i. 40, 41):

“C’est un pays qui sera fort heureux s’il jouit d’une paix longue, et si les deux partis qui le divisent à present ne lui font subir le sort de la Pologne et de tant d’autres républiques. Ces deux partes sont appelés les Whigs et les Torys. Le premier est entièrement pour la liberté et l’independance; il est composé de gens de la plus basse extraction qui ne possédent point de biens; la plupart des habitants de la compagne en sont. Les Torys sont pour les Anglais, ou, pour mieux dire, pour la paix, sans trop se soucier d’être libres ou dépendants; ce sont les gens d’une classe plus distinguée, les seuls qui eussent des biens dans le pays. Lorsque les Whigs sont les plus forts, ils pillent les autres tant qu’ils peuvent.”

[162] Simcoe, Lt.-Col. J. G., _A History of the Operations of a Partisan Corps called the Queen’s Rangers, commanded by Lt.-Col. J. G. Simcoe, during the war of the American Revolution_. New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1884, 8vo, pp. 328.

[163] The Americans made several attempts to make use of the Indians: Montgomery used them in his Canadian expedition; they were in the New England army which laid siege to Boston; in April, 1776, Washington wrote to Congress urging their employment in the army, and reported on July 13th that, without special authority, he had directed General Schuyler to engage the Six Nations on the best terms he and his colleagues could procure; and again, submitting the propriety of engaging the Eastern Indians. John Adams thought “we need not be so delicate as to refuse me assistance of Indians, provided we cannot keep them neutral.” A treaty was exchanged with the Eastern Indians on July 17, 1776, whereby they agreed to furnish six hundred Indians for a regiment which was to be officered by the whites. As a result of this, the Massachusetts Council subsequently reported that seven Penobscot Indians, all that could be procured, were enlisted in October for one year; and in November Major Shaw reported with a few Indians who had enlisted in the Continental service. Winsor, _Narr. and Crit. Hist._, vol. vi. 656, 657. The following brief entry in a diary will show that even among the patriot forces savage customs sometimes found place: “On Monday the 30th sent out a party for some dead Indians. Toward morning found them, and skinned two of them from their hips down for boot legs: one pair for the major, the other for myself.” _Proceedings N. J. Hist. Soc._, ii. p. 31.

[164] _North American Review_, lix. 264 (Sabine). “The opponents of the Revolution were powerful in all the thirteen colonies; in some of them they were nearly if not quite equal in number to its friends the Whigs. On the departure of Hutchinson he was addressed by upwards of two hundred merchants, lawyers and other citizens of Boston, Salem and Marblehead. On arrival of Gage, forty-eight from Salem presented their dutiful respects; on his retirement he received the ‘Loyal address from gentlemen and principal inhabitants of Boston’ to the number of ninety-seven, and eighteen country gentlemen and official personages who had taken refuge in Boston.” ...

* * * * *

“The division of parties in Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire was much the same as in Massachusetts. New York was the loyalists’ stronghold, and contained more of them than any colony in America. While proof to sustain this assertion can be adduced to almost any extent, we shall cite but a single though conclusive fact; namely, that soon after the close of the war the Assembly of that State passed a bill prohibiting adherents of the crown from holding office, which was objected to and returned by the Council of Revision, who, among other reasons for their course, stated, that if it were suffered to become a law, there would be difficulty, and in some places an impossibility, of finding men of different political sympathies, even to conduct the elections. In some of the southern colonies, the loyalists were almost as numerous as in New York. In the Carolinas it may be hard to determine which party had the majority; and it will be found that there were occasions when the royal generals obtained twelve or fifteen hundred recruits among the inhabitants, merely by issuing a proclamation or call upon them to stand by their allegiance to “the best of sovereigns.... Few of the Carolinians would enlist under the American banner; but after the capitulation (of Charlestown) they flocked to the royal standard by hundreds.” See also Sabine’s _Loyalists_, Introductory Sketch; Ryerson, _Loyalists of America_, ii. 57, 124. For remarks on the war, as a civil war, see Ramsay, _Hist. U. S._, ii. 467–9.

[165] Sabine, i. 65.

