IV.THE LOYALISTS.
Theopportunity of uniting together the colonies was lost when the government of England, under William and Mary, condoned the rebellion in Massachusetts, and allowed Connecticut and Rhode Island to resume their charters. From that time onward, union under the royal authority was impossible, even in the face of the pressing dangers of the French and Indian wars, to which for over sixty years the colonies were almost continuously exposed. Futile attempts were made, but in face of such a triumph of individualism nothing could be accomplished. When the conference at Albany, in 1754, put forth a plan of federation, drawn up by Benjamin Franklin and studiously moderate in its provisions, it was rejected with indignation by the colonies, as tending to servitude, and by the authorities in England, as incurably democratic.152Yetthe attempt that had been made had, at least, one result: it had created what we may call an imperial party, the members of which were devotedly attached to the connection with Great Britain, and opposed to that narrow spirit so prevalent in the colonies, which esteemed nothing as of value in comparison with their local customs and local privileges. This party grew strong in New York, where the extravagances of Leisler’s insurrection had called for stern chastisement, and was also well represented in New England. The new charter of Massachusetts, which gave it a governor appointed by the crown, while preserving its Assembly and its town organizations, had tended to encourage and develop, even in that fierce democracy, those elements of a conservative party which had been called into existence some years before by the disloyalty and tyranny of the ecclesiastical oligarchy. Thus, side by side with a group of men who were constantly regretting their lost autonomy, and looking with suspicion and prejudice at every action of the royal authorities, there arose this other group of those who constantly dwelt upon, and frequently exaggerated, the advantages they derived from their connection with the mother country. In Connecticutthere was a strong minority that had opposed the re-assumption of the charter after the overthrow of Andros; and in all the royal provinces an official class was gradually growing up, that was naturally imperial rather than local in its sympathies. The Church of England, also, had at last waked up to a sense of the spiritual needs of its children beyond the seas, and by means of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was sending devoted and self-sacrificing missionaries to labor among the people of the colonies.153The influence of this tended inevitably to maintain and strengthen the feeling of national unity in those of the colonists who came under the ministrations of the missionaries. In the colony of Connecticut, especial strength was given to this movement by an unexpected religious revolution, in which several of the prominent ministers of the ruling congregational body, and many of the best of the laity, forsook their separatist principles and returned to the historic church of the old home.154The wars with the French, in which colonists fought side by side with regulars, in a contest of national significance, tended upon the whole to intensify the sense of imperial unity; although there can be nodoubt that the British officers generally, by their contemptuous speeches and by their insolent manner towards the colonials whom they affected to despise, prepared the way for the eventual rupture of sentiment between the colonies and England.155
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that neither navigation laws nor the Stamp Act nor parliamentary interference had as much to do in alienating the affections of Americans from the mother country, as had the ill-mannered impertinence of the British officers and the royal officials. This insolence, when joined to Grenville’s bungling and exasperating attempt to extend imperial taxation to the colonies, had the result of uniting for a time nearly all Americans in opposition to the measures proposed by the advisers of the king, and enabled them to win a great constitutional victory over the attempt to impose stamp duties upon them. The division into two distinct parties, though as has been pointed out the groups had been gradually forming and drawing apart from one another, did not really come into definite existence until the further impolitic measures of successive ministries had strengthened the hands of those who were traditionally disposed to resist the authority of England.
It is very hard for us to put ourselves in the place of men of a century ago, and to think their thoughts and surround ourselves in imagination with their environment; we naturally carry back much of the nineteenth century into the eighteenth. We know the America of to-day, a vigorous, healthy, prosperous, mighty nation, reaching from sea to sea, filled with a busy people, adorned with the achievements of a hundred years, hallowed by many sacred memories. The American flag has floated proudly through the smoke of battle in every quarter of the world, and for a hundred years men have seen in it the symbol of a country and a fatherland. It is difficult for us to realize that, before 1776, these influences had no power; there was then no nation, no country, no fatherland, no flag, nothing but a number of not over-prosperous colonies, with but little love or liking for one another. Even the strongest Americans did not venture to use the wordnationor its derivatives, but called their congress, even after the formal separation from England, simply the Continental Congress. The very considerations which show us how wonderful and even sublime were the faith and the devotion of the leaders of the American revolution,will also show us how natural it was, how almost inevitable it was, that other men, whose connection with England was closer and more intimate, whose habits of mind were conservative rather than progressive, who had been brought up to fear God and honor the king and to think more about their duties than about their rights, should cling with devotion to the cause of the mother-country and condemn the revolution as a “parricidal rebellion.”
