is patriot Governor, flocked to Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick like birds seeking a more congenial clime,
recalling the flight of the Huguenots after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes one hundred years earlier. It is not easy to estimate
the number who fled before this savage and violent action of the
Legislature. Sir Guy Carleton, in command at New York, fixes the
emigration at one hundred thousand souls. For many years the "Landing
of the Loyalists" was annually commemorated at St. John, and in the
cemeteries of England and Scotland are found the tombstones of these
unfortunate devotees of the mother country.

It is likely Clinton was too intolerant, but it was the intolerance
that follows revolution. Hamilton, on the other hand, became an early
advocate of amnesty and oblivion, and, although public sentiment and
the Legislature were against him, he finally succeeded in modifying
the one and changing the other. "Nothing is more common," he observed,
"than for a free people in times of heat and violence to gratify
momentary passions by letting in principles and precedents which
afterwards prove fatal to themselves. If the Legislature can
disfranchise at pleasure, it may soon confine all the votes to a small
number of partisans, and establish an aristocracy or an oligarchy; if
it may banish at discretion, without hearing or trial, no man can be
safe. The name of liberty applied to such a government would be a
mockery of common sense."[22]

[Footnote 22: _Hamilton's Works_ (Lodge), Vol. 3, p. 450.]

The differences between Congress and the Legislature respecting the
collection of duties also brought Clinton and Hamilton into conflict.
As early as 1776 Hamilton had considered the question whether Congress
ought not to collect its own taxes by its own agents,[23] and, when a
member of Congress in 1783, he urged it[24] as one of the cardinal
features of an adequate federal system. In 1787 he was a member of the
Legislature. Here he insisted upon having the federal revenue system
adopted by the State. His argument was an extended exposition of the
facts which made such action important.[25] Under the lead of Clinton,
however, New York was willing to surrender the money, but not the
power of collection to Congress.

[Footnote 23: _Republic_, Vol. 1, p. 122.]

[Footnote 24: _Madison Papers_, Vol. 1, pp. 288, 291, 380.]

[Footnote 25: _Works_, Vol. 2, p. 16.]

Meantime, the pitiable condition to which the Confederati