The Glorious Cause, page 69
Lesser offenses in Pennsylvania, misprision of treason, might bring lesser penalties—imprisonment, instead of death, and forfeiture of half one’s estate. Misprision of treason introduced a vagueness into the business of discouraging opposition to the Revolution, a vagueness most useful to those with a sharp understanding of patriotism and an appetite for harassing the unpatriotic. The Pennsylvania statute made speaking or writing in opposition to the public a misprision. Attempting to convey intelligence to the enemy, attempting to incite resistance to the government or to encourage a return to British rule, discouraging enlistments, stirring up tumults or disposing the people to favor the enemy, and opposing revolutionary actions or measures were all misprisions.37
The year after this statute was passed the Pennsylvania legislature conferred upon itself authority to issue proclamations of attainder, and during the war it approved almost 500 acts of attainder. It also permitted the use of other means of prosecuting offenses considered subversive besides the charges of treason or misprision of treason. Charges of piracy, burglary, robbery, misdemeanor, counterfeiting, and larceny could be used.
Although loyalists found all these measures employed against themselves in Pennsylvania, and similar ones in the other states, they did not usually receive savage treatment. But they were convicted for treason and lesser offenses, and they were sometimes executed. They also saw their property confiscated.
Killing the loyalists was a proposal occasionally made in the newspapers and probably much more often in private. The killing, however, could not usually be done without patriot losses—most deaths occurred in the bloody encounters around New York City throughout the war, or near Philadelphia in the fall and winter of 1777–78, or in the Carolinas in 1780-–81. Executions occurred infrequently and almost never without judicial process.
Taking the loyalists’ property from them was less dangerous but sometimes almost as difficult as taking their lives. For the law had to be observed; and then there were the friends and families of loyalists—and sometimes their creditors—all of whom had interests in seeing that the proceedings against estates followed an equitable course. The law itself recognized differences among loyalists whose property might be seized: there were those who had apparently plotted with the king’s ministers to enslave America, most obviously those royal officials who had fled for their lives about the time that fighting began—the Governor Hutchinsons of the colonies. The Massachusetts General Court waited until April 1779 before it approved a statute which permitted the confiscation of Hutchinson’s property, and of others like him, “Certain Notorious Conspirators” in the words of the act. A second statute dealt with less notorious loyalists who had fled—”absentees” according to the act, and sometimes referred to as “refugees,” or “open avowed enemies,” and “absconders.” This act required that in the actual confiscations due process must be observed. The legislature passed a resolve later in the spring of 1779 permitting sales of confiscated estates. Widows and wives left behind by their absconding husbands were entitled to one-third of the estate after creditors were paid. The acts paid particular attention to the rights of creditors.38
Many of the loyalists in Massachusetts whose estates were seized and sold had lived in Suffolk County, which included Boston. Studies of these sales do not indicate that an alteration in the county’s social structure followed. They do show, however, that men who had not owned land in Suffolk now purchased it.39
The changes in New York proved to be more important, though there, as elsewhere, the old social structure survived the Revolution. Still, leveling—a word that raised the hackles of landlords—occurred. Before the war tenants had rebelled in Dutchess County and elsewhere. The issues, the rents and fees extracted by landlords, had nothing directly to do with those dividing America from Britain, but the great riots in 1765 over the Stamp Act seemed to inspire tenants. The next year saw mobs in action in the Hudson Valley, and a good deal of blood was shed before they were put down. When the war began in 1775, tenants usually took the side opposed to their landlords’. Thus when it became known that Frederick Philipse, lord of Philipsburgh Manor in Westchester, was a Tory, his tenants happily went to the revolutionaries. The manor contained about 50,000 acres which were confiscated after Philipse chose exile. The law guaranteed preemptive rights to tenants of Tories convicted or attainted of treason, that is the law provided that the tenants had the first right of purchase at fair market value. The state sold Philipsburgh Manor under the Confiscation Act of 1784 in a series of transactions which created 287 new owners where formerly there had been only one—Frederick Philipse. The average holding of the new owners was 174 acres.40
Whig tenants also gained the lands of Tory landlords in Dutchess County, where the estates of Roger Morris and Beverly Robinson were confiscated in 1779. At least 401 tenants purchased 455 blocks of land in the sales that followed. Holding on to the land was another matter, and after the war many of these tenant-purchasers found making the payments difficult or impossible. A number gave up the attempt, and tenancy survived.41
The Livingstons in Albany County fared much better than many of their neighbors. The Livingstons favored American independence, but not personal liberty for their tenants. Not surprisingly, their tenants took the side of the Crown, especially in 1777 when they learned that Burgoyne was on his way south from Canada. Before these tenants succeeded in arming themselves, militia from adjoining Dutchess and from New England broke them apart. No real war followed, but militia and tenants skirmished and six tenants died. The militia arrested hundreds of others. Tenancy withstood these shocks on the Livingston Manor in New York and most of the other estates where it had flourished, and it continued until the mid-nineteenth century.42
As loyalists, the tenants in New York departed from the usual pattern: they “chose” loyalty rather than “remained” loyal. Their decision constituted a rejection of the prevailing Whig ideology. But they may have had an ideology of their own, based on the feeling that they were exploited by their landlords. Thus they, like patriots all over America, acted in the name of individual liberty.
