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Loyalists
America’s first civil war took place during the Revolution, an ultra-violent, family-splitting, and often vindictive conflict between "patriots" and loyalists.
On April 22, 1775, three days after a British column marched out of Boston and clashed with militiamen at Lexington and Concord, the news—and the cry of Revolution!—reached Danbury, Connecticut, where 18-year-old Stephen Maples Jarvis was working on the family farm.
When their side lost the Revolution, New Englanders who had backed Britain packed up, sailed north, and established the town of St. Andrews, New Brunswick. It still flourishes.
When, in 1783, it became clear that a band of American rebels had succeeded in their insurrection against King George, Robert Pagan and 443 of his neighbors in Castine, Maine did the only thing loyal subjects of the Crown could do: they dismantled their houses and pubs, board b
To the end of his life, America’s most notorious traitor believed that he was a primary hero of the Revolution.
Shortly after noon on Thursday, April 20, 1775, a weary post-rider swung out of the saddle at Hunt’s Tavern in New Haven, Connecticut with an urgent message from the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence.
Thousands of them sided with Great Britain, only to become the wandering children of the American Revolution
IN THE EARLY summer of 1775 the rebeb of Virginia evicted their royalist governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, from his capital at Williamsburg and drove him to refuge aboard a British warship.
To read Thomas Jones’s acerb History of New York during the Revolutionary War is to behold the outward man of the portrait—prim, carping, easily outraged, a nob who looks as though he had sniffed something odious.
In reprisal for a Tory atrocity, Washington ordered the hanging of a captive British officer chosen by lot. He was nineteen.
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