Loyalists, from the middle of 1776 down to 1783, form no longer a literature of argumentative discussion, but rather a literature of emotional appeal, exultant, hortatory, derisive, denunciatory, — a literature chiefly lyrical and satirical. II Even yet, in this last decade of the nineteenth century, it is by no means easy for Americans - especially if, as is the case with the present writer, they be descended from men who thought and fought on behalf of the Revolution to take a disinterested attitude, that is, an historical one, toward those Americans who thought and fought against the Revolution. Both as to the men and as to the questions involved in that controversy, the rehearsal of the claims of the victorious side has been going on among us, now for a hundred years or more, in tradition, in history, in oration, in song, in ceremony. Hardly have we known, seldom have we been reminded, that the side of the Loyalists, as they called themselves, of the Tories, as they were scornfully nicknamed by their opponents, was even in argument not a weak one, and in motive and sentiment not a base one, and in devotion and selfsacrifice not an unheroic one. While the war was going forward, of course the animosities aroused by it were too hot and too fierce, especially between the two opposing groups of Americans, to permit either party in the controversy to do justice to the logical or to the personal merit of the other. When at last the war came to an end, and the champions of the Revolution were in absolute triumph, then the more prominent Tories had to flee for their lives; they had to flee from the wrath that had come, and to bury themselves, either in other lands or in obscure places of this land. Then, of course, they and all their detested notions and emotions. and deeds, whether grand or petty or base, went down out of sight, submerged beneath the abhorrence of the victorious Revolutionists, and doomed, as it appears, to at least one solid century of oratorical and poetical infamy, which has found its natural and organized expression in each recurring Fourth of July, and in each reappearance of the birthday of Washington. May it not, however, at last be assumed that a solid century should be, even under such conditions, a sufficient refrigerator for overheated political emotion? May we not now hope that it will not any longer cost us too great an effort to look calmly, even considerately, at least fairly, upon what, in the words and acts of the Tories, our fathers and grandfathers could hardly endure to look at all? And, surely, our willingness to do all this can hardly be lessened by the consideration that, "in dealing with an enemy, not only dead, but dead in exile and in defeat, candor prescribes the fullest measure of generous treatment." 1 At any rate, the American Revolution affords no exemption from the general law of historic investigation, — that the truth is to be found only by him who searches for it with an unbiassed mind. Until we shall be able to take, respecting the problems and the parties of our own Revolution, the same attitude which we freely and easily take respecting the problems and parties of other revolutions — that is, the attitude, not of hereditary partisans, but of scientific investigators will it be forbidden us to acquire a thoroughly discriminating and just acquaintance with that prodigious epoch in our history. III As preliminary to some examination of the argumentative value of the position taken by the Loyalist party, let us inquire, for a moment, what recognition may be due to them simply as persons. Who and what were the Tories of the American Revolution? As to their actual number, there is some difficulty in framing even a rough estimate. No attempt at a census of politi-' cal opinions was ever made during that period; and no popular vote was ever taken of a nature to indicate, even approximately, the numerical strength of the two opposing schools of political thought. Of course, in every community there were Tories who were Tories in secret. These could not be counted, for the good reason that they could not be known. Then, again, the number of openly avowed Tories varied somewhat with variations in the prosperity of the Revolution. Still further, their number varied with variations of locality. Throughout the entire struggle, by far the largest number of Tories was to be found in the colony of New York, particularly in the neighborhood of its chief city. Of the other middle colonies, while there were many Tories in New Jersey, in Delaware, and in Maryland, probably the largest number lived in Pennsylvania, - a number so great that a prominent officer 2 in the Revolutionary army described it as the "enemies' country." Indeed, respecting the actual preponderance of the Tory party in these two central colonies, an eminent champion of the Revolution bore this startling testimony: "New York and Pennsylvania were so nearly divided — if their propensity was 1 Winthrop Sargent, Preface to The Loyalist Poetry, etc., vi. 2 Timothy Pickering. not against us-that if New England on one side and Virginia on the other had not kept them in awe, they would have joined the British." Of the New England colonies, Connecticut had the greatest number of Tories; and next, in proportion to population, was the district which was afterwards known as the State of Vermont. Proceeding to the colonies south of the Potomac, we find that in Virginia, especially after hostilities began, the Tories were decidedly less in number than the Whigs. In North Carolina, the two parties were about evenly divided. In South Carolina, the Tories were the more numerous party; while in Georgia their majority was so great that, in 1781, they were preparing to detach that colony from the general movement of the rebellion, and probably would have done so, had it not been for the embarrassing accident which happened to Cornwallis at Yorktown in the latter part of that year. If we may accept these results as giving us a fair, even though crude, estimate concerning the local distribution of the Tories, we have still to come back to the question which deals with their probable number in the aggregate. Naturally, on such a problem, the conclusions reached by the opposing parties would greatly differ. Thus, the Tories themselves always affirmed that could there have been a true and an unterrified vote, they