Conceived in Liberty (218 page)

The Americans had had no chance to hear present-day opinion that they were merely fighting a conservative and moderate revolution; hence they went at the Tories with a zeal that went beyond the bounds of libertarian principle. The concept of “enemy of American liberty” was quickly extended from violators of the continental boycott to anyone critical of the Revolution. Known and suspected Tories were hauled before the local committees, and as Professor Miller puts it, “If the committees failed to persuade, the mob took over. Thus was created a police system, secret, efficient, and all-powerful.”
*

Letters, especially to England, were seized at the post offices and carefully examined; spies eagerly took on the task of keeping watch on suspected
Tories. And in contrast to enforcement of the Continental Association, committees did not try to confine punishment of Tories to voluntary boycott and ostracism; instead, fines, imprisonment, confiscation, and banishment came increasingly into play. Persons were hauled before local committees for criticizing the Continental Congress, belittling the Massachusetts Army, criticizing Presbyterian prominence in the Revolution, and a host of other “errors of opinion.” The new extralegal Massachusetts General Court urged Harvard College to dismiss all faculty members having Tory views. Individual Tories were not only boycotted and forced to recant their heresies; stronger methods of punishment were adopted as soon as the rebel committees became the effective authorities in their areas. As early as May 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress recommended to local selectmen and committees that they confiscate the arms of all unfriendly to the rebel cause and forbid anyone to leave the province without special permission of the local committee or the Congress. The following month, the provincial congress
directed
the town committees and selectmen to confiscate and take charge of the property of all Tories who had fled behind the British lines at Boston or elsewhere. In New Hampshire, the provincial congress, as the supreme judicial body of the province, sentenced Tory Col. John Fenton to indefinite imprisonment as “an enemy to the liberties of America.” In September, the New York Provincial Congress created a hierarchy of penalties for Tories, including fines, disarming, prison, and banishment. And in November, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed a law decreeing death and forfeit of property to anyone assisting the British army with information or supplies.

One of the critical litmus tests used by the local committees to smoke out Tories was a public oath of loyalty to a defense association succeeding the old Continental Association. As historian Alexander C. Flick concluded, the association

became the first decisive test of the politics of individuals.... It stamped the individual as a Whig or Tory in the eyes of his neighbors, and treatment was meted out to him accordingly.... Hesitation [to sign] involved suspicion; refusal, guilt. The Loyalist who was true to his convictions, creed, and king was detested, reviled and if prominent, ruined in business, tarred and feathered, mobbed, ostracized, or imprisoned; and all this at the will of a committee, self-constituted and responsible to no one.
*

Thus, a Revolution and revolutionaries dedicated to the cause of liberty moved to suppress crucial liberties of their opposition—an ironic but not unsurprising illustration of the inherent contradiction between Liberty and Power, a conflict that can all too readily come into play even when Power is employed on behalf of Liberty.

Hesitant to take any steps that might lead irrevocably to independence, the Continental Congress refused to do anything about hunting and combatting Tories, leaving the task to the separate towns and provinces—this despite the requests from Massachusetts and Maryland for a general congressional test oath for all the colonies. In October 1775, however, Congress learned that Dr. Benjamin Church, one of the top revolutionary leaders of Massachusetts and chief surgeon of the Continental Army, was a traitor in the pay of the British. This grave shock led Congress to urge the various local committees to crack down on everyone who might “endanger the safety of the colony or liberties of America.” The committees redoubled their efforts in rounding up suspects, imposing test oaths and punishing recalcitrants with disfranchisement or prison. The Continental Army was also authorized to aid in suppressing Tories. Even as conservative a man as George Washington wondered why the Tories, “abominable pests of society... who are preying upon the vitals of their country [should] be suffered to stalk at large, whilst we know that they will do us every mischief in their power.”

