Washington and His Comrades in Arms: A Chronicle of the War of IndependenceWrong, George McKinnon
History
Washington and His Comrades in Arms: A Chronicle of the War of Independence
Wrong, George McKinnon
United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783; Washington, George, 1732-1799 -- Military leadership
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.
CHAPTER X. FRANCE TO THE RESCUE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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