The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet "The Confederacy and the Transvaal"

by Sydney George Fisher

Your ancestor had still other difficulties to face of which it may be well to remind you. Long before actual fighting began in our revolution the rebel party, or perhaps I should say, the rougher elements of it, created by means of tar and feathers and other methods, a reign of terror throughout the whole country. They went about in parties taking weapons of all kinds out of loyalists' houses, although they have since put a clause in the National and all state constitutions that "the right to keep and bear arms shall never be infringed." Those documents also without exception, I believe, contain a clause guaranteeing freedom of speech and of the press; but the rebel party of your ancestor extinguished completely and utterly both of these rights; so completely that Rivington, the principal publisher of loyalist pamphlets, fled for his life to a British man-of-war; and loyalists scarcely dared refer to politics even indirectly in private letters.

If the loyalists were really a majority, as they professed to be, the rebels were determined to break them up. Loyalists were ridden and tossed on fence rails, gagged and bound for days at a time, stoned, fastened in rooms with a fire and the chimney stopped on top, advertised as public enemies so that they would be cut off from all dealings with their neighbors; they had bullets shot into their bedrooms, their horses poisoned or mutilated; money or valuable plate extorted from them to save them from violence and on pretence of taking security for their good behavior; their houses and ships were burnt; they were compelled to pay the guards who watched them in their houses; and when carted about for the mob to stare at and abuse they were compelled to pay something at every town. For the three months of July, August and September of the year 1774, one can find in the American Archives alone, over thirty descriptions of outrages of this kind.

In short, lynch law prevailed for many years during the revolution, and the habit became so fixed that we have never given it up. As has been recently shown the term lynch law originated during the revolution and was taken from the name of the brother of the man who founded Lynchburgh in Virginia.

The revolution was not by any means the pretty social event that the ladies of the so-called patriotic societies suppose it to have been. It was on the contrary a rank and riotous rebellion against the long established authority of a nation which had saved us from France, built us up into prosperity and if she were ruling us to-day would, I am entirely willing to admit, abolish lynch law, negro burning, municipal and state legislative corruption and all the other evils about which reformers fret.

But feeling that we were a naturally separated people, the rebel party among us insisted that we had the inalienable right to rule ourselves. We were seized with the spirit of independence, or as the people of your way of thinking at that time called it "a chimera of patriotism." Against this natural and inalienable right no authority, we declared, no matter how meritorious and venerable need be respected.

The Boers, though receiving far greater provocation than we received, have behaved much better. They have not tarred and feathered Englishmen as we did or ridden them on rails, or suffocated them with smoke, or burnt their houses or hazed or tortured them in any way. Their conduct in the whole war has been most fair, honorable and meritorious, showing the high character of their intelligence and morals and their superiority to the British.

In our revolution, wherever the rebel party were most successful with their reign of terror they drove all the judges from the bench and abolished the courts; and for a long time there were no courts or public administration of the law in many of the colonies, notably in New England.

To people of the loyalist turn of mind all these lynching proceedings were an irrefragable proof, not only that the rebel party were wicked, but that their ideas of independence, of a country free from British control and British law, were ridiculous, silly delusions, dangerous to all good order and civilization. That such people could ever govern a country of their own and have in it that thing they were howling so much about, "liberty," was in their opinion beyond the bounds of intelligent belief.

These lynching proceedings, the loyalists said, increased the loyalist party very fast and made them sure of a majority. I shall not discuss that question. But there is no doubt that many rebels went over to the loyalist side; and many others who did not actually go over were shaken in their faith and hardly knew what to think. Your ancestor belonged to the party who did all this lynching and inaugurated the reign of terror and he has himself told us how it staggered him. The prospect of raising such men as the lynchers to power by a revolution was a serious matter. A man one day congratulated him on the anarchy, the mob violence, the insults to judges, the closing of the courts and the tar and feathers which the patriots and their congress were producing.

"Oh Mr. Adams, what great things have you and your colleagues done for us! We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no courts of justice now in this province, and I hope there never will be another."