The Loyalists of America and Their Times Volume II Part 13

"And whereas divers others persons, citizens of this State, and owing allegiance thereto (whose names are not herein recited), did, in violation of said allegiance, traitorously a.s.sist, abet, and partic.i.p.ate in the aforesaid treasonable practices: Be it therefore enacted, by the authority of the aforesaid, that all and every of the person or persons under this description shall, on full proof and conviction of the same in a court of law, be liable and subjected to all the like pains, penalties, and forfeitures inflicted by this Act on those offenders whose names are particularly mentioned therein.

"And be it further enacted, that all debts, dues, or demands due or owing to merchants and others residing in Great Britain, be and they are hereby sequestered, and the Commissioners appointed by this Act, or a majority of them, are hereby empowered to recover, receive, and deposit the same in the Treasury of this State, in the same manner and under the same regulations as debts confiscated, there to remain for the use of this State until otherwise appropriated by this or any other House of a.s.sembly.

"And whereas there are various persons, subjects of the King of Great Britain, possessed of or ent.i.tled to estates, real and personal, which justice and sound policy require should be applied to the benefit of this State: Be it therefore enacted, by the authority aforesaid, that all and singular the estates, real and personal, belonging to persons being British subjects, of whatever kind or nature, of which they may be possessed, or others in trust for them, or to which they are or may be ent.i.tled in law or equity, and also all debts, dues, or demands owing or accruing to them, be confiscated to and for the use and benefit of this State; and the monies arising from the sale which shall take place by virtue of and in pursuance of this Act, to be applied to such uses and purposes as the Legislature shall hereafter direct.

"And be it further enacted, by the authority aforesaid, that the State will and do guarantee and defend the Commissioners appointed by this Act, or a majority of them, in all their proceedings for carrying the powers and authorities given them by the same into full effect; and will also warrant and for ever defend all and every sale or sales which the said Commissioners, or a majority of them, shall make to any purchaser or purchasers of any part or parts of the real and personal estates confiscated by this Act.

"Augusta, State of Georgia, 4th May, 1782."]

[Footnote 113: Historical Introduction to Col. Sabine's Biographical Sketches of the American Loyalists, pp. 77-81.]

[Footnote 114: In the historical essay above quoted, the author says: "The examination now completed of the political condition of the colonies, of the state of parties, and of the divisions in particular cla.s.ses in society, and avocations in life, leads to the conclusion that the number of our countrymen who wished to continue their connection with the mother country was very large. In nearly every Loyalist letter or other paper which I have examined, and in which the subject is mentioned, it is either a.s.sumed or stated in terms that the LOYAL were _the majority_; and this opinion, I am satisfied, was very generally entertained by those who professed to have a knowledge of public sentiment. That the adherents of the Crown were mistaken, is certain.

But yet in the Carolinas, and Georgia, and possibly in Pennsylvania the two parties differed but little in point of strength, while in New York the Whigs were far weaker than their opponents." (Historical Introduction to Col. Sabine's Biographical Sketches of the American Loyalists, p. 65.)]

[Footnote 115: In the historical essay above quoted we have the following words:

"What was the nature of the conflict between the two parties in South Carolina? Did the Whigs and their opponents meet in open and fair fight, and give and take the courtesies and observe the rules of civilized warfare? Alas, no! They murdered one another. I wish it were possible to use a milder word; but murder is the only one that can be employed to express the truth. Of this, however, the reader shall judge. I shall refrain from a statement of my own, and rely on the testimony of others.

"Gen. Greene thus spoke of the hand-to-hand strifes, which I stigmatize as murderous. 'The animosity,' said he, 'between the Whigs and Tories renders their situation truly deplorable. The Whigs seem determined to extirpate the Tories, and the Tories the Whigs. Some thousands have fallen in this way in this quarter, and the evil rages with more violence than ever. If a stop cannot be soon put to these ma.s.sacres, the country will be depopulated in a few months more, as neither 'Whig' nor 'Tory' can live." (Historical Introduction to Colonel Sabine's Biographical Sketches of the American Loyalists, p. 33.)]

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

TREATMENT OF THE LOYALISTS BY THE AMERICANS, AT AND AFTER THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

It remains now to ascertain the reception with which the applications of Loyalists were met in the several State Legislatures. During the last three years of the war, the princ.i.p.al operations of the British army were directed to the Southern States; and there the exasperations of party feeling may be supposed to have been the strongest.[116]

No where had arbitrary authority been exercised more unmercifully towards the revolutionists than by Earl Cornwallis and Lord Rawdon in South and North Carolina. Dr. Ramsay says: "The troops under the command of Cornwallis had spread waste and ruin over the face of all the country, for 400 miles on the sea coast, and for 200 miles westward.

