As She Began: An Illustrated Introduction to Loyalist Ontario

Canada.

Introduction

Adam Young was one of the first un-American Americans. Native-born and of German extraction, there was nothing particularly unusual about the man. He was a small farmer in Tryon County, New York, who by thirty years of labour had cleared and cultivated one hundred acres of land. By the time the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, Young, sixty years old and a pillar of his community, was slipping into a comfortable old age. Although members of his own family, even his own brothers and sisters, supported the revolutionary cause, Adam Young steadfastly declared himself for the king. As a committed British partisan, he gave shelter and provisions to those fleeing from the Revolution and recruited local men for the royalist forces. Young was harassed and vilified by his neighbours because of his loyalty. He was hauled before the Tryon County Committee of Safety and when he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new republic, he was marched out of New York into Connecticut and flung into prison for eleven months. Scarcely had Young returned home when a rebel mob descended upon him, burning his home, laying waste to his fields and carrying off his stock. But the old man could not be broken. Gathering his few remaining possessions and shouldering his rifle, he trudged off to join the forces of the crown. His wife and younger children, destitute and on the verge of starvation, were forced to walk overland to the British stronghold at Fort Niagara. There they remained until the war had run its bloody course.

From 1778 to 1782 Young, joined in time by all four of his sons, served his king in a grim war within a war. As a royalist guerilla fighter he participated in a savage civil war which sowed death and destruction in a thousand-mile swath below the Great Lakes. Young and several thousand other Americans who fought for the crown on the northern frontier won their battles, but they were the complete losers when peace came. Their lands were confiscated and harsh new state laws prevented many of them from returning home. The new United States of America set about eradicating every reminder of their existence. Within a generation, it was as though they had never lived.

Young did not vanish. Exiled from his native land, he finished out his days in the new colony of Upper Canada. There, on the banks of the Grand River, he once again began the arduous task of hacking a farm out of the wilderness. Reviled as a traitor by one nation, Young was a founding father of another. He and those who had stood beside him would be known in Canadian history as the United Empire Loyalists.¹

Who were the United Empire Loyalists and what did they think and do? We who live in Ontario have compelling reason for trying to fathom them. The first settlers of our province were Loyalists. They founded our first towns and built our first churches and schools. They created the first farms out of the Ontario wilderness. They helped shape our institutions, our laws and our ways of looking at ourselves. They are a major part of our past. We must attempt to understand Adam Young and his contemporaries in order to understand our heritage.

Later generations of Canadians have often misjudged the Loyalists. The still-prevailing interpretation of them comes from the late nineteenth century, wrought by Canadian nationalists who believed Canada should accept a vigorous role in the affairs of the British Empire. They, not unreasonably, saw the Loyalists as earlier defenders of the unity of the Empire. In tune with the sentiments of their day, however, they also characterized the Loyalists as the epitome of Anglo-Saxondom. They were convinced that the Loyalists were the very cream of the population of the Thirteen Colonies, that they were an educated and cultured elite, representing the learning, the piety, the gentle birth, the wealth and the good citizenship of the British race in America.²

Many Canadians today still hold to a variant of this interpretation of the Loyalists. The Loyalists, they believe, were bluebloods and snobs, toadies to the British authorities and ersatz aristocrats who unimaginatively tried to force inappropriate British ways on a new and vigorous North American society. Many Ontarians believe that the Loyalists are of interest only to a few old-established families who trace their pedigrees back to them, that the Loyalists settled in only a few areas and therefore did not greatly affect the overall growth of the province, and that in the main they are best forgotten.

In fact, the Loyalists were a very mixed group, white, black and red, only a minority of whom were Englishmen. If anything, the Loyalists were more ethnically and religiously diverse than their rebel opponents. They tended to come from the middle and lower rather than the higher strata of society. The Loyalists were not puppets of the British imperial power. Although they believed in a continuing link, few of them accepted that British customs and institutions could be transplanted without modification to North America. In Ontario, they contended as vociferously for forms of local government and land-holding to suit their situation as their opponents to the south had done before the Revolution. Though they established only a handful of communities directly, they exercised an influence all out of proportion to their numbers. They were the founding group in our province; its political, social, religious and economic systems were put in place to meet the needs and desires of those who wished to continue to live under the crown, the Loyalists.

We owe much to the Loyalists. Without them, there probably would not have been a Canada. Ontario and New Brunswick would have been settled by American frontiersmen. Nova Scotia would still be connected with Great Britain because of its strategic importance. The British would have had no reason to hold on to Prince Edward Island and little incentive to risk much for the French settlement along the St. Lawrence. Cleared out of the lands to the south, Britain would have had no claim to retain the vast lands granted the Hudson’s Bay Company. Canada as we know it would not exist. If we owe our geography to the Loyalists, we also owe to them our political tradition of evolution rather then revolution, our ideal of steady progression towards constitutional democracy. Likewise, in their diversity and heterogeneity we can find one origin of our tossed salad society with its stress on pluralism and tolerance, as opposed to the American melting pot. It is indeed time that Ontarians acknowledged the debts they owe to their brave and determined forefathers, the Loyalists.

