• MAKING THE REVOLUTION

• REBELLION

• 1. Loyalists I: Civil War
• 2. Loyalists II: Traitor!
• 3. Loyalists III: Join—or Else
• 4. Loyalists IV: Backcountry
• 5. The Pacifists
• 6. The Enslaved
• 7. Common Sense?
• 8. Declaring Independence
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• Using Making the Revolution
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REBELLION: 1775-1776

2. Loyalists II: Traitor!

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From the beginning of the revolutionary period in the 1760s, British supporters were harassed, intimidated, and often attacked by Patriot mobs. As war approached in the 1770s, the victims of Patriot wrath expanded to include lukewarm supporters and the vocally undecided, and the attacks upon them and the damage to their property, escalated in severity. "Humanity would shudder," writes Patriot historian David Ramsay, "at a particular recital of the calamities which the Whigs inflicted on the Tories, and the Tories on the Whigs" (i.e., the Patriots on the Loyalists, and vice versa). Here we will view the actions, nonviolent and violent, used by Patriots at the outbreak of war to control and avenge Loyalists.

• Anti-Loyalist broadsides and blank forms of allegiance, 1775-1776. With the surge in war preparedness after the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, actions to curb Loyalist opposition also surged—and publicizing those actions became strategically important. In New England the Patriot Committees of Safety published broadsides including "Wanted" posters (not titled as such at the time) and the coerced recantation statements of intimidated Loyalists. What would be the effect of viewing these statements in newspapers and publicly posted broadsides? In addition are two blank forms to affirm allegiance to the U.S.: one to be signed by Loyalists renouncing allegiance to Britain and the other to be signed by anyone assuming an office in the new government. How do the two forms differ? (3 pp.)



• Anti-Loyalist violence, 1774-1775: incidents compiled by Peter Oliver, Origin and Progress of the American Revolution, 1781. One Loyalist victim was the Boston judge Peter Oliver, who was forced from his judgeship and driven out of America to Nova Scotia and then Britain. "I took my leave of that once happy country," he wrote in his diary in 1776, "where peace and plenty reigned uncontrolled until that infernal Hydra Rebellion, with its Hundred Heads, had devoured its happiness . . ."1 In 1781 he wrote an angry history of the prewar period entitled Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, in which he adapted a newspaper list of violent acts upon Loyalists over a six-month period. What kinds of intimidation and injury were inflicted upon Loyalists? What did the attackers hope to accomplish? Explain Oliver's tone in the first and last sentences of the piece. (5 pp.)





• "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1830, depicting anti-Loyalist violence in pre-revolutionary Boston. Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of 1830 is set in colonial Boston of one hundred years earlier when, in Hawthorne's words, "colonial affairs . . . had caused much temporary inflammation of the popular mind." Bostonians resented the new taxes imposed in 1730 by Britain to replenish its depleted treasury, aggravating their anger over Britain's removal of their right to elect their own governors in the late 1600s. In this atmosphere, the story depicts mob vengeance inflicted on an aristocratic American-born British official as witnessed by the official's eighteen-year-old nephew, a country boy setting out to create his adult life (perhaps representing the fledgling nation-to-be). The official, Major Molineux, has been tarred and feathered by the mob, an act of humiliation and retribution long employed in colonial America by irate crowds upon unpopular persons—especially Loyalists during the revolutionary period. The mob would strip the victim to the waist, pour hot tar over his/her body, and roll the person in feathers that would adhere to the tar. Usually the person was paraded about the area in a cart before being released, perhaps, or threatened with further violence. Occasionally the victims would die. In another story, "The Hutchinson Mob," published in 1840, Hawthorne described the mob attack on the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson in Boston during the Stamp Act controversy of 1765; excerpts of this story are included in a sidebar. How does Hawthorne depict the Bostonians who tar-and-feather Major Molineux? How does the naive nephew respond? What is Hawthorne illustrating about mob behavior and bystanders? (12 pp.)

Note: Many Loyalist writings are included in Themes I-IV. See the chronological all-texts list.

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