At a council meeting held at Quebec, November 9, 1789, an order was passed for "preserving a register of the Loyalists that had adhered to the unity of the empire, and joined the Royal Standard previous to the treaty of peace in 1783, to the end that their posterity may be distinguished from future settlers in the rank, registers, and rolls of the militia of their respective districts, as proper objects for preserving and showing the fidelity and conduct so honorable to their ancestors for distinguished benefit and privileges."
Today their descendants are organized as the United Empire Loyalists, and count it an honor that their ancestors suffered persecution and exile rather than yield the principle and idea of union with Great Britain.
The cause of the Loyalists failed, but their stand was a natural one and was just and noble. They were the prosperous and contended men—the men without a grievance. Conservatism was the only policy that one could expect of them. Men do not rebel to rid themselves of prosperity. Prosperous men seek to conceive prosperity. The Loyalist obeyed his nature, but as events proved, chose the ill-fated cause, and when the struggle ended, his prosperity had fled, and he was an outcast and an exile.
If, when George III. and his government recognized the independence of the thirteen colonies, the Loyalists had been permitted to remain here and become, if they would, American citizens, the probabilities are that, long before this time, an expansion would have taken place in the national domain which would have brought under its control the entire American continent north of the United States, an extension brought about in an entirely peaceful and satisfactory manner. The method of exclusion adopted peopled Canada, so far as its English-speaking inhabitants were concerned, with those who went from the United States as political exiles, and who carried with them to their new homes an ever-burning sense of personal wrong and a bitter hatred of those who had abused them.
The indifference shown to treaty obligations by Congress and the states, and the secret determination to eradicate everything British from the country, is now known to have been the deliberate, well-considered policy of the founders of the Republic.
This old legacy of wrongdoing has been a barrier in the way of a healthful northern development of the United States. The contentions which gave rise to these hostile feelings have been forgotten, but the feelings themselves have long outlived the causes which gave rise to them.