Tory Insurgents

The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays

Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, Robert S. Davis, Donald C. Lord, Janice Potter-MacKinnon, Robert M. Weir

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611172287
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

A new edition of the germinal study of Loyalism in the American Revolution

Building on the work of his 1989 book The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, accomplished historian Robert M. Calhoon returns to the subject of internal strife in the American Revolution with Tory Insurgents. This volume collects revised, updated versions of eighteen groundbreaking articles, essays, and chapters published since 1965, and also features one essay original to this volume. In a model of scholarly collaboration, coauthors Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and Robert Scott Davis are joined in select pieces by Donald C. Lord, Janice Potter, and Robert M. Weir.

Among the topics broached by this noted group of historians are the diverse political ideals represented in the Loyalist stance; the coherence of the Loyalist press; the loyalism of garrison towns, the Floridas, and the Western frontier; Carolina loyalism as viewed by Irish-born patriots Aedanus and Thomas Burke; and the postwar reintegration of Loyalists and the disaffected. Included as well is a chapter and epilogue from Calhoon's seminal—but long out-of-print—1973 study The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760-1781. This updated collection will serve as an unrivaled point of entrance into Loyalist research for scholars and students of the American Revolution.

The Loyalist Perception

ROBERT M. CALHOON

The nature of loyalism in the American Revolution is an intractable historical problem, in part, because the loyalists appeared in several distinct social and political settings: pre-Revolutionary colonial society, rebellious American states, the various parts of the British Empire to which they fled, and the post-Revolutionary republic where still more reemerged as respectable citizens. In each of these contexts the loyalists revealed different facets of the values, attitudes, and characteristics which accounted for their adherence to the Crown. While it is dangerous to read back into the loyalists’ Revolutionary experience things they said in retrospect, it is also misleading to assume that the loyalists revealed everything they had to say about themselves under the intense pressures of specific crises in the pre-Revolutionary controversy or later during the Revolution itself.

While a perceptive kind of comparative history will be needed to bring together the pieces of the loyalist puzzle, it is also important to explore as analytically as possible the loyalists’ perception of reality, the structure of their values, and the pattern of their rational and emotional responses within each of the historical contexts from which they operated. Historians dealing with the loyalists have, for the most part, asked questions about the location and condition of identifiable groups of loyalists, the thrust of loyalist rebuttals to specific tenets of whig belief, and the political and social conditions which made some colonists unusually dependent on British authority for their security and identity. Another kind of question should probe the loyalists’ view of themselves and focus on their own statements of self-consciousness and self-awareness. Pre-Revolutionary critics and victims of a colonial resistance felt conscious of certain political and social roles which they tried to play as the imperial controversy progressed; they wrestled with the dilemma of adapting, improving, relaxing, or intensifying their perfor -mance of those roles as the pre-Revolutionary movement made those roles increasingly awkward; as each individual realized that he was not going to regain his former authority, influence, or equanimity, he communed within himself and gave some expression to the anguish he felt. The loyalists’ understanding and presentation of their roles, dilemmas, and anguish in letters, pamphlets, oratory, state papers, and in the way they dealt with public issues and devised strategies for defending themselves revealed a coherent view of external events and their own character in time of crisis.

A useful tool in the examination of this kind of loyalist testimony is the concept of perception, the process of giving structure to thought and sensations. Perception seeks explanations and patterns in the random data the senses detect in a social situation: it uses language “to determine or at least to influence what one notices around him”: it is a process which creates categories and “category-systems” in the mind. Perception deals with a man’s self-image, emotional and intellectual dexterity and stamina, the imperatives govern his conduct in times of crisis and the predispositions which operate in periods of routine. By treating pre-Revolutionary opponents of colonial resistance as verbalizing, category-building, reflective, self-conscious figures, one can gain access to the interior of their political thought.¹ As the pre-Revolutionary critics and opponents of colonial resistance responded to the crises of that period, they constructed three reasonably distinct models of political reality. One was the enunciation of principle, the repeated statement of legal, historical, and constitutional rules which bound the Empire together and necessarily circumscribed colonial liberty. A second was the search for accommodation, the belief that grounds for compromise existed and could be discovered and exploited through the use of good sense and prudence. A third was the appeal to doctrine, the sometimes shrill, uncompromising insistence that all colonial resistance and remonstrance was morally wrong and aesthetically abhorrent.

