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Some recent historians have argued that life in the British colonies in America from approximately 1763 to 1789 was marked by internal conflicts among colonists. Inheritors of some of the viewpoints of early twentieth-century Progressive historians such as Beard and Becker, these recent historians have put forward arguments that deserve evaluation. The kind of conflict most emphasized by these historians is class conflict. Yet with the Revolutionary War dominating these years, how does one distinguish class conflict within that larger conflict? Certainly not by the side a person supported. Although many of these historians have accepted the earlier assumption that Loyalists represented an upper class, new evidence indicates that Loyalists, like rebels, were drawn from all socioeconomic classes. Looking at the rebel side, we find little evidence for the contention that lower-class rebels were in conflict with upper-class rebels. Indeed, the war effort against Britain tended to suppress class conflicts. Where it did not, the disputing rebels of one or another class usually became Loyalists. Loyalism thus operated as a safety valve to remove socioeconomic discontent that existed among the rebels. Disputes occurred, of course, among those who remained on the rebel side, but the extraordinary social mobility of eighteenth-century American society usually prevented such disputes from hardening along class lines. Social structure was in fact so fluidthough recent statistics suggest a narrowing of economic opportunity as the latter half of the century progressedthat to talk about social classes at all requires the use of loose economic categories such as rich, poor, and middle class, or eighteenth-century designations like the better sort. Despite these vague categories, one should not claim unequivocally that hostility between recognizable classes cannot be legitimately observed. Outside of New York, however, there were very few instances of openly expressed class antagonism. | 