Besides this highest motive, which influenced the best and the purest-minded among the opponents of colonial separation, there were undoubtedly other motives of lower character, which affected some men in their decision, and disposed them to loyalty. The political power of all the colonies had been largely in the hands of those who were known as the “better sort,” usually gentlemen of good family, rich and well educated; in some of the colonies official position had been treated as the special prerogative of a few distinguished families who contended with one another for its possession: none of the colonies, not even Connecticut, was democratic as we understand the term to-day. In some cases the revolutionary movements and impulses came from a class which wishedto occupy public positions from which they had been excluded, and in others from dissatisfied and discontented men of birth and family, who were tired of being out in the cold, while their rivals were enjoying the pleasures and emoluments of office.156Thus in New York, the history of the revolution is closely bound up with the family feuds of the De Lanceys on the one side with the Livingstons on the other. In Massachusetts, the quarrel between Governor Bernard and the Otises did much to increase the patriotism of the latter family; and until the very breaking out of hostilities, the contest within the colony was between a majority of the well-to-do merchants and lawyers of Boston on the one side, and the least stable elements of the populace, under the leadership of one of the most skilful of political agitators, Samuel Adams, upon the other.
There is no doubt that, in Massachusetts at least, most well-to-do persons considered the agitation at first to be merely political, the usual device of the “outs” against the “ins”; they laughed at the loud talk of some of the orators, and considered that it was put on for effect.157When, in addition to this, the cause of American rights was disgraced, year after year, by riots, murder,arson, and sedition, those who were entrusted with the responsibilities of office, however much they sympathized with the abstract principles that were upheld by the popular leaders, were prejudiced against the concrete application of them.158We should also remember that, down to the time of the battle of Bunker Hill, if not later, all parties united in the most loyal and devoted language. The rights that were claimed were not the rights of Man, but of “natural-born subjects of the king of Great Britain”; the king was always described as “the best and most generous of monarchs,” and separation was never mentioned as a possibility in any public utterance. War was looked forward to by some of the most eager as a means of bringing the ministry to terms, or as an unavoidable necessity if the unconstitutional taxation was persisted in; but, up to the very last, most men agreed with Richard Henry Lee, who said to Adams, as they parted after the first Continental Congress in 1774: “All offensive acts will be repealed—Britain will give up her foolish project.”159
When the most ardent American patriots used this language, and used it sincerely, it is not remarkable that those who formed the opposing political party, who were conservativewhen these were the radicals, should have felt that they were bound by their duty to their king and country, or that they should also have felt that the disorderly actions and the factious attitude of some of the extreme patriots in Massachusetts and elsewhere were simply seditious. These convictions were undoubtedly strengthened by the abominable treatment which many of them personally received. They were not apt to look with greater favor upon a cause whose votaries had tried to recommend it to their liking by breaking their windows, plundering their houses, constantly insulting them, their wives and their daughters, to say nothing of tarring and feathering them, or of burning them in effigy. The penal measures imposed by the Parliament upon the town of Boston and the colony of Massachusetts had been brought upon themselves by the so-called patriots. One rather wonders at the slowness and mildness of the British government, and at their miserable inefficiency, than at any repressive measures that they undertook. They deserved to lose the colonies for their invincible stupidity, which led them from one blunder into another; they irritated when they ought either to have crushed or conciliated; they tried half-measureswhen vigorous action was necessary; they persisted in affronting all the other colonies while they failed in chastising sedition in Massachusetts. The result was that they drove many men, who were loyal subjects of Great Britain in 1774, into revolution in 1776, while they allowed the rebels of Massachusetts to wreak vengeance at their will upon those who had been faithful in their allegiance to their king.160
Besides those who were loyalists from conviction and temperament and those who were almost unavoidably so from the political position they occupied, there were also men who were loyalists from the profit it gave them. Such were the holders of the minor offices in the gift of the royal governors, the rich merchants who represented English trading-houses, and dreaded war and disturbance. There were others whose chief desire was to be upon the winning side, who were unable to conceive the possibility of the defeat of the English government by a handful of insurgent colonists, and some also who, from local or personal dislikes or prejudices, or from love of opposition, took a different side from that which was taken by their neighbors. It is probable, however, that there were hardly any whose motives were not tosome extent mixed; few on the one hand so disinterested or so devoted as not to be moved in some degree by self-interest or prejudice, few on the other hand whose nature was so biassed by prejudice or so sordid with love of place or pension as not also to be moved by the higher impulse of fidelity.
Loyalty is hard to define; it is one of those virtues which appeals not so much to the head as to the heart. Its critics accuse it of being irrational and illogical, as being based upon sentiment rather than upon conviction. Yet, in spite of logic and reason, or rather, on account of its profounder logic and higher reason, loyalty will hold its own, and strike an answering chord of admiration in the human heart as long as men appreciate disinterested virtue. It may be classed with the other unreasoned qualities that men yet esteem, with faith and truth, honor and courage, decency and chastity. It may be a man’s intellectual duty to follow the dictates of his understanding and to act upon his temporary convictions, whatever pain the action cost; nevertheless, the man whom we respect and follow is not the man who is always changing, who is easily influenced by argument, but the man who abides by certain fixed principles, and refusesto desert them, unless it can be shown him that beyond all chance of mistake they are wrong and misleading.
It has been sometimes asserted that loyalty can only be felt towards a personal ruler or a dynasty; such a restriction of the term is entirely unfounded. It is, by its very derivation, devotion to that which is legal and established. Legality and Loyalty are etymologically the same. No one can doubt that there is a high and noble devotion to right and justice which is as admirable and as strong as a devotion to any person. It is a more refined sentiment and appeals to a higher moral sense than does the simple fidelity to a person, beautiful and touching though such devotion be. The loyalty of men who, like the younger Verneys, espoused the side of the Parliament in its struggle with Charles the First, was as true and real a sentiment, though its character was impersonal, as was that of the stout Sir Edmund, who, though “he liked not the quarrel,” followed the king, because “he had eaten his bread too long to turn against him in his necessity.” There could hardly be a finer example of this loyalty to an idea than was shown by those Americans who condemned the stupid errors of the king and his advisers,and realized fully the danger to liberty in the system of government that George the Third was attempting to carry out in England and in America, and yet, in spite of all, remained patriotic subjects, not from affection but from principle, trusting to constitutional methods to overcome the evils which they felt as strongly as any of those who made them a justification for revolution.
As has been shown, among those who adhered to the side of the mother country in the revolution there were men of all kinds and convictions. There were those who were loyal because they believed in the legal right of the Parliament to tax the colonies, short-sighted as the policy might be, and considered their duty and their allegiance to be due to the united empire. There were those who adhered to the king’s cause from personal devotion to him and to his dynasty, an unreasonable devotion in the eyes of some, but certainly not as contemptible as American satirists have loved to describe it. There were those who were by nature conservatives, willing to do anything sooner than change, governed completely by a prejudice which hardly deserves the noble name of loyalty, but still had in it an element of steadiness and sturdiness that redeems it from contempt.There were also, undoubtedly, men who calculated the chances of victory in the struggle and espoused the side that they thought was likely to win; there were those who were for the king from pure gregariousness, because some of their friends and neighbors were on that side; and, finally, some who, from a mere love of opposition, set themselves against the cause of America because their neighbors and townsmen favored it.
And, as the motives which impelled men were different, so also their actions differed when the rupture came between the king and the colonies. Some were active favorers of the cause of the king, doing whatever they could to assist it and to injure the cause of their rebellious neighbors. Others sadly left their homes at the outbreak of the war and took refuge in England or in some of the English provinces, suffering want, anxiety, and despair, snubbed and despised by the insular English, compelled to hear America and Americans insulted, dragging along a miserable existence, like that of the shades whom Virgil found upon the bank of the infernal river, not allowed to return to earth or to enter either Elysium or Tartarus. Others attempted to live in peaceful neutrality in America, experiencing the usual fate of neutrals,animals like the bat neither beast nor bird but plundered and persecuted by both. Such betook themselves usually to the protection of the British arms, and were to be found in the greatest numbers at or near the headquarters of the British generals in Savannah or Charlestown, Newport or New York.
