Loyalism Reviv’d

These days, Americans have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for books about the “Founding Fathers” and even a few prominent “Founding Mothers” such as Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren. But few Americans, be they popular authors, readers, or scholars, have ever evinced much interest in the “anti–Founding Fathers”—the loyalists, those colonists who remained true to the Empire and whom their rebellious fellows deemed to be traitors. Such scholarly attention as has been paid to the loyalists in the United States has tended to come in spurts: around the middle of the nineteenth century, when biographical dictionaries were compiled; early in the twentieth century; and, most recently, during the long bicentennial decade of the 1970s (starting in the late 1960s and spilling over into the early 1980s), when I and a few others addressed aspects of the loyalists’ experience in several monographs.¹ In Canada, of course, the scholarly circumstances have been quite different: there, loyalist exiles are viewed as the founders of English-speaking Canada, so they have consistently attracted historians’ attention.

For the past twenty years or so, the United States has seen little or no publication on the loyalists.² That may now be changing. Just as young historians of modern America are rushing to study the rise of contemporary conservatism—an observation I offer based on the dissertation topics of applicants for a position in our department in the 2010–11 academic year—so too, perhaps, scholars studying eighteenth-century America are being drawn to the conservatives of their day, the men and women who refused to break with the past and who insisted on maintaining their identities as adherents of the British Empire.

Ruma Chopra, whose book is the revision of a dissertation in American history, takes her title from a phrase commonly employed by loyalists to describe the circumstances of their own time; “unnatural rebellion” was, she comments, “a defensive metaphor” that “generated structures of feeling around which multiple emotions could cluster and set other ideas as almost inconceivable” (p. 3). Despite many differences in origins and motivations, she argues, all loyalists “feared the rebellion would lead to the anguish and miseries associated with a state of nature, one in which might makes right” (p. 2). She focuses on New York because, as the site of the British headquarters for most of the war (1776–83), that port city offered loyalism the “greatest chance of success” (p. 6).

But Chopra’s own narrative perhaps belies that confident statement. Or perhaps it instead proves that, if the loyalists’ best chance lay in New York City, they had little hope of succeeding anywhere in the colonies.

She begins with a brief account of resistance to British revenue acts in New York City before the war, accurately noting that very few New Yorkers supported the Stamp Act (1765) and the Townshend Duties (1767). Even though New York’s colonial politics were famously factionalized, both factions—revolving around the mercantile DeLancey family and the landed Livingston family—initially opposed such laws. Indeed, she points out that, counterintuitively, the “conservative” DeLanceys (most of whom eventually opted for loyalism), aligned themselves with the Sons of Liberty in several elections after 1765, thereby outflanking the opposition.

But then came the period Chopra terms “rebel usurpation” (p. 27)—the crucial years from 1774 to 1776. Consensus in the city broke down. She portrays New York’s elites as followers, not leaders; ordinary citizens radicalized, and elites then had to decide where they stood politically, especially after the first shots were fired in April 1775. She identifies a key moment when “political allegiance suddenly became locked” (p. 44): February 1776, when the British-born rebel, General Charles Lee, arrived in the city with militiamen who attacked neutrals as vigorously as they did open opponents of the radicals...