School of War - Ep. 8: H.W. Brands on the Patriots and the Loyalists

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Biography H.W, Brands is the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his doctorate in history. He is the author of thirty books, including two which have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize: The First American and Traitor to His Class. His latest book, released November 9, is Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution. Times 01:51- Introduction 07:36 - The sidelining of the Loyalists in American history and memory 12:53 - Individual decisions in the context of the Revolutionary War 18:42 - The Indian population and Joseph Brant 23:20 - The decision to rebel Recorded on November 9, 2021

What makes a man betray his country? We consider the leaders of the American Revolution to be our founding generation, but at the time, and certainly at the start of the conflict, sticking with Great Britain presented to the average colonist an arguably safer course. The decisions made by these loyalists form a baseline from which we consider the true boldness of the leading revolutionaries. History is written by the winners, so some obvious questions present themselves. Who were these Tories? Why did they stick with the crown and the cause of King George? And what happened to them in the end?

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who knock these feelings down will hear all of us soon. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean, and thank you for joining School of War. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Professor H.W. Brands. He is the Jack S. Blanton Senior Chair in History at the University of Texas in Austin, the author of numerous books, several of which have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently the author of Our First Civil War, retelling the story of the American Revolution, but lingering in particular on the plight of the loyalists in that conflict. We'll get to that in just a second, but Professor, I wanted to ask you,

typically ask my guest to kind of tell us a little bit about themselves, how they came to work on the subjects that they're working on, and give us a bit of account of their career. So please tell us about yourself. Sure, well, depending on how deep you want to go, I've been in this business of history of teaching and writing history, since the 1980s. Actually, I started teaching earlier than that.

My first teaching gigs were in high school. The writing came a little bit later. I had been teaching at the high school level for a few years and decided that I wanted to get maybe more intellectually back from my high school students, I assume you, from my students that I was getting from my high school students. They don't have enough life experience as 15-year-olds to be able to discuss what I came to think. were the really interesting questions that we were dealing with. So as I was thinking about sort of moving upstream in the teaching business, I got a master's degree and then I decided to go for a PhD.

And by then I had realized, and I would, I'll have to say that I was fairly unfamiliar with the culture of higher education. And so it took me while to piece together exactly what the job description of community college professor was. And I was, I taught community college for a while. and then a university professor, but I gathered by all this time that if you land in one of these jobs, then you would get paid to teach and to write. My original interest was an American foreign policy. And my first book was my dissertation, which was on the foreign policy of the Eisenhower administration. And I pursued that for my first few books. But I really got sort of more broadly interested in American history when I had signed a contract to write about the foreign policy

of Theodore Roosevelt. And I became aware, of course, I mean, I became more aware of the fact that foreign policy owes a great deal of the way it unfolds to domestic politics. So you cannot really understand foreign policy of any presidential administration unless you pay close attention to the politics. So when I was writing about Theater Roosevelt, I decided that my study of Theodore Roosevelt was going to be a of his entire presidency, not just the foreign policy side. And then, then I became aware that to understand Peter Roosevelt's presidency, you need to understand the rest of his life. So the book became ultimately a full-blown biography. And I wrote a series of biographies. And I like the biographies. Biography is certainly a well-respected genre. It's a way of writing history, but reaching a broader

audience. There are many more people who will pick up a biography than we'll pick up a book that just label the history of this, that or the other thing. The biography is the genre of nonfiction that is closest to the novel, because novels typically have a protagonist and the author of the novel tries to get you in the head of the character. Well, this is what biographers do. It turned out, I wrote a series of biographies. It turned out that five of the six were of presidents, biographies of presidents. The other one was of Benjamin Franklin who died too soon to be president of the United States. And this is because I conceived these books as a history of the United States in six volumes, but they were just hanging on these individual figures. And if you're going to

write about the United States, and if this is going to be history of the United States, and if it's going to uncover the most important events of the various periods of American history, a president is an exceedingly useful person to hang the story on because presidents are right in the thick of things. I imagine when I can see this, maybe I'd write one of these about a writer or about a business figure. And if you did, it would be a stretch to include all the stuff that I had not needed to go into history of the United States. Anyway, so I did that for a while. And then I sort of ran out of biography figures, more precisely. I covered the ground of U.S. history.

So the first volume in this six-volume series was on Benjamin Franklin. And I like to think appropriately entitled it, the first American. And the last one was on Ronald Reagan, because Ronald Reagan carried the story to his death in the early 21st century. And I thought, okay, past that, we're writing current events, which finally brings me to this book on the American Revolution. And I had recently written about, well, the run up to and some of the conclusion of the Civil War, I wrote about John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. And it occurred to me, I knew enough about the American Revolutionary War to realize that it wasn't exactly. It wasn't only Americans against the British. It was Americans against Americans.

