Recently, historians of the American Revolution have gravitated towards studying the civil war that lay at the heart of this transformative event. A rising generation of historians, employing new methods and asking fresh questions, have reinterpreted this conflict—which divided families and communities—as a crucible of social and political change with repercussions that reverberate to this day. One of the key insights of this scholarship is the malleability of political allegiance in the face of the violent and destructive experience of war. Revolutionary warfare affected Americans of all social orders, both women and children as well as men, the free and the enslaved, indigenous Americans as well as Euro-American colonists, patriots, loyalists, and even the “disaffected.” This panel contributes to the growing body of scholarship by exploring the ambiguities of political allegiance on the local level during the war’s early months.

Long before the Declaration of Independence, British subjects throughout North America struggled to redefine the meaning of allegiance. Radical colonists, nominally professing loyalty to the king, nonetheless abused and intimidated his supporters. Donald F. Johnson’s paper examines how Revolutionary sympathizers came to rely on force, and the promise of reprieve, to demarcate the bounds of allegiance in their communities. His paper analyzes this process at the local level, highlighting the importance of coercion in revolutionary political mobilization. In so doing, Johnson re-directs our gaze from urban centers to the small towns and rural communities where the majority of Colonial Americans lived.

In a similar vein, Jacqueline Reynoso’s paper geographically re-orients the study of political allegiance away from the thirteen rebellious colonies that would become the United States and towards Britain’s other mainland North American colony: Quebec. The French-speaking Canadian habitants, who only recently had been conquered into British subjecthood, responded to the war not by embracing independence but instead by renegotiating the terms of their allegiance to the British crown. She argues for the importance of local context in shaping their allegiance. Local concerns in Canada remade the meaning of subjecthood within the empire more broadly.

Cole Jones’s paper explores the political allegiance of the ethnic minority population of Scottish Highlanders in North Carolina. Once reviled by Protestant Britons, both metropolitan and provincial alike, for their alien language, religion, customs, and political attachment to the exiled House of Stuart, the Scots nonetheless rallied to King George’s cause in the opening days of the Revolution. Jones’s paper examines how and why imperial officials sought to mobilize North Carolina’s Scottish population as counterrevolutionaries. He argues for the contextual importance of local experience—both in Scotland and in North Carolina—for understanding the politics of allegiance on the ground during the American Revolution.

Taken together, these three papers argue for the importance of the local, not just the ideological or the material, for elucidating loyalty in a time of revolution. Political allegiance, then as now, was often contradictory, protean, and ambiguous.