Tory Insurgents

Robert S. Davis, Timothy M. Barnes, Robert M. Calhoon

Description

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.

Sujets

• Revolutionary Periode
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Georgia in the American Revolution
• Patriotic Party
• Continental Association
• Insurgency
• Rockingham Whigs
• Demagogy
• Populism
• Battles of Saratoga
• Puritan
• History of the Americas
• American Revolutionary War
• Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat
• Tyrant
• Suffolk Resolves
• United States
• Declaratory Act
• Tea Act
• Benedict Arnold

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 24 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172287
• Langue: English

Extrait

T ORY I NSURGENTS
T HE L OYALIST P ERCEPTION AND O THER E SSAYS
Revised and Expanded Edition
Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and Robert S. Davis
I N C OLLABORATION WITH
Donald C. Lord, Janice Potter-MacKinnon, and Robert M. Weir
1989, 2010 University of South Carolina

The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays was first published by the
University of South Carolina Press in 1989, and then revised and expanded in 2010.
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina,
by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012

www.sc.edu/uscpress

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print editions as follows:

Calhoon, Robert M. (Robert McCluer)
Tory insurgents: the loyalist perception and other essays / Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and Robert S. Davis; in collaboration with Donald C. Lord, Janice Potter-MacKinnon, and Robert M. Weir. - Rev. and expanded ed.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: The loyalist perception and other essays. Columbia, S.C.:
University of South Carolina Press, c1989.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-890-7 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-57003-920-1 (pbk: alk. paper)
1. American loyalists. 2. United States-Politics and government-1775-1783.
I. Barnes, Timothy M. II. Davis, Robert Scott, 1954- III. Lord, Donald C.
IV. Potter-MacKinnon, Janice, 1947- V. Weir, Robert M. VI. Calhoon, Robert M. (Robert McCluer) Loyalist perception and other essays. VII. Title.
E277.C23 2010
973.3-dc22
2010003403

ISBN 978-1-61117-228-7 (ebook)
for Jack P. Greene and in memory of Jack Barnes, Don Higginbotham, and Heard Robertson
C ONTENTS
Preface
Introduction

P ART 1 : I DEAS

1 The Loyalist Perception
R OBERT M. C ALHOON
2 The Constitution Ought to Bend : William Smith, Jr. s, Alternative to the American Revolution
R OBERT M. C ALHOON
3 The Removal of the Massachusetts General Court from Boston, 1769-1772
R OBERT M. C ALHOON AND D ONALD C. L ORD
4 The Scandalous History of Sir Egerton Leigh
R OBERT M. C ALHOON AND R OBERT M. W EIR
5 I Have Deduced Your Rights : Joseph Galloway s Concept of His Role, 1774-1775
R OBERT M. C ALHOON
6 Unhinging Former Intimacies : Robert Beverley s Perception of the Pre-Revolutionary Controversy, 1761-1775
R OBERT M. C ALHOON
7 The Uses of Reason in Political Upheaval
R OBERT M. C ALHOON

P ART 2: A CTION

8 The Character and Coherence of the Loyalist Press
J ANICE P OTTER -M AC K INNON AND R OBERT M. C ALHOON
9 Loyalist Discourse and the Moderation of the American Revolution
T IMOTHY M. B ARNES AND R OBERT M. C ALHOON
10 Civil, Revolutionary, or Partisan: The Loyalists and the Nature of the War for Independence
R OBERT M. C ALHOON
11 The Floridas, the Western Frontier, and Vermont: Thoughts on the Hinterland Loyalists
R OBERT M. C ALHOON
12 Loyalism and Patriotism at Askance: Community, Conspiracy, and Conflict on the Southern Frontier
R OBERT S. D AVIS
13 The Man Who Would Have Been: John Dooly, Ambition, and Politics on the Southern Frontier
R OBERT S. D AVIS

P ART 3: P RACTICE

14 Moral Allegiance: John Witherspoon and Loyalist Recantation
R OBERT M. C ALHOON AND T IMOTHY M. BARNES
15 Aedanus Burke and Thomas Burke: Revolutionary Conservatism in the Carolinas
R OBERT M. C ALHOON
16 The Reintegration of the Loyalists and the Disaffected
R OBERT M. C ALHOON WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF T IMOTHY M. B ARNES
Conclusion: A Special Kind of Civil War
R OBERT M. C ALHOON

