There is something rather remarkable happening in American political life. The possibility of another American civil war is once again being discussed seriously, not merely by the usual political fruitcakes, deranged TV pundits and sweaty TikTokkers living in their mother’s basement, but by academics and specialists in the history of civil conflict. And what most Americans don’t realise is that this would be the nation’s Third Civil War.
One of the most interesting voices in this discussion is Barbara F. Walter, Professor of International Relations at the University of California, San Diego. Walter has spent much of her academic career studying the causes of civil wars around the world. She has advised the American government's Political Instability Task Force and has examined the circumstances in which countries descend into internal armed conflict.In her book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, and in subsequent interviews, Walter has argued that some of the warning signs she has encountered in countries such as Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan are becoming recognisable in the United States. Her argument is not that another civil war is inevitable, but that America should not assume that its political institutions and history make it immune to the conditions that produce one.
It is an uncomfortable prospect for a country whose national identity is so deeply rooted in its founding struggle for liberty and independence.
But perhaps there is an even more uncomfortable historical reality that Americans should confront before contemplating the possibility of another civil war, the fact that the American ‘War of Independence’ was a civil war.
The account of the Rebellion (NB: not a revolution, as that, if successful, would have replaced King George as the ruler of Great Britain), that most Americans are taught is one of an oppressed colonial population united against British tyranny. But this crude narrative conceals a fundamental truth. The inhabitants of the thirteen colonies were not united in their desire for independence. A substantial proportion remained loyal to the British Crown. They were not British invaders or foreign occupiers. They were Americans: people born in the colonies, living in American communities, raising American families and frequently descended from generations of colonial settlers.
When the shooting started, they did not simply find themselves fighting British soldiers. They found themselves fighting their neighbours, their relatives and, in some cases, members of their own families. And almost everybody was a British subject.
For example, Benjamin Franklin, one of the most celebrated architects of American independence, found himself permanently estranged from his own son, who remained loyal to the Crown.
The Battle of Kings Mountain is perhaps the clearest military illustration of the civil-war character of the Rebellion.
The battle took place in the southern backcountry, where Patriot and Loyalist communities had become increasingly hostile to one another.
The Patriot force consisted of approximately 900 militiamen. Their opponents were approximately 1,100 Loyalists under the command of British Major Patrick Ferguson.
But there is a detail that deserves particular attention.
Every participant in the battle was ‘American’ (a term that had not been in common use previously) except Ferguson himself. The Loyalists were American colonists who wanted to remain within the British Empire. The Patriots were their neighbours and fellow British subjects who wanted independence. The battle was short and devastating. Ferguson was killed, and the Loyalist force was overwhelmed. The Loyalists suffered approximately 150 deaths, with hundreds more wounded or captured. Four brothers, divided by their political allegiance, died there.
These are not incidental anecdotes in an otherwise straightforward war of independence. They are evidence of a much larger and largely neglected dimension of the American Rebellion.
The conflict divided communities, destroyed families, produced refugees and involved imprisonment, confiscation of property and acts of violence and retribution against people whose principal offence was their political allegiance.
Yet the United States has largely chosen to remember its birth as a story of national unity and liberation rather than one of internal division and civil conflict.
The first uncomfortable fact is that there was no unanimous American movement for independence.
Estimates of political allegiance vary, partly because people changed their positions, concealed their sympathies, or tried to remain neutral. Nevertheless, historians commonly estimate that only 40% actively supported the Patriot cause, while 20% supported the Crown. That leaves a large segment of 40% who remained neutral, undecided, or tried to avoid involvement.The Patriots were therefore not representing a united colonial population. They were leading a minority of the population.The Loyalists were an extraordinarily varied group. They included wealthy landowners, merchants, Anglican clergymen, royal officials, farmers and ordinary working people. Some believed that separation from Britain was unnecessary and dangerous. Others believed that the British constitutional system offered protections that an untested government could not guarantee.
Many were born in America. Their families had lived there for generations. They had no particular desire to return to Britain because Britain was not, in any meaningful personal sense, their home.
Some colonists opposed British taxation and government policy, but nevertheless opposed independence. The choice was not necessarily between supporting everything Britain did and supporting rebellion.
The end of the war did not mean that the Loyalists could simply return to their former lives. Many had suffered intimidation, imprisonment, and violence. Others had lost their property. In several states, legislation permitted the confiscation and sale of Loyalist estates.
New York passed a major confiscation law in 1779, targeting the property of people who had supported the Crown. Other states introduced similar measures.
The consequences were substantial. Political allegiance could mean losing a home, a business, land, and generations of accumulated wealth.
Some Loyalists remained in the United States and eventually reintegrated into society. The scale of the subsequent exodus is remarkable.
Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff, in her book Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Rebellionary World, estimates that approximately 60,000 Loyalists left the newly independent United States.
That represented roughly one person in every forty of the American population at the time. They went to Canada, Britain, the Caribbean, and other parts of the British Empire. Many settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, helping to shape the future development of Canada.
The scale of the exodus is particularly striking when compared with the familiar story of American independence. The new republic celebrated its victory while tens of thousands of its former inhabitants were leaving, taking their families and possessions with them.
There is another reason why the familiar account of the Rebellion is inadequate. Neither the Patriots nor the Loyalists represented all the interests and communities of North America. Native American nations made their own political calculations. Some supported the British, others supported the Patriots, and many sought to protect their territories and independence from either side. The rebellion ultimately brought disastrous consequences for many Indigenous communities, particularly as the new United States expanded westward.
Enslaved Africans also faced choices that exposed the contradictions of the Rebellion. The British offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped their Patriot owners and reached British lines. Thousands took that opportunity. The British evacuation at the end of the war included thousands of Black people who had sought freedom behind British lines.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating independence. But there is something fundamentally misleading about presenting it as the unanimous expression of an American people who did not yet exist as a united political nation.
The Patriots won, with the help of the world’s superpower, France (and its opportunistic allies, Spain and the Dutch), so they got to write the history books. Their beaten opponents (not the British, who simply shrugged, crushed the French at Trafalgar and Waterloo, and then built the biggest Empire the world has ever seen) became the traitors, and their stories gradually receded from the centre of the national narrative. And Americans may have become constitutionally independent from Great Britain, but not economically; that took them until 1859 to achieve.
The result is a national mythology in which the American Rebellion is remembered principally as a war between Britain and America, rather than as a conflict that divided American society itself.
In the year when Americans celebrated (in a somewhat somewhat subdued manner compared to 1976) the birth of their nation, the US is now once again discussing the possibility of an existential civil conflict. Barbara Walter's work is a reminder that no country is permanently immune to the political conditions that can produce internal violence.
So, perhaps this is an appropriate moment for Americans to reconsider the history of their own foundation.
Firstly, the American Rebellion was a war for independence, but it was also a civil war. It divided a population that had previously shared a political and social identity. It set neighbours against neighbours, brothers against brothers and fathers against sons. It produced imprisonment, confiscation, dispossession and exile.
Second, the people who opposed independence were not foreign interlopers. They were fellow colonists who had a different vision of their country's future. They were as much a part of the society from which the United States emerged as those who eventually won independence.
Third, it is time for American teachers to recognise the reality that the United States was not born as a united nation fighting a foreign enemy. It emerged from a violent struggle between people who could not agree on what America should be.
For every Patriot who declared independence, there was a Loyalist who might reasonably have replied: “Not in my name.”
P.S. If you are interested in this era, try to get hold of Rick Atkinson’s Trilogy of books.
PPS: the portrait is of my ancestor, General Sir Brendan Bruce Bt, by George Romney (private collection).