms so as not to attract hostile missiles. Confined as the war broke out, he jumped bond in 1776, but then stayed under bond when re-arrested. He weathered the storm and emerged in the 1780s owning over 100,000 acres of land.50 Loyalism often tested family connections. Ichabod Jones went to Northampton jail as an unrepentant Tory, but his rebel son, John Coffin Jones (class of 1768) won him some relief by posting a £2,000 bond.

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His father’s behavior did not harm the reputation of John Coffin Jones, a conservative rebel who went on to become a leading Federalist politician, who helped organize Massachusetts’ version of the church-and-king mobs against radicals in the 1790s.51 Father and son were not that far apart in their views, apparently divided only on crown loyalty. The rich and well-connected loyalist who was not a Harvard grad might be protected from the worst consequences. Yale-educated John Worthington of Springfield, Massachusetts, was an attorney who founded a long line of New England attorneys, and never had to leave the town, even though the loyalist oligarchy with which he had knitted his daughters by marriage mostly absconded. By 1783, in Springfield’s polls he was running second only to Hancock for governor.52 Balky Suffolk County Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf lived out his long life (1704–95) in his home.53 Women like Elizabeth Murray even more easily obtained sanctuary. Having inherited money and made more in business, she roosted in the Inman mansion, a crusty loyalist, refusing to take refuge in Boston, smoldering in exasperation that her husband, Ralph Inman, fled into exile in England. She suffered one vehement denunciation in the press in 1777, but her property and personal security were never in doubt. Her husband took the oath of allegiance in 1779 and got permission to return to Cambridge and try to reclaim his sequestered estates. There was no longer any love between the two, and just before she died in 1785 she planned to cross the Atlantic, yearning for her homeland in Scotland, but nostalgically, not because she was under political pressure in New England.54 Some of the remaining loyalists did leave now under local coercion by their towns. Ebenezer Rice and Benjamin Tyler led forty-six New Hampshire families across the frontier into Quebec in 1784, complaining bitterly that they were “overburdened with Usurpation, Tyrene, and opression from the Hands of Violent Men.”55 Another new exile was Edward Winslow (class of 1736) of Plymouth, who had, as Deputy Collector in that port, tried to stop destruction of tea there.56 He stayed through the war, causing much trouble, until he moved to Halifax in 1783, and never looked back. An ambiguous character is Sir John Bernard, Baronet, son of the former Massachusetts governor. The state seized his father’s extensive lands and he lived in a hut at first, pathetically trying to become a farmer, until the state relented and helped him leave. Then he became a bureaucratic servant of the crown in the West Indies, was even knighted, every inch the royalist exile.57

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absconders who tried and failed to return Most absconders who attempted to return were those who had the means to travel to New England and re-establish themselves, but even some of them were too uncomfortable or too unwelcome to stay. In part, it depended on how soon after the war they tried – it paid to wait for bitterness to subside. William Browne (class of 1755) provides an example of the most disappointed of those Harvard men who tried and failed to return. Once the richest man in Salem, he was born with a legacy including perhaps as much as 100,000 acres of developed real estate. Although not an arch-Tory, he accepted the office of Mandamus Councilor. He went into exile in 1776, and in London got an appointment as governor of Bermuda. Despite that, at the end of the war he slipped into New England through Rhode Island and enjoyed a protective mantle provided by leading rebel authorities. He stayed just long enough to see his estate liquidated at government auction. Testing the political waters to see if he could be reinstated, in the end, he completed his term of office in the West Indies and lived out his retirement in London.58 The state could not allow a Mandamus Councilor to come back. Another rich man with hopes too high was William Vassall (class of 1733), who claimed he had left Boston in 1775 only for business, not political reasons. He returned from England after the peace and began trying to recover his property for years. He was too notorious, so the legislature and courts refused his suit “with warmth & Vehemence” in Rhode Island.59 In Massachusetts, he instigated one of the several cases that led to Chisholm v. Virginia and the eleventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1794. Congress addressed the threat of loyalist suits by writing it into the Constitution that a state had to agree before it could be sued in federal court by a foreigner or another state.60 Vassall died in England in 1800. In 1774, Stephen Jarvis was the eighteen-year-old son of Danbury’s Stephen Senior, whom the son described as “a great Tory” who never absconded.61 Stephen Jr. defied his father, either for political reasons or because his father refused to agree to Junior’s marriage to Amelia Glover. Junior joined the rebel militia “under the Command of a Brother of My Mother, a great Whig.”62 However, by July Fourth, he had changed his mind and became a sergeant in the Queen’s Rangers, the famous loyalist regiment. He served in several campaigns and rose to the rank of colonel, until a leave of absence in 1783, when he had a joyous reunion with

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his parents, and prepared to marry the patient Amelia. However, news spread that he was in town (on a passport signed by the mayor and others), and it caused a hullabaloo. He gravely confronted a big crowd that stormed the house: some shook hands with him, although “others again damned me for a dam’d Tory, others charging me with Cutting out prisoners tongues.”63 When he proclaimed that he had a wedding planned and was not just stopping by, the crowd turned angrier. The protesters returned the following day, but Junior charmed them. He threw open a window and offered to share a bottle with his besiegers. When it was empty “they swore I was a dam’d honest fellow, I had married the finest woman in the country, that my conduct had deserved her, and they would protect me with their lives.” That night, before the town could sober up, the couple slipped off to take refuge with relatives in the country, then he returned to active duty. After the war, the Jarvises returned to the town and stayed a winter, “visited by all the most respectable Inhabitants of the place.”64 But in March 1784, sentiment turned against him again, and one midnight a crowd started battering the door of his father’s house. The couple fled, turning their backs on the homeland to become storekeepers in New Brunswick.65 Members of the loyalist corps just were not welcome.

the return of some absconded notorious loyalists Exiles had choices, but Britain was expensive, the West Indies too coarse, whereas the new British provinces in Canada were nearby, cheap, and familiar-looking to New Englanders, despite harder winters and meaner ports. As Alan Taylor has shown, the United States and Upper Canada set sharply competitive terms for the purchase of land, so they both attracted strong immigrant streams.66 As a result, most of the exiles had an attractive alternative just north of the United States, and once there, few regretted their decision, but some did yearn for the homeland. A gallery of returning loyalists suggests they had good prospects.67 A remarkable variety of the absconded returned. One story is chockfull of ironies, showing how ideology divided families. Sylvester Gardiner of Massachusetts was the ultimate loyalist. A physician trained in Boston and France, he became the leading apothecary in New England, and, by shrewd investment, a major landowner. With his profits from the importation of drugs, he purchased rights to 100,000 acres in Maine, and was actively developing it. He was a pillar of King’s Chapel, the principal Anglican institution in the province. He absconded in 1776, but his rebel

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son, John, helped him obtain asylum in Rhode Island in 1785, just before he died. Despite his son’s gesture, he cut off the young man with one guinea in his will because John was a radical. John set up in Maine and went on to become a leading progressive in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. His own son (John Sylvester John) reverted to the tradition of his grandfather and became a stalwart conservative. All three were born with silver spoons in their mouths and shepherded through the system to come out on top, but they show once again that interest and family only help explain the political positions of some people, not all.68 One of the most affecting of all loyalist stories is that of another doctor, Samuel Stearns of Paxton, in Worcester County, Massachusetts. A consistent but not especially obstreperous loyalist from the beginning, his big mistake was to continue to provide his professional services to other loyalists, so finally he was “stigmatized with that horrible title, tory.”69 Not seriously molested before 1780, he was then accused – falsely by a British Army deserter, according to him – of communicating with the enemy, and a judge ordered him held on a £100,000 bond. He heard rumors in the street of a plan to execute him, so he fled to British protection. Then, in 1783, determined to take advantage of the loyalist provisions in the treaty, he returned to Paxton to recover what might be left of his estate, and remove to Nova Scotia. The town’s committee went to court against him and soon after his arrival he was in jail again, where he stayed two years.70 The doctor cried pathetically that he had harmed no one, robbed no one, and had to stand by helplessly while rebels plundered his estate. There had never been “an instance of the like kind since the Europeans first came to America,” according to his supporters, an immensely ironic metaphor.71 Stearns had now become so exasperated by the injustice, “a thing that would be decryed by the most barbarous nations,” he tried a different tack, which was to prove his loyalism was merely formal or ideological, and that he had not actually practiced it in direct opposition to the United States. He also listed for his readers the many scientific, mathematical, and philosophical problems in which he had been absorbed during his exile.72 Stearns finally got out of jail after three years, a uniquely long incarceration after the war. He applied to the Loyalist Claims Commission for £4,000 in 1789, and received a small part of it.73 He came home from England to New York in 1791, where his 627-page treatise on disease finally appeared, then settled in New England, lapsing into poverty, with one more stint in jail as a debtor, just before he died in 1809.74

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Samuel Stearns still did not understand that merely not harming or robbing did not make him innocent of disloyalty. He had remained under British protection throughout the war when not in jail. Stearns did not understand he was going through a revolution, not just a rebellion, and that the rebels had permanently redistributed his property in the community he had abandoned. He might have rebuilt his practice if he had just accepted his losses. There had to be a limit on amnesty if the Revolution was to mean anything. A good contrast to Stearns is provided by William Samuel Johnson. He was at the nexus of land, sectionalism, religion and ideology in revolutionary Connecticut. As seen earlier, the colony was hard hit by the apostasy of numerous Congregationalist ministers, including Yale graduates who converted to the Church of England like Johnson’s father, Samuel Johnson, one of the spectacular early renegades.75 William Samuel Johnson was one of the most amazing loyalist “survivors” who came out of the Revolution headed straight for a career as a Federalist politician. Graduating from Yale in 1740, he became a successful lawyer and one of the delegates to the Stamp Act Congress, enjoying the political trust of the colony’s majority. Thus, he was liberal enough to be acceptable in the east. However, he was in sync with fellow westerners on the land question, refusing to support the east’s claims on the Susquehanna Valley. He subsequently served as the colony’s agent in London (1767 to 1771). While there, he agreed with the colonial boycott to force repeal of the Townshend Acts. When he came home, he reluctantly sided with the Susquehanna Company because its partisans had gained a majority in the legislature, leading to the establishment of a Connecticut township in the disputed territory in 1774. However, as a staunch fence-sitter, he refused the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence’s request that he serve as delegate to Congress, and he resigned as a militia officer, for he believed Congress and the rebellion were wrong. So early in 1776, Johnson resigned his seat on the Council, and when the state legislature created a statutory loyalty oath in 1777, he refused to take it and had to stop practicing law. For a long time, that was all the community demanded of him, until 1779, when he got arrested for an ambiguous role in Tryon’s assault on New Haven. He remained quiet after his release. Then in 1785 this remarkable loyalist got elected to Congress! He helped finalize the Susquehanna settlement by winning the Western Reserve in Ohio for Connecticut. Now a Federalist lodge pole, the voters sent him as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, to his state’s ratifying convention, to the U.S. Senate, and he served as president of Columbia College (later, University) through the 1790s.76

