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18th CENTURY LOYALISTS and PATRIOTS
Contributed by: Dennis P. Arntzen
WELCOME to my family biography. This site will detail the lineage and rich historical heritage from all of my family surnames.
WHEN I was a teenager, I asked my mother, "What was your family's nationality?" She responded, "We have a lot of English and Scottish, some Dutch and Irish, a little Indian and French." She didn't know any other details about her family line. She passed away in May, 1999. My father passed away in November, 2000. After that, I realized that our family story could be lost forever if it was not researched and published.
DURING the course of researching my family line on the Internet, I discovered that my mother's family had a very interesting history as compared to my father's side. My father's family came from Norway and Denmark. My mother's family line decended from the ancestors who came to America prior to the Revolutionary War. At this point, it would be worth reviewing the course of events that took place during the 1700s that ordained my mother's family's history.
COLONALISM - PATRIOTS versus
LOYALISTS
PRIOR to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, America looked less like a group of colonies and more like a nation whose per capita wealth challenged that of its founding British empire. The political theory of the day dictated that colonies exist to increase the prosperity of the nations that had given birth to them. In order to maximize the benefits of the colony, the parent nation had to control all of its activities in financial, governing, religious, and cultural affairs. The colony had to be wholly subservient to the interests of the founding nation that had invested in it.
AT the onset, England's Parliament administered the Thirteen Colonies with a loose hand, expecting only that trade should increase and its sovereignty be acknowledged. This solution brought about the following results that were contrary to the founding investor's interest:
1 - THEORY dictates that the raw materials of the colony should be exchanged for the manufactured goods of the founding nation. Yet, American shipyards had, for a long time, exported completed vessels to Europe rather than lumber to England. Rather than exporting iron ores to Britain, colonial cities used the ores to support their foundries and trades.
2 - THE founding nation should be the distribution center for the goods of the colonies, which gave them economic benefits and increased global power over their rivals. But colonial merchants from ports like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia had been shipping their fish, flour, lumber, and locally manufactured goods to wherever markets offered. And the benefits seemed to flow back to the colonies rather than to London.
3 - DISTANT and isolated from its parent country, the colonies needed some form of governing institutions. An elected assembly was the fundamental right of property owning Englishmen. In the colonies, as in England, property owners paid taxes to support their governing expenses. As a result, each of the colonies had an elected assembly that participated in governing and administering the colony from standard British practice. The English settlers of the colonies never acknowledged giving up their rights of Englishmen merely because they had moved from Britain to America. But the paradox of those Englishmen was: how could their constitutional rights as Englishmen be reconciled with the fact that their rights had to be subservient to the nation that invested in their foundation?
4 - THEORY in the area of religion and culture does not allow for diversity from its founding nation. The first Pilgrim settlers of the new world established a governing compact and their Congregational church. Later, Parliament recognized the Congregational church's freedom from the authority of the Church of England. With this precedence, the Quakers, Presbyterians, Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists established their religious tenets and governing authority. They vigorously sought to preserve their identity and impose their own authority seperate from the Church of England. Along with this religious diversity came cultural interests. By 1775, large and affluent cities of the colonies supported colleges, newspapers, painters, writers, and scientific societies. While they experienced British cultural influence, they were not controlled by it.
5 - WITH the Indian nations that surrounded them, the French in Canada, and Spain in the southwest, the colonies were taking the lead in determining their own western expansion. They maintained militia regiments and privateering fleets to serve their own colonial interests. When there was a population surplus, the colonists expanded their boundries and used their colonial troops to displace the native populations. This action was contrary to England's treaties with the local Native nations.
IN the eighteenth century, fur trade was a competing economic interest between the European nations. France had posts in Canada that traded commodities for pelt from the native Indian nations of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The English also had posts in the New York and Pennsylvania colonies. In order to expand their trading borders, the competing European nations, along with their allied Indian nations, conducted raids on the competing posts and settlements along the frontier. England established borders with the Iroquois Indian nation in exchange for their alliance against the French and their allies. This allowed the Mohawk Indian tribes to conduct raids against colonists that tried to settle within their acknowledged territorial boundries in New York. British regiments were deployed to America to defend English interests.
