Loyalists and the American Revolution

For eight months in 1777, an American Loyalist—pledging continued allegiance to the British crown in the early stages of the American Revolution—found himself in solitary confinement in Connecticut’s infamous Litchfield jail. His food came poked through a hole in the door. “Debarred,” he later wrote, of “Pen, Ink, and Paper,” he found that his sole human intercourse was the rare scraps of talk he could wring from his jailers. It was as if he had been “buried alive.” There was neither seat, nor bed, nor toilet—just a straw-covered floor. The prisoner would eventually lose his teeth and hair. “I should deem it a favor,” he wrote to Jonathan Trumbull, Connecticut’s Patriot governor, “to be immediately taken out and shot.” He was not executed but rather, exchanged for the captured rebel leader of Delaware, saw out the war in New York City, a Loyalist stronghold that would stay in British hands until November 1783, two years after Yorktown.