New Foreword for Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts

American Ancestors has just reissued James Henry Stark’s The Loyalists of Masssachusetts with a new foreword by me.

I came across a copy of Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts in my local library when I was early in my research on eighteenth-century Boston. I was struck by its combination of detailed research on exiled families and apparently still-hot resentment at how the whole Revolution thing turned out.

One notorious detail of this book is an illustration of Paul Revere on horseback—complete with fringed buckskin coat, beard, and vicious snarl.

In researching the publication of The Loyalists of Massachusetts for this foreword, I realized that Stark didn’t commission that and the other full-page illustrations. He reused them from an earlier history of the Revolution. He did, however, change the captions to make their message more pointed.

Stark published through his own printing company, which he had cofounded with a former “spirit photographer.” That gave him the freedom to devote hundreds of pages to “The Other Side of the American Revolution,” as his subtitle said.

I also looked into the reception of the book in 1910. Some reviewers thought Stark, a childhood immigrant from Britain, was too harsh on the Patriots. The press magnified that controversy. The argument became a front-page story in newspapers well outside New England as editors enjoyed the spectacle of elite Bostonians arguing over their ancestors’ actions.

Another of Stark’s interests was yachting. In fact, he was on a cruise when the controversy over his book broke out. I think he’d be pleased that the cover of this new edition shows Sir Isaac Coffin, alumnus of Boston’s South Latin School and admiral in the Royal Navy.