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For any exile who declared sincere commitment to uphold the United States, readmission was easy. For example, the Massachusetts legislature readily allowed William Boden of Marblehead to re-enter in January, 1778. He claimed he left in 1775 for Nova Scotia to protect his property there, and had never directly supported the enemy. He was willing to post a £2,000 bond, swear “to do nothing contrary to the measures that are or shall be taken by this or the other United States,” and promise “to take an active part,” like a good “fellow-subject.”77 Now John Amory seems to have become a thorough convert to the republic: “there is no form of Government upon earth, that he so much desires to live under.”78 The tempestuous Jonathan Danforth of Hardwick obtained permission to come back, although he had “behaved in a very insolent and abusive Manner” toward the town’s committee ever since 1774.79 After Goshen, Connecticut’s Ashbel Humphrey was shunned out of town, he lived in the forest, “the Life of a Fugitive,” until he made his way to the other loyalists on Long Island, where he was “plunged amidst a host of Murderers, Thieves, Robbers & Blasphemers,” until he begged permission to return home in early 1782.80 Samuel Hoyt of Danbury left Boston with the British in 1776 because, he believed, the rebels would kill all loyalists who stayed behind. In 1778, he had returned under a proclamation of clemency, but his estate was already forfeit. The local committee informed him he could return once he acknowledged that he was the target of a “justly incensed multitude of the people.”81 Robert Fowle was the nephew of rebel printer Daniel Fowle, who broke with his uncle and began publishing the loyalist New Hampshire Gazette or Exeter Morning Chronicle in 1776, until the rebels shut him down and jailed him for allowing his press to be used by loyalist counterfeiters. He finally escaped to British lines and the state banished him. Even so, he came back after the war, married his brother’s widow, and settled down.82 The large family of Justin Sherman of New Milford fled to the protection of the British in 1776, but in 1785 they won permission to return to what remained of their estate.83 Most impressive is the story of Ebenezer Punderson, the stout loyalist who had finally absconded to become a British Army functionary. After the war, he successfully begged Connecticut’s General Assembly for the right to return and become a loyal citizen.84 It is true that a few met unpitying tribunals when they returned. For example, Abel Hall had absconded from Weston, Connecticut, after a crowd dragged him from his bed and jailed him in May, 1776. Acquitted of formal charges, he joined the rebel army to prove his sincerity. The British captured him and pressed him into their army, twice, but he never convinced his town that he had no choice. In 1786, the state confiscated

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his personal estate to cover outstanding court costs, and by 1805 he was “a decrepid old man worn out with troubles,” who pleaded for the return of his property.85 The state assembly refused the petition: his title was long since superseded. Members of the possessing classes appear to have enjoyed the benefit of different rules. The ordinary returning loyalist soldier faced profound skepticism. For a sharp contrast, there is Ward Nicholas Boylston, Benjamin Hallowell’s son, incorrigible leader of the exile community in London until 1800, who then returned to his homeland to inherit his fortune, become a major benefactor of Harvard and live nearly three more decades in respectable comfort.86

absconded harvard graduates who returned Representative of the more successful returnees was physician William Paine (class of 1768), son of loyalist leader Timothy Paine of Worcester. He followed his father’s lead politically, fled to London in 1774, kissed the king’s hand, and returned to America with an appointment that would eventually make him “Physician to His Majesty’s Hospitals within the District of North America.” Meanwhile, his aged father muddled through in Massachusetts, and was able to recover some of his estate. William later tried to settle in Passamaquoddy Bay, then served for a while in the legislature of New Brunswick, but New England seemed to beckon despite his promise of success in Canada. He obtained permission to return to gather some property, but upon his arrival in Salem he was surprised and overwhelmed by a warm reception from some, so he stayed and returned to practice. He kept out of politics, but became a founder of the American Antiquarian Society.87 Another physician was John Jeffries (class of 1763), whom fellow Doctor Joseph Warren could not persuade to change sides. For his British loyalty, the crown awarded him with appointments that led to a successful career in Canada and then in England. Nevertheless, he returned to Massachusetts to collect a large inheritance in 1787, returned to practice, became a famous gynecologist (two thousand deliveries), and took up ballooning, one of the region’s first aeronauts.88 Thomas Brattle (class of 1760), son of the broken-hearted William, was a patriot who had been allowed by rebel authorities to conduct loyalist relatives to England in 1775. He stayed a bit too long among them there, returning only in 1779, and had to disembark in Rhode Island because his home state of Massachusetts had become suspicious on account of his long absence. That state’s legislature rebuffed him as late as 1783,

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despite the fact that he had tried to show his loyalty by serving in the Rhode Island militia. In the vote, the coastal counties advocated mercy, but men from the interior counties demonstrated the shift in power to their side by voting down Brattle’s request.89 Several representatives who voted to allow his return reaped the voters’ wrath at the next election. Brattle now simply defied the government, returned to Cambridge, and brought suit against the rebel who had gained possession of his house. It became a major case before the Supreme Judicial Court in 1784. By sheer bravado, not only did he win back his citizenship and his family mansion, he became a Justice of the Peace, member of numerous societies, and threw glittering parties for the elites, presumably the real key to his successful reintegration.90 Even the most ardent Anglicans could come back. William Walter of Roxbury (class of 1756) made a little exploratory tour of Boston and Salem in 1787, and in 1790 took up the living of Christ Church, Cambridge, but soon moved to Christ Church, Boston, where he was also an active Mason.91 Another Anglican convert, William Clarke (class of 1759), hailing from the once notoriously deranged community of Salem Village (Danvers), returned to New England at least by 1792, when he appears as the priest and Anglican missionary for Quincy. In 1800 he rubbed his hands in pleasure that conservatives had outvoted Jefferson’s Jacobins in the Massachusetts polls. He died honestly poor among his countrymen in 1815, engrossed in researching past graduates of Harvard College.92 Another native-born Anglican priest, Samuel Roberts of New Town, Connecticut, pleaded that he had been apolitical and “did as almost every ignorant Man generally does, swim with the Tide,” but was now “become a Whig,” so his community welcomed him back.93 Samuel Curwen was a moderate loyalist who went with the flow of his set and quit New England to wait out the war in England. Soon disenchanted there, after the war he resolved to go home and get away from “an innate despotically inclined King and a sett of profligate unprincipled men of influence and politicians.”94 He may also have discovered, with John Adams, that at least by 1780, “there is not in England one half the Malice and Rancour against Frenchmen and Spaniards that there is against Americans.”95 Massachusetts allowed Curwen to come home to Salem to live his remaining years on the kindness of friends. He represents the truly sad figure among exiles, who realized too late that he belonged on the other side.96 The general liberality of rebels toward returnees is well documented in state archives.97 As his friend in Connecticut reported to skeptical exile

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Samuel Peters in 1784, “the vindictive Spirit of the Country is almost totally altered,” and loyalists who had been “treated with the greatest Bitterness, are now in as good Reputation as any.”98 The post-war rehabilitation of so many people reflected a triumph of the progressive spirit.99 Only a few individual loyalists were justified in claiming that they were “the most oppressed, disappointed, dejected poor Devils that your imagination can conceive,” as Godfrey Malbone reported in 1784, hounded by the “damned republican Faction.”100 Few of those who came home to stay ever gave up their basic Tory doctrines: class privilege, prerogative power, British nationalism, social organicism. They scorned egalitarian, republican, internationalist, meritocratic principles. They learned to self-censor, but their old Tory views continued, disguised and diffused, helping to configure the Federalist Party. As Martin Van Buren put it, the First Party System was structured by the “substantially unchanged views” of “Cavaliers [Federalists] and Roundheads [Democratic Republicans].”101 In fact, the majority of persisters and returnees immediately set about trying “to reverse what they regarded as the dangerous excesses of the revolutionary era.”102 Federalist historians like Jeremy Belknap drew a thick veil over the subject, claiming bitterly that “the passions of jealousy, hatred and revenge were freely indulged” against the loyalists.103 Returning Tories after 1783 generally fulfilled the low expectations of skeptical radicals, who saw them as Englishmen with their faces set against the winds of progress. It is no surprise that Democratic Republicans denounced the Federalists as Tories for writing the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798.104 A populist party suspicious of arrogant wealth resurged in the national polls in 1800, a fatal blow for the Federalist Party, with its right wing to thank.105 As one of that party’s most promising young members, John Quincy Adams, spat over his shoulder as he fled into the arms of Jefferson’s party in 1808, Federalists were “the political descendants in direct line from the tories of our Revolutionary war, and hold most of their speculative opinions.”106 It was possible for John Adams’s son to make such a political leap because the party that welcomed him was under the sway of a broad new populism, one remotely rooted in the old republican legacy of 1649, even if that history was dim to many Americans.107 Tory doctrines hunkered down deep in their nest as Jacobin flames towered all round them, reappearing later in American politics as sustained, destructive reaction. The story of returning loyalists ends on a note of bittersweet irony, the case of Samuel Peters. Long-time priest for an Anglican parish in

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Hebron, he had fled noisily into exile in England, irreconcilable. There he remained until 1805, boring his congregants with unfashionably instructive sermons, refusing the crown’s generous offer to become bishop of the rude and turbulent state of Vermont, composing a biased history of Connecticut. He eventually went home to live out his days in obscurity, poverty, and, presumably, bitterness and senility until his death in 1826. He made a fruitless journey into the West in an attempt to validate his old land claims, and, with an extraordinary final flourish, published a last book. It was about the Puritan radical Hugh Peter, from whom he descended.108 In fine Puritan form, Peters lauds Peter as the scion of a well-to-do old family laid low by the machinations of “created noblemen,” like Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Charles I’s hireling. Peter had “gloried in his poverty, in his stripes, and imprisonment” at the king’s hand.109 In full diatribe against the Royalists of 1649, Peters scores them for being an over-proud, cynical aristocracy who demanded privilege over the low-born. Here he was, apparently a thorough New Englander in his commitment to its historic mission, but that just did not make him a rebel in 1776. Here he was, staunch royalist, in thrall to ancestorworship, apparently oblivious to the immense irony of celebrating Peter and the other regicides of 1649, that key moment when the new era began for democratic republicans. More consciously than any people before them, New Englanders were bent on making history rather than just letting George III make it for them. The rebels created what became “the ideal commonwealth” for future radicals, despite weak-minded racial and gender assumptions by white men in 1776.110 As Eric Foner writes in his meditation on Thomas Paine, the most forwardlooking radicals were “not looking back to some mythical Saxon past for an ideal of government,” nor even to 1649, but to a new ideology that would allow them “to begin the world over again.”111 Yet the past had guided New Englanders into the war, and it kept them from being too cruel to those who were too narrow or too selfish to accept the very radical ideas of liberty, democracy and equality.

Notes 1. In 1777, loyalist exile Jonathan Sewall warned the rebels to repent and return to obedience to their king because there was “a day of strict reckoning hastening on,ˮ when the British won the war. See Carol Berkin, Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist (New York, 1974), 122.