That commitment did not set them apart from most loyalists. For the loyalists shared the revolutionaries’ belief in the rights of the individual, though they parted company with the revolutionaries over the meaning of those rights. When the agitation over British measures began in the 1760s this difference was not clear, and many who later became loyalists decried Parliamentary actions, opposing, for example, the right of Parliament to tax the colonies. Some, most notably Thomas Hutchinson, even argued that Parliament could not properly tax the Americans because they were not represented. Ultimately, loyalists like Hutchinson were unable to follow their own reasoning to the conclusion most of the revolutionaries found unavoidable—Parliament had become the enemy of the subject’s liberty. They could not accept the proposition that the ultimate source of liberty and order was the consent of the individual, that government dedicated to the preservation of freedom took its origins from the agreement of the people. The loyalists, so far as they explained themselves, insisted on the importance of tradition and long-established institutions, such as Parliament, in the creation and protection of liberty. And therefore, for most loyalists the crisis in America came to a head when independence was proposed. Independence found the loyalists unprepared to cast off all that they had known. They did not believe that a new basis of political authority had been fashioned in America. The old was sufficient, and they clung to it—and suffered as a result.
Understandably the sufferings of the loyalists left the revolutionaries unmoved. But the sufferings were real. The loss of property, physical injury, and the deaths of friends and members of families were hard to bear. For those who left America, there was still another sort of pain, the loneliness of exile in strange lands, and probably for many the realization that came belatedly that they were more American than British. The diaries and letters that testify to this realization are moving documents. “I earnestly wish to spend the remainder of my Days in America,” Sir William Pepperell of Massachusetts wrote in 1778, “I love the Country, I love the People.” Pepperell’s feeling of longing and sadness took voice in many loyalist houses abroad in the years of the war—and in the years following it.43
V
Unlike loyalists, black slaves admired the principles of the Revolution, yet they were largely excluded from armed service in the patriot cause. As early as 1766, slaves, probably inspired by the agitation over the Stamp Act, paraded through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, shouting “Liberty.” The city immediately picked up its muskets while the authorities had the countryside scouted for signs of an insurrection. Liberty remained the white man’s right.44
The ten years that followed undoubtedly taught slaves as well as their masters something more about liberty. Slaves probably had always been willing to act for freedom provided they had any chance of getting it. The coming of war in 1775 gave them the chance. Lord Dunmore’s promise of freedom in return for their service brought forward several hundred slaves in Virginia within a week of his proclamation in November 1775. Those who reached him had to travel to the coast and find a boat, for he was on board a British warship in Chesapeake Bay. Slaveholders tightened their control over their slaves as soon as the proclamation was issued. Still, 300 slaves escaped to Dunmore within a week of the proclamation.45
Dunmore suffered military defeat in December at Great Bridge, across the Elizabeth River, ten miles below Norfolk. Thereafter slaves had an increasingly difficult time in joining him. In all, some eight hundred made it. Dunmore formed them into a regiment, but they did no fighting. They died, however, in large numbers in the king’s service, victims of smallpox carried by the crews on British warships. When Dunmore sailed for England in August of the next year, only about 300 black soldiers accompanied him.
More slaves served in the American army. Virtually every Continental regiment contained a few. They enlisted, or were enlisted by their masters for conventional reasons—bounties, land, and the opportunity to earn their freedom. Some were freed before they entered the army; more perhaps were promised their freedom in return for their military service. For the most part they did not serve in separate units though there was a small Rhode Island regiment, officered by whites, composed entirely of blacks.46
Military service might have provided a means by which large numbers of slaves gained their freedom. But within a year of the war’s beginning whites, almost everywhere but especially where there were large numbers of slaves, opposed the enlistment of blacks. Compensating their owners would have entailed an expense a hard-pressed Congress could not meet; nor for that matter, could, or would, the state legislatures. The prospect of large numbers of armed blacks was also not smiled upon. Slavery rested on fear and coercion, and the enslavers could never entirely escape the fear that those they held against their wills would turn on them.
