Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution by Donald F. Johnson

Author:Donald F. Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Ambiguous Allegiances

For people living under British military rule, political allegiance was fluid, contingent, and often contradictory. Men and women living in occupied zones chose sides for a variety of reasons, both personal and ideological, and often changed their loyalties as circumstances shifted. These shifts occurred in reaction to the harsh conditions and the new opportunities offered by occupation. In the course of their everyday lives, civilians made pragmatic, calculated decisions to ensure their own survival, protect loved ones, and safeguard property. These choices could tacitly or openly support either side without prejudice, and as a result the same individual could appear to one side a revolutionary while maintaining loyalist status on the other. Despite the fluidity of their loyalties, these people cannot be regarded as mere opportunists, although opportunism surely played into their calculations. Keeping one’s loyalties ambiguous represented a deliberate and necessary strategy to survive the food shortages, cramped quarters, and often dangerous circumstances of occupation.

Nevertheless, flexible allegiances frustrated British officers and their loyalist allies, and attempts to pin down loyalties came to dominate occupation society. To cope with the uncertain political positions of citizens, officials and loyalists wrote polemics, issued proclamations, and developed legal policies to persuade people to side with the king. As these instruments evolved over the course of the war, a distinct vocabulary of loyalty developed in the print culture, court proceedings, and public life of occupied cities. Occupation regimes used this emerging loyalist lexicon to craft arguments intended to induce wavering Americans to openly declare their loyalty to the Crown, rewarding those who signed oaths of allegiance and punishing those who refused. As they did so, professions of loyalism came increasingly to define everyday life under military rule. Pledging allegiance to the king offered avenues for physical protection, social advancement, and economic opportunity. Oaths and petitions also ensured access to material support from the occupation authorities. By necessity, everyone living under British rule became fluent in both the vocabulary and customs of loyalism, and many people successfully used acts and public affirmations of their allegiance to procure relief from British authorities. While many—perhaps even most—of those who professed their loyalty in occupied cities indeed favored the king’s cause, the effectiveness of professions of allegiance in securing aid and opening avenues for advancement could, and did, allow inveterate rebels to use it to their advantage.

Ironically, the transformation of loyalism into an organizing principle of occupation society undermined its effectiveness in achieving the restoration of royal rule in the colonies. As the possibilities for abuse became more and more apparent, those who had declared their allegiance early in the war came to distrust the larger numbers of refugees and newcomers who claimed these protections later on. As they observed overtly loyal American civilians continuing to hold social, commercial, and political ties to friends and relatives in rebel-held areas, British officers also became increasingly suspicious of affirmations of loyalty. Even as more and more civilians declared their allegiance as the war progressed, an atmosphere of suspicion

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