America’s First Civil War

The American Revolution is remembered as a great struggle for liberty, and rightly so. Yet in carrying through the struggle against British authority, Patriots coerced fellow Americans who resisted, opposed, or refused to support their cause. Between 1773 and 1781, as resistance assumed powers of government, Patriot coercion broadened, extending from intimidation and public humiliation to disarmament, confiscation, and execution. Its targets ranged from noncombatant dissenters and reluctant neutrals to collaborators and armed Loyalist militiamen. The Patriot war against British authority required what all wars require, wholesale initiations of coercion including oppressive taxation, commandeering of resources, and conscription, that forced men into mortal danger.

In “Of the Origin of Government,” David Hume observed that “liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence” (EMPL 41). Hume understood that there is a fundamental tension between liberty and authority: “A great sacrifice of liberty,” Hume wrote, “must necessarily be made in every government” (EMPL 40). Political order can sustain liberty only with an authority capable of compelling those subject to it. One governmental authority may be replaced by a more libertarian one, but the initiation of coercion still remains essential to authority. Thus, authority, in Hume’s conservative-liberal adage, remains essential to liberty. Neither democracy nor contractarian yearnings change the reality of subjection.

What follows in this essay is not an argument against the Revolution, nor an attempt to suggest that the initiations of coercion were unjustified. As historians of Loyalism and revolutionary violence have increasingly emphasized, the Patriot struggle against Britain was also an American civil war. Patriots and Loyalists warred with one another within the same communities in a contest over political authority.¹ This essay traces what some Americans did to other Americans during a revolution now remembered as a triumph of liberty. Before the American-on-American coercion became largescale, violence began against officers and soldiers of Britain serving in the Colonies. The line between American-on-American violence and American-on-British violence is a fuzzy one, since Americans were British subjects before the Revolution and British officers formed part of colonial society.

1765–70: From Violent Resistance to Military Confrontation in Boston

The Imperial Crisis that culminated in the American Revolution began after Parliament sought to raise revenue from the Thirteen Colonies following Britain’s massive expenditures during the Seven Years’ War. The Stamp Act became the most incendiary of those measures, and opposition to it gave colonial resistance an increasingly violent character.

The Sons of Liberty became the principal extra-legal organization that mobilized resistance to British policy, and they did not shrink from intimidation. Boston became especially notorious as the primary location for such mobilization. On August 14, 1765, opponents of the Stamp Act carried an effigy of Massachusetts stamp distributor Andrew Oliver through Boston before hanging and burning it. The crowd then turned against Oliver’s property, tearing up his garden, breaking into his house, destroying his furniture, and terrorizing his family.² John Adams, no friend of British colonial policy, denounced the violence as “a very atrocious Violation of the Peace and of dangerous Tendency and Consequence.”³ Oliver soon announced that he would resign his office.

Four months later, the Sons of Liberty demanded of Oliver a public renunciation. In a letter dated December 16, 1765, they ordered that he appear beneath the Liberty Tree the following day and declare that he would not serve as stamp distributor, warning that his “Non-compliance, Sir, will incur the Displeasure of the true-born Sons of Liberty.”⁴ The next morning, a broadside posted around Boston summoned the “true-born Sons of Liberty” to the Liberty Tree “to hear the public Resignation, under Oath, of Andrew Oliver.”⁵ Oliver concluded that “there was no avoiding a compliance with this Demand” and publicly resigned under oath before a large crowd at the Liberty Tree.