292 “A Day of Strict Reckoning”? New England Loyalists After 1783 2. Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy Toward the United States, 1783–1795 (New York, 1971), 49. 3. Ibid., 50. 4. Samuel Eliot Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray, Loyalist,ˮ Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 14, Transactions, 1911– 1913 (Boston, Mass., 1913), 320–50. 5. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 64. For a review of the commission, see Mary Beth Norton, The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (London, 1974), 185–249. For a recent historian who seems to agree with Ritcheson, see Harry M. Ward, The War for Independence and the Transformation of American Society (London, 1999), 35–48. 6. Abigail Adams quoted in Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 59. On popular hostility to returnees, see Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (New York, 2010), 190– 95. Of course: nobody lost his life on this account. The richest men who did not recover, like Maine’s William Pepperrell and his father-in-law Isaac Royall, lived out their lives in England in comfort. See Colin Nicolson and Stuart Scott, “A ‘Great National Calamity’: Sir William Pepperrell and Isaac Royall, Reluctant Loyalists,ˮ Historical Journal of Massachusetts 28 (2000), 117–41. 7. “Ward Chipman Diary: A Loyalist’s Return to New England in 1783,ˮ ed. Joseph B. Berry, Essex Institute Historical Collections 87 (1951), 223–25. See pp. 211–41. Chipman assisted Edward Winslow in persuading the crown to create the loyalist colony of New Brunswick, set off from Nova Scotia, in 1784. See Ann Gorman Condon, The Envy of the American States: The Loyalist Dream for New Brunswick (Fredericton, N.B., 1984); and William Pencak, “Stability through Segregation: Loyalist Refugees in Canada,ˮ in States, Citizens and Questions of Significance: Tenth Round Table on Law and Semiotics, ed. John Brigham and Roberta Kevelson (New York, 1997), 163–74. On political divisions in Nova Scotia, see Gordon T. Stewart and George Rawlyk, A People Highly Favoured of God: The Nova Scotia Yankees and the American Revolution (Hamden, Conn., 1972); John B. Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony during the Revolutionary Years (New York, 1937), 291–353. 8. Charles S. Hyneman, The American Founding Experience: Political Community and Republican Government, ed. Charles E. Gilbert (Urbana and Chicago, Ill., 1994), 115. 9. David Maas supports that view even though public animosity ran high in 1783, in David E. Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists (New York, 1989), 429–66. 10. Allan Kulikoff, “Revolutionary Violence and the Origins of American Democracy,ˮ Journal of the Historical Society 2 (2002), 233. See pp. 229–60. 11. John Shy, “The Loyalist Problem in the Lower Hudson Valley: The British Perspective,ˮ in The Loyalist Americans: A Focus on Greater New York, ed., Robert A. East and Jacob Judd (Tarrytown, N.Y., 1975), 5, 7. See pp. 3–13. 12. In reprisal, towns bordering the new colony where rebels retained control plundered some local loyalists’ estates. See Claim of Benjamin Millekin, April

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5, 1787, PRO AO 12/11, 80. On the background of the area known as Machias, contested territory between Nova Scotia and Massachusetts before the Revolution, see Elizabeth Mancke, The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca.1760–1830 (New York, 2005), 83–107. 13. James S. Leamon, Revolution Downeast: The War for American Independence in Maine (Amherst, Mass., 1993), 104–34; Ronald N. Tagney, The World Turned Upside Down: Essex County During America’s Turbulent Years, 1763–1790 (West Newbury, Mass., 1989), 367–81; Wilbur H. Siebert, “The Exodus of the Loyalists from Penobscot and the Loyalist Settlements at Passamaquoddy,ˮ Collections of the New Brunswick Historical Society 9 (1914), 485–520; Robert W. Sloan, “New Ireland: Men in Pursuit of a Forlorn Hope, 1779–1784,ˮ Maine Historical Society Quarterly 19 (1979), 73–90; John D. Faibisy, “Penobscot, 1779: The Eye of the Hurricane,ˮ Maine Historical Society Quarterly 19 (1979), 91–117; Samuel F. Batchelder, Bits of Cambridge History (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), 282–349; and George E. Buker, The Penobscot Expedition: Commodore Saltonstall and the Massachusetts Conspiracy of 1779 (Annapolis, Md., 2002). 14. Petition of Norwalk Selectmen to the General Assembly, December 5, 1780, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, CSA, Hartford, Conn., 19:353. 15. Willard R. Randall, Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor (New York, 1990), 585–90. Arnold accidentally burned the estate of a leading local loyalist. See Depositions by J. Graves and Abraham Jarvis, and Benedict Arnold re: Jeremiah Miller, September 29, October 23, and n.d., 1783, PRO AO 13/42, 100, 106v, 109v. For another view of Arnold, see James Kirby Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered (New York, 1997). For the effects of violence on a family in southern Connecticut, see Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel, Jr., The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family on Revolutionary America (New York, 1984), 145–71. 16. Richard H. Phelps, Newgate of Connecticut, Its Origin and Early History (Hartford, Conn., 1876), 14. 17. Ibid., 35–9. 18. Robert S. Allen, “The Evacuations,ˮ in The Loyal Americans: The Military Role of the Loyalist Provincial Corps and their Settlement in British North America, 1775–1784, ed. Robert S. Allen (Ottawa, Ont., 1983), 61–6. On the West Indies and elsewhere, see Wallace Brown, “The Loyalists in the West Indies,ˮ in Red, White and True Blue: The Loyalists in the Revolution, ed. Esmond Wright (New York, 1976), 73–96; Wallace Brown, “The American Loyalists in Jamaica,ˮ Journal of Caribbean History 26 (1992), 121–46; and Wilbur Siebert, The Legacy of the American Revolution to the British West Indies and Bahamas: A Chapter Out of the History of the American Loyalists (Columbus, Ohio, 1913). On Canada, see Wallace Brown and Hereward Senior, Victorious in Defeat: The American Loyalists in Exile. (New York, 1984). 19. Edward H. Tebbenhoff, “The Associated Loyalists: An Aspect of Militant Loyalism,ˮ New York Historical Society Quarterly 63 (1979), 115–44. The

294 “A Day of Strict Reckoning”? New England Loyalists After 1783 writer argues that the British generally held the loyalist units in check after 1780. 20. Benjamin Gilbert to Daniel Gilbert, June 1783, in Winding Down: The Revolutionary War Letters of Lieutenant Benjamin Gilbert of Massachusetts, 1780–1783, ed. John Shy (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1989), 108. 21. Discourse, Shewing the Difference between Whigandus and Torybandus. By a Friend to Peace (N.p., 1779), 4. See also [Roger Sherman], Remarks on a Pamphlet, entituled “A Dissertation on the Political Union and Constitution of the Thirteen United States of North-America, By a Citizen of Philadelphia.ˮ By a Connecticut Farmer [New Haven, Conn., 1784], 42–3. 22. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973), 564. 23. Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York, 2005), 367. 24. Petition of Norwalk to the General Assembly, January 15, 1783, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 26:247–8. 25. The Hancock group believed that “to be called into combinations [that is, radicalism], under the notion of supporting liberty, is always a dangerous measure,ˮ because it made possible the “banefulˮ work of “public incendiaries.ˮ See Zabdiel Adams, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency John Hancock, Esq; Governour; His Honor Thomas Cushing, Esq., LieutenantGovernor; the Honorable the Council; and the Honorable the Senate, and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, May 29, 1782, Being the Day of the General Election ([Boston], 1782), 25. Public proceedings against loyalists continued periodically throughout the war. For example, see Committee of the General Assembly to Investigate Inimicals at Guilford, July 12, 1781, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, CSA, 27:249. 26. Nathaniel Whitaker, The Reward of Toryism, A Discourse on Judges V, 23 (Newburyport, Mass., 1783). See also Moses Mather, Sermon, Preached in the Audience of the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut, in Hartford, on the Day of Their Anniversary Election, May 10, 1781 (New London, Conn., 1781), 10–11. 27. Whitaker, The Reward of Toryism, A Discourse on Judges V, 23, 13. 28. Ibid., 17. Whitaker set up a graded spectrum of amnesties, beginning with the absolute banishment of those who had deliberately aided the British, for “let the Ethiopean change his skin, and the leopard his spots, then will such abandoned wretches cease to do evil,ˮ meaning, never. See ibid., 19. 29. Ibid., 22. 30. Ibid., 23, 26. 31. Ibid., 31. There was no mistaking the class concern in Whitaker’s tone – he also aimed at those rebel rich who were not zealous enough for “the Safety of the States, and good of mankind.ˮ See ibid., 23, 31. 32. “A New York Loyalist to Lord Hardwicke,ˮ 1783, in The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence, Library of America, (New York, 2001), 790–2.

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33. John Murray, Jerubbaal, or Tyranny’s Grove Destroyed, and the Altar of Liberty Finished. A Discourse on America’s Duty and Danger (Newburyport, 1784), 57. 34. Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory. A Sermon, Preached before His Excellency Jonathan Trumbull, Esq., L.L.D., Governour and Commander in Chief, and the Honourable General Assembly, of the State of Connecticut, Convened at Hartford, at the Anniversary Election [May 8, 1783], 2nd edn. (Worcester, Mass., 1785), 10–11. It was a society that “realized the capital ideas of Harrington’s Oceana.ˮ For a pungent rejoinder by John Trumbull of Connecticut, who attacked those of any party who reintroduced “luxury,ˮ see [John Trumbull], The Double Conspiracy, or Treason Discovered but not Punished. A Matter of Fact, Delineated after the Life, in the Form of a Play ([Hartford? Conn.], 1783), 8. 35. Robert A. Feer, Shays’s Rebellion (New York, 1988), 297–301. See also Robert A. East, “The Massachusetts Conservatives in the Critical Period,ˮ in The Era of the American Revolution: Studies Inscribed to Evarts Boutelle Greene, ed. Richard B. Morris (New York, 1939), 349–91. Those in the farm towns had long suspected a “Toryˮ conspiracy of power afoot in the big towns. See Van Beck Hall, Politics Without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780– 1791 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1972), 9, 22, 83–5, 131–65. 36. John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Amherst, Mass., 1992), 213. 37. [Alexander Hamilton], “A Letter from Phocion to the Considerate Citizens of New-York on the Policies of the Day,ˮ (January 1, 1784, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 3, 1782–1786, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (New York, 1962), 485. See pp. 483–97. 38. Ibid., 494. 39. [Isaac Ledyard?], Mentor’s Reply to Phocion’s Letter; With Some Observations on Trade, Addressed to the Citizens of New York (New York, 1784), 11, 17. The editors of Hamilton’s papers doubt the attribution by earlier experts to Ledyard and conclude that the true writer is unknown. See The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 3, 1782–1786, 530, n.1. 40. [Alexander Hamilton], “Second Letter from Phocion,ˮ April, 1784, Syrett and Cooke, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 3, 1782–1786, 556. See pp. 530–8. See Hall, Politics Without Parties, 140–2, on those who encouraged the return of exiles at war’s end, to bring in needed capital and reduce friction with the British. See also Nancy L. Rhoden, “The American Revolution (I): The Paradox of Atlantic Integration,ˮ in British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Stephen Foster (New York, 2013), 282. See pp. 255–88. 41. For a description of how constant threats of violence attended the struggle over land in the interior counties of Massachusetts after the war, see Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), 109–21, 190–4.

