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Allen, Thomas B. Tones: Fighting for the King in America 's First Civil War. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. xxiii + 473 pages. Paper, $16.99.
It is very tempting for historians of the American Revolution to create an oversimplified battlefield; two distinct sides aligned with two polemical doctrines battling for political control. The American Revolution has particularly suffered from such streamlining, as the acknowledgment of American power in the modern world influences most attempts to explain the incredibly complex circumstances surrounding that event. Many authors feel a need to delineate clearly the British from the new, rugged, and rebellious Americans in a historical dialogue to reaffirm the truly "revolutionary" nature of the events that ushered in the creation of the United States. In Tories, historian Thomas B. Allen challenges these conceptions by analyzing the true nature of the Loyalist movement during the Revolution. In so doing, Allen comes to two important conclusions: First, the Revolutionary War was very much a civil war against Americans who remained loyal to the British Crown, and that the reasons for this loyalty differed according to region, as well as one's economic status and ethnicity; Second, as the conflict progressed and expanded from a localized theater in New England to one involving nearly all British possessions in North America, the barbarous and cruel methods used by both sides to fight the war became more frequent and intense.
Allen's research for Tories appears to have been methodical, and his choice of source material reflects...