Some American writers have been extremely severe upon the Americans who served in the royal armies; such condemnation is certainly illogical and unjust. They were fighting, they might have reasoned, to save their country from mob rule, from the dominion of demagogues and traitors, and to preserve to it what, until then, all had agreed to be the greatest of blessings—the connection with Great Britain, the privilege and honor of being Englishmen, heirs of all the free institutions which were embodied in the “great and glorious constitution.”
If the loyalists of New York, Georgia, and the Carolinas reasoned in this manner, we cannot blame them, unless we are ready to maintain the proposition that the cause of every revolution is necessarily so sacred that those who do not sympathize with it should at least abstain from forcibly opposing it. The further charge is made that the worstoutrages of the war were committed by Tories, and the ill-doings of Brant and Butler at Wyoming and Cherry Valley, together with the raids of Tryon and Arnold, are held up to the execration of posterity as being something exceptionally brutal and cruel, unparalleled by any similar actions on the part of the Whig militia or the regular forces of either army, Sullivan’s campaign through the Indian country being conveniently forgotten.161Impartial history will not palliate the barbarities that were committed by either party; but there can be no doubt that the Tory wrong-doings have been grossly exaggerated, or at least have been dwelt upon as dreadful scenes of depravity to form a background for the heroism and fortitude of the patriotic party whose misdeeds are passed over very lightly. The methods of the growth of popular mythology have been the same in America as elsewhere; the gods of one party have become the devils of the other. The haze of distance has thrown a halo around the American leaders, softening their outlines, obscuring their faults, while the misdeeds of Tories and Hessians have grown with the growth of years. But it is an undoubted fact that there were outrages upon both sides, brutal officers on both sides, bad treatmentof prisoners on both sides, guerilla warfare with all its evil concomitants on both sides, and in these respects the Tories were no worse than the Whigs. There was not much to choose between a Cowboy and a Skinner, very little difference between Major Ferguson’s command and that of Marion and Sumter. There was no more orderly or better-behaved troop in either army than Simcoe’s Queen’s Rangers;162possibly there was none on either side as bad as the mixture of Iroquois Indians and Tory half-breeds who were concerned in the massacres at Wyoming and Cherry Valley.
The Americans, however, do not deserve any credit for abstaining from the use of Indian allies. They tried very hard to make use of them, but without success. A few Englishmen in the Mohawk Valley, faithful to the traditions of just and honest treatment of the Indians, which had been inherited from the Dutch, had succeeded in making the Iroquois regard them as friends, but everywhere else the Indian and the colonist were bitter and irreconcilable foes. The savage had long scores of hatred to pay, not upon the English nation or English army, but upon the American settlers who had stolen his lands, shot his sons, and debauched his daughters. Theemployment of the Mohawks by the English was an outrage and a crying shame upon civilization; but the responsibility of it lies directly upon the government which allowed it, and the commanding generals who sanctioned the expeditions, and only indirectly upon the men who carried out the directions of their superiors.163It is interesting to remember in this connection that the courteous and chivalrous Lafayette raised a troop of Indians to fight the British and the Tories, though his reputation has been saved by the utter and almost ludicrous failure of his attempt. The fact is that, as far as the Americans were engaged in it, the war of the Revolution was a civil war, in which the two sides were not far different in numbers or in social condition, and very much the same in their manners and customs. The loyalists contended all through the war that they were in a numerical majority, and that if they had been properly supported by the British forces and properly treated by the British generals, the war could have been ended in 1777, before the French alliance had given new hopes and new strength to the separatist party.164
Sabine, in his well-known work on the loyalists of the Revolution, computes thatthere were at least twenty thousand Americans in the military service of the king at one time or another during the war.165Other authorities think this estimate too high, but the number was extremely large. In New York and New Jersey it is probable that the opponents of separation outnumbered the patriot party, and the same is probably true of the Carolinas and Georgia. Even in New England, the nursery of the Revolution, the number was large and so formidable, in the opinion of the revolutionary leaders, that in order to suppress them they established a reign of terror and anticipated the famous “Law of the Suspected” of the French Revolution. An irresponsible tyranny was established of town and country committees at whose beck and call were the so-called “Sons of Liberty.” To these committees was entrusted an absolute power over the lives and fortunes of their fellow-citizens, and they proceeded on principles of evidence that would have shocked and scandalized a grand inquisitor.
