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LOYALIST STUDIES IN THE MARITIMES: PAST AND FUTURE
DIRECTIONS
William Godfrey, History Department,
Mount Allison University, NS, Canada
During and immediately after the American Revolution, some
17,000 to 20,000 loyalist Americans fled to Nova Scotia, another
approximately 15,000 to what would become the colony of New Brunswick,
roughly 7,000 to 10,000 to Canada and smaller numbers to other British
Colonies or to Great Britain itself. In Nova Scotia a pre-loyalist population of
around 20,000 already existed and in Canada the newcomers were vastly
outnumbered by the existing French-Canadian population of at least 70,000.
With a pre-loyalist population of only 3,000 or 4,000, New Brunswick became
an overwhelmingly loyalist preserve. Among the more immediate results of
this substantial migration were the creation of New Brunswick in 1784, as it
was separated from Nova Scotia, and the division of Canada into Upper and
Lower Canada in 1791. The point has been made many times, consequently,
that the American revolution created not one but two nations: the United
States and a reinvigorated British North America which would, by evolution
not revolution, gradually become the Canadian nation state.
There was a time when it could be argued that the loyalists were
somewhat neglected by historians. Over the last thirty years, however, such
has not been the case. As Americans celebrated their bicentennial and were
even willing to consider historical losers such as the loyalists, Canadians
responded with balancing studies concerning their founding fathers.1 The
result has been stimulating and rewarding but the outpouring has been so great
that perhaps loyalist studies today has reached the point where an
overemphasis on their achievements and impact is obscuring and restricting
our understanding of the early development of the colonies in which they
allegedly became the dominant force. Loyalist studies are in need of
integration within a broader historical context in order to better appreciate both
the loyalist and the non-loyalist experiences.
It is perhaps natural to react in this somewhat negative fashion
because, while the loyalists had an undoubted impact, at times the
achievements with which they are credited rather stretch the imagination. To
give only one over-simplified and exaggerated example: the loyalists are
credited with bringing British North America a profoundly important Tory
touch which would eventually result in a much broader political spectrum than
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GODFREY: LOYALIST STUDIES
that found in the United States since it would be influential in provoking a left
wing socialist presence.2 As a resident of loyalist New Brunswick, it is
difficult to discover this vibrant socialist tradition although within the last
decade, admittedly, there have been at least two occasions when an aroused
left wing electorate did actually vote into the provincial legislature a solitary
representative of the New Democratic Party, Canada's version of democratic
socialism. After 200 years, the creation of the New Jerusalem in Fredericton
remains somewhat distant.
Turning from my own obscurity and restricted appreciation of
loyalism, based largely on studies of the first governor of New Brunswick,
Thomas Carleton, an Anglo-Irish non-loyalist, and New Brunswick's first
tribune of the people, James Glenie, a Scot non-loyalist,3 it must be
acknowledged that the take-a-loyalist-to- lunch phenomenon of recent years
has produced major revisions of our historical understanding. As one
commentator observed: the "state of Loyalist historiography has never been
better. Important questions are being asked and resolved....There is no need to
propose an agenda for future Loyalist studies when historians are working so
well." 4 Among the major questions tackled have been the simple ones of who
the loyalists were and where they came from. An image of loyalists as white,
Anglican Americans has been softened as an Indian and black presence
is acknowledged along with the discovery of loyalist ranks including
demobilized soldiers recruited in Great Britain or in colonies that remained
loyal, thus not really "American" at all. Also discovered are individuals who
had only recently arrived in the revolting American colonies from Great
Britain or continental Europe, equally questionable American loyalists. In
terms of religion, Protestant dissenters and Catholics were present. While
there is no doubt that some members of the provincial loyalist elites were
drawn from the upper levels of society, the rank-and-file, the overwhelming
