Tory (American Revolutionary War)

“ But the leaders of this "people's party," men like the Clintons of the State of New York, were sometimes as aristocratic in their social life as the leaders of the Federalists. During the Revolutionary War the only parties were those who aimed at national independence, and the Royalists, or Tories, who did not wish to sever their connection with the mother-country; but these Tories had no political influence when the government was established under Washington. ”

“ I think it may be safely asserted that where one Tory lost his life at the hands of the Whigs during the Revolution, fifty Whigs were slain in cold blood by the Tories. The reason is obvious—a heart warmed with love of country is benevolent and humane; its active opposers may fairly be presumed to be mercenary, and consequently cruel. ”

“ Surely the Tories will believe the Tory lords! The truth is, they do believe them and know as fully as any Whig on the continent knows, that the king and ministry never had the least design of an accommodation with America, but an absolute, unconditional conquest. And the part which the Tories were to act, was, by downright lying, to endeavor to put the continent off its guard, and to divide and sow discontent in the minds of such Whigs as they might gain an influence over. In short, to keep up a distraction here, that the force sent from England might be able to conquer in "one campaign." ”

“ During that Revolution, human beings in America, in conformity with their respective beliefs in the Tory or the American concept of the relation of human being to government, had been divided into what history knows as the Tories and the Americans. Many of the human beings, assembled in those conventions of ten or twelve years later, had been sincere Tories in the days of the Revolution. ”

“ The sins of the Butlers and their bloodthirsty followers were visited in robbery and insult upon unoffending men, who were like them in nothing but in being labelled with the epithet "Tory." During the seven years that the city of New York had been occupied by the British army, many of these loyalists had found shelter there. The Whig citizens, on the other hand, had been driven off the island, to shift as best they might in New Jersey, while their comfortable homes were seized and assigned by military orders to these very Tories. ”

“ That the nation at large remained Tory in sentiment was seen from the fact that in every House of Commons elected after the Revolution the majority was commonly Tory; it was only indeed when their opposition to the war and the patriotic feeling which it aroused rendered a Tory majority impossible that the House became Whig. And even in the height of Whig rule and amidst the blaze of Whig victories, England rose in the Sacheverell riots, forced Tories again into power, and ended the Whig war by what it deemed a Tory peace. ”

“ American troops set fire to the houses of the people to plunder and rob. In fact in some sections the colonists looked upon the British army with as much favor as the American army. New York alone confiscated $3,600,000 worth of property belonging to Tories, and all the states did likewise. During that entire period the Tories were the great sufferers. It is obvious that a person had as much legal and moral right to be a Tory as to be a Whig, provided he committed no act of violence against society, and the great majority of Tories had committed none. ”

“ The Toryism of America is also against us. I call that man a Tory, who prefers the accidents of man to the substance of manhood. I mean one who prefers the possessions and property of mankind to man himself, to reason and to justice. Of this Toryism we have much in America, much in New England, much in Boston. In this town, I cannot but think the prevailing influence is still a Tory influence. It is this which is the support of the demagogues of the State and the Church. ”

“ To the Tory, the Empire seems to be something in itself; he is impressed with its size, its wealth, its population; the mere existence of such a huge fabric, efficiently maintained, under the national flag, satisfies him. The Liberal is more concerned with what the Empire represents, with its maintenance of individual liberty, with its development of the subject peoples which it contains, with its encouragement to exploitation, with its implied antagonism to foreign peoples, with its increase of the cost of armaments, and with its effect upon the temper of domestic government. ”

“ In the early days of the Revolution the ultra Tories were gradually driven into the ranks of the enemy, until for a time it might be said that all revolutionary America had become Whig; the name Tory, however, was still applied to those who, though opposed to the usurpations of George III., were averse to a final separation from England." G. Pellew, John Jay, page 269. "The terms Tories, Loyalists, Refugees, are burdened with a piteous record of wrongs and sufferings. ”

“ The freeman's speech is sedition, and the patriot's deed a crime.
Wherever the race, the law, the land,—whatever the time or throne,
The Tory is always a traitor to every class but his own.
Thank God for a land where pride is clipped, where arrogance stalks apart;
Where law and song and loathing of wrong are words of the common heart;
Where the masses honor straightforward strength, and know, when veins are bled,
That the bluest blood is putrid blood—that the people's blood is red!
And honor to Crispus Attucks, who was leader and voice that day ”

“ Throughout the Mohawk valley the influence of Sir John Johnson, the Tory son of the famous baronet of the Seven Years’ War, was thought to be supreme; and it turned out to be very powerful both with the white population and with the Indians. At the other end of the line, in New York city, the Tory element was strong, for reasons already set forth. On Long Island, the people of Kings and Queens counties, of Dutch descent, were Tories almost to a man, while the English population of Suffolk was solidly in favour of independence. ”

“ English national sentiment was hostile to the Americans in their independent attitude, and the Whigs--the liberals then in English politics--were a discredited and weakened party for many years because of their leaning to the American side of the questions in dispute. Following close upon the American war, came the French Revolution, which frightened into Toryism great numbers of people who did not by nature belong there. ”

“ As certainly as the despot remains a despot, whether his motives are good or bad, so certainly does the Tory remain a Tory, whether he has egoistic or altruistic motives for using state-power to restrict individual liberty, beyond the degree required for maintaining the liberties of other individuals. ”

