Brad A. Jones. Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. 324 pp. Ill. $32.99 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-5017-5403-6; $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-5401-2.
Reviewed by Benjamin Anderson (The University of Edinburgh)
Published on H-Early-America (April, 2022)
Commissioned by Troy Bickham (Texas A&M University)
Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic explores the concept of “Loyalism” and its adherents’ experience during the American Revolution in four major cities of the first British Empire: Glasgow, Scotland; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Kingston, Jamaica; and New York City, New York. Loyalists in these four communities, writes Brad A. Jones, were bound by a reinforced and passionate commitment to a representative British monarchy. Although these Loyalists expressed their Loyalism in different ways because of local conditions and experiences, a commonality existed: they were deeply attached to a collection of Protestant Whig beliefs, “like free trade, political liberty, and religious freedom,” and considered this representative monarchy to be the protector of liberty and Protestantism from Catholicism, France, and Spain (p. 154).
This book is divided into seven chapters that are in chronological order. In chapter 1, Jones traces the communication networks that stretched across the British Atlantic world in the eighteenth century, which connected these four cities to each other and the center of the British Empire in London. It is a particularly valuable chapter, for local newspapers, in conjunction with Loyalist pamphlets, form the bulk of Jones’s sources. By using these newspapers and outlining this network, Jones demonstrates how ideas spread across the British Atlantic, which, in the process, allowed the spread of Loyalist thought. Chapters 2 through 4 explore how local issues led these four communities to react differently to the Stamp Act, Townshend Duties, Coercive Acts, and Quebec Act and develop their own respective understandings of Loyalism and what it meant to be British. Chapter 5 then considers the diverging reasons that led Glasgow, Halifax, Kingston, and New York to support Britain. Chapter 6 analyzes the counternarrative that Loyalists constructed in response to the Continental Congress’s alliance with Catholic France. Finally, chapter 7 focuses on the unity among the Loyalists as a result of the Gordon Riots; the passage of the Papist Act of 1778, which gave greater freedom to Catholics in Britain; and the intervention of Catholic France and Spain in 1778 and 1779.
Jones’s greatest contribution is to the Loyalist historiography. “We know far less,” he writes, “about how loyal Britons around the North Atlantic reacted to the Patriots’ actions and their interpretation of British policies” (p. 9). To an extent, he is correct. The likes of William H. Nelson, Robert Calhoon, Janice Potter, and Bernard Bailyn produced some of the most important early works on Loyalism, helping us to achieve a firm understanding of what Loyalism was and what it meant to be a Loyalist. Their work, however, suffers from generalizations because they focus purely on elite Loyalist figures, such as Thomas Hutchinson, Jonathan Sewall, and Joseph Galloway. By concentrating on these elite figures, they suggested that the common and elite Loyalists shared the same revolutionary experience and motivations. Only in recent decades, namely, through the likes of Joseph Tiedemann and his work on New York’s Loyalists, have historians started to recover common Loyalists’ voices. By using the reports and correspondence in newspapers—one of the very few places that a common colonist’s thoughts can be found—Jones effectively adds to this field. Nevertheless, newspapers can also be restrictive because they were mainly accessible to white people, and this is evident by Jones’s inability to bring African Americans and Native Americans into his analysis. He demonstrates the importance of self-interest and local issues in helping them to determine their loyalties and come to terms with the Patriots’ conduct before and during the Revolutionary War. Furthermore, by concentrating on the Loyalists’ Protestant Whig beliefs, he offers up an original argument that takes the study of Loyalism down new avenues.
This focus, however, leads to Jones making a significant contradiction in his work. In an attempt to add greater originality, he appears to argue that this Protestant Whig argument was the sole motivator in leading Loyalists to choosing their allegiance. He criticizes historians for focusing “on [the] Loyalists’ personal interest to describe their political allegiances” (p. 11); yet, self-interest is an intrinsic theme in Resisting Independence. In chapter 5, for example, he effectively demonstrates that local self-interests determined how the Loyalists reacted to the increasing tensions between the Patriots and Britain: Glasgow merchants recognized the profits they could gain from lucrative contracts to supply the British Army; white slave owners in Kingston saw Britain as their security against a slave rebellion on the island, thus ensuring their profits remained intact; and Haligonians saw the revolution as an opportunity to limit the authority of Nova Scotia’s unpopular governor. Only in New York, he explains, was there much more passionate support for British representative monarchy and Protestant Whig values because the Loyalists’ had experienced the Patriots’ violence firsthand. Indeed, it seems there is an urge to treat political ideals and self-interest as two distinct motivations that were incapable of working in tandem with one another, but, in reality, this was not the case for many colonists. In Vermont, for example, Ethan Allen combined these Protestant Whig values with his own self-interests that lay in his land empire, which led him to open negotiations with the British Empire about Vermont returning to it. The investigation of self-interest is a relatively new topic among historians of the American Revolution, who have predominantly confined their studies to towns and communities in New York and the southern backcountry that experienced multiple occupations by the Continental and British armies. Jones makes an excellent contribution to this field by elevating it from the North American colonies to the British Atlantic world.
Overall, Resisting Independence is a well-written piece of work. Jones combines a compelling narrative with analysis, thus making it a good read for experts as well as beginners in the subject of the American Revolution, Loyalism, and the British Atlantic world. It offers a fascinating insight into how networks were developed and nurtured between the colonies that enabled Protestant Whig ideas to spread and develop Loyalism, while also demonstrating how the societies of Glasgow, Halifax, Kingston, and New York coped with the revolution and its subsequent war.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-early-america.
Citation:
Benjamin Anderson. Review of Jones, Brad A., Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic.
H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56996
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |