Eleven-year-old Nate is the protagonist of I Survived the American Revolution. He is loyal to his loved ones and unhesitatingly sacrifices his own well-being to ensure their safety. Over the course of the novel, Nate grows to become a courageous young man. In his earlier years, he accompanied his Papa on a ship, and he now views the world around him in the context of his own time at sea and finds himself daydreaming of those days. However, toward the end of the book, he learns to live in the present moment and focuses on the bigger picture of the Revolutionary War.

In the novel’s early chapters Nate is not concerned about the war. He doesn’t care who wins because he does not believe that his own circumstances will change in the slightest. In his eyes, “Eliza and Theo would still be [enslaved]. Papa would still be gone. And [he] would be stuck here, pulling up Storch’s weeds” (17). Nate remembers listening to Papa and the other men on the ship talking about a new country, and overhears Storch and his friend Marston, who are both Loyalists, confidently predicting that the British will win the war.