Ray Raphael

“In 1777 the rebels tried to round up the rest of Johnson’s former tenants, but they too escaped to Canada. For the remainder of the Revolution Sir John Johnson and his Scotsmen, together with their Iroquois allies, engaged in protracted and violent warfare with the American rebels along the northern frontier.18 Several other groups of recent immigrants remained loyal to the Crown. Although many Dutch and Germans supported the Revolution, those who maintained their own language and culture did not. Similarly, the Huguenots who settled in New Rochelle, the only French immigrants who continued to speak their native tongue, supported the British. William Nelson explains why: Taking all the groups and factions, sects, classes, and inhabitants of regions that seem to have been Tory, they have but one thing in common: they represented conscious minorities, people who felt weak and threatened. . . . Almost all the Loyalists were, in one way or another, more afraid of America than they were of Britain. Almost all of them had interests that they felt needed protection from an American majority. Being fairly certain that they would be in a permanent minority (as Quakers or oligarchs or frontiersmen or Dutchmen) they could not find much comfort in a theory of government . . . based on the “common good” if the common good was to be defined by a numerical majority.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

“Americans in the 1770s were sharply divided according to religion, national origin, location, and even language. Scots Irish Presbyterians in North Carolina, English American Anglicans in Virginia, Dutch and German Mennonites in Pennsylvania, Scottish Highlander Catholics in New York, native-born Congregationalists in Massachusetts—each group had its own culture, its own beliefs, its own set of interests.”
― Ray Raphael, A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence