Vince Brannigan wrote:

Stephen Harding wrote:
Brian Sharrock wrote:

Slight semantic problem; the loyalists(sic) _were_ British.
They didn't 'side with' the British, they were British, remained
British and refused to follow the rebellious smugglers, slave-owners,
land-owner and lawyer clique into an armed French-funded
insurrection. History _does_ record that they were treated badly
by the revolting colonists.

So is this the current Euro spin on the American Revolution?

Just a bunch of criminal, low life types, cajoled by the perfidious
French, into breaking away from "The Empire", where most wanted to
stay?
My, my how the politics of anti-Americanism spins its web.

It is the historical record, not current spin
See for example

http://www.uelac.org/loyalist.pdf

Nope. Largely revisionist spin.

Smuggling was indeed a common undertaking in port cities all along the
eastern seaboard. Some fairly prominent people benefited from the "trade"
as well.

Slave owners were by no means the majority, even in the south. Independence
from Britain would have had little effect on the American slave market, just
as it had little effect even when the US finally got around to banning the
import of slaves.

And of course, the French were originally content to watch from the sidelines
until there was actually some possibility of success. That didn't happen
until at least Saratoga. The French had nothing to do with starting the
American Revolution except in providing theory from philosophical types.

The position that the American Revolution was largely driven by a small group
of self-interested people (better money making possibilities with
independence) basically follows the political thinking of liberal or
downright Marxist thinking academics.

Under this paradigm of human political/economic/social action, no one does
anything without clear beneficial economic gain. Only the "socialist man"
is able to rise above this selfishness because the people own the means of
production, and workers can no longer be exploited. The bad things capitalism
does (and capitalist governments) is thus no longer possible.

The fact is the America of 1770 had probably the largest percentage of middle
class population of any place on earth, doesn't lend itself well to risky
propositions like treason against the most powerful country on earth. An
extremely high percentage of Americans were property owners.

Ben Franklin pretty much put the revolution supporters as 1/3rd of the population,
with about 1/3 loyalist, and 1/3 fence sitters. He ought to have some idea of
this since he was a very bright man, a reporter at heart, there at the time, and
even had a son who was the Royal Governor of New Jersey, who stayed loyal to the
crown, eventually leaving America to finish his life in Britain.

Many loyalists and Hessian soldiers were settled in Nova Scotia after
the American revolution. See for example The Hessians of Nova Scotia:
The Personal Data Files of 225 Hessian Soldiers who Settled in Nova
Scotia by Johannes HelmutMerz. 1994


Lots of Hessian POWs settled in this area (western MA) and upper NY state
after the war. Of course they also gravitated towards PA "Dutch" country as
well for obvious reasons.


SMH