Date: Wednesday 5 February

Venue: Council Room, King's College London

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, in particular, discuss GPP strengths in military history and the Hanoverian connections of the Georgian monarchs.

Schedule of events:

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

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.

Mount Vernon and Georgian Papers Programme Lecture 2025