To get a decent hearing, losers need to be wrong but romantic; in a word, Cavaliers. Otherwise, history scurries on past them, to keep up with the victory parade, usually, pace WH Auden, not stopping to say Alas. Few losers have received such a thumping as the loyalists in the American Revolution. They were reviled as traitors while they were still the enemy, then despised after they had been defeated and fled to Canada or England; then quite soon it was forgotten they had ever existed. From obloquy to oblivion, in roughly a generation.
No single loyalist was spat on with such venom as Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor and then governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1758 to 1774. By the American rebels he was more loathed than Lord North or even George III. As a struggling young lawyer, John Adams, later second president of the US, poured buckets of vitriol on Hutchinson and his “very ambitious and avaricious disposition”: “the liberties of this country had more to fear from [him]… than from any other man, nay than from all other men in the world”. Adams’s passionate loathing came to be widely shared. When Hutchinson died in 1780, a broken man exiled in England and shattered by the deaths of his beloved wife and daughter, he was top of the official list of “conspirators against the liberties of the people, barred from ever returning to Massachusetts and all his property confiscated”.
Subscribe to read the full article. Change Browser if you are already subscribed.