“ The Tory foresaw an easier mode of gaining money for the government he abhorred, with a firmer hold on the people for the monarch he despised, and his antagonism bore all the energy of political partisanship. ”

“ His hero-worship gave no little encouragement to the more brutal sort of Toryism, and there are still many English people who believe that the history of a nation is only the biography of its great men. But his insistence upon the direct responsibility of the social organization for the happiness of every one within it was in the line of a reaction against crude individualism, which by 1850 was strongly marked outside Tory philanthropy. ”

“ It would be a mistake, however, to identify too closely the parties in England with the parties in America. The old Tory party in England was very different from the so-called Tory party in America. The term Tory in America was, as a matter of fact, an epithet of derision applied by the revolutionists to all who opposed them. The opponents of the revolutionists called themselves not Tories, but Loyalists or ‘friends of government.’
There were, it is true, among the Loyalists not a few who held language that smacked of Toryism. ”

“ The Whigs seem determined to extirpate the Tories, and the Tories the Whigs. Some thousands have fallen in this way in this quarter, and the evil rages with more violence than ever. If a stop cannot be soon put to these massacres, the country will be depopulated in a few months more, as neither 'Whig' nor 'Tory' can live." (Historical Introduction to Colonel Sabine's Biographical Sketches of the American Loyalists, p. 33.) ”

“ The Tory damns the Whig, for maintaining a resistance, which he himself never fails to practice; and the Whig reproaches the Tory with slavish principles, yet calls him rebel if he do not practice them. The truth is, all men dread the power of oppression out of their own hands, and almost all men wish it irresistible when it is there.
We change sides every day, yet keep the same names for ever. I have known a man a staunch Whig for a year together, yet thought and called a Tory by all the Whigs, and by the Tories themselves. ”

“ Modern Toryism is identified with Imperialism, and, except for the relics of old controversies between sects, most of the antagonism of Liberal and Tory centres to-day about the Empire. The most definite opposition is to be observed in original conceptions. ”

“ Practical Toryism, the theory as it has been expressed in actual politics, has been until recent years the Toryism of a governing class. But no class has a monopoly of it. The same habit of mind exists everywhere. There is nothing so universal as the aristocratic temper, which disposes of the fortunes of others according to its own sense of what is fitting. The Tory statesman of a hundred and fifty years ago was a landowner, a Churchman, and a man of wealth. But his view of life would have been much the same if he had been a tinker, an atheist, and in daily expectation of the workhouse. ”

“ It is to independence that every Tory owes the present safety which he lives in; for by that, and that only, we emerged from a state of dangerous suspense, and became a regular people.
The necessity, likewise, of being independent, had there been no rupture between Britain and America, would, in a little time, have brought one on. The increasing importance of commerce, the weight and perplexity of legislation, and the entangled state of European politics, would daily have shown to the continent the impossibility of continuing subordinate ”

“ Some who will not venture to assert, that the real difference between Whig and Tory, was lost at the Revolution, seem inclined to think that the difference is now abolished, and that affairs are so far returned to their natural state, that there are at present no other parties amongst us but Court and Country; that is, men who, by interest or principle, are attached either to Monarchy or to Liberty. It must indeed be confessed, that the Tory party seem of late to have decayed much in their numbers, still more in their zeal, and I may venture to say, still more in their credit and authority. ”

“ It has been a frequent subject of complaint against the Tory government, both before the Revolution of 1832, and on their return to power in 1841, that they were too liberal to their opponents, and forgetful of their friends, in the dispensing of the public patronage; and we have only to take up the Red Book, to see that this praise or imputation justly belongs to them. But no man alive ever heard of a Whig, during the ten years they were in power, being accused of giving any thing to a Tory. ”

“ He that is not a supporter of the independent States of America in the same degree that his religious and political principles would suffer him to support the government of any other country, of which he called himself a subject, is, in the American sense of the word, a Tory ”

“ On that day people cluster like bees all over the omnibuses, till the vehicle looks like a mere ball of humanity stuck together, rolling down to some excursion-train. This is a bitter sight to an old-fashioned Churchman. [A] The American Tory will [Pg 649] hate any day that releases the poor and the oppressed into God's glorious liberty. One of the most worthy and offensive men you can meet in London is the American Tory of this description: worthy, because honest and clean and free from vice ”

“ ELECTORS “awake, arise, or be for ever fallen.” Men of all shades of Politics, Whig and Tory, buckle on your armour, go hand in hand, beat back the foe that would rob you of your franchise. Shew your independence, let cowardice be distant. It is not a question between Whig and Tory that we have to decide, (Sandars is neither Whig or Tory,) but between Independence and Mental Slavery. ”

“ On the remarkable nature of this identity, that one secures and the other interferes with individual liberty and, therefore, both affect individual liberty, we shall find that he bases the Tory concept that state governments can do as they please with all liberties of the American citizens. ”

“ As the war drew to its close and it became plain to every one that the cause of the patriots must triumph, the feeling between the two parties of Americans became less bitter; and the Tories, in many cases, saw that it would be wise for them to accept the situation, and become loyal citizens of the United States of America, as before they had been loyal subjects of Great Britain. ”

“ In all places held by the patriot army a Tory refusing to renounce his allegiance to King George ran considerable danger not only of mob visit, but of confiscation of property, exile, imprisonment, or, in flagrant cases of adherence to the enemy, death. ”