Loyalists were most often people who were conservative by nature or in politics, valued order, were fearful of 'mob' rule, felt sentimental ties to the Mother Country, were loyal to the King or concerned that an independent new nation would not be able to defend themselves.

Shortly thereafter, Brigadier General Timothy Ruggles formed a Loyalist military unit called the "Loyal American Association", also in Massachusetts.

[5] The first organized Loyalist unit permitted to fight in a serious battle of the Revolution was Allan Maclean's 84th Regiment of Foot (Royal Highland Emigrants), who helped the British successfully defend Quebec after the American invasion of Canada in the last days of 1775.

In early 1776, under the command of Brigadier General Donald Macdonald, a substantial force of North Carolina Loyalists, possibly as many as five thousand, began a march to the seacoast to join a British assault on Charleston.

Many Long Island Loyalists, wearing pieces of red cloth on their hats to show their sympathies, landed with Howe, and participated in the fighting.

Loyalists seized Richard Stockton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and after imprisonment and cruel treatment[citation needed], he broke down, and signed an oath of allegiance to George III.

[12] At this early stage of the war, the Loyalist soldiers were primarily used for guard duties and keeping order, or distracted with civil warfare.

Burgoyne started south from Canada at the end of June, 1777, with a force of nearly eight thousand British regulars, Hessian auxiliaries, Loyalists, Indians and French Canadians.

At one point, a column of Loyalists turned their green jackets inside out as a ruse, and got very close to Herkimer's men; this was followed by hand-to-hand fighting.

[14] A detachment of Hessian troops under Lieutenant-Colonel Friedrich Baum, accompanied by Loyalists, Indians and French Canadians, was sent by Burgoyne in the direction of Bennington, Vermont.

At Saratoga, Loyalists, Indians and French Canadians acted as scouts and sharpshooters for the British, but the fighting ended with a decisive defeat for the royal cause—the surrender of Burgoyne and his army on October 17, 1777.

[17] The British general Guy Carleton, impressed by the ambush at Oriskany, authorized John Butler to raise eight more companies of Loyalist Rangers, "to serve with the Indians, as occasion shall require".

An early raid was made in May, 1778, on Cobleskill, New York, where three hundred Loyalists and Indians, led by the Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant, defeated a small Patriot force of militia and Continental regulars, then burned homes, crops and barns.

One historian has said, "The Tories [Loyalists] usually neither gave nor expected any quarter, and when this vengeful spirit was augmented by the Indian propensity for total war, the results were almost invariably grim.

Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton and Colonel Daniel Brodhead, at the head of forty-six hundred men, advanced on the Indians, their objective "the total destruction and devastation" of the Iroquois settlements.

[23] Throughout Lord Howe's campaigning in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, many uniformed Loyalist troops had continued to be used for guard duties, keeping order and foraging.

An early setback for the policy lay in the fate of the eight hundred North and South Carolina Loyalists who gathered at the Broad River under Captain Boyd.

A crucial contribution was made by Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the English commander of a Loyalist unit called the British Legion.

[28] Another leader of Loyalists, the Scotsman Patrick Ferguson, commanded a force called the American Volunteers, who formed part of the army which took Charleston.

A substantial number of Cornwallis's three thousand men were Loyalists—North Carolina Loyalist regulars and militia, a Northern unit called the Volunteers of Ireland, and the infantry and cavalry of the British Legion.

An American historian has called Lord Rawdon's outnumbered nine-hundred-man British force "a motley collection of Loyalists stiffened by a few regulars".

The patriots, without anything but hindrance from their French allies, met initially with disastrous setbacks but finally, in a campaign that is a textbook study in the tactics and techniques of partisan warfare, recovered, for all practical purposes, the Carolinas and Georgia.

"[51] A document dated 1 May 1782 in the papers of George Washington records various violent acts taken against people in parts of New Jersey, such as Monmouth County, some of whom are specifically identified as being Loyalists, and among those listed is Philip White for which the paper says:[52] Philip White Taken lately at Shrewsburry in Action was marched under a guard for near 16 Miles and at Private part of the road about three Miles from Freehold Goal (as is asserted by creditable persons in the country) he was by three Dragoons kept back, while Capt.

Tilton and the other Prisoners were sent forward & after being stripped of his Buckles, Buttons & other Articles, The Dragoons told him they would give him a chance for his Life, and ordered him to Run—which he attempted but had not gone thirty yards from them before they Shot him.Philip White's brother, Aaron White, was captured with him, and although originally said that Philip was shot after trying to escape later recanted inasmuch as his statement had been made under threat of death and that his brother had actually been murdered in cold blood.

[58] The story began when Lord Dunmore, the former royal governor of Virginia, on November 7, 1775, proclaimed freedom for all slaves (or indentured servants) belonging to Patriots, if they were able and willing to bear arms, and joined the British forces.

Colonel Tye finally died after being wounded in an assault by his men on the home of Joshua Huddy, the Patriot later hanged by William Franklin's Associated Loyalists.

[69] An American historian has said about the war in the South, "The more intelligent and articulate [sic] of the freed slaves were quite frequently used by the British as guides in raiding parties or assigned to the commissary..."[70] (to help round up provisions).

In the second wave, 30,000 Americans, attracted by promises of land and low taxes in exchange for swearing allegiance to the King, went in the 1790s to the western Niagara Peninsula.

By the time of the Civil War, American popular hostility to the Loyalists was fading, to be replaced by a vague memory of a few malcontents who for some reason could not accept the Revolution.

The Disney television series The Swamp Fox (about the Patriot leader Francis Marion) showed Loyalists as cowardly guns-for-hire and was condemned by the Canadian House of Commons.