The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon ed. by Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore (review)

This collection of fifteen essays about Loyalists honors the scholarship and mentorship of Robert McCluer Calhoon, known especially for his sweeping The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York, 1973) and Political Moderation in America’s First Two Centuries (New York, 2009). The essays in The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon are organized in two equal parts: “Perceptions,” a key concept from Calhoon’s work, stressing Loyalists’ ideologies, motivations, and self-understandings; and “Moderation,” a core value for some Loyalists as well as for their postwar reintegration into U.S. society.

Coeditor Rebecca Brannon’s introduction notes that “the umbrella term of disaffected” usefully “covers a wide variety of people” who were motivated by an “incredible diversity of issues” (p. 2). In her view, many individuals “have been dumped under the capaciously large category of Loyalism,” which can override important matters of individual agency (p. 3). Not all Loyalists became so by choice, and they certainly did not do so for identical reasons. From a welter of causes and experiences, one common theme that unites many of the essays and that reflects a recent trend in the field is a strong awareness of the American Revolution as a “civil war” and of the idea that “the American nation was born in violence” (p. 2). The volume also stresses “a long-standing moderate strain in American politics,” yet moderation can be hard to square with the emphasis on violent civil war (not to mention our present Trumpist moment) (p. 7).

The collection accurately reflects the current contours of Loyalist studies with an especially even geographical representation of the regions that would become the United States and with three essays on Canada, though a lack of attention to the British West Indies is notable. While slavery and Native Americans are discussed in several essays, African Americans (perhaps better, Afro-Britons) and Indigenous people do not occupy center stage in any essay. Interestingly, only one essay deals substantially with the prewar period; thus, the war itself and the postwar era, especially, receive the greatest attention. Also striking is the biographical approach in many of the essays as well as an emphasis on intellectual, ideological, and cultural assessments. The essays are all quite short, all are scholarly (with robust citations), and all show a good balance of primary and secondary source research.

Four essays focus on southern subjects, a pair each on intellectual and military history, and merit closer attention for readers of this journal. The opening (and longest) essay, by Taylor Stoermer, compares moderate Loyalist John Randolph as an “Augustan and metropolitan,” a constitutionalist dedicated to the parliamentary supremacy of 1688, with his cousin Thomas Jefferson as one of the “provincial cosmopolitans” (pp. 11, 19). While lacking a pointed argument, the learned essay sketches a sound “transformation” in Virginia “from a political culture of constitutional sense to one of revolutionary sensibility” (p. 15). Eileen Ka-May Cheng’s assessment of how Patriot historian David Ramsay built on and transformed the work of Loyalist historian Alexander Hewatt provides close readings of passages about natural history, Native Americans, and slavery. Cheng stresses Anglo-American affinities that Ramsay deployed to portray South Carolina as a cosmopolitan country with an exceptional role to play in world history. While Stoermer looks back to common British values of the eighteenth century that diverged, Cheng sees that shared culture as foundational for a U.S. nationalist “cosmopolitan humanitarianism” that simultaneously denied its British roots and excluded Indians and people of African descent (p. 227).

Carole W. Troxler assesses six backcountry Loyalist recruiters to test the validity of British general Charles Cornwallis’s complaints about the failures of southern Loyalists in arms. She persuasively argues that Cornwallis failed to grasp the severe circumstances that backcountry Loyalists faced, and she chides historians for...