The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration [1920 ed.] — John Shaqi
The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration [1920 ed.]Wallace, W. Stewart (William Stewart)
History
The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration [1920 ed.]
Wallace, W. Stewart (William Stewart)
American loyalists; United Empire loyalists
From the point of view of Canadian history, the most interesting of these
expeditions were those conducted by Sir John Johnson and Colonel Butler.
They were carried on with the Canadian border as their base-line. It
was by the men who were engaged in them that Upper Canada was at first
largely settled; and for a century and a quarter there have been levelled
against these men by American and even by English writers charges of
barbarism and inhumanity about which Canadians in particular are
interested to know the truth.
Most of Johnson’s and Butler’s men came from central or northern New
York. To explain how this came about it is necessary to make an excursion
into previous history. In 1738 there had come out to America a young
Irishman of good family named William Johnson. The famous naval hero, Sir
Peter Warren, who was an uncle of Johnson, had large tracts of land in
the Mohawk valley, in northern New York. These estates he employed his
nephew in administering; and, when he died, he bequeathed them to him. In
the meantime William Johnson had begun to improve his opportunities. He
had built up a prosperous trade with the Indians; he had learned their
language and studied their ways; and he had gained such an ascendancy
over them that he came to be known as ‘the Indian-tamer,’ and was
appointed the British superintendent-general for Indian Affairs. In the
Seven Years’ War he served with great distinction against the French. He
defeated Baron Dieskau at Lake George in 1755, and he captured Niagara
in 1759; for the first of these services he was created a baronet, and
received a pension of £5000 a year. During his later years he lived at
his house, Johnson Hall, on the Mohawk river; and he died in 1774, on the
eve of the American Revolution, leaving his title and his vast estates to
his only son, Sir John.
Just before his death Sir William Johnson had interested himself in
schemes for the colonization of his lands. In these he was remarkably
successful. He secured in the main two classes of immigrants, Germans
and Scottish Highlanders. Of the Highlanders he must have induced more
than one thousand to emigrate from Scotland, some of them as late as
1773. Many of them had been Jacobites; some of them had seen service
at Culloden Moor; and one of them, Alexander Macdonell, whose son
subsequently sat in the first legislature of Upper Canada, had been on
Bonnie Prince Charlie’s personal staff. These men had no love for the
Hanoverians; but their loyalty to their new chieftain, and their lack of
sympathy with American ideals, kept them at the time of the Revolution
true almost without exception to the British cause. King George had no
more faithful allies in the New World than these rebels of the ’45.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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