Virginia and Maryland seem to have been the only provinces in which the body of the people sympathized with the projects of the revolutionary leaders. The few loyalists there were in Virginia retired to Englandwith the last royal governor, and in Maryland a strong sense of local independence and local pride led the colony to act with unanimity and moderation.
The rigorous measures adopted by the new governments in the Eastern States, and the activity of their town committees, succeeded in either driving out their loyalist citizens or reducing them to harmless inefficiency. In New York and New Jersey, however, they remained strong and active throughout the war; and as long as the British forces held Georgia and the Carolinas, loyalty was in the ascendant in those states.
The question will naturally be asked, why, if they were so numerous, were they not more successful, why did they yield to popular violence in New England and desert the country while the contest was going on, why did they not hold the Southern States and keep them from joining the others in the Continental Congresses and in the war. In the first place, a negative attitude is necessarily an inactive one; and in consequence of this and of the fact that they could not take the initiative in any action, the loyalists were put at a disadvantage before the much better organization of the patriotic leaders. Though these were few in number,in the South they were of the best families and of great social influence, and in the North they were popular agitators of long experience. They manipulated the committee system so carefully that the colonies found themselves, before they were aware of the tendency of the actions of their deputies, involved in proceedings of very questionable legality, such as the boycotting agreement known as the American Association, and the other proceedings of the Continental Congress.166When the war began, the population of the three southernmost states had very little care, except for their own lives and pockets. They were, with the exception of a few distinguished families, descendants of a very low grade of settlers. Oglethorpe’s philanthropy had left the legacy of disorder and inefficiency to the colony of Georgia, a legacy which the Empire State of the South has now nobly and grandly outlived. North Carolina had a most heterogeneous population, and was, perhaps, the most barbarous of all the colonies; while in South Carolina the extremes in the social scale were most strongly marked, from the high-spirited Huguenot gentlemen to the poor whites who formed the bulk of the population, worse taught, worse fed, and worse clad than thenegro slaves. Such a population as this, living also in constant fear of negro insurrection, was not likely to count for much on the one side or the other; and we shall find, if we read Gates’s and Greene’s dispatches on the one side, and Rawdon’s and Cornwallis’s on the other, that the rival commanders agree in one thing at least—in condemning and despising the worthlessness of the militia recruited in the southern country.167It was the utter cowardice of this militia that lost the battle of Camden and caused the needless sacrifice of the lives of the braver Continentals; and the correspondence of the English general is full of instances that prove that, except for plundering and bushwhacking, there was little use to be made of the loyalists in the South.
As to the other questions, why, when the loyalists were so numerous, were they not more successful, and why did the eastern loyalists yield to the violence that was offered them, one question nearly answers the other. They were not successful, because they had no leaders of their own stock and country, and because the British commanders blundered throughout the war with as unerring certainty and unfailing regularity as the various British ministries had done from1764 to 1776. The game was in the hands of the English, if they had known how to play it, for the first three years of the war. Then English inefficiency, rather than any belief in the ability of the colonists to make good their own independence, brought about the French alliance; and the war assumed from thenceforward a very different aspect. The desertion of their cause and their country by the many Tories who left New England for Great Britain or the loyal provinces, and the supineness of the men of place and position who attempted to preserve an attitude of neutrality instead of siding openly either for or against the king, weakened the king’s cause in America and prevented the numbers of the loyalist population from counting for as much as they were really worth.