And I was attuned to this by other wars, not only America's wars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but lots of other wars then. And one of the conclusions that I drew is that it is essentially never the case, that it is just one group against another group. It's almost never the case that it's just one country against another country, especially in any war of national liberation or anything like this, any revolutionary war, any civil war. And so I reflected that back on the American Revolutionary War. and I wanted to bring out that this was at its heart, sort of at its moral heart, at its political decision heart, it was American against American. Yeah, the British were there. And the point of the American nationalists, if I can call them that,

although in the book I call them Patriots, was to evict, to eject the British. But in order to do so, they had to initially and concurrently gain ascendancy over the Americans who didn't want the British to leave. So hence the Patriots against the Loyalists in what I call our first civil war. Your background as a biographer, I think shows in this book. In some ways, it's almost a kind of class biography or a biography of elites from closely related classes that are then torn apart by the war. The story of the loyalists and the sort of standard accounts of the revolution or, you know, certainly the accounts that are taught in high school or in an introductory fashion in college, you know, it's just sort of politely downplayed. These figures are, you know, they're the

losers, ultimately, but they're not even as important as the losers in the standard account, who are British or were originally British in the sense of being born in Britain and coming from Britain to fight the war. Why are these loyalists sidelined in our memory? After the war was over, they were quite unwelcome in this new country. And this new country is the United States. because they sided with the other side. They were, and this is, this is one of the great ironies of history and the ironies of their personal experience. They were branded traitors for simply maintaining the loyalties

to maintaining their honor in observing oaths of loyalty that they had taken. Typically, when somebody is accused of treason, it is for something that they did and something that, some line that they stepped across. In this case, they didn't step across any line. The border underneath them moved. And this is a case where ordinarily, sins of omission, if you want to call it that,

are considered somewhat less mortal than sense of commission. Okay, you should have done something, but you didn't. Instead of you really did something heinous that you should not have done. Well, in the case of the loyalists, this thing that they did was really, if you want to call it a sin, it was a sin of omission. And so to be hounded out of office, to have your property seized, all for doing something that before July 4th, 1776 wasn't at all even illegal. It was it was the honorable thing to do. And then you wake up on July 5th, 1776, and now you are a criminal.

So this is something that was disconcerting for them, disorienting for them. And I want to answer this question. And the question is when I pose basically on page one, what causes a man to forsake his country and take arms against it? Because it seems to me that the burden of explanation should not be on why did the loyalists become loyalists. They didn't become anything. They simply stayed what they were. The question is, why did patriots become patriots? And this really cuts against the grain of most writing on the American Revolution and even most thinking about the American Revolution, because from the time we're in elementary school, we are sort of led to conclude that, well, of course they were going to become patriots.

Of course, they were going to decide that British law was oppressive and they would revolt against it. But that, that of course is a big stretch. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, these were two very unlikely rebels. Well, what made these people become rebels? Why did they take up arms against their country? this country that in many ways had served them very well. So this is something I explore. John Adams is my other sort of main patriot. Now, there were a lot of people who wanted primarily just to keep their heads down and not get involved. Maybe a third of Americans were patriots. A third were loyalists.

And the other third, they didn't want to have anything to do with either side. But of course, it's in the nature of conflict like this, civil war conflict, nationalist revolution conflict, that both sides have an incentive to try to smoke out those in the middle and make them choose sides and typically make them choose their side. So the middle ground gets narrower and narrow and narrow over the course of the conflict. And among those included, so there are two categories of people that I look at here in addition to the ones that I've already mentioned. And these are the slaves, the enslaved peoples who they have to decide. Their decision, of course, was constrained in added ways to people who were not slaves, but they still had a choice to make, especially when

the British government offered freedom, emancipation, to slaves of patriot masters who would come over the British lines and fight against their former masters. George Washington slaves, for example, they have to make this choice. Do they just stay on the plantation and, in effect, stay with the Patriot side, or do they take up the British offer? Even if I do become free, how much better will my life be? As a black person living in, well, a free United States, you know, who knows? And for especially for those who are taking up the British offer, can the British promise be trusted? If they promise freedom, will they really deliver freedom? That's if they win the war. What happens if they lose the war? You know, are we going to be

sort of the flotsam of the battle. There's one other category that I deal with. Real quick, before we get to Indians, which I think is the remaining category, I just want to ask, you know, you point out that in the Civil War, you know, regional considerations would largely dictate, you know, almost exclusively in most respects, dictate where you come down. What does it say about the character of the American Revolution as an event in world history that this question of choice or decision by the,

the individual is so prominent, unlike in these other conflicts? I would say in the first place, leaving aside the Indians, which we're going to get to, there were no such sort of tribal loyalties in the American colonies. It was already a rather diverse group in the 1770s. People came primarily from the British Isles, but there were Germans. There were people from different religious groups. there were they were mostly sort of ethnically the same but even among them there was no sense that my loyalty is to a people or a community different than my political community and so when people made it say if you're living in Pennsylvania you're living in Pennsylvania and you want to decide whether you're going to be a patriot or a loyalist so Benjamin Franklin Pennsylvania decides he's

can become a patriot. Joseph Galloway, almost as prominent as Franklin, Pennsylvania, he becomes a loyalist. There wasn't a whole lot that predicted which side you would take because of who your family was, what your background was. And I think it's because that this was essentially an immigrant community originally. The slaves, of course, they were taken from their homes, not voluntarily, and the Native Americans, which were going to get to in the moment. But everybody else broke their ties with wherever they had lived before to come to America. There weren't those familial connections. Many of them backly broke family ties to leave. But even then, the Civil War split families, as in the Franklins, which I'll probably say more about in a moment. So I think there's that.

But I would actually, I'll go back to what you said about regional affiliations, predict things in the American Civil War up to a point. Because, yes, as I said, if you were in one of those clearly northern states, you would have almost no incentive to fight for the South because the war was not, in many ways, it was not a typical civil war. It wasn't for control of the government of the United States. It was a secessionist war, call it a nationalist war. And so there's nothing in it for somebody living in Massachusetts to fight for southern independence. That's somebody else's goal. Whereas if you lived in the South, then that was a matter. And if you look at Southerners, then they're really much more in the position that Americans, I'll call them, the American colonists were during the American

Revolutionary War because they're fighting the, this is going to produce a market change in the status quo if this project goes through. To put it another way, in Massachusetts, there was going to be no change in the status quo regardless of how the war turned out. But if you lived in Virginia, there was. And it's important to remember that in the American Civil War, there were four slave states that did not join the Confederacy. And they essentially made the decision, they made a collective decision, okay, we're not going to join this rebellion. If you want to look at the American Revolutionary War from the perspective of 250 years later, we're coming up on the 250th anniversary of America's Declaration of Independence. And from world history, from that world historical perspective,

then yeah, as a first approximation, it's Americans against British, because that's the way it turns out. The United States becomes this separate country, an independent country, and Britain loses. But if you want to get close to it, if you want to know what it was like living then, then you have to get, take this closer view. And you're reminded, once again, that just as all wars are initially and ultimately political, these kind of wars are political throughout. And for the American patriots, led by George Washington, they discover early on, they don't have to win the war. They simply they have to avoid losing the war. And if they do that, they can basically raise the ultimate and total cost to the British government to a point where the British are going to say,

ah, you know what, we're going to go home. And with my students, I started teaching long enough ago that the Vietnam War was a recent memory. And I would draw analogies between the position of Britain in the American Revolutionary War and the position of the United States in the war in Vietnam because for Britain and for the United States, there was always the fallback option of falling back and ending the conflict short of success, but with no existential damage to the country. If the British lost the American colonies, okay, a blow to pride and the economy will have to be readjusted a little bit, but it's not as though the British government's going to fall, parlance is going to thrown into turmoil. And furthermore, just as in the,

in the case of the American War in Afghanistan, but before the American War in Vietnam. So the British War in North America, the end comes when there's a change of government in the country that's trying to hold on to this position. And the Americans, that is, the Patriots, Washington, Franklin, they realized this. And so they were playing at the, even while they were fighting against British soldiers and their American loyalists allies, they're also realizing that the ultimate audience is the British voting public or some approximation to that because Britain wasn't a democracy exactly at that time. So I think then the Indian population is probably the population where you see the most kind of demographic determinism, though not necessarily amongst the leaders who still

are confronted with these choices, right? I think we're going to tell us about Joseph Brandt and his choice. Yeah. So Joseph Brandt was the leader of the Mohawks who were a group of the Iroquois confederacy, by this time the six nations of the Iroquois. And the Iroquois had been the dominant Indian alliance in the region of upstate New York, the great legs, even into the Ohio Valley. And every time before the American Revolutionary War, when the British would go to war against the French, these are the two groups, the two foreign groups fighting. before control of North America. They had to choose. Do we side with the British or do we side with the French? And beyond just personal affinities, and indeed there were personal affinities, one of the reasons that Joseph Brandt sided with the British was they had family connections to important British figures. But beyond that, there's the twofold question of, so which side is likely to win?

