With the final words of the Declaration of Independence, the signatories famously pledged to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their “sacred Honor.” But what about those who made the opposite choice?
Loyalists – often referred to as Tories, Royalists or King’s Men at the time – amounted to between 15% and 20% (300,000 to 400,000) of the 2 million white people in the colonies in 1775. It 1779 about 25,000 Loyalists were enlisted in the British service, a number larger than that commanded personally by George Washington.
After the war, about 15 percent of the Loyalists (65,000–70,000 people) fled to other parts of the British Empire; usually to Britain, but also to Canada. Southern Loyalists moved mostly to Florida, which had remained loyal to the Crown, and to British Caribbean possessions.
By looking through the analytical lens of honor culture, Dishonored Americans: The Political Death of Loyalists in Revolutionary America (University of Virginia Press, 2023) offers an innovative assessment of the experience of Americans who made the fateful decision to remain loyal to the British Crown during and after the Revolution.
Loyalists, as Timothy Compeau explains, suffered a “political death” at the hands of American Patriots. A term drawn from eighteenth-century sources, political death encompassed the legal punishments and ritualized dishonors Patriots used to defeat Loyalist public figures and discredit their counter-revolutionary vision for America.
By highlighting this dynamic, Compeau makes a significant intervention in the long-standing debate over the social and cultural factors that motivated colonial Americans to choose sides in the conflict, narrating in compelling detail the severe consequences for once-respected gentlemen who were stripped of their rights, privileges, and power in Revolutionary America.
Timothy Compeau is Assistant Professor of History at Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario.
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