With Little Less Than Savage Fury

By forcing Americans to choose loyalty to the king or to rebel against Britain, the Revolution often tore up families and pit neighbor against neighbor. America's first civil war took place during the Revolution, an ultra violent, family-splitting, and often vindictive conflict between patriots and loyalists. American history textbooks don't often discuss the internal confusion and acrimony that the outbreak of revolution set off in the British American colonies. Here, Allen talks about Stephen Jarvis whom his family and his town would all become caught up in a civil war within the Revolutionary War. What had begun as political conflict between politicians called Whigs and their "Tory" opponents had evolved into a war with the peculiarly brutal qualities of fraternal conflict. The "patriots" taunted, then tarred and feathered, and finally, when war came, killed their Tory neighbors and kinfolk. Americans who called themselves Tories gave themselves a proud new name: loyalists, a label that had not been needed when all Americans were subjects of the king.