and what's going to become of us if we ally with the winner, what's going to be come of us if we ally with the loser. And one would ordinarily think that you'd want to ally with the winner. And in most cases, that turned out to be a good deal. If you could guess who was going to win. But there were surprises involved here too. If you were a Mohawk leader, as long as there were French and the British around, you could promise something. think for the French to get the British to bid up the price of your alliance, your cooperation. But if either side lost, then you were at the mercy. There was only one foreign group that you were having to deal with. And so during the Revolutionary War, this doesn't involve the French, but now it involves the English have gone to war with each other. And so you've got to decide

which faction to support. And if you bet on the British, then, okay, you hope the British are going to win. If you bet on the Americans, presumably you hope the Americans are going to win, but the risk there is, if the Americans win, and they do indeed drive out the British, then you are at the mercy of the Americans. There's no counterbalancing force. And the counterbalancing force was both military, but perhaps most immediately commercial. So who are you going to be able to cut better deals with and the trade that you have with the other side? And then there's the whole question that this was becoming more pronounced. In fact, this is one of the causes of the war. This is one of the principal reasons George Washington decides that the British have to go. Settlement is just cresting

the Appalachian Mountains, the Appalachians, the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania, and out into the Ohio Valley. And Washington is one of many of the Americans who has bought land out there. Now, Washington was certainly not going to relocate himself from Mount Vernon out onto the banks to the Ohio River. He had purchased the land for sale. He was going to flip the real estate. For the Indians who are making their choice, if the Americans win, then there aren't going to be the British around to tell those settlers they can't go out there. So the Indians will have to take them on head first. So as a result of this, the various tribes in the frontier region, they kind of split more or less down the middle. Some of them back the Americans, the American patriots,

some of them back the British. And then there are those, well, there are those like Joseph Brand, who's as I say, leader of the Mohawks who decided that the British were the ones to put his money on. The British lost. So Brand and his Mohawks, they joined the loyalist Exodus and they went to Canada. Now, in Brand's case, it turned out that before long, George Washington, who had been his foe, who had ordered a special campaign against Joseph Brandt and the Mohawks, realized that Brandt was a figure who would be very useful in American diplomacy. So it wasn't long after the war that Brandt was invited back to the United States, back to Philadelphia, where the government was meeting,

to talk to Washington and try to arrange for the exchange of lands out in the Iroquois territory. So of all of the ones who sided with the loyalists, Joseph Brandt might very well have come out best. And so to this original driving question of the book, what drives someone to rebel against, pick your phrase, your government, your regime, your country. When we look at the really prominent figures that you've surveyed, what kind of rule can we draw concerning the balance that each of them face between. their interests, say their material interests and how much that drove their decision versus their attitude to the ideas that were in play at the time of the revolution. And I ask the question because, you know, as you're well aware, there's a tremendous amount of debate about the revolution right now in our politics. And it's not a new phenomenon. I mean, for at least what,

a hundred years or so, there have been claims made by very serious historians and writers that the leading American revolutionaries, the kind of people you're writing about in large part, Washington, Franklin, are driven by essentially class interests in which ideas are kind of, you know, their ideology. And then the new flavor of this debate is, you know, this, you know, deeply flawed claim that the Americans, the patriots who hold slaves are concerned that the British are going to end slavery, and that's why they're fighting the war. So the argument takes different forms, but it sort of boils down to these guys didn't really stand for anything beyond their own material interests. You can tell from the way that I'm phrasing it that I'm skeptical of that claim, but it's obviously probably also untrue to go 100%

in the other direction and say this is pure idealism. There's some kind of mix here. How do you think about that having now spent some time looking at these figures, where does the balance lie? The easy answer is the most correct answer, and that is it depends entirely on the individual. So it's hard to come up with any kind of rule that has predictive value applied across numbers of individuals. In response to your pointing out that some people said that this was a class thing. It was in a very basic sense in that it was a struggle between call them the ruling classes of Britain and the ruling classes of the American colonies. And Britain was not even close to democracies then. So the thinking of ordinary farmers or working people in Britain had

