trembling hills and reverberating mountains of the country round, the proclamation of victory! the first triumph of Young Freedom over the arms of her haughty oppressor. The sword was brought; the soldier's eye And, as he grasped the ancient blade, I leave you, mark me, mark me, now, ""Twas on that dread, immortal day, A captain raised his blade on me, And while the glorious battle raged, It lightened Freedom's will; For, boy, the God of Freedom blessed "Oh! keep this sword," his accents broke,- But his wrinkled hand still grasped the blade, Upon that dying bed. The sun remains, the sword remains, Its glory growing still, And twenty millions bless the sire And sword of Bunker Hill. CHARACTER OF THE LOYALISTS.1 BY MOSES COIT TYLER. (From the "Literary History of the American Revolution.") [MOSES COIT TYLER, American educator and author, was born at Griswold, Conn., August 2, 1835; studied theology at Yale and Andover; and for a few years held the pastorate of a Congregational church in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was professor of English in the University of Michigan (1867-1881), and since 1883 has occupied the chair of American history at Cornell. He is a frequent contributor to magazines and reviews, and the author of a "History of American Literature during the Colonial Time" (1878), "A Manual of English Literature" (1879) "Life of Patrick Henry" (1888), and "Literary History of the American Revolution."] AFTER the question of number, very properly comes that of quality. What kind of people were these Tories, as regards intelligence, character, and standing in their several communities? And here, brushing aside, as unworthy of historical investigators, the partisan and vindictive epithets of the controversy, many of which, however, still survive even in the historical writings of our own time, we shall find that the Loyalists were, as might be expected, of all grades of personal worth and worthlessness; and that, while there was among them, no doubt, the usual proportion of human selfishness, malice, and rascality, as a class they were not bad people, much less were they execrable people, as their opponents at the time commonly declared them to be. In the first place, there was, prior to 1776, the official class; that is, the men holding various positions in the civil and military and naval services of the government, their im 1 Copyright, 1887, by G. P. Putnam's Sons. mediate families, and their social connections. All such per sons may be described as inclining to the Loyalist view in consequence of official bias. Next were certain colonial politicians who, it may be admitted, took a rather selfish and an unprincipled view of the whole dispute, and who, counting on the probable, if not inevitable, success of the British arms in such a conflict, adopted the Loyalist side, not for conscience' sake but for profit's sake, and in the expectation of being rewarded for their fidelity by offices and titles, and especially by the confiscated estates of the rebels, after the rebels themselves should have been defeated, and their leaders hanged or sent into exile. As composing still another class of Tories may be mentioned, probably a vast majority of those who stood for the commercial interests, for the capital and the tangible property of the country, and who, with the instincts natural to persons who have something considerable to lose, disapproved of all measures for pushing the dispute to the point of disorder, riot, and civil war. Still another class of Loyalists was made up of people of professional training and occupation, — clergymen, physicians, lawyers, teachers, a clear majority of whom seem to have been set against the ultimate measures of the Revolution. Finally, and in general, it may be said that a majority of those who, of whatever occupation, of whatever grade of culture or of wealth, would now be described as conservative people, were Loyalists during the American Revolution. And by way of concession to the authority and force of truth, what has to be said respecting the personal quality commonly attaching to those who, in any age or country, are liable to be classed as conservative people? Will it be denied that within that order of persons one may usually find at least a fair portion of the cultivation, of the moral thoughtfulness, of the personal purity and honor, existing in the entire community to which they happen to belong? Precisely this description, at any rate, applies to the conservative class in the American colonies during that epoch, a majority of whom dissented from those extreme measures which at last transformed into a revolution a political movement which began with the avowed purpose of confining itself to a struggle for redress of grievances, and within the limits of constitutional opposition. If, for example, we consider the point with reference to cultivation and moral refinement, it may seem to us a significant fact that among the members of the Loyalist party are to be found the names of a great multitude of the graduates of our colonial colleges-especially of Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and Pennsylvania. Thus, in an act of banishment passed by Massachusetts, in September, 1778, against the most prominent of the Tory leaders in that State, one may now read the names of three hundred and ten of her citizens. And who were they? Let us go over their names. Are these the names of profligates and desperadoes, or even of men of slight and equivocal consideration? To any one at all familiar with the history of colonial New England, that list of men, denounced to exile and loss of property on account of their opinions, will read almost like the beadroll of the oldest and noblest families concerned in the founding and upbuilding of New England civilization. Moreover, of that catalogue of three hundred and ten men of Massachusetts, banished for an offense to which the most of them appear to have been driven by conscientious convictions, more than sixty were graduates of Harvard. This fact is probably a typical one; and of the whole body of the Loyalists throughout the thirteen colonies, it must be said that it contained, as one of its ablest antagonists long after admitted, "more than a third of influential characters," that is, a very considerable portion of the customary chiefs and representatives of conservatism in each community. By any standard of judgment, therefore, according to which we usually determine the personal quality of any party of men and women in this world, whether the standard be intellectual, or moral, or social, or merely conventional, the Tories of the Revolution seem to have been not a profligate party, nor an unprincipled one, nor a reckless or even a light-minded one, but, on the contrary, to have had among them a very considerable portion of the most refined, thoughtful, and conscientious people in the colonies. So true is this, that in 1807 a nobleminded Scottish woman, Mistress Anne Grant of Laggan, who in her early life had been familiar with American colonial society, compared the loss which America suffered in consequence of the expatriation of the Loyalists by the Revolution, to the loss which France suffered in consequence of the expatriation of so many of her Protestants by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. -- So much, then, must be said on behalf of the Tories of the Revolution, in point of numbers, they were far from inconsiderable, and in point of character, they were far from despicable. On the one hand, they formed no mere rump party. If they were not actually a majority of the American people, - as they themselves always claimed to be, and as some careful scholars now think they were, they did at least constitute a huge minority of the American people: they formed a section of colonial society too important on the score of mere numbers to be set down as a paltry handful of obstructives; while in any rightful estimate of personal value, quite aside from mere numbers, they seem to deserve the consideration which conscientious and cultivated people of one party never ask in vain of conscientious and cultivated people of the opposite party, at least after the issues of the controversy are closed. Pressing forward, then, with our investigation, we proceed to apply to the American Loyalists that test by which we must judge any party of men who have taken one side, and have borne an important share in any great historical controversy. This is the test of argumentative value. It asks whether the logical position of the party was or was not a strong one. Even yet it is not quite needless to remind ourselves that the American Revolution was a war of argument long before it became a war of physical force; and that, in this war of argument, were involved a multitude of difficult questions, constitutional, legal, political, ethical, — with respect to which honest and thoughtful people were compelled to differ. All these questions, however, may, for our purposes, be reduced to just two: first, the question of what was lawful under the existing constitution of the British empire; and, secondly, the question of what was expedient under the existing circumstances of the colonies. Now, paradoxical as it may seem to many of the American descendants of the victorious party, each of those questions had two very real and quite opposite sides; much was to be said for each side; and for the Tory side so much was to be said in the way of solid fact and of valid reasoning, that an intelligent and a noble-minded American might have taken that side, and might have stuck to it, and might have gone into battle for it, and might have imperiled all the interests of his life in defense of it, without any just impeachment of his reason or of his integrity,— |