seems surprising that persons should be found to speak of any peculiar doctrine of the Reformation; since no historical fact is more clearly ascertained, than that there was a diversity of opinion among the Reformers of the sixteenth century. Look at Luther, Calvin, Melancthon, Zwingle, Socinus; who requires to be told that among these there was diversity of opinion? But they all agreed in renouncing Church authority, and accepting the Holy Scriptures as their standard, and asserted the right of the individual mind to think and judge for itself in matters of religion.

The plain truth is, that Luther and the first Reformers, by asserting this principle and standing on it as they did, laid the basis of the Reformation. And to whatever extent they availed themselves of it, and acted upon it in clearing away errors and abuses, to that extent they commenced and carried on the work of reformation. At best, however, the labors of Luther and his associates can be regarded only as a commencement. The accumulated errors of fifteen centuries

could not be swept away at once. The work of religious reform has still to be carried on. The simple form of Christianity is yet sadly marred by human additions; and the obligation remains upon us all to do our part in restoring it to its primitive purity and loveliness.

J. C.

ART. VII.

THE AMERICAN LOYALISTS.*

THE author of the work before us seems to consider the political class of whom he treats as an almost neglected topic, until a very recent day. Our own experience leaves us not without a fellow-feeling of the difficulties attending such a research. It is scarcely half a dozen years since that, having engaged to render some account of a portion only -though a very select and respectable one of this obnoxious body, we were met at the threshold by the want of some work speaking of them otherwise than in the most cursory or casual manner. Of this sort are the references by Hutchin

*The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of the Adherents to the British Crown in the War of the Revolution; alphabetically arranged, with a Preliminary Historical Essay. By LORENZO SABINE. Boston: Little & Brown. 1847. 8vo. pp. 720.

son, in the latter half of the third volume of his History, to the members of our Massachusetts Assembly who were well affected to the crown; - notices so slight and meagre as poorly to satisfy, if they even stimulated, curiosity. Within the brief period, however, just named, have appeared the Journal and Letters of Curwen, a Salem "absentee" (1842), the Life of Peter Van Schaack, of New York (1842), a person of much higher weight of talent and character and a much valued friend of Mr. Jay, and Colonel Simcoe's "Operations of the Queen's Rangers" (1844), a partisan corps made up entirely of Southern loyalists. But earlier than all, be it remembered, were (so far as they went, that customary qualifying phrase) certain sketches of graduates of Harvard of anti-revolutionary principles at the opening of the Revolution. These nameless memorials took refuge under the covers of the American Quarterly Register, a work whose cessation (we should be rather glad to say suspension) many of us yet mourn; and have not come, we are constrained to infer, under Mr. Sabine's notice, though, on the other hand, not a few things in his volume, both facts and dates, puzzle us a little in thus believing.

That the class of men in question have not before this been a subject of distinct, separate consideration, amply as the period of the Revolution has been illustrated in our day, is no less matter of wonder than of regret. The delay, too, has been seriously prejudicial to our getting, with the desired precision, points of personal history. One generation at least, if not more, now in every case intervenes between the actors and their biographers. It will be readily seen how greatly it adds to this embarrassment, when those of whom one is in quest have died in a foreign land, and left not a vestige of themselves behind. This is the first form of the twofold difficulty which attends inquiries touching the American Loyalists. The several Hutchinsons and Olivers have become names only of the memory, which may be said also of Richard Lechmere, of Auchmuty, of William Browne of Salem, of Jonathan Sewall, of James Putnam, father and son. No pulse hereabouts now beats with the blood of the lordly Vassals of Cambridge, Boston, and Quincy. Commodore Loring of Jamaica Plain, one of the commissioners of excise, Colonel Murray of Rutland, whose rotundity made him a butt as the Falstaff of his day, and Colonel Royall of Medford (except that he still lives in his bounty to Cam

The Hon. John

bridge), all are gone, root and branch. Chandler of Worcester, whose sons and daughters were as numerous as those of his royal master, and with whose family every other leading family of the region was proud to entwine itself by marriage alliance, sleeps far away from the town and shire of whose honors he had almost the monopoly, and the very name had there died out, as we learn from Lincoln, a full generation ago. As to the Borlands, the Ervings, the Brinleys, saving some little qualification, the same statement may essentially be made.

