H.W. Brands Uncovers America’s Long History of Civil Conflict
I
In his new book, Our First Civil War, Pulitzernominated historian H.W. Brands sets out to tell the untold story of the American Revolution. He had long noted that the most bitter fighting of the Revolution was not between Americans and Britons but rather Americans and Americans, namely the patriots who wanted independence and the loyalists who did not. At the beginning of the book, Brands relates the aftermath of a battle between Americans in the Carolinas, wherein loyalists “went over the ground plunging their bayonets into everyone that exhibited any signs of life.” The animus came from both sides, yet this conflict has been largely forgotten in favor of the conflict between Americans and Britons. But the current divisions in American society inspired Brands to tell this forgotten story. Brands thinks we get important facts backwards in regard to the loyalists. As he points out, historical retrospect leads us to treat the decision for independence as the default for Americans in the 1770s, but in fact the opposite was true. “Loyalists just did what they had been doing before,” says Brands, “People like Washington and Franklin are the ones that have to be explained.”
26
Discover CONCORD
| Spring 2022
That explanation is more complex than it might appear. Washington was one of the richest men in Virginia, and Benjamin Franklin was an influential and worldfamous intellectual. Neither of them, it would seem, had any revolution-worthy grievances. “This is a question I pose to my students,” says Brands, “What would have to happen in the United States for you to say this is no longer your government and you’ll fight against it to create a new government? Most of my students cannot imagine anything like that. George Washington couldn’t imagine anything like that either ten years before the Declaration of Independence.” Unlike the Civil War of the 1860s, the conflict between patriots and loyalists did not fall along clear geographic lines. It pitted neighbor against neighbor and even split families. Brands relates one particularly moving example. William Franklin, as governor of New Jersey, had taken the loyalist side against his father. Benjamin Franklin was deeply wounded by this and took his grandson, William’s son, Temple Franklin, to Europe with himself to raise the boy as a patriot. Years later, Temple wished for his father and grandfather to
Photos courtesy of Doubleday
BY SAM COPELAND
reconcile, so he arranged a surprise meeting between them at a port in England. When William saw his father, he held out his hand and asked for forgiveness, but Franklin refused. Even as a man close to death, Benjamin Franklin could not reach over the divide that had split his family. Despite the intensity of the conflict between patriots and loyalists, it has nearly been forgotten. Brands attributes this to the mass exodus of loyalists from America following the war. Some 100,000 loyalists left for England, Canada, and the West Indies, leaving behind few physical symbols of what they had stood for. The new American society had no incentive to memorialize the loyalists and quickly went about constructing the myth of a unified war against the British. The British, for their part, had no incentive to memorialize the loyalists
