Volume 4, Part 2, Suppressing Tories
Volume 4, Chapter 13, The Suppression of Tories Begins
Throughout the rebellious colonies developed the pattern of governmental authority largely devoted to fighting the War of the Revolution,
and exercised by illegal representative bodies, provincial congresses or conventions,
Realizing that the executive function should be inherently subordinate to the law-making function, the rebels created a highly democratic system, making committees of safety, operating committees of the legislature, the major executive arms of the provinces, which could function when the legislatures were not in session.
On the local level, the old committees of inspection, observation and correspondence which had enforced the Continental Association naturally evolved into new city and rural committees to run the war, specifically to raise and operate the militia, and especially to crush dissenting Tories.
The Americans had had no chance to hear present-day opinion that they were merely fighting a conservative
and moderate revolution. Hence, they went at the Tories with a zeal that went beyond
the bounds of libertarian principle. The concept of enemy of American liberty was quickly extended
from violators of the continental boycott to any one critical of the revolution. Known
Letters, especially to England, were seized at the post offices and carefully examined.
Spies eagerly took on the task of keeping watch on suspected Tories, and in contrast
to enforcement of the Continental Association, committees did not try to confine punishment
of Tories to voluntary boycott and ostracism. Instead, fines, imprisonment, confiscation,
and banishment came increasingly into play. Persons were hauled before local committees
for Criticizing the Continental Congress, Belittling the Massachusetts Army, Criticizing
Presbyterian Prominence in the Revolution, and a host of other Errors of Opinion.
The new extra-legal Massachusetts General Court urged Harvard College to dismiss all
faculty members having Tory views. Individual Tories were not only boycotted and forced
to recant their heresies, stronger methods of punishment were adopted as soon as the
As early as May 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress recommended to local selectmen and
committees that they confiscate the arms of all unfriendly to the rebel cause and forbid
anyone to leave the province without special permission of the local committee or the Congress.
The following month, the Provincial Congress directed the town committees and select men
to confiscate and take charge of the property of all Tories who had fled behind the British
lines at Boston or elsewhere.
In New Hampshire, the Provincial Congress, as the supreme judicial body of the province,
sentenced Tory Colonel John Fenton to indefinite imprisonment as an enemy to the liberties
of America. In September, the New York Provincial Congress created a hierarchy of penalties
for Tories, including fines, disarming, prison and banishment. And in November, the Rhode
Island General Assembly passed a law decreeing death and forfeit of property to anyone assisting
the British Army with information or supplies. One of the critical litmus tests used by
by the Local Committees to Smoke Out Tories was a public oath of loyalty to a defense
association succeeding the old Continental Association.
As historian Alexander C. Flick concluded, the association became the first decisive
test of the politics of individuals. It stamped the individual as a Whig or Tory in the eyes
Hesitation to sign involved suspicion, refusal, guilt. The loyalist who was true to his convictions,
creed and king, was detested, reviled, and if prominent, ruined in business, tarred and
feathered, mobbed, ostracized or imprisoned, and all this at the will of a committee, self-constituted
and Responsible to No One. Thus, a revolution and revolutionaries dedicated to the cause
of liberty moved to suppress crucial liberties of their opposition, an ironic but not unsurprising
illustration of the inherent contradiction between liberty and power, a conflict that
can all too readily come into play even when power is employed on behalf of liberty. Hesitant
to take any steps that might lead irrevocably to independence, the Continental Congress
refused to do anything about hunting and combating Tories, leaving the task to the separate towns
and provinces. This despite the request from Massachusetts and Maryland for a general congressional
test oath for all the colonies. In October 1775, however, Congress learned that Dr. Benjamin
George, one of the top revolutionary leaders of Massachusetts and chief surgeon of the
Continental Army, was a traitor in the pay of the British. This grave shock led Congress
to urge the various local committees to crack down on everyone who might endanger the safety
of the colony or liberties of America. The committees redoubled their efforts in rounding
The Continental Army was also authorized to aid in suppressing Tories.
Even as conservative a man as George Washington wondered why the Tories, a bombable pest of
society who are preying upon the vitals of their country, should be suffered to stalk
at large, whilst we know that they will do us every mischief in their power.
In their grave concern with the American Tories, the American revolutionaries were not striking
at phantoms.
While the idea that Tory and rebel sentiment among the people was equally matched is a
historical misreading of John Adams, it remains true that the Tories constituted a real and
substantial threat to the revolution.
A letter by John Adams has been traditionally interpreted by historians as judging that
one-third of the Americans supported the revolution, one-third were opposed, and one-third were
neutral. In fact, Adams was referring to American attitudes toward the later French, not the
American Revolution. In another letter, Adams estimated that the American Revolution was
was supported by two-thirds of those taking sides one way or the other.
About one-third of politically interested Americans were Tories or loyalists, while
the Revolution held the allegiance of the other two-thirds.
Also neglected is what the Tories did during the Revolutionary War, for even the historians
concentrating on the Tories have been so sympathetic to them as to highlight their status as refugees
and to play down their considerable role as armed and militant warriors of counter-revolution.