majority, were the middling and lower sort. Harvard and Yale graduates were
present but far more numerous were the illiterate and those with a very limited
education at best. At one point New England was assumed to be the home of
substantial numbers of loyalists, with Massachusetts in particular a primary
source. Now it is clear that New York was the most substantial contributor
to loyalist ranks while the other middle colonies and the south were also well
represented. Given the geographic patterns of loyalism, theories have been
advanced about the British military presence in certain areas resulting in the
resident's loyalist leanings, New York for example. Supplying or in any way
dealing with the British army, rather than any fervent loyalism, emerges as the
sin committed by some which led their neighbours to shun and persecute them
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as loyalists. As one study of loyalism in Virginia put it: "Non-ideological
local dynamics affecting the loyalism may include a mixture of emotional
responses, interpersonal relationships, and beliefs endangered by warfare: fear
of British force in the area, self-serving expediency, kinship and socialites ,
and confidence in British victory." 5 Given as well the ethnic, religious and
social mix, loyalists totally committed to a well-ordered, deferential,
hierarchical society might have been more than balanced by those willing to
question such assumptions. In summary, the loyalists emerge as far more
complex and diverse in their makeup and beliefs, while the picture of an heroic
commitment to King and country by self-sacrificing individuals has been
tarnished. 6
An obvious problem in any discussion of loyalism in the American
colonies and in its Canadian setting is that we are sometimes dealing with quite
different individuals in different settings and different time frames.
Articulate spokesmen for the American loyalist case s made peace with their
patriot neighbours and remained in the new United States. Others retreated
to an England they thought they knew but found themselves uneasy aliens,
without influence or impact. Consequently the loyalist ideology they
espoused was never carried by them into North American asylums to be
actually practised. Other loyalists who did emerge as leading figures in New
Brunswick and Nova Scotia over time felt the need to adjust their beliefs
once exposed to opposition criticisms, changes in British policy, and the
new governmental structures and societies with which they had now to cope.
If one substitutes the word loyalist for revolutionary, we might heed Daniel
Rogers' warning that it is not "as if the revolutionary [i.e.loyalist] mind had
come across the Atlantic in one or another eighteenth-century sailing vessel,
packed as tract and pamphlet, to be grafted onto a headless social body." 7
Once in exile a well-defined loyalist ideology was not necessarily
transferred and applied intact no did it necessarily remain unchanged and rule
supreme.
Janice Potter has argued that "there was an ideology common to
Loyalist from different backgrounds and regions" and, although her study is
based only on loyalist writings in New York and Massachusetts, it presents an
elegant examination of the loyalist alternative. Among her spokesmen, only
a few re-emerged in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia but there are sufficient
of them -Charles Inglis, Jonathan Sewall, and Jacob Bailey for example -to see
a clear and strong linkage and continuity between revolutionary and exiled
post-revolutionary loyalism. Her writers, while willing to be critical of some
aspects of the imperial system, cried out for the restoration of order in colonial
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society and proposed reforms in both the structure of the empire and
colonial institutions. Drawing on Locke, Bolingbroke, Trenchard and Gordon,
Montesquieu and Burke, it was William Blackstone who was their
"ideological kindred spirit. His antipathy to anarchy, his belief in the innate
sociability of man, and his positive view of the state were all embraced
enthusiastically..." The balanced constitution -King, House of Lords, and
House of Commons, at once independent and interdependent - required that
the three branches worked together harmoniously. But the American
problems revealed that although "American institutions were modelled on
those of the mother country, the nonelected branches [governors and
councillors] were much weaker than their British counterparts." The
necessary reform must be a strengthening of the nonelected institutions.