[166] A. W. Farmer, _The Congress Canvassed_, pp. 17–19, exhibits the manner in which delegates to Congress were chosen in New York. “The New York City committee (a self-appointed body) applied to the supervisors in the several counties to call the people together and to choose committees, which committees were to meet in one grand committee; and this grand committee of committees were to choose the delegates for the county or to declare their approbation of the New York delegates, and if any county did not meet and choose their committee it was to be taken for granted that they acquiesced in the New York choice.” Again as to delegates chosen by the Assemblies: “The Assembly has no legal right to act by itself and claim to represent the people in so doing. The people are not bound by any act of their representatives till it hath received the approbation of the other branches of the legislature. Delegates so appointed are, at best, but delegates of delegates, but representatives of representatives. When therefore the delegates at Philadelphia, in the preamble to their Bill of Rights, and in their letter to his Excellency General Gage, stiled their body ‘a full and free representation of ... all the Colonies from Nova Scotia to Georgia,’ they were guilty of a piece of impudence which was never equalled since the world began, and never will be exceeded while it shall continue.” Again: “No provincial legislature (even if complete) can give them such powers as were lately exercised at Philadelphia. The legislative authority of the province cannot extend further than the province extends. None of its acts are binding one inch beyond its limits. How then can it give authority to a few persons, to make rules and laws for the whole continent?... Before such a mode of legislation can take place, the constitution of our colonies must be subverted and their present independency on one another must be annihilated.”

The logic of the loyalist writers is unanswerable, and their legal reasoning is usually correct and precise; the fallacy of their position was that they were in face of a revolution. Elements had been introduced into the struggle which, like the presence of an infinite quantity in an equation, vitiated the reasoning, however correct the process may have been. The author argues, for example: “To talk of subjection to the King of Great Britain, while we disclaim submission to the Parliament of Great Britain, is idle and ridiculous. It is a distinction made by the American Republicans to serve their own rebellious purposes, a gilding with which they have enclosed the pill of sedition, to entice the unwary colonists to swallow it the more readily down. The King of Great Britain was placed on the throne by virtue of an Act of Parliament: And he is king of America, by virtue of being king of Great Britain. He is therefore king of America by Act of Parliament. And if we disclaim that authority which made him our king, we, in fact, reject him from being our king, for we disclaim that authority by which he is king at all.” It may be noticed that the fundamental Whig doctrine of the supremacy of Parliament, which is here so strongly urged, was never understood or appreciated by those who called themselves Whigs in America.

[167] _Clinton-Cornwallis Correspondence_, i. pp. 263, 265.

[168] _Clinton-Cornwallis Correspondence_, ii. pp. 308, 309.

[169] Jones, Thomas, _History of New York_, i. 362–3, 172–176.

[170] _Christian Examiner_, viii. pp. 127, 128 (Dabney). Curwen, _Journal_, 475, 479.

[171] Sabine, _North American Review_, lix. pp. 287, 288. _Loyalists_, i. 71–81. Ryerson, _Loyalists of America_, ii. 130, 136.

[172] _No. Am. Rev._, lix. p. 289.

[173] _The Journal and Letters of the late Samuel Curwen_, New York and Boston, 1842, p. 147.

[174] _Parliamentary History_, vol. xxiii. 411, 412, 430, 481. The following extracts may be added to those given in the text; Mr. Burke said: “Better to have left the whole to future negotiation, and to have been totally silent upon the subject in the treaty, than to have consented to have set our hands to a gross libel on the national character, and in our flagitious article plunged the dagger into the hearts of the loyalists, and manifested our own impotency, ingratitude and disgrace” (p. 468). In the same debate Mr. Lee said: “Europe, Asia, Africa and America beheld the dismembership and diminution of the British Empire. But this, alarming and calamitous as it was, was nothing when put in competition with another of the crimes of the present peace, the cession of men into the hands of their enemies, and delivering over to confiscation, tyranny, resentment and oppression the unhappy men who trusted to our fair promises and deceitful words. This was the great ground of his objection: and he called it a disgraceful, wicked and treacherous peace; inadequate to its object, and such as no man could vote to be honorable without delivering his character over to damnation for ever” (p. 492).

[175] Ryerson, ii. 64. Curwen’s _Journal_, 367. Jones, _History of N. Y._, ii. The bitterness of the mortification, and resentment at the treatment they had received from the hands of their friends, is well exhibited in Judge Jones’s remarkable work, which, however trustworthy or the reverse it may be in other respects, may be followed implicitly as an exhibition of loyalist feeling towards the mother country.

