Volume 2 — CHAPTER XXXVII.

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 principal 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 passed 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 Massachusetts school of persecuting bigotry and of hatred, from generation to generation, to England and English institutions. 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 petitions 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 petitioners; and a great part of those names which were upon the confiscation, banishment and amercement lists were struck off."

"The petitions 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 petition from the banished, praying to be allowed to return to their homes, was rejected without a division; and a law was passed 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, Massachusetts, 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 friendships and intimacies would have been revived, and long before this time all would have mingled in one mass. * *

"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 class 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 Assembly 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 principal 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]

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