Preface

Summary

The intertwined sections of America’s Declaration of Independence (July 1776) have drawn historians’ scrutiny ever since the signing of this renowned document. Perhaps this fact has been most evident in the tendency of scholars to emphasize certain segments of the Declaration over others. This has been evident particularly in the attention given to the initial paragraph of the document highlighting the Lockean compact theory of government and the basis for a people to rebel against their rulers. It may also be observed in the considerable heed given to the next part, a list of grievances leveled against King George III, and to the concluding paragraph, in which the colonists’ separation from Britain is firmly enunciated. Often overlooked, however, is the next to last paragraph, in which the signers assert that the colonists “had not been wanting in our attention to our British brethren,” but that in response, their fellow subjects in the Mother Country have been deaf to “the voice of justice and consanguinity.”

This blanket censure of all Britons was, however, an unfair generalization. Scholars have long shown that there were, in fact, many individuals in the British Isles who, before and during the years of armed conflict in America (1775–1783), had displayed their sympathies for the Americans and their opposition to alleged attempts to repress them. But the studies of these British friends of America have largely centered upon the more prosperous or prominent men in that nation. The individuals who have received this attention would include Whig politicians Charles James Fox, David Hartley, Thomas Brand Hollis, Sir George Savile, John Wilkes, and Edmund Burke, and intellectuals such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. While these men have certainly merited scholarly attention, they in fact represented a distinct minority of the British populace. What remains lacking is a study offering insights into the less well-known but more numerous Britons from the “middling levels” of the eighteenth-century Georgian social order and those among them who provided assistance of various sorts to the American dissidents.

During and after the bicentennial observances of the American War of Independence, United States historians, in particular, have published a great many works that have concentrated their attention on the responses of the ordinary, less visible colonists to the complex and divisive upheaval that encompassed the break with Great Britain.