In their grave concern with the American Tories, the American revolutionaries were not striking at phantoms. While the idea that Tory and rebel sentiment among the people was equally matched is a historical misreading of John Adams, it remains true that the Tories constituted a real and substantial threat to the Revolution.
*
About one-third of politically interested Americans were Tories, or “Loyalists,” while the Revolution held the allegiance of the other two-thirds.
**

The population of the rebelling colonies at the time of outbreak totalled approximately 2.5 million. Of these, about half a million were Negro slaves, who certainly were potential rebels against the revolutionaries and
hence potential aids to the British. If we consider one-third of the whites to have been politically apathetic, then we have a mighty reservoir of another half million pro-British inhabitants. Such a huge reservoir of active or potential defectors inexorably turned the American Revolution into a civil war as well.

Who were the Tories? This question has suffered from insufficient research; too many historians, in their eternal search for an American “consensus” of sweetness and light, have preferred to forget about the hard knot of American Tories and what was done to them during the Revolutionary War.
*

The first thing to be said is that the Tories were not at all uniformly distributed geographically. For example, the two major centers of population, New England and Virginia, were relatively Tory-free. The few thousand Virginia Tories were concentrated among Ulster Scots on the frontier in western Virginia, settlers on the Eastern Shore (the Chesapeake Peninsula), and native Scottish merchants and factors concentrated on the coast near Norfolk. New England Tories were to be found in scattered pockets: many in Newport, in the coastal towns of the Maine region, New Hampshire, Cape Cod, parts of western Massachusetts. Western Connecticut, near the New York border, was the only one of these regions where Tories approached a majority, even though the bulk of Connecticut was overwhelmingly rebel. All in all, New England Tories barely reached one-tenth of the population.

There were more Tories in the other colonies of the South than in Virginia, and these were mainly concentrated in the back country of the Carolinas—the pockets of Highland Scots near Wilmington and Cape Fear in North Carolina and the city of Charleston—and in royal-bureaucrat-ridden and subsidized Georgia. However, in none of the major population areas of the South did the Tories constitute a majority, and all in all, they totalled about 30 percent of southerners.

The most ominous and threatening center of Tory strength lay in the middle colonies, which were almost evenly divided between Whig and Tory. This equal strength was particularly true of New York, the greatest Tory stronghold outside of Georgia. In such areas as western Long Island, upstate, and the lower Hudson valley, Tory adherence was almost overwhelming. New Jersey, in Bergen County and in the south, was almost as fertile Tory ground. Toryism was particularly strong in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties, especially among the Quakers. Tories were also strong in Delaware and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Ethnic and religious minorities within a region tended to oppose the dominant majority and hence to side with Great Britain. Thus, while
Anglicans in the low-church Anglican South were solidly revolutionary, the minority of Anglicans in the North, far more high church and attached to Britain, were predominantly Tory. Also in the North, many Baptists and the budding Methodist movement were restive and Tory. Most Dutch in New York and New Jersey, and Quakers in southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, and many native-born Scots tended to be Tories. The Ulster Scots, however, at least in the South, were rather evenly divided.

Had the British acted early and energetically to mobilize the Tories, to organize their scattered centers of strength, and to exploit the potential conflicts within American society, they might have been able to deal the Revolution a crippling blow. The Negro slaves, as we have pointed out, were a huge potential reservoir of discontent to mobilize against the Revolution. And New York, a fertile field, lay available for exploitation. The Revolution split the landed oligarchy of the province, with the Anglican DeLanceys of New York City and the lower Hudson valley turning Tory, while the Presbyterian Livingstons of the northern Hudson valley supported the break with England, though only meekly. As a result, the disgruntled tenants of the Livingstons and their fellow Whig landlords naturally gave their support to the Tory cause. And many Ulstermen of the back-country Carolinas, long unhappy about underrepresentation and governmental discrimination against them, were Tories or lukewarm to a revolution made by the planters of the lowlands.
*

