My reading has led me to conclude that the allegiances (patriot/rebel, loyalist/tory, neutral) were not nearly so deep nor nearly so permanent as modern descendents would like to believe. The choice was not nearly so clear cut as our hindsight would lead us to believe. One's choice to be on one side or the other, in some cases, was not made voluntarily. It was not at all uncommon for persons to change sides, sometimes more than once. Sometimes when a person was captured by their opponents, an option was given them to switch sides. Since the alternatives were not very attractive, the option was frequently taken (even if only temporarily). Near the end of the conflict, in the South, anyway, a person who had been a Loyalist could "erase that record" by serving a certain number of months in the patriot/rebel militia. Even after such a vitriolic civil war, *most* loyalists, if they had done nothing really bad, stayed on their land (or returned to it, by community consent) and continued to attend the same church they had attended before (but perhaps not allowed to vote on church matters for 3 years!). The way they lived with it was to "agree not to talk about it". Many modern descendents of loyalists in the area are dumbfounded to discover their ancestors were loyalists (the grandchildren were not told which side granddaddy fought on, they has merely "assumed" he was a patriot). We are sometimes given the impression that after the war, all those who had been Loyalists lost everything they had and had to leave the country. This is believed to have been true for only one loyalist in five. Locally, in some cases, it could well have been five out of five, but overall, the fraction was much smaller. We often hear John Adams being quoted as an authority for saying that the population was divided evenly into thirds (for/against/neutral). If you dig deep enough into his writings, you can find him giving other breakdowns, dependent upon the point he was making. I have heard one unrepentant loyalist descendent use this breakdown in his chop-logic for declaring the US government being an "illegal" government (since 2/3 did not favot it)! I don't think anyone can argue with there being "some" for, "some" against, and "some" on the fence. It is far too simplistic to say that there were equal numbers of each, and that this distribution never changed during 7 or 8 years of conflict. There would have been a lot of ebb and flow into and out of these "camps". In 1775, I believe it would be hard to make a case that there was any substantial percentage of the population favoring independence, and that the vast majority of the population could have been placed in a category of "concerned about other things". As the war ground on, the percentage who came to conclude that independence was not only a viable option but the most viable option would have increased substantially. As the fortunes of one side or the other improved, there would have been some shifting of position among many who wanted to position themselves (and their property) "out of harm's way". It would seem reasonable to me that after Yorktown, if there had been a Gallup-type poll, it would have been found that there was a substantial increase in those favoring independence! So rather than there being some fixed distribution or allegiances, this would have been a dynamic ever-changing situation.

John Robertson <jr@jrshelby.com> wrote: >My reading has led me to conclude that the allegiances (patriot/rebel, >loyalist/tory, neutral) were not nearly so deep nor nearly so permanent as >modern descendents would like to believe. The choice was not nearly so >clear cut as our hindsight would lead us to believe. I've reached the same conclusion- with most of my reading being NY & NJ. -snip- >We often hear John Adams being quoted as an authority for saying that the >population was divided evenly into thirds (for/against/neutral). Several years ago [before I learned how fleeting memory was & began to keep more detailed notes] I read a historian's reasoning behind *his* belief that Adams was talking about the French Revolution, anyway. I've tried to relocate the passage without success & I've never seen the location of Adams' original passage mentioned so I could judge for myself. Was it in letters to Jefferson? Jim