Читать книгу The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution - James Henry Stark - Страница 22

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The American Revolution, like most other revolutions, was the work of an energetic minority who succeeded in committing an undecided and fluctuating majority to courses for which they had little love; leading them, step by step, to a position from which it was impossible to recede. To the last, however, we find vacillation, uncertainty, half measures, and, in large classes, a great apparent apathy. There was, also, a great multitude, who, though they would never take up arms for the king; though they, perhaps, agreed with the constitutional doctrines of the revolution, dissented on grounds of principle, policy, or interest, from the course they were adopting.

That the foregoing is a correct presentation of the case is shown by a letter written by John Adams, when in Congress, to his wife. He says:

"I have found this congress like the last. When we first came together, I found a strong jealousy of us from New England, and the Massachusetts in particular—suspicions entertained of designs of independency, an American republic, Presbyterian principles, and twenty other things."[59]

It was an open question with many whether a community liable to such outbreaks of popular fury did not need a strongly repressive government; and especially when the possibilities of a separation from the mother country was contemplated, it was a matter of doubt whether such a people were fit for self-government. Was it not possible that the lawless and anarchical spirit which had of late years been steadily growing, and which the "patriotic" party had actively encouraged, would gain the upper hand, and the whole fabric of society would be dissolved?

In another letter of John Adams to his wife at this time, he gives us an idea of what the opinion was of the Loyalists concerning the doctrines taught by the disunionists, and which, he says, "Must be granted to be a likeness." "They give rise to profaneness, intemperance, thefts, robberies, murders, and treason; cursing, swearing, drunkenness, gluttony, lewdness, trespassing, mains, are necessarily involved in them. Besides they render the populace, the rabble, the scum of the earth, insolent and disorderly, impudent and abusive. They give rise to lying, hypocrisy, chicanery, and even perjury among the people, who are drawn to such artifices and crime to conceal themselves and their companions from prosecution in consequence of them. This is the picture drawn by the Tory pencil, and it must be granted to be a likeness."[60]

There are several passages in the writings of John Adams that seem to indicate that he at times had doubts of the righteousness of the course he had pursued. They were written in his later years, though one refers to an incident alleged to have occurred during his early manhood. In a letter to a friend in 1811, he thus moralizes: "Have I not been employed in mischief all my days? Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolations to the human race and the whole globe ever since?" But he justifies himself with the reflection: "I meant well, however; my conscience was as clear as crystal glass, without a scruple or doubt. I was borne along by an irresistible sense of duty." In his diary Mr. Adams recalls to mind one incident which occurred in 1775. He mentions the profound melancholy which fell upon him in one of the most critical moments of the struggle, when a man whom he knew to be a horse-jockey and a cheat, and whom, as an advocate, he had often defended in the law courts, came to him and expressed the unbounded gratitude he felt for the great things which Adams and his colleagues had done. "We can never," he said, "be grateful enough to you. There are now no courts of justice in this province, and I hope there will never be another." "Is this the object," Adams continued, "for which I have been contending? said I to myself. Are these the sentiments of such people, and how many of them are there in the country? Half the nation, for what I know; for half the nation are debtors, if not more, and these have been in all the countries the sentiments of debtors. If the power of the country should get into such hands—and there is great danger that it will—to what purpose have we sacrificed our time, health and everything else?"[61]

Misgivings of this kind must have passed through many minds. To some may have come the warning words of Winthrop, the father of Boston, uttered one hundred and fifty years before these events occurred, in which he said: "Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government, and histories record that it hath always been of least continuance and fullest of trouble."[62]

There was a doubt in the minds of many people, which we have often heard uttered in recent times, with reference to the French people in their long series of revolutions, and equally so with the Spanish-American republics with their almost annual revolutions, whether these words of Winthrop were not correct, and that the people were really incapable of self-government. It was a doubt which the revolution did not silence, for the disturbing elements which had their issue in the Shay Rebellion, The Whiskey Insurrection and the mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line, in 1781, were embers of a fire, smothered, not quenched, which rendered state government insecure till it was welded into the Federal Union. There was a widespread dislike to the levelling principles of New England, to the arrogant, restless and ambitious policy of its demagogues; to their manifest desire to invent or discover grievances, foment quarrels and keep the wound open and festering.[63]

Those who rebelled in good faith did so because they feared that the power of Parliament to tax them moderately to raise money for their own defence might be used sometime in the future for a less worthy purpose, and then they would all be "slaves." Their argument led to mob rule and anarchy, till the adaption of the Federal Constitution, after the close of the Revolutionary War.

