"Loyalist Influence" on British Policy Toward the United States After the American Revolution

THE LOYALIST ISSUE is one of the most neglected problems in British or American History.' In the former Mother Country, the triumph of Whig historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries estabvlished the Revolution and all those who supported the British cause as a source of embarrassment. The struggle was an aberration in Britain's great march to more liberal constitutional and social arrangements. Even its value as a useful object lesson was minimized by the great battle against Napoleonic tyranny which followed so quickly on its heels. For their part, American writers have dwelt in loving detail on the successful founding of the new nation. Loyalists were tories, traitors witlhin the gates for whom no epithets were too harsh. Furthermore, the ethic has been as strong among American historians as it is in American society at large. The loyalists were, after all, not merely traitors, but monumental losers. Recently, after long silence, several studies on the loyalists have appeared; and there is at last under way a truly Anglo-American enterprise to locate and study all available loyalist sources on both sides of the Atlantic. It may well be that the somber events of our own generation have wrought a fundamental shift of spirit: away from success as the absolute goal of national life toward an acceptance of less heady, more modest accomplishments. Perhaps we have achieved, painfully enough, sufficient maturation to escape the dreadftul white-black dichotomy in human affairs, to exhibit our wounds

Economic history · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History

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