Thomas Hutchinson was, of course, the preeminent loyalist enunciator of principle, combining a sure grasp of fundamentals with a sensitivity for intricacies. “I have but one set of principles upon government in general and the constitution of this province in particular. There must be one supreme legislature in every state.” He admitted, however, that “it is a very difficult matter to determine any certain proportion of freedom necessary to the happiness of a subordinate state.”² He devoted a lifetime to the search for that “certain proportion of freedom” and we know a great deal about the depth and nature of that commitment from Edmund S. Morgan’s analysis of Hutchinson in the Stamp Act crisis, Malcolm Freiberg’s dissection of his ambition and his self-doubts, Clifford K. Shipton’s defense of his rectitude, and Bernard Bailyn’s discovery of his consti -tutional acumen.³ What this fragmented, somewhat static, portrait lacks is an appreciation of Hutchinson’s emotionality—the passions which integrated his roles and aspirations and aggravated his suffering. One way to fill this void is to focus, not only on his manifest principles, ambitions, and skills, but also on the strange paradoxes and polarities of his political character.⁴

The strongest of those polarities was his belief that he was primarily a defender of colonial liberty and that prudent submission to British authority was a subtle strategy for preserving that liberty. As Edmund Morgan showed in 1948, Hutchinson privately came close to denying the legitimacy of the entire Grenville program and stated categorically that it did infringe on inherent colonial rights; yet in 1770 he privately proposed a horrifying set of coercive measures for Britain to impose on Massachusetts. Hutchinson was never conscious of any contradiction. The coercion he sadly recommended was intended to have a stunning, sobering effect on the shortsighted and excited men and inaugurate a stabilizing period and thereby strengthen Massachusetts’ capacity to resist British encroachments.⁵ Hutchinson’s tremendous personal reserve created the very suspicions which kept his political life in upheaval; against his aloofness, however, tugged his ambition to provide decisive public leadership. He candidly spoke of this tension in his character during his dispute with the General Court over the Boston Resolves in 1773:

If I am wrong in my principles of government or in the inferences I have drawn from them, I wish to be convinced of my error. I have laid before you the principles of your constitution. If you do not agree with me I wish to know your objections. They may be convincing to me or I may be able to satisfy you of the insufficiency of them. In either case, I hope, we shall be able to put an end to those irregularities which shall ever be the portion of a government where the supreme authority is controverted.⁶

In 1773, that was exactly the kind of dialogue Hutchinson sought to have with his contemporaries—a healing exchange in which he prescribed the premises of the discussion. He could emerge just that far, but no further, from his private contemplation of the issues of liberty and authority.

Hutchinson struggled intelligently with these conflicting impulses toward withdrawal and involvement. He resisted the temptation to dismiss whig argument with superficial rebuttals; he regarded the complexity of the pre-Revolutionary debate with great seriousness; this polarity pitted his dismay against his intellect and curiosity. It enabled him to be at once withdrawn and self-conscious and also capable of seeing himself in a larger context. When he became fully engaged in the task of understanding a tenet of whig belief, Hutchinson brought to his work the full force of his highly controlled emotionality. During the protracted dispute from 1769 to 1772, over the removal of the General Court from Boston, he tried to breathe life and vitality into the notion that the royal instructions to colonial governors were a positive benefit to the political life of the province. As he elaborated his explanation, the Crown’s prerogative became an intimate, all-embracing, pervasive, organic influence which transmuted mobility and finesse to otherwise static executive authority. In turn the governor’s receptiveness, discretion, and intelligence in responding to imperial directives determined their effectiveness. Hutchinson constructed an idealized minuet between Crown and governor which was almost poetic and sensuous in its structure and intricacy.⁷ Hutchinson, significantly, conceived of British power as a throbbing, expansive force which could permeate and activate his own behavior as governor. Colonial leaders conceived of British power in exactly the same fashion; as Bernard Bailyn observes, they were transfixed by the “essential . . . aggressiveness” of political power and by its “endlessly propulsive tendency to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries.⁸ Confident that he could serve as a channel and instrument of British authority without damaging the liberty of his province, Hutchinson only succeeded in confirming his enemies’ deepest fears about the capacity of the Crown to insinuate itself into the political life of the province.

