The Patriots, also known as the Whigs or Revolutionaries, were supporters of the American cause during the American Revolutionary War. The patriots supported the idea of an independent United States that was ruled by a republican government, not by a monarch, as Great Britain was. The patriots came from all backgrounds, including lawyers like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, planters like Thomas Jefferson and George Mason, merchants like Alexander McDougall and John Hancock, and ordinary farmers like Daniel Shays and Joseph Plumb Martin, and they were united by their belief in a free America. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were key leaders of the republican movement, and Paine's pamphlet Common Sense essentially outlined the views of the Patriots; they were not willing to be ruled by a monarch whose word was seen as more valuable than that of the House of Commons, the Americans were not willing to depend on a power 3,000 miles away, and that a small island would not rule a large continent. The patriots also opposed "taxation without representation" and the British government's arbitrary rule in the colonies. Between 40% and 45% of the population of the Thirteen Colonies supported the patriots during the war, and the patriots would found a new nation after the war came to an end in 1783. Afterwards, the patriots were divided into the liberal and pro-decentralization Democratic-Republican Party and the conservative and pro-centralization Federalist Party.
The Patriot movement was divided into conservative and populist factions which disagreed over how far the principle of equality should be carried. Conservatives were concentrated in and around the coastal cities of Boston, Salem, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Charleston and in the tidewater regions of Virginia and the Carolinas, while Populists came from the inland valleys of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia and the highlands of Pennsylvania, North Jersey, Virginia, and the Carolinas, though the conservatives controlled a few backcountry constituencies like the Berkshire mountain region of western Massachusetts and the wilderness area of Virginia that became the state of Kentucky. Most Episcopalians and Quakers were conservatives, while most Baptists were populists. Congregationalists and Presbyterians divided on the basis of residence, dewllers in the coastal areas tending to be conservatives and inlanders tending to be populists. In Pennsylvania, liberal "Constitutionalists" were based among the Scots-Irish of the western highlands and in the Susquehanna Valley around Harrisburg, while the conservative "Republicans" dominated Philadelphia and conservative German farmers in Lancaster and York counties. In New York, the Clinton family supported the populists, while the Schuylers and Livingstons supported the conservatives. In Virginia, the conservatives dominated the Northern Neck peninsula, while the populists took root in the "Southside" region south of the James River.