PATRIOT DISSENT
AFTER England had won the French and Indian war and gained sovereignty of Canada, Parliament felt that the British regiments that had fought the war would have to be garrisoned in the colonies. New regulations for quartering troops within America were laid down. Relations with Native nations were more closely regulated after the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It recognized native territorial rights and forbade the acquisition of native land by private citizens. Customs officials gained new powers to investigate and supervise trade. To pay for the added cost of colonial administration, new or revised taxes were imposed to secure more revenue. The 1764 Sugar and molasses tax, the 1765 Stamp tax on the circulation of legal documents and papers, and new customs taxes on tea, glass, and other trade goods were put into place. Not only did the colonists have to pay taxes to their colonial legislature to support their internal affairs, they also had to pay taxes to Parliament for their expenses in the colonies. The taxpayers viewed this as a double tax because the taxes paid to both interests were for support of the same government services that the colonists had always maintained for themselves.
THE Thirteen Colonies were unused to interference of this kind. Past practices allowed them to exercise substantial authority in their own affairs. They found that Parliament intended to be more specific in the practical matters of colonial affairs, especially in areas that conflicted with past policies mandated by the colonial legislature. This meant that parliamentary regulations and colonial contribution to the rising costs of the empire had to be complied with. "They must obey and we must prescribe", had been British statesman William Pitt's succinct definition of the essential relationship between the colonies and Parliament in 1770. Now Parliament was prepared to see itself obeyed. The paradox of Englishmen's rights as previously discussed in colonial theory brought about a perceived threat of Parliamentary tyranny. The colonial Englishmen viewed Parliament's acts as not merely preserving but extending their power to govern.
THE only legitimate claim one could have to oppose the government was that the rights of Englishmen were in jeopardy. Thereby, anyone who opposed their government's policies had to take up the cause of liberty and call himself a patriot, which was synonymous with being a "loyal member of the opposition". Eventually, the more vocal colonial spokesmen called themselves 'Sons of Liberty'.
COLONIAL protest that a tiny tax on tea would enslave them to the British government was likely to get skeptical responses from Britons in England. They themselves paid heavy taxes to defend the empire and they were already used to hearing the term "liberty" to justify all kinds of dubious factional claims. Britain's response to the colonists was to cite the rights of Parliament to regulate according to their national interests.
THE problem with constant appeals to liberty lay in the speed with which they poisoned the atmosphere of reasonable discussion. Despite affirmations of loyalty, the language of liberty was a language of extremism. Those that disagreed with your claim of defending the rights of Englishmen were traitors. If liberty was natural and good, then the only threat to it was the conspiracy of corrupt men seeking unfettered power. Such traitors and tyrants would naturally conceal these plans and disguise their actions.
AMERICANS, increasingly proud of their own society, grew convinced that Britain, becoming old and corrupt, was conspiring against the wealth and freedom of America. Englishmen, committed to the rule of Parliament, were easily convinced that colonial demagogues were conspiring to steal the richest jewel of the empire by pretending that minor taxes were major attacks on their liberty. There was a serious political problem to face - how to reconcile the right of colonists to participate in their government with the right of Parliament to be supreme throughout the British realm.
EVENTUALLY, almost any action taken against royal authority could be justified in the name of liberty. In 1770, an unruly crowd of hostile Bostonians had confronted a group of British soldiers who were on sentry duty in front of the Customs House. The men of Boston jeered and shouted insults at them. They threw rocks, oyster shells, and chunks of ice; threatened the soldiers with clubs; and pressed up close to the muzzles of their guns and dared them to fire. For some unfortunate reason, the soldiers fired into the crowd and killed several citizens (Image to the left). Samuel Adams was a founder of the 'Sons of Liberty', a shrewd political activist, and he knew how to sway public opinion. The Sons of Liberty made sure that everyone heard about what they called "The Boston Massacre". Samuel Adams had his good friend Paul Revere, a silversmith and engraver, make a copper engraving that showed British soldiers mowing down peaceful Bostonians. That engraving was used to publish distorted stories across the nation's newspapers and pamphlets (Image to the right).
TWO years later, a gang of Rhode Island smugglers seized and burned the British naval schooner 'Gaspee' in retaliation for its unusual vigilance in pursuing customs violators. The colonists claimed that the British troops had no right to be present uninvited in the colonies. The lawbreakers were able to win wide support by casting doubt on the Royal Navy's right to operate against colonial shippers. To partisans of liberty, all British authority was illegitimate. Therefore, any actions the British troops took were turned against them whatever the circumstances.
