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
cost the government during the years following 1783 it is difficult to
compute. Including the cost of surveys, official salaries, the building
of saw-mills and grist-mills, and such things, the figures must have run
up to several millions of pounds.
When it is remembered that all this had been already done, it will be
admitted to be a proof of the generosity of the British government that
the total of the claims allowed by the royal commission amounted to
£3,112,455. The grants varied in size from £10, the compensation paid
to a common soldier, to £44,500, the amount paid to Sir John Johnson.
The total outlay on the part of Great Britain, both during and after the
war, on account of the Loyalists, must have amounted to not less than
£6,000,000, exclusive of the value of the lands assigned.
With the object possibly of assuaging the grievances of which the
Loyalists complained in connection with the proceedings of the royal
commission, Lord Dorchester (as Sir Guy Carleton was by that time
styled) proposed in 1789 ‘to put a Marke of Honor upon the families who
had adhered to the unity of the empire, and joined the Royal Standard
in America before the Treaty of Separation in the year 1783.’ It was
therefore resolved that all Loyalists of that description were ‘to be
distinguished by the letters U.E. affixed to their names, alluding to
their great principle, the unity of the empire.’ The land boards were
ordered to preserve a registry of all such persons, ‘to the end that
their posterity may be discriminated from future settlers,’ and that
their sons and daughters, on coming of age, might receive grants of
two hundred acre lots. Unfortunately, the land boards carried out
these instructions in a very half-hearted manner, and when Colonel John
Graves Simcoe became lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, he found the
regulation a dead letter. He therefore revived it in a proclamation
issued at York (now Toronto), on April 6, 1796, which directed the
magistrates to ascertain under oath and to register the names of all
those who by reason of their loyalty to the Empire were entitled to
special distinction and grants of land. A list was compiled from the land
board registers, from the provision lists and muster lists, and from the
registrations made upon oath, which was known as the ‘Old U. E. List’;
and it is a fact often forgotten that no one, the names of some of whose
ancestors are not inscribed in that list, has the right to describe
himself as a United Empire Loyalist.
CHAPTER XII
THE AMERICAN MIGRATION
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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