Note 166 — IV. THE LOYALISTS.

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.