THE most famous and consequential challenge to British authority was Boston's "tea party" of December 1773. That tea party set in motion the events that would transform colonial government. Early in 1774. British Parliament enacted the "Coercive Acts" that was designed as a series of punitive acts against the citizens of Massachusetts. That act took away their assembly's right to appoint its executive council, abolished town meetings, closed the port of Boston indefinitely, and closed down the customs house that Boston's trade required. The British military commander, General Thomas Gage, became Massachusetts new governor. He arrived in Boston with four additional regiments and renewed authority to use force against civil disturbances.
IN response to the Coercive Acts, the leading members of Massachusetts' legislature transformed themselves into a provincial congress. They still carried an aura of legitimacy as the colony's properly elected representatives, but they were now entirely independent of parliamentary sanctions. Soon after, the rest of the colonies transformed their colonial legislatures into provincial congresses. They reorganized the colonial militias as their arm of resistance, voting a boycott of all trade with Britain, and established committees of safety to protect against conspiracy and subversion. They simply defined out of existence the agencies of government that represented British authority in America. In the fall of 1774, these provincial congresses took the first steps to unify themselves by forming themselves into the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
IN April 1775, General Gage sent troops a few miles away from Boston to seize an illegal stock of arms at Concord. Shots were fired at Lexington, and the war had begun. Almost immediately, Gage found himself besieged at Boston by angry militias and a steadily growing army with artillery and siege tools. In June, a pitched battle was fought at nearby Bunker Hill. The debate over liberty was suddenly a war. The term "patriot" had transformed its meaning of "member of the loyal opposition" to signify a "friend of the revolution". "Liberty" ceased to refer to the rights of Englishmen and began to mean American freedom from English tyranny.
LOYALIST DILEMMA
NEARLY twenty percent of the total American population who had not gone from loyalty through patriotic dissent to rebellion now faced an unforgiving new nation. The Continental Congress took steps to secure its authority in America. Every American was invited to sign the articles of association that defined the boycott of British goods. Every American that refused to sign on was judged inimical to the liberties of America. Congress also began to print its own money. Soon, ones willingness to accept Continential currency at face value became one of the tests of support for the colonial cause. Those who were loyal to England were called "Tories" amongst patriots and "Loyalist" amongst Britons. One Connecticut Loyalist stated, "Neighbor was against neighbor, father against son, and son against father. He that would not thrust his own blade through his brother's heart was called an infamous villain."
Loyalists included farmers in the Hudson valley, many Dutch people in New York and New Jersey, Germans and Quakers in Pennsylvania, and Scottish people in the Carolinas. Some people were loyal to Britain because they were members of the Church of England. And, some loyalists were dependent on the British for jobs and income. In order to save their farms or to avoid a beating and a stay in jail, many loyalists fought desperate campaigns to remain neutral and away from the battlefields. Before the Committee of Safety, John Willett was asked which side he supported, replied, "that he wished those might succeed who had justice on their side." The committee judged him an enemy of American liberty.
THE bitterness of persecution helped to shape unswerving loyalty in colonial Americans who might otherwise have tried to avoid choosing between their king and their neighbors. Thomas Barker, Justice of the Peace in a loyal community in New York's Duchess County, discovered the reliance on persecution that underlay a questionable democratic process. The dilemma of his experience is detailed by a neighbor, Leonard Reid, who described the process in Barker's community, "In June 1775, the rebellious people appointed a town meeting to choose committeemen, to which Esquire Barker went on purpose to oppose and if possible to frustrate their design. At this meeting, Esquire Humphreys, one of the rebellious parties, nominated such people as he thought proper for committee members and requested the people to signify their approbation by holding up their hands. I suppose there was about ten or fourteen hands held up. To this, Esquire Humphreys said, 'It's a clear vote'.
ESQUIRE Barker objected and requested Humphreys to renew the signal and let such people as did not wish a committee signify to the same token. To this, Esquire Humphreys objected and said, 'The vote was clear'. Esquire Barker spoke to the people saying, 'All you that wish no committee signify it by following me', and stepped out. The number of people that followed, I suppose, was near two hundred. Some time after this, Esquire Barker was made a prisoner by the rebellious people."
