The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (121 page)

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saw mobs in action in the Hudson Valley, and a good deal of blood was shed before they were put down. When the war began in 1775, tenants usually took the side opposed to their landlords'. Thus when it became known that Frederick Philipse, lord of Philipsburgh Manor in Westchester, was a Tory, his tenants happily went to the revolutionaries. The manor contained about 50,000 acres which were confiscated after Philipse chose exile. The law guaranteed preemptive rights to tenants of Tories convicted or attainted of treason, that is the law provided that the tenants had the first right of purchase at fair market value. The state sold Philipsburgh Manor under the Confiscation Act of 1784 in a series of transactions which created 287 new owners where formerly there had been only one -- Frederick Philipse. The average holding of the new owners was 174 acres.
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Whig tenants also gained the lands of Tory landlords in Dutchess County, where the estates of Roger Morris and Beverly Robinson were confiscated in 1779. At least 401 tenants purchased 455 blocks of land in the sales that followed. Holding on to the land was another matter, and after the war many of these tenant-purchasers found making the payments difficult or impossible. A number gave up the attempt, and tenancy survived.
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The Livingstons in Albany County fared much better than many of their neighbors. The Livingstons favored American independence, but not personal liberty for their tenants. Not surprisingly, their tenants took the side of the Crown, especially in 1777 when they learned that Burgoyne was on his way south from Canada. Before these tenants succeeded in arming themselves, militia from adjoining Dutchess and from New England broke them apart. No real war followed, but militia and tenants skirmished and six tenants died. The militia arrested hundreds of others. Tenancy withstood these shocks on the Livingston Manor in New York and most of the other estates where it had flourished, and it continued until the mid-nineteenth century.
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As loyalists, the tenants in New York departed from the usual pattern: they "chose" loyalty rather than "remained" loyal. Their decision constituted a rejection of the prevailing Whig ideology.
But they may have

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had an ideology of their own, based on the feeling that they were exploited by their landlords. Thus they, like patriots all over America, acted in the name of individual liberty.

That commitment did not set them apart from most loyalists. For the loyalists shared the revolutionaries' belief in the rights of the individual, though they parted company with the revolutionaries over the meaning of those rights. When the agitation over British measures began in the 1760s this difference was not clear, and many who later became loyalists decried Parliamentary actions, opposing, for example, the right of Parliament to tax the colonies. Some, most notably Thomas Hutchinson, even argued that Parliament could not properly tax the Americans because they were not represented. Ultimately, loyalists like Hutchinson were unable to follow their own reasoning to the conclusion most of the revolutionaries found unavoidable -- Parliament had become the enemy of the subject's liberty. They could not accept the proposition that the ultimate source of liberty and order was the consent of the individual, that government dedicated to the preservation of freedom took its origins from the agreement of the people. The loyalists, so far as they explained themselves, insisted on the importance of tradition and long-established institutions, such as Parliament, in the creation and protection of liberty. And therefore, for most loyalists the crisis in America came to a head when independence was proposed. Independence found the loyalists unprepared to cast off all that they had known. They did not believe that a new basis of political authority had been fashioned in America. The old was sufficient, and they clung to it -- and suffered as a result.

Understandably the sufferings of the loyalists left the revolutionaries unmoved. But the sufferings were real. The loss of property, physical injury, and the deaths of friends and members of families were hard to bear. For those who left America, there was still another sort of pain, the loneliness of exile in strange lands, and probably for many the realization that came belatedly that they were more American than British. The diaries and letters that testify to this realization are moving documents. "I earnestly wish to spend the remainder of my Days in America," Sir William Pepperell of Massachusetts wrote in 1778, "I love the Country, I love the People." Pepperell's feeling of longing and sadness took voice in many loyalist houses abroad in the years of the war -- and in the years following it.
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Unlike loyalists, black slaves admired the principles of the Revolution, yet they were largely excluded from armed service in the patriot cause. As early as 1766, slaves, probably inspired by the agitation over the Stamp Act, paraded through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, shouting "Liberty." The city immediately picked up its muskets while the authorities had the countryside scouted for signs of an insurrection. Liberty remained the white man's right.
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The ten years that followed undoubtedly taught slaves as well as their masters something more about liberty. Slaves probably had always been willing to act for freedom provided they had any chance of getting it. The coming of war in 1775 gave them the chance. Lord Dunmore's promise of freedom in return for their service brought forward several hundred slaves in Virginia within a week of his proclamation in November 1775. Those who reached him had to travel to the coast and find a boat, for he was on board a British warship in Chesapeake Bay. Slaveholders tightened their control over their slaves as soon as the proclamation was issued. Still, 300 slaves escaped to Dunmore within a week of the proclamation.
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Dunmore suffered military defeat in December at Great Bridge, across the Elizabeth River, ten miles below Norfolk. Thereafter slaves had an increasingly difficult time in joining him. In all, some eight hundred made it. Dunmore formed them into a regiment, but they did no fighting. They died, however, in large numbers in the king's service, victims of smallpox carried by the crews on British warships. When Dunmore sailed for England in August of the next year, only about 300 black soldiers accompanied him.

More slaves served in the American army. Virtually every Continental regiment contained a few. They enlisted, or were enlisted by their masters for conventional reasons -- bounties, land, and the opportunity to earn their freedom. Some were freed before they entered the army; more perhaps were promised their freedom in return for their military service. For the most part they did not serve in separate units though there was a small Rhode Island regiment, officered by whites, composed entirely of blacks.
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Military service might have provided a means by which large numbers of slaves gained their freedom. But within a year of the war's beginning whites, almost everywhere but especially where there were large numbers of slaves, opposed the enlistment of blacks. Compensating their owners would have entailed an expense a hard-pressed Congress could not meet; nor for that matter, could, or would, the state legislatures. The prospect of large numbers of armed blacks was also not smiled upon. Slavery Tested on fear and coercion, and the enslavers could never entirely escape the fear that those they held against their wills would turn on them.

Why, after declaring that all men were created equal and making a revolution in the name of liberty, did Americans not free their slaves? The answer to this question lies somewhere in the tangled history of racial attitudes and American perceptions of economic necessity in the eighteenth century. White Americans had been imbued with prejudices against blacks even before slavery took hold in the seventeenth century. Fears of black animality, revulsion against their physical appearance, fantasies about their sexual proclivities had bitten deeply into white minds. These feelings help explain why blacks were enslaved.
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More than prejudice contributed to the development of slavery, of course. Blacks in America lacked power; their condition must have incited a disposition to exploit them. And slavery itself, as an institution of labor, gradually assumed an enormous importance in the economy, especially in the plantation colonies. Long before the Revolution, slavery had become an institution that seemed not only appropriate, when whites considered the debased character of blacks, but inescapable when they tried to imagine an economy of free labor.

The irony of white Americans claiming liberty while they held slaves did not escape the revolutionary generation. Too many men on both sides of the Atlantic remarked on it. The Society of Friends in America led the criticism, but there were others in all the new states who called for emancipation of the slaves in the name of natural rights and of Christian principles.

Not surprisingly, political leaders in the northern states reacted more positively to such appeals. In one way or another all the northern states acted to provide for the gradual emancipation of slaves.
Most did so

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by passing laws ordering that children born into slavery must be freed several years after their birth. Pennsylvania's legislature approved such a law while the war was going on; Rhode Island and Connecticut waited until the year the war ended. In Massachusetts, courts anticipated the legislature and abolished slavery. Elsewhere in the North the process took longer but by the opening of the new century it was almost complete.
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