almost nothing to do with British policy. So on that side, decisions weren't made. It was closer to a democracy in America because in New England, ordinary farmers could vote for the Massachusetts legislature. In Pennsylvania, they could vote for the legislature, the assembly there, and so on. In the South, it was a little bit more elite tilted, and the big planters had more sway. And, of course, in the states that had large numbers of the colony states that had large numbers of slaves, then as a portion of the population, those people who cast votes who were active politically was smaller. So, and in one very basic sense, it was a struggle, it wasn't a revolution, it was a struggle for home rule. And if you look at the way things turned out, after the American

revolution, the same ruling structures were in place as before the revolution, with the exception that there's no superstructure of British officials on top. So this was not a revolution in the sense of the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the French Revolution, basically the early phase of the French Revolution. It wasn't turning society over. It did, however, unleash language that spoke of democracy, that certainly established a republic in contrast to a monarchy. So if that's a step in the direction of actual self-government, then there you are. So the governments that, the government that the, individual states set up, the national government-based established, first in the Articles of Confederation

and the Constitution that we still live under, it was an experiment in self-government, it's far more self-government than was practiced in Britain, because Britain still had a monarchy. Yeah, the parliament was somewhat a Senate over the monarch, but you still had this king. So the equivalent of a president who could be very active but wasn't answerable to anybody. Okay. So it is a step in that direction, but it's still. Again, so if you look at the class structure of American society after the success of the American Revolution and the class struggle, the class structure of the American colonies before then to slice off the top layer of British control and you've got the same group. It doesn't turn things over in America. But it does, it does start the pot boiling. It does start things boiling from the bottom. So when Thomas Jefferson declares that all men are created equal, this is design. It's almost a, rhetorical flourish in saying that Americans have, as Americans, have equal rights to determine their fate as people in Britain do. But it catches on. It resonates among the American public.

And it becomes the basis for the emergence of democracy in America, starting in the 1820s and 1830s. And it becomes a striving force. So it's an example of words have power. Words, once you say them, once you write them, they're no longer under your control. And the meanings that people impose on them can go beyond anything that you imagined yourself or perhaps even that you intended yourself. So that's one way of explaining. The ruling groups in America just want to rule themselves. That's very closely related to another sort of simple explanation for the whole thing. And that is that Americans were simply used to running their own affairs. The British had never held a tight reign over American governance since the very beginning. In the old days, it used to be called the period of

benign neglect, where Britain had enough going on at home. And the reason the people who went out to America went out to America was that they didn't like it was going in Britain. And for the most part, the British government said, go do your stuff. You can govern yourselves. There, eventually things were tightened up a little bit. But by the 1770s, the American colonies had about a century and a half in some cases, of experience of, you know, basically governing themselves. The King occasionally would step in and veto this, law, or that, or something like that. But Americans just, they weren't yet calling themselves Americans, but they did think of themselves as having greater rights than ordinary people in England had. And they still had contacts. And they would write to people

back home, someone would have occasionally travel home and realize, okay, we're just sort of left more on our own. And when the British in the 1760s decided to tighten up, when they added new taxes, new taxes that still didn't tax the Americans anywhere near as heavily as people in England were taxed, Americans felt this was a burden because it was a novelty. They weren't used to being taxed that way by the British government. So there's that aspect of it. As far as the people who were motivated by what we talk about on the 4th of July, the spirit of liberty, the desire to govern ourselves, I'm not going to say that that was the driving force exactly. not in that language. So most of them, there were a few political theorists. There was Thomas Jefferson, and, you know, there were Benjamin Franklin to some degree. But Franklin, Franklin's great hope was that the British in Britain would be smart enough, prudent enough, far-sighted enough to recognize that America could become a co-equal part of the British Empire.

And if they'd just say America was growing faster than Britain was, and both in terms of numbers and in terms of economy. And it was Franklin's dearest hope that America and Britain would become the two sides of what, to borrow a phrase from the 20th century, would have this special relationship and that they could support each other. Well, you know, it sort of turned out that what Winston Churchill helped create in the 20th century was what Franklin had in mind in the 18th century, except the British wouldn't buy into it.

They or at least the people who are making the decisions at the crucial time. They said, nope, nope, you've got to remain. subordinate. I might just add here, Americans took a lesson from that. And when in the 1780s, the United States was figuring out how it was going to deal with new states and expanding, they wrote into the Constitution and in the article's confederation before that, that these new states would enter the union on an equal footing with the original states, which was quite a bold thing. It was, as far as I know, the first time anybody had ever done this, new territories were always expected to be subordinate to the old territory. But what this meant was the United States remained a republic,

when other countries became empires. H.B. Brands, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for joining. Good to talk to, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.