would have had a great majority; and that the several measures of the Revolution had not only never been submitted to such a test, but had been resolved upon and forced into effect by a few resolute leaders who, under the names of committees of correspondence, committees of observation, committees of safety, conventions, and congresses, had assumed unconstitutional authority, and had pretended, without valid credentials, to speak and to act for the whole population of their towns, or counties, or provinces. To translate the Tory explanation into the language of the present day, it may be said that, in their belief, the several measures of the Revolution were the work of a well-constructed and powerful political machine, set up in ป each colony, in each county, in each town, and operated with as much skill and will and unscrupulousness as go into the operation of such machines in our time. This opinion, which, in its substance, was most ably presented in those days by the Tory writers, has been adopted by a very candid English historian now living, who says of the American Revolution that, like most other revolutions, it "was the work of an energetic minority, who succeeded in committing an undecided and fluctuating majority to courses for 1 The Works of John Adams, X. 63. which they had little love, and leading them step by step to a position from which it was impossible to recede." 1 Of course, with such an estimate as to the superior numbers of the Tories, their own opponents did not agree; but they did admit that the Tory party was at any rate a very large one. Perhaps no statesman on the Whig side was better informed on such a subject than John Adams, or was less inclined to make an undue concession to the enemy; and he gave it as his opinion that about onethird of the people of the thirteen States had been opposed to the measures of the Revolution in all its stages.2 This opinion of John Adams, which he affirmed more than once in the latter part of his life, was on one occasion mentioned by him in a letter to his old compatriot, Thomas McKean, Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a member of every American Congress from that of 1765 to the close of the Revolution. "You say," wrote McKean in reply, "that . . . about a third of the people of the colonies were against the Revolution. It required much reflection before I could fix my opinion on this subject; but on mature deliberation I conclude you are right, and that more than a third of influential characters were against it." 8 Out of three millions of people, then, at least one million did not approve of the policy of carrying their political opposition to the point of rebellion and separation. According to John Adams and Thomas McKean, every third American whom we could have encountered in this part of the world between 1765 and 1783 was a Loyalist. Surely, an idea - a cause- that was cherished and clung to, amid almost every form of obloquy and disaster, by so vast a section of American society, can hardly deserve any longer to be turned out of court in so summary and contemptuous a fashion as that with which it has been commonly disposed of by American writers. IV After the question of number, very properly comes that of quality. What kind of people were these Tories, as regards intelligence, character, and standing in their several communities? And here, brushing aside, as unworthy of historical investigators, the partisan and vindictive epithets of the controversy,—many of which, however, still survive even in the historical writings of our own time, we shall find that the Loyalists were, as might be expected, of all grades of personal worth and worthlessness; and 1 Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, new ed., IV. 224. that, while there was among them, no doubt, the usual proportion of human selfishness, malice, and rascality, as a class they were not bad people, much less were they execrable people as their opponents at the time commonly declared them to be. In the first place, there was, prior to 1776, the official class; that is, the men holding various positions in the civil and military and naval services of the government, their immediate families, and their social connections. All such persons may be described as inclining to the Loyalist view in consequence of official bias. Next were certain colonial politicians who, it may be admitted, took a rather selfish and an unprincipled view of the whole dispute, and who, counting on the probable, if not inevitable, success of the British arms in such a conflict, adopted the Loyalist side, not for conscience' sake but for profit's sake, and in the expectation of being rewarded for their fidelity by offices and titles, and especially by the confiscated estates of the rebels, after the rebels themselves should have been defeated, and their leaders hanged or sent into exile. As composing still another class of Tories, may be mentioned probably a vast majority of those who stood for the commercial interests, for the capital and the tangible property of the country, and who, with the instincts natural to persons who have something considerable to lose, disapproved of all measures for pushing the dispute to the point of disorder, riot, and civil war. Still another class of Loyalists was made up of people of professional training and occupation,- clergymen, physicians, lawyers, teachers, a clear majority of whom seem to have been set against the ultimate measures of the Revolution. Finally, and in general, it may be said that a majority of those who, of whatever occupation, of whatever grade of culture or of wealth, would now be described as conservative people, were Loyalists during the American Revolution. And by way of concession to the authority and force of truth, what has to be said respecting the personal quality commonly attaching to those who, in any age or country, are liable to be classed as conservative people? Will it be denied that within that order of persons, one may usually find at least a fair portion of the cultivation, of the moral thoughtfulness, of the personal purity and honor, existing in the entire community to which they happen to belong? Precisely this description, at any rate, applies to the conservative class in the American colonies during that epoch, a majority of whom dissented from those extreme measures which at last trans |