Essays in American history

by Henry Ferguson

As has been shown, among those who adhered to the side of the mother country in the revolution there were men of all kinds and convictions. There were those who were loyal because they believed in the legal right of the Parliament to tax the colonies, short-sighted as the policy might be, and considered their duty and their allegiance to be due to the united empire. There were those who adhered to the king’s cause from personal devotion to him and to his dynasty, an unreasonable devotion in the eyes of some, but certainly not as contemptible as American satirists have loved to describe it. There were those who were by nature conservatives, willing to do anything sooner than change, governed completely by a prejudice which hardly deserves the noble name of loyalty, but still had in it an element of steadiness and sturdiness that redeems it from contempt. There were also, undoubtedly, men who calculated the chances of victory in the struggle and espoused the side that they thought was likely to win; there were those who were for the king from pure gregariousness, because some of their friends and neighbors were on that side; and, finally, some who, from a mere love of opposition, set themselves against the cause of America because their neighbors and townsmen favored it.

And, as the motives which impelled men were different, so also their actions differed when the rupture came between the king and the colonies. Some were active favorers of the cause of the king, doing whatever they could to assist it and to injure the cause of their rebellious neighbors. Others sadly left their homes at the outbreak of the war and took refuge in England or in some of the English provinces, suffering want, anxiety, and despair, snubbed and despised by the insular English, compelled to hear America and Americans insulted, dragging along a miserable existence, like that of the shades whom Virgil found upon the bank of the infernal river, not allowed to return to earth or to enter either Elysium or Tartarus. Others attempted to live in peaceful neutrality in America, experiencing the usual fate of neutrals, animals like the bat neither beast nor bird but plundered and persecuted by both. Such betook themselves usually to the protection of the British arms, and were to be found in the greatest numbers at or near the headquarters of the British generals in Savannah or Charlestown, Newport or New York.

Some American writers have been extremely severe upon the Americans who served in the royal armies; such condemnation is certainly illogical and unjust. They were fighting, they might have reasoned, to save their country from mob rule, from the dominion of demagogues and traitors, and to preserve to it what, until then, all had agreed to be the greatest of blessings—the connection with Great Britain, the privilege and honor of being Englishmen, heirs of all the free institutions which were embodied in the “great and glorious constitution.”

If the loyalists of New York, Georgia, and the Carolinas reasoned in this manner, we cannot blame them, unless we are ready to maintain the proposition that the cause of every revolution is necessarily so sacred that those who do not sympathize with it should at least abstain from forcibly opposing it. The further charge is made that the worst outrages of the war were committed by Tories, and the ill-doings of Brant and Butler at Wyoming and Cherry Valley, together with the raids of Tryon and Arnold, are held up to the execration of posterity as being something exceptionally brutal and cruel, unparalleled by any similar actions on the part of the Whig militia or the regular forces of either army, Sullivan’s campaign through the Indian country being conveniently forgotten.[161] Impartial history will not palliate the barbarities that were committed by either party; but there can be no doubt that the Tory wrong-doings have been grossly exaggerated, or at least have been dwelt upon as dreadful scenes of depravity to form a background for the heroism and fortitude of the patriotic party whose misdeeds are passed over very lightly. The methods of the growth of popular mythology have been the same in America as elsewhere; the gods of one party have become the devils of the other. The haze of distance has thrown a halo around the American leaders, softening their outlines, obscuring their faults, while the misdeeds of Tories and Hessians have grown with the growth of years. But it is an undoubted fact that there were outrages upon both sides, brutal officers on both sides, bad treatment of prisoners on both sides, guerilla warfare with all its evil concomitants on both sides, and in these respects the Tories were no worse than the Whigs. There was not much to choose between a Cowboy and a Skinner, very little difference between Major Ferguson’s command and that of Marion and Sumter. There was no more orderly or better-behaved troop in either army than Simcoe’s Queen’s Rangers;[162] possibly there was none on either side as bad as the mixture of Iroquois Indians and Tory half-breeds who were concerned in the massacres at Wyoming and Cherry Valley.

The Americans, however, do not deserve any credit for abstaining from the use of Indian allies. They tried very hard to make use of them, but without success. A few Englishmen in the Mohawk Valley, faithful to the traditions of just and honest treatment of the Indians, which had been inherited from the Dutch, had succeeded in making the Iroquois regard them as friends, but everywhere else the Indian and the colonist were bitter and irreconcilable foes. The savage had long scores of hatred to pay, not upon the English nation or English army, but upon the American settlers who had stolen his lands, shot his sons, and debauched his daughters. The employment of the Mohawks by the English was an outrage and a crying shame upon civilization; but the responsibility of it lies directly upon the government which allowed it, and the commanding generals who sanctioned the expeditions, and only indirectly upon the men who carried out the directions of their superiors.[163] It is interesting to remember in this connection that the courteous and chivalrous Lafayette raised a troop of Indians to fight the British and the Tories, though his reputation has been saved by the utter and almost ludicrous failure of his attempt. The fact is that, as far as the Americans were engaged in it, the war of the Revolution was a civil war, in which the two sides were not far different in numbers or in social condition, and very much the same in their manners and customs. The loyalists contended all through the war that they were in a numerical majority, and that if they had been properly supported by the British forces and properly treated by the British generals, the war could have been ended in 1777, before the French alliance had given new hopes and new strength to the separatist party.[164]

