[168] Clinton-Cornwallis Correspondence, ii. pp. 308, 309.
[169] Jones, Thomas, History of New York, i. 362–3, 172–176.
[170] Christian Examiner, viii. pp. 127, 128 (Dabney). Curwen, Journal, 475, 479.
[171] Sabine, North American Review, lix. pp. 287, 288. Loyalists, i. 71–81. Ryerson, Loyalists of America, ii. 130, 136.
[172] No. Am. Rev., lix. p. 289.
[173] The Journal and Letters of the late Samuel Curwen, New York and Boston, 1842, p. 147.
[174] Parliamentary History, vol. xxiii. 411, 412, 430, 481. The following extracts may be added to those given in the text; Mr. Burke said: “Better to have left the whole to future negotiation, and to have been totally silent upon the subject in the treaty, than to have consented to have set our hands to a gross libel on the national character, and in our flagitious article plunged the dagger into the hearts of the loyalists, and manifested our own impotency, ingratitude and disgrace” (p. 468). In the same debate Mr. Lee said: “Europe, Asia, Africa and America beheld the dismembership and diminution of the British Empire. But this, alarming and calamitous as it was, was nothing when put in competition with another of the crimes of the present peace, the cession of men into the hands of their enemies, and delivering over to confiscation, tyranny, resentment and oppression the unhappy men who trusted to our fair promises and deceitful words. This was the great ground of his objection: and he called it a disgraceful, wicked and treacherous peace; inadequate to its object, and such as no man could vote to be honorable without delivering his character over to damnation for ever” (p. 492).
[175] Ryerson, ii. 64. Curwen’s Journal, 367. Jones, History of N. Y., ii. The bitterness of the mortification, and resentment at the treatment they had received from the hands of their friends, is well exhibited in Judge Jones’s remarkable work, which, however trustworthy or the reverse it may be in other respects, may be followed implicitly as an exhibition of loyalist feeling towards the mother country.
[176] Jones, ii. 645–654. Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission for Enquiry into the Losses, etc., London, 1815. Ryerson, ii. 159–182. Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson, ii. 435–437. Sabine, i. 86–90. In March, 1784, the number of persons who had preferred their petitions was 2,063, and the alleged losses £7,046,278, besides outstanding debts in America amounting to £2,354,135. “In 1788 Mr. Pitt submitted a plan for classifying the claimants, and of classifying and apportioning the nature and amount of consolation to be allotted to each; and to those whose losses had been caused principally by the deprivation of official or professional incomes, he proposed a system of pensions. By the 5th of April, this year (1790), the Commissioners in England had heard and determined 1,680 claims, and had liquidated the same at the sum of £1,887,548. It appeared, finally, that the number of applicants from England, and from the Canadian provinces, attained to the aggregate of 5,072, of which 954 either withdrew their applications or failed to press them, and the sum of the losses is stated to have been £8,026,045. Another return is made out by Mr. J. E. Wilmot, one of the Commissioners, wherein the amount of the claim is given as £10,358,413, and the amount of the claims allowed at £3,033,091. The subject was again raised in Parliament in 1821, but though there was much sympathy expressed for the sufferings of those who had trusted to their country to recompense their fidelity, the sympathy exhausted itself in words.” See also Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, iv. 268. Curwen, 367, 368.
[177] Ryerson, ii. 127. No. Am. Rev., lix. 279. Hawkins, Missions of the Church of England, 249. The Frontier Missionary, or Life of the Rev. Jacob Bailey, by W. S. Bartlett, New York, 1853 (Collections of the Protestant Episcopal Historical Society, vol. ii.). This work gives a pathetic account of the hardships and privations undergone by the exiles in Nova Scotia, as well as a graphic picture of the methods used by the town committees in New England with those who adhered to the cause of the king.