Interspersed with these thoughts were calls for deference to a "natural
aristocracy of men of superior merit" as community leaders, rejection of
popular sovereignty, the omnipotence of Parliament and indivisibility of
sovereignty, as wells no right of resistance but "the right to petition King or
Parliament for redress " of grievances.8
How well did these ideas travel up the Atlantic seaboard? If Neil
MacKinnon's study of both the elite and the rank-and-file of Nova Scotian
loyalists if correct, they travelled northward but with many other ideas and
feelings. A bitterness, sense of betrayal and loss of faith made the journey as
well. "these were brave epithets cast over heir shoulders, about quitting 'this
damned country with pleasure,' but they had left not because of an abhorrence
for republican principles," according to MacKinnon, "They left because they
could not stay. They were 'wretched outcasts of America and Britain'." The
early optimism that "We shall be with you - everybody, all the world moves
on to Nova Scotia" would soon be overcome by a bleaker perception of their
new home in "Nova Scarcity". As one loyalist commented: "It is the most
inhospitable climate that ever mortal set foot on. The winter of insupportable
length and coldness, only a few spots fit to cultivate, and the land is covered
with a cold spongy moss instead of grass, and the entire county is wrapt in the
gloom of perpetual fog." Arriving in the colony with a substantial pre-loyalist
population occupying much of the best land, and faced by constant delays and
setbacks, whether in provisioning or in surveying and settling the land, the
loyalist experience was far from easy and frequently harsh. Most survived,
some prospered, many who stayed gradually adjusted to the new realities; but
some behaved like pioneers and refugees at other times in other places in
quickly moving on to new homes in other British North American colonies or,
horror of horrors, back to their American homes!
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Included among the refugees were some who simply anticipated
better opportunities and moved primarily for the free provisions and land.
Some of the newcomers were not American loyalists at all. By MacKinnon's
reckoning, 20 per cent were disbanded British regulars and their dependants
rather than American loyalists. Of the legitimately American, 40 per cent
came from New York, 15 percent from other middle colonies, 20 per cent from
New England, and 25 per cent, black and white, from the southern colonies.
Not surprisingly, since they were drawn from different colonies, different
religions and different levels of society, fragmentation quickly set in and the
impossibility of any monolithic loyalist mentality soon became apparent.
A few of the more prominent loyalists chose to question the loyalty of
their pre-loyalist bluenose neighbours which i turn sparked some very harsh
judgements concerning the loyalists themselves. Mather Byles III described
preloyalist residents as "King Killers" who had lived with "loyalty on the tip of
their tongues and rebellion on their hearts." But those who were attacked
were quick to respond that while they resected the "true loyalist", what all too
often surfaced in Nova Scotia were the "dregs of America", quarrelsome, lazy,
dishonest, fractious, endlessly demanding and perpetually "ungrateful". The
governor, John Parr, joined at time in this denunciation, at one point blaming
his problems with the assembly on "a cursed factious party spirit, which was
never known here before the Emigration of the Loyalist, who brought with
them, those levelling republican Principles". Loyalists who supported
assembly rights and privileges, however, and certainly not all loyalists took
that tack, were a part of a coalition which transcended loyalist/pre-loyalist
divisions. It was a contest between the hinterland residents and the entrenched
Halifax establishment,capital dominance versus outport neglect, which was
really at issue. In this struggle, while the mor select loyalists "were usurping
the loyalist image and shaping it to their own ends, the great majority were
placing increased emphasis upon their democratic principles and instincts..."
Adjustments were made and the attitudes did change but there were
some among the newcomers who eventually gave up on their new homeland
ever becoming the envy of the new nation to the south. In substantial
numbers they joined in a "re-exodus," this time from Nova Scotia, probably in
many cases back to the United States. Crop failures and short-comings as
farmers or fishermen contributed but by 1788, once the King's provisions were
no longer available and the King's bounty remained accessible, in the form of
"portable pensions" which could be collected outside of the British empire, a
good number departed. Loyalist communities throughout Nova Scotia felt
this loss but it was Shelbourne,once larger than Halifax but soon to shrink to
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GODFREY: LOYALIST STUDIES
village-size, which best revealed this decline. In 1786 and 1787, a list of the
Shelbourne residents planning to depart had 74 per cent of them heading back
to the United States.
