| Summary: | This chapter evaluates how loyal Britons struggled to strip rebellious Americans of their Britishness. Their counternarrative, a British common cause, was crafted in the days after the thunderclap that the First Continental Congress sounded all across the British Empire. Popular understandings of loyalism celebrated a renewed defense of monarchy and legal government, and remained committed to basic Protestant Whig principles like free trade, political liberty, and religious freedom. But the promulgators of this cause also continued to argue that their opponents were nothing more than deceived subjects who were misled by a few self-interested colonists — mostly New Englanders — into war against their own nation. Loyal subjects thus failed to make rebellious Americans into dangerous enemies. This failure presented real problems for loyal subjects across the North Atlantic. If American Patriots were just misguided Britons, then it stood to reason that the Patriot cause presented no real threat to popular understandings of Britishness. In part, this explains why so many loyal subjects were reluctant to support the war in the early years.
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