Note 164 — IV. THE LOYALISTS.

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.” ...

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“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.