Their marches from Charleston to Camden, from Camden to the River Dan, from the Dan through North Carolina to Wilmington, from Wilmington to Petersburg, and from Petersburg through many parts of Virginia, till they finally settled in Yorktown, made a route of more than 1,100 miles.

Every place through which they pa.s.sed in these various marches experienced the effects of their rapacity. Their numbers enabled them to go where they pleased; their rage for plunder disposed them to take whatever they had the means of removing; and their animosity to the Americans led them often to the wanton destruction of what they could neither use nor carry off. By their means, thousands had been involved in distress."[117]

It was therefore in South Carolina, more than any other State, that animosity might be expected to be intense and prolonged against the Loyalists; but among these men of the South, with their love of freedom, and dash and energy in war, there was a potent element of chivalry and British generosity which favourably contrasts with the Ma.s.sachusetts school of persecuting bigotry and of hatred, from generation to generation, to England and English inst.i.tutions. Accordingly we learn from Moultrie's Memoirs, Vol. II., p. 326, that "after the peace, a Joint Committee from the Senate and House of Representatives in South Carolina, chosen to hear the pet.i.tions of Loyalists who had incurred the penalties of the confiscation, banishment, and amercement laws, made a report to the separate Houses in favour of the great majority of the pet.i.tioners; and a great part of those names which were upon the confiscation, banishment and amercement lists were struck off."

"The pet.i.tions of others were afterwards presented from year to year, and ultimately almost the whole of them had their estates restored to them, and they were received as citizens."[118]

As to the proceedings of the other States, after the close of the war, in regard to the United Empire Loyalists, the following summary, from the _Historical Introduction_ to Colonel Sabine's _Biography of the American Loyalists_, will be sufficient:

"At the peace, justice and good policy both required a general amnesty, and the revocation of the acts of disability and banishment, so that only those who had been guilty of flagrant crimes should be excluded from becoming citizens. Instead of this, however, the State Legislatures generally continued in a course of hostile action, and treated the conscientious and pure, and the unprincipled and corrupt, with the same indiscrimination as they had done during the struggle. In some parts of the country there really appears to have been a determination to place these misguided but then humbled men beyond the pale of human sympathy.

In one legislative body, a pet.i.tion from the banished, praying to be allowed to return to their homes, was rejected without a division; and a law was pa.s.sed which denied to such as had remained within the State, and to all others who had opposed the revolution, the privilege of voting at the elections or of holding office. In another State, all who had sought royal protection were declared to be aliens, and to be incapable of claiming and holding property within it, and their return was forbidden. Other Legislatures refused to repeal such of their laws as conflicted with the conditions of the treaty of peace, and carried out the doctrines of the States alluded to above without material modification. But the temper of South Carolina was far more moderate.

Acting on the wise principle that 'when the offenders are numerous, it is sometimes prudent to overlook their crimes,' she listened to the supplications made to her by the fallen, and restored to their civil and political rights a large portion of those who had suffered under her banishment and confiscation laws. The course pursued by New York, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Virginia was different. These States were neither merciful nor just; and it is even true that Whigs, whose gallantry in the field, whose prudence in the Cabinet, and whose exertions in diplomatic stations abroad, had contributed essentially to the success of the conflict, were regarded with enmity on account of their attempts to produce a better state of feeling and more humane legislation. Had these States adopted a different line of conduct, their good example would not have been lost, probably, upon others, smaller and of less influence; and had Virginia especially been honest enough to have permitted the payment of debts which her people owed to British subjects before the war, the first years of our freedom would not have been stained with a breach of our public faith, and the long and angry controversy with Great Britain, which well-nigh involved us in a second war with her, might not have occurred.

"Eventually, popular indignation diminished; the statute book was divested of its most objectionable enactments, and numbers were permitted to occupy their old homes, and to recover the whole or part of their property; but by far the greater part of the Loyalists who quitted the country at the commencement of, or during the war, never returned; and of the many thousands who abandoned the United States after the peace, and while these enactments were in force, few, comparatively, had the desire or even the means to revisit the land from which they were expelled. Such persons and their descendants form a very considerable proportion of the population of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Upper Canada.

"It is equally to be regretted on grounds of policy that the _majorities_[119] in the State Legislatures did not remember, with Mr.

