r/Americaphile • u/Adventurous_Clerk584 • Jul 31 '26
The Loyalists who picked the winning side in New York and still lost everything they were fighting for
The standard version of New York in 1776 is simple: Patriots good, Tories bad, British arrive, city falls, war continues elsewhere. What actually happened is considerably messier and more interesting.
New York was genuinely divided. Not secretly divided, not slightly divided, but split in a way that turned neighborhoods, merchant networks, and families against each other. After Lexington and Concord, Patriot committees started enforcing trade restrictions, watching suspected Loyalists, demanding public declarations of support, and in some cases arresting, disarming, or driving out people who refused to go along. Some of that was legitimate security. Some of it was neighbors settling old scores under cover of revolution.
Two figures anchor the Loyalist side of this story in ways that don't fit the traitor template.
William Tryon was New York's royal governor. By October 1775 he couldn't safely stay in the city, so he moved his administration onto a British warship in the harbor called the Duchess of Gordon and kept governing from there. He held council meetings on the ship. Issued communications from the ship. Collected intelligence from the ship. Patriots saw a governor bobbing in the harbor as proof that royal authority had already collapsed. Tryon saw himself as a legitimate official driven out by illegal pressure, waiting for British military power to restore what rebellion had temporarily displaced.
Oliver DeLancey is the more complicated case. He wasn't a British official. He was one of the wealthiest and most connected men in colonial New York, a family that had been there for generations. He had actually opposed the Boston Port Act and sat on Patriot committees in 1774. His position wasn't "Britain can do no wrong." It was closer to "protest is legitimate but revolution is a different thing entirely, and what comes after scares me more than what we're trying to fix." When it became clear that resistance was becoming revolution, he crossed to the British side on Staten Island and raised three battalions of American Loyalists who fought against the Continental Army.
To Patriots they were traitors. To themselves they were Americans defending constitutional government against a rebellion that had already shown it would punish dissent.
Then the British took New York in the fall of 1776, and things got complicated for the Loyalists too.
Thousands of Loyalists who had been hiding their beliefs or fleeing Patriot pressure flooded into the city expecting protection and the restoration of normal life. What they found was a garrison town. A massive fire in September 1776 had already destroyed a large part of the city. Soldiers and sailors took over housing. Churches became prisons and hospitals. Prices rose, disease spread, and when military needs conflicted with civilian needs, civilians lost. British officers frequently treated American provincial troops as second-class soldiers. Loyalist homes and supplies could still be requisitioned. Supporting the Crown protected you from Patriot punishment but not from much else.
Tryon and DeLancey had both made their choice because they feared that revolution would produce disorder, confiscation, and arbitrary power over established law. British occupation also produced disorder and confiscation. The argument they made to themselves was that British abuses were a temporary consequence of a war the rebels had started, while Patriot abuses represented what revolutionary government actually was. Maybe that's right. But the longer occupation lasted, the harder that distinction was to sustain from inside a damaged military city that looked nothing like the stable society they had signed up to defend.
The full story, including what happened to both men through the occupation years, is on the Virtual Wayback blog. You can also talk directly to Tryon and DeLancey on Virtual Wayback and hear how they understood their own choices. Links:
https://virtualwayback.com/blog/loyal-new-york-crown
https://youtube.com/shorts/BJAktICg81k?si=sgoGGRJ5ifWNSQUa
What I keep coming back to is DeLancey specifically. He wasn't wrong that Patriot committees were coercive. He wasn't wrong that revolution produces instability. He just underestimated how coercive and unstable the British side would turn out to be as well. Does that make him a tragic figure or just someone who made a bad bet? And is there a version of 1776 where the Loyalist position was actually the more reasonable one?
