‘The Friends of America’: British Sympathy with the American Revolution

Abstract

Among other struggles, the American Revolution was a constitutional conflict between American patriots and British imperialists who disagreed sharply and fundamentally in their understanding of the liberties of British subjects and their interpretation of the British constitution. What can reasonably be regarded as a civil war within the British Atlantic empire in the later eighteenth century was not simply a conflict in which two British peoples, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, disputed about their constitutional interpretations of the past and over their constitutional visions for the future. The constitutional issues were so complex and the consequences of victory or defeat so grave that the peoples on both sides of the Atlantic were also divided internally on the wisdom and justice of the arguments put forward by the American patriot and British imperialist leaders. On both sides of the Atlantic some people were quite unable to make up their minds or feared making the wrong choice and so they tried to remain neutral and awaited the outcome of the conflict without being directly involved in it. But there was also, on both sides of the Atlantic, a minority that opposed the views and repudiated the actions of the majority.