Robert M. Calhoon - Tory Insurgents: The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays

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 StatesPolitics and government17751783.

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

973.3dc22

2010003403

ISBN 978-1-61117-228-7 (ebook)

R OBERT M. C ALHOON

R OBERT M. C ALHOON

R OBERT M. C ALHOON AND D ONALD C. L ORD

R OBERT M. C ALHOON AND R OBERT M. W EIR

R OBERT M. C ALHOON

R OBERT M. C ALHOON

R OBERT M. C ALHOON

J ANICE P OTTER -M AC K INNON AND R OBERT M. C ALHOON

T IMOTHY M. B ARNES AND R OBERT M. C ALHOON

R OBERT M. C ALHOON

R OBERT M. C ALHOON

R OBERT S. D AVIS

R OBERT S. D AVIS

R OBERT M. C ALHOON AND T IMOTHY M. BARNES

R OBERT M. C ALHOON

R OBERT M. C ALHOON WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF T IMOTHY M. B ARNES

R OBERT M. C ALHOON

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, 17601781 (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 Smiths 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 upheavalthe 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. Daviss 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 others 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.