From Marginality to Mediation: Defining History and Identity in Loyalist Historical Writing

“Fettered Loyalism,” “The Losers,” “Dissent and the Alternative that Was Lost”--these are all phrases that modern scholars have used to characterize the loyalist historians of the American Revolution. The notion of the loyalist historians as “losers” refers to the defeat of the loyalists in both the Revolution itself and the battle for historical recognition after the Revolution. Yet the loyalist historians were not all as defeated by the outcome of the Revolution as conventional accounts suggest. If, when viewed as Americans, the loyalist historians appear to be “losers,” who were simply an appendix to American history, I hope that by examining these historians from a transatlantic perspective and placing their histories in the context of eighteenth-century American and British historiography, to show how their marginality made them central figures in mediating the relationship between British and American identity.

Specifically, I look at how the loyalist historians used the fluidity of history as a genre in the eighteenth century to define and negotiate the relationship between their sense of British and American identity, focusing on Thomas Hutchinson’s, George Chalmers’, and Alexander Hewatt’s histories of colonial and revolutionary America. Early national historians such as David Ramsay and George Bancroft in turn drew heavily on these histories as they sought to define and promote American nationalism in their own works. The loyalist historians thus helped lay the foundations for American nationalism, providing a crucial vehicle in enabling early national American historical writers to convert their sense of British identity into an American one. Hence, just as it has sometimes been said that the Confederacy lost the Civil War but won the peace, it could be argued that the loyalist historians were the real “winners” of the Revolution—at least in their influence on American historical consciousness and national identity.