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 worst
outrages 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.[161] Impartial 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 treatment of 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;[162] possibly 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. The employment 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.[163] It
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 that there were at least twenty thousand Americans in
the military service of the king at one time or another during the
war.[165] Other 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 England
with 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.[166] When 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 the negro 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.[167] It 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 from 1764 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 pass that
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 devoted loyalist 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 complain was 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
reduced to 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.[170] In 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
pronounced by 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 Liberty at
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. In New 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 towards relieving 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 in _that august body_, the
General Court, that all efforts have hitherto proved in vain. Not
twopence in the 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 his condemners: “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]