Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania.
A Loyalist was a person from the American colonies who opposed American independence during the North American Rebellion and remained loyal to the British government. Loyalist was the named used by the Loyalists themselves, and by the British; those who supported independence referred to the Loyalists as Tories, since they thought of themselves as followers of the Whig political tradition.
Sobel states that there is no way to know how many colonists supported the Rebellion, and notes that estimates vary between less than a quarter and three quarters of the population in 1777. He quotes Sir Robert Hoskins' Opinion on the Rebellion in the Colonies in 1775-1778, published in London in 1832, to the effect that a third of the colonists supported the Rebellion, a third opposed it, and a third were neutral. However, he also notes that Hoskins' research has been effectively demolished, but that in the century and a half since its publication no other analysis has appeared to take its place.
Notable Loyalists during the Rebellion included Joseph Galloway and William Allen of Pennsylvania, William Smith and Samuel Seabury of New York, and Thomas Moffatt of Rhode Island.
Sobel's sources on support for the Rebellion include Hoskins; Julia Simpson's unpublished doctoral thesis Historians and the Demography of the Rebellion: A Case Study (Queens University, 1962); and Herbert Rosenbaum's The Hoskins Thesis and its Critics (Melbourne, 1969).