North Carolina patriot. 'Law should be strictly adhered to, severity exercised, but the doors of mercy should never be shut.'

The test laws, nevertheless, and the other discriminating laws passed against the Loyalists provided the excuse for a great deal of barbarism and ruthlessness. In Pennsylvania bills of attainder were passed against no fewer than four hundred and ninety persons. The property of nearly all these persons was confiscated, and several of them were put to death. A detailed account has come down to us of the hanging of two Loyalists of Philadelphia named Roberts and Carlisle. These two men had shown great zeal for the king's cause when the British Army was in Philadelphia. After Philadelphia was evacuated, they were seized by the Whigs, tried, and condemned to be hanged. Roberts's wife and children went before Congress and on their knees begged for mercy; but in vain. One November morning of 1778 the two men were marched to the gallows, with halters round their necks. At the gallows, wrote a spectator, Roberts's behaviour 'did honour to human nature.'

   He nothing common did or mean
   Upon that memorable scene

Addressing the spectators, he told them that his conscience acquitted him of guilt; that he suffered for doing his duty to his sovereign; and that his blood would one day be required at their hands. Then he turned to his children and charged them to remember the principles for which he died, and to adhere to them while they had breath.

But if these judicial murders were few and far between, in other respects the revolutionists showed the Tories little mercy. Both those who remained in the country and those who fled from it were subjected to an attack on their personal fortunes which gradually impoverished them. This was carried on at first by a nibbling system of fines and special taxation. Loyalists were fined for evading military service, for the hire of substitutes, for any manifestation of loyalty. They were subjected to double and treble taxes; and in New York and South Carolina they had to make good all robberies committed in their counties. Then the revolutionary leaders turned to the expedient of confiscation. From the very first some of the patriots, without doubt, had an eye on Loyalist property; and when the coffers of the Continental Congress had been emptied, the idea gained ground that the Revolution might be financed by the confiscation of Loyalist estates. Late in 1777 the plan was embodied in a resolution of the Continental Congress, and the states were recommended to invest the proceeds in continental loan certificates. The idea proved very popular; and in spite of a great deal of corruption in connection with the sale and transfer of the land, large sums found their way as a result into the state exchequers. In New York alone over 3,600,000 pounds worth of property was acquired by the state.

The Tory who refused to take the oath of allegiance became in fact an outlaw. He did not have in the courts of law even the rights of a foreigner. If his neighbours owed him money, he had no legal redress. He might be assaulted, insulted, blackmailed, or slandered, yet the law granted him no remedy. No relative or friend could leave an orphan child to his guardianship. He could be the executor or administrator of no man's estate. He could neither buy land nor transfer it to another. If he was a lawyer, he was denied the right to practise his profession.

This strict legal view of the status of the Loyalist may not have been always and everywhere enforced. There were Loyalists, such as the Rev. Mather Byles of Boston, who refused to be molested, and who survived the Revolution unharmed. But when all allowance is made for these exceptions, it is not difficult to understand how the great majority of avowed Tories came to take refuge within the British lines, to enlist under the British flag, and, when the Revolution had proved successful, to leave their homes for ever and begin life anew amid other surroundings. The persecution to which they were subjected left them no alternative.

CHAPTER IV

THE LOYALISTS UNDER ARMS

It has been charged against the Loyalists, and the charge cannot be denied, that at the beginning of the Revolution they lacked initiative, and were slow to organize and defend themselves. It was not, in fact, until 1776 that Loyalist regiments began to be formed on an extensive scale. There were several reasons why this was so. In the first place a great many of the Loyalists, as has been pointed out, were not at the outset in complete sympathy with the policy of the British government; and those who might have been willing to take up arms were very early disarmed and intimidated by the energy of the revolutionary authorities. In the second place that very conservatism which made the Loyalists draw back from revolution hindered them from taking arms until the king gave them commissions and provided facilities for military organization. And there is no fact better attested in the history of the Revolution than the failure of the British authorities to understand until it was too late the great advantages to be derived from the employment of Loyalist levies. The truth is that the British officers did not think much more highly of the Loyalists than they did of the rebels. For both they had the Briton's contempt for the colonial, and the professional soldier's contempt for the armed civilian.

Had more use been made of the Tories, the military history of the Revolution might have been very different. They understood the conditions of warfare in the New World much better than the British regulars or the German mercenaries. Had the advice of prominent Loyalists been accepted by the British commander at the battle of Bunker's Hill, it is highly probable that there would have been none of that carnage in the British ranks which made of the victory a virtual defeat. It was said that Burgoyne's early successes were largely due to the skill with which he used his Loyalist auxiliaries. And in the latter part of the war, it must be confessed that the successes of the Loyalist troops far outshone those of the British regulars. In the Carolinas Tarleton's Loyal Cavalry swept everything before them, until their defeat at the Cowpens by Daniel Morgan. In southern New York Governor Tryon's levies carried fire and sword up the Hudson, into 'Indigo Connecticut,' and over into New Jersey. Along the northern frontier, the Loyalist forces commanded by Sir John Johnson and Colonel Butler made repeated incursions into the Mohawk, Schoharie, and Wyoming valleys and, in each case, after leaving a trail of desolation behind them, they withdrew to the Canadian border in good order. The trouble was that, owing to the stupidity and incapacity of Lord George Germain, the British minister who was more than any other man responsible for the misconduct of the American War, these expeditions were not made part of a properly concerted plan; and so they sank into the category of isolated raids.

From the point of view of Canadian history, the most interesting of these expeditions were those conducted by Sir John Johnson and Colonel Butler. They were carried on with the Canadian border as their base-line. It was by the men who were engaged in them that Upper Canada was at first largely settled; and for a century and a quarter there have been levelled against these men by American and even by English writers charges of barbarism and inhumanity about which Canadians in particular are interested to know the truth.

Most of Johnson's and Butler's men came from central or northern New York. To explain how this came about it is necessary to make an excursion into previous history. In 1738 there had come out to America a young Irishman of good family named William Johnson. The famous naval hero, Sir Peter Warren, who was an uncle of Johnson, had large