Georgian Papers Programme Mount Vernon Lecture 2025: The Tory Rising: Insurrection in the Revolutionary South

05 February 2025 18:00 to 20:00

05Feb

George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Georgian Papers Programme (GPP) are pleased to invite you to a lecture by Dr T. Cole Jones (Purdue) on Wednesday 5 February. The lecture will begin at 18:00 and will be followed by a wine reception.

Ahead of the lecture, there will also be an informal coffee meet and greet at 16:30 where we will give a brief update about GPP and look ahead to future activity on the programme. And building on the topic of Dr Jones’ lecture, we will be especially discussing GPP strengths in military history and the Hanoverian connections of the Georgian monarchs.

Schedule

16:30-17:30 – Coffee meet and greet

18:00-19:30 – Lecture

19:30 onwards – Wine reception

The Tory Rising: Insurrection in the Revolutionary South – Dr T. Cole Jones, Purdue University

At the center of the American Revolution lay a vicious civil war. More than a fifth of white colonial Americans remained loyal to the royal government under which they were born. A similar number of enslaved people of African descent sought to exploit the conflict to obtain their freedom. And hundreds of thousands of indigenous Americans were forced to take sides in a desperate struggle to stem the expropriation of their ancestral lands. All three groups rose in rebellion against the Patriot majority, pushing British imperial officials to embrace a far harsher, and potentially more revolutionary, mode of carrying on the war. It nearly succeeded. This talk will examine the causes, course, and consequences of the largest loyalist insurrection of the conflict that culminated at the desultory yet decisive Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge, North Carolina, in February 1776. Although long overshadowed by events to the northward, the 1776 loyalist rising catalyzed popular American support for independence and revealed fundamental miscalculations in British strategy that would continue to plague crown forces until war’s end.

About the speaker

Cole Jones is the author of Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution (Penn Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Society of the Cincinnati Prize from the American Revolution Institute and the 2022 Excellence in American History Book Award from the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution. The book also received honorable mentions for the Colonel Richard W. Ulbrich Memorial Book Award from the U.S. Military History Group and the Harry M. Ward Book Prize from the American Revolution Roundtable of Richmond, and it was a finalist for the Journal of the American Revolution 2020 Book of the Year Award.

Captives of Liberty was reviewed in New York Times, Choice Reviews, American Historical Review, Reviews in American History, Journal of American History, Journal of the Early Republic, William and Mary Quarterly, Social History, Journal of Military History, Journal of the American Revolution, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of Early American History, Journal of British Studies, History: Reviews of New Books, Pennsylvania History, and Strategypage.com.

Jones received his Ph.D. in early American history from the Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in history from Duke University. Prior to coming to Purdue, he was the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the New-York Historical Society.

Jones has published numerous articles in academic journals and edited collections, including New England Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, Journal of Military History, and Common-Place. He has received fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Army Center of Military History, and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon, among others.

Jones is at work on his next book, which is provisionally entitled, Tory Rising: Insurrection in the Revolutionary South. He has received fellowships to support this research from the Virginia Historical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, and the Georgian Papers Programme from King's College London and George Washington's Mount Vernon.