Tory Insurgents by Robert M. Calhoon Timothy M. Barnes

Author:Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes [Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 9781611172287
Google: rDoMCAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Published: 2012-08-24T16:03:18+00:00

Elevating Rationality over Aggrievement

The values of moderate loyalism reflected the fact that most loyalists in the garrison were ordinary people, and their conciliatory values were the simple ones they had customarily associated with their lives before they had been convulsed by war. Their ideology after 1775 had been controlled by the course of the war, and their ultimate arrival, after 1778, at a position of moderation was a yearning for the “days of peace and tranquillity, . . . security, protection, and safety” that existed before the conflict had destroyed their lives.135 One garrison dweller in New York expressed the modest hope that, in the future, no one would “make him afraid” any longer. In the first two years of the war, moderate loyalists had every reason to believe that the rebellion could be easily suppressed and the Continental Army overwhelmed with British military might. The first taste of warfare around New York City in 1776, loyalists now recalled, had shocked them, and by 1778 many believed the nature of the war and the frightening demands for evergreater levels of bloodshed made it too awful to continue. “How deplorable . . . are the scenes of war,” one loyalist wrote, “families, houses, friends, property, life” and “civil communities” on both sides obliterated. The only solution was for patriots and loyalists to “detest and resist” warfare.136 The social dynamics of revolutionary war, as Judith L. Van Buskirk has recently written, made New York patriots and loyalists into “generous enemies. . . . While some city residents found no reason to stay, others banked on their unoffending, quiet lives under British occupation to spare them from any American backlash.” The discourse of moderation in the garrison town press undergirded that calculation, that “banking” on reciprocal patriot moderation.137

Like ships in the night, loyalist and patriot moderates unknowingly approached each other along parallel paths of ideological engagement. Few patriots read the garrison town press, and the loyalists paid little attention to the complex and difficult constitutional development of the confederation. But in spite of living in different political and ideological worlds, when moderates on both sides reflected on the course of events, they reached similar conclusions. Ever since the first Revolutionary committees of safety had begun grilling persons suspected of disaffection from the whig cause in late 1774, the political culture of the new regime had regarded the disaffected as potentially useful members of the new order who should be reintegrated into American society at the lowest legal, military, and social cost. Beginning in 1777, court systems in the new states recognized the right of individuals to enjoy a decent interval between the collapse of royal authority and the creation of durable Revolutionary regimes during which to settle on their allegiance. Legislatures imposed loosely worded oaths of allegiance as inexpensive ways to bind the apprehensive and the ambivalent to the new regime. Commanders of the Continental Army discovered the political value of playing for time as a way of persuading the large neutralist segment of the white population to tilt toward the Americans and away from the British.

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