296 “A Day of Strict Reckoning”? New England Loyalists After 1783 42. Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D. D., L. L. LD, President of Yale College, 3 vols., ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York, 1901), 3:61. 43. William A. Benton, Whig-Loyalism: An Aspect of Political Ideology in the American Revolutionary Era (Rutherford, N.J., 1969). 44. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 8:507–20. Separated from Trowbridge by a hair’s-breadth in being on the patriot side was Thomas Cushing (class of 1744), who was an uncertain political quantity until he finally denounced the Coercive Acts, earning him a seat in the revolutionary Massachusetts Council. He went on to be an amazing political survivor, eventually lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, the perennial second man. See ibid., 11:377–95. 45. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 17:310–14. For a similar story of a loyalist who stayed and became a very successful businessman after the war, see John H. Cary, “‘The Juditious are Intirely Neglected’: The Fate of a Tory,ˮ New England Historical and Genealogical Register 134 (1980), 99–114. 46. For a similar conclusion about New York, see Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia, Pa., 2002), 192–5. 47. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 17:190–207. 48. Ibid., 25–6. Another doctor, Isaac Rand (class of 1761), was a staunch loyalist who nevertheless continued to enjoy general freedom of movement because he had a wide clientele. He later became a founder of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and Harvard gave him an M.D. in 1798. See Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 15:101–4. 49. Lorenzo Sabine, “Rev. Edward Bass,ˮ in Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, With Historical Essay, intro. Ralph Adams Brown (Port Washington, N.Y., 1966), 1:214–15. 50. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 15:287–90. 51. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 17:49–54. 52. Sabine, “John Worthington,ˮ Biographical Sketches, 2:456–7; Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence, R.I., 1954), 63–6. 53. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 7:182–90. 54. Patricia Cleary, Elizabeth Murray: A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America (Amherst, Mass., 2000), 184–226; Mary Beth Norton and Carol Ruth Berkin, “A Cherished Spirit of Independence: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Boston Businesswoman,ˮ in Women of America, ed. Mary Beth Norton and Carol Ruth Berkin (Boston, Mass., 1979), 48–67. See also Petition of Ralph Inman, April 30, 1779, Resolves of the General Assembly (Boston, Mass., 1779), 165. 55. Wilbur H. Siebert, The Loyalist Refugees of New Hampshire (Columbus., Ohio, 1916), 22. 56. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 10:100–9. 57. Sabine, “Sir John Bernard,ˮ Biographical Sketches, 1:225–6. On one strange post-war migrant to Canada who had been a radical and a plague to loyalists, Benjamin Kent, see Clifford K. Shipton, New England Life in the Eighteenth Century: Representative Biographies from Sibley’s Harvard Graduates (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 254–64.

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58. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 13:551–60; Claim of William Browne, June 8, 1786, PRO AO 12/10, 107v–22v. He claimed £33,256. 59. Henry Marchant to William Vassall, May 9, 1786, Marchant Papers, RIHS, Manuscripts. See also Vassall to Marchant, February 2, 1785, and Vassall to Marchant, November 14, 1785, Marchant Papers. 60. Sabine, “William Vassall,ˮ Biographical Sketches, 2:384–5. 61. “The Narrative of Colonel Stephen Jarvis,ˮ in Loyalist Narratives from Upper Canada, ed. and intro., James T. Talman (Toronto, Ont., 1946), 149. See pp. 149–266. See also George A. Jarvis, George Murray Jarvis, and William Jarvis Wetmore, comp., The Jarvis Family (Hartford, Conn., 1879), 36–40. 62. Talman, “Narrative of Colonel Stephen Jarvis,ˮ 149–50. 63. Ibid., 219. 64. Ibid., 224. On the operation of the local surveillance system, see ibid., 154–5. 65. He had another joyful reunion with family in Connecticut in 1818. For the claims of other Jarvises and the related Dibblees, see Claim of William and Samuel Jarvis, March 23, 1784, PRO AO 13/422. See f.2–4v; and William Jarvis to the Commissioners, March 29, 1788, Claim of Polly Dibblee, November 17, 1787, PRO AO 13/41, 250v. See also Claim of Polly Dibblee, PRO AO 13/41, 218–18v; General Assembly of Connecticut v. Isaac Quintard and Tyler Dibblee, March, 1775, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 1:395. One of the closest students of Connecticut’s history marvels at the willingness to readmit the absconders. See Oscar Zeichner, “The Rehabilitation of Loyalists in Connecticut,ˮ New England Quarterly 11 (1938), 308–30. However, there were limits. An outright collaborator like Joel Stone had to leave, to found a new town in Ontario. See Joel Stone to the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury, December 6, 1784, in McDonald/Stone Family Papers, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ont., vol. 1, folder 2, 198. See pp. 183–200. See also, “The Narrative of Joel Stoneˮ, in Talman, Loyalist Narratives from Upper Canada, 323–6. 66. A surprising number of the immigrants heading for Upper Canada in the early decades were American citizens looking for land, or fed up ideologically. See Alan Taylor, “The Late Loyalists: Northern Reflections of the Early American Republic,ˮ Journal of the Early Republic 27 (2007), 1–34. 67. This conclusion by Maas, in The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists, 467–555, would appear to be true in all the colonies. There are almost no reports of mobbing, and there was a relatively straightforward legal process in the courts. See also James L. Walsh, “Friend of Government or Damned Tory: The Creation of the Loyalist Identity in Revolutionary New Hampshire, 1774–1784,” Ph.D. diss., University of New Hampshire, 1996, 289–90. 68. T. A. Milford, The Gardiners of Massachusetts: Provincial Ambition and the British-American Career (Durham, N.H., 2005). 69. Samuel Stearns, A Short History of the Treatment that Dr. Samuel Stearns hath Met with in Massachusetts since the Commencement of Hostilities between Great-Britain and Her Colonies ([Worcester, Mass.], 1786), 4. 70. Because of the state’s contempt for habeas corpus in his case, it went on and on. See ibid., 9.

298 “A Day of Strict Reckoning”? New England Loyalists After 1783 71. George Dana, Jonathan Richardson, and Samuel Newton, A Petition for a Contribution in Order to Relieve a Distressed Prisoner [Worcester, Mass., 1786], broadside. 72. Ibid. See Samuel Stearns, The Universal Kalendar, Comprehending the Landsman’s and Seaman’s Almanac, for 1783 (New York, [1782]). He was preparing publication of “The North American Dispensatory,ˮ the largest catalog of diseases and antidotes “in the known world.ˮ See Dana, Richardson, and Newton, A Petition for a Contribution. 73. Claim of Samuel Stearns, September 24, 1789, PRO AO 13/48, 663–74. 74. Samuel Stearns, The American Oracle, Comprehending an Account of Recent Discoveries in the Arts and Sciences, with a Variety of Religious, Political, Physical, and Philosophical Subjects, Necessary to be Known by All Families for the Promotion of their Present Felicity and Future Happiness (New York, 1791). See John C. L. Clark, “‘The Famous Dr. Stearns’: A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Stearns, With a Bibliography,ˮ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 45:2 (1935), 317–424. 75. He decided that his ordination did not have true divine authority, and went to England (as all Anglican divines in America had to do) for his reordination, came home to Stratford, and by 1727 had organized his parishioners to protest colonial taxes they paid (in addition to Johnson’s compensation) to support the Congregationalist minister. See Elizabeth B. McCaughey, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson (New York, 1980), 1–7. 76. Ibid., 62–5, 132, 164, 184, 189–94, 201–3. 77. Resolution on the Petition of the Committee of Marblehead, January 28, 1778, Massachusetts Bay, Resolves of the General Assembly of the State of Massachusetts-Bay, January 7 to March 13 [Boston, Mass., 1778], 15– 16. 78. Norton, The British Americans, 247. See pp. 247–8. 79. House Resolution, October 9, 1778, Massachusetts Bay, Resolves and Orders of the General Assembly of Massachusetts-Bay, September 16 to October 16, 1778 [Boston, Mass., 1778], 55. For another interesting case, see Decision, Claim of George Spooner, February 17, 1790, PRO AO 12/101, 209. 80. Petition of Ashbel Humphrey, January, 1782, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 23:302. He was permitted to return, at the same time the petition of Elisha Davis of Greenwich, who had thrived by illicit trade across enemy lines from Long Island, was denied by an angry legislature. See Petition of Elisha Davis, April 29, 1782, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 23:348. 81. Petition of Daniel Hoyt, April 27, 1787, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 37:143. See ff. 136–43. 82. He made a feeble attempt in 1793 to pursue those who had taken his press in 1777, but he must have known the courts would not entertain such an action. See Charles H. Bell, History of the Town of Exeter in New Hampshire (Boston, Mass., 1888), 201–3. 83. Petition of Daniel Sherman, et al., May 12, 1785, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 28:254.

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84. Petition of Ebenezer Punderson, October 9, 1783, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 26:279. Some returnees were men who came back only because the British Claims Commission would give them nothing, like John Bannister of Rhode Island, whom the Commission all but ordered to return to that state, where he still had a family. See Decision, Claim of John Bannister, PRO AO 12/99, 11v–12. 85. Petition of Abel Hall, October 7, 1805, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 3, 1:118. 86. William Bentinck-Smith, “Nicholas Boylston and His Harvard Chair,ˮ Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser. 93 (1981), 34–39. See pp. 17–39. 87. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 17:67–75. 88. Ibid., 15:419–27. For similar cases, see Nathaniel Chandler (class of 1768), scion of one of the richest and most conservative families in Worcester County, see Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 17:9–11, and David Greene (class of 1768); see ibid., 27–9. 89. Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties Before the Constitution (New York, 1973), 83–119. 90. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 14:570–2. 91. Ibid., 14:113–21. 92. Ibid., 14:398–402. Se also Robert B. Hanson, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1635– 1890 (Dedham, Mass., 1976), 156–9; and Stephanie Kermes, “‘I wish for nothing more ardently on earth, than to see my friends and country again’: The Return of Massachusetts Loyalists,ˮ Historical Journal of Massachusetts 30 (2002), n. 43. See pp. 30–49. 93. Petition of Samuel Roberts to the General Assembly, February 6, 1782, CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 1, 23:300–1. 94. Samuel Curwen, The Journal of Samuel Curwen: Loyalist, 2 vols., ed. Andrew Oliver (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 2:969. 95. John Adams to Samuel Cooper, December 9, 1780, Papers of John Adams, 18 vols., ed. Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint (Cambridge, Mass., 1977–2016), 10: 400. See pp. 400–2. 96. A curious case is that of Edward Bancroft, the New Englander who overcame a disadvantaged birth and put himself at the fulcrum of Anglo-American politics. Apparently, he was never a genuine loyalist, but he had become so Anglicized in London by the 1780s that he could not be happy in America, and said goodbye to it forever in 1783. See Thomas J. Schaeper, Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy (New Haven, Conn., 2011), 228–40. 97. See CSA, Connecticut Archives, Revolutionary War Series 3, vol. 2. 98. John Tyler to Samuel Peters, December 1, 1784, The Church of England in Pre-Revolutionary Connecticut: New Documents and Letters Concerning the Loyalist Clergy and the Plight of Their Surviving Church, ed. Kenneth W. Cameron (Hartford, Conn., 1976), 218. See pp. 218–19. 99. Robert A. East, Connecticut’s Loyalists (Chester, Conn., 1974), 45–9. For the story in New Haven, see Christopher Collier, Roger Sherman’s Connecticut: Yankee Politics and the American Revolution (Middletown, Conn., 1971), 199–201.

