Wars of independence are also civil wars. In America neighbors, brothers, and fathers and sons chose different sides, and many people tried to choose neither. Civilians far from the battlefields, especially women, kept households, farms and boycotts going, and some joined the fighting. This level looks at the people the heroic story often leaves out.
Who were the Loyalists?
Historians estimate that about one in five white colonists stayed loyal to the crown, though the figure is uncertain and varied by region; Loyalists were numerous in New York, parts of the Carolinas and Georgia. They came from every class. Some were royal officials and Anglican clergy. Others were tenant farmers whose landlords were Patriots, religious minorities who trusted the crown more than local majorities, or recent immigrants with no stake in colonial quarrels. Many simply believed that rebellion against lawful authority was wrong and that the colonies would be safer, richer and freer inside the empire.
Their arguments deserve a fair hearing. Loyalists warned that independence would mean a long, bloody war, rule by crowds and committees, and the loss of British protection at sea. They pointed out that Patriot committees censored newspapers, demanded loyalty oaths and punished dissent, the very tyranny Patriots claimed to oppose. Before the break, the Pennsylvania lawyer Joseph Galloway had offered a middle way. Galloway's Plan of Union of 1774 proposed an American legislature under the crown, sharing power with Parliament; the First Continental Congress narrowly set it aside.
The price of loyalty
Patriot governments passed laws seizing Loyalist property, banishing Loyalists and barring them from professions. Crowds sometimes tarred and feathered them. When the war ended, about 60,000 Loyalists left the United States, taking perhaps 15,000 enslaved people with them. Most went to Nova Scotia, where the new province of New Brunswick was created for them in 1784, or to Quebec, Britain and the Caribbean. A British commission later paid partial compensation for their losses. Their descendants helped shape English-speaking Canada.
Most colonists were probably neither firm Patriots nor firm Loyalists. Many shifted with the army that was nearest, paid whatever authority held the county, and hoped to be left alone.
Women and the boycotts
The boycotts of the 1760s and 1770s depended on women, who made most household purchases. Groups calling themselves Daughters of Liberty held public spinning bees to make homespun cloth. In 1774 fifty one women in Edenton, North Carolina, signed a pledge to give up British tea. During the war, Esther DeBerdt Reed and Sarah Franklin Bache organized the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, which raised money and sewed thousands of shirts for soldiers.
Thousands of women followed the armies as cooks, laundresses and nurses, often because their husbands' pay could not feed their families. A few fought. Deborah Sampson of Massachusetts enlisted in 1782 disguised as a man under the name Robert Shurtleff and served until a fever revealed her identity. Mercy Otis Warren wrote satirical plays against the royal government and later a three volume history of the Revolution.
Did the Revolution change women's lives?
In March 1776 Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John in Congress: "in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors." She asked John to remember the ladies in the new laws, and warned that women would not hold themselves bound by laws in which they had no voice. John replied that he could not help laughing.
The legal changes were small. Married women still could not own property in their own names. One exception stands out: New Jersey's 1776 constitution let property-owning women vote, as well as free Black men who met the property test, until a law of 1807 took the vote away. More lasting was a new ideal that the historian Linda Kerber named "republican motherhood," the belief that women served the republic by raising virtuous citizens. It kept women in the home, but it also justified better schooling for girls.
Worked example: the two Franklins
Benjamin Franklin's son William was the royal governor of New Jersey. When war came, the father chose independence and the son chose the king. Patriots arrested William in 1776 and held him for two years, part of the time in solitary confinement. He later organized Loyalist raids from New York and left for England in 1782. The two met once more after the war, briefly and coldly, and Benjamin left his son almost nothing in his will, writing that William's conduct explained why. Ask what each man thought he was defending. Benjamin saw a tyrannical ministry and a people's right to govern themselves. William saw a lawful government, an oath of office and an empire that had made the colonies prosperous. Neither was a coward or a fool. The Revolution forced honorable people to choose, and the losers paid for their choice with their homes, their country and sometimes their families.