150 Chapter VII
Revolutionary government as a step toward constitutional government, com-
mittees of public safety, representatives on mission to carry revolution to the local
authorities, paper money, false paper money, price controls, oaths, detention, con-
fiscation, aversion to “moderatism,” and Jacobins who wind up as sober guardians
of the law—how much it all suggests what was to happen in France a few years
later! With allowance for differences of scale and intensity, there was foreshad-
owed in the America of 1776 something of the gouvernement révolutionnaire and
even the Terror of France in 1793—except for the death sentences and the horrors
that went with them, and except for the fact that the victims of these arbitrary
proceedings never returned to political life as an organized force, to keep alive for
all time an inveterate hatred of the Revolution.^17
It is not easy to say why some Americans warmly embraced the Revolution, or
why others opposed it, or how many there were on each side. Independence made
it in principle necessary to choose between loyalty and rebellion. But there were
many who by isolation managed to avoid commitment, or whose inclinations
swayed with the course of battle, or who, torn in their beliefs, prepared passively to
accept whichever authority in the end should establish itself. Numbers therefore
cannot be given. It has often been repeated, as a remark of John Adams, that a
third of the American people were patriot, a third loyalist, and a third neutral; but
this neat summary has gone into the attic of historical fallacies; what Adams
meant, when he offered it in 1815, was that a third of the Americans in the 1790’s
had favored the French Revolution, a third had opposed it, and a third had not
cared.^18 The bulk of American opinion, after July 1776, seems to have been actively
or potentially for independence. Positive and committed loyalists were a minority,
but not therefore unimportant. They had the strength of the British empire on
their side, and much also in the American tradition to support them. They believed
in liberties for the colonies, and in old and historic rights under the British consti-
tution, which, however, they felt to be less threatened by Parliament than by unruly
new forces in America itself.
It is not possible to explain the division between patriot and loyalist by other or
supposedly more fundamental divisions. The line coincided only locally or occa-
sionally with the lines of conflict that had appeared before the war. Families di-
vided, brothers often went different ways. Doubtless many a man marked himself
for a lifetime by the impulsive decision of a moment. Economic and class motiva-
tions are unclear. The most firmly established merchants and lawyers tended to
loyalism, but there were respected merchants and lawyers who embraced the revo-
lution. New York and Virginia were both full of great landowners, but New York
was the most loyalist province, Virginia one of the most revolutionary. Ironmas-
ters, who had reason to object to British controls on the American iron industry,
17 What the United States has missed by having no returned émigrés, or real counterrevolution
within its own borders, may be seen in the work of the Canadian Arthur Johnston, dedicated to the
loyalists, the “true heroes of the Revolution,” and breathing not academic revisionism but intense
loathing of that event: Myths and Facts of the American Revolution: a Commentary on United States His-
tory as it is Written (Toronto, 1908).
18 J. R. Alden, The American Revolution (N.Y., 1954), 87, and the general discussion of loyalism in
these pages.