300 “A Day of Strict Reckoning”? New England Loyalists After 1783 100. Godfrey Malbone to Samuel Fitch, August 10, 1784, Claim of Samuel Fitch, PRO AO 13/45, 9. 101. Martin Van Buren, Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States, reprt. 1867 (New York, 1967), 7. See also p. 11. 102. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 341. 103. Jeremy Belknap, The History of New Hampshire, 3 vols. (Boston, Mass., 1791), 2:394. 104. Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: “The People,ˮ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (New York, 2007), 246. When members of the popular party called the Federalists “Toriesˮ in the 1790s, they were tapping into an ancient tradition. See John M. Murrin, “Escaping Perfidious Albion: Federalism, Fear of Aristocracy, and the Democratization of Corruption in Postrevolutionary America,ˮ in Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest: Political Values in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Richard K. Matthews (Bethlehem, Pa., 1994), 126. See pp. 103–47. 105. John M. Murrin, “The Great Inversion, or Court Versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688–1721) and America (1776–1816),ˮ in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 404. See pp. 368–453. 106. John Quincy Adams to Ezekiel Bacon, November 17, 1808, Writings of John Quincy Adams, vol. 3, 1801–1810, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York, 1914), 253. See pp. 248–53. This letter is as close as the writer came to a formal renunciation of the party in which he was born and bred. 107. Theodore Roosevelt rediscovered the Good Old Cause for his own Progressive purposes, in an admiring but essentially Romantic popular biography of Cromwell. See Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Cromwell (New York, 1900). For a stirring invocation of Cromwell and other heroes of 1649 (“who overthrew the power of the royal tyrant, King Charles I”) in 1852 by an Ohioan in Congress, incited in the sectional debates by a southern member’s speech, see William E. Van Vugt, British Buckeyes: The English, Scots, and Welsh in Ohio, 1700–1900 (Kent, Ohio, 2006), 61. See pp. 60–1. 108. Claim of Samuel Peters, December, 1873, PRO AO 13/50, 61–3; Sheldon S. Cohen, Connecticut’s Loyalist Gadfly: The Reverend Samuel Andrew Peters (Hartford Conn., 1977), 48–51; Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 2:181–2. 109. Samuel Peters, A History of the Rev. Hugh Peters, A. M, Arch-Intendant of the Prerogative Court of Doctors Commons, Member of the Celebrated Assembly of Divines at the Savoy, Westminster; and Principal Chaplain to the Lord Protector and to the Lords and House of Commons, from the Year 1640 to 1660 (New York, 1807), 6. See especially pp. 48–53. After his execution, Peter’s wife and daughter followed his instruction and fled to New England, where they obtained protection. See ibid., pp. 77–90. The executioner dispatched Peter the same day (October 16, 1660) and in the same way as regicide and Solicitor General John Cook: he was hanged briefly but taken down while still alive, castrated and disemboweled, finally killed by

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beheading, then drawn and quartered, all the while ridiculed by the executioner and the crowd. See Eleanor Bradley Peters, “Hugh Peter: Preacher, Patriot, Philanthropist, Fourth Pastor of the First Church in Salem,ˮ Historical Collections of the Essex Institute 38 (1902), 128–31. See pp. 1–51, 97–146. 110. Paul Crook, “Whiggery and America: Accommodating the Radical Threat,ˮ in Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis, ed. Michael T. Davis (New York, 2000), 192. See pp. 191–206. See also Gregory Claeys, “The Example of America a Warning to England? The Transformation of America in British Radicalism and Socialism, 1790–1850,ˮ in Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison, ed. Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (Brookfield, Vt., 1996), 66–80. 111. Eric Foner, “Tom Paine’s Republic: Radical Ideology and Social Change,ˮ in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb, Ill, 1976), 198, 199. See pp. 187–232. If Foner fails to answer the question “Wither radicalism in America?ˮ in that essay, he takes it up in later publications. See also Alfred F. Young, “Afterword: How Radical Was the American Revolution?ˮ in Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb, Ill., 1993), 317–64.

Conclusion

The huge and persistent loyalist problem shows that the Revolution did not unite and transform all Americans. The Revolution was not an irresistible impulse. The presence of so many loyalists forced rebels into a long, arduous struggle to prevail. The naysayers’ sheer force of numbers and the stubbornness of their royalist convictions are impressive. Even in the months leading up to July Fourth, they appeared to gain traction. Rebel leaders underestimated the opposition because of their notion, as Thomas Paine put it, that mere “servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism.”1 However fearful the loyalists were, it did not mean they would all flee or submit quietly. Those who stayed in their homes after the flight of the absconders formed a large and sullen group, who dampened rebel impetuosity. The Declaration of Independence had to wait for nearly a year after George III declared the colonists to be in rebellion, and they needed that time to achieve barely sufficient unity to overcome loyalist resistance. At least four conclusions are possible. First, that slow pace of the Revolution – thirty months from the Tea Party to the Declaration – opens up a general thesis about revolutions. The rebels came to understand that power circulates relentlessly among individuals and groups; it is “never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth.”2 It was impossible to concentrate power at some specific location on the political spectrum for very long, so it had to be renegotiated constantly throughout the Revolution. Historians should be more impressed by the rebels’ endurance and the skills of their surgical team in Philadelphia, given the immense obstacles they faced in a crisis that changed from day to day. 302

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Second, the size of the loyalist problem demolishes any conventional notion that there was a “New England culture,” a magic glowing ether with the power to unite the people of the four colonies for or against rebellion. The New Englander was the supreme individualist, whereas culture in the organic sense denies the individual’s “autonomy of spirit.”3 Yet self-culture by the disciplined individual to realize one’s strengths and overcome weaknesses, was more fully developed in New England than anywhere on earth.4 The Puritan’s wrangling with the terrible logic of predestination required one to use all God-given faculties, especially to exploit disciplined rational thought as “a matter of pride, an obligation, and a virtue.”5 That was one aspect of rebel New Englanders’ ethic (as opposed to a culture), which prized “efficiency, ingenuity, disciplined work, [and] educated experimentation” within the limits of and in service to the common good.6 It was a spirit deeply affronted by the Tea Act’s reassertion of the arrogant East India Company’s privileges. The Tea Act proved that the Company stood for the opposite of every element of the ethic: it was inefficient, entrenched in tradition, undisciplined (as indicated by its mountain of unsold tea), and unwilling to experiment, for it would take the Company another six decades to introduce tea production into India to end the Chinese monopoly. Third, the social implications of the loyalist problem were far-reaching, and will require another volume to explore thoroughly in the years after 1783. The “Mohawks” who overthrew the Company on Griffin’s Wharf were acting within a heritage of populist power to stand up to oligarchs, to established “status, stasis, and [British] communal obligations.”7 The Mohawks may not have had a very articulate vision of where they were headed, but it sufficed that they understood well enough what was wrong with privilege and class domination, which stifle individualism and progressive change. In general, the Revolution “had to become truly revolutionary because it had . . . to shatter loyalties and patterns of behavior that were becoming quite venerable” – but not by driving out the dissenters.8 The rebels had to tolerate those who sided with the old regime, as a test of their respect for individual conscience. When huge crowds of common people engulfed and humbled high and mighty gentlemen, it marked a new era. Removing the heads of oligarchic “chains of interest had destructive effects on the society out of all proportion to the actual numbers involved.”9 Especially in the seaports, radicalization “advanced very rapidly once the barriers of traditional thought were broken down.”10 Riding herd on local magnates for months or years corroded traditional rules of deference that structured

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the social hierarchy. As a result, by the end of the war, as one foreign traveler in the states put it, “there is an equality here, which to an European would be matter of wonder.”11 The country was starting out with wrecked infrastructure, exclusion from the British imperial trade network and financial system, and chronically hard times that would last until 1800. That economic insecurity helped reinforce egalitarian fraternity among the common people, fueled by their impatience with privilege, of which the many persisting loyalists constantly reminded them.12 Fourth, loyalism forced rebels to strengthen their competing political ideology. At the beginning, democratic-republican ideology existed only in historical versions in books and vague metaphors. One could not openly advocate abolishing the monarchy and lords, endowing all male adults with the right to vote, and guaranteeing social equality of personal regard as a right. These were discredited ideas associated with sad failures in history like the republic of Rome (founded 509 bce) that finally unraveled in 27 bce, the republic in Florence that fell to a condottiere in 1532, or the one in England that over-boiled in 1660.13 When the rebels gingerly abandoned self-censorship in 1774 they were free to develop a new political structure informed by history, but then found English history closed off to them. For loyalists threatened their unity by associating the rebels with the Roundheads of the 1640s. And yet, loyalists dared not enunciate a full-blown version of royalist ideology, focusing instead on their “feelings, expectations, intellectual and cultural heritage, and standards of public morality,” often expressed in sarcasm.14 They mostly jeered at the rebels, and loyalist jeering did help rebels throw off the shackles of the past. But it left them naked, except for the loincloth of “nature’s God,” as they called it with almost comical equivocation in the Declaration.15 So the delegates in Philadelphia slowly worked out an ideology expressed in the most general terms possible – liberty, democracy, equality. It could work so long as it remained historically neutered, not very specific, and so long as American individualism proved mature enough to make effective citizenship possible, in a suddenly created and flimsily defined “country.” By default, on July Fourth, they ended up with a mere confederation, with no king (thus, liberty), where laws were made only by elected representatives (democracy), and where all agreed on antagonism to privilege (which was as close as the rebel elites could come to tolerating a true principle of “equality”). The very word “democracy” remained “a vituperative term” that only loyalists used, like “republic” – to discredit the rebels.16 Thus, the founders began with a parchment-thin

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platform of ideals, on which only their common sense could erect a successful revolution. Since popular common sense is always “fragmentary and contradictory” rather than coherent, and episodic rather than stable, the risks were great.17 The persisting loyalists and the haunted property of the absconded served throughout the war to keep fresh the rebels’ common sense, that is, informed by basic progressive ideals the loyalists despised. When they started over in 1783, the only thing they could agree on for sure was that the loyalists were wrong. Notes 1. Thomas Paine, quoted in Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), 140. 2. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York, 1980), 98. The “neverˮ is debatable, but the characterization is accurate as to the course of revolutions. 3. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Malden, Mass., 2000), 4. 4. Ibid., 5–6. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. and ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), 130. See also Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), 78–86. 6. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York, 2010), 118. I take liberty here: Appleby’s reference is to seventeenthcentury England, mine more specific. 7. Ibid., 119. 8. John M. Murrin, “Political Development,ˮ in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore, Md.: 1984), 447. See pp. 408–56. 9. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 176. 10. Gary B. Nash, “Social Change and the Growth of Prerevolutionary Urban Radicalism,ˮ in Gary B. Nash, Race, Class, and Politics: Essays on American Colonial and Revolutionary Society, foreword by Richard S. Dunn (Urbana and Chicago, Ill., 1986), 234. See pp. 211–42. 11. [Thomas Brockway?], The European Traveller in America (Hartford, Conn., 1785), 6. Antiquarian Franklin Bowditch Dexter doubted that Charles Evans was correct in attributing this piece to the Connecticut clergyman Brockway (1745–1807), whose only certain publications were of a religious nature. The copy in Early American Imprints has the name “Calvin Hornickˮ penned on the cover. 12. Allan Kulikoff, “‘Such Things Ought Not To Be’: The American Revolution and the First National Great Depression,ˮ in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York, 2014), 134–64.

