This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan.
CHRONICLES OF CANADA
Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
In thirty-two volumes
Volume 13
THE UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS
A Chronicle of the Great Migration
By W. STEWART WALLACE
TORONTO, 1914
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTORY
II. LOYALISM IN THE THIRTEEN COLONIES
III. PERSECUTION OF THE LOYALISTS
IV. THE LOYALISTS UNDER ARMS
V. PEACE WITHOUT HONOUR
VI. THE EXODUS TO NOVA SCOTIA
VII. THE BIRTH OF NEW BRUNSWICK
VIII. IN PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
IX. THE LOYALISTS IN QUEBEC
X. THE WESTERN SETTLEMENTS
XI. COMPENSATION AND HONOUR
XII. THE AMERICAN MIGRATION
XIII. THE LOYALIST IN HIS NEW HOME
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
The United Empire Loyalists have suffered a strange fate
at the hands of historians. It is not too much to say
that for nearly a century their history was written by
their enemies. English writers, for obvious reasons, took
little pleasure in dwelling on the American Revolution,
and most of the early accounts were therefore American
in their origin. Any one who takes the trouble to read
these early accounts will be struck by the amazing manner
in which the Loyalists are treated. They are either
ignored entirely or else they are painted in the blackest
colours.
So vile a crew the world ne'er saw before,
And grant, ye pitying heavens, it may no more!
If ghosts from hell infest our poisoned air,
Those ghosts have entered these base bodies here.
So sang a ballad-monger of the Revolution; and the opinion
which he voiced persisted after him. According to some
American historians of the first half of the nineteenth
century, the Loyalists were a comparatively insignificant
class of vicious criminals, and the people of the American
colonies were all but unanimous in their armed opposition
to the British government.
Within recent years, however, there has been a change.
American historians of a new school have revised the
history of the Revolution, and a tardy reparation has
been made to the memory of the Tories of that day. Tyler,
Van Tyne, Flick, and other writers have all made the
_amende honorable_ on behalf of their countrymen. Indeed,
some of these writers, in their anxiety to stand straight,
have leaned backwards; and by no one perhaps will the
ultra-Tory view of the Revolution be found so clearly
expressed as by them. At the same time the history of
the Revolution has been rewritten by some English
historians; and we have a writer like Lecky declaring
that the American Revolution 'was the work of an energetic
minority, who succeeded in committing an undecided and
fluctuating majority to courses for which they had little
love, and leading them step by step to a position from
which it was impossible to recede.'
Thus, in the United States and in England, the pendulum
has swung from one extreme to the other. In Canada it
has remained stationary. There, in the country where they
settled, the United Empire Loyalists are still regarded
with an uncritical veneration which has in it something
of the spirit of primitive ancestor-worship. The interest
which Canadians have taken in the Loyalists has been
either patriotic or genealogical; and few attempts have
been made to tell their story in the cold light of
impartial history, or to estimate the results which have
flowed from their migration. Yet such an attempt is worth
while making--an attempt to do the United Empire Loyalists
the honour of painting them as they were, and of describing
the profound and far-reaching influences which they
exerted on the history of both Canada and the United
States.
In the history of the United States the exodus of the
Loyalists is an event comparable only to the expulsion
of the Huguenots from France after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes. The Loyalists, whatever their social
status (and they were not all aristocrats), represented
the conservative and moderate element in the revolting
states; and their removal, whether by banishment or
disfranchisement, meant the elimination of a very wholesome
element in the body politic. To this were due in part no
doubt many of the early errors of the republic in finance,
diplomacy, and politics. At the same time it was a
circumstance which must have hastened by many years the
triumph of democracy. In the tenure of land, for example,
the emigration produced a revolution. The confiscated
estates of the great Tory landowners were in most cases
cut up into small lots and sold to the common people;
and thus the process of levelling and making more democratic
the whole social structure was accelerated.
On the Canadian body politic the impress of the Loyalist
migration is so deep that it would be difficult to
overestimate it. It is no exaggeration to say that the
United Empire Loyalists changed the course of the current
of Canadian history. Before 1783 the clearest observers
saw no future before Canada but that of a French colony
under the British crown. 'Barring a catastrophe shocking
to think of,' wrote Sir Guy Carleton in 1767, 'this
country must, to the end of time, be peopled by the
Canadian race, who have already taken such firm root,
and got to so great a height, that any new stock
transplanted will be totally hid, except in the towns of
Quebec and Montreal.' Just how discerning this prophecy
was may be judged from the fact that even to-day it holds
true with regard to the districts that were settled at
the time it was written. What rendered it void was the
unexpected influx of the refugees of the Revolution. The
effect of this immigration was to create two new
English-speaking provinces, New Brunswick and Upper
Canada, and to strengthen the English element in two
other provinces, Lower Canada and Nova Scotia, so that
ultimately the French population in Canada was outnumbered
by the English population surrounding it. Nor should the
character of this English immigration escape notice. It
was not only English; but it was also filled with a
passionate loyalty to the British crown. This fact serves
to explain a great deal in later Canadian history. Before
1783 the continuance of Canada in the British Empire was
by no means assured: after 1783 the Imperial tie was
well-knit.
Nor can there be any doubt that the coming of the Loyalists
hastened the advent of free institutions. It was the
settlement of Upper Canada that rendered the Quebec Act
of 1774 obsolete, and made necessary the Constitutional
Act of 1791, which granted to the Canadas representative
assemblies. The Loyalists were Tories and Imperialists;
but, in the colonies from which they came, they had been
accustomed to a very advanced type of democratic government,
and it was not to be expected that they would quietly
reconcile themselves in their new home to the arbitrary
system of the Quebec Act. The French Canadians, on the
other hand, had not been accustomed to representative
institutions, and did not desire them. But when Upper
Canada was granted an assembly, it was impossible not to
grant an assembly to Lower Canada too; and so Canada was
started on that road of constitutional development which
has brought her to her present position as a self-governing
unit in the British Empire.