Faces of Loyalism: Alexander McDonell (1762-1842) by William Berczy

Born in Scotland, McDonell had moved with his family to the Delaware River Valley. In 1779 at the age of 17, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in Butler’s Rangers and served the rest of the war with that unit. After the war, McDonell had a long and varied career in Upper Canada as representative in the House of Assembly for Glengarry, Sheriff of the Home District and agent for Lord Selkirk’s Baldoon settlement in Upper Canada. During the war of 1812 he was deputy paymaster general and after the war superintendent of the settlement of disbanded soldiers at Perth.

1

Who Were the Loyalists?

The popular American image of the Loyalists, portrayed in novels, television and films, is certainly not an heroic one. The Loyalist is seen as a stiff-necked Tory, rich, greedy and self-interested. Speaking with an affected English accent, he was probably a corrupt officeholder and owner of a great house, indolently whiling away his days driving about in a gilded carriage, a parasite who remained loyal only for personal gain. According to this American stereotype, the Loyalist was an isolated figure, a small sore upon the generally healthy body politic to be expunged by the hardy colonial freedom fighters.

Whatever else one says of the Loyalists, they were not few in number. It has been estimated that there were nearly 500,000 colonists who remained loyal to the British crown. That would be about 16 per cent of the total American population, or 20 per cent of white Americans. In 1780 some 8,000 Loyalists were actively serving their king in organized regiments at a time when Washington’s army numbered only about 9,000. Between 80,000 and 100,000 Loyalists eventually fled from the United States, about half of them to Canada, making it by far the most important centre of refuge. The Maritimes became home for about 45,000 while some 9,500 went to Quebec. Of these, approximately 7,500 settled in what was then western Quebec, later to become Upper Canada and finally Ontario.¹

A rough portrait of the white Ontario Loyalists can be sketched from the claims for war losses that 488 of them submitted to the British government shortly after the Revolution.² What is striking about this first-hand testimony is that it almost entirely contradicts the American stereotype. These people had enjoyed neither wealth nor privilege. Only five of them had held public office, three in relatively modest positions: that of magistrate, town clerk and employee of the Indian Department. Of the other two, one had been the postmaster of the City of Albany and Albany County, the other the sheriff of Tryon County. There was only one among the claimants who by modern standards would have been considered a professional – a physician. Two were surgeons (one a surgeon-apothecary) and one a school teacher. A small number had been shopowners, tavern-keepers or artisans, and two had been shipowners. But ninety per cent of the Loyalists listed themselves simply as farmers.³

Although the average land claim was deceptively large – 191 acres, leased or owned – a full 42 per cent indicated that they had had less than ten acres cleared. The great majority of Ontario Loyalists were pioneer farmers, most of whom had resided in New York State, 54 per cent of those coming from the sprawling county of Tryon, then the western frontier of New York settlement.⁴ Tryon County included the Mohawk Valley, the acknowledged hotbed of loyalism in western New York. Albany County accounted for 25 per cent, while Charlotte County, which then included what is now Vermont, had 14 per cent.

Large numbers of these Ontario Loyalists would have spoken with accents, but their accents would not have been either English or affected, as the popular American image would suggest. Fifty-four per cent of the Ontario claimants were foreign-born and many probably did not speak English at all. Over half of them were Scots, a large proportion of them Gaelic-speaking Highland Roman Catholics. There was also a good number of Germans and Irish (most of whom would have been Scots-Irish), while a meagre 8 per cent (some thirty-nine individuals) were English by birth. Most of the foreign-born were quite recent immigrants. Those Scots who indicated the length of their residence had only been in the country an average of four years before the beginning of the Revolution; the English had been there eight years, the Irish, eleven, and the Germans, eighteen.

Faces of Loyalism: Robert Kerr (1764-1824), artist unknown

During the Revolution, Kerr was a surgeon’s mate at Machiche, the main Loyalist refugee camp in Quebec and after 1780, surgeon to the second battalion of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York. After the war, he was appointed surgeon to the Indian Department and settled at Niagara in 1789. He was a judge of the Surrogate Court at Niagara and grand master of the Provincial Grand Lodge. He married Elizabeth, a daughter of Molly Brant and Sir William Johnson.

George III Indian Chief Medal, ca. 1775-1783

The custom of issuing medals to enlist and maintain the support of the Indian tribes had been a well-established practice in North America since the Spanish and French regimes. During the Revolution, British medals were struck in some profusion. They came in several different sizes, to correspond with the significance of the recipient and some, for the purpose of economy, were hollow. The obverse of the medal is a youthful bust of George III, the reverse the royal arms and supporters. Many similar medals have symbolic scenes or commemorations of victories on their reverse. The lack of any really major victories in the Revolution, despite the many successes of the Loyalist regiments in the Northern Department, probably precluded such depictions on British revolutionary medals.

Certificate of Recognition, 1778

During the 1770s, the practice was introduced of granting commissions to the Indian chiefs to whom medals had