1775 (24 page)

British placemen and officials—from governors, attorneys general, and justices down to retired army officers and a host of lesser Crown officeholders—were obvious vocational pillars of Loyalism. Appointive positions were well salaried, and in hundreds of cases—in the colonies, as in Britain—one man could hold and be paid for three or even four offices. Judge Edward Winslow of Plymouth, Massachusetts, “was the local customs collector, the registrar of the Court of Probate, the Clerk of the Common Pleas and General Sessions of the Peace, as well as ‘first magistrate in the county of Plymouth.’” The ubiquitous Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson—Patriots nicknamed him Sir Thomas Graspall—was also justice, member of the Council, and captain of Castle William. North Carolina’s Edmund Fanning collected pay as town commissioner for Hillsborough, public register, assemblyman for Orange County, and Crown prosecutor.
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New York, being the Crown’s principal administrative center, had a concentration of placemen. South Carolina was notorious for royal appointments—the courts and Governor’s Council, in particular—going to Britons at the expense of Carolinians. At one point in the 1760s, the locally born held only two Council seats out of ten. The archetypal placeman was Egerton Leigh, attorney general, admiralty court judge, and Council member.

Notwithstanding Patrick Henry, James Otis, and other Patriotic firebrands, the most prominent lawyers, especially in commercial centers like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, were drawn to political power and influence, not to the local Sons of Liberty. Later British compensation to
displaced American Loyalists identified 55 lawyers and 81 physicians.
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Doctors, too, had practices centered on the wealthy and influential. Quite a few Church of England clergy—for example, Samuel Seabury and John Sayre in Connecticut—doubled as physicians.
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During the 1760s and early 1770s, British officials and royal governors dwelt on enlarging the provincial patronage pool—the civil list, in that era’s parlance—and having it funded automatically out of revenues collected in America. Samuel Adams, the Patriot faction’s leading Machiavellian, feared that such patronage could dangerously enlarge Crown influence. Indeed, “chains of interest” flourished. Beyond Boston, chains in Massachusetts centered on courthouse and lawyer cliques in the Springfield area—the so-called River Gods—as well as in Marshfield and Plymouth to the southeast.
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Well-connected Congregationalist as well as Anglican “friends of government” could be drawn in, as in southwestern Connecticut towns like Ridgefield, where Congregational Church friends and relations of influential New Haven Crown prosecutor Jared Ingersoll allied with local Anglicans.

One notable Philadelphia axis—Loyalists who worshipped at the fashionable First Presbyterian Church—grouped around lawyers who shared training at London’s Middle Temple, relations and close associates of former Pennsylvania chief justice William Allen, and the well-connected Shippen clan. Members of the city’s Second and Third Presbyterian churches, by contrast, were overwhelmingly on the Patriot side.
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Dozens of other relationships could be found up and down the seaboard, helping to explain seeming religious anomalies.

Certain commercial niches also bred Loyalists. Substantial merchants, especially in the major cities and the fifteen or so towns with populations of 4,000 to 8,000, had beliefs forged since the 1760s in the heat of importation and boycott acrimony. Merchants’ loyalties, when not pulled by ethnicity or religion, were often swayed by specialties and by British commercial relationships, to which we will shortly return.

Many people in coastal towns had maritime loyalties. Shipbuilding, along with iron working and rum distillation, were the three enterprises deemed industries by British yardsticks. Two of these, shipbuilding and rum, were at their most important in New England. In that region, maritime vocations made most participants rebels—hostile to British customs agents and regulations, furious at the Royal Navy over impressment, and sympathetic to smugglers, even if they themselves rarely indulged.

As for ordinary seamen, whose sentiments will be examined in the
next chapter’s
urban focus, sweeping political judgments must be somewhat hedged. During the Revolution, thousands served on Tory and Loyalist privateers operating out of New York and lesser occupied seaports. Arch-maritime Nantucket tried to be neutral. However, between 1763 and the outbreak of the Revolution, seamen leaned very much to the Patriot side—participating in waterfront mobs, resisting press-gangs, putting up Liberty poles, or burning revenue boats.