The clever French diplomatist who collected and translated the correspondence of Lord George Germaine with the British generals and admirals, a remarkably well-informed critic of the military operations in America, states in his Preface his opinion as follows: “Another thing which clearly proves that the affairs of the English have been badly conducted in America, is that the American loyalists alone were superior in number to the rebels. How, then, has it come to passthat troops double in numbers, well paid and wanting nothing, aided besides by a German army, have failed in opposing the partisans of liberty, who, badly paid and badly equipped, often lacked everything? Manifestly it is in the different capacity of the commanders that we must seek for the counterweight which has turned the scale in favor of the latter. If the English had had a Washington at the head of their army there would long since have been no more question of war on the American Continent.... M. Linguet has said somewhere in his annals that the secretaries of the Congress were better than the secretaries of the English generals. The same may be said of the generals themselves.”168
Besides being inefficient in the field, the British commanders alienated their friends and weakened the attachment of the loyalists to the cause of the king by their extremely impolitic treatment of the American provinces within their occupation. The regular officers made no secret of their contempt for the colonists, and plundered them without mercy, making little, if any, distinction between loyalist or rebel, Tory or Whig. Judge Thomas Jones, a New Yorker of prominence and position, who was a devotedloyalist and one of the number especially singled out by name in the Act of Confiscation and Attainder passed by his native state, has left us his record of the way in which the British officers and officials exasperated rather than conciliated the Americans, and punished rather than rewarded the loyal for their attachment to the king and the integrity of the empire. He writes: “In 1780, part of the army went into winter quarters upon the westernmost end of the island, where they robbed, plundered, and pillaged the inhabitants of their cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry, and, in short, of anything they could lay their hands upon. It was no uncommon thing of an afternoon to see a farmer driving a flock of turkeys, geese, ducks, or dunghill fowls and locking them up in his cellar for security at night.... It was no uncommon thing for a farmer, his wife and children to sleep in one room, while his sheep were bleating in the room adjoining, his hogs grunting in the kitchen, and the cocks crowing, hens cackling, ducks quacking, and geese hissing in the cellar.... This robbing was done by people sent to America to protect loyalists against the persecutions and depredations of rebels. To complainwas needless; the officers shared in the plunder.” In Newtown, a Hessian soldier opened a butcher’s shop, where he undersold all competitors, because while they had to pay for their meat he had no such outlay. In 1781, when the troops left Flushing, a resident of that place wrote, “There was not a four-footed animal (a few dogs excepted) left in Flushing, nor a wooden fence.”
We cannot wonder at the indignant words with which Mr. Jones closes his recital of this vandalism. “If Great Britain had, instead of governing by military law, by courts of police, and courts martial, revived the civil law, opened the courts of justice, invested the civil magistrates with their full power, and convened general assemblies in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and in South and North Carolina (as well as in Georgia, where it produced the most salutary effects), as the rebels abandoned these provinces and fled before the British arms; and prevented, by severely punishing, all kinds of plunder, rapine, and pillage committed by the army, the rebellion in all probability would have terminated in a different manner. The empire would not have been disgraced or dishonored, nor Great Britain reducedto the necessity of asking pardon of her ungrateful children, acknowledging herself in the wrong, and granting them absolute, unconditional independence. But, alas! the very reverse of this marked every step in the royal army in all its proceedings, and Great Britain, as well as the Independent States of America, feel to this day the dire effects of a conduct so very impolitic, so unmilitary, so unjustifiable, and so repugnant to the Constitution, the spirit, the honor, and the sentiments of Englishmen.169
And now let us inquire how the loyalists were treated by the new governments of the various states. Besides the irregular violence to which the unfortunate loyalists were exposed at the hands of Sons of Liberty and town committeemen, they were marked out for punishment and plunder by the new state governments as they came into existence. The State of Massachusetts proscribed three hundred and eight persons by name, whom it condemned, if ever found within its borders, to imprisonment and eventual banishment; and if they ventured to return, it denounced the death penalty upon them. Not all of these were the wealthy merchants and lawyers who had offended the populace by their addresses to Hutchinson and Gage;at least a fifth of the number were from the middle classes of society, and some of them were of still humbler position. The State of New Hampshire, small as its population was at that time, banished seventy-six by name and confiscated twenty-eight estates. New York attainted and confiscated the property of fifty-nine persons by name, three of whom were women whose chief offence lay in the attractiveness of their estates. Pennsylvania summoned sixty-two persons to surrender themselves for trial for treason, and on their failing to appear they were pronounced attainted, and thirty-six estates were confiscated. In Delaware the property of forty-six refugees was confiscated. In North Carolina, sixty-five estates were confiscated. In South Carolina, for the offence of attachment to the royal cause in different degrees of offensiveness, two hundred and fifteen persons were either fined twelve per cent. of their entire property, or deprived of it wholly, or banished from the