IV.
THE LOYALISTS.
The opportunity of uniting together the colonies was lost when the government of England, under William and Mary, condoned the rebellion in Massachusetts, and allowed Connecticut and Rhode Island to resume their charters. From that time onward, union under the royal authority was impossible, even in the face of the pressing dangers of the French and Indian wars, to which for over sixty years the colonies were almost continuously exposed. Futile attempts were made, but in face of such a triumph of individualism nothing could be accomplished. When the conference at Albany, in 1754, put forth a plan of federation, drawn up by Benjamin Franklin and studiously moderate in its provisions, it was rejected with indignation by the colonies, as tending to servitude, and by the authorities in England, as incurably democratic.[152] Yet the attempt that had been made had, at least, one result: it had created what we may call an imperial party, the members of which were devotedly attached to the connection with Great Britain, and opposed to that narrow spirit so prevalent in the colonies, which esteemed nothing as of value in comparison with their local customs and local privileges. This party grew strong in New York, where the extravagances of Leisler’s insurrection had called for stern chastisement, and was also well represented in New England. The new charter of Massachusetts, which gave it a governor appointed by the crown, while preserving its Assembly and its town organizations, had tended to encourage and develop, even in that fierce democracy, those elements of a conservative party which had been called into existence some years before by the disloyalty and tyranny of the ecclesiastical oligarchy. Thus, side by side with a group of men who were constantly regretting their lost autonomy, and looking with suspicion and prejudice at every action of the royal authorities, there arose this other group of those who constantly dwelt upon, and frequently exaggerated, the advantages they derived from their connection with the mother country. In Connecticut there was a strong minority that had opposed the re-assumption of the charter after the overthrow of Andros; and in all the royal provinces an official class was gradually growing up, that was naturally imperial rather than local in its sympathies. The Church of England, also, had at last waked up to a sense of the spiritual needs of its children beyond the seas, and by means of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was sending devoted and self-sacrificing missionaries to labor among the people of the colonies.[153] The influence of this tended inevitably to maintain and strengthen the feeling of national unity in those of the colonists who came under the ministrations of the missionaries. In the colony of Connecticut, especial strength was given to this movement by an unexpected religious revolution, in which several of the prominent ministers of the ruling congregational body, and many of the best of the laity, forsook their separatist principles and returned to the historic church of the old home.[154] The wars with the French, in which colonists fought side by side with regulars, in a contest of national significance, tended upon the whole to intensify the sense of imperial unity; although there can be no doubt that the British officers generally, by their contemptuous speeches and by their insolent manner towards the colonials whom they affected to despise, prepared the way for the eventual rupture of sentiment between the colonies and England.[155]
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that neither navigation laws nor the Stamp Act nor parliamentary interference had as much to do in alienating the affections of Americans from the mother country, as had the ill-mannered impertinence of the British officers and the royal officials. This insolence, when joined to Grenville’s bungling and exasperating attempt to extend imperial taxation to the colonies, had the result of uniting for a time nearly all Americans in opposition to the measures proposed by the advisers of the king, and enabled them to win a great constitutional victory over the attempt to impose stamp duties upon them. The division into two distinct parties, though as has been pointed out the groups had been gradually forming and drawing apart from one another, did not really come into definite existence until the further impolitic measures of successive ministries had strengthened the hands of those who were traditionally disposed to resist the authority of England.
It is very hard for us to put ourselves in the place of men of a century ago, and to think their thoughts and surround ourselves in imagination with their environment; we naturally carry back much of the nineteenth century into the eighteenth. We know the America of to-day, a vigorous, healthy, prosperous, mighty nation, reaching from sea to sea, filled with a busy people, adorned with the achievements of a hundred years, hallowed by many sacred memories. The American flag has floated proudly through the smoke of battle in every quarter of the world, and for a hundred years men have seen in it the symbol of a country and a fatherland. It is difficult for us to realize that, before 1776, these influences had no power; there was then no nation, no country, no fatherland, no flag, nothing but a number of not over-prosperous colonies, with but little love or liking for one another. Even the strongest Americans did not venture to use the word nation or its derivatives, but called their congress, even after the formal separation from England, simply the Continental Congress. The very considerations which show us how wonderful and even sublime were the faith and the devotion of the leaders of the American revolution, will also show us how natural it was, how almost inevitable it was, that other men, whose connection with England was closer and more intimate, whose habits of mind were conservative rather than progressive, who had been brought up to fear God and honor the king and to think more about their duties than about their rights, should cling with devotion to the cause of the mother-country and condemn the revolution as a “parricidal rebellion.”
Besides this highest motive, which influenced the best and the purest-minded among the opponents of colonial separation, there were undoubtedly other motives of lower character, which affected some men in their decision, and disposed them to loyalty. The political power of all the colonies had been largely in the hands of those who were known as the “better sort,” usually gentlemen of good family, rich and well educated; in some of the colonies official position had been treated as the special prerogative of a few distinguished families who contended with one another for its possession: none of the colonies, not even Connecticut, was democratic as we understand the term to-day. In some cases the revolutionary movements and impulses came from a class which wished to occupy public positions from which they had been excluded, and in others from dissatisfied and discontented men of birth and family, who were tired of being out in the cold, while their rivals were enjoying the pleasures and emoluments of office.[156] Thus in New York, the history of the revolution is closely bound up with the family feuds of the De Lanceys on the one side with the Livingstons on the other. In Massachusetts, the quarrel between Governor Bernard and the Otises did much to increase the patriotism of the latter family; and until the very breaking out of hostilities, the contest within the colony was between a majority of the well-to-do merchants and lawyers of Boston on the one side, and the least stable elements of the populace, under the leadership of one of the most skilful of political agitators, Samuel Adams, upon the other.