[176] Jones, ii. 645–654. Wilmot, _Historical View of the Commission for Enquiry into the Losses, etc._, London, 1815. Ryerson, ii. 159–182. _Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson_, ii. 435–437. Sabine, i. 86–90. In March, 1784, the number of persons who had preferred their petitions was 2,063, and the alleged losses £7,046,278, besides outstanding debts in America amounting to £2,354,135. “In 1788 Mr. Pitt submitted a plan for classifying the claimants, and of classifying and apportioning the nature and amount of consolation to be allotted to each; and to those whose losses had been caused principally by the deprivation of official or professional incomes, he proposed a system of pensions. By the 5th of April, this year (1790), the Commissioners in England had heard and determined 1,680 claims, and had liquidated the same at the sum of £1,887,548. It appeared, finally, that the number of applicants from England, and from the Canadian provinces, attained to the aggregate of 5,072, of which 954 either withdrew their applications or failed to press them, and the sum of the losses is stated to have been £8,026,045. Another return is made out by Mr. J. E. Wilmot, one of the Commissioners, wherein the amount of the claim is given as £10,358,413, and the amount of the claims allowed at £3,033,091. The subject was again raised in Parliament in 1821, but though there was much sympathy expressed for the sufferings of those who had trusted to their country to recompense their fidelity, the sympathy exhausted itself in words.” See also Lecky, _England in the Eighteenth Century_, iv. 268. Curwen, 367, 368.

[177] Ryerson, ii. 127. _No. Am. Rev._, lix. 279. Hawkins, _Missions of the Church of England_, 249. _The Frontier Missionary, or Life of the Rev. Jacob Bailey_, by W. S. Bartlett, New York, 1853 (Collections of the Protestant Episcopal Historical Society, vol. ii.). This work gives a pathetic account of the hardships and privations undergone by the exiles in Nova Scotia, as well as a graphic picture of the methods used by the town committees in New England with those who adhered to the cause of the king.

[178] Hawkins, _Missions_, 371–3. Ryerson, ii. 206. _Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings_, Oct., 1886, p. 95. For the treatment of the loyalists in the United States after the treaty of peace, see especially Jones, _Hist. New York_, vol. ii. Roberts, _Hist. of New York_, ii. 449 ff. Lecky (_Hist. England in the Eighteenth Century_, iv. 267) remarks rather sharply: “The loyalists to a great extent sprung from and represented the old gentry of the country. The prospect of seizing their property had been one great motive which induced many to enter the war. The owners of the confiscated property now grasped the helm. New men exercised the social influence of the old families, and they naturally dreaded the restoration of those whom they had displaced.”

[179] _Vide supra_, Note 11.

[180] _No. Am. Rev._, lix. 262 (Sabine). Lecky’s tribute to the loyalists may be added: “There were brave and honest men in America who were proud of the great and free empire to which they belonged, who had no desire to shrink from the burden of maintaining it, who remembered with gratitude the English blood that had been shed around Quebec and Montreal, and who, with nothing to hope for from the crown, were prepared to face the most brutal mob violence and the invectives of a scurrilous press, to risk their fortunes, their reputations, and sometimes even their lives, in order to avert civil war and ultimate separation. Most of them ended their days in poverty and exile, and as the supporters of a beaten cause history has paid but a scanty tribute to their memory, but they comprised some of the best and ablest men America has ever produced, and they were contending for an ideal which was at least as worthy as that for which Washington fought. The maintenance of one free, industrial and pacific empire, comprising the whole English race, may have been a dream, but it was at least a noble one.” _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_, iii. 418. For historical notices of the loyalists in Canada, the following are also useful: _Settlement of Upper Canada_ (1872), by William Canniff; _Toronto of Old_ (1873), by Dr. H. Scadding; _Centennial of the Settlement of Upper Canada by the United Empire Loyalists, 1784–1884_; _The Celebrations at Adolphustown, Toronto, and Niagara_, Toronto, 1885.

THE END.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

The last footnote of the book (180) on page 210 had no anchor. Transcriber added one at the end of the last paragraph on page 198.