Gregory T. Knouff
Seductive Sedition: New Hampshire Loyalists’ Memories of the American Revolution
This paper will focus on how New Hampshire Loyalists remembered the pervasive American Revolutionary imagery of them as dangerous political seducers of the people. Revolutionary authorities identified traitors as much in terms of what individuals said as what they did. Loyalists were denounced in gendered and familial metaphors befitting the need to construct an image of a domestic enemy who refused to show fidelity to the new state. This paper argues that Loyalists constructed an identity during and after the Revolutionary War that inverted this formulation. They fostered a view of themselves as faithful British subjects victimized by rebel traitors who seduced the masses with emotive persuasion coupled with the threat of brutal repression. Loyalists also emphasized that they were not able to speak freely, critically, and rationally about imperial politics during the Revolution. Thus, the Loyalist memory of the war revolved around a just, yet lost cause that was overwhelmed by a small group of self-interested cynics who seized power by manipulating imagery through language and intolerance of dissent. This paper will explore how the use of language, particularly gendered and familial metaphors, constructed power and identity in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Atlantic World.
Gregory Knouff is Professor of History at Keene State College in New Hampshire. He teaches courses in Colonial North America, American Revolution, American Military History, Loyalist History, Native American History, the African Atlantic World, and Gender in Early North America. He is the author of The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (2004, paperback, 2012) and several published essays articles including, most recently, “Masculinity, Race and Citizenship: Soldiers’ Memories of the American Revolution,” in Gender, War, and Politics: The Wars of Revolution and Liberation, ed. Karen Hagemann et al. (2010). His current book project is A Seductive Sedition: Loyalists, Language, and Power in Revolutionary New Hampshire.
