Next, the dastardly figures of the American Revolution.

The Loyalists.

Who were these underhanded villains trying to foil the Patriots at every turn?

No, they weren't villains.

They were people who felt stronger cultural ties, religious ties, political ties to the king and to that notion of what it meant to be a British subject.

Join me for a daring investigation into loyalism.

But fair warning, this could upend your views of the entire revolutionary era.

Drive-by history starts now.

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Every day thousands of motorists pass by countless history markers and say to themselves, "One of these days I'm going to stop and read that.

One of these days I'm going to find out what happened and why it mattered."

Well, this is that day.

I'm heading to a history marker that talks about the American Revolution.

But from the other side, we always hear about the Patriots, but rarely about the Tories.

Who stayed loyal and why is a relatively new area of study.

I'm wondering where these new findings are going to lead me.

I'm Ken Magos and this is Drive-By History.

Today's investigation, part of our special series focused on the American Revolution, begins in Red Bank, New Jersey, about an hour south of New York City and an hour and a half northeast of Philadelphia.

Like many towns in this region, Red Bank was caught in the crosshairs of the revolution.

And like so many people in the region, not everyone welcomed the patriots.

Here's the history marker.

It's behind this fence.

It says the White Homestead.

Touched by history for nearly three centuries.

This house witnessed the revolution, sheltering its Quaker loyalist owners and officers of the Royal British Army.

The usual story, loyalist equals villain.

They're seen as greedy and self-interested.

However, if history has taught me anything, it's that the usual story isn't all that usual.

In the end, I'm off to find out more.

The American Revolution was, in many ways, a civil war.

Neighbors, even family, split between loyalty and rebellion.

Sometimes it felt harsher than the Civil War that came decades later, divided as it was by North and South.

As the sign shows, during the American Revolution, your enemy could be living right next door.

To dig deeper, I'm heading to the Guggenheim Library, once the summer home of Murray and Leonie Guggenheim on the campus of Monmouth University, where Anthony Bernard has been unraveling Loyalist history, trying to follow the threads into our colonial past.

Hey Anthony, how you doing?

Ken, how's it going?

Good to see you.

Welcome.

Listen, I just came from a history marker that talks about the White Homestead.

It says that it sheltered Tories and British officers.

Now I find this fascinating because we don't often hear about Loyalists.

Now this is a great example of a local history that's tied into the national narrative.

There were Loyalists all over the colonies, but the White Homestead is a really good place to start.

So what happened there?

Well, I've been reading through this book.

Oh, the New Jersey coast in three centuries, volume three.

And I found out that the White Homestead is the oldest house in Red Bank that's still standing.

It's listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Yeah.

And get this, Ken, part of the house dates back to the early 1700s.

So long before the revolution.

Exactly.

Well, I can't wait to find out what research you've come upon.

I can't wait to tell you.

Seems like that's a great, great resource there that you found.

Robert White was from an early English colonial family.

They came here under something called the Monmouth Patent.

I know the Monmouth Patent.

It was an early English land grant issued around the time that the English took control from the Dutch.

Yes, and the patent was also granted to Shrewsbury, New Jersey, which was named after Shrewsbury, England.

And in England, Shrewsbury is a major tourist destination with lots of medieval history.

Good point.

The colonists were naming one thing for the other, presumably to honor their English heritage.

Then Shrewsbury must have been an area with a very strong English identity.

Absolutely.

Okay, let's go look more at this "Curious to Learn."

After returning the book, Anthony and I sat down to resume our conversation.

Now, what's important to keep in mind is that from 1685 until the time of the Revolution, colonists were proud of their English heritage, of being English.

So over time, some held on to those views while others started to see themselves as Americans.

Yes, exactly.

Now in Shrewsbury, things became really intense.

The community was totally divided over the Revolution.

So some sided with English out of a sense of identity.

Is that what you're saying?

That's part of it, but there are other parts.

Shrewsbury also drew people seeking religious freedom, especially the Quakers.

Robert White was Quaker.

Yeah, the marker said that and the Quakers are against violence.

Alice Paul was a Quaker, right?

She called herself a suffragist, peaceful, unlike the violent suffragettes in England.

We did a whole investigation into that history.

Yes, we did.

And history rhymes.

Robert White's views on violence would have been the same.

But why harbor British officers?

They were violent, brutal even.

Isn't that endorsing violence?

The history here is murky.

Some of the White family was actively loyalist.

But I wouldn't say Robert White was harboring them.

