If breaking windows be the sport,
Who bravely breaks the most.
But oh! for him my fancy culls
The choicest flowers she bears,
Who constitutionally pulls
Your house about your ears.
When William Cowper wrote these lines, his sources of information with regard to affairs in America were probably slight; but had he been writing at the seat of war he could not have touched off the treatment of the Loyalists by the revolutionists with more effective irony.
There were two kinds of persecution to which the Loyalists were subjected—that which was perpetrated by ‘lawless mobs,’ and that which was carried out ‘constitutionally.’
It was at the hands of the mob that the Loyalists first suffered persecution. Probably the worst of the revolutionary mobs was that which paraded the streets of Boston. In 1765, at the time of the Stamp Act agitation, large crowds in Boston attacked and destroyed the magnificent houses of Andrew Oliver and Thomas Hutchinson. They broke down the doors with broadaxes, destroyed the furniture, stole the money and jewels, scattered the books and papers, and, having drunk the wines in the cellar, proceeded to the dismantling of the roof and walls. The owners of the houses barely escaped with their lives. In 1768 the same mob wantonly attacked the British troops in Boston, and so precipitated what American historians used to term ‘the Boston Massacre’; and in 1773 the famous band of ‘Boston Indians’ threw the tea into Boston harbour.