215 



PAUT IV. 



HISTORICAL VIEW OF THE CONTROVERSY AS TO THE INTENT AND MEAN- 

 ING OF THE FIRST ARTICLE OF THE CONVENTION OF 1818. 



The documents* submitted by the President, in answer to the reso- 

 lution of the Senate of July 23, 1852, embracing as they do the able 

 and spirited defence of our rights, by Mr. Everett, never before pub- 

 lished, as well as several other papers of interest, afford much valuable 

 information. But yet, it is apparent that our archives are singularly 

 deficient in documentary evidence to show both sides of the contro- 

 versy as it really exists. We have already seen that the loyalists, or 

 "tories," opposed any stipulations whatever, at the peace of 1783, and 

 we are now to find that the principal cause of our difficulties since that 

 time — whether past or present — on the question of the fisheries, is to 

 be traced to the same source. 



At the close of the Revolution, justice and good policy both required 

 of our fathers a general amnesty, and the revocation of the laws of 

 disability and banishment ; so that all adherents of the crown who de- 

 sired, might become American citizens. Instead of this, however, the 

 State legislatures, generally, continued in a course of hostile action, 

 and treated the conscientious and the pure, and the unprincipled and 

 corrupt, with the same indiscrimination as they had done during the 

 struggle. The tories were ruined and humbled men. Most of them 

 would have easily fallen into respect for the new state of things, old 

 friendships and intimacies would have been revived, and long before 

 this time all would have mingled in one mass; but in some parts of 

 the United States there seems to have been a determination to drive 

 them from the country at all hazards, as men undeserving of" human 

 sympathy. Eventually, popular indignation diminished; the statute- 

 book was divested of its most objectionable enactments, and numbers 

 were permitted to occupy their old homes, and to recover the whole or 

 a j)art of their property; but by far the greater part of the loyalists, 

 who quitted the thirteen StJites at the commencement of or during the 

 war, never returned ; and of the many thousands who abandoned their 

 native land at the peace, and while these enactments were in force, 

 few, comparatively, had the wish, or even the means, to revisit the 

 country from which they were expelled. It cannot be denied, and we 

 of this generation should admit, that our fathers dealt harshly with 

 many, and unjustly with some, of their oj)p()nents. Indeed, whoever 

 visits the British colonies will be convinced that persons were doomed 

 to misery who were as true in heart and hoj)e as was Washington him- 

 self; that, in the divisions of families which everywhere occurred, and 

 which f()rmed one of the most distressing circumstances of the ci»nllict, 

 there wer<; wives and daughters who, although bound to loyalists by 

 the holiest ties, had given their sympathies to the whigs from the be- 



• Executive Docuinont, No. 100. 