Sabine, in his well-known work on the loyalists of the Revolution, computes that there were at least twenty thousand Americans in the military service of the king at one time or another during the war.[165] Other authorities think this estimate too high, but the number was extremely large. In New York and New Jersey it is probable that the opponents of separation outnumbered the patriot party, and the same is probably true of the Carolinas and Georgia. Even in New England, the nursery of the Revolution, the number was large and so formidable, in the opinion of the revolutionary leaders, that in order to suppress them they established a reign of terror and anticipated the famous “Law of the Suspected” of the French Revolution. An irresponsible tyranny was established of town and country committees at whose beck and call were the so-called “Sons of Liberty.” To these committees was entrusted an absolute power over the lives and fortunes of their fellow-citizens, and they proceeded on principles of evidence that would have shocked and scandalized a grand inquisitor.

Virginia and Maryland seem to have been the only provinces in which the body of the people sympathized with the projects of the revolutionary leaders. The few loyalists there were in Virginia retired to England with the last royal governor, and in Maryland a strong sense of local independence and local pride led the colony to act with unanimity and moderation.

The rigorous measures adopted by the new governments in the Eastern States, and the activity of their town committees, succeeded in either driving out their loyalist citizens or reducing them to harmless inefficiency. In New York and New Jersey, however, they remained strong and active throughout the war; and as long as the British forces held Georgia and the Carolinas, loyalty was in the ascendant in those states.

The question will naturally be asked, why, if they were so numerous, were they not more successful, why did they yield to popular violence in New England and desert the country while the contest was going on, why did they not hold the Southern States and keep them from joining the others in the Continental Congresses and in the war. In the first place, a negative attitude is necessarily an inactive one; and in consequence of this and of the fact that they could not take the initiative in any action, the loyalists were put at a disadvantage before the much better organization of the patriotic leaders. Though these were few in number, in the South they were of the best families and of great social influence, and in the North they were popular agitators of long experience. They manipulated the committee system so carefully that the colonies found themselves, before they were aware of the tendency of the actions of their deputies, involved in proceedings of very questionable legality, such as the boycotting agreement known as the American Association, and the other proceedings of the Continental Congress.[166] When the war began, the population of the three southernmost states had very little care, except for their own lives and pockets. They were, with the exception of a few distinguished families, descendants of a very low grade of settlers. Oglethorpe’s philanthropy had left the legacy of disorder and inefficiency to the colony of Georgia, a legacy which the Empire State of the South has now nobly and grandly outlived. North Carolina had a most heterogeneous population, and was, perhaps, the most barbarous of all the colonies; while in South Carolina the extremes in the social scale were most strongly marked, from the high-spirited Huguenot gentlemen to the poor whites who formed the bulk of the population, worse taught, worse fed, and worse clad than the negro slaves. Such a population as this, living also in constant fear of negro insurrection, was not likely to count for much on the one side or the other; and we shall find, if we read Gates’s and Greene’s dispatches on the one side, and Rawdon’s and Cornwallis’s on the other, that the rival commanders agree in one thing at least—in condemning and despising the worthlessness of the militia recruited in the southern country.[167] It was the utter cowardice of this militia that lost the battle of Camden and caused the needless sacrifice of the lives of the braver Continentals; and the correspondence of the English general is full of instances that prove that, except for plundering and bushwhacking, there was little use to be made of the loyalists in the South.

As to the other questions, why, when the loyalists were so numerous, were they not more successful, and why did the eastern loyalists yield to the violence that was offered them, one question nearly answers the other. They were not successful, because they had no leaders of their own stock and country, and because the British commanders blundered throughout the war with as unerring certainty and unfailing regularity as the various British ministries had done from 1764 to 1776. The game was in the hands of the English, if they had known how to play it, for the first three years of the war. Then English inefficiency, rather than any belief in the ability of the colonists to make good their own independence, brought about the French alliance; and the war assumed from thenceforward a very different aspect. The desertion of their cause and their country by the many Tories who left New England for Great Britain or the loyal provinces, and the supineness of the men of place and position who attempted to preserve an attitude of neutrality instead of siding openly either for or against the king, weakened the king’s cause in America and prevented the numbers of the loyalist population from counting for as much as they were really worth.