Divided Loyalties

Choosing between rebellion and loyalty was agonizing. Families split, friendships broke, and communities tore apart.

An estimated 60,000 to 80,000 Loyalists fled to Canada, Britain, or the Caribbean during and after the war, losing their property and livelihoods. Many were ordinary people who believed in British law and order. Their story of displacement and exile is largely missing from American memory, because the winners wrote the textbooks.

Benjamin Franklin's own son William was a Loyalist governor who fled to London and never reconciled with his father.