Colonial Loyalist Quotes

Newspapers printed stories of variable accuracy, beginning with a twenty-six-line account in the loyalist Boston News-Letter on April 20, deploring “this shocking introduction to all the miseries of a civil war.” The New-Hampshire Gazette’s headline read, “Bloody News.” In barely three weeks, the first reports of the day’s action would reach Charleston and Savannah. Lurid rumors spread quickly: of grandfathers shot in their beds, of families burned alive, of pregnant women bayoneted. Americans in thirteen colonies were alarmed, aroused, angry. “The times are very affecting,” Reverend Ezra Stiles told his diary in Rhode Island on April 23.

A popular Islamist tactic was to leave threatening notes on the doors of suspected Afghan collaborators who dared so much as to speak to the American invaders. We labeled them night letters, just another terror tactic, and reported their prevalence to our higher command. Few of my troopers, of course, knew that colonial patriots left the same sorts of threatening notes on the doors of alleged loyalists in Boston and Philadelphia. Is there really any difference?

The Westminster government continued to aggravate the situation by haughty mismanagement, and on 4 July 1776 the Congress passed a Declaration of Independence from Britain. This was a constitutionally dubious act with no real democratic basis. Only one in five of the inhabitants of the colonies was in any sense active in the cause of independence, and there were at least 500,000 declared loyalists (out of a total population of 2,500,000) at the beginning of the war.

La guerre d'indépendance des treize colonies fût un point tournant de notre histoire. Elle a été d'un côté bénéfique pour nous car elle mena à l'Acte de Québec, mais d'un autre, avec la venue des loyalistes, elle allait changer à jamais notre visage démographique.

La guerre d'indépendance des treize colonies fût un point tournant de notre histoire. Elle a été d'un côté bénéfique pour nous car elle mena à l'Acte de Québec, mais d'un autre, avec la venue des loyalistes, elle allait changer à jamais le visage de notre démographie.

Committed only to royal victory, rather than to abolition, Clinton distinguished blacks who fled from rebels from those who escaped Tories. He sometimes returned ex-slaves to Loyalist masters.74 Furthermore, he instructed Cornwallis, his successor in South Carolina, “to make such arrangements as will discourage . . . [slaves of Tories] joining us.”75 Yet even slaves of Tories still escaped to the British forces. And Clinton instructed Major General Alexander Leslie, a British commander in Charleston, to assign the vast number of blacks who had answered his proclamation to any job except soldiering. Clinton’s directive to Leslie echoes the imperial racism exemplified by the likes of Captain Ewald. As a contrast, the French Jacobins, responding to the Saint Domingue insurrection in one sweeping 1794 measure, would abolish slavery throughout the French colonies.