Not Every American Colonist Was a Rebel

There Are Two Sides to Every Story

We all know that there are two sides to every story, but if you’re an American you grow up believing that the only two sides to the story of the American Revolution were the colonial rebels and the British Empire. In reality, there was another, much ignored facet to the conflict: colonial rebels vs. loyalist colonists, also known as Royalists, Tories, or King’s Men. In some ways, the Revolution was our first Civil War, though on a much smaller scale than the one that would nearly destroy the nation from 1861 to 1865.

So who were these loyalist colonists, and why didn’t they join their rebellious compatriots in the fight to become an independent nation? Let’s look at some things they never taught you in school.

There were a number of reasons that a significant proportion of the American colonists remained loyal to the Crown. I say a significant proportion because it truly was; it is estimated that up to 20% of the two million Whites in the colonies in 1775 were loyalists. Some of those reasons will seem quite practical to us today if viewed objectively.

Loyalists tended to be older, more established both socially and economically, and were thus understandably resistant to radical change. Many (though 170 years after the founding of the Jamestown colony certainly not all), had family in Britain and thus had an attachment to the mother country, if only sentimentally. It’s not unlike a fourth or fifth generation Italian-American feeling an affinity for the ancestral homeland they’ve never set foot in.

Some, perhaps even most, loyalists simply saw England as the legitimate government and believed rebellion against that government to be wrong. This is not unusual historically, as there have always been groups within a colonized people who felt a loyalty to their colonizer, whether that colonizer was benevolent or not. We see instances of this from Roman Gaul to British India.

Obviously, some loyalists wanted to remain part of Britain because it was economically advantageous to them; this was especially true in the Southern colonies. England (along with France) bought the bulk of American cotton, and this was a relationship cotton producers were in no hurry to endanger. There was…

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