Editing Benjamin Thompson (section)

==American Revolutionary War==
When the [[American Revolutionary War]] began, Thompson, by now a wealthy and influential landowner, came out in opposition to the uprising. He soon used his connections in the state militia to recruit and arm [[loyalist (American Revolution)|loyalists]] seeking to aid British forces fighting the [[patriot (American Revolution)|rebels]]. This earned him the enmity of New Hampshire's Patriot faction; he was stripped of his command and a mob attacked and burned Thompson's house. He fled to the British lines, abandoning his wife, as it turned out, permanently. Thompson became a political and military advisor to General [[Thomas Gage]] (to whom he was already passing information on the Americans), and later assisted Lord [[George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville|George Germain]] in the organization and provisioning of Loyalist units.

In 1781, Thompson financed his own military unit - The [[King's American Dragoons]] - which primarily served on [[Long Island]] in 1782 and early 1783, where they earned local notoriety for demolishing a church and burial ground in order to erect [[Fort Golgotha and the Old Burial Hill Cemetery|Fort Golgotha]] in [[Huntington, New York|Huntington]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://town.huntington.ny.us/permit_pics/215.pdf |title=Old Burying Ground (17th Century) & Fort Golgotha (1782) |access-date=16 December 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110429024837/http://town.huntington.ny.us/permit_pics/215.pdf |archive-date=29 April 2011 }}</ref>

While working with the British armies in America he conducted experiments to measure the force of [[gunpowder]], the results of which were widely acclaimed when published in 1781 in the ''[[Philosophical Transactions]]'' of the [[Royal Society]].<ref>{{cite journal |author=Thompson |first=Benjamin |year=1781 |title=New Experiments upon Gun-Powder, with Occasional Observations and Practical Inferences |journal=[[Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London]] |volume=71 |pages=229–328 |doi=10.1098/rstl.1781.0039 |jstor=106525 |doi-access=free}}</ref> On the strength of this, he arrived in [[London]] at the end of the war with a reputation as an accomplished scientist.

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