The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (120 page)

The strongest expression of this sense occurred of course on the battlefield, where a feeling of identity and a commitment to virtue were most clear. That the army sometimes failed in the service of the cause does not mean that the revolutionary generation's experience was false. No society ever holds perfectly to the courses it sets for itself; and no good and honorable experience can ever be completely free of evil and dishonor.

The Continental army's sometimes erratic performance reflected the society's. The American army in fact was entangled with American society in ways unprecedented in the eighteenth century before the French Revolution. Society and the army shared problems in a common confusion, confusion born of the youthful, half-formed character of each. Procurement of supplies, protection of property, identification of friends (Whigs) and enemies (loyalists), and especially the recruitment of troops preoccupied both civilians and soldiers in a manner uncommon in wellestablished nations where institutional purposes were well understood and procedures were matters of routine. To an extraordinary extent for the eighteenth century, the army was an extension of society.

Battle gave soldiers an experience that no challenge of civilian life equaled. And yet the test of battle was endurable, as we have seen, in part because the Continental army shared so much with the people who sustained it. In the long struggle of the war, what made the cause "glorious," besides its great principles, was the fact that so many believed in it. As it took hold of Americans' imagination, the glorious cause became, in the popular phrase, the "common cause."

The cause was not common to all in America. About 500,000 Americans remained loyal to Britain between 1775 and 1783, and perhaps as many as 80,000 of them left their homes to take refuge in England, Canada, Nova Scotia, and the West Indies. Altogether the "loyalists," as they called themselves ("Tories" they were to those who made the Revolution),

comprised about 16 percent of the total population or a little more than ig percent of all white Americans.
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Loyalty to the Crown was the normal condition of American colonials before 1775; perhaps we should not be surprised that almost one-fifth of the whites in the colonies chose not to -- or could not -- give up the customary allegiance to England. Somehow they resisted the call to revolution in the name of their rights. Not that many believed that those rights were not threatened in the decade before the war began. Many shared the growing revulsion against the British government's heavyhanded measures of the 1760s and early 1770s. But their loyalty ran deeper and cut them off from the politics of their time. Those who showed what their feelings were often received harsh treatment; and among those who feared for their lives or who could not stand to see the old ties broken were some who actively opposed the Revolution -in most cases by taking themselves out of their country or by joining regiments which served the British army.

In no colony did loyalists outnumber revolutionaries. The largest numbers were found in the middle colonies: many tenant farmers of New York supported the king, for example, as did many of the Dutch in the colony and in New Jersey. The Germans in Pennsylvania tried to stay out of the Revolution, just as many Quakers did, and when they failed, clung to the familiar connection rather than embrace the new. Highland Scots in the Carolinas, a fair number of Anglican clergy and their parishioners in Connecticut and New York, a few Presbyterians in the southern colonies, and a large number of the Iroquois Indians stayed loyal to the king.
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This rough list suggests an explanation of the weakness, indeed the failures, of the loyalists. They were' disparate groups, divided among themselves, and separated from genuine power. Thus the loyal Anglicans in New England found themselves surrounded by the dominant Congregationalists. The Germans and Dutch of the middle colonies who did not always agree among themselves faced the more powerful English

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and Scotch-Irish. The Scots were never numerous anywhere in the colonies, and as for the tenants in the Hudson Valley, they too were a minority. All these groups were minorities -- "conscious minorities" as William Nelson the historian calls them -- and disabled by the traits that set them apart.

Their weakness made them dependent upon the royal government which, for its own reasons, never made effective use of them. The weakness and vulnerability these minorities felt undoubtedly contributed to their disposition to remain loyal. They recognized how they differed from the majority in America and looked across the Atlantic for support. Among the Dutch in New York and New Jersey who had not assimilated the English language and culture were to be found more loyalists than among those who had. In the Hackensack Valley the division between the two sorts of Dutch was especially clear. One group clung to the old language and customs and to the old religion; the other learned English and in the Great Awakening was swept up by revivalism. When the Revolution came, the English-speaking Dutch, imbued with evangelical values, supported it. The conservative Dutch held aloof, preferring to give their loyalty to the English king, to avoid the unknown, and to stay within the small circle of a familiar and apparently safe world.
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Safety resided in quiet and inaction. Those loyalists who revealed their sympathies by incautious speech and those who acted in defense of their principles found life to be dangerous. For in every colony public authority sought to suppress them. The British army offered protection, of course, but the British army had a way of moving on. When it did so -- from Boston in 1776, Philadelphia in 1778, and most of the Carolinas in 1781 -- the loyalists who had come forward in its support either left with it or faced the consequences of staying behind.

