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This lecture by Sarah Hand Meacham, Ph.D., explores the surprising loyalty of many colonial Americans before the Declaration of Independence. Despite fifteen months of open warfare, many American colonists remained proud subjects of Britain. Debates over independence unfolded in taverns, churches, and courtrooms, largely among white men, while enslaved people and women navigated the revolution in their own ways, supporting wartime efforts and seeking freedom. This lecture examines the social, political, and psychological forces that made rebellion unlikely, what ultimately pushed colonists toward independence, and the limited immediate changes that followed.

About the speaker

Sarah Hand Meacham (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is an associate professor and associate chair of the Department of History in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of "Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Technology, and Gender in the Early Chesapeake" (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Pets, Status, and Slavery in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake” in The Journal of Southern History. She is currently writing a book about emotions in early America, including articles on the American invention of cheerfulness and on emotional expectations placed on enslaved men and women.