John Adams, of indisputable authority, tells us that more than a third of the property owners and men of affairs, were opposed to the revolution throughout the war.
Lecky, in his history of England, declares that an examination of the correspondence of the revolution at any period shows that, “in the middle colonies at least, those who really desired to throw off the English rule were a small and not very respectable minority. The great mass were indifferent, half-hearted, engrossed with their private interests or occupations, prepared to risk nothing till they could clearly foresee the issue of the contest. In almost every part of the States—even in New England itself—there were large bodies of devoted royalists.”
After the war more than a hundred thousand, it is estimated, of irreconciliable royalists were expelled from the colonies.
When General Gage evacuated Boston, more than a thousand royalists from that immediate territory went with him to Halifax, Nova Scotia, so that our American grandmothers, even a hundred years later, when exasperated, would exclaim against their tormentor, with much of the ancient vehemence, “You go to Halifax!”
If we want to appreciate Washington and to understand his wonderful service for mankind, we must understand the difficulties and obstacles he had to overcome. The “Spirit of ’76” belonged at first to only a few inspired souls, who had a wonderful vision of human rights for a new world. Right was might with them and their might-right won the great cause as the immortal “Spirit of ’76.”
General Washington’s description of the conditions are vividly portrayed in a letter to Joseph Reed, from Cambridge, dated November 28, 1775:
“Such a dearth of public spirit, and such a want of virtue, such stock jobbing and such fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages of one kind or another in this great change of military arrangement I never saw before, and pray God’s mercy that I may never be witness to again. What will be the end of these manœuvers is beyond my scan. I tremble at the prospect. We have been till this time enlisting about three thousand five hundred men. To engage these I have been obliged to allow furloughs as far as fifty men to a regiment, and the officers, I am persuaded, indulge as many more. The Connecticut troops will not be prevailed upon to stay longer than their term, saving those who have enlisted for the next campaign and are mostly on a furlough; and such a mercenary spirit pervades the whole that I should not be at all surprised at any disaster that may happen. In short after the last of this month our lines will be so weakened that the Minute Men and Militia must be called in for their defense; and these being under no kind of government themselves, will destroy the little subordination I have been laboring to establish, and run me into one evil whilst I am endeavoring to avoid another; but the less must be chosen. Could I have foreseen what I have experienced, and am likely to experience, no consideration upon earth would have induced me to accept the command.”
At the meeting of the colonies in congress at Philadelphia in 1774, George the Third saw that it was a conquest of wills and he exclaimed, “The die is cast, the colonies must either submit or triumph.” But even when the British government was sending Hessian mercenaries over against the colonies, a thing regarded as a supreme outrage by those opposed to England, it was almost impossible to get together enough American patriotism to adopt a declaration of independence.
John Adams says that a large section of Congress regarded such a declaration with both terror and disgust. To those who have believed that a unanimous patriotism made only a little severe fighting necessary, backed by some clever generalship, there can be no proper appreciation of the great American achievement.