Читать книгу The Diverting History of a Loyalist Town - Grace Helen Mowat - Страница 6

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English traders came to the shores of Passamaquoddy about the year 1760, and some attempt at settlement on the islands seems to have been made a few years later.

In 1770, William Owen obtained a grant of the Island of Campobello, which soon developed into a considerable settlement. There the Owen family remained for over a century, living like feudal lords, entertaining with lavish hospitality and governing their possession with kindly, but despotic authority.

Deer Island about this time came into the possession of another English gentleman, Captain Farrell, and a social life developed among the Islands, but on the mainland there was little or no settlement till the year 1783. Islands in those days were more accessible when boats were the chief means of transportation.

Then came the Loyalists, and with their coming the town of St. Andrews was founded.

The great majority of the Loyalists who were exiled from the States at the close of the Revolutionary War, embarked from New York, where they had assembled under the military protection of Sir Guy Carleton. Poor Sir Guy, we are told, was completely snowed under with Loyalists, who swarmed his garrison; and nobly he grappled with their problems, finding ships for their transportation and provisions for their maintenance, lands for them to dwell in and balm for their lacerated feelings. An extract from an old letter written from New York at this period is of interest. The letter[A] is headed “On Board the Tryal, off Staten Island, Nov. 29th, 1783”, and is written to Edward Winslow, then in Nova Scotia arranging for the settlement of the Loyalists; the writer is his friend Ward Chipman, afterwards one of the prominent founders of Saint John. He writes:

[Footnote A: Published in the Winslow papers.]

“I have been a witness to the mortifying scene of giving up the city of New York to the American troops. About 12 o’clock on Tuesday, the 25th inst., all our troops were paraded on the wide ground before the Provost, where they remained till the Americans, about 1 o’clock, marched in through Queen Street and Wall Street and the Broad-way, when they wheeled off to the hay-wharf and embarked immediately and fell down to Staten Island. I walked out and saw the American troops, under General Knox, march in, and was one of the last on shore in the city; it really occasioned most painful sensation and I thought Sir Guy Carleton, who was on parade, looked unusually dejected. The particular account of the business of the day you will find in the newspaper which I have enclosed to Blowers. I have passed two days since, in the city to which I returned upon finding all was peace and quiet; a more shabby, ungentlemanlike-looking crew than the new inhabitants are, I never saw, tho’ I met with no insult or molestation. The Council for sixty days, which is invested with supreme authority for that term, is sitting. What will be determined by them is uncertain; many are apprehensive of violent and severe measures against individuals. I paid my respects to Generals Knox and Jackson, the latter is Commandant of the city; they received me very politely. I had the satisfaction also of seeing General Washington, who is really a good-looking, looking, genteel fellow. Scarce any of our friends, or any man of respectability, remains at New York.”

The New York Loyalists were sent in great numbers to Saint John, which was then a part of the Province of Nova Scotia and under the jurisdiction of Halifax; it was at the time called Parrtown. They were supplied by the government with boards, nails and window glass, tools of various kinds and, for those going farther up the river, a cow and a plow. All disbanded soldiers received an axe and a spade and their half pay. Rations of food and clothing were distributed among them and continued to be doled out in gradually lessening quantities for three years. The government supplies were not always on hand when required and families who had settled farther up the river were difficult to reach during the winter, and many hardships were endured during the first winter. In those days of slow transportation it was a considerable undertaking for any Government to supply thirty thousand refugees, suddenly transplanted from comfortable, often luxurious, homes, with sufficient supplies to keep them in the mere necessities of life in that country that was then little more than a wilderness.

We often hear the comment in these later days, by those who are unfamiliar with the true history of the Loyalists, that they were foolish to have left the “good land of the free”. Why could they not have stayed in their comfortable homes and been contented with a President, instead of fleeing to the lands governed by an obnoxious King? The Loyalists unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, had no alternative; their property was destroyed, their lands confiscated, they were ill-treated at every turn and in some instances put to death, and finally proscribed and banished.

American history has little to say on this subject; it is naturally more impressed by British tyranny. British history is equally silent. The rebellion in the American colonies meant little to historians busy recording French conflicts and the Napoleonic wars. The vision of a united Empire, its value to trade and commerce as seen by the more widely travelled and better educated colonists, were invisible to the advocates of “liberty, fraternity and equality”.

That the Colonists had grievances, the Loyalists did not deny. They had grievances themselves when they formed their own colonies, but they overcame them without rebellions. The treaty of 1783 had provided that their property would be respected, and it is probable that Washington and all those possessed with wisdom and authority would have gladly prevented the persecution of the Loyalists, but in that wide and scattered country it was impossible to restrain the excited and victorious rabble that inevitably follows in the trail of all revolution. They longed to give a practical demonstration of their new found “liberty, fraternity and equality”. They construed “liberty” into plunder, and “equality” into insulting those to whom they had once been subordinate, with the derisive cry of “Tory”.

So it was that thirty thousand perfectly good, honest British subjects packed up their worldly goods in brass-studded “hair trunks”, and with their family plate, family portraits and old mahogany, sailed off in ship loads to the Bay of Fundy.

If the story of the Loyalists is inadequately told in history, it has been often told and retold by the firesides of remote country homes—told to the children for bedtime stories—told at Christmas festivities and anniversaries, when whole families came to spend the day. Still they are told, even unto this day—stories of suffering, banishment and privation, courage, endurance and resourceful reconstruction.

You will find the story also silently folded up in bundles of old yellow letters stowed away in those same old hair trunks that the Loyalists brought.

It is all a very strange romantic story when you piece it together bit by bit. The story of an exiled people, landing with their traditions of refinement, their priceless heirlooms, their children and servants, in a land that they must reclaim from the forest. And after all, it was lovely land and they soon learned to love it. Where could there be found a more fitting setting for a tale of romance?