I would say he didn't turn them away.

Harboring makes it sound like something it wasn't.

So the family is labeled as being loyalist because they weren't against the king.

Exactly.

That's a piece of it.

Fascinating.

This history has a lot of pieces.

It does.

And that's where the next leg of this investigation begins.

To find out more, Anthony sends me to Middletown, New Jersey, to Marlpit Hall.

I'm met by Kean University historian Dr.

Jonathan Mercantini, a scholar of the Revolutionary Era and a familiar face on Drive-By History.

Together, we step back in time to a moment when lives were torn apart, when family took up arms brother against brother.

The 1770s, a time of American Civil War.

Yeah, I think the American Revolution is more of a civil war than what we know is the Civil War in many ways.

You've got neighbors who are going to be on different sides of that line.

Some are going to be loyalists.

Some are going to be patriots.

Some are trying to navigate in between viewing each other with suspicion.

And there's lots of violence.

But you've got an ideological line that separated them rather than the Mason Dixon line.

Absolutely.

In other words, in this Civil War , your enemy wasn't in the South or the North.

In this Civil War, Enemies were living as neighbors, side by side, one road to the next.

Let's talk about percentages in this region.

What was the percentage between loyalists, patriots, and those who kind of remained undecided?

So the scholarship is still not so much confused but complicated on this.

I'm one of the people who believes it's about a third patriot, a third loyalist, a third people trying to keep their head down and trying to stay out of their way.

I think most of us identify with the patriots.

We tell ourselves that if we'd lived at the time, we'd never have sided with loyalists.

After all, the loyalists were villains, weren't they?

No, they weren't villains.

They were people who felt stronger cultural ties, religious ties, political ties to the king and to that notion of what it meant to be a British subject.

The history of Loyalists is understudied overall as part of the American Revolution.

As I step into this Loyalist home, I find my curiosity piqued.

I'm intrigued to hear that this history is understudied.

I didn't think any aspect of the American Revolution could be understudied.

But as I'm about to find out what I thought I knew about the loyalists is actually only a sliver of the story.

But we'll get there.

First I'm immediately impressed by the home size and scope.

This is the home of a prosperous and accomplished man a man named Edward Taylor.

He was wealthy he didn't want to risk losing that wealth and he was politically powerful in that environment leading up to the American Revolution and independence.

So far what I'm hearing fits into the archetype almost to a T. Someone who is affluent and greedy.

A wealthy family had a lot to lose.

And for them, again, it's rational to remain loyal.

So then I have to ask, is this representative of what the typical loyalist?

Yeah, I don't know that there's one single typical loyalist because different people, different families would have had their own reasons for remaining loyal.

And this brings us to the point of contention.

Why historians say loyalism is understudied and misunderstood.

Most were not blindly allegiant to England.

In this case, Edward Taylor objected to British rule as well.

He was opposed to a lot of the British government policies in the 1760s and 1770s.

This history is far from good guys in blue versus bad guys in red.

The reasons for staying loyal were varied and highly complex.

As we're about to hear, some reasons for staying loyal were so understandable, so relatable, you might wonder if you would have remained loyal yourself.

There were lots of reasons why someone might remain loyal.

One of the biggest being their sense of identity is really rooted in being British.

And so giving that up, rejecting the crown was really threatening.

Don't forget at the time of the revolution we were all British, many of us proudly British.

Our nation, that is Great Britain, was a world power.

Sure the British had the most powerful Navy, they had a strong army, there was protection from that.

Siding with the British provided a sense of security.

Those loyalists were motivated by fear.

They did not want to be vulnerable.

Siding with the Continentals put too much at risk, not just property, but life and Lynn.

Would have been one of the factors they were weighing in their allegiance.

Absolutely.

Sometimes choosing sides involved the preference for order and predictability.

These people found comfort in known patterns.

British society was highly organized.

Surrendering that kind of structure troubled some colonists.

The Patriots championed democracy, a form of government that in the 1770s had not been practiced since ancient times.

There's a fear of democracy, fear of the rabble, fear of what might happen if the masses are unleashed and so maintaining that order is really powerful to them.

When you think about it, that makes a lot of sense.

It wasn't obvious that American democracy was going to work and if it failed, you might lose everything.

This notion that the rabble is going to come, take their property, take their livelihood away, potentially take their political power away in a way.

Concerns about forming a whole new government, modeled after something that ultimately collapsed in ancient Rome and Greece.

You would expect there to be reluctance.

