"John Adams' rule of thirds" Topic

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was really referencing the FRENCH revolution. Nevertheless . . .

"This famous quote comes from a letter Adams wrote in 1815 to Massachusetts Senator James Lloyd, saying "I should say that full one third were averse to the revolution…. An opposite third… gave themselves up to an enthusiastic gratitude to France. The middle third,… always averse to war, were rather lukewarm both to England and France;…." Truth is, Adams was not addressing America's rebellion – he was writing about American attitudes towards the French Revolution, when Americans grappled with either supporting France or maintaining commercial ties with Britain. The mistake appears to stem from historian Sydney George Fisher, who misinterpreted Adams's meaning in his 1908 book, The Struggle for American Independence, Volume I. Others, reading the quote without the full context of Adams's letter, have repeated the error ever since. In Fisher's defense, it is easy to get the context of the passage wrong because it's buried in the middle of a somewhat windy paragraph that jumps around with references to multiple topics, years, and other correspondence. And that paragraph is buried in the middle of a somewhat windy letter (at 2,105 words) which also jumps around with references to multiple topics, years, and other correspondence. Fisher may have missed the point because he got tired of looking for it." !!!

"Some insight into Adams's thoughts on popular support of the American Revolution – and into the differences of opinion on the subject – is in an 1813 Adams letter of his to old Continental Congress friend, Delaware's Thomas McKean. McKean was writing about the Revolution and proposed that "The great mass of the people were zealous in the cause of America" during the Stamp Act crisis, but Adams disagreed with the statement. He reminded McKean about the strength of Loyalist sentiment in America and added, "Upon the whole, if we allow two thirds of the people to have been with us in the revolution, is not the allowance ample?" Modern studies allow us to put a finer point on Adams's estimate."

"Historian Thomas Fleming offers that there may have been 75,000 to 100,000 Loyalists in America during the Revolution and that 60,000 to 80,000 fled after the war. In a thorough 1968 study, historian Paul H. Smith estimated that Loyalists comprised about 16% of America's total population and a precise 19.8% of free citizens. And historian Robert Calhoon wrote that probably 15 to 20% of adult white males remained loyal to Britain, and that 40 to 45% of the free population, "at most no more than a bare majority" actively supported the Patriots."

The rest of the article is short and worth a reading.

AND remember that about half of Americans lived in the subsistence economy and did not use money, or vote, or know much about what was going on. Local issues might shape attitudes towards the Revolution. In the Carolinas the western regulators hated the eastern planters who had crushed them at Alamance. When the planters became Patriots many former regulators became Loyalists, according to Forrest MacDonald in E PLURIBUS UNUM, "loyal to a king who for all they knew might only have been a rumor."