Continued disorder in Boston eventually prompted a substantial military escalation. The presence of British soldiers led to the violent confrontation remembered as the Boston Massacre. On March 5, 1770, a crowd surrounded British soldiers outside the customhouse on King Street, insulting them and throwing objects at them before the soldiers opened fire on the crowd, killing five men. John Adams later helped defend the soldiers, arguing that if the crowd’s assault had endangered their lives, they were right to act in self-defense and that even lesser abuse would constitute “a provocation” sufficient to reduce a killing charge from murder to manslaughter.⁶ Captain Thomas Preston and six of the eight soldiers were acquitted while the other two soldiers were convicted of manslaughter.⁷

1773–74: From Popular Intimidation to Exemplary Violence in Boston

The Tea Act of May 1773 opened a new phase of the dispute over Parliament’s authority in the colonies, bringing Boston’s established repertoire of popular intimidation to bear upon the Americans responsible for importing and handling the East India Company’s tea. Boston’s Sons of Liberty orchestrated resistance to the Tea Act through committees, public gatherings, and organized crowds, giving the campaign clear direction even when responsibility for specific violent acts remained obscure. An anonymous summons ordered the East India Company’s consignees—that is, American merchants who received and then sold the tea—to appear at Liberty Tree on November 3 and resign their commissions, warning: “Fail not upon your peril.”⁸ When they did not appear, the Liberty Tree assembly appointed a committee that marched to Richard Clarke’s warehouse, accompanied by a large crowd. Its chairman then warned that refusal would expose the consignees to “the utmost weight of the people’s resentment.” Members of the crowd forced their way through the warehouse doors and attempted to reach the consignees upstairs but were physically fended off.^{9, 10}

The arrival of the merchantman Dartmouth carrying company tea brought the popular campaign’s coercive demands to bear upon the Americans responsible for handling its cargo. A public meeting directed the owner of the Dartmouth not to enter the tea at the customhouse and Captain James Hall not to land it, warning each that disobedience would be “at his peril.”¹¹ A broadside dated December 2 and signed “The People” warned that those who assisted in landing the tea would be made “the first Victims of our just Resentment.”¹² The Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, resolved the moment by destroying the tea.

The tarring and feathering of John Malcolm in January 1774 demonstrated how violence against one customs officer served as a threat against others. Malcolm had long been an object of popular resentment for his zealous enforcement of imperial trade regulations. After Malcolm struck another man with his cane on January 25, 1774, a magistrate issued a warrant for his arrest, but a Boston crowd intervened to impose its own punishment.^{13, 14} That evening, the crowd stormed Malcolm’s house and dragged him from it, tarred and feathered him on King Street, and carted him through the streets while beating and whipping him. The crowd ordered Malcolm to resign his commission and curse the governor and customs commissioners. At the gallows, his tormentors placed a rope around his neck and threatened to hang him; when he continued to refuse, they beat him until he declared that he would do whatever they demanded. The Boston merchant John Rowe condemned the punishment in his diary: “This was looked upon by me & every Sober man as an act of outrageous Violence.”¹⁵ Malcolm reported that his tormentors declared that “they would soon serve all the Custom House officers in Like manner.”¹⁶ A handbill signed by “Joyce, Junr., Chairman of the Committee for Tarring and Feathering,” declared that the attack “was not done by our Order,” yet reserved the same punishment “for bringing Villains of greater Consequence to a Sense of Guilt and Infamy.”¹⁷ Two London satirical prints published later that year turned Malcolm’s punishment into an emblem of Boston’s political violence (figs. 2a–b).

1775: Coercing Opinion Across the Colonies

Patriot coercion restricted what Americans could say, preach, and print. In Marblehead, Massachusetts, it operated through the compelled retraction of speech favorable to British authority. In May 1774, the Essex Gazette published a complimentary address to departing governor Thomas Hutchinson signed by thirty-three inhabitants.²⁰ The town demanded recantations the following month; several appeared in the newspaper later that year.²¹ On May 2 and 4, 1775—shortly after the Battles of Lexington and Concord—the Massachusetts Committee of Safety published recantations of thirteen signers along with their acceptance of those recantations (fig. 3). Their statements read like petitions for readmission to the community. One hoped for “the Forgiveness of all Mankind” and another asked his townsmen to restore him to their “Favour and Friendship.” The Committee recommended that the men be protected from “all Injuries or Insults whatsoever,” but only “so long as they adhere to their several Recantations, and continue to assist and abide by their Country.”²²

