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

by Rick Atkinson

Perhaps half a million Americans remained committed to the Crown. One scholarly computation asserted that loyalists made up 16 percent of the total population—or about 20 percent of white colonials. Of roughly 3.2 million Americans alive from 1775 to 1783, 513,000 demonstrated loyalty by supporting the British cause, fighting with one of two hundred loyalist units, or eventually going into exile. Other estimates posited that as many as a third of all Americans remained loyal. Although that was probably an exaggeration, their numbers without doubt ran high in certain belts and pockets: along the frontier from the western Carolinas through western New York, for instance, and along the coast of the middle colonies from the lower Chesapeake to Long Island, as well as in the Hudson valley. Loyalists often had shallow roots in America; many were recent immigrants rather than native-born. Others had ties that bound them to the mother country, as placemen or merchants trading with London or Glasgow. “The height of my ambition,” a New Yorker wrote, “was and is to live and die a British subject.” Anglican churchgoers tended toward loyalism where they were a minority, as in New England, but not where they were dominant, as in South Carolina. (All Anglican clerics were ordained in Britain and swore allegiance to the king.) Families could be sundered just as painfully as communities or colonies, like the Eastchester, New York, clan of Judge Jonathan Fowler, who personally immigrated to...