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13. On the discouraging historical legacy of republics, their seemingly inexorable declension, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York, 2000), 125–45. 14. Robert M. Calhoon, “Conclusion: A Special Kind of War,ˮ in Tory Insurgents: The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, revd. and expanded edn., Robert M. Calhoon Timothy M. Barnes, and Robert S. Davis (Columbia, S.C., 2010), 373. See pp. 370–3. 15. For the best introduction, see John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 103–21. For an example of the phrase before the Declaration, see Oliver Noble, Some Strictures upon the Sacred Story Recorded in the Book of Esther, Shewing the Power and Oppression of State Ministers Tending to the Ruin and Destruction of God’s People (Newburyport, Mass., 1775), 28. See also Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (New York, 2014). 16. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), 223. 17. Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,ˮ in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York, 1996), 431. See pp. 411–40.

Index

Adams, Abigail, 121, 276 Adams, Amos, 60 Adams, John, 3, 57, 60, 65, 93, 131, 137, 155, 167, 216, 221, 226, 248, 251, 289, 290 Adams, John Quincy, 290 Adams, Samuel, 21, 28, 64, 65, 67, 68, 119, 120, 123–5, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134, 136, 157, 162, 163, 168, 182, 184, 186, 188, 254 African Americans, 25, 153, 225–9, 232 agrarian law, 217 Akerley, Moses, 262 Alien and Sedition Acts, 290 Allen, James, 54 Allen, John, 59, 133, 228 Allen, Jolley, 192 America, 123 American Antiquarian Society, 288 American Political Society, 154 American Revolution, 2, 15, 27, 50, 67, 94, 150, 215, 276 Amory, John, 130, 287 Andros, Edmund, 132 Anglican/ism. See Church of England Anglo-Saxons, 20, 21 anti-Semitism, 92, 227 Appleby, Joyce, 87–8 Arabella, 120 aristocracy, 3, 5, 87–8, 98, 153, 161, 193, 215, 216, 223, 279, 291 Aristotle, 149 Ark of the Covenant, 123

Arnold, Benedict, 257, 277 Atherton, Joshua, 160, 164 Attucks, Crispus, 226 Auchmuty, Robert, 253 Auchmuty, Samuel, 183 Austin, Jonathan Williams, 100–1 Bailey, Jacob, 135 Baldwin, Ebenezer, 156, 228, 248 Ball, John, 5 Bancks, John, 53 Baptists, 30, 153, 217, 260 Barlow, Joel, 229 Barr´e, Isaac, 101, 121 Bass, Edward, 281 Batcheller, Breed, 195 Bates, Walter, 193 Baxter, Prudence, 199 Beckford, William, 92, 94 Belinda, 227 Belknap, Jeremy, 290 Bengal, 98 Bermuda, 164, 283 Bernard, Francis, 163 Bernard, John, 282 Bible, 17, 18, 21, 23, 28, 122, 133, 149, 217, 220, 229 Bill of Rights, 52, 87, 90, 94, 95, 131, 165 Birmingham, 161 Black Regiment, 127, 161 Blackstone, William, 91 Boden, William, 287

307

308

Index

Bolton, Thomas, 168 Boston, 19, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 61, 62, 68, 93, 95, 96, 100, 101, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 138, 149, 154, 162, 163, 165, 168, 169, 181, 184, 185, 190–2, 196, 197, 198, 222, 250, 251, 254, 263, 281, 287, 289 Bunch of Grapes, 191 Faneuil Hall, 129, 135 Green Dragon Tavern, 32 Griffin’s Wharf, 34, 119, 303 King’s Chapel, 55, 191, 284 Long Wharf, 129 Old South Meeting House, 119, 168 press gang riots, 95 Town Meeting, 95 Boston Massacre, 60, 92, 95, 119, 226 oration, 98, 99, 101, 125, 127, 160, 168, 250 Boston Tea Party, 1, 6, 7, 18, 30, 55, 61, 63, 94, 98, 119–22, 123, 128, 130, 136, 160, 161, 164, 166, 167, 186, 192, 247, 280, 302 Mohawks, 16, 50, 60, 119, 120, 122, 132, 222, 303 Boswell, James, 53 Boudinot, Elias, 228 Bowdoin, James, 88, 110, 133, 144, 164, 176, 197, 204, 224, 227, 240 Boylston, Ward Nicholas, 288 Brattle, Thomas, 288 Brattle, William, 163, 288 Breen, T. H., 2 Brewer, Holly, 232 Brewer, John, 90 Brewster, Nero, 226 British Empire, 27 Brooke, John L., 279 Brother Jonathan, 58, 61, 190, 217 Brown, Abijah, 187 Brown, Hezekiah, 189 Brown, Richard D., 135, 247, 249 Brown, Timothy, 187 Brown, Wallace, 247 Browne, William, 283 Brush, Crean, 185, 192 Bunker Hill, Battle of, 30, 90, 128, 183, 191, 195 Burgoyne, John, 183, 197, 221 Burke, Edmund, 84, 93, 189 Burroughs, George, 151

Byles, Mather, 191 Byles, Mather Jr., 222 Cabot family, 254 Calhoon, Robert M., 4 Callahan, Rebecca, 231 Calvinism, 15, 23, 230 Cambridge Crisis, 130, 136, 149, 154 Canada, 6, 93, 130, 135, 156, 224, 232, 260, 261, 262, 274, 276, 277, 284, 288 Acadia, 18, 277 Halifax, 95, 164, 282 New Brunswick, 224, 262, 284, 288 Nova Scotia, 163, 193, 196, 224, 231, 277, 285, 287 Quebec, 94, 131, 132, 197, 282 Upper Canada (Ontario), 228, 284 Canada, Lower. See Canada, Quebec Caner, Henry, 55 cap of liberty, 125 Capen, Hopestill, 191 Carigal, Raphael Chaim Isaac, 18 Castle William, 95, 99, 130, 137, 150, 191 Catiline, 67, 122 Cato, 121 Cavaliers, 17, 21, 34, 62, 66 Champlin, Mary, 249 Champlin, Thomas, 249 Charles I, 15, 52, 54, 55, 56, 66, 68, 91, 120, 125, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 198, 228, 291 Charles II, 16, 52, 53, 62, 66, 98, 248, 249 Chatham. See Pitt, William the Elder Chauncy, Charles, 92, 163 China, 120, 303 Chipman, Ward, 276 Chisholm v. Virginia, 283 Church of England, 5, 16, 23, 29, 31, 56, 60, 125, 131, 152, 160, 163, 257, 261, 281, 284, 289, 290 Anglicanism, 23, 151, 152 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 23, 62, 135, 281, 289 Church, Benjamin, 60, 189 Clarke, Jonas, 248 Clarke, Jonathan, 123 Clarke, Richard, 123 Clarke, William, 289 Clay, Henry, 192 Clinton, Henry, 183, 197, 276

Index Coercive Acts, 7, 102, 109, 114, 129, 130, 134, 136, 139, 143, 155, 172, 296 Administration of Justice Act, 130, 131 Boston Port Act, 129, 131, 134, 192 Massachusetts Government Act, 130, 131, 136 Quartering Act, 130, 131 Coffin, Nathaniel, 135 Coke, Edward, 15 Cole, Edward, 263 Collins, John, 222 Columbia College, 286 Committees of Correspondence, 123, 135, 137, 195, 286 common good, 21, 31, 85, 88, 89, 248, 251, 303 Congregationalism, 5, 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31, 55, 60, 99, 127, 152, 153, 187, 228, 286 Connecticut, 28, 29, 158–9, 197, 255–9, 277–8 Colchester, 187 Danbury, 248, 283, 287 distribution of loyalists, 151–2 Fairfield, 152, 195, 277 Fairfield County, 197 Farmington, 134 Goshen, 287 Hebron, 158, 291 Lebanon, 187, 198 New Haven, 59, 61, 197, 257, 277, 286 New Milford, 287 New Town, 152, 289 Norwalk, 152, 277, 278 Norwich, 160, 168, 187 Preston, 160 Ridgefield, 152, 197 Stafford, 229 Stamford, 193 Stonington, 187 Wallingford, 158 Waterbury, 189 Weston, 287 Woodbury, 189 Constitutional Convention, 286 Continental Association, 156, 165, 186, 228 Cooke, Nicholas, 154 Coos County, 281 Copley, John Singleton, 124

309

Corner Store, 280 Cornish, 20 country, 122, 123, 126, 127, 132, 137, 154, 167, 181, 182, 189, 190, 195, 304 covenant, 21 Halfway Covenant, 25 Crane, Elaine Forman, 230 Cranston, Samuel, 31 Cromwell, Oliver, 5, 52, 67, 68, 120, 123, 182 Crown Point, Battle of, 195 Cuffe, Paul, 226, 229 culture, 4, 16, 18–20, 32, 51, 122, 303 Cumings, Henry, 228 Curwen, Samuel, 164, 289 customs men, 51, 95, 122, 135, 137, 150, 231, 252, 282 Dalrymple, John, 221 Dalrymple, William, 95 Dana, James, 217, 223 Danelaw, 20 Danes, 20, 216 Danforth, Jonathan, 287 Daniels, Bruce, 24 Dartmouth College, 195, 228 Dawes, Thomas, 224 Day, John, 224 Deane, Silas, 195 Deblois, George, 123 Declaration of Independence, 17, 34, 54, 59, 68, 101, 133, 184, 189, 194, 196, 302, 304 Declaratory Act, 130, 155 Deism, 22 democracy, 2, 5, 8, 22, 30, 32, 66, 68, 87, 216, 291, 304 Democratic-Republican Party, 25, 290 Dickinson, John, 59, 66 Dixwell, John, 59 Draper, Margaret, 231 Draper, Richard, 231 Dunbar, David, 158 Dunbar, Jesse, 158 Dunbar, Moses, 158 Dunning, John, 131 Eager, Miriam, 232 Eagleton, Terry, 4, 19 East Anglia, 20–1

