The Battle of Shallow Ford, October 14, 1780
byIn September 1780, writing from Hillsborough, North Carolina, just one month after the disastrous defeat at Camden, Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates penned a disconcerted…
Loyalists
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The First Efforts to Limit the African Slave Trade Arise in the American Revolution: Part 2 of 3, The Middle and Southern Colonies
byThe first article of this series discussed the increasing chorus of American Patriots in New England raising their voices against the African slave trade….
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Minorcans, New Smyrna, and the American Revolution in East Florida
byBeyond Florida’s state boundaries the history of New Smyrna is seldom mentioned.[1] Well known to the locals of New Smyrna Beach, the region’s settlement by…
A Painter Abroad: John Singleton Copley Writes to His Wife
byIt may have been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s patriotic paean that belatedly canonized a heroic horseman as a key figure of the American Revolution, but…
This Week on Dispatches: Matthew Reardon on the Whaleboat Wars on the Connecticut River
byOn this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews history teacher and JAR contributor Matthew Reardon on the Loyalist raid up the Connecticut River in 1782 when…
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1774: The Long Year of Revolution
by1774: The Long Year of Revolution by Mary Beth Norton (Knopf, 2020) Although previous works have tried to draw attention to “The Missing 16…
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Cornwallis and the Winter Campaign, January to April 1781
byLeaving Colonel Francis Lord Rawdon to command in the field from Georgetown to Augusta, Lt. Gen. Charles Earl Cornwallis, the British General Officer Commanding…
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Teaching the American Revolution with Simulations
byWhat most Americans know about the Revolutionary War they learned when they were in elementary or middle school. The curricular timing is fortunate in…
The East Florida Gazette, 1783–1784
byEast Florida only had one newspaper in the colony’s entire history. The newspaper went live during the final year of the American War for…
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Plight of the Loyalist Refugees of Lloyd’s Neck, Long Island
byQueens County of Long Island, New York, had an overwhelming Loyalist population throughout the Revolutionary War period. After the war many Loyalists remained on…
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Maj. Gen. John Sullivan and the Occupation of Easton, Pennsylvania, May 7–June 18, 1779
byFor a brief seven weeks, the Pennsylvania frontier village of Easton became the second largest community within the state. With an estimated 25,000 inhabitants,…
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Tapping America’s Wealth to Fund the Revolution: Two Good Ideas that Went Awry
by“Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place,” Gen. George Washington wrote from Valley Forge on December 23, 1777,[1] to Henry Laurens, the…
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Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation: Information and Slavery
byLord Dunmore, John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore (1730-1809) and Royal Governor of Virginia (1771-1776),[1] was an important political and military figure during…
St. Paul’s Church, New York: A Revolutionary War Site
byNestled amid factories, automotive shops and diners in an industrial section of southern New York, just a short walk from the Bronx boundary, sits…
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Isaac Roosevelt: Merchant, Federalist, Banker, New Yorker
byOn Saturday September 17, 1938 New York governor Herbert H. Lehman and 5,000 others assembled in Poughkeepsie to observe the sesquicentennial of the Empire…
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Enoch Crosby: A Hudson Valley Spy in Fact and Fiction
byJames Fenimore Cooper published his wildly popular second novel, The Spy: a Tale of the Neutral Ground, in 1821. The book tells the story…
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Milton’s Odyssey: The Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Service of Georgia’s John Milton
byGeorgia’s fragile independence within the new American republic was shattered on December 29, 1778, when British troops attacked Savannah. Despite clear signs that the…
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Worthy of Commemmoration
byWe recently ran an article about monuments commemorating the American Revolution. We asked our contributors: If you could commission a monument, what would you…
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Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789
byRevolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 by Joseph M. Adelman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) An explosion of new…
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James Moore’s Commission in the East Florida Rangers
