The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

Loyalists typically abhorred both civil disobedience—once begun, where would it end?—and mob violence, including rogue committees of safety formed by “half a dozen fools in your neighborhood,” as one man put it, with the arbitrary authority to wreck the lives of their political opponents. “Which is better,” the Boston clergyman Mather Byles asked, “to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?” Most loyalists believed in law, stability, and beneficent British rule, “against which a deluded and hysterical mass, led by demagogues, threw themselves in a frenzy,” as the historian Bernard Bailyn wrote. Yet with each passing month, loyalist weaknesses became more evident, including the absence of national leaders and an inability to match the rebels in organization, propaganda, or emotional pitch. By the summer of 1776, it had become clear that only massive British support could prop up the loyal cause.