When the Loyalists said no to joining the American Revolution

This year will mark two 250th anniversaries. The first is the signing of the American Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, an independence officially and begrudgingly recognized by the British in the Treaty of Paris signed in September of 1783 after numerous bloody battles.

This semiquincentennial will be celebrated in the U.S. with the requisite parades, pageants, fairs and the Patriot Games, a high-school-level athletic competition.

The second probably will be lower key: a commemoration of the Loyalists — Europeans and Indigenous Peoples who opposed violent revolution. They chose to support the British Crown and contributed to the establishment of modern Canada.

It could be argued that the European Loyalists were the original anti-51st state proponents, who rejected casting aside British-style government and law and order in favour of American republicanism. Indigenous Loyalists believed that the British would protect their ancestral lands and stop American expansionism — which proved impossible.

It has been estimated that in 1776 about 20 per cent or 500,000 of the Thirteen Colonies’ population of approximately 2.5 million identified as Loyalists. They were a diverse mixture of Brits, Scots, Germans, Dutch and free Blacks. Of those, about 50,000 eventually settled in British North America. Another 25,000 or so departed for Great Britain, the British West Indies (Jamaica and the Bahamas) And about 6,000 Black Loyalists relocated to Sierra Leone on the coast of West Africa.

The Loyalists were castigated as “Tories” or wealthy British-loving conservatives. Yet, many, in fact, shared American ideals about life, liberty and property — the tenets of the 17th century English philosopher John Locke’s theory on natural rights possessed by all humans from birth regardless of government decrees.

But they mightily rejected rebelling against the British Crown. It should be noted, too, that many White Loyalists owned Black slaves and brought them to Canada. These individuals remained slaves for the duration of their lives and their children were only freed once they turned 25-years old.

Slavery was abolished in the British Empire by an act of the British Parliament passed in 1833.

The British indeed taxed the Americans unfairly (though the taxes were never that high) and expected them to be subservient colonists, heeding the dictates of the Mother Country — no questions asked. It took a decade, from the detested Stamp Act of 1765 to the Battle of Lexington in April 1775 and the Declaration of Independence 14 months later for an all-out war to erupt.

By then, most of the Loyalists believed, and with good reason, that the American Revolution would ultimately fail.

How could a ragtag group of colonists defeat the most powerful empire in the world? Yet with military help from France, which wanted to avenge its loss to the British in the Seven Years War, Spain and the Netherlands, along with George Washington’s astute leadership, the use of guerilla tactics by the colonists, and poor British military strategy, the Americans remarkably prevailed.

There was a steep and dangerous price for being a Loyalist. Mob rule during the revolution was vicious and violent.

“You must try to walk in our shoes in order to understand the effect persecution had on our lives,” wrote Loyalist John Melchoir File decades after he had left New York. Loyalists were beaten and driven from their homes, placed in stocks, imprisoned and perhaps worst of all, tarred and feathered.

In the case of the latter, the poor victim was partially stripped and doused in warm pitch or pine tar (which was not as scalding hot as the tar or asphalt used today in road construction), and plunged into a vat of goose or chicken feathers. The humiliated individual was then paraded through the streets often with a rope around his neck and threatened with hanging. Tar and feathering was not usually fatal, but the brutality was not easily forgotten. As File added, “oil did gradually take off the tar and feathers from the skin of victims, but the psychological effect of this cruel treatment lasted a lifetime.”

Despite the harsh treatment during and after the revolution, many Loyalists remained in the newly designated United States. Others sought free land and economic opportunities in present day Canada. All that was required to obtain the land was an oath of allegiance to the Crown.

Three decades later, when the War of 1812 between the Americans and the British and Canadians ended in a stalemate, Loyalists and their families took even greater pride in their defiant stand during the revolution. They became “United Empire Loyalists,” an honourable distinction still used to the present time by their descendants.

“Without the War of Independence,” wrote the late journalist and author Peter C. Newman, “Canada would likely not have existed. It was the massive Loyalist influx from south of the border that saved the northern territory from being annexed by the Yanks. The newcomers, having formed a hard core of settlers loyal to their adopted grubstakes, became the mothers and fathers — nurturers and role models — of the new nation.”

And, 250 years later we especially remain grateful they did.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. His most recent book is The Dollar-A-Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War.