310

Index

East India Company, 93, 98, 119, 121, 164, 219, 303 England, 2, 4, 6, 15, 17, 20, 22, 27, 52, 53, 56, 66, 68, 85, 98, 123, 130, 133, 136, 165, 192, 225, 255, 260, 289 armed forces, 7, 16, 18, 31, 89, 90–102, 127, 130, 134, 168, 196, 287 House of Commons, 15, 34, 51, 63, 89, 90, 92, 93, 121, 122, 131, 134, 274 House of Lords, 15–16, 52, 63, 85, 89, 132, 304 London, 53, 55, 66, 91, 98, 164, 182, 288 national debt, 93 Parliament, 15, 16, 17, 18, 52, 54, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 85, 89–90, 92, 94, 99, 101, 120, 121, 126, 130, 131, 133, 155, 159, 162, 186, 194, 253, 260, 261, 275 Privy Council, 96, 123, 262 ruling class, 3, 6–7, 16, 18, 34, 53, 84–9, 90, 97, 126, 133, 215, 221, 254 Westminster, 15, 33, 130, 136, 263 English constitution, 15–16, 28, 51, 54, 55, 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 91, 96, 97, 120, 125, 126, 131, 132, 155, 166, 183, 253 English Revolution, 2, 7, 16, 21, 22, 34, 51–69, 84, 87, 248, 291, 304 Fifth Monarchists, 55 Levellers, 7, 21, 28, 55, 63, 68, 150, 223 New Model Army, 61 Enlightenment, 22, 41, 75, 90, 105, 202, 223 equality, 2, 6, 8, 27, 216, 291, 304 Evelyn, Glanville, 60 Faneuil, Benjamin, 130 Federalist Party, 3, 8, 25, 164, 281, 282, 286, 290 Fenton, John, 30 Filmer, Robert, 55 First Party System, 290 Fiske, Nathan, 63 Fitch, Thomas, 257 Florence, 304 Foner, Eric, 291 Fort Cavendish, 95 Fort Chartres, 95 Fort Griswold, 277 Fortune, 122

forty-shilling freehold, 24 Foster, Dan, 59, 60 Foster, Isaac, 229 Fowle, Daniel, 287 Fowle, Robert, 287 Fox, Charles James, 53, 94 France, 90, 97, 101, 166, 224, 254, 284 Frankland, Agnes Surriage, 231 Frankland, Charles, 231 Franklin, Benjamin, 96, 100, 101, 123, 223 Freeman, Elizabeth, 227 French Revolution, 53 Gage, Margaret Kemble, 129 Gage, Thomas, 64, 67, 96, 97, 129, 134, 135, 149, 163, 167, 181, 183, 186, 231 Gallatin, Albert, 61 Galloway, Joseph, 64 Gardiner, John, 285 Gardiner, John Sylvester John, 285 Gardiner, Sylvester, 219, 284 Gay, Ebenezer, 163 George III, 3, 16, 17, 34, 57, 59, 63, 84, 86, 89, 90, 96, 99, 100, 101, 120, 122, 124, 126, 132, 133, 153, 167, 184, 188, 194, 219, 223, 249, 291, 302 George IV, 89 Gleason, Ezra, 219 Glorious Revolution, 16, 51, 52, 55, 59, 84, 133 Gloucester, Battle of, 184 Glover, Amelia, 283 Goffe, John, 198 Gold, Harriet Ruggles, 228 Goldsbury, Samuel, 154 Goodwin, Samuel, 135 Gordon, William, 90, 223, 254 Gove, Jonathan, 197, 281 Gray, Harrison, 165, 167, 275 Great Awakening, 23, 25, 257 Great Lakes, 95, 262 Great Migration, 16 Great War for Empire, 6, 84, 94 Greece, Ancient, 100, 157 polis, 19, 216 Greenleaf, Stephen, 282 Hall, Abel, 287 Hall, David D., 22

Index Hall, Prince, 226 Hallowell, Benjamin, 137, 198, 254, 288 Hamilton, Alexander, 279 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 231 Hamilton, Joseph, 231 Hampden, John, 56 Hancock, John, 88, 95, 97, 99–100, 125, 127, 155, 160, 168, 182, 186, 188, 197, 220, 252, 275, 278 Hanoverian Dynasty, 84, 132 Harrington, James, 279 Harrison, Thomas, 52 Hart family, 196 Hart, Levi, 228 Harvard College, 132, 161, 223, 280, 288, 289 Hawley, Joseph, 65 Haynes, Lemuel, 225 Hays, Moses, 196 Hazard, Joseph, 249 Henley, Robert Earl of Northington, 99 Hewes, George Robert Twelves, 122 Higginson family, 254 Hill, Brian W., 89 Hill, Wills Earl of Hillsborough, 95, 162 historical consciousness, 1, 2, 5–6, 17, 19, 32, 52, 67, 91, 119, 183, 184, 191, 199, 280, 290, 291 Hitchborn, Benjamin, 232 Hitchcock, Gad, 129 HMS Romney, 162 Home Counties, 91 Hooper, Joseph, 156 Hopkins, Samuel, 228 Hopkins, Stephen, 55, 60, 61, 229 Houston, John, 135, 195 Howard, Simeon, 99, 223 Howe, William, 165, 183, 190 Hoyt, Mary, 258 Hoyt, Samuel, 287 Huguenots, 153, 164 Hulton, Ann, 128 Hulton, Henry, 150, 181, 222 Hume, David, 52–3, 99 Humphrey, Ashbel, 287 Huntington, Enoch, 127, 128 Hutchinson, Foster, 222 Hutchinson, Thomas, 15, 23, 26, 55, 57, 95, 97, 121, 123, 126, 128, 129, 130, 136, 154, 163, 168, 219, 221, 250, 252

311

Hutchinson, Thomas Jr., 222 Hyde, Edward Earl of Clarendon, 291 ideology, 17, 166, 247, 304 India, 98, 303 Ingersoll, Jared, 166, 257 Inman, Elizabeth Murray, 219, 282 Inman, Ralph, 282 Ireland, 92, 126, 130, 224, 249 Irish, 20, 261 Jackson family, 254 Jacobites, 89, 90, 126 James II, 16, 52, 91, 93, 99, 125, 132, 136, 167 Jameson, James Franklin, 5, 247 Jarvis, Stephen Jr., 283–4 Jarvis, Stephen Sr., 283 Jefferson, Thomas, 66, 227, 232, 289 Jeffries, John, 288 Jesus of Nazareth, 21, 122, 217 Jews, 18, 28, 92, 122, 136, 149, 153, 196, 217, 227, 278 Johnson, Samuel, 53, 286 Johnson, William Samuel, 91, 286 Jones, Ichabod, 281 Jones, James, 198 Jones, John Coffin, 282 Joyce, George, 198 Julius Caesar, 133, 216 July Fourth oration, 222 Junius, 94 Kelly, Erasmus, 196 Ketcham, James, 158 Keteltas, Abraham, 222 Kimber, Isaac, 53 Kulikoff, Allan, 276 Land Bank, 25 Langford, Paul, 87 Lathrop, John, 99, 249, 250 Leacock, John, 66 Lechmere family, 222 Ledyard, Isaac, 279 Lee, Andrew, 128 Lee, Ann, 230 Lee, Charles, 59 Leonard, Daniel, 57, 101, 164, 165, 166, 215, 219 Lewis, Ezekiel, 196

312

Index

Lexington and Concord, Battle of, 7, 57, 128, 149, 181, 182 liberalism, 87 liberty, 2, 8, 125, 127, 216, 291 Liberty Tree, 122, 123 Lilburne, John, 21 Lincoln, William, 32 literacy, 25 Locke, John, 5, 21, 28, 87, 133, 221, 228 Lollards, 17, 18, 216 Long Island, Battle of, 156 Louis XIV, 90 Louis XVI, 133 Lovejoy, David S., 153 Lowell family, 254 loyalists absconders, 149, 150, 165, 183, 190–1, 198, 231, 247, 250–1, 252, 255, 256, 258, 260, 263, 274, 280, 283–4 anti-rebel tactics, 64, 68, 130–1, 135–6 confiscation of estates, 8, 247–63 definition, 95, 131 distribution, 29, 31, 150–4 historical consciousness, 50 ideology, 1–2, 4, 17, 31, 84–5, 97, 101, 132–3 persisters, 2, 3, 8, 149–50, 151, 157, 167, 182, 185, 191–2, 195, 232, 252, 255, 278–9, 280, 290, 302, 305 reintegration, 8, 284–91 shunning, 128, 149, 152, 156–7, 182, 183, 189, 195, 261, 262, 280, 287 Tory policy, 1, 4, 7, 126–9, 156–61, 184, 274–91 Lynd, Staughton, 4 Maas, David E., 254, 276 Macaulay, Catherine, 53, 57 Maccarty, Thaddeus, 187 Machiavelli, Niccolo, ` 127 Magna Carta, 15, 19, 122, 216 Maier, Pauline, 224 Main, Jackson Turner, 217, 255 Maine. See Massachusetts Bay (Province) Malbone, Godfrey, 290 Malcolm, John, 122 Mammon, 221 Mandamus Councilors, 135, 136, 157, 161, 164, 167, 283 Marblehead, 245, 298 Mark, 226

Mary II, 52, 132 Mason, Robert T., 30 Masons, 191, 289 Massachusetts Bay (Colony), 2, 16, 30, 54, 55, 153, 167 Body of Liberties, 16 constitution, 15, 120 Plymouth, 17 Salem, 16 Salem Village, 289 town meeting, 15 witches, 16, 151, 197, 199 Massachusetts Bay (Province), 23, 26, 28, 64, 97, 129, 282 Berkshires, 159 Billerica, 228 Cambridge, 169, 186, 222 Charlestown, 137, 149, 156, 184 circular letter, 95, 162 constitution, 130, 160, 182, 252 Council, 96, 130 Cumberland County, 166 Danvers, 289 Deerfield, 263, 280 Essex County, 133, 150 Falmouth, 184, 188 General Court, 45 Gloucester, 232 Great Barrington, 159 Halifax, 158 Hardwick, 157, 165, 287 Harvard, 122 Hingham, 163 Hopkinton, 231 House of Representatives, 28, 95, 126, 129, 162, 164 Lincoln County, 219 Maine, 186, 219, 276, 284 Majabigwaduce, 276 Marblehead, 156, 276, 287 Middleborough, 230 Milton, 129 Newburyport, 150, 281 Northampton, 281 Northborough, 128, 231 Paxton, 285 Penobscot Bay, 276 Plymouth, 158, 282 Plymouth County, 158, 252 Pownalborough, 135, 186, 231 Provincetown, 192

Index Provincial Congress, 120, 155, 157, 165, 169, 182–3, 187, 231 radicalism, 54, 60, 64, 97, 119, 135 Roxbury, 289 royal salaries controversy, 126, 136 Salem, 123, 133, 134, 149, 155, 156, 167, 283 Springfield, 282 Suffolk County, 154, 155, 157, 183 Taunton, 165 Tewkesbury, 187 town meeting, 136, 186 Waltham, 187 Worcester, 32, 136, 157, 185, 187, 188, 194, 288 Worcester County, 135, 154, 161, 169 Massachusetts Bay (State), 197, 247, 261, 276, 281, 282, 283, 288, 289 Cambridge, 282, 289 constitution, 227, 229, 252 Essex County, 254 General Court, 90, 248, 287, 289 House of Representatives, 254, 285 Passamaquoddy Bay, 288 Quincy, 289 radicalism, 252 Salem, 288, 289 Mather, Increase, 167 Mayer, Arno, 276 Mayhew, Jonathan, 28, 55, 56 McIntosh, Ebenezer, 224 Mead, Elijah, 185 Mein, John, 64 Merritt, Bruce G., 263 middle colonies, 64, 66 militia, 15, 100 Milton, John, 57, 60 Minerva, 123, 125, 163 Minute Men, 137, 167, 181 Mississippi River Valley, 263 Mobile, 95 Mohegans, 228 Molasses Act, 93 Molyneux, Thomas More, 63 Morris, Robert, 66 Morton, Perez, 191 Moss, Charles, 63 Murray, James, 219 Murray, John, 229, 279 Murray, John Lord Dunmore, 226