Militiamen, of whom the thirteen colonies mustered some 70,000 in 1775, often took politics from those activities, as we will see. Loyalist-leaning individuals, obliged to serve in the militia in a Patriot-dominated region, if not converted at least learned to keep quiet. Enlisted men in Philadelphia organized themselves into class-conscious associations and played a driving role in radical politics.

Another large group of radicals in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston were artisans (many of them middle class), “mechanics,” and journeymen. Unskilled laborers were typically put in a different category. The
next chapter
will have more detail, but in all four cities men in skilled to semiskilled vocations were a major pro-Revolutionary force by 1775. As the big seaports grew between 1750 and 1775, tax and household surveys documented a rising stratification by wealth and income. Artisans—the description then stretched to include architects, newspaper publishers, painters, and musicians—generally lost ground to the richest percentiles and felt buffeted by hard economic times. Whiffs of what later generations would call class consciousness came into play. Artisans and mechanics were drawn to the rebel side by several factors—dislike for the rich merchants who sold imported goods from Britain, self-interest in promoting American manufactures, and enthusiasm for boycotts and other political activities aimed at replacing British-made luxury goods with simpler, less expensive products made locally.

Farmers, small or substantial, pursued the dominant vocation in a late eighteenth century that was still overwhelmingly agricultural. Their politics would have varied widely with community, religion, geography, and relative prosperity. Growers of crops enumerated by Britain—tobacco, indigo, rice, naval stores—will be considered separately. A different set of variables affected unhappy tenants of New York’s great landowners or patroons. Some mid–Hudson Valley tenants angry at their great Whig landlords—in Livingston Manor, for example—followed dissatisfaction to the Tory side.
Unhappy tenants of landed Tories like the Philipses, Bayards, and DeLanceys probably reacted the other way. Landowners whose western land speculations were jeopardized by British policies mostly went against the Crown.

Local patterns and market dependence could also persuade. Prosperous, long-established commercial farming areas adjacent to Manhattan and Philadelphia were conservative and Tory-leaning in 1775. Partly guided by distinctive cultures—the Quakers of Greater Philadelphia or the old-line Dutch-speaking farm communities circling Manhattan—they were content to supply British occupiers.

The hinterland saw other influences. Farmers whose westward migration had been thwarted or delayed by the Proclamation Line in the 1760s—or who feared British-led Indian raids a decade later—would mostly have taken the Patriot side. So-called Peace Germans—Amish, Mennonites, Moravians, Dunkers, et al. who tilled some of the richest lands in Pennsylvania and central North Carolina—wanted to avoid taking sides. Congregationalist farmers in stony New England would have been rebels. By contrast, neutralism shading into Loyalism flourished in parts of the Carolina backcountry, where settlers nurtured greater grudges against coastal plantation elites than against a faraway George III.