Bibliographical Essay
Index
P REFACE
In 1989 The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays reprinted eleven previously published articles and essays. I had coauthored four of its chapters, one each with Timothy M. Barnes, Donald C. Lord, Janice Potter (now Potter-MacKinnon), and Robert M. Weir. These collaborative chapters reappear in this expanded volume, which has become still more collaborative. Barnes and I here collaborate on another chapter, one of the longest in the book and published here for the first time. Over the past quarter century, Robert S. Davis has emerged as the preeminent historian of loyalism in frontier Georgia and South Carolina, and he contributes two chapters extensively revised especially for this volume. With the assistance of Barnes and Davis, my 1991 essay on Carolina loyalism as viewed by the Irish-born patriots Aedanus and Thomas Burke is reprinted here with a new concluding section, as is a chapter and the epilogue from my long out-of-print The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760-1781 (1973).
The new material and new authorship of this edition strengthens our conviction that ideas leading toward action and finally maturing into settled patterns of practice remain the configuration of loyalist scholarship. Thus part 1, Ideas, introduces an array of pre-Revolutionary loyalists and one loyalist-leaning neutralist. Chapters 2 through 6 portray William Smith, the visionary yet closeted theorist of a different kind of empire than the one he sensed was threatened with revolutionary disruption in 1776; Thomas Hutchinson, who waged a tenacious and intelligent struggle to exile the Massachusetts Assembly and Council from Boston until legislative leaders and the British government could appreciate the value of disciplined colonies governed by disciplined imperial institutions; Egerton Leigh, the sexual adventurer and vice admiralty judge in South Carolina who provoked his kinsman Henry Laurens to take the moral and ethical measure of imperial officialdom; Joseph Galloway, the architect of a reform empire superficially like William Smith s but rooted in quite different insecurities from those troubling the New York councillor; and, finally, Robert Beverley, the Virginia planter who styled himself in 1775 as sorrowful spectator of these tumultuous times. Here we add, as an appendix, the long letter containing that self-portrait.
Introducing these biographical chapters is the title essay of the original col -lection, The Loyalist Perception, positing patterns of principle, accommodation, and doctrine as a framework of pre-Revolutionary loyalism. The opening chapter contains new material on the place of the loyalists in the political structure of the Mother Country. These new passages argue that principled loyalism was nourished by association with the talented if myopic upper levels of the British imperial bureaucracy, that accommodating loyalism imbibed the flexible and professed openness of the Rockingham Whigs, and that doctrinaire toryism was an extension of the stability of Anglican parish life in England. Part 1 now concludes with a chapter from The Loyalists in Revolutionary America on moderate patriots, neutralists, and moderate loyalists in the years from 1774 and 1777, exploring the uses of reason in political upheaval-the beginning, as readers will see in chapter 9, of growing moderation on both sides of the revolutionary divide.
While part 1 emerged from the scholarship of the 1960s and early 1970s, part 2, Action, echoes the concern of historians from the mid- to late- 1970s and into the 1980s with human activity. Thus social historians of the Revolution considered the Revolution a learning process in which ideas came to permeate the behavior of groups of people within American society. The printers and writers of anonymous essays in the garrison town press discussed in chapters 8 and 9 were one such group. Another much larger group included thousands of loyalists in arms discussed in chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13.
Three of the six chapters in part 2 are new to the collection. Timothy M. Barnes and I originally wrote Loyalist Discourse and the Moderation of the American Revolution for the first, and as yet unpublished, volume in a new history of discourse in America. Davis s chapter on Kettle Creek, Loyalism and Patriotism at Askance, and his biographical study of the patriot John Dooly are in fact companion pieces in which, as Professor Davis demonstrates, loyalists and patriots mirrored in each other s emotions, aggressions, and identities. Originally published in the online Journal of Backcountry Studies and in the Georgia Historical Quarterly, respectively, they have been revised especially for this book.
Finally, in part 3, Practice, we present loyalist scholarship from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s on the culmination of Revolutionary history as thoughtful action, or practice. My collaboration with Barnes began in 1975 when our paths crossed at the American Antiquarian Society where we discovered evidence identifying John Witherspoon as the instigator of mock ritual humiliations of the loyalist printers Benjamin Towne and James Rivington. Our 1985 article on Witherspoon did not include the extensive political, social, cultural, and ethical context that we had reconstructed. Much of that context ended up on the cutting room floor only to be swept up and reintroduced as the interpretive framework of my 1987 essay The Reintegration of the Loyalists and the Disaffected. Barnes s collaboration in framing this essay is here belatedly acknowledged. Part 3, and in a sense the second edition as a whole, concludes with A Special Kind of Civil War, the longer portion of the epilogue and conclusion from The Loyalists in Revolutionary America.
Between 1997 and 2002, Kenneth G. Anthony helped conceptualize both this book and a companion volume on political moderation; during the final two years of the preparation of both books, Marguerite Ross Howell served as project manager and capably oversaw myriad editorial details. Ed Roush and Karen S. Walker offered insights and encouragement. The authors also acknowledge with appreciation the assistance of Catherine S. Cat McDowell of the Digital Projects Office, Walter Clinton Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Sallie Harlan, Lynne Landwehr, Jess Shelander, Deanna Slappey, Richard Smallwood, Karen Walker, and the support of th