byUnder the leadership of Royal Governor Patrick Tonyn, East Florida remained in the hands of the British Crown during the Imperial Crisis, not an…
This Week on Dispatches: Joseph Wroblewski on the Queen’s Rangers during the British Occupation of Philadelphia
byOn this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews educator and JAR contributor Joseph Wroblewski on the operations of the Queen’s Rangers during the British occupation of…
Cornwallis Quits Charlotte, Abandoning the Autumn Campaign of 1780
byThis article is a companion piece to one of mine that appeared in this journal on July 18, 2017. Beginning with the start of the…
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Jacob Duché: Mixing Religion and Politics During the Revolution
byIn a country in which one of the main constitutional principles is separation of church and state, it is counter-intuitive to find that there…
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“That Damned Absurd Word Liberty:” Les Habitants, the Quebec Act, and American Revolutionary Ideology, 1774–1776
byThe American invasion of Quebec of 1775-1776 failed to achieve its primary objective: to bring into the fold what the Continental Congress referred to…
This Week on Dispatches: Tristan J. New on Joseph Galloway’s Efforts for a Peaceful Resolution with Great Britain
byOn this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews budding scholar Tristan J. New about Joseph Galloway and his proposal for a peaceful political resolution with…
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Midsummer 1780 in the Carolinas and Georgia—Events predating the Battle of Camden
byBesides dealing with events elsewhere, this article relates in particular the plight of the Carolina loyalists and the way in which British ascendancy in…
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The Consequences of Loyalism
byThe Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon edited by Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore (University of South Carolina Press, 2019)…
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Thomas Fletchall’s Association: A Loyalist Proclamation in the South Carolina Backcountry
byThomas Fletchall was a man of considerable influence in the South Carolina backcountry. Born in Maryland in 1725, Fletchall and his family relocated to…
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The Road to Charleston: Nathanael Greene and the American Revolution
byThe Road to Charleston, Nathanael Greene and the American Revolution by John Buchanan (University Press of Virginia, 2019) John Buchanan’s latest account of the southern theater…
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Grappling with Imperium in Imperio: Indivisible Sovereignty in Joseph Galloway’s British Empire
byAlthough by 1775 hostilities between Great Britain and the American colonies had commenced, there were still those within the colonies who believed that the…
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Southern Gambit: Cornwallis and the British March to Yorktown
bySouthern Gambit: Cornwallis and the British March to Yorktown by Stanley D.M. Carpenter (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019) In his recent book, Stanley Carpenter produced…
“My Dear Nell:” The Love Letters of John Moultrie
byDr. John Moultrie was born in 1729 in South Carolina to a father of the same name, one of five brothers. Educated in Edinburgh,…
This Week on Dispatches: Cho-Chien Feng on the Revolutionary Memories of New York Loyalists
byIn this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews St. Louis University doctoral candidate Cho-Chien Feng about what the American Revolution meant to Loyalists after the…
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Henry Mowatt and the “Wretched” Ship HMS Albany
byIn 1782, when the sixteen-gun sloop-of-war HMS Albany was determined to be at the end of her usefulness, nobody seemed truly surprised or sad about…
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Another Three Loyalist Declarations Signed in the Fall of 1776
byThe Declaration of Dependence signed by 547 New York City Loyalists in November 1776 was not the only such declaration written and signed by loyal…
Revisiting B. E. Griffiths: Former Slave, Queen’s Ranger, and “Son of Africa”
byIn a recent article, Todd Braisted reconstructed the remarkable story of a black Loyalist soldier, “Trumpeter Barney” of the Queen’s Rangers.[1] Through meticulous archival…
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The Double Spy: The Service and Suffering of Caleb Bruen
by“But while a confidence trickster, a play actor or a gambler can return from his performance to the ranks of his admirers, the secret…
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Terror in the Ramapos
byWhile there were many Revolutionary-era outlaws, Claudius Smith and the Cowboys of the Ramapos stand apart. Their story has long been exaggerated and romanticized…
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Brothers Mourn the Death of Captain Thomas Moultrie
byThomas Moultrie was one of five sons of a successful South Carolina planter. He served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War as…