The opinion of such an authority as Lecky on our revolutionary movements must be worthy of thoughtful attention; and his opinion is this: "Any nation might be proud of the shrewd, brave, prosperous and highly intelligent yeomen who flocked to the American camps; but they were very different from those who defended the walls of Leyden, or immortalized the field of Bannockburn. Few of the great pages of history are less marked by the stamp of heroism than the American Revolution and perhaps the most formidable of the difficulties which Washington had to encounter were in his own camp."[64] And he concludes his survey of the movement with these words: "In truth the American people, though in general unbounded believers in progress, are accustomed, through a kind of curious modesty, to do themselves a great injustice by the extravagant manner in which they idealize their past. It has almost become as commonplace that the great nation which in our own day has shown such an admirable combination of courage, devotion and humanity in its gigantic Civil War, and which since that time has so signally falsified the prediction of its enemies and put to shame all the nations of Europe by its unparalleled efforts in paying off its national debt, is of far lower moral type than its ancestors at the time of the War of Independence. This belief appears to me essentially false. The nobility and beauty of Washington can, indeed, hardly be paralleled. Several of the other leaders of the Revolution were men of ability and public spirit, and few armies have ever shown a nobler self-devotion than that which remained with Washington through the dreary winter at Valley Forge. But the army that bore those sufferings was a very small one, and the general aspect of the American people during the contest was far from heroic or sublime. The future destinies and greatness of the English race must necessarily rest mainly with the mighty nation which has arisen beyond the Atlantic, and that nation may well afford to admit that its attitude during the brief period of its enmity to England has been very unduly extolled. At the same time, the historian of that period would do the Americans a great injustice if he judged them only by the revolutionary party, and failed to recognize how large a proportion of their best men had no sympathy with the movement."[65]

Our native historians and the common run of Fourth of July orators have treated their countrymen badly for a hundred years. They have given the world to understand that we are the degenerate children of a race of giants, statesmen, and moralists, who flourished for a few years about a century ago and then passed away. An impartial examination of the records would show that we are wiser, better, more benevolent, quite as patriotic and brave as the standard heroes of 1776. We may give our ancestors credit for many admirable virtues without attempting to maintain that a multitude of unlettered colonists, scattered along the Atlantic coast, hunting, fishing, smuggling, and tilling the soil for a slender livelihood, and fighting Indians and wild beasts to save their own lives, possessed a vast fund of political virtue and political intelligence, and left but little of either to their descendants. The public is beginning to tire of this tirade of indiscriminate eulogy, and the public taste is beginning to reject it as a form of defamation. And so the ripening judgment of our people is beginning to demand portraits of our ancestors painted according to the command that Cromwell gave the artist; to paint his features, warts, blotches, and all, and to demand an account of our forefathers in which we shall learn to speak of them as they were.

Sabine, in his valuable work, "Loyalists of the American Revolution," says: "I presume that I am of Whig descent. My father's father received his death-wound under Washington, at Trenton; my mother's father fought under Stark at Bennington. I do not care, of all things, to be thought to want appreciation of those of my countrymen who broke the yoke of colonial vassalage, nor on the other hand, do I care to imitate the writers of a later school, and treat the great and the successful actors in the world's affairs as little short of divinities, and as exempt from criticism. Nay, this general statement will not serve my purpose. Justice demands as severe a judgment of the Whigs as of their opponents, and I shall here record the result of long and patient study. At the Revolutionary period the principles of unbelief were diffused to a considerable extent throughout the colonies. It is certain that several of the most conspicuous personages of those days were either avowed disbelievers in Christianity, or cared so little about it that they were commonly regarded as disciples of the English or French school of sceptical philosophy. Again, the Whigs were by no means exempt from the lust of land hunger. Several of them were among the most noted land speculators of their time, during the progress of the war, and, in a manner hardly to be defended, we find them sequestering and appropriating to themselves the vast estates of those who opposed them. Avarice and rapacity were seemingly as common then as now. Indeed, the stock-jobbing, the extortion, the fore-stalling of the law, the arts and devices to amass wealth which were practised during the struggle, are almost incredible. Washington mourned the want of virtue as early as 1775, and averred that he 'trembled at the prospect'—soldiers were stripped of their miserable pittance that contractors for the army might become rich in a single campaign. Many of the sellers of merchandise monopolized (or 'cornered') articles of the first necessity, and would not part with them to their suffering countrymen, and to the wives and children of those who were absent in the field, unless at enormous profit. The traffic carried on with the army of the king was immense. Men of all descriptions finally engaged in it, and those who at the beginning of the war would have shuddered at the idea of any connection with the enemy, pursued it with increasing avidity. The public securities were often counterfeited, official signatures forged, and plunder and jobbery openly indulged in. Appeals to the guilty from the pulpit, the press, and the halls of legislature were alike unheeded. The decline of public spirit, the love of gain of those in office, the plotting of disaffected persons, and the malevolence of factions, became widely spread, and in parts of the country were uncontrollable. The useful occupations of life and the legitimate pursuits of commerce were abandoned by thousands. The basest of men enriched themselves, and many of the most estimable sank into obscurity and indigence. There were those who would neither pay their debts nor their taxes. The indignation of Washington was freely expressed. 'It gives me sincere pleasure,' he said, in a letter to Joseph Reed, 'to find the Assembly is so well disposed to second your endeavor in bringing those murderers of our cause to condign punishment. It is much to be lamented that each state, long ere this, has not hunted them down as pests of society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America. No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the man who can build his greatness upon his country's ruin.'"