This book explores how the loyalist rebuttal to the American patriot movement during the decade leading up to 1776 derived much of its inspiration and rationale from the literature of the Greco-Roman world—the same repository of classical ideas and principles the patriots coopted to persuade their fellow countrymen to disavow the English crown and pursue independence. Although previous histories have described how the ideas of the ancient Mediterranean, transmitted through the Renaissance and Enlightenment writers, were important—even vital—to the revolutionary movement, few questions have been raised in the historiography concerning the loyalists’ political motivations and actions with respect to the ancient literary canon.
This study sheds new light on the pre-revolutionary controversy and pamphlet war in the colonies, examining those ideological currents, derived from antiquity, that informed both radical and conservative responses to the transatlantic crisis throughout the 1760s and 1770s. The same tradition of Western thought that inspired some British Americans to rebel against the mother country compelled others to remain loyal to the British system of government and fervently oppose the revolutionary agenda.
Classical republican ideas did not predispose British Americans to rebel against the crown. Rather, the decision to declare independence was the outcome of a highly contested ideological struggle waged between adversaries well-versed in the literature, motifs, and principles of the ancient world. Invoking the republican precepts of the Greco-Roman past, the loyalist rebuttal posed a significant challenge to the legitimacy and rationale of the colonial resistance. The fact the Whig-patriots were able to surmount these formidable obstacles demonstrates just how radical, in an ideological sense, the American Revolution truly was.