“C’est un pays qui sera fort heureux s’il jouit d’une paix longue, et si les deux partis qui le divisent à present ne lui font subir le sort de la Pologne et de tant d’autres républiques. Ces deux partes sont appelés les Whigs et les Torys. Le premier est entièrement pour la liberté et l’independance; il est composé de gens de la plus basse extraction qui ne possédent point de biens; la plupart des habitants de la compagne en sont. Les Torys sont pour les Anglais, ou, pour mieux dire, pour la paix, sans trop se soucier d’être libres ou dépendants; ce sont les gens d’une classe plus distinguée, les seuls qui eussent des biens dans le pays. Lorsque les Whigs sont les plus forts, ils pillent les autres tant qu’ils peuvent.”
[162] Simcoe, Lt.-Col. J. G., A History of the Operations of a Partisan Corps called the Queen’s Rangers, commanded by Lt.-Col. J. G. Simcoe, during the war of the American Revolution. New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1884, 8vo, pp. 328.
[163] The Americans made several attempts to make use of the Indians: Montgomery used them in his Canadian expedition; they were in the New England army which laid siege to Boston; in April, 1776, Washington wrote to Congress urging their employment in the army, and reported on July 13th that, without special authority, he had directed General Schuyler to engage the Six Nations on the best terms he and his colleagues could procure; and again, submitting the propriety of engaging the Eastern Indians. John Adams thought “we need not be so delicate as to refuse me assistance of Indians, provided we cannot keep them neutral.” A treaty was exchanged with the Eastern Indians on July 17, 1776, whereby they agreed to furnish six hundred Indians for a regiment which was to be officered by the whites. As a result of this, the Massachusetts Council subsequently reported that seven Penobscot Indians, all that could be procured, were enlisted in October for one year; and in November Major Shaw reported with a few Indians who had enlisted in the Continental service. Winsor, Narr. and Crit. Hist., vol. vi. 656, 657. The following brief entry in a diary will show that even among the patriot forces savage customs sometimes found place: “On Monday the 30th sent out a party for some dead Indians. Toward morning found them, and skinned two of them from their hips down for boot legs: one pair for the major, the other for myself.” Proceedings N. J. Hist. Soc., ii. p. 31.
[164] North American Review, lix. 264 (Sabine). “The opponents of the Revolution were powerful in all the thirteen colonies; in some of them they were nearly if not quite equal in number to its friends the Whigs. On the departure of Hutchinson he was addressed by upwards of two hundred merchants, lawyers and other citizens of Boston, Salem and Marblehead. On arrival of Gage, forty-eight from Salem presented their dutiful respects; on his retirement he received the ‘Loyal address from gentlemen and principal inhabitants of Boston’ to the number of ninety-seven, and eighteen country gentlemen and official personages who had taken refuge in Boston.” ...
* * * * *
“The division of parties in Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire was much the same as in Massachusetts. New York was the loyalists’ stronghold, and contained more of them than any colony in America. While proof to sustain this assertion can be adduced to almost any extent, we shall cite but a single though conclusive fact; namely, that soon after the close of the war the Assembly of that State passed a bill prohibiting adherents of the crown from holding office, which was objected to and returned by the Council of Revision, who, among other reasons for their course, stated, that if it were suffered to become a law, there would be difficulty, and in some places an impossibility, of finding men of different political sympathies, even to conduct the elections. In some of the southern colonies, the loyalists were almost as numerous as in New York. In the Carolinas it may be hard to determine which party had the majority; and it will be found that there were occasions when the royal generals obtained twelve or fifteen hundred recruits among the inhabitants, merely by issuing a proclamation or call upon them to stand by their allegiance to “the best of sovereigns.... Few of the Carolinians would enlist under the American banner; but after the capitulation (of Charlestown) they flocked to the royal standard by hundreds.” See also Sabine’s Loyalists, Introductory Sketch; Ryerson, Loyalists of America, ii. 57, 124. For remarks on the war, as a civil war, see Ramsay, Hist. U. S., ii. 467–9.
[165] Sabine, i. 65.
[166] 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.
[167] Clinton-Cornwallis Correspondence, i. pp. 263, 265.