You can understand the choice to remain loyal.

Now on to another reason why people sided with the British.

This one you'd probably never expect.

Some people stayed loyal because they had a problem with George Washington.

Washington realized that the survival of the revolution depended on the survival of the army.

And he knew that his army could not match man for man against the British army.

And so he fought using unconventional tactics for some people.

That was not a gentlemanly way of fighting.

It was not a European way of fighting.

And so it tainted the revolutionary cause.

There was a criticism against the patriots.

Yes, absolutely.

Sometimes George Washington engaged in surprise attacks.

Arguably, he ambushed the British using tactics that were both ruthless and bloody.

Are you saying then it was guerrilla warfare?

There's absolutely elements of guerrilla warfare into what Washington is doing here in New Jersey and throughout all of the theaters of the war.

And folks who were against his use of guerrilla tactics would have been labeled as loyalists?

Absolutely.

As we continue walking through the house, Jonathan Mercantini goes on to explain that there were still other reasons that compelled people to stay loyal.

One of them involved religion.

Is it fair to say then also that there was a fear of the wrath of God?

For some people there was.

Some loyalists believed what the Continentals were fighting for was nothing short of deicide.

In other words a crime against heaven.

You have to remember that the king is also the head of the Anglican Church.

So a rebellion against the king is not just a political rebellion.

It's a religious rebellion.

And for people for whom that religious faith was so central to their identity, so central to the way that they saw the world, they're not going to be able to reject the king to quote kill the king in that way.

And the issue wasn't just Anglican.

Beliefs associated with other religions also played into the decision to stay loyal.

As Anthony mentioned in the library, many Quakers felt they had no other choice.

You have a strong Quaker presence in this region.

Quakers are traditionally pacifists.

They were trying to avoid violence.

They didn't want to support either side.

They didn't want to be involved in the fighting at all, trying to find that middle ground.

As we continue through the house, Jonathan Mercantini explains that there were still other compelling reasons to be a loyalist.

The next one involves significant irony.

There were people who were fighting for their own independence by staying loyal to the British Crown.

Sure, early on, even before the Declaration of Independence, the Governor of Virginia and others promised freedom to enslaved Africans that joined the British Army that sided with the British cause.

Many of them did so.

Many others just took advantage of the disruption caused by the war to run away themselves and claim their own freedom.

So yes, you have this notion that people are remaining loyal but seeking their independence and securing their independence, particularly Africans.

By fighting against the cause for independence here in the colonies.

Yeah, it's ironic, right?

One of the less familiar stories associated with the American Revolution involves an enslaved person named Colonel Ty.

He was an African who not only chose loyalism, he gave his life fighting for the British cause.

Yeah, Colonel Ty is a fascinating story.

He leads a group that we know as the Black Brigade, up to 24 formerly enslaved Africans.

They're based out of Sandy Hook, again, not far from where we are.

But what's one of the really impressive things about Colonel Ty and why we know about him is because British regular forces were willing to serve alongside with him.

Colonel Ty was among the most respected and feared commanders of the revolution.

Ty would attack and plunder patriot homes, relying on his knowledge of nearby swamps, rivers and inlets to strike suddenly.

His story again emphasizes that, as a civil war, the enemy was always right around the corner, just waiting to pounce.

At the time, people were always on edge, always in fear.

It's absolutely terrifying.

You had to be afraid of being attacked in the middle of the night.

You know, maybe you would have your horses stolen.

Maybe you would have some livestock taken, but maybe they were coming to your house to take you.

I knew going into this investigation that Tories weren't villains, but I'm coming out of this investigation surprised by just how relatable their views are.

And that got me thinking.

How was the American Revolution seen from the other side of the Atlantic?

Was it the mirror image of here?

That is, did most people in England share the loyalist view?

Or were people in England sympathetic to the patriot cause?

To find out, I'm heading to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.

It has a fantastic gallery committed to the British side of the story.

It's where I meet Michelle Craig MacDonald.

She's an esteemed historian of 18th century America.

So I'm curious, was there an effort in England to help the loyalists, the people who stayed loyal in this country, loyal to the crown?

There absolutely was.

Yeah.

I think it's important to remember that this is not a conflict between two different nations.

This is a conflict between populations within the same empire.

Again, the idea that the American Revolution was very much a civil war is one of the first themes that surfaces in my conversation with Michelle.

There must have been all kinds of relationships at play involving people who really mattered to one another.

This is crucial.

This wasn't an us and them.