Jefferson, that separation from England 'was contemplated with affliction by all,' and that, like Mr. Adams, many sound Whigs 'would have given everything they possessed for a restoration to the state of things before the contest began, provided they could have had sufficient security for its continuance.' Then they might have done at an early moment after the cessation of hostilities, what they actually did do in a few years afterwards--namely, have allowed the banished Loyalists to return from exile, and, excluding those against whom enormities could have been proved, have conferred upon them, and upon those who had remained to be driven away at the peace, the rights of citizens. Most of them would have easily fallen into respect for the new state of things, old friends.h.i.+ps and intimacies would have been revived, and long before this time all would have mingled in one ma.s.s. * *

"As a matter of _expediency_, how unwise was it to perpetuate the feelings of the opponents of the revolution, and to keep them a distinct cla.s.s for a time, and for harm yet unknown! How ill-judged the measures that caused them to settle the hitherto neglected possessions of the British Crown! Nova Scotia had been won and lost, and lost and won, in the struggle between France and England, and the blood of New England had been poured out upon its soil like water. But when the Loyalists sought refuge there, what was it? Before the war, the fisheries of its coast, for the prosecution of which Halifax itself was founded, comprised, in public estimation, its chief value; and though Great Britain had quietly possessed it for about seventy years, the emigration to it of the adherents of the Crown from the United States, in a single year, more than doubled its population. Until hostile events brought Halifax into notice, no civilized people were poorer than the inhabitants of that colony; since, in 1775, the a.s.sembly estimated that 1,200 currency--a sum less than $5,000--was the whole amount of money which they possessed. By causing the expatriation, then, of many thousands of our countrymen, among whom were the well-educated, the ambitious, and the well-versed in politics, we became the founders of two agricultural and commercial colonies; for it is to be remembered that New Brunswick formed a part of Nova Scotia until 1784, and that the necessity of the division then made was of our own creation. In like manner we became the founders of Upper Canada. The Loyalists were the first settlers of the territory thus denominated by Act of 1791; and the princ.i.p.al object of the line of division of Canada, as established by Mr. Pitt's Act, was to place them, as a body, by themselves, and to allow them to be governed by laws more congenial than those which were deemed requisite for the government of the French on the St. Lawrence.

Our expatriated countrymen were generally poor, and some of them were actually without the means of providing for their common wants from day to day. The Government for which they had become exiles was as liberal as they could have asked. It gave them lands, tools, materials for building, and the means of subsistence for two years; and to each of their children, as they became of age, two hundred acres of land. And besides this, of the offices created by the organization of a new Colonial Government, they were the chief recipients. The ties of kindred and suffering in a common cause created a strong bond of sympathy between them, and for years they bore the appellation of 'United Empire Loyalists.'"[120]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 116: Writing under date of January, 1782, Mr. Hildreth says: "The surrender of Cornwallis was soon felt in the Southern department.

Wilmington was evacuated, thus das.h.i.+ng all the hopes of the North Carolina Tories. Greene approached Charleston, and distributed his troops so as to confine the enemy to the neck and adjacent islands.

"In re-establis.h.i.+ng the State Government of _South Carolina, none were allowed to vote who had taken British protection_. John Matthews was elected Governor. Among the earliest proceedings of the a.s.sembly was the pa.s.sage of a law _banis.h.i.+ng the most active British partisans and confiscating their property_. The services of Greene were also gratefully remembered in a vote of 10,000 guineas, or $50,000, to purchase him an estate.

"The Georgia a.s.sembly, in meeting at Augusta, chose John Martin as Governor, _and pa.s.sed a law of confiscation and banishment very similar to that of South Carolina_. Greene presently received from this Province, also, the present of a confiscated plantation. _North Carolina_ acknowledged his services by a grant of wild lands." (History of the United States, Vol. III., Chap. xliii., p. 373.)]

[Footnote 117: Dr. Ramsay's History of the United States, Vol. II., Chap, xxv., p. 456.

"Under the immediate eye of Cornwallis," says Mr. Bancroft, "the prisoners who had capitulated in Charleston were the subjects of perpetual persecution, unless they would exchange their paroles for oaths of allegiance. Mechanics and shopkeepers could not collect their dues except after promises of loyalty.

"Lord Rawdon, who had the very important command on the Santee, raged equally against deserters from his Irish regiment and against the inhabitants. The chain of forts for holding South Carolina consisted of Georgetown, Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah on the sea; Augusta, Ninety-Six, and Camden in the interior. Of these, Camden was the most important, for it was the key between the north and south. On the rumour of an advancing American army, Rawdon called on all the inhabitants round Camden to join in arms. One hundred and sixty who refused he shut up during the heat of midsummer in one prison, and loaded more than twenty of them with chains, some of whom were protected by the capitulation of Charleston." (Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. X., Chap. xv., pp. 311, 312, 313.)

"Peace was restored to Georgia (July, 1782), after having been four years in possession of the British. That State is supposed to have lost 1,000 of its citizens and 4,000 slaves." (Moultrie's Memoirs, Vol. II., p. 340; quoted in Holmes' American Annals, Vol. II., p. 340.)]

