• MAKING THE REVOLUTION

• REBELLION

• 1. Loyalists I: Civil War
• 2. Loyalists II: Traitor!
• 3. Loyalists III: Join—or Else
• 4. Loyalists IV: Backcountry
• 5. The Pacifists
• 6. The Enslaved
• 7. Common Sense?
• 8. Declaring Independence
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REBELLION: 1775-1776

3. Loyalists III: Join—or Else

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What the British travellers Nicholas Cresswell and Janet Schaw witnessed in America that inspired their grim appraisals was the harsh and uncompromising enforcement of loyalty to the Patriot cause, often pursued through intimidation, threats, and violence. After the First Continental Congress initiated a boycott of British goods in late 1774, Patriot "Committees of Safety" were created in all the colonies, and one of their first tasks was to gather signed pledges of support for Congress and the boycott. Insisting on one-hundred-percent support, the Committees threatened Loyalists and the uncommitted with ostracism, loss of property, and physical harm. They were "often self-appointed and usually composed of the Sons of Liberty," writes historian Catherine S. Crary, whose purpose "was not justice or a regard for civil rights, but rooting out Loyalists and blocking their support of the British cause."1 What the Congress had promoted to spur a united front in demanding Americans' rights from Britain soon degenerated into mass violations of the rights of Loyalists or wavering citizens. Here we see the workings of the Committees of Safety as described by two British travellers in the southern colonies.

• On the treatment of Loyalists in Virginia, travel journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774-1777, selections. An Englishman travelling in the British Atlantic colonies, Cresswell found himself in Virginia in the volatile mid 1770s when clear-cut political allegiances became mandatory. Declare yourself—are you a Patriot or a Loyalist? Not only did Cresswell observe this process in horror, he was victimized by it, forced by the town Committee of Safety to stay in the colony while—he wasn't sure—they investigated him as a spy? tried to force him into the Patriot forces? He realized he would have to make his escape from America, which he did in 1777. While attributing some of the colonies' troubles to the British, Cresswell describes the calculated villainy of Patriot leaders and the puritanical fanaticism of some preachers as the chief causes of the turmoil that was setting the colonists against each other. In the name of liberty, colonial leaders have suppressed dissent and condoned the violent intimidation of Loyalists. Preachers have used religious prejudice to turn their followers against the king. Colonists who have awakened from their "delirium" are forced publicly to assent to the Patriots' rule but secretly curse it as slavery. "This country turned Topsy Turvy," he writes upon leaving, "changed from an earthly paradise to a Hell upon terra firma." (7 pp.)



• On the treatment of Loyalists in North Carolina, travel letters of Janet Schaw, 1775, selections. Scotswoman Janet Schaw also witnessed the intimidation of Loyalists during a visit to North Carolina in 1775, where she observed a society that was splitting asunder under the stress of revolutionary politics. Zealous Patriots were forcing men and women along the Cape Fear River to take sides. They employed violence and intimidation and, Schaw suggests, even feigned a slave revolt to unite their countrymen in opposition to the British. Schaw recorded her impressions in travel letters that were compiled and published in 1921 as Journal of a Lady of Quality; Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the Years 1774 to 1776. As its editor reminds us, "such contemporary evidence makes us realize that our forefathers, however worthy their object, were engaged in real rebellion and revolution, characterized by the extremes of thought and action that always accompany such movements, and not in the kind of parlor warfare described in many of our textbooks."2 (7 pp.)

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