HARASSMENT was directed almost as vigorously at the least powerful of loyalists, the wives and children of men who had already left home on account of their loyalty. Sometimes, wives and families of loyalist soldiers were merely ejected from their homes and obliged to join their men in exile. Mary Hoyt of Norwalk, Connecticut, whose sailor husband had joined the Royal Navy as a coastal pilot in 1776, had a spectacular tale of her misfortunes. "Living in their dwelling house in Norwalk with her family, on account of her husband's being in the King's service, she was frequently insulted and abused, both by the leading and common people in the rebellion and the soldiers, when marching, by firing balls into the house. On the night of the 17th February 1777, a number of armed men, supposed to be about fifty, came to the house, broke open the doors, instantly rushed in upon her and closely confined her, and immediately plundered and destroyed all the household furniture and clothing they could lay their hands on, leaving her and her family consisting of five children naked and destitute of clothing at that inclement season." One of the children died soon after the incident. The rest of the family were "harried through town" and finally sent off to New York City.
LOCAL Committees of Safety undertook active searches for disloyalty, frequently investigating rumors and denunciations, and threatening arrest or exile to anyone who refused the oath of allegiance to the American cause. A suspected loyalist who did not flee could be summoned before the committee and asked to show cause, if any, why he should be considered a friend of the Sons of Liberty. Those loyalists who incurred the suspicion or the wrath of their local committees, an invitation to join the Continental Army were sometimes both a test of loyalty and a punishment. William Free of Westchester, New York, invited to prove his allegiance to Congress by appearing "complete in arms to stop the progress of the British", promptly, "made the best of his way into the British lines and joined the Westchester Refugees". Alexander Fairchild was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail for high treason, "as it was termed by the usurped power of the rebels of the province of Connecticut for his attachment of the British government".
EACH new continental state officially authorized exile, property seizure, and other penalties for anyone unwilling to give allegiance to the revolutionary authority. Exile and imprisonment were usually a cover for or prelude to property confiscation. The victim could be a wealthy landowner like Thomas Barclay, whose goods and property filled a twenty-six page inventory when they were sold at public auction in 1777. Or you could be a tenant farmer like Luke Bowen, who "rented 125 acres of land for which I got a deed right and title forever for 6 pounds a year in New York currency".
IN December 1776, the Pennsylvania Congress included the Allen's in a list of citizens considered inimical to the liberties of America. A troop of militia soldiers surrounded Allen's house, arrested him, and took him to the Committee of Safety in Philadelphia. By pledging, "not to say or do anything injurious to the present cause in America", Allen won his release and permission to return to his home at Northampton. He observed that Pennsylvania was "divided into two classes of men, those that plunder and those that are plundered". He concluded that the revolutionary proceedings "bear the mark of the most wanton tyranny ever exercised in any country".
BOSTONIAN Mather Byles had defended his loyalty in the face of mass protests against British rule with the ironical question, "Which is better - to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?" Facing the vengeful anger of a population in arms, many loyalists became all the more convinced that tyranny in the name of liberty was more threatening to their lives and freedoms than the rather abstract injustices said to flow from parliamentary taxation.
THE future Bill of Rights was written with guarentees from the lessons learned from their colonial experiences. Part of the lessons learned was from British interference in colonial affairs. But it appears that most of it was experiences of Patriot excesses. If the Sons of Liberty had lived by the guarentees in that Bill, the Loyalists wouldn't have experienced so much inhumane and dismal treatment.
IF we forget the lessons of the past, we are doomed to repeat it in the future. With the recent government actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco, domestic terrorism at Oklahoma City, and political defiance of the will of people - especially on tax issues - America's future could be doomed to repeat the turmoil of the Revolutionary era.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Moore, Christopher.The Loyalists-Revolution, Exile, and Settlement. McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, Ontario. 1994.
Kelsay, Isabel Thompson.Joseph Brant, 1743-1807. Man of Two Worlds. Syracuse University Press, New York. 1986.
Weber, Michael.The American Revolution, The Boston Massacre. Raintree Steck - Vaughn Publishers. 2000.
Freedman, Russell. Give me Liberty!, "If this be Treason". Holiday House, New York. 2000.
RECOMMENDED READING
Edmonds, Walter D. Drums Along the Mohawk. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Ma. March 1986.
Yankee Doodle Dandy
