incident to the prevailing lack of geographical knowledge of the vast
continent, held further seeds of trouble. These contentions, however,
were far in the future. At the moment another defect of the treaty
proved to be Canada's gain. The failure of Lord Shelburne's Ministry to
insist upon effective safeguards for the fair treatment of those who had
taken the King's side in the old colonies, condemned as it was not only
by North and the Tories but by Fox and Sheridan and Burke, led to that
Loyalist migration which changed the racial complexion of Canada.

The Treaty of 1783 provided that Congress would "earnestly recommend"
to the various States that the Loyalists be granted amnesty and
restitution. This pious resolution proved not worth the paper on which
it was written. In State after State the property of the Loyalists
was withheld or confiscated anew. Yet this ungenerous treatment of the
defeated by the victors is not hard to understand. The struggle had been
waged with all the bitterness of civil war. The smallness of the field
of combat had intensified personal ill-will. Both sides had practiced
cruelties in guerrilla warfare; but the Patriots forgot Marion's raids,
Simsbury mines, and the drumhead hangings, and remembered only Hessian
brutalities, Indian scalpings, Tarleton's harryings, and the infamous
prison ships of New York. The war had been a long one. The tide of
battle had ebbed and flowed. A district that was Patriot one year was
frequently Loyalist the next. These circumstances engendered fear and
suspicion and led to nervous reprisals.

At least a third, if not a half, of the people of the old colonies
had been opposed to revolution. New York was strongly Loyalist, with
Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the Carolinas closely following. In the end
some fifty or sixty thousand Loyalists abandoned their homes or suffered
expulsion rather than submit to the new order. They counted in their
ranks many of the men who had held first place in their old communities,
men of wealth, of education, and of standing, as well as thousands
who had nothing to give but their fidelity to the old order. Many,
especially of the well-to-do, went to England; a few found refuge in the
West Indies; but the great majority, over fifty thousand in all, sought
new homes in the northern wilderness. Over thirty thousand, including
many of the most influential of the whole number (with about three
thousand negro slaves, afterwards freed and d