In Maryland, the Reverend Jonathan Boucher faced armed intimidation over his preaching. A 1774 pamphlet attributed to him defended Parliament’s right to require “implicit obedience.”²⁴ On the day appointed by the Continental Congress for a fast, July 20, 1775, Boucher went to St. Barnabas’s Church near Upper Marlboro. He later recollected that a committee forbade him from entering his pulpit and that some two hundred men surrounded him “under Arms, & in Shirts,” threatening that he would “never . . . come out alive” if he defied them. When the crowd began drumming him away to the “Rogue’s March,” Boucher seized one of its “Head-men” and threatened to “blow his Brains out” unless the violence ceased.²⁵ Boucher later accused George Washington—whose stepson he had tutored—of tolerating his persecution, insisting that “everything that savours of, or but approaches to, coercion or compulsion is persecution and tyranny.”²⁶ He renounced their friendship: “With your cause I renounce you.” Boucher sailed for Britain in September of 1775; Purdie’s Virginia Gazette published an anonymous comment rejoicing that America was “in so fair a way of being disgorged of all those filthy, grovelling vermin.”²⁷

In New York, Patriot coercion fell first upon a clergyman who had challenged the authority of the Continental Congress and then upon the press that had printed his challenges. Between November 1774 and January 1775, the Reverend Samuel Seabury published four pamphlets, mostly under variants of “Farmer,” that disputed the authority of the Continental Congress and denounced local committees that ostracized violators of the Continental Association.²⁸ James Rivington printed Seabury’s pamphlets along with Patriot replies, including one by Alexander Hamilton. His press nevertheless aroused Patriot resentment. In a broadside of April 27, 1775, Rivington acknowledged that “many publications” from his press had “given offence to the colonies” and denied holding sentiments unfriendly to American liberties (fig. 4).²⁹

By November of 1775, suspicion that Seabury was “A.W. Farmer” had made him a target. Sixteen men set out from New Haven, Connecticut “to disarm the principal Tories” in Westchester County and “secure” Seabury.³¹ Their leader was Isaac Sears, a longtime leader of New York’s Sons of Liberty who had risen to his role during the Stamp Act crisis. Two days later, according to a memorial that Seabury had drafted during his confinement, about forty armed men seized him at his grammar school in Westchester and carried him to New Haven, where he was paraded through the town “in triumph.”³² On November 23, the main body of Sears’s expedition rode into New York City with bayonets fixed, drew up before Rivington’s printing office, carried away “the principal part of his types,” and marched out to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”³³ In a letter of November 26, Hamilton acknowledged that Rivington’s press had been “dangerous and pernicious” and that the Loyalists might need to be “repress[ed] and overawe[d],” but he condemned an expedition undertaken “of mere will and pleasure, without any proper authority.”³⁴

Spring 1776: Disarming the Disaffected

By spring 1776, revolutionary authorities were assuming powers of government over the colonies’ internal order. On March 14, the Continental Congress recommended that “the several assemblies, conventions, and councils or committees of safety” immediately disarm all persons “notoriously disaffected to the cause of America,” as well as those who refused to associate for the armed defense of the United Colonies. The resolution provided for appraisal and payment for the seizures; the seized arms were allocated first to Continental troops raised in each colony, next to colonial forces, and finally to Patriot “Associators.”³⁵ Congress left enforcement—including the determination of who was “notoriously disaffected”—to revolutionary authorities within each colony.

In June, three locally elected collectors of arms in Macungie Township, Pennsylvania, demanded that Joseph Romich surrender his firearms. Romich refused and denied their authority, denouncing them as “Thieves & Robbers and not Christians.” When they returned, the collectors searched his house.³⁶ After Romich and his brother ignored a summons from Northampton County’s Standing Committee, a party of Associators found them shut inside a room. Holding a gun later found primed and loaded, Joseph Romich warned, “we are in a passion, we do not know what we may do.”³⁷ On June 15, after hearing testimony, the Standing Committee required the brothers to pay all costs and sign a recantation it had drafted or be denounced in English- and German-language newspapers as “Enemies to their Country.” Published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on July 10, their recantation promised immediate surrender of their firearms and future conduct that would “recommend us to the friends of American liberty” (fig. 5).³⁸

The several incidents that I have recounted above illustrate the local-level coercive underpinnings of the civil war nestled within “the American cause.” The newly established American states suppressed dissidence among Americans as they sought to establish their authority and fight Britain’s effort to reassert her authority over the Colonies.

