Tories by Thomas B. Allen

From The Week of January 09, 2011

It's often said that history is written by the victors. While I find this to be an over-generalization of a more nuanced truth, it is obvious that the preponderance of histories chronicling wars and revolutions position the victors as their protagonists. As such, there's a certain degree of massaging, of streamlining the narrative, that occurs as the facts about a conflict do battle with, and inevitably succumb to, that conflict's myths. The American Revolution is particularly susceptible to this massaging because the birth of America was intentionally mythologized, both by its Founders, who were intensely aware of their legacies, and its subsequent generations, who held up the mythology of 1776 as inspiration to their fellow man to do better, to be better. In this whitewashing, no fact has been more conveniently forgotten than that a thick strain of pro-British, royalist sentiment existed in the Colonies around 1776, a strain which nearly derailed the whole, glorious venture.

Before they were American citizens, the men, women and children who lived in the Colonies during the revolution were British citizens, subjects of an English king. For the vast majority of them, they would have never known any other kind of rule than monarchy. After all, the last stable, productive republic of any significance was Roman and it had died 1,800 years earlier after Brutus and his conspirators did their best to turn Julius Caesar into a pincushion. Trying to convince these British colonists to throw off everything they'd ever known in order to test out some wild-eyed notion of freedom for all would have been a tall order. After all, many people find comfort in the status quo. In Tories, Mr. Allen dispels the idea of colonial unity behind the revolution, arguing that at least one out of every five colonists was loyal to the British crown, a problem of sufficient magnitude that Continental forces had to be deployed to various towns, to ensure their loyalty. What's more, it was suggested that those loyal to America report on anyone whose sympathies might lie with England. In and of themselves, this isn't remarkable; all revolutions are characterized by such tactics. But I've never heard them said of the American Revolution before. And it is this that provides the shock value to Mr. Allen's account.

For all that Mr. Allen's premise is strong, narratively, Tories leaves much to be desired. After the reader has grappled with the book's primary revelation, there's not much left here but a reconstruction of numerous incidents in which loyalists attempted to subvert the revolution. It does not take long for these to become tedious. Mr. Allen had a good thing, but an obsessive need to make note of every detail of every encounter leeches both the drama and the joy from his effort here. Interesting, but twice as long as it should have been. (2/5 Stars)