Washington still speaks of sending a small party of cavalry to escort
Lafayette "safely through the Tory settlements" of New York. Virginia,
as late as the spring of 1776, was "alarmed at the idea of
independence."

Washington admitted that his countrymen--of that State--"from their form
of government, and steady attachment heretofore to royalty," would "come
reluctantly" to that idea, but trusted to "time and persecution." In
1781 the ground for transferring the seat of war to the Chesapeake was
the number of loyalists in that quarter. In the Southern States the
division of feeling was still greater. In the Carolinas, a Loyalist
regiment was raised in a few days in 1776, and again in 1779. In
Georgia, in South Carolina, the bitterest partisan warfare was carried
on between the Whig and Tory bands; and a body of New York Tories
contributed powerfully to the fall of Savannah in 1778 by taking the
American forces in the rear.

On the other hand it is unquestionable that in the extent and quality of
the support which they met with, the British generals were cruelly
disappointed. Up to May, 1778, General Howe had declared that in
thirteen corps raised, with a nominal strength of six thousand five
hundred men, the whole number amounted only to three thousand six
hundred nine, of whom only a small proportion were Americans, and that
"all the force that could be collected in Pennsylvania, after the most
indefatigable exertions during eight months," was only nine hundred
seventy-four men. Of the far more numerous loyalist levies in the South,
Lord Cornwallis speaks in the most disparaging terms. A whole regiment
in South Carolina marched off on one occasion in a body. Speaking of the
friends to the British cause in North Carolina he wrote, "If they are as
dastardly and pusillanimous as our friends to the southward, we must
leave them to their fate." At the time of the battle of Guilford Court
House (1781) the idea of such friends "rising in any number and to any
purpose had totally failed." No "provincial" general ever rose to
eminence on the British side, although more than one was appointed, and
it is clear that if the struggle was so long protracted it was not
through the valor or constancy of the loyalists.

The real causes of its protraction--though it may be hard to an American
to admit the fact--lay in the incapacity of American politicians, and,
it must be added, in the supineness and want of patriotism of the
Americ