January–February 1777: Allegiance or Expulsion in New Jersey

By early 1777, open war had forced Americans to pick sides and more actively discriminate between friends and foes. On January 25, Washington declared that “it has become necessary to distinguish between the friends of America and those of Great-Britain.”⁴⁰ Each side demanded obedience. The rival claims became especially stark in New Jersey where military control shifted rapidly. Washington ordered that anyone who had accepted British protection, signed a declaration of fidelity to the Crown, or taken an oath of allegiance to the king now surrender such British protection, certificate, or passport and swear allegiance to the United States. Those who preferred British protection could withdraw with their families behind British lines. Washington later instructed that those withdrawing might take their clothing and household furniture, but American authorities should secure any property that would be useful to the British.⁴¹ If one neither complied nor withdrew to behind British lines within thirty days, he would be deemed an adherent of the king and treated as one of the “common enemies of the American States” (fig. 5).

Within three weeks, Washington’s proclamation was printed and reprinted as broadsides and newspaper articles from Hartford to Williamsburg.⁴³ In British-controlled New York, the Loyalist New-York Gazette called it “a Proclamation for the Encouragement of Perjury.”⁴⁴

1777–78: The Coercive Demands of Revolutionary Government

The coercive demands of the Revolution extended beyond the disaffected as revolutionary governments sought to raise money, manpower, and material. In August 1777, Massachusetts ordered that one-sixth of its militia be drafted to reinforce the army, requiring drafted men to serve unless excused or able to provide substitutes.⁴⁵ That November, the Continental Congress recommended that the states raise five million dollars in taxes for the following year.⁴⁶ Military necessity also led to the requisitioning of private property for the army. Washington authorized officers to “purchase hire or press” horses and wagons and to seize essential clothing, while Congress in December directed him to take livestock and provisions in exposed districts “from all persons without distinction,” leaving only what families required for their maintenance.⁴⁷ These were among the ordinary coercions imposed upon Americans, regardless of their sympathies, to maintain the revolutionary effort.

Other coercive demands turned precisely on political allegiance. Pennsylvania soon made revolutionary obedience a legal obligation. The Test Act of June 13, 1777 required most white men over eighteen to renounce George III, pledge allegiance to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and report treasonous conspiracies. Declaring that “allegiance and protection are reciprocal,” it punished refusal with sweeping civil disabilities and disarmament.

The Test Act’s certificates of allegiance (fig. 7) also served as instruments of internal surveillance: A traveler unable to produce one could be brought before a magistrate as a suspected spy and, if he refused the test, imprisoned without bail.⁴⁸ At Lancaster on August 22, Christopher Marshall recorded that Captain McCullough had “taken upon him to examine all strangers passing through here respecting taking the test.” Although several complied, John Hollingshead refused and was committed to jail.⁴⁹

After the British occupied Philadelphia in September 1777, Pennsylvania went beyond compelling allegiance to punishing collaboration with the British.⁵⁰ On March 6, 1778, the General Assembly passed a conditional act of attainder against thirteen Pennsylvanians accused of assisting the British, including Joseph Galloway. Failure to surrender for trial by April 20 meant attainder for treason and forfeiture of their property; the act also authorized Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council to name additional suspects and administer the forfeitures.⁵¹ When the British evacuated Philadelphia on June 18, Galloway departed with them. On July 21, state agents inventoried the contents of his Market Street house.⁵² The Pennsylvania Packet subsequently advertised his farm and household goods for public sale (fig. 8).⁵³