Why, after declaring that all men were created equal and making a revolution in the name of liberty, did Americans not free their slaves? The answer to this question lies somewhere in the tangled history of racial attitudes and American perceptions of economic necessity in the eighteenth century. White Americans had been imbued with prejudices against blacks even before slavery took hold in the seventeenth century. Fears of black animality, revulsion against their physical appearance, fantasies about their sexual proclivities had bitten deeply into white minds. These feelings help explain why blacks were enslaved.47
More than prejudice contributed to the development of slavery, of course. Blacks in America lacked power; their condition must have incited a disposition to exploit them. And slavery itself, as an institution of labor, gradually assumed an enormous importance in the economy, especially in the plantation colonies. Long before the Revolution, slavery had become an institution that seemed not only appropriate, when whites considered the debased character of blacks, but inescapable when they tried to imagine an economy of free labor.
The irony of white Americans claiming liberty while they held slaves did not escape the revolutionary generation. Too many men on both sides of the Atlantic remarked on it. The Society of Friends in America led the criticism, but there were others in all the new states who called for emancipation of the slaves in the name of natural rights and of Christian principles.
Not surprisingly, political leaders in the northern states reacted more positively to such appeals. In one way or another all the northern states acted to provide for the gradual emancipation of slaves. Most did so by passing laws ordering that children born into slavery must be freed several years after their birth. Pennsylvania’s legislature approved such a law while the war was going on; Rhode Island and Connecticut waited until the year the war ended. In Massachusetts, courts anticipated the legislature and abolished slavery. Elsewhere in the North the process took longer, but by the opening of the new century it was almost complete.48
The southern states did not follow this example. There slavery was too deeply embedded. But these states did join those to the north in closing the slave trade. The Congress in the 1780s and the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 would also do more—the Congress would bar slavery from the Old Northwest, and the Convention would draft a constitution which permitted a national prohibition of imports of slaves after 1807.49
Even considered together these actions against slavery may not seem impressive. They did not destroy slavery; it would flourish until the Civil War. In taking these steps Americans still fell short of honoring their own great standards, especially Jefferson’s claim that all men are created equal. But they had done much. They had made slavery a peculiar institution—peculiar in its confinement to the southern states. Had the North tried to force the South to follow its lead, the new republic would have broken apart. The people of the North were no better than those of the South, and we should consider carefully before assigning to them wisdom or a power of seeing into the future. They failed to act against slavery in the South as much out of a sense of their own weakness as out of wisdom. Whatever the reasons, white people in the North and South decided that for the time being at least the union that protected republican government was more important than a full-scale dedication to equality.50
VI
For the most part, American Indians along the Atlantic coast had avoided, or resisted, white attempts to reduce them to slavery. Yet their lives in tribes or communities had by the time of the revolutionary crisis in the 1760s assumed a character far different from that of the sixteenth century when the Europeans first invaded. The immediate and most profound effect of the European presence was produced by diseases. Indians had no immunity to the illnesses carried by European settlers, and later by African slaves. Even simple respiratory infections took a toll. Smallpox and measles, among other diseases, proved extraordinarily deadly. Demographers have offered various estimates of the size of Indian populations when the outsiders first appeared. None of these estimates can be exclusively trusted, based as they are on limited evidence and employing varieties of inferential methods. But while certainty is elusive, it is clear that over the three hundred years following the appearance of the Europeans, Indian populations fell drastically. Some tribes almost disappeared, and all along the Atlantic coast they took enormous losses, sometimes approaching 90 percent of their number.51
When the revolutionary crisis began, most of these Indians lived to the west of European settlements, in seven communities from upper New England in the North to Florida in the South. They were fragmented groups, each with its own governance modified in virtually every case by relations with the white settlements to the east. The hundred or so years before the Revolution had smashed whatever pre-Columbian unity that existed in the traditional alignments. Disease, wars, the relentless pressure of whites on their lands, had broken apart tribes and kin groups. These groups, loose collections of villages, had formed themselves over and over again—the survivors of these man-made disasters adapting to new circumstances in an attempt to retain some control of their lives. As their numbers declined they resorted to incorporating captives of wars fought among themselves, a tactic that diluted their traditional cultures even as it strengthened their military and political power. Language groups ramified as different peoples joined together to found new communities which were often on the move but almost always living in small villages. Tribal designations meant less than they ever had; so altered were the traditional tribes that a modern historian has suggested that their communities should be considered “addresses” rather than “tribal designations.”52
Depending upon their proximity to white settlements, and the influence of white traders, almost every aspect of Indians’ “tribal” life was transformed. They recognized the utility of colonial tools, clothing, and weapons and sought them. They also proved susceptible to the rum and other drink offered in trade by whites. Very few Indians avidly pursued Christianity, but Christian missionaries, often from the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel, had some success in making converts. Most communities stretching from upper New England to upper Florida remained indifferent to the white man’s god, though in settled areas there were pockets of the faithful, the “Praying Indians” in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for example.53
