13. The Suppression of the Tories Begins

0:00Volume 4, Part 2, Suppressing Tories Volume 4, Chapter 13, The Suppression of Tories Begins Throughout the rebellious colonies developed the pattern of governmental authority largely devoted to fighting the War of the Revolution, and exercised by illegal representative bodies, provincial congresses or conventions, Realizing that the executive function should be inherently subordinate to the law-making function, the rebels created a highly democratic system, making committees of safety, operating committees of the legislature, the major executive arms of the provinces, which could function when the legislatures were not in session.

0:50On the local level, the old committees of inspection, observation and correspondence which had enforced the Continental Association naturally evolved into new city and rural committees to run the war, specifically to raise and operate the militia, and especially to crush dissenting Tories. 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 any one critical of the revolution. Known Letters, especially to England, were seized at the post offices and carefully examined.

2:03Spies 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 extra-legal 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 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.

3:28The following month, the Provincial Congress directed the town committees and select men 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 Colonel 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 by the Local Committees to Smoke Out Tories was a public oath of loyalty to a defense association succeeding the old Continental Association.

4:37As 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 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 combating Tories, leaving the task to the separate towns and provinces. This despite the request from Massachusetts and Maryland for a general congressional

6:08test oath for all the colonies. In October 1775, however, Congress learned that Dr. Benjamin George, 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 The Continental Army was also authorized to aid in suppressing Tories.

6:58Even as conservative a man as George Washington wondered why the Tories, a bombable pest 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. 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 was supported by two-thirds of those taking sides one way or the other.

8:10About one-third of politically interested Americans were Tories or loyalists, while the Revolution held the allegiance of the other two-thirds. 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. The population of the rebelling colonies at the time of outbreak totaled approximately 2.5 million. Of these, about half a million were Negro slaves, who certainly were potential rebels against the revolutionaries and hence potential aides to the British. If we consider Who were the Tories?

9:26This 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, In addition, 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.

10:31Western 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 totaled about 30 percent of southerners.

11:19The 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 in the budding Methodist movement were restive and Tory. Most Dutch in New York and New Jersey

12:40and 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 The Negro slaves, as we have pointed out, were a huge potential reservoir of discontent

13:17to 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 Delancies of New York City and 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 under-representation and governmental discrimination against them were Tories or lukewarm to a revolution made by the planters of the lowlands.

14:10However, 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 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. The Tories, as we have seen, ranged through all social classes and occupations, from the aristocratic Delancies of New York to the lowly tenants of the Whig landlords and back-country Settlers of the Carolinas.

15:52List and welded together all the disparate threads of Tory and anti-wick 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 counter-revolutionaries 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 arch-conservatives 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 coal or land, and the great majority of loyal folk would rise up and help their rulers smite the traitors.

17:04A 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.