Pennsylvania’s punishment went beyond confiscation. Even before the British evacuation, on May 8, 1778, the Supreme Executive Council ordered fifty-seven suspected collaborators to surrender for trial, including the Quaker carpenter Abraham Carlisle and the Quaker miller John Roberts.⁵⁴ Unlike Galloway, both remained in Pennsylvania, and Roberts affirmed his allegiance and posted bond before standing trial.⁵⁵ On September 26, Carlisle was convicted of treason for serving the British at Philadelphia’s gates. On October 2, Roberts was convicted of joining British forces, although testimony that he had served as a guide was disputed.⁵⁶ A petition conceded that Roberts and Carlisle “most justly merit[ed]” their sentences but argued that, because punishment served “to deter others” and the British would probably “never again visit this State,” their distressed wives and children should weigh in “the Scale of Mercy.”⁵⁷ The Executive Council declined a reprieve.⁵⁸ On November 4, Carlisle and Roberts walked behind a cart with halters around their necks to the Philadelphia Common, where they were hanged.⁵⁹

1779–80: Civil War Trials and Exemplary Punishment in the South

By 1779, fighting increasingly resembled a civil war, especially in the Carolina backcountry. Captured Loyalists were sometimes prosecuted and executed as traitors rather than treated as prisoners of war. On February 14, 1779, a Patriot militia defeated a Loyalist militia at the Battle of Kettle Creek, Georgia. Prisoners taken in the battle, together with men later arrested or induced to surrender, eventually numbered roughly 150. Even before learning of the battle’s outcome, Brigadier General Andrew Williamson concluded that the rising had discredited the Loyalists’ “most solemn assurances” of submission or peaceful conduct. “Our eyes are now opened,” he wrote on February 16, and “severe examples must certainly be made for the benefit of the state, and a terror to others.”⁶⁰ On February 20, South Carolina enacted an ordinance declaring that anyone who had received the state’s protection owed assistance in its defense. The ordinance made it treasonous for a protected inhabitant thereafter to withdraw and attempt to join the enemy; by its terms, it did not straightforwardly apply to the men already captured at Kettle Creek. South Carolina authorities nevertheless prosecuted dozens of the captives for treason rather than treating them as prisoners eligible for exchange; five were eventually hanged.⁶¹

The same refusal to treat armed Loyalists as enemy soldiers reappeared in more summary form after the Patriot victory at the Battle of Kings Mountain. On October 7, 1780, Patriot militiamen surrounded and defeated Major Patrick Ferguson’s Loyalist force. After Ferguson fell, Patriot fire continued through the Loyalists’ first attempt to surrender before officers halted the killing and took more than six hundred survivors prisoner.⁶² A week later, at Biggerstaff’s Old Fields in North Carolina, a tribunal of twelve Patriot officers summarily tried selected prisoners for murder, robbery, house-burning, and related offenses against Patriot inhabitants.⁶³ Decades later, Colonel Isaac Shelby recollected that thirty-six were found guilty and nine were hanged before he intervened as three more were prepared for execution.⁶⁴

Conclusion

From Boston in 1773 to the Carolina backcountry in 1780, Patriots coerced their fellow Americans as they carried through their struggle against British authority. The allied victory at Yorktown in October 1781 effectively ended Britain’s attempt to restore its authority by force. By then, Patriots had long transformed resistance to British authority into an authority of their own such that their struggle for liberty also became a struggle to command obedience from other Americans.

The American Revolution exemplified Hume’s tension between liberty and authority: Institutions established in the name of American liberty prescribed conduct, demanded allegiance, and punished resistance. In that tension lay the American Revolution’s paradox: The Revolution enlarged Americans’ liberty while enlarging the power of some Americans to initiate coercion against other Americans. The Revolution had not abolished political subjection, and Americans began to fashion a new system for it.

The same paradox attended the American Founding more generally. In 1788, James Madison wrote that the great difficulty in framing a government is that “you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”⁶⁵ The Founding confronted Americans with the problem of constituting a political authority to which they would be subject while constraining its exercise.

Benjamin Franklin famously reported to Americans that the system of government framed by the Constitution was to be a republic—if they could keep it.