The Tories, as we have seen, ranged, through all social classes and occupations, from the aristocratic DeLanceys of New York to the lowly tenants of the Whig landlords and the back-country settlers of the Carolinas. Neither were they dominantly concentrated within any broad social class. It is therefore impermissible to identify them with any particular economic or social group. However, neither can we discard social-class analysis altogether. While most of the wealthy were rebels and the Tories ranged through all social classes, it is also true that the proportion of the upper class was greater among the Tories than among the rebels, and a far greater proportion of Tories was concentrated among such well-to-do groups as royal bureaucrats and officials, British factors in the South, and Georgia planters. Thus, almost two-thirds of the councillors—members of the royally appointed upper houses of the colonial assemblies—became Tories.

For the British to have organized and welded together all the disparate threads of Tory and anti-Whig potential would have required energy and ability that the British did not have. For one thing, the British, like all counter-revolutionaries always and everywhere, scoffed at the Revolution as being a movement of a small fanatical minority rather than a majority, and as a movement of a weak and inferior breed of men. All counterrevolutionaries tend to gravely underestimate their enemies by treating rebellion as the work of a small subversive band of dogmatic and fanatical ideologues. The vast majority, these archconservatives typically feel, are deeply loyal to the constituted government. Therefore, the British confidently believed that no intensive coordination of the Tories was necessary. Surely, they need only call, or land, and the great majority of loyal folk would rise up and help their rulers smite the traitors!

A second cause of chronic British optimism, as we have seen, was the chauvinist contempt for the Americans as a people and for their martial abilities—a contempt redoubled by the British devotion to orthodox military prescriptions and ignorance of guerrilla forms of warfare. The defeat of the Revolution also required an indomitable will, but General Howe, the commander-in-chief of the British armies after the removal of the disgraced Gage, in October 1775, was an ardent Whig opposed to the war. These inner convictions kept him valiantly trying for a compromise political peace rather than a repressive military solution to the conflict, thereby substantially weakening the resolve of the counter-revolution.
*

*
John C. Miller,
Triumph of Freedom, 1773–1783
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), p. 40.

*
Alexander C. Flick,
Loyalism in New York During the American Revolution
(New York: Columbia University, 1901), pp. 47–48. Also see Harold M. Hyman,
To Try Men’s Souls
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 70ff.

*
A letter by John Adams has been traditionally interpreted by historians as judging that one-third of the Americans supported the Revolution, one-third were opposed, and one-third were neutral. In fact, Adams was referring to American attitudes toward the later
French,
not the American, revolution. In another letter, Adams estimated that the American Revolution was supported by two-thirds of those taking sides one way or the other. For the facts of the Adams letter, see John R. Alden,
The American Revolution, 1775–1783
(New York: Harper & Row, 1954), p. 87.

**
Also neglected is what the Tories
did
during the Revolutionary War. For even the historians concentrating on the Tories have been so sympathetic to them as to highlight their status as refugees and to play down their considerable role as armed and militant warriors of counter-revolution. See Albert T. Klyberg, “The Armed Loyalists as Seen by American Historians,”
Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society
(1964), pp. 101–108.

*
Cf., William H. Nelson,
The American Tory
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 92.

*
However, the long-held view of historians that the old rebel Regulators of the Carolinas later became Tories has been refuted by the recent researches of Johnson, Barnwell, and Brown. The former Regulators of both North and South Carolina were predominantly Whig revolutionaries; indeed, it was only the old South Carolina
Moderators
who became largely Tory. See Richard Maxwell Brown,
The South Carolina Regulators
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1963), pp. 123–26, 213–14.

*
Howe’s leniency toward the rebels was considerably strengthened by the arrival in the summer of 1776 of his Whig brother, Richard Lord Howe, as commander of the British fleet in North America. See Ira D. Gruber, “Richard Lord Howe: Admiral As Peacemaker,” in George A. Billias, ed.,
George Washington’s Opponents: British Generals and Admirals in the American Revolution
(New York: William Morrow, 1969), pp. 235–41.