Perhaps the most sorrowful phase of the Revolution was the internal conflict waged between its friends and its enemies in America, where neighbor fought against neighbor.During this pitiless struggle the strength of the Loyalists tended steadily to decline; and they came at last to be regarded everywhere by triumphant revolution as a vile people who should bear the penalties of outcasts.In this attitude towards them Boston had given a lead which the rest of the country eagerly followed.To coerce Loyalists local committees sprang up everywhere.It must be said that the Loyalists gave abundant provocation.They sneered at rebel officers of humble origin as convicts and shoeblacks.There should be some fine hanging, they promised, on the return of the King's men to Boston.Early in the Revolution British colonial governors, like Lord Dunmore of Virginia, adopted the policy of reducing the rebels by harrying their coasts.Sailors would land at night from ships and commit their ravages in the light of burning houses.Soldiers would dart out beyond the British lines, burn a village, carry off some Whig farmers, and escape before opposing forces could rally.Governor Tryon of New York was specially active in these enterprises and to this day a special odium attaches to his name.
For these ravages, and often with justice, the Loyalists were held responsible.The result was a bitterness which fired even the calm spirit of Benjamin Franklin and led him when the day came for peace to declare that the plundering and murdering adherents of King George were the ones who should pay for damage and not the States which had confiscated Loyalist property.Lists of Loyalist names were sometimes posted and then the persons concerned were likely to be the victims of any one disposed to mischief.Sometimes a suspected Loyalist would find an effigy hung on a tree before his own door with a hint that next time the figure might be himself.A musket ball might come whizzing through his window.Many a Loyalist was stripped, plunged in a barrel of tar, and then rolled in feathers, taken sometimes from his own bed.
Punishment for loyalism was not, however, left merely to chance.
Even before the Declaration of Independence, Congress, sitting itself in a city where loyalism was strong, urged the States to act sternly in repressing Loyalist opinion.They did not obey every urging of Congress as eagerly as they responded to this one.In practically every State Test Acts were passed and no one was safe who did not carry a certificate that he was free of any suspicion of loyalty to King George.Magistrates were paid a fee for these certificates and thus had a golden reason for insisting that Loyalists should possess them.To secure a certificate the holder must forswear allegiance to the King and promise support to the State at war with him.An unguarded word even about the value in gold of the continental dollar might lead to the adding of the speaker's name to the list of the proscribed.Legislatures passed bills denouncing Loyalists.The names in Massachusetts read like a list of the leading families of New England.The "Black List" of Pennsylvania contained four hundred and ninety names of Loyalists charged with treason, and Philadelphia had the grim experience of seeing two Loyalists led to the scaffold with ropes around their necks and hanged.Most of the persecuted Loyalists lost all their property and remained exiles from their former homes.The self-appointed committees took in hand the task of disciplining those who did not fly, and the rabble often pushed matters to brutal extremes.When we remember that Washington himself regarded Tories as the vilest of mankind and unfit to live, we can imagine the spirit of mobs, which had sometimes the further incentive of greed for Loyalist property.
Loyalists had the experience of what we now call boycotting when they could not buy or sell in the shops and were forced to see their own shops plundered.Mills would not grind their corn.
Their cattle were maimed and poisoned.They could not secure payment of debts due to them or, if payment was made, they received it in the debased continental currency at its face value.They might not sue in a court of law, nor sell their property, nor make a will.It was a felony for them to keep arms.
No Loyalist might hold office, or practice law or medicine, or keep a school.
Some Loyalists were deported to the wilderness in the back country.Many took refuge within the British lines, especially at New York.Many Loyalists created homes elsewhere.Some went to England only to find melancholy disillusion of hope that a grateful motherland would understand and reward their sacrifices.
Large numbers found their way to Nova Scotia and to Canada, north of the Great Lakes, and there played a part in laying the foundation of the Dominion of today.The city of Toronto with a population of half a million is rooted in the Loyalist traditions of its Tory founders.Simcoe, the first Governor of Upper Canada, who made Toronto his capital, was one of the most enterprising of the officers who served with Cornwallis in the South and surrendered with him at Yorktown.
The State of New York acquired from the forfeited lands of Loyalists a sum approaching four million dollars, a great amount in those days.Other States profited in a similar way.Every Loyalist whose property was seized had a direct and personal grievance.He could join the British army and fight against his oppressors, and this he did: New York furnished about fifteen thousand men to fight on the British side.Plundered himself, he could plunder his enemies, and this too he did both by land and sea.In the autumn of 1778 ships manned chiefly by Loyalist refugees were terrorizing the coast from Massachusetts to New Jersey.They plundered Martha's Vineyard, burned some lesser towns, such as New Bedford, and showed no quarter to small parties of American troops whom they managed to intercept.
What happened on the coast happened also in the interior.At Wyoming in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, in July, 1778, during a raid of Loyalists, aided by Indians, there was a brutal massacre, the horrors of which long served to inspire hate for the British.A little later in the same year similar events took place at Cherry Valley, in central New York.Burning houses, the dead bodies not only of men but of women and children scalped by the savage allies of the Loyalists, desolation and ruin in scenes once peaceful and happy such horrors American patriotism learned to associate with the Loyalists.These in their turn remembered the slow martyrdom of their lives as social outcasts, the threats and plunder which in the end forced them to fly, the hardships, starvation, and death to their loved ones which were wont to follow.The conflict is perhaps the most tragic and irreconcilable in the whole story of the Revolution.