Committees of safety and inspection which had come into being with the "Association" in 1774 sought out some of the domestic enemy. The committees listened carefully for seditious speech; they watched for tax evaders, and they took note of those who refused to serve in the militia. Once regular governments got hold of things again in 1775 and 1776, local courts and in some cases special bodies created by the legislatures assumed the responsibility of putting down the disaffected. In New York the Provincial Congress, the body succeeding the royal legislature, established a "Committee and Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies."
New Jersey also turned to extraordinary

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agencies. Pennsylvania satisfied itself by use of regular courts, but it armed them, as most states did, with a treason act. The one passed in Pennsylvania listed seven offenses which constituted high treason when committed by a resident against the state or the United States. These offenses, which included accepting a commission from the enemy, levying war, enlisting or persuading someone else to enlist in the enemy's army, furnishing arms or supplies to the enemy, carrying on a traitorous correspondence with the enemy, entering a treasonable combination, and providing intelligence to the enemy, might be punished by a penalty of death and forfeiture of property.
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Lesser offenses in Pennsylvania, misprision of treason, might bring lesser penalties -- imprisonment, instead of death, and forfeiture of half one's estate. Misprision of treason introduced a vagueness into the business of discouraging opposition to the Revolution, a vagueness most useful to those with a sharp understanding of patriotism and an appetite for harassing the unpatriotic. The Pennsylvania statute made speaking or writing in opposition to the public a misprision. Attempting to convey intelligence to the enemy, attempting to incite resistance to the government or to encourage a return to British rule, discouraging enlistments, stirring up tumults or disposing the people to favor the enemy, and opposing revolutionary actions or measures were all misprisions.
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The year after this statute was passed the Pennsylvania legislature conferred upon itself authority to issue proclamations of attainder, and during the war it approved almost 500 acts of attainder. It also permitted the use of other means of prosecuting offenses considered subversive besides the charges of treason or misprision of treason. Charges of piracy, burglary, robbery, misdemeanor, counterfeiting, and larceny could be used.

Although loyalists found all these measures employed against themselves in Pennsylvania, and similar ones in the other states, they did not usually receive savage treatment. But they were convicted for treason and lesser offenses, and they were sometimes executed. They also saw their property confiscated.

Killing the loyalists was a proposal occasionally made in the newspapers and probably much more often in private. The killing, however, could not usually be done without patriot losses -- most deaths occurred in

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the bloody encounters around New York City throughout the war, or near Philadelphia in the fall and winter of 1777-78, or in the Carolinas in 1780-81. Executions occurred infrequently and almost never without judicial process.

Taking the loyalists' property from them was less dangerous but sometimes almost as difficult as taking their lives. For the law had to be observed; and then there were the friends and families of loyalists -and sometimes their creditors -- all of whom had interests in seeing that the proceedings against estates followed an equitable course. The law itself recognized differences among loyalists whose property might be seized: there were those who had apparently plotted with the king's ministers to enslave America, most obviously those royal officials who had fled for their lives about the time that fighting began -- the Governor Hutchinsons of the colonies. The Massachusetts General Court waited until April 1779 before it approved a statute which permitted the confiscation of Hutchinson's property, and of others like him, "Certain Notorious Conspirators" in the words of the act. A second statute dealt with less notorious loyalists who had fled -- "absentees" according to the act, and sometimes referred to as "refugees," or "open avowed enemies," and "absconders." This act required that in the actual confiscations due process must be observed. The legislature passed a resolve later in the spring of 1779 permitting sales of confiscated estates. Widows and wives left behind by their absconding husbands were entitled to onethird of the estate after creditors were paid. The acts paid particular attention to the rights of creditors.
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Many of the loyalists in Massachusetts whose estates were seized and sold had lived in Suffolk County, which included Boston. Studies of these sales do not indicate that an alteration in the county's social structure followed. They do show, however, that men who had not owned land in Suffolk now purchased it.
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The changes in New York proved to be more important, though there, as elsewhere, the old social structure survived the Revolution. Still, leveling -- a word that raised the hackles of landlords -- occurred. Before the war tenants had rebelled in Dutchess County and elsewhere. The issues, the rents and fees extracted by landlords, had nothing directly to do with those dividing America from Britain, but the great riots in 1765 over the Stamp Act seemed to inspire tenants.
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