In the final words of the Declaration of Independence, the signatories famously pledged their lives, their fortunes and their “sacred Honor” to one another, but what about those who made the opposite choice? By looking through the lens of honor culture of the period, Timothy Compeau, assistant professor of history at Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario, offers an innovative assessment of the experience of Americans who made the fateful decision to remain loyal to the British Crown during and after the Revolution. Loyalists, as Dr. Compeau explains, suffered a “political death” at the hands of American Patriots. A term drawn from eighteenth-century sources, “political death” encompassed the legal punishments and ritualized dishonors Patriots used to defeat Loyalist public figures and discredit their counter-revolutionary vision for America. By highlighting this dynamic, Dr. Compeau makes a significant intervention in the long-standing debate over the social and cultural factors that motivated colonial Americans to choose sides in the conflict, narrating in compelling detail the severe consequences for once-respected gentlemen who were stripped of their rights, privileges and power in Revolutionary America.
About the Speaker
Timothy Compeau is an assistant professor of history at Huron University College in London, Ontario, Canada, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario. His research focuses on the British Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with a specific focus on honor culture and loyalism in the Age of Revolutions. He is the project director of “Loyalist Migrations,” a partnership with the United Empire Loyalists Associations of Canada (UELAC), which allows researchers access to genealogical records of the UELAC, as well as other archival sources, to reconstruct the migrations of thousands of exiles, refugees, economic migrants, settlers and soldiers from all walks of life who fled the American Revolution. He was also the co-editor of Seeing the Past with Computers: Experiments with Augmented Reality and Computer Vision for History (University of Michigan Press, 2019).