1204 MISCELLANEOUS. 



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 humble 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 tune 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 part of their property; but by far the greater part of the loyalists, 

 who quitted the thirteen States 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 opponents. Indeed, 

 whoever visits the British colonies will be convinced that persons were 

 doomed to misery who were as true in heart and hope as was Wash- 

 ington himself; that, in the divisions of families which every where 

 occurred, and which formed one of the most distressing circumstances 

 of the conflict, there were wives and daughters who, although bound 

 to loyalists by the holiest ties, had given their sympathies to the 

 whigs from the beginning, and who, in the triumph of the cause which 

 had had their prayers, went meekly as woman ever meets a sorrow- 

 ful lot into hopeless, interminable exile. It is to be lamented that 

 better counsels did not prevail. Had New York, Massachusetts, and 

 Virginia especially, been either merciful or just, transactions which, 

 in ages to come, will be very likely to put us on our defence, would not 

 stain our annals. The example of South Carolina should have been 

 followed by all. As it was, whigs whose gallantry in the field, whose 

 prudence in the cabinet, and whose exertions in diplomatic stations 

 abroad, had contributed essentially to the success of the conflict, 

 were regarded with enmity on account of their attempts to produce a 

 better state of feeling and more humane legislation. 



As a matter of expediency, how unwise was it to continue to per- 

 petuate the opponents of the Revolution, and to keep them a distinct 

 class, for a time, and for harm yet unknown! How ill-judged the 

 measures that caused them to settle the hitherto neglected possessions 

 of the British crown! Nova Scotia had been won and lost, and lost 

 and won, in the wars between France and England, and the blood of 

 New England had been poured upon its soil like water; but when we 

 drove thousands and tens of thousands of our countrymen to seek a 

 refuge there, what was it ? Before the war, the fisheries of its coast 

 for the prosecution of which Halifax itself was founded comprised, in 



