This pious resolution proved not worth
the paper on which it was written. In State after State the
property of the Loyalists was withheld or confiscated anew. Yet
this ungenerous treatment of the defeated by the victors is not
hard to understand. The struggle had been waged with all the
bitterness of civil war. The smallness of the field of combat had
intensified personal ill-will. Both sides had practiced cruelties
in guerrilla warfare; but the Patriots forgot Marion's raids,
Simsbury mines, and the drumhead hangings, and remembered only
Hessian brutalities, Indian scalpings, Tarleton's harryings, and
the infamous prison ships of New York. The war had been a long
one. The tide of battle had ebbed and flowed. A district that was
Patriot one year was frequently Loyalist the next. These
circumstances engendered fear and suspicion and led to nervous
reprisals.
At least a third, if not a half, of the people of the old
colonies had been opposed to revolution. New York was strongly
Loyalist, with Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the Carolinas closely
following. In the end some fifty or sixty thousand Loyalists
abandoned their homes or suffered expulsion rather than submit to
the new order. They counted in their ranks many of the men who
had held first place in their old communities, men of wealth, of
education, and of standing, as well as thousands who had nothing
to give but their fidelity to the old order.
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