country.170In Rhode Island, death and confiscation of estate were the punishments provided by law for any person who communicated with the ministry or their agents, afforded supplies to their forces, or piloted the armed ships of the king; and certain persons were pronouncedby name enemies to liberty, and their property forfeited in consequence. In Connecticut, where the loyalists were very numerous but inclined to be quiet if they were let alone, these offences only involved loss of estate and of liberty for a term not exceeding three years; but to speak, write, or act against the doings of Congress or the Assembly of Connecticut was punishable by disqualification from office, imprisonment, and the disarming the offender. The estates of those who sought the royal fleets or land forces for shelter might, by law, be seized and confiscated. In her treatment of loyalists Connecticut showed the same shrewd sense that had characterized the proceedings of that republic from its earliest days; and the result was seen in the fact that the loyalists, instead of being alienated, became after the war was over some of her best and most patriotic citizens. William Samuel Johnson, who during part of the war, at least, was under surveillance as a suspected Tory, but who when the war was over was one of Connecticut’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and Seabury, the author of the clever and exasperating “A. W. Farmer” letters, who had been pulled through the mud by Sons of Libertyat New Haven, were none the less loyal citizens of the commonwealth and of the nation, and none the less respected by men who had differed from them, because they had been loyal to their convictions of duty. In Massachusetts, the feeling was much more bitter, and, in addition to the special act already mentioned, any person suspected of enmity to the Whig cause might be arrested under a magistrate’s warrant and banished, unless he would swear fealty to the friends of liberty; and the selectmen of towns could prefer in town meeting charges of political treachery and the individual thus accused, if convicted by a jury, could be sent into the enemy’s jurisdiction. By a second special act the property of twenty-nine persons, “notorious conspirators,” was confiscated; of these, fifteen had been “mandamus” councillors; two, governors of the province; one, lieutenant-governor; one, treasurer; one, secretary; one, attorney-general; one, chief-justice; and four, commissioners of customs. The State of Virginia, though passing no special acts, passed a resolution that persons of a given description should be deemed and treated as aliens, and that their property should be sold and the proceeds go into the public treasury for future disposal. InNew York, the county commissioners were authorized to apprehend and decide upon the guilt of such inhabitants as were supposed to hold correspondence with the enemy or who had committed some other specified acts, and might punish those whom they adjudged to be guilty with imprisonment for three months or banishment for seven years. Persons opposed to liberty and independence were prohibited from the practice of law in the courts; and any parent whose sons went off and adhered to the enemy was subject to a tax of ninepence in the pound value of such parent’s estate for each and every such son.
The Congress naturally left such matters largely to the individual states, but nevertheless passed a resolution subjecting to martial law and death all who should furnish provisions, etc., to the British army in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, and resolved that all loyalists taken in arms should be sent to the states to which they belonged, there to be dealt with as traitors.171
In regard to this subject of legal attainder and exile, Mr. Sabine remarks very moderately and sensibly: “Nor is it believed that either the banishment, or the confiscation laws, as they stood, were more expedient than just. The latter did little towardsrelieving the public necessities, and served only to create a disposition for rapacity, and to increase the wealth of favored individuals. Had the estates, which were seized and sold, been judiciously or honestly managed, a considerable sum would have found its way to the treasury; but, as it was, the amount was inconsiderable, some of the wisest and purest Whigs of the time hung their heads in shame, because of the passage of measures so unjustifiable, and never ceased to speak of them in terms of severe reprobation. Mr. Jay’s disgust was unconquerable, and he never would purchase any property that had been forfeited under the Confiscation Act of New York.”172
Curwen, a Salem loyalist who was allowed to return after the war, writes in terms that, though exaggerated, yet describe the result upon public morals of the confiscations:
“So infamously knavish has been the conduct of the commissioners, that though frequent attempts have been made to bring them to justice, and respond for the produce of the funds resting in their hands, so numerous are the defaulters inthat august body, the General Court, that all efforts have hitherto proved in vain. Not twopence inthe pound have arrived to the public treasury of all the confiscations.”173
It only now remains to notice the treatment the unfortunate loyalists received from their friends in England and the manner in which the British government—for which they had sacrificed home, friends, and property, and had embraced exile, contempt, and penury—threw them upon the tender mercies of their opponents in the treaty of peace. This surrender of their interests by Lord Shelburne called out, in both Houses of the Parliament, expressions of sympathetic indignation; but the sympathy never took any material shape. Sheridan, in the House of Commons, execrated the treatment of these unfortunate men, “who, without the least notice taken of their civil and religious rights, were handed over as subjects to a power that would not fail to take vengeance on them for their zeal and attachment to the religion and government of the ‘mother country.’” In the House of Lords, Lord Loughborough said, “that neither in ancient nor modern history had there been so shameful a desertion of men who had sacrificed all to their duty and to their reliance upon British faith.”
