After the legislation of 1778 every grievance the colonists had put forward as a reason for taking up arms had been redressed, every claim they had presented had been abandoned, and from the time when the English parliament surrendered all right of taxation and internal legislation in the colonies, and when the English Commissioners laid their propositions before the Americans, the character of the war had wholly changed. It was no longer a war for self-taxation and constitutional liberty. It was now an attempt, with the assistance of France and Spain, to establish independence by shattering the British empire.
There were brave and honest men in America who were proud of the great and free empire to which they belonged, who had no desire to shirk the burden of maintaining it, who remembered with gratitude that it was not colonial, but all English blood that had been shed around Quebec and Montreal in defence of the colonies. Men who with nothing to hope for from the crown were prepared to face the most brutal mob violence and the invectives of a scurrilous press; to risk their fortunes, their reputation, and sometimes even their lives, in order to avert civil war and ultimate separation. Most of them ended their days in poverty and exile, and, as the supporters of a beaten cause, history has paid but a scanty tribute to their memory. But they comprised some of the best and ablest men America has ever produced, and they were contending for an ideal which was at least as worthy as that for which Washington fought.
It was the maintenance of one great, free, industrial, and pacific empire, comprising the whole British race, holding the richest plains of Asia in possession, blending all that was most venerable in an ancient civilization with the abundant energies of a youthful social combination likely in a few generations to outstrip every commercial competitor, and to acquire an indisputable ascendency among the nations. Such an ideal was a noble one, and there were Americans who were prepared to make any personal sacrifice to realize it. These men were the LOYALISTS of the Revolution. Consider what the result would be today had not this "Anglo-Saxon Schism," as Goldwin Smith calls it, taken place. There would be a great English-speaking nation of 130,000,000 that could dominate the world. They would in all substantial respects be one people, in language, literature, institutions, and social usages, whether settled in South Africa, in Australia, in the primitive home, or in North America.
Because the Revolution had its origin in Massachusetts, and the old Bay State furnished a large part of the men and the means to carry it to a successful issue,[49] it seems to have been taken for granted that the people embraced the popular side almost in a mass.
A more mistaken opinion than this has seldom prevailed. At the evacuation of Boston, General Gage was accompanied by eleven hundred Loyalists, which included the best people of the town. Boston at that time had a population of 16,000. "Among these persons of distinguished rank and consideration there were members of the council, commissioners, officers of the customs, and other officials, amounting to one hundred and two; of clergymen, eighteen; of inhabitants of country towns, one hundred and five; of merchants and other persons who resided in Boston, two hundred and thirteen; of farmers, mechanics and traders, three hundred and eighty-two."[50]
Cambridge lost nearly all her men of mark and high standing; nearly all the country towns were thus bereft of the very persons who had been the most honored and revered. With the exiles were nearly one hundred graduates of Harvard college.
Among the proscribed and banished were members of the old historic families, Hutchinson, Winthrop, Saltonstall, Quincy, the Sewells, and Winslows, families of which the exiled members were not one whit behind those that remained, in intelligence, social standing and moral worth.
At the evacuation of New York and Savannah no fewer than 30,000 persons left the United States for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. From northern New York and Vermont the Loyalists crossed over into Upper Canada, and laid the foundations of that prosperous province under the vigorous leadership of Governor Simcoe, who, during the war, commanded a regiment of Loyalist rangers which had done efficient service. Many of the Southern Loyalists settled in Florida, the Bahamas and the West India Islands.
Familiar New England names meet one at every turn in the maritime provinces, especially Nova Scotia. Dr. Inglis, from Trinity church, New York, was the first bishop, and Judge Sewell, of Massachusetts, the first chief justice there. The harshness of the laws and the greed of the new commonwealth had driven into exile men who could be ill spared, and whose absence showed itself in the lack of balance and of political steadiness which characterized the early history of the republic, while the newly-founded colonies, composed almost exclusively of conservatives, were naturally slow, but sure, in their development. The men who were willing to give up home, friends and property, for an idea, are not men to be despised; they are, rather, men for us to claim with pride and honor as American—men of the same blood, and the same speech as ourselves; Americans who were true to their convictions and who suffered everything except the loss of liberty, for their political faith. We look in vain among the lists of voluntary and banished refugees from Massachusetts for a name on which rests any tradition of disgrace or infamy, to which the finger of scorn can be pointed. Can this be said of the Revolutionary leaders of Massachusetts, the so-called patriots, to whom the Revolution owes its inception? If the reader has any doubts on this subject, then let him compare the lives of the Loyalists, as given in this work, with those of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other Revolutionary leaders. The Loyalists were generally people of substance; their stake in the country was greater, even, than that of their opponents; their patriotism, no doubt, fully as fervent. "There is much that is melancholy, of which the world knows but little, connected with this expulsion from the land they sincerely loved. The estates of the Loyalists were among the fairest, their stately mansions stood on the sightliest hill-brows, the richest and best-tilled meadows were their farms; the long avenue, the broad lawn, the trim hedge about the garden, servants, plate, pictures, for the most part these things were at the homes of the Loyalists. They loved beauty, dignity and refinement." The rude contact of town meetings was offensive to their tastes. The crown officials were courteous, well-born and congenial gentlemen.
"The graceful, the chivalrous, the poetic, the spirits over whom these feelings had power, were sure to be Loyalists. Democracy was something rude and coarse, and independence to them meant a severance of those connections of which a colonist ought to be proudest.