The Loyalist Problem in Revolutionary New England

The Loyalist Problem in Revolutionary New England begins with a snapshot of the region on the eve of the Boston Tea Party. The colonists' Republican tradition helped them spark the Revolution, but their special history also threatened the unity of the United States throughout the Revolutionary War, for Loyalists tried to discredit New Englanders as a naturally rebellious people. Yet Ingersoll shows that the rebels never sought to drive the dissenters out of the new nation, and accorded them a remarkable degree of liberal toleration, with the great majority of Loyalists ultimately becoming citizens of the new states.

About the Author

Thomas N. Ingersoll is Associate Professor at Ohio State University, Lima. His first book was Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819 (1999). In To Intermix with our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removals (2005), he explores the social and political problems created by racial mixture. His guiding interest is how people in early America defined legitimate membership in society, who had rights and who did not.