313

Nash, Gary B., 4, 27 Native Americans, 16, 18, 24, 26, 94, 163, 227, 275 natural law, 4, 122, 132, 304 Nedham, Marchmont, 59 Negro election day, 225 neutrals, 3, 4 New Brunswick. See Canada New France, 18, 96, 130 New Hampshire, 28, 29–30, 198, 259 Amherst, 164 Bedford, 135, 195 Coos County, 281 distribution of loyalists, 152–3 Exeter, 189, 195, 197 Goffstown, 281 Nelson, 195 New Boston, 281 Portsmouth, 30, 156, 226 New Hampshire Grants. See Vermont New Hampshire Medical Society, 281 New Ireland, 276 New Toryism, 84, 89, 126, 164 New York, 3, 26, 29, 65, 102, 123, 126, 151, 152, 153, 156, 159, 163, 187, 190, 194, 197, 226, 257, 261, 263, 277, 279, 285 Long Island, 158, 287 New York, Battle of, 185 Noble, Oliver, 99, 128 Norman Conquest, 248 Norman Yoke, 21 Normans, 20, 216 North Carolina, 257 North, Frederick Lord, 64, 89, 121, 219 North, Lord. See North, Frederick Lord Nutting, John, 276 Occom, Samson, 227 Ohio, 286 Ohio River Valley, 263 oligarchy, 4, 53, 165, 220, 221, 222, 232, 263, 282, 303 Olive Branch Petition, 84 Oliver, Andrew, 119, 130, 154, 161, 221 Oliver, Peter, 122, 126, 136, 159, 161, 221 Oliver, Thomas, 137, 222 Oliver family, 222 Oneidas, 228 Osborn, Sarah, 230

314

Index

Otis, James Jr., 95, 122 Overing, John, 196 Paine, Thomas, 22, 68, 193, 223, 291, 302 Paine, Timothy, 136, 288 Paine, William, 288 Parsons, Theophilus, 281 patriarchy, 232 Patten, Matthew, 135 Patterson, Stephen, 254 Pencak, William, 127 Penn family, 261 Pennsylvania, 3, 22, 29 Penobscot Bay, Battle of, 277 Peter, Hugh, 291 Peters, Samuel, 60, 158, 263, 290–1 Petition of Right, 15–16, 19, 51, 84, 88, 216 Philadelphia, 17, 59, 64, 67, 123, 134, 135, 152, 182, 302, 304 Phillis, 226 Phipps family, 222 Pilgrims, 17 Pitt, William the Elder, 89, 121, 153, 189 Pokanokets, 153 Poland, 101, 166 Pope Day, 27, 60 population African Americans of New England, 225 Boston, 191 Connecticut, 24, 152, 255 England, 85, 93 Great Britain, 93 loyalists, 190 Massachusetts, 24 Native Americans of New England, 24 New England, 23 New Hampshire, 24 Rhode Island, 24 Thirteen Colonies, 3 Vermont, 24 Porter, Asa, 281 Potter-MacKinnon, Janice, 231 powder alarm, 130, 156 Pownall, Thomas, 63 predestination, 18, 22, 23, 303 Preston, Robert, 64 Pride, Thomas, 52 Proclamation Line of 1763, 26, 94, 98, 263 Proclamation of Rebellion, 188 Prussia, 93

Punderson, Ebenezer Jr., 55, 149, 160, 169, 187, 287 Punderson, Ebenezer Sr., 160 Puritanism, 4, 15, 21, 22, 31, 62, 67, 150, 153, 166, 216, 220 Puritans, 2 Putnam, James, 185 Pynchon, William, 251 Quakers, 16, 23, 29, 230, 260 Quebec Act, 102, 130, 131, 136 Quincy, Josiah Jr., 59, 98, 119, 160, 182, 186 Quincy, Samuel, 182 radicalism, 262–3 Ramsay, David, 253 regicides, 54, 55, 56, 59, 62, 198, 248, 291 Republican Motherhood, 230 republicanism, 4, 32, 54, 62, 63, 65, 123, 125, 129, 132, 158, 190, 304 Restoration, 16, 62, 248 Revere, Paul, 123, 155, 218, 222 Rhode Island, 18, 28, 30–1, 196–7, 259–60 distribution of loyalists, 153–4 Grantham, 154 Little Compton, 123 Narragansett Bay, 31, 153, 259 Newport, 24, 26, 30, 31, 153, 154, 196, 226, 230, 231, 263 North Kingston, 231 Providence, 30, 149, 153, 154, 185, 196, 226 South Kingston, 249 Rice, Ebenezer, 282 Ritcheson, Charles R., 274 Rockingham, Lord. See Watson-Wentworth, Charles Marquess of Rockingham Rogers, James, 263 Rogers, Robert, 185 Roman Catholicism, 17, 52, 126, 129, 131, 216, 220 Rome, Ancient, 28, 97, 99, 100, 125, 157, 304 Roundheads, 21, 61, 62, 65, 66, 132, 216, 290, 304 Rowe, John, 190, 192 Royal American Magazine, 125 Royall, Isaac, 227 Royall family, 222 Ruggles, John, 196

Index Ruggles, Timothy Dwight, 136, 161, 163, 165, 167 Rush, Benjamin, 123 Russia, 101 Sampson, Deborah, 230 Saratoga, Battle of, 250 Sarter, Caesar, 226 Scotland, 91, 282 Scots, 20, 249, 261 sectionalism (New England), 26 sectionalism (North/South), 54–67 Seely, Seth, 193 Sermon on the Mount, 19 Sewall, Esther Quincy, 137 Sewall, Jonathan, 137 Shakers, 230 Shays’s Rebellion, 252 Sheperd, John, 198 Sherman, Justin, 287 Sherwood, Justus, 263 Shklar, Judith N., 232 Shy, John, 6 Sidney, Algernon, 56 slave trade, 226, 228, 229, 242, 243 slavery, 31, 61, 62, 65, 122, 215, 225–6, 228–9, 232 abolitionism, 225 Slocum, Charles, 154 Slotkin, Richard, 278 Smith, Adam, 88 Smith, Venture, 225 smuggling, 92, 95, 121 Socrates, 18, 122 Solemn League and Covenant, 134, 187 Somerset, James, 225 Sons of Liberty, 53, 66, 102, 119 South Americans, 227 South Carolina, 3, 253, 261, 274, 276 Spain, 90, 97, 224 Spitalfields, 92 St. George’s Fields prison, 92 St. Lawrence River Valley, 95 Stamp Act, 63, 153, 161, 257, 286 Stamp Act Congress, 163 standing army, 15, 16, 18, 52, 53, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 157 Stanhope, Philip Lord Chesterfield, 223 Star Chamber, 130 Stearns, Samuel, 285 Stiles, Benjamin, 189

315

Stiles, Ezra, 18, 98, 216, 227, 279, 280 Stone, Timothy, 220 Stuart pretenders, 91, 150, 249 Suffolk Resolves, 7, 156 Susquehanna Company, 29, 257, 286 Symsbury Prison, 277 tar and feathers, 122, 160 Tawney, Richard Henry, 220 Taylor, Alan, 284 tea, 121–2, 128, 169, 196, 230, 282, 303 Tea Act, 32, 96, 102, 120, 131, 222, 303 Tennessee River Valley, 263 Thacher, Peter, 98 Thomas, Nathaniel Ray, 198 Thompson, Edward P., 86 Three Resolutions, 16 Tilly, Charles, 92 Tory policy, 2, 8 Townshend Acts, 32, 95, 121, 162, 286 Treaty of Paris (1763), 17, 85 Treaty of Paris (1783), 274, 275 Trenchard, John, 93 Troutbeck, John, 198 Troutbeck, Sarah, 198 Trowbridge, Edmund, 280 Trumbull, John, 130, 216, 248 Trumbull, Jonathan, 29, 151, 159, 181, 185, 187, 257 Tryon, William, 197, 277, 286 Tudor, William, 99 Tyler, Benjamin, 282 Unitarianism, 163 United States Civil War, 252 Congress, 190, 249, 250, 252, 253, 274, 277, 283, 286 Constitution, 281, 283 Continental Army, 65, 169, 181, 185, 223, 227, 230 Continental Congress, 4, 7, 54, 59, 63, 65, 66, 67–9, 84, 94, 122, 134, 155, 185, 186, 189, 193, 194 Continental Navy, 154 Van Buren, Martin, 290 Van Tyne, Claude, 198 Vassall, William, 283

316

Index

Vassall family, 222 Venner, Thomas, 55 Vermont, 30, 153, 192, 260, 291 vice-admiralty court, 95 Virginia, 3 House of Burgesses, 62 Jamestown, 62 Williamsburg, 62 Walker, Quok, 227 Walpole, Robert, 84, 88 Walter, William, 289 Wanton, Joseph, 31, 136, 154, 185 War of Independence, 64, 67, 149 Ward–Hopkins dispute, 153 Warren, James, 82, 113, 139, 143, 165, 177, 184, 188, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, 226, 235, 239, 249, 250, 252, 254, 264, 266, 268 Warren, John, 222 Warren, Joseph, 75, 82, 110, 129, 146, 168, 183, 191, 200, 201, 206, 222, 288 Warren, Mercy Otis, 1, 98, 119, 120, 121, 128, 197, 199, 220, 221, 232 Washington, George, 65, 68, 151, 185, 194, 257 Watson-Wentworth, Charles Marquess of Rockingham, 90, 96 Weber, Max, 220 Webster, Daniel, 192 Webster, Samuel, 127 Wells, William V., 125 Welsh, 20 Wentworth, Benning, 30 Wentworth, John I, 30 Wentworth, John II, 30, 136, 152, 154, 280 Wentworth, Thomas Earl of Strafford, 137 Wesley, John, 87

West Indies, 6, 93, 98, 196, 274, 277, 282, 284 West, Samuel, 128 Western Reserve, 277, 286 Wheatley, Phyllis, 225, 247 Wheelock, Eleazar, 195, 227 Whigs and Tories, 56, 84, 88–90, 91 Whitaker, Nathaniel, 149, 278 Whiting, William, 251 Whitney, Peter, 128 wigs, 26, 251 Wilkes, John, 57, 87, 92, 122 Wilkinson, Jemima, 230 Wilkites, 92–3, 96 William III, 29, 52 William the Conqueror, 21 Williams, Elisha, 28 Williams, Israel, 159 Williams, John, 280 Williams, Roger, 15, 153 Williams, Samuel, 55 Winslow, Edward, 130, 232, 282 Winthrop, John, 29, 120 Wise, John, 28, 54 witanagemot, 18, 19, 123, 216 women, 25, 215, 230–2, 261, 282 Wood, Abiel, 186 Wood, Gordon, 217 Woodward, Samuel, 198 Woolf, Daniel, 20 Worthington, John, 282 Wright, Conrad E., 161 Wright, Esmond, 261 Wycliffe, John, 21 Yale College, 228, 282, 286 Yankees, 18, 260 Yorkers, 260 Zebedee, 217