Recovering Neutral Ground
Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution by Travis Glasson (Yale University Press, 2025)
Reviewed by Matthew J. Sparacio
We know a lot about a few people who lived through the American Revolution and the War for Independence, but we know very little about most people who lived through those times. Historians have traditionally used the law of thirds to divide up colonial society’s loyalties for the two decades between 1763 and 1783: one third remaining devoted Royalists and committed to the parliamentary rule of law, one third upstart freedom fighters who matured into the new nation’s “founders,” and one third undetermined on where their allegiance lay. The fundamental problem with this model, at least for historians, is that the extremes get most of the attention while 33% (some historians say this total could be closer to 60%) of the people who lived through the tumult of revolution are left out of the story.
Who were the men and women stuck in the middle of a political crisis growing more violent by the day? Who were, to quote the heading in the May 1779 issue of The Pennsylvania Packet, or, The General Advertiser, these “Moderate-men, Any-bodies-men, Every-bodies-men, No-bodies-men"?
Travis Glasson’s new examination of the Cruger merchant family, Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution attempts to answer this question. The Crugers were a typical early American merchant family. Across three generations from the late 1600s through the early 1800s, they fostered and maintained strong British Atlantic connections. Although based in New York, they had ties to St. Croix (Alexander Hamilton famously worked as a clerk under Nicholas Cruger (1744-1800) and his business partner David Beekman), Jamaica, and Bristol, moving flour grown in the Hudson River Valley to the West Indies and enslaved persons between the Caribbean colonies. Like families today, they worked together to ensure financial stability. But that doesn't mean family members agreed on everything. And like families today, they found themselves confronting exceptional times. They did not know – and could not predict, despite their best efforts at prognostication – the future, so they devoted their time and attention to what they knew best: their family, their business pursuits, and their local communities.
The Crugers made decisions based on shared principles and (at times) struggled to keep up with larger political and cultural shifts unleashed by the American Revolution. They did what they thought was right, and they did what they could. For example, the Crugers joined other leading New York merchants in 1770 to create a parallel organization to the Sons of Liberty, the so-called “Friends of Liberty and Trade” who advocated for modifying total nonimportation tactics in response to the Townshend Acts. They claimed that nonimportation actually hurt New Yorkers in the long run, and lifting the import ban would aid the colony’s poor workers. They used democratic measures - including holding town meetings with Sons of Liberty, polling locals, and maintaining robust correspondence with merchants in other colonies - to proclaim parliamentary taxation as problematic. Indeed, the Crugers helped lift nonimportation in New York, but in doing so, members of the Crugers’ extended family left themselves open to ridicule and criticism from neighbors who grew increasingly polarized. And over time, most worked to intentionally distance themselves from their moderate wartime stance and rehabilitate their standing in the new American society. But the Crugers were a conflicted bunch!
A few members of the Cruger family wound up choosing a side. Most notably, John Harris Cruger (1737-1807) became an officer in the King’s Army, left New York, campaigned in the Georgia and South Carolina backcountry, and eventually left for England where he would live out his days. But most of the Cruger family tried to remain in a kind of contested and uncomfortable middle ground. John’s brother Henry Cruger Jr. (1739-1827) was a devoted Wilkite and member of Parliament serving his Bristol constituents, who in a speech proclaimed himself an “American” while trying to push Edmund Burke closer to supporting the colonies without surrendering a framework of Parliamentary supremacy. Their father John Cruger II (1710-1791), on the other hand, served on New York’s committee of correspondence, organizing anti-Stamp Act resistance. Together the Crugers were, in Glasson’s framing, a family of “nobodyists,” neither a group of roughish villains nor valiant heroes in the high drama of the Revolution.
Glasson taps into a couple of simple but easily overlooked realities about political movements and resistance. First, the political spectrum is a sliding scale that individuals move along and are not locked into. Members of the Cruger family, and presumably others in colonial society, oscillated back and forth between patriotism and loyalism for a long time before circumstances compelled them to remain in or between these polarized camps. Second, people understand many of their actions as ideologically driven only retroactively. As the Crugers confronted imperial crisis after crisis, beginning with the Stamp Act debates, their decisions were often shaped less by esoteric constitutional debates and instead dictated by their relationships and whether they (both as individuals and as a family) stood to benefit financially from a particular outcome. And time after time, as Glasson outlines, what the Crugers valued most appears to have been not some Whiggish definition of liberty, but peace and stability.
Most other studies of the Crugers and the circles they occupied in New York typically cast the family firmly in the category of “loyalists.” And while this is undoubtedly true for John Harris Cruger, Glasson asks us to consider neutrality and peace instead of loyalism as the motivation for the other Crugers (and by extension, the rest of that messy, hidden in plain sight, undeclared third of colonial American society). Indeed, most Crugers based in New York were staunch resisters to what they considered unfair Parliamentary policy in the 1760s and worked hand in hand with men who today we would call patriots. The Crugers were clearly sympathetic to many of the critiques emanating from the colonies. But as Glasson notes, their sympathy had limits.
For the Crugers, the violent resistance embraced by some of their neighbors proved to be a line in the sand. As Glasson notes, the “centrality of violence and coercion” served as the determining factor for many colonists on the fence about political reform and – taken to its extreme – outright revolution. Despite their agreement with the basis of some colonial calls for reform, most Crugers refused to legitimize violence by subjects against agents of the Crown. They also refused to swear oaths of allegiance to patriot New Yorkers. This placed the family at risk, despite some leading patriots – like John Jay – vouching for their character. Most spent the war years trying to keep a low profile and maintain the appearance of strict neutrality.
The Crugers’ experiences show how the American Revolution and War for Independence was more than a simple civil war between patriots and loyalists. The “American-Revolution-as-civil-war” interpretation has become mainstream in the aughts, in part spurred by the success of widely read historians like Alan Taylor (The Divided Ground, 2006) and David Armitage (Civil Wars, 2018), and is likely to remain entrenched thanks to the success of Ken Burns’ magisterial new PBS documentary, The American Revolution. But for Glasson, the Crugers show that the era was defined by a struggle between two different groups: militant partisans and everyone else.
Nobody Men is important because it complicates our understanding of what peace meant for (perhaps most) colonial Americans. For nobodyists like the Crugers, peace was not a celebrated objective marked entirely by independence or constitutionalism. The peace they sought was merely an end to fighting and the opportunity to get on with their lives. Colonists cared more about putting a halt to the unrestrained violence unleashed by the war than proving a specific political point. Thanks to Glasson, the role of the political moderates in the Revolution, those same “Any-bodies-men, Every-bodies-men, No-bodies-men” and their families mentioned in The Pennsylvania Packet, are no longer overlooked.
Matthew Sparacio is a lecturer of colonial and Native American history at Georgia State University. He mostly posts about dogs and pizza on instagram @calumetsncrowns .
