122 Life of Count Rumford. 



Major Thompson, who had always clung to that title, 

 though its provincial commission gave him no rank in 

 the regular army, was now honored with the commis- 

 sion, in the British army, of a Lieutenant-Colonel. It 

 was to forces already organized, or in fragmentary 

 bodies supposed to admit of being rallied into new 

 vigor, in America, that Thompson's commission ap- 

 plied. His pay was 24 s. 6d. per diem. 



But the officer, though at the age of twenty-eight 

 not yet a veteran, wished for, and meant to do, full 

 military duty. He needed a command. Where should 

 he find a regiment ? He provided for himself, and 

 resolved to secure a following from those who, in his 

 native land, had willingly espoused the cause of the 

 King against their own country. They called them- 

 selves loyal Americans. For the most part they were a 

 sorry company, the most desperate and hated in their 

 mode of warfare and in their subserviency, and the 

 bitterest sufferers in the wreck of the cause to which, 

 in principle or in malignity, as the case may have been, 

 they had given themselves. The ranks of the " Loyal 

 American Regiments," gathered in full or only in a 

 skeleton form in New York and in the Southern Prov- 

 inces, were held to the royal side by a very slender 

 allegiance, influenced in part by fear, and in part by 

 the stronger attraction of pay in English coin above 

 that of a paper currency. They, however, found it 

 very easy to shift to the American side; and perhaps a 

 majority of them had been so impartial as to serve in 

 the course of the war with equal merit, principle, and 

 efficiency in both armies. 



Yet it was not so easy for the officers of these regi- 

 ments of loyalists to pass from one side to the other. 