But other families there were who either returned or remained, the latter breasting, as they best could, the antipathy to which they were subjected. With the descendants of too many of these there exists a foolish weakness or false shame, which leads to the disguising or varnishing over of the real position taken by their friends at the crisis of the Revolution. Here lies the other part of the twofold difficulty referred to which meets the antiquary. The common explanation resorted to in behalf of such is, to rescue their patriotism at the expense of their firmness or courage. How much is thus gained to the final reputation of those concerned may well admit of doubt. They approved, it is said, no more than others, the arbitrary course of government, but were dismayed at the prospect of so hopeless a struggle, and bowed before the storm. Rightly understood, however, that they thought not so badly as their friends of this or that measure of the colonial policy is really no blot upon their escutcheon. Who takes it upon him to say, that the opinions in the one instance were not as likely to be independent and honest as in the other? for, of course, our query applies not to the office-holders, but to the gentry simply, the majority of whom were as sincerely and confidently on the same side of the question. Patriotism and loyalty are not, of necessity, at swords' points at all, however thus arrayed in common speech; and in fact, we do not doubt, that among those who to the last hour "honored the king," not only were to be found the most liberal and public-spirited of the community, (it was, perhaps, their place of right so to be), but as true friends and seekers as any of their country's good, they understood it. But the timidity of those claiming kindred with them in our day, at which we have hinted, that desires to throw a veil over this part of their history, is all a mistake; sometimes, to be sure, amusing, when it does not,

as

as now and then happens, tread on the verge of truth. The writer of a very brief sketch of Major Thomas Brattle (Mass. Hist. Coll.) wastes most of his space- very suspiciously, we think in eulogium upon him as an excellent patriot; and when we were first told, to our surprise and almost skepticism, of Curwen himself, as having been a refugee, we at once recurred (sure of having seen it) to the notice of him which followed his decease (Salem Gazette), and lo! an ostracism of ten years was not an event in the life of a quiet citizen thought worth even alluding to.

The position of Mr. Sabine has been, as he rightly conceives, very favorable to the service which he has undertaken, of ferreting out the history of a class of men over whom to such an extent obscurity has come, and as may be thought from our preceding remarks who have themselves seemed to wish to help forward that result. Among those who finished their course in the Provinces, for aught we know, the majority, he probably felt himself entirely at home. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick might be almost said to have been colonized anew with the peace of 1783; the latter, from the large accession given it by "the fifty-five grantees," of whom Abijah Willard of Lancaster was the principal, it was thought best to organize as a distinct government, and St. John's, St. Andrew's, and other places, then took a start in their growth, which might rather justify calling it the date of their origin. Whatever his Majesty lost by the unhappy Revolution, certain it is that his Majesty's Northern colonies gained immensely. It shows most strikingly the previous paucity of educated men in that region, that in 1815, when Edward Winslow the younger (of Plymouth) made by his death a breach in their number, the entire bench of New Brunswick was composed of American Loyalists, three of the four, including the chief justice, being sons of Harvard. Mr. Sabine, however, does not seem to have depended upon, or contented himself with, the vantage-ground afforded by his observatory station, but to have visited, or corresponded with, the remoter and southern portions of the Union, and to have explored con amore and with laudable diligence the Acts of the various State assemblies, and the few other sources of information that yet remain. In truth, so far as sectional and prevalent sentiment on the great question was concerned, it is idle to the last degree to dispute that the stronghold of the royal cause was in the trans-Potomac colonies; and furVOL. XLIII. -4TH S. VOL. VIII. NO. 1.

11

ther, we believe there were more Loyalists in the Middle States than in New England. No name, for example, in the latter could boast of equal potency and influence with the Delancey house of New York. The author, it is pleasant to find, is entirely of our opinion on this head, and enters upon this, as some may think, delicate subject with a becoming freedom, feeling that in a thorough survey of the public mind such a comparative view was unavoidable, and that he was fully sustained. Though the South Carolina statesmen of the present day, he observes, have urged that "her patriotic devotion" at the time of the great struggle "was inferior to none, and exceeded most of the confederated States," yet, tried by the law and the testimony, it was not "Some gallant Whigs she sent to the field, and several wise ones to the council." But as one swallow makes not summer," according to the homely saying, so the names of the elder or younger Laurens, of Middleton, and Rutledge, in debate, or of Marion, Sumpter, and Pickens in the strife, will do little "to prove that the Whig leaven was diffused through the mass of the people."

So.

Mr. Sabine's statements are not only, without doubt, well founded, but to any one aware of the very unlike character of the opposite extremes of the country they commend themselves as perfectly natural and credible. The dividing line between the grades of Southern society was more broadly defined and obvious, slavery apart, than there is any idea of among us. It is so at this day, we presume, but the remark was far more true then; the condition of things being, in all material points, analogous to that in the mother-land. The "distinction of ranks" once admitted and carried into life, and the higher gentry regarded as a virtual nobility, from that platform the upward eye will be turned with admiring envy and special reverence to the rank which is the highest of all and the fountain of all, and which is felt to be the more august from being distant and unseen. This inclination to the crown, Episcopacy which was there, to all intents, the Establishment cherishes and matures into a fixed habit of the mind.

Our author, in proof of his point, goes on to show in detail, from authentic documents, the relative proportion of troops furnished to the field by the different portions of the Confederacy, presenting Massachusetts (as every body knows already) on a proud elevation. The number contrib