Loyalist (American Revolution)

Loyalists were American colonists who supported Great Britain during the American Revolutionary War. About 20 percent of Americans between 1775 and 1783 were estimated to have been Loyalists. Patriots, the revolutionaries who fought for independence against Great Britain, intimidated and harassed Loyalists throughout the war.

After the successful revolution, some Loyalists remained in the United States, where Americans who had supported independence continued to mistreat them. Tens of thousands of Loyalists left America for other territories of the British Empire. In those distant locations, many of them became lonely and homesick for their American homeland.

Background

The American Revolutionary War was a conflict not only between the American colonies and Great Britain. It also sharply divided the American people among themselves; most colonists, whether openly or in their minds only, definitively preferred either American liberty or British loyalty.

Not all Loyalists allied with Britain out of simple self-interest. Some officials of the British government in the colonies did oppose the American cause of liberty because their livelihoods—in the form of British patronage—depended upon Great Britain maintaining control of its American territories. Other British employees in America became Loyalists because they knew the colonists were wrong to believe Britain was planning to enslave them. Still other Loyalists sided with Britain out of fear that a successful revolution in the colonies would produce anarchy and mob rule. Loyalists of these persuasions tended to be older and well educated and therefore more skeptical about radical social change.

In certain cases, Americans who might otherwise have remained neutral in the revolution were made to choose a side by events beyond their control. Some Quakers from Pennsylvania, pacifists in their religious philosophies, became Loyalists only because the Patriots had ordered them to complete military service for the revolutionary cause. Other citizens who truly preferred to stay neutral sided with Britain because, during the war itself, both the American and British armies intimidated and threatened those who were undecided.

Some colonial inhabitants were driven to British loyalty by existing ethnic and racial tensions in America. Four of the six individual nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, for instance, sided with the British during the war because they believed Britain would be more inclined than the Americans to grant them their land claims. The Iroquois's general distrust of Americans had grown out of many years of losing their territories to the ever-expanding colonist population.

Many new Scottish immigrants in New England ultimately became Loyalists due to their mistreatment by the region's English settlers, with whom the Scottish had encountered disagreements. Great Britain also actively recruited Loyalists from the colonies' African American slave population and promised them freedom if they fought in the British army.

All of these Loyalists during the revolution eventually numbered about five hundred thousand, or 20 percent of the American population. They were a diverse group; except for their support for Great Britain throughout the conflict, the different types of Loyalists—Quaker, Native American, African American, Scottish, and others—had little in common. Loyalists arose from every social class and nearly every occupation in the colonies, from poor farmers to wealthy merchants.

Impact

Not all of the American colonies' five hundred thousand Loyalists actively aided Great Britain during the war. Many Loyalists only privately opposed the actions of the Patriots and the cause of American independence. Speaking out more noticeably in support of the British would have risked intimidation, threats, and harassment by the Patriots, who saw all Loyalists, regardless of their individual circumstances, as selfish, cowardly people.

Other Loyalists expressed their views more publicly. They ignored the colonies' non-importation agreements by purchasing British goods, wrote letters praising the British Parliament, and spied on Patriot activities. A small fraction of the total Loyalist population, about nineteen thousand, actually joined the British army and fought the American colonists.

Patriots intimidated and abused known Loyalists for the duration of the revolution. The rebels sometimes arrested and jailed those they only suspected of supporting the British. In other cases, the Patriots looted, seized, or destroyed Loyalist homes and other properties. A common Patriot punishment for Loyalists was tarring and feathering. This involved stripping Loyalists of their clothing, covering them in hot tar, and throwing feathers all over their bodies. With their flesh burned and covered in feathers, the Loyalists were made to display themselves in public. Patriots humiliated Loyalists this way to make examples of Britain's supporters in the colonies.

The eventual American victory in the Revolutionary War in 1783 reinforced the misery and ill treatment the Loyalists had been experiencing since the early 1770s. The peace treaty that ended the war required the US Congress to redistribute all the Loyalist properties that had been seized during the revolution. Congress was able to do this only in some cases, as fighting among Loyalists and Patriots in some areas, particularly the South, prevented Loyalists from resettling peacefully.

Between sixty thousand and eighty thousand Loyalists left the United States after the war. They settled in Great Britain, Canada, the Caribbean, and Spanish Florida, where they encountered enormous hardship. Many Loyalists fell into poverty in Britain, although Parliament tried to aid them financially. Thousands of African American Loyalists became impoverished or sick in Britain or Canada, and in some cases were resold into slavery in the Caribbean.

Loyalists who had left America later reported being depressed and homesick. They felt like exiles who could never return to the country of their birth and lamented the revolution that had disrupted their idyllic prewar existence. From London, American Loyalist politician Thomas Hutchinson wrote that he would rather have died in a farmhouse in New England than in an aristocrat's dwelling in old England. American history since the revolution has viewed the Loyalists mostly unfavorably.

Bibliography

Chopra, Ruma. Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013.

Gould, Philip. Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America. Oxford UP, 2013.

"Loyalists." George Washington's Mount Vernon, www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/article/loyalists/. Accessed 18 Oct. 2016.

"The Loyalists." USHistory.org, www.ushistory.org/us/13c.asp. Accessed 18 Oct. 2016.

"Loyalists during the American Revolution." University of Groningen, www.let.rug.nl/usa/outlines/history-1994/the-road-to-independence/loyalists-during-the-american-revolution.php. Accessed 18 Oct. 2016.

"Loyalists, Fence-Sitters, and Patriots." USHistory.org, www.ushistory.org/us/11b.asp. Accessed 18 Oct. 2016.

"Picking Sides: Loyalists in the Legislature." United States House of Representatives, 23 Aug. 2013, history.house.gov/Blog/Detail/15032398363. Accessed 18 Oct. 2016.

"What Happened to British Loyalists after the Revolutionary War?" NPR, 3 July 2015, www.npr.org/2015/07/03/419824333/what-happened-to-british-loyalists-after-the-revolutionary-war. Accessed 18 Oct. 2016.