To such charges Lord Shelburne could only reply by a feeble appeal to the mercy of hiscondemners: “I have but one answer to give the House; it is the answer I give my own bleeding heart. A part must be wounded that the whole of the empire may not perish. If better terms could be had, think you, my lords, that I would not have embraced them? I had but the alternative either to accept the terms proposed or continue the war.”174
Lord Shelburne’s statement was correct. He had entered upon the negotiations for peace full of sympathy for the loyalists and resolved to make their cause the cause of England; but when, to his attempts to obtain for them the restoration of their property and the abolition of penal laws, was opposed a steadynon possumus, his enthusiasm for his persecuted fellow-countrymen waned; and when at last it was plainly suggested to him that a year’s prolongation of the war would cost more than all the loyalists’ property put together, he consented to accept the assurance, the futility and emptiness of which was evident upon the face of it, that “Congress shall earnestly recommend” to the several states to repeal the laws of attainder and confiscation which had been passed against the Tories and their property. One of the American negotiators brusquelyremarked that it was better and more proper that the loyalists should be compensated by their friends than by their enemies. This desertion of their interests almost broke the hearts of some of the best and most public-spirited of the loyalists, who had given up everything for the cause of their country, and now saw themselves consigned to poverty in their old age, or at the best to supplicating aid of the British government and being exposed to all “the insolence of office and the scorns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.”175
It took a long time to adjust the claims and to distribute the bounty which was doled out by unwilling officials. It was 1783 when the war closed, but not until 1790 was the indemnity paid out to the claimants; and then England forced her unfortunate pensioners, made paupers by their trust in her, to accept about £3,300,000 for losses reckoned at over £8,000,000. It is estimated that over a thousand claimants had in the mean time perished in want and penury. Those were on the whole more fortunate, as events proved, who had braved it out in America than were those who had trusted to the gratitude of England.176
What was the loss of America was thegain to her nearest neighbors, the coast provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. As early as 1775 the exodus from Boston to Halifax had begun; and when Howe evacuated the city, a large number of loyalists took refuge with the fleet and army, and leaving all behind came to Halifax to seek their fortunes under another sky. From that time on, throughout the war, Halifax was the haven of refuge for persecuted loyalists.177At the evacuation of New York and Savannah no fewer than 30,000 persons left the United States for Nova Scotia. Halifax was so crowded that houses could not be had at any price, and provisions were held at famine prices.178From northern New York and Vermont the loyalists crossed over into Upper Canada and laid the foundation of that prosperous province under the vigorous government of Governor Simcoe, who during the war had commanded a regiment of loyalist rangers which had done efficient service.179With many a suffering, many a privation, these exiles for conscience’ sake toiled to make homes for themselves in the wilderness, and it is to them that the development of those provinces is due. Familiar New England names meet one at every turn in these provinces,especially in Nova Scotia. Dr. Inglis of Trinity Church, New York, was the first bishop, and Judge Sewall of Massachusetts, the first chief justice there. The harshness of the laws and the greed of the new commonwealths thus drove into exile men who could be ill spared, and whose absence showed itself in the lack of balance and of political steadiness that characterized the early history of the Republic. This, moreover, perpetuated a traditional dislike, grudge, and suspicion between the people of the United States and their nearest neighbors, men of the same blood and the same speech; while the new-founded colonies, composed almost exclusively of conservatives, were naturally slow, if sure, in their development.
This dislike and suspicion is now fortunately diminishing with the lapse of years, but it was a great pity it ever was created. The men who were willing to give up home, friends, and property for an idea, are not men to be despised or laughed at, as was the fashion of the generation which roared with delight over the coarse buffooneries of Trumbull’s McFingal. They are rather men for us to claim with pride, and to honor as Americans, Americans who were true to their convictions of duty, confessors for their political faith.
Sabine relates the following conversation:
“‘Why did you come here, when you and your associates were almost certain to endure the sufferings and absolute want of shelter and food which you have now narrated?’ asked an American gentleman of one of the first settlers of St. John, New Brunswick, a man whose life ... was without a stain. ‘Why did we come here?’ replied he, with emotion that brought tears;—‘for our loyalty; think you that our principles were not as dear to us as were yours to you?’”180