There is no doubt that, in Massachusetts at least, most well-to-do persons considered the agitation at first to be merely political, the usual device of the “outs” against the “ins”; they laughed at the loud talk of some of the orators, and considered that it was put on for effect.[157] When, in addition to this, the cause of American rights was disgraced, year after year, by riots, murder, arson, and sedition, those who were entrusted with the responsibilities of office, however much they sympathized with the abstract principles that were upheld by the popular leaders, were prejudiced against the concrete application of them.[158] We should also remember that, down to the time of the battle of Bunker Hill, if not later, all parties united in the most loyal and devoted language. The rights that were claimed were not the rights of Man, but of “natural-born subjects of the king of Great Britain”; the king was always described as “the best and most generous of monarchs,” and separation was never mentioned as a possibility in any public utterance. War was looked forward to by some of the most eager as a means of bringing the ministry to terms, or as an unavoidable necessity if the unconstitutional taxation was persisted in; but, up to the very last, most men agreed with Richard Henry Lee, who said to Adams, as they parted after the first Continental Congress in 1774: “All offensive acts will be repealed—Britain will give up her foolish project.”[159]
When the most ardent American patriots used this language, and used it sincerely, it is not remarkable that those who formed the opposing political party, who were conservative when these were the radicals, should have felt that they were bound by their duty to their king and country, or that they should also have felt that the disorderly actions and the factious attitude of some of the extreme patriots in Massachusetts and elsewhere were simply seditious. These convictions were undoubtedly strengthened by the abominable treatment which many of them personally received. They were not apt to look with greater favor upon a cause whose votaries had tried to recommend it to their liking by breaking their windows, plundering their houses, constantly insulting them, their wives and their daughters, to say nothing of tarring and feathering them, or of burning them in effigy. The penal measures imposed by the Parliament upon the town of Boston and the colony of Massachusetts had been brought upon themselves by the so-called patriots. One rather wonders at the slowness and mildness of the British government, and at their miserable inefficiency, than at any repressive measures that they undertook. They deserved to lose the colonies for their invincible stupidity, which led them from one blunder into another; they irritated when they ought either to have crushed or conciliated; they tried half-measures when vigorous action was necessary; they persisted in affronting all the other colonies while they failed in chastising sedition in Massachusetts. The result was that they drove many men, who were loyal subjects of Great Britain in 1774, into revolution in 1776, while they allowed the rebels of Massachusetts to wreak vengeance at their will upon those who had been faithful in their allegiance to their king.[160]
Besides those who were loyalists from conviction and temperament and those who were almost unavoidably so from the political position they occupied, there were also men who were loyalists from the profit it gave them. Such were the holders of the minor offices in the gift of the royal governors, the rich merchants who represented English trading-houses, and dreaded war and disturbance. There were others whose chief desire was to be upon the winning side, who were unable to conceive the possibility of the defeat of the English government by a handful of insurgent colonists, and some also who, from local or personal dislikes or prejudices, or from love of opposition, took a different side from that which was taken by their neighbors. It is probable, however, that there were hardly any whose motives were not to some extent mixed; few on the one hand so disinterested or so devoted as not to be moved in some degree by self-interest or prejudice, few on the other hand whose nature was so biassed by prejudice or so sordid with love of place or pension as not also to be moved by the higher impulse of fidelity.
Loyalty is hard to define; it is one of those virtues which appeals not so much to the head as to the heart. Its critics accuse it of being irrational and illogical, as being based upon sentiment rather than upon conviction. Yet, in spite of logic and reason, or rather, on account of its profounder logic and higher reason, loyalty will hold its own, and strike an answering chord of admiration in the human heart as long as men appreciate disinterested virtue. It may be classed with the other unreasoned qualities that men yet esteem, with faith and truth, honor and courage, decency and chastity. It may be a man’s intellectual duty to follow the dictates of his understanding and to act upon his temporary convictions, whatever pain the action cost; nevertheless, the man whom we respect and follow is not the man who is always changing, who is easily influenced by argument, but the man who abides by certain fixed principles, and refuses to desert them, unless it can be shown him that beyond all chance of mistake they are wrong and misleading.
It has been sometimes asserted that loyalty can only be felt towards a personal ruler or a dynasty; such a restriction of the term is entirely unfounded. It is, by its very derivation, devotion to that which is legal and established. Legality and Loyalty are etymologically the same. No one can doubt that there is a high and noble devotion to right and justice which is as admirable and as strong as a devotion to any person. It is a more refined sentiment and appeals to a higher moral sense than does the simple fidelity to a person, beautiful and touching though such devotion be. The loyalty of men who, like the younger Verneys, espoused the side of the Parliament in its struggle with Charles the First, was as true and real a sentiment, though its character was impersonal, as was that of the stout Sir Edmund, who, though “he liked not the quarrel,” followed the king, because “he had eaten his bread too long to turn against him in his necessity.” There could hardly be a finer example of this loyalty to an idea than was shown by those Americans who condemned the stupid errors of the king and his advisers, and realized fully the danger to liberty in the system of government that George the Third was attempting to carry out in England and in America, and yet, in spite of all, remained patriotic subjects, not from affection but from principle, trusting to constitutional methods to overcome the evils which they felt as strongly as any of those who made them a justification for revolution.