Episode Details

History is written by the winners, and the winners of the American Revolution wrote the Loyalists down as a handful of rich cowards. The truth was larger: as many as a fifth of Americans stayed loyal to the King — and their case against the Revolution was made by serious people in good conscience. This is the story of the other side. A parson dragged 70 miles by armed horsemen for writing pamphlets; a clergyman who preached obedience with a loaded pistol on his pulpit; the Boston wit who asked whether it was better to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or three thousand tyrants a mile away. From Samuel Seabury’s “jaws of a lion” this is the Revolution seen from the losing side of it — a civil war that split families down the middle, and a bet on the Crown that hundreds of thousands of Americans made, and lost.