Virginia and Maryland seem to have been the only provinces in which the body of the people sympathized with the projects of the revolutionary leaders. The few loyalists there were in Virginia retired to England with the last royal governor, and in Maryland a strong sense of local independence and local pride led the colony to act with unanimity and moderation. The rigorous measures adopted by the new governments in the Eastern States, and the activity of their town committees, succeeded in either driving out their loyalist citizens or reducing them to harmless inefficiency. In New York and New Jersey, however, they remained strong and active throughout the war; and as long as the British forces held Georgia and the Carolinas, loyalty was in the ascendant in those states. The question will naturally be asked, why, if they were so numerous, were they not more successful, why did they yield to popular violence in New England and desert the country while the contest was going on, why did they not hold the Southern States and keep them from joining the others in the Continental Congresses and in the war. In the first place, a negative attitude is necessarily an inactive one; and in consequence of this and of the fact that they could not take the initiative in any action, the loyalists were put at a disadvantage before the much better organization of the patriotic leaders. Though these were few in number, in the South they were of the best families and of great social influence, and in the North they were popular agitators of long experience. They manipulated the committee system so carefully that the colonies found themselves, before they were aware of the tendency of the actions of their deputies, involved in proceedings of very questionable legality, such as the boycotting agreement known as the American Association, and the other proceedings of the Continental Congress.[166] When the war began, the population of the three southernmost states had very little care, except for their own lives and pockets. They were, with the exception of a few distinguished families, descendants of a very low grade of settlers. Oglethorpe’s philanthropy had left the legacy of disorder and inefficiency to the colony of Georgia, a legacy which the Empire State of the South has now nobly and grandly outlived. North Carolina had a most heterogeneous population, and was, perhaps, the most barbarous of all the colonies; while in South Carolina the extremes in the social scale were most strongly marked, from the high-spirited Huguenot gentlemen to the poor whites who formed the bulk of the population, worse taught, worse fed, and worse clad than the negro slaves. Such a population as this, living also in constant fear of negro insurrection, was not likely to count for much on the one side or the other; and we shall find, if we read Gates’s and Greene’s dispatches on the one side, and Rawdon’s and Cornwallis’s on the other, that the rival commanders agree in