Two Faces of Loyalism

TheCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume 11,No. 1,Spring 1980 TwoFacesof Loyalism JohnE. Ferling. The Loyalist Mind: Joseph Galloway andthe American Revolution. Pennsylvania Park: The Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, 1977. 157 pp. AnneY. Zimmer. Jonathan Boucher: Loyalist in Exile. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978. 395 pp. Bruce Tucker "Theprinciples and ways of thinking of Whigs and Tories, or of Republicans andLoyalists," Jonathan Boucher wrote in his Reminiscences of an American Loyalist,"are hardly more different than are their tempers." 1 Despite the helpful simplicity of Boucher's assessment, historians have not generally succeeded in integrating the Loyalist experience with the history of the American Revolution. Loyalists, it seems, did not originate in one geographical area, class or religious denomination, nor did they share a cohesivepolitical ideology. Many Americans, moreover, shifted their sympathies according to the success or failure of the British program of pacification in local communities. As many as a half million colonists preferred the British cause, John Shy estimates, and yet only a small fraction of these emigrated or expressed public dissent. Most of those who remained wereable to relocate themselves in the political life of the Republic without difficulty. 2 Historians have not been able to surmount these obstacles to explain precisely how Loyalists perceived and experienced the Revolution. The recent literature on Loyalism falls into two categories. Historians like William Nelson, Mary Beth Norton and Robert Calhoon have attempted to describe the Loyalists collectively, while others like Bernard Bailyn and Carol Berkin have taken a biographical approach. 3 Loyalist biographers have examined the intersection of political ideology with personality and have helped to explain the links between private life and 66 Bruce Tucker political experience. The most successful of these biographies, moreover. have portrayed not simply what Loyalists believed about political issues. but also the circumstances of their private lives which limited both theu perceptions and options in the conflict. It was this sense of temperament that Boucher insisted lay at the heart of the struggle between Patriots and Loyalists, and this same quality which Bernard Bailyn tried to recreate in his biography of Thomas Hutchinson. Bailyn sought to probe Hutchin- , son's inner life in order to explain "why any sensible, well-informed, rightminded American with a modicum of imagination and common sense could possibly have opposed the Revolution" (p. x). The two books under review. , John Ferling's The Loyalist Mind: Joseph Galloway and the American Revolution , and Anne Zimmer's Jonathan Boucher: Loyalist in Exile, help us 1 to understand better the politics of two leading, articulate Loyalists, but they do not reach beyond the achievements of ordinary political biography to connect ideology with personal life. Consequently neither book contributes greatly to the re-integration of the Loyalist experience into the history of the Revolution itself. Of the two figures, Boucher is potentially the more interesting to a biographer. An immigrant in America, he became an Anglican clergyman and rose quickly into prominence in Maryland society. He fathered two illegitimate children, outlasted two of his three wives, and late in life he raised a family of eight children. Brash in character, he did not shy away from the dangers of public confrontation. He pamphleteered on behalf of the King's cause, preached for a time with loaded pistols at his side. and resolutely and successfully challenged hostile mobs. Unlike many of the exiles who struggled out their last years in England, moreover, Boucher managed to continue with an energetic career. He advised the Bntish government on its American policy, published his reflections on the origms of the conflict, and busied himself with teaching, writing and his ministry He also wrote local history in Cumberland, recommended social welfare programs for the area, and completed a glossary of English provincial words which was published posthumously in 1833. Boucher's broad intellectual interests, his political activism and his outspokenness certainly should have enticed the interest of a biographer before 1978. Anne Zimmer seeks to study Boucher sympathetically in order to understand more fully the parameters of the Revolutionary crisis. Boucher's story, she writes, "reminds us that there was an articulate body of citizens with logical and reasoned arguments on the British side of the...