The population of the rebelling colonies at the time of outbreak totaled approximately
2.5 million. Of these, about half a million were Negro slaves, who certainly were potential
rebels against the revolutionaries and hence potential aides to the British. If we consider
Who were the Tories?
This question has suffered from insufficient research.
Too many historians, in their eternal search for an American consensus of sweetness and
light, have preferred to forget about the hard knot of American Tories and what was
done to them during the Revolutionary War. The first thing to be said is that the Tories
were not at all uniformly distributed geographically. For example, the two major centers of population,
In addition, New England and Virginia were relatively Tory-free. The few thousand Virginia
Tories were concentrated among Ulster Scots on the frontier in western Virginia, settlers
on the eastern shore, the Chesapeake Peninsula, and native Scottish merchants and factors
concentrated on the coast near Norfolk. New England Tories were to be found in scattered
Pockets, many in Newport, in the coastal towns of the Maine region, New Hampshire, Cape Cod,
parts of western Massachusetts.
Western Connecticut, near the New York border, was the only one of these regions where Tories
approached a majority, even though the bulk of Connecticut was overwhelmingly rebel.
All in all, New England Tories barely reached one-tenth of the population.
There were more Tories in the other colonies of the South than in Virginia, and these
were mainly concentrated in the back country of the Carolinas, the pockets of Highland
Scots near Wilmington and Cape Fear in North Carolina, and the city of Charleston, and
in royal bureaucrat-ridden and subsidized Georgia.
However, in none of the major population areas of the South did the Tories constitute a majority,
And all in all they totaled about 30 percent of southerners.
The most ominous and threatening center of Tory strength lay in the middle colonies,
which were almost evenly divided between Whig and Tory.
This equal strength was particularly true of New York, the greatest Tory stronghold
outside of Georgia.
In such areas as western Long Island, upstate, and the lower Hudson Valley, Tory adherence
was almost overwhelming. New Jersey, in Bergen County and in the South, was almost as fertile
Tory ground. Toryism was particularly strong in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties,
especially among the Quakers. Tories were also strong in Delaware and on Maryland's
eastern shore. Ethnic and religious minorities within a region tended to oppose the dominant
Majority, and hence to side with Great Britain. Thus, while Anglicans in the Low Church Anglican
South were solidly revolutionary, the minority of Anglicans in the North, far more high church
and attached to Britain, were predominantly Tory. Also in the North, many Baptists in
the budding Methodist movement were restive and Tory. Most Dutch in New York and New Jersey
and Quakers in southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania and many native-born Scots tended
to be Tories. The Ulster Scots, however, at least in the South, were rather evenly divided.
Had the British acted early and energetically to mobilize the Tories to organize their scattered
centers of strength and to exploit the potential conflicts within American society, they might
The Negro slaves, as we have pointed out, were a huge potential reservoir of discontent
to mobilize against the Revolution. And New York, a fertile field, lay available for exploitation.
The Revolution split the landed oligarchy of the province with the Anglican Delancies
of New York City and Lower Hudson Valley Turning Tory, while the Presbyterian Livingstons
of the Northern Hudson Valley supported the break with England, though only meekly. As
a result, the disgruntled tenants of the Livingstons and their fellow Whig landlords naturally
gave their support to the Tory cause, and many ulstermen of the back country Carolinas,
Long unhappy about under-representation and governmental discrimination against them were
Tories or lukewarm to a revolution made by the planters of the lowlands.
However, the long-held view of historians that the old rebel regulators of the Carolinas
later became Tories has been refuted by the recent researches of Johnson, Barnwell and
The former regulators of both North and South Carolina were predominantly Whig revolutionaries.
Indeed it was only the old South Carolina moderators who became largely Tory.
The Tories, as we have seen, ranged through all social classes and occupations, from the
aristocratic Delancies of New York to the lowly tenants of the Whig landlords and back-country
Settlers of the Carolinas.
List and welded together all the disparate threads of Tory and anti-wick potential would
have required energy and ability that the British did not have.
For one thing, the British, like all counter-revolutionaries always and everywhere, scoffed at the revolution
as being a movement of a small fanatical minority rather than a majority, and as a movement
of a Weak and Inferior Breed of Men. All counter-revolutionaries tend to gravely underestimate their enemies
by treating rebellion as the work of a small subversive band of dogmatic and fanatical
ideologues. The vast majority, these arch-conservatives typically feel, are deeply loyal to the constituted
Government. Therefore, the British confidently believed that no intensive coordination of
the Tories was necessary. Surely they need only coal or land, and the great majority
of loyal folk would rise up and help their rulers smite the traitors.
A second cause of chronic British optimism, as we have seen, was the chauvinist contempt
for the Americans as a People, and for their martial abilities, a contempt redoubled by
the British devotion to orthodox military prescriptions and ignorance of guerrilla forms
of warfare.
The defeat of the Revolution also required an indomitable will, but General Howe, the
commander-in-chief of the British armies after the removal of the disgraced Gage in October
1775 was an ardent Whig opposed to the war. These inner convictions kept him valiantly
trying for a compromise political peace, rather than a repressive military solution to the
Conflict, thereby substantially weakening the resolve of the Counter-Revolution.