Almost a hundred years have passed away since the war-cloud arose which swept away thirteen of Britain’s colonies upon the uncertain and tempest-tossed ocean of Republicanism. That storm is long since stilled, as well as the hearts of those who took part therein.
While the statesman and politician may, with advantage, study the lesson then read, and which has been but lately annotated by the United States civil war, by the determined subjection of eight millions of Southerners, who desired freedom to establish a new government, let it be our humble occupation to record some of the immediate individual results of that great tempest, of which American writers, with but few exceptions, have never spoken fairly. Writers among them are not wanting to give lively pen pictures of their revolutionary heroes; not only forgetting the sufferings of the loyalists—the devoted ones, who gave up all—property, homes, friends, all the associations of a birth-place, rather than bow the knee to Baal; but who have wilfully misrepresented them; have charged them with crimes, at once atrocious and unfounded. The sufferings, the losses, the hardships, incident to pioneer life, with the noble purposes and undeviating loyalty of the British American tories, have never been fully related—never engaged the pen of the faithful historian. American writers, on the contrary, have recorded in glowing colors the deeds and actions of the “fathers of the Republic.” To this no objection; can be made; but may we not charge those historians with uncharitableness, with unnecessary neglect of the claims of the loyalists to pure motives, with ignoring their brave deeds, their devoted sufferings, and with unduly ascribing to the “king’s men” motives base and cruel. But the sufferings of the U. E. Loyalists are unrecorded. The world has rarely been told that they were persecuted, their homes pillaged, their persons maltreated, their valuables seized, their houses made desolate, their real estate taken from them, without legal proceedings. The world has been so flooded with the writings of Americans, describing their own excellencies and eulogizing their own cause, that no space has been found to do simple justice to the noble ones who preferred British rule to the uncertain and untried. Indeed, so strongly and for so long a time has the current been flowing to swell the ocean of American glory, that hardly a voice or pen is found doing service for the unfortunate loyalists, who chose to endure a little rather than rush into the vortex of rebellious strife. Even Englishmen have so long listened to one-sided statements, that no one of them can be found to say a word for the old tory party of America. Hence it is that the U. E. Loyalists are very imperfectly known; their history unwritten, their tales of sorrow unattended to, their noble doings unsung. Had there been a hand to guide a describing pen,—to picture the doings, the sufferings, the self-denying heroism of the loyal party; to recount the motives underlying all they did; and had there been ears as willing to listen, and eyes to read, and hearts to receive the facts as those of a contrary nature have obtained, then a far different impression would have been made, and fixed upon the world.