[Footnote 118: Quoted in Holmes' Annals, Vol. II., p. 351.]

[Footnote 119: "I say _majorities_, because I am satisfied that in almost every State there were minorities, more or less numerous, who desired the adoption of a more moderate course. In New York it is certain that the first political parties, after the peace, were formed in consequence of divisions which existed among the Whigs as to the lenity or severity which should be extended to their vanquished opponents."]

[Footnote 120: Historical Essay, introductory to Colonel Sabine's Sketches of the American Loyalists, pp. 86-90.]

APPENDIX A. TO CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

REVIEW OF THE PRINc.i.p.aL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, AND REMARKS ON THE FEELINGS WHICH SHOULD NOW BE CULTIVATED BY BOTH OF THE FORMER CONTENDING PARTIES.

The entire failure of the Americans to conquer Canada in the war of 1812-1815 is an ill.u.s.tration of the folly of coercing the allegiance of a people against their will. Upper Canada at that time consisted of less than 100,000 inhabitants; yet, with the extra aid of only a few hundred English soldiers, she repelled for three years the forces of the United States--more than ten times their number, and separated only by a river.

Mr. J.M. Ludlow, in his brief but comprehensive "History of the War of American Independence, 1775-1783," Chapter vii., well states _the folly of England in endeavouring to conquer by arms the opinions_ of three millions of people, and the impossibility of the American colonists achieving their independence without the aid of men and money, and s.h.i.+ps from France, to which, in connection with Spain and Holland, the Americans are actually indebted for their independence, and not merely to their own sole strength and prowess, as American writers so universally boast. Mr. Ludlow observes:

"At a time when steam had not yet baffled the winds, to dream of conquering by force of arms, on the other side of the Atlantic, a people of the English race, numbering between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000, with something like 1,200 miles of seaboard, was surely an act of enormous folly. We have seen in our own days the difficulties experienced by the far more powerful and populous Northern States in quelling the secession of the Southern, when between the two there was no other frontier than at most a river, very often a mere ideal line, and when armies could be raised by 100,000 men at a time. England attempted a far more difficult task, with forces which, till 1781, never exceeded 35,000 men, and never afterwards exceeded 42,075, including 'Provincials,' _i.e._, American Loyalists." (But England, repeatedly on the verge of success, failed from the incapacity and inactivity of the English generals.)

"Yet it is impossible to doubt that not once only, but repeatedly during the course of the struggle, England was on the verge of triumph. The American armies were perpetually melting away before the enemy--directly, through the practice of short enlistments; indirectly, through desertions. These desertions, if they might be often palliated by the straits to which the men were reduced through arrears of pay and want of supplies, arose in other cases, as after the retreat from New York, from sheer loss of heart in the cause. The main army, under Was.h.i.+ngton, was seldom even equal in numbers to that opposed to him. In the winter of 1776-77, when his troops were only 4,000 strong, it is difficult to understand how it was that Sir William Howe, with more than double the number, should have failed to annihilate the American army."

"WEAKNESS OF THE AMERICAN ARMY.

"In the winter of 1777-78 the 'dreadful situation of the army for want of provisions,' made Was.h.i.+ngton 'advise' that they should not have been excited to a general mutiny and desertion. In May, 1779, he hardly knew any resource for the American cause _except in reinforcements from France_, and did not know what might be the consequence if the enemy had it in their power to press the troops hard in the ensuing campaign. In December of that year his forces were 'mouldering away daily,' and he considered that Sir Henry Clinton, with more than twice his numbers, could 'not justify remaining inactive with a force so superior.' A year later he was compelled, for want of clothing, to discharge the levies which he had always so much trouble in obtaining; and 'want of flour would have disbanded the whole army' if he had not adopted this expedient.

"In March, 1781, again the crisis was 'perilous,' and though he did not doubt the happy issue of the contest, he considered that the period for accomplishment might be too far distant for a person of his years. In April he wrote: 'We cannot transport provisions from the States in which they are a.s.sessed to the army, because we cannot pay the teamsters, who will no longer work for certificates. It is equally certain that our troops are approaching fast to nakedness, and that we have nothing to clothe them with; that our hospitals are without medicines, and our sick without nutriment, except such as well men eat; and that all our public works are at a stand, and the artificers disbanding. * * It may be declared in a word that we are at the end of our tether, and that now or never our deliverance must come.' Six months later, when Yorktown capitulated, the British forces remaining in North America, after the surrender of that garrison by Cornwallis, were more considerable than they had been as late as February, 1779, and Sir Henry Clinton even then declared that with a reinforcement of 10,000 he would be responsible for the conquest of America.