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In a way, the American Revolution was besides a civil war. By 1774, American colonists were divided into two camps: patriots and loyalists. Hotheaded patriots like the Sons of Liberty wanted to rid themselves of British rule at all costs. While the loyalists, either through stubborn loyalty to the crown or uncomplicated pragmatism, opposed all-out revolution.

It'southward estimated that up to 1-fifth of American colonists were loyalists and they didn't all belong to aristocracy British families tied to the crown or armed services, says Ben Marsh, a professor of American history at the Academy of Kent. Tens of thousands of merchants, farmers, Native Americans and enslaved people all had their reasons for preferring the known problems of British rule over an unpredictable independence.

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Merely loyalists were on the losing side of the Revolution. Their businesses were ransacked, the homes confiscated, and afterward the state of war as many as 70,000 loyalists became refugees, fleeing to British imperial outposts in Canada and the Caribbean, or dorsum to England itself.

Here are the stories of vii famous loyalists, virtually of whom paid a steep price for daring to oppose the Revolution:

1. William Franklin

William Franklin was an illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, but the two had a close relationship. They worked together on Poor Richard's Almanack and the older Franklin used his influence to have William appointed governor of the colonial Province of New Bailiwick of jersey, where he earned a reputation equally a reformer.

"Like other loyalists, William Franklin hated what the Crown was doing and thought it was wrong, just he didn't disagree enough to warrant a revolution," says Marsh.

As calls for war grew louder, Benjamin Franklin urged his son to resign and take a leadership post with the patriots, just William refused. On January 13, 1775, Governor Franklin made a plea to the New Jersey Legislature: "You accept now pointed out to you, gentlemen, two roads," he said, "one evidently leading to peace, happiness, and a restoration of the public placidity—the other inevitably conducting you to anarchy, misery, and all the horrors of a civil war."

When his state chose Revolution, Franklin was confined to firm arrest for his loyalist views, and then shipped to a prison in Connecticut, where he was defenseless communicating and plotting with other loyalists. Franklin was thrown into solitary solitude and wasn't fifty-fifty permit out to run across his dying wife.

Franklin described his agony in a letter to Gov. Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut. "I suffer so much in being thus buried alive, having no one to speak to day or nighttime, and for the want of air and exercise," wrote Franklin, "that I should deem it a favor to exist immediately taken out and shot."

Released every bit part of a prisoner exchange in 1778, Franklin became a loyalist leader in British-controlled New York and even organized guerilla attacks on patriot forces. He fled to London at the war'due south end and never reconciled with his father.

2. Thomas Hutchinson

Born into a prominent Massachusetts family unit, Thomas Hutchinson was a successful merchant, a respected judge and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the explosive run-upwards to the Revolution.

In 1765, Hutchinson opposed the Postage stamp Act while lieutenant governor, but that didn't end an angry mob from looting and nearly destroying his home. Hutchinson was acting governor during the Boston Massacre and ensured that the British soldiers were tried for the deaths of half-dozen Bostonians, but he was still cast as the enemy.

"Hutchinson was a pragmatist trying to navigate a line between British policies, which were becoming more aggressive, and the demands of the patriots, but it was an impossible job," says Marsh.

When patriots in other cities turned away British tea ships rather than pay the steep duties required by the Tea Act of 1773, Hutchinson stood his ground. He ordered that all duties be paid on the three tea ships docked in Boston Harbor, which the Sons of Liberty answered with the infamous Boston Tea Party.

Hutchinson sailed to England in 1774 in a last-ditch attempt to broker peace between the crown and the colonies, merely he never returned to Massachusetts. Historians like Marsh meet Hutchinson as a sympathetic effigy who was in the wrong place at the incorrect time.

"With the exception of a handful of nasty people, much of the rest of the loyalists are quite tragic stories of people whose loyalties, equally far as they were concerned, remain pure and stable, but it was the rest of the earth that changed," says Marsh.

3. John Malcolm

John Malcolm is a far less sympathetic character than Franklin or Hutchinson. Malcolm was an overzealous and often cruel British customs officer who was tarred and feathered not once, but twice by patriot mobs.

The beginning incident happened in 1773, when Malcolm gleefully seized a Sons of Freedom ship at a port in Maine and threatened the crew with a sword if they didn't listen his authority. When word spread of Malcolm'due south behavior, a group of local sailors "disarm'd [him] of Sword, Cane, Lid & Wig," poured hot tar and feathers over his wearing apparel and paraded him through the streets for an hour.

If the public shaming was meant to humble Malcolm, it didn't work. A yr later, Malcolm got into trouble in Boston when he whacked a local shoemaker on the head for insolence. The shoemaker, information technology turns out, was a member of the Sons of Liberty and an angry oversupply chop-chop gathered outside of Malcolm's house.

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Stubborn and defiant to the cadre, the 50-twelvemonth-old Malcolm taunted the crowd from his upstairs window, yelling, "You lot say I was tarred and feathered, and that it was non done in a proper manner, damn you let me meet the man that dare do it better!"

