Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth

by Holger Hoock

While Patriots displayed their old scars as cause for national pride, Loyalists had little choice but to hide their trauma. The dominant national narrative of Patriot martyrdom branded the Loyalists as un-patriotic, un-American dissenters. They were effectively eliminated from public discourse, and a mantle of collective amnesia fell over the violence that Patriots had inflicted on their neighbors. We find little trace in the American historical consciousness of the threats, physical abuse, and imprisonment endured by thousands. The Patriots controlled the story of Revolution, war, and peace—in monuments and histories, in Revolutionary parades and Fourth of July speeches. While the Patriots wore the scars of their own war wounds openly, the Loyalists did not nurture a melancholy folklore of loss like the Jacobites after the 1745 rebellion or American Southerners after the Civil War. The few Loyalists who sought to spread their version of events found no American publishers. The price for the losers’ reintegration in America was to keep their own scars hidden.