These were people who had direct family ties and direct business ties in North America and in the Caribbean.

They were being directly impacted by these events.

They weren't distant.

They were personal.

We don't often hear about this aspect of the history, but even in England, the American Revolution hit close to home.

I couldn't agree with you more.

This is again, not something that's happening in an international realm.

This is about defining who are citizens, what are the rights of citizenship, and what is the role of government within that empire.

These were all members who saw themselves as constituents of the same government.

Just ten years before Lexington and Concord, history tells us American colonists did not want to be independent.

Britain controlled the most powerful empire on the planet, and many people were proud of the Crown's accomplishments.

However, around that time, England started to view the colonies differently, arguably as a place of growing importance within Great Britain, a place that deserved greater attention and a place that needed greater protection.

All that costs money.

If you look at what happens after 1765, after the Stamp Act, after the end of the French and Indian War, you see a significant change in terms of how Parliament is thinking about the colonists and their representation in government and how the government is thinking about the economic contributions of its colonies.

You know about the Stamp Act and the other acts that enraged the colonists.

The thing is the colonists had paid taxes in the past.

The new ones however were coming directly from British Parliament rather than their own legislatures or assemblies.

What you really have is a change underway.

England's government was becoming more centralized.

And believe me this just didn't worry colonists.

This also raised the attention and the eyebrows of people living in England because if it could happen there it could happen here.

Right.

This history gets a little complex but it's absolutely fascinating.

Michelle believes that the loyalists the people you think of as conservatives were actually the advocates of change.

So this is going to be a little radical.

OK.

Bear with me.

Yes.

To be a loyalist in 1765, right, meant you were watching your government change.

The way it thought about representation from the colonies, the kinds of legislation and taxes it imposed was making a stronger central government, or at least it was behaving as a stronger central government than it had before.

Michelle is asserting that, by contrast, it was the patriots who railed against change.

In other words, rather than seeing the Loyalists as holding on to an old system, think about the revolutionaries who were arguing that how they had been operating is what should remain.

They were the group asking for change to be halted, not for it to go forward.

One more time, the Loyalists were advocates of change, advocates of moving to a stronger central government.

The Patriots were advocates of the status quo, advocates of a weaker central government, what we call a decentralized government.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Years later, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would come to blows over the same ideology.

And I know we're in the weeds a little, but it really is an intriguing hypothesis.

Getting back to England at the time of the revolution, let's just say, whether you had family in America, or whether you had professional contacts, or whether you were just watching the politics play out.

If you lived in England, you were watching events closely.

Again, important to think about this not just as an us and them, it was a we.

These were individuals and families and communities that were navigating a rapidly fluctuating imperial system.

As I mull over what both Michelle Craig McDonald and Jonathan Mercantini have explained during this investigation, I find myself thinking the reasons for staying loyal make a lot of sense to me.

And I have to think others must have felt the same.

I'm curious why you think more people didn't stay loyal.

In North America?

Yeah.

Because they did so at great risk.

There was a tendency under patriotic governments to require citizens to sign an oath of allegiance.

And if you didn't, you could actually be prosecuted or in some cases imprisoned without a trial.

So if you were a loyalist and your community outed you as a loyalist, you did so at tremendous personal risk for yourself and for your family.

Michelle tells me the inverse was true under British occupation.

If Britain was occupying a city and you didn't swear an oath of allegiance to the loyal, to the British crown, then you faced that risk.

As a result, it wasn't uncommon for people to waffle, allied with the British for a time, then the Patriots, and then back with the British, and so on.

That's another almost forgotten aspect of the American Revolution.

This was a period of tremendous change.

I think it's tempting to want to say that it was one static system, that people either chose one way or chose another way.

This was a seven years war.

And who was in charge of your community?

Who was the government who is currently in power?

Who had won the most recent battle, often influenced where you put your political allegiance?

As the day draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on all that I've discovered about the American Revolution.

There really is so much more to our nation's founding than we otherwise learn about in popular culture.

I think a lot of what we discovered today might be surprising to you.

I realize it might even be a little unpleasant.

It goes against what you usually hear.

So I think it makes sense to end this investigation with a question I try to address in every episode of Drive-By History.

Why does it matter?

I think it's important because otherwise you end up with a straw man.

Right?

It seems so obvious that the patriots were on the side of right.

The loyalists must have been on the side of wrong and royalism and old-fashioned ways.

But in point of fact, it was much, much messier than that.

See you next time.

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