American Realities with Bill Youngs
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      • Table of Contents
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      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
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      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
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        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, American Realities, Volume One: 
Historical Episodes from First Settlements to the Civil War, Chapter Five


Bostonians Reading Stamp Act, courtesy of the Wikipedia Commons

5. Divided Loyalties
Jonathan Boucher and the Pre-Revolutionary Crisis


Summary

Picture
We are so accustomed to thinking of the American Revolution as a natural and righteous event that we find it difficult to comprehend its Loyalist opponents. By presenting a sympathetic picture of one of the most articulate Loyalists, this essay tries to draw us into the problem of doing justice to both sides in the Revolution. We begin with Jonathan Boucher’s early life in England, his career as a minister in Virginia and Maryland, and his hostility to the Revolutionary movement. After we watch Boucher depart for England with his American wife, the essay leads us to consider the elements of temperament and ideology that separated Tories such as Jonathan Boucher from the patriots.

Author Reads From the Text

On May 4, 1775, George Washington boarded a ferry at Alexandria, Virginia, to cross the Potomac River. The Battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought two weeks before, and he was now on his way to the Continental Congress at Philadelphia. As his boat crossed the river, Washington spied an old friend, the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, on board another ferry. The people on Boucher’s boat gave Washington three cheers, and he, in turn, beckoned them to stop so that he could come aboard and shake their hands. According to Boucher, “Everybody seemed to be on fire, either with rum, or patriotism, or both.”
      

As Boucher greeted Washington, he was afire with neither rum nor patriotism. Instead, he was worried about the events that threatened to divide Britain and America. In a “few disturbed moments of conversation” he warned Washington that the troubles between England and America would surely lead to civil war and colonial independence. Washington tried to reassure Boucher, telling him that his fears were groundless and that if Boucher “ever heard of him joining in any such measures … [he] had his leave to set him down for everything wicked.”


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Chapter 4: Reform in Colonial America
Chapter 6: The American Revolution