Chapter 31: Loyalists and Black Slaves. Another group that suffered terribly because of the American Revolution were the Loyalists. When I took American history in high school, our textbooks referred to these Americans who remained loyal to Britain as "Tories." But the real Tories were a political party in Britain, and the Loyalists in the Thirteen Colonies had no connection with them. That's why history books today more accurately refer to them as Loyalists. What kind of people were the Loyalists?
Generally speaking, they were the most conservative members of the colonies. In the North, they tended to be members of the upper class. In contrast, in the South, it was often the backcountry poor from Scotland who were Loyalists. In the North, the Loyalists often belonged to the older established families. Some of them were descendants of the original proprietors. For example, many of the old Dutch families in New York were Loyalists.
Many of William Penn's descendants, who had left the Quaker Church and become Anglicans, were also Loyalists. Many of the German Lutherans who settled in Pennsylvania were also Loyalists. They had taken oaths of allegiance to the King of England as a condition of their being allowed to settle in Pennsylvania. Many of these German Lutherans honored their oaths when the American Revolution broke out.
They were not opposed to war, as were the Mennonites, Amish, Brethren, and Quakers, but they did not want to join a rebellion against the King. The royal governors and other men who represented the British government in the colonies were also among the Loyalists. One example was Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts at the time of the Revolution. He was the great-great-grandson of Anne Hutchinson, the famous Puritan dissenter.
Another Loyalist governor was William Franklin, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. He was educated in England, and after settling in America, he traveled back to England several times with his father. On one of these trips to England, he married an English lady. In 1763, the English government appointed him as a royal governor of New Jersey.
When revolutionaries took over New Jersey's government, William Franklin declared them to be an illegal assembly, so the revolutionaries arrested him and imprisoned him for most of the war. Interestingly, as a general rule, the Loyalists didn't like the taxes that were at issue any more than did the revolutionaries. But they were opposed to mob violence in response to the taxes. Instead, they wanted to use lawful political means to get the taxes repealed. They often quoted Romans 13 to the revolutionaries.
To many of the Loyalists, taking up arms against the government was not only treason, but it also violated God's law. Perhaps because the Loyalists hit a tender nerve with the revolutionaries, the revolutionaries hated them even more than they hated the British. As we saw previously, the revolutionists made it very difficult for a person to remain neutral. Every colony drafted males, typically from ages 18 to 53 years, into the colonial militia.
So most men were forced either to take up arms to overthrow the government or to flee to where the British army was in control. There was no neutral ground. But if they fled, the revolutionist governments confiscated their property. Furthermore, if they were caught trying to flee to the British side, they were flogged, imprisoned, or hanged. The terms "lynching" and "lynch mob" originated from the actions of a revolutionary militia colonel named Charles Lynch.
In 1780, Colonel Lynch and his militia rounded up men in Southern Virginia who they suspected of being Loyalists. They held their own extrajudicial trial for these men and found them guilty. They then flogged or hanged the accused men and confiscated their property. The men not hanged were then conscripted into the Virginia militia to fight against the British and their fellow Loyalists.
Although many Loyalists started off fairly neutral at the beginning of the conflict, they became incensed at being forced either to take up arms against the British government or lose their property and suffer punishment. As a result, a number of them, particularly in the South, joined the British army to protect their property, their freedoms, and their very lives.
It's important that we understand the difference between the Loyalists and the non-resistant Kingdom Christians, such as the Quakers, Brethren, Moravians, and Mennonites. The Kingdom Christians generally were non-political, refusing to take up arms in support of either side in the conflict. Their allegiance was to the Kingdom of God. In contrast, the Loyalists were not non-resistant. They would have been willing to take up arms if they had agreed politically with the revolutionists.
As I've mentioned, some of them did take up arms to fight with the British. In a letter to a friend, John Adams estimated that at the time of the Revolution, one-third of the overall population in the Thirteen Colonies were Loyalists. He guessed that in Pennsylvania, New York, and the South, Loyalists made up half of the population. Modern historians acknowledge that even during the war, only about 40 to 45 percent of the population actively supported the Revolution.
But the silent majority were unorganized and largely non-confrontational. As a result, the well-organized and highly motivated minority were able to impose their will on the majority. Christianity and the Loyalists. We don't know as much about the religious beliefs of the Loyalists as we do about those of the Founding Fathers. We do know that people who are socially conservative are often spiritually conservative. Those Loyalists whose religious beliefs we do know about were conservative Christians.
For instance, years after the Revolution, in a letter to a friend, John Adams mentioned the religious beliefs of two prominent Loyalists: Governor Hutchinson and Secretary Oliver. You say, Mr. Samuel Adams had too much sternness and pious bigotry. A man in his situation and circumstances must possess a large fund of sternness of stuff, or he will soon be annihilated. His piety ought not to be objected to him or any other man. His bigotry, if he had any, was a fault.
But he certainly had no more than Governor Hutchinson and Secretary Oliver, who I know from personal conversation were as staunch Trinitarians and Calvinists as he was, and treated all Arians and Arminians with more contempt and scorn than he ever did. The fate of the Loyalists. Sadly, as I've said, the animosity that the revolutionists felt toward the Loyalists was even greater than the hostility they felt toward the British.
In fact, the sticking point that delayed the final peace treaty to end the Revolutionary War was how the American victors would treat the Loyalists. Britain wanted a guarantee that all property confiscated from the Loyalists would be returned to them. They also wanted the peace treaty to state that the Loyalists would receive full restoration of their rights as citizens. But the revolutionaries refused to agree to those terms.
Finally, Britain relented and accepted an innocuous provision in the treaty that the Continental Congress would "recommend" to the states that all property and rights be restored to the Loyalists. This left the Loyalists without any legal guarantees. Loyalists who returned to their homes after the war were often mobbed and beaten. As a result, some 42,000 Loyalists were forced to flee from their American homeland to settle in Canada or England. Black slaves.
Another group that suffered enormously because the colonists won the war were the Black slaves. To be sure, it's doubtful that their situation would have immediately changed if Britain had won the war. Most of them would have remained slaves. But the English had already ended slavery in England, and they offered freedom to any slaves who left their masters and fought on the British side. Thousands of slaves took them up on this offer.
In response, the revolutionary governments issued proclamations that any slave caught trying to flee to the British would be put to death. As a result, when the white Loyalists took refuge in Nova Scotia at the end of the war, they were joined by about 3,000 former slaves who had fought on the side of the British and faced death as a result.
What boded even worse for the Blacks was that, after the war, the United States Constitution entrenched the system of Black slavery as a legal and abiding institution in the United States. This was particularly tragic because, in 1833, Parliament passed a law abolishing slavery in all British colonies. If the American colonies had not won their independence, this would have freed the American slaves.
This was 32 years before the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in the United States, abolishing slavery, and it was done without a war. Ironically, in many ways, the victorious colonists themselves lost much because of the Revolution.