The patriot mob was happy to oblige. They seized Malcolm and dragged him on a sled to King Street, where, instead of pouring the tar over his clothes, they stripped him naked in the freezing Jan air and practical the hot tar and feathers direct to his skin.

Malcolm fled to England a few months later carrying a box containing strips of his ain flesh that peeled off when removing the tar, and a petition to the King over his "savage" handling. He never returned to Boston, leaving behind a married woman and children.

"Equally a loyalist, Malcolm is very two-dimensional and he's used to keen effect in the patriot propaganda of the fourth dimension," says Marsh, "similar the famous cartoons of him being tarred and feathered in Boston."

iv. Thomas Dark-brown

At that place were agog loyalists outside of big cities like Boston and Philadelphia, too. One of the nigh famous was Thomas Brown, a wronged merchant from Georgia who took his vengeance on the patriots equally the leader of the King'due south Rangers.

Brown arrived in Georgia in 1774 simply equally the Revolution was heating upwardly. Refusing to side with the patriots on boycotting merchandise with Britain, Brown was badly browbeaten by the Sons of Liberty and the soles of his anxiety were nearly burned off.

"He'south a much more interesting character in some ways than John Malcolm," says Marsh. "Brown'southward response was, 'If you button me, I volition button dorsum.' He turned his victimization into an angry militaristic antiphon."

Brown fled to Florida, where he convinced the colonial governor to put him in charge of a regiment of loyalist fighters, who with aid from local Indian tribes would ride confronting the patriots. In 1776, Brown was deputed as lieutenant colonel of the Florida Rangers, later known as the King's Rangers.

Brown led the Male monarch's Rangers on raids along the Georgia-Florida border and fought the patriot armies in Savannah, Charleston and Augusta, where he was forced to give up in 1781. Released equally part of a prisoner exchange, Brown and many of his rangers eventually settled in the British-ruled Bahama islands, where he was elected to the legislature and ran a sugar plantation.

five. Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea)

Joseph Brant, Thayendanega — Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant)

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Known equally Thayendanegea in his native Mohawk language, Joseph Brant was the most famous of the many Native American loyalists.

Brant enjoyed close family unit ties with Sir William Johnson, British superintendent of the Northern Indians of America, considering Johnson had married Brant's sister. Educated by the British and fluent in six tribal languages, Brant had "really practiced connections on both sides of the cultural dissever," says Marsh, "and he made the well-nigh of them during the state of war."

It was Brant who convinced iv of the Half dozen Nations to fight for the British in 1775, arguing that the British were more likely to uphold their land agreements with the Indians than the Americans. Brant then traveled to England, met the King and became a favorite of the British aristocracy, who promised full support of Native American loyalists.

Brant returned to the colonies in 1776 where he fought aslope the British to retake New York, then led his Indian armies into boxing in the Mohawk Valley. The patriot press portrayed Brant and his fighters as brutal savages, and "Monster Brant" (every bit he was known) was blamed for a Seneca raid in which 30 civilians were killed in retaliation for an earlier patriot attack.

"The patriot press made the most of the ways that the British are mobilizing enslaved and Indigenous people during the state of war to paint a story of America under duress from these external forces," says Marsh. "Brant was nowhere near as bad as the patriot'south portray, only was an effective leader of his people both during and after the war."

Later the British surrender, Brant spent his remaining years trying to negotiate treaties with the British, Americans and Canadians to salve tribal lands from white settlement.

6. Boston Rex

When the Revolution began, the British shrewdly recruited enslaved people to fight against their American masters. An estimated 12,000 slaves of African descent known every bit "Black Loyalists" took up arms for the British during the Revolutionary State of war and tens of thousands of others risked their lives to seek freedom backside the British lines.

Amongst them was Boston King, an enslaved man from South Carolina who survived smallpox and capture at sea to escape to safety in British-controlled New York. When the war concluded, the British kept their give-and-take and negotiated "certificates of freedom" for iii,000 formerly enslaved people, including King and his wife Violet.

King and the other Black Loyalists were settled in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, where they suffered violence and famine, but survived to found a community. We know King's story because he became a prominent preacher and wrote his memoirs, which draw his journey to Sierra Leone with a shipload of other Black religious pilgrims, and his education in England.

7. Jonathan Boucher

Loyalist preacher Jonathan Boucher dared to baptize and brainwash formerly enslaved Black people in Virginia and Maryland, which made him controversial from the commencement. Just when he took to his pulpit to oppose patriot firebrands like Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry, he put a target on his back.

"Boucher concluded up preaching in his church with ii loaded pistols," says Marsh.

One 24-hour interval a patriot mob gathered outside the church building and threatened that if Boucher stood up to preach they would drag him out. E'er defiant, Boucher shouted "God Save the King," grabbed a local patriot leader, put a pistol to his neck and escaped with his life.

Boucher, in one case a close friend of George Washington, fled to United kingdom in 1775 where he wrote i of the start histories of the American Revolution outside of the United States.

Source: https://www.history.com/news/loyalists-revolutionary-war

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