Hutchinson’s insistence on principle and his calculated style of debate and exposition distinguished him from William Smith, Jr., and other moderate critics of colonial resistance who shunned dispute over principle and sought practical, improvised accommodation with Britain. In 1767, Smith devised a constitution for the British Empire which he believed should be a malleable instrument which could accommodate the growing political maturity of the colonies.⁹

His ability as a constitutional theorist and diagnostician complemented a different set of Smith’s predispositions during the pre-Revolutionary period: his fondness for the intricate strategies which his fellow councillors employed in competing for the ear and trust of successive royal governors, especially William Tryon who arrived in 1771. After one protracted struggle Smith believed he had won Tryon’s confidence and made him suspicious of the rival Delancey faction. “I shall feed that spirit,” he exulted in a moment of revelation, “to disentangle him from a fear of Council and Assembly.” During the Tea crisis in December 1773, he tried to use the same methods to guide Tryon’s hand during a hazardous period. He besieged Tryon with suggestions on how to avoid violence if the tea was landed or how to prevent its unloading if violence was unavoidable. The destruction of the tea in Boston took the decision out of Tryon’s hands and launched a new period of greater crisis for royal officials. “It must mortify Tryon who had spoken so vauntingly and assured the government of the landing” of the tea, Smith noted with customary care. But he was much more aware that his own attempts to guide Tryon’s hand had been of little practical value to the governor. “Tryon will think I animated him to render him unpopular,” he lamented; “how dangerous it is to give private advice.”¹⁰

Smith appeared in 1774–1775 simply to be a conservative gravitating to the right of his former allies in the Livingston faction; in reality he was wholly en -grossed in working out the implications of his chosen roles as constitutional analyst and behind-the-scenes manipulator of government and party policy. He wrote and circulated numerous essays on the constitutional and tactical problems facing colonial leaders and propounded an almost clinical set of negotiating tactics, which included “feeling the pulse of the ministry,” proceeding “without a word about rights,” and exercising exquisite tact and timing. When all this came to naught he responded by writing his longest and most moving exposition of the issues of the Revolution, one which juxtaposed a scathing indictment of British policy and defense of colonial liberty with an absolute refusal to sanction armed rebellion. The conflict between the two commitments reduced him to an abject state of intellectual immobility long before his apparently opportunistic conversion to the British cause. “I persuade myself,” he told an inquisitive committee of safety on July 4, 1776, “that Great Britain will discern the propriety of negotiating for a pacification.” He could not relinquish the hope that the elusive search for accommodation would transfix the lives of other men as completely as it had his own.¹¹

The enunciation of principle often reflected a concern with law and the details of imperial administration while the search for accommodation expressed an awareness of the subtleties of colonial politics. In contrast, the appeal to doctrine came from men on the periphery of political life and imperial government. Eschewing legal and practical objections to colonial resistance, they focused directly on the immortality and ugliness of discontent. The high Anglican polemicists were, of course, the quintessential doctrinaire loyalists and Bailyn has most effectively shown that their writings struck with jugular accuracy at the most significant tenets of whig theory. In Samuel Seabury’s vivid denunciation of violence and intimidation, Jonathan Boucher’s taut authoritarian logic, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler’s breathtaking endorsement of subordination, Bailyn found “wrathful epitaphs” to an “ancient, honorable, moribund philosophy” of order and obedience.¹²

Seabury’s fame as a polemicist rests on his colorful and pugnacious denunciation of whig tactics for enforcing the Continental Association boycott on trade with Britain in late 1774 and early 1775. But his vivid language has distracted attention away from the systematic argument which formed the core of the Letters of a Westchester Farmer—the nature of perception itself. Seabury was fascinated with the way in which the mind handles sense impressions and organizes them into concepts. He beseeched his readers to practice enough sophistication to subject each new impression of rebellion to careful and critical scrutiny. Unless men assessed the future implications of their actions and appreciated the power and destructiveness of mass contagion, they could not prudently restrain their enthusiasms nor calm the passions of their fellow men. The root of the problem was the finite capacity of the mind and the limitless appeal of false political ideas. “At present politics seems to engross almost every body,” he complained in 1769, “and leaves no room for more serious and important reflection.” The result by 1774 was a “sullen, sulky obstinacy” which “takes possession of us. . . . Preposterous pride! . . . It degrades instead of exalting our characters” and was the product of “all the insidious arts that evilminded and designing men can possibly make use of.” Only by assuming a posture of aloof, watchful sk...