_propria forma_, into the hands of Sir Edmund Andros at Hertford, in
October, 1687, and were annexed to the Mass. Bay colony, in preference
to New York, according to royal promise and their own petition. But
the very night of the surrender of it, Samuel Wadsworth of Hertford,
with the assistance of a mob, violently broke into the apartments of
Sir Edmund, regained, carried off and hid the charter in the hollow of
an elm, and in 1689, news arriving of an insurrection and overthrow
of Andros at Boston, Robert Treat, who had been elected in 1687, was
declared by the mob still to be Governor of Connecticut. He daringly
summoned his old Assembly, who being convened, voted the charter to be
valid in law, and that it could not be vacated by any power, without
the consent of the General Assembly. They then voted, that Samuel
Wadsworth should bring forth the charter; which he did in a solemn
procession, attended by the High Sheriff, and delivered it to the
Governor. The General Assembly voted their thanks to Wadsworth, and
twenty shillings as a reward for stealing and hiding their charter in
an elm.”
[136] _Conn. Col. Rec._ (1678–89), 248.
[137] Bulkeley, Gershom, _Will and Doom_, in _Conn. Col. Rec._
(1678–89), 390, 391.
[138] _Conn. Col. Rec._ (1678–89), 393 _note_, 404 _note_.
[139] Trumbull, _History of Connecticut_, i. 371–375.
[140] For Andros’s own account of the transaction, see _N. Y. Col.
Doc._, iii. 722–726. _Andros Tracts_, iii. 20, 21. _R. I. Col. Rec._,
iii. 281.
[141] It is interesting to notice in this regard, that the chief
complaint Increase Mather made against Andros, in his interview
with James II., was that he did not sufficiently observe the king’s
Declaration of Indulgence. Mather, Cotton, D. D., _Life of Increase
Mather_, p. 41, London 1725. _Parentator_, pp. 109–116 (reprinted in
part in _Andros Tracts_, iii. 121–187). _Cf._ Randolph’s account in
_N. Y. Col. Doc._, iii. 578; also, Chalmers, _Pol. Annals_, 426.
[142] Whitmore. _Andros Tracts_, i. 1–10. Hutchinson, i. 374–377.
_N. Y. Col. Doc._, iii. 722, 726. Palfrey, _History of New England_,
iii. ch. xiv., xv. That the revolution was carefully prepared and
planned, see Mather, Samuel, _Life of Cotton Mather_, p. 42, and _N. Y.
Col. Doc._, iii. 587, 588 (Deposition of Philip French), New York, 1689.
“The above said Mr. Philip French further declared that being on board
the ‘Prudent Sarah,’ Benjamin Gillem Mast^r coming from England in
company with Sir Will^m Fips. heard him speak severall times the words
following to this effect, ‘that he did say the first fishing boat he
mett he would hire and goe privately ashore and rise a company without
beating of drum, and that he would take the packets sent to S^r Edmund
and not deliver them to him, except he appeared in Councill, and there
would secure him.’
“That about the same time upon the said voyage he heard S^r Will^m
Fips say that he appeared before the Lords, and one of them starting
up asked him whether they would stand by the rights of their Charter,
or for the abuses they had received from Sir Edmund Andros; it was
answered, by the right of their charter.
“And about the same time this Deponant heard him say, that they (which
this Deponant supposes were the Lords or the Cômons assembled in
Parliament) told him, that if they did give them trouble to hang Sir
Edmund, they deserved noe funds.”
[143] _Conn. Col. Rec._ (1678–89), 250, 455–460.
[144] _N. Y. Col. Doc._, iii. 723. Whitmore, _Andros Tracts_, iii. 22,
23, 41–43 (for his escape and capture, 95–102).
[145] Hutchinson, i. 394.
[146] Beverly, _History of Virginia_, i. 37. C. W. (Charles Wolley),
A. M., _A Two Years’ Journal in New York_. For an unfavorable account,
_Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc._, v. 124–166, “_An Account of the Present
State and Government of Virginia_.” The Sainsbury Papers, in the State
Library at Richmond, Va., are transcripts and abstracts from the London
originals, of all official papers of this period, relating to Virginia,
and an examination of them made in 1892, through the kindness of the
State Librarian, gave strong corroboration of the view of Andros’s
administration presented by Wolley and Beverly, and presented Blair
and his friends in a less amiable light than they have presented
themselves. _Cf._ Meade, _Old Churches and Families of Virginia_, i.
107, 108. Perry, _History of the American Episcopal Church_, vol. i.
chapter vii.
[147] Perry, _Historical Collections of the American Colonial Church:
Virginia_.
[148] Whitmore, I. xxxiv. Duncan, 130, 131, 589. “In 1704, under
Queen Anne, he was extraordinarily distinguished by having the
lieutenant-governorship of Guernsey bestowed on him, whilst he also
continued bailiff, his duties, as such, being dispensed with for the
time, he having power given to him to appoint his lieutenant-bailiff,
who was likewise authorized to name a deputy.”
[149] Whitmore, I. xxxv.
[150] Duncan, 589. “Sir Edmund was for many years at the head of a
mixed and adventurous population, in newly settled and important
colonies, distant from the mother country, a station at all time
arduous, but immeasurably so in the age of revolutions in which he
lived, when the institutions longest established were not exempt
from the common jeopardy, and unusual energy was called for in all,
wherever situated, by whom the royal authority was to be asserted. He
resolutely encountered the duties and responsibilities of his high
office throughout the long course of his career, and was successful
in resisting, in his military as well as in his civil capacity, the
intrigues and hostilities of the neighboring French and Indians, to
which he was continually exposed. By some of the chroniclers of the
period, who wrote, doubtless, not uninfluenced by its partisanship,
he has been represented, in his earlier government under James the
Second, as an abettor of tyranny; but by others of them, appearing to
have possessed the best means of judging of the circumstances under
which he acted, his conduct has been liberally estimated. His later
administration, under William the Third, is allowed to have been
irreproachable. All the colonies advanced greatly in improvement whilst
under his charge; and the fact that he was distinguished by the marked
approval and successive appointments of his several sovereigns, after,
no less than before, the Revolution, cannot but be interpreted as the
strongest testimonial in his favor, and highly to the honor of his
reputation.”
Chalmers remarks (_Political Annals_, i. 422): “The charges of greatest
magnitude were not the faults of the governor, but of the constitution;
the smaller accusations arose from actions directly contrary to his
instructions. Did he act contrary to them and to his commission, he
had been the most faithless of servants, and most criminal of men. But
he did not. For, when the agents of the province impeached him before
William, they accused him not of acting inconsistent with either,
but of having exercised an authority unconstitutional and tyrannous.
His conduct was approved of by James; and he was again appointed a
colonial governor by William, because he equally appeared to him
worthy of trust. Unhappily oppressed by a real tyranny, the colonists
of those days beheld every action with diseased eyes, and their
distempers have descended in a great measure to their historians, who
have retailed political fictions as indubitable truths.” And again:
“What a spectacle does the administration of Andros hold up to mankind
for their instruction; under a form of government, plainly arbitrary
and tyrannous, more real liberty was actually enjoyed than under the
boasted system, which appeared so fair.”
[151] _Doc. Hist. of N. Y._, i. 179.
IV.
THE LOYALISTS.
The opportunity 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.[152] Yet
the 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 Connecticut there 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.[153] The
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.[154] The 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 no doubt 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 word
_nation_ or 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 wished to 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.[156] Thus
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.[157] When, 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.[158] We 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 conservative when 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-measures when 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 to some 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 refuses to 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.