The precarious side of farm economics, particularly where tobacco cultivation quickly exhausted the soil, pushed many wealthy landowners and planters to enlarge their income through land investments. Virginians were lured into the various companies pursuing large grants in the Ohio Country, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and even the Great Lakes. Farther north, others looked elsewhere, but anxious Virginia investors reducing their dependence on tobacco and hoping to pay off their debts through land profits outweighed any others politically. George Washington himself explained the emphasis: “the greatest estates we have in this Colony were made…by taking up and purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess.” By 1775, Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Arthur Lee, and Patrick Henry were looking and investing beyond the mountains.
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Planters living in Virginia’s Northern Neck or the adjoining Piedmont were especially drawn to the Ohio Company and supported its interests, which contributed to both the French and Indian War and Lord Dunmore’s 1774 fight with the Shawnee. One early-twentieth-century Virginia historian went so far as to claim that “for Virginians, the Revolution was in part a war of agrarian conquest; the British land system was broken down; territory
to the west was brought again under the control of Virginia, and virgin lands were opened to settlement. So unanimous was the support of the Revolution by the agricultural class in Virginia that scarcely a loyalist was to be found among the planters.”
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Debt pressure and land hunger drove Virginians into radical rhetoric. Historian Bruce Mann has explained that “the image of debtors as slaves was a common one before the Revolution, although almost exclusively in the tobacco regions of the Chesapeake…they [planters] clearly felt enslaved, both by their British creditors, whose duns threatened their personal liberty, and by Parliament, whose duns threatened their political liberties. Hence the spectacle, so anomalous to modern sensibilities as well as to contemporary British observers, of slaveholders denouncing British conspiracies to reduce them to slavery.”
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Mercantile loyalties varied by specialty. The broad merchant category—participants also edged into ship owning, loan making, store keeping, land speculating, and manufacturing ventures—was among the largest in influence and political involvement. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., in his
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution,
correctly emphasized their 1760s importance but generally made only a twofold distinction. He differentiated between Loyalist-leaning dry-goods importers and Patriot-tending “wet goods” merchants likely to trade with the West Indies and deal in rum, molasses, and smuggled provisions.
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In general, Progressive historians overlooked the revealing subcategories—importer from Britain, shopkeeper, vendue auctioneer, Scottish factor, goods smuggler from Holland, and so forth—that best explained individual political loyalties.

To begin with, merchants, compared to other economic groups, were so impacted by most of our dozen issues that
not
taking sides would have been difficult. Those in the large seaports, where from 1765 to 1774 imports and protests were constant topics, would have been buffeted by a cross-current of currency, debt, trade regulation, taxes, and customs matters. Most of all, they would have confronted nonimportation, boycotts, and antiluxury drives, and at least in the North, no other vocations would have been as influential or as well represented in town meetings, chambers of commerce, associations, and the like.

Taking the major cities in 1775, Loyalism was significant in Boston’s mercantile community and prevalent in New York’s. Philadelphia’s economic climate was unusual because so many established merchants were Quakers unhappy with the independence movement but hesitant over open
Loyalism (at least prior to the British occupation of 1777–1778). Few generalized statements satisfactorily explain the political behavior of all three merchant communities.

Loyalties in Boston have been well parsed by historian John W. Tyler, whose sophisticated survey of the entire group by politics, religion, wealth, and specialization was further polished through cross-checking with confidential private insurance records. This way he found out who was sailing to what port with what cargo and bringing back what in return. Out of 318, 118 became committed Loyalists, 37 remained “scrupulously neutral,” and 163 actively sided with the Patriots.
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Given the lopsidedly patriotic sentiment in Massachusetts as a whole, these choices were hardly overwhelming.

In New York, a majority of merchants apparently took the Loyalist side. Among members of the New York Chamber of Commerce in 1775, 57 were Loyalists, 21 were neutrals, and only 26 were Whigs. The Committee of Fifty-one, a 1774 association, included 26 Loyalists, 7 neutrals, and 18 Whigs. No breakdown exists of specialties among New York merchants, but one chronicler emphasized two groups taking the Patriot side: persons involved in sugar refining and distilling, and those connected to the West Indies with a reputation for smuggling. By contrast, the most conspicuous Loyalist merchants held official positions (especially on the Council), had thrived on British contracts during the French and Indian War, traded principally with England, Scotland, or Ireland, or managed branches of British firms.
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Loyalists and neutrals also outnumbered Patriots in Philadelphia’s mercantile community. Religious divisions explained much of the split, according to the principal researcher.
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Anglican and Quaker merchants had the expensive carriages; less affluent Scotch-Irish Presbyterians led the minority who were Patriots. The long-established Quaker merchant community took a largely neutral or pro-British position.
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During the late 1760s, the split deepened: “Resonant fear of Presbyterian hegemony was a major factor in the Quaker merchants’ view of the Revolutionary movement. They perceived an inexorable logic to the Revolutionary process that had nothing to do with commercial problems, parliamentary taxation or ministerial tyranny. Like their forebears of the seventeenth century, the Presbyterians were evidently using discontent over constitutional issues to seize power for themselves and deny their fellow Christians freedom of conscience.”
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