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
differences contributed to embitter the conflict, and doubtless made
Whigs or Tories of people who had no other interest at stake.
It is commonly supposed that the Loyalists drew their strength from the
upper classes in the colonies, while the revolutionists drew theirs
from the proletariat. There is just enough truth in this to make it
misleading. It is true that among the official classes and the large
landowners, among the clergymen, lawyers, and physicians, the majority
were Loyalists; and it is true that the mob was everywhere revolutionist.
But it cannot be said that the Revolution was in any sense a war of
social classes. In it father was arrayed against son and brother against
brother. Benjamin Franklin was a Whig; his son, Sir William Franklin, was
a Tory. In the valley of the Susquehanna the Tory Colonel John Butler,
of Butler’s Rangers, found himself confronted by his Whig cousins,
Colonel William Butler and Colonel Zeb Butler. George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, John Adams, were not inferior in social status to Sir William
Johnson, Thomas Hutchinson, and Joseph Galloway. And, on the other hand,
there were no humbler peasants in the revolutionary ranks than some of
the Loyalist farmers who migrated to Upper Canada in 1783. All that can
be said is that the Loyalists were most numerous among those classes
which had most to lose by the change, and least numerous among those
classes which had least to lose.
Much labour has been spent on the problem of the numbers of the
Loyalists. No means of numbering political opinions was resorted to at
the time of the Revolution, so that satisfactory statistics are not
available. There was, moreover, throughout the contest a good deal of
going and coming between the Whig and Tory camps, which makes an estimate
still more difficult. ‘I have been struck,’ wrote Lorenzo Sabine, ‘in
the course of my investigations, with the absence of fixed principles,
not only among people in the common walks of life, but in many of the
prominent personages of the day.’ Alexander Hamilton, for instance,
deserted from the Tories to the Whigs; Benedict Arnold deserted from the
Whigs to the Tories.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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