On July 4, 1776, fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence. They were not the only colonists with something to say. An estimated one-fifth of the colonial population opposed independence, remained loyal to the Crown, or argued a different path forward. Their petitions, journals, plans, testimonies, and letters survive in institutional archives. This series presents them.
The Dissenting Record
1763–1783
Same sourcing rules apply
Building
The standard narrative of the American Revolution names the signers and forgets everyone else. The primary source record does not.
Loyalists are among the most documented and least presented figures of the founding era. They left behind memoirs, petitions, intelligence reports, legal arguments, diplomatic plans, and private correspondence now held at the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New Jersey Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, the Public Archives of Canada, and HathiTrust. Most readers can name only one loyalist. The archive contains hundreds.
This series does not defend or condemn the Loyalist position. It presents what these people wrote, what happened to them, and what their documents say. The editorial standard is identical to every other series in this archive: the primary sources drive the story, and nothing is presented without a confirmed institutional citation.
Delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774. His Plan of Union proposed an American colonial parliament with veto power over Parliament's decisions on taxation and trade. It failed by one vote. The full text survives. So does the vote count.
Last royal governor of Massachusetts. His private letters, leaked in 1773, helped ignite the confrontation he had spent his career trying to prevent. He went into exile in 1774 and advised the British government from London until his death. His diary is in the archive.
Royal Governor of New Jersey and the only son of Benjamin Franklin. When his father became a Patriot, William stayed loyal. He was imprisoned for two years, led Loyalist operations from New York, and spent the rest of his life in England. They saw each other once more. Benjamin's will left him almost nothing.
Head of British intelligence in North America. He ran the operation that turned Benedict Arnold and nearly delivered West Point to the British. Captured in civilian clothes with Arnold's papers in his boot. Tried by court martial and hanged as a spy on October 2, 1780. A Continental Army surgeon recorded his last hours.
Mohawk clan mother and the most consequential intelligence figure of the Revolution most people have never heard of. In 1777 her warning to British forces enabled the ambush at Oriskany. A British officer wrote that one word from her carried more weight with the Six Nations than a thousand from any white man. Her correspondence is in the Claus Papers at the Public Archives of Canada.
A Salem merchant who left in April 1775 and spent nine years in England watching the war from a distance, writing in his journal, and waiting to go home. His account is not a political argument. It is the record of an ordinary man in an impossible position. The journal is at the Library of Congress and confirmed public domain.
The most effective Loyalist guerrilla commander of the Southern campaign. He conducted raids, prisoner rescues, covert operations, and intelligence gathering across the Carolinas. Then he wrote a memoir. It reads like nothing else from the period. The full text is at HathiTrust.
Called Britain's most daring Loyalist operative. He conducted reconnaissance and infiltration missions across New Jersey and New York, twice escaped Patriot custody, and intercepted Continental Army dispatches. His memoir contains firsthand accounts of operating behind enemy lines that have no parallel in the Loyalist record.
Commander of the Queen's Rangers, one of the most effective Loyalist military units of the war. He wrote a detailed memoir of his campaigns. After the war he became the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. His Journal of the Operations of the Queen's Rangers is in institutional archives.
Anglican minister in Virginia and Maryland who preached against independence while Patriot mobs gathered outside his church. He delivered his final American sermon with two loaded pistols on the pulpit. He fled to England in 1775 and wrote one of the first histories of the American Revolution outside the United States.