Within loyalist ranks were "the rich and poor, the learned and
illiterate, the powerful and the weak, the flexible opportunist and the supporter
who would remain loyal no matter the cost". Some turned their backs on Nova
Scotia, Mac Kinnon asserts, but those who stayed were a "potent factor" in the
colony's development and, in areas such as the political arena, had an impact
substantially greater than their limited numbers warranted. However at least
initially, it was not strengthening of governor and council they aimed at. It was
the enhancement of assembly authority as representative of the people with
"the right to study and question not only the Council's but also the Governor's
actions." 9
At first glance Potter's loyalist ideology had an equally rough passage
to New Brunswick. David Bell's book on loyalist Saint John from 1783 to
1786 confirms many of MacKinnon's observations. From the outset, "Far
from being united by common 'Loyalist' beliefs and shared experience the
exiled community was deeply and bitterly divided". While many of their
complaints concerned inadequate provisioning and delays in surveying and
settling them on their promised land, some newcomers also questioned the
assumed authority of their betters in society, called for religious privileges for
the Church of Scotland to match those of the Church of England, and above all
express their outrage that the privileged among them would dare to seek more
substantial land allotments, even extensive estates. In the first election held in
New Brunswick in 1785 Saint John's six seats in the legislature were hotly
contested as the community divided into the lower covers, the plebians, against
the upper covers, the patricians. Rioting led to military intervention and a
re-count of votes disallowed sufficient lower cover votes to turn the results
around and place all six seats in the hands of the upper covers, now identified
as the governor's party. Dissillusionment eventually caused an exodus similar
to that from Nova Scotia but not on the same large scale, although a number of
the more prominent dissenters were soon gone. Nonetheless, issues such as
taxation without representation, the use of military for civil purposes, and the
propriety of government officers, placemen, seeking seats in the assembly10
had been raised and revealed serious disagreement with the triumphant ruling
loyalist elite.
Ann Gorman Condon has provided a thorough examination of that elite
which, with the help of New Brunswick's governor, Thomas Carleton,
proposed to impose upon the new colony a blueprint demonstrating the
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apparent continued vitality of certain features of Potter's loyalist ideology.11
Monarchical and aristocratic elements were strengthened by placing more
power in the hands of the appointed governor and council. Offices in the new
colonial bureaucracy were to be awarded, as Carleton phrased it, to the "ablest
and best men in Each district...Gentlemen not only of real merit, but also
distinguished by services and sufferings during the late Rebellion..." 12 [i.e.
loyalist leaders]. With the propertied class in political control this
government of gentlemen would see to it that support was provided for
institutions, such as the Anglican church, "to inculcate loyalty and respect for
the established order..." Despite an initial electoral triumph, which placed the
governor's party in total control at all levels of government, as Condon notes
throughout her study, opposition and dissent refused to disappear. The
"ingrained democratic habits" in her words, produced in the 1790s an
assembly which challenged governor and council on so many issues that
government totally broke down from 1795 to 1799 with no legislation being
passed. The assembly consistently rejected executive measures while the
council and governor vetoed assembly proposals. In Condon's judgement, the
loyalist leaders' "attempt to establish a political oligarchy in New Brunswick"
had "failed" when constantly confronted by members of the loyalist
rank-and-file "determined to preserve the traditions of self-government and
egalitarianism they had grown up with in the American colonies".13
Thomas Carleton had come to a similar conclusion that within
loyalist ranks was a democratic impulse which must be countered and
controlled at all times. Shortly after his arrival in the colony he explained: "it
will be best that the American Spirit of innovation should not be nursed
among Loyal Refugees by the introduction of Acts of Legislature, for purposes
to which by Common Law and practice of the best regulated Colonies, the
Crown alone is acknowledged to be competent".14 In the mid-1790s, when
the legislative impasse occurred, he blamed it on "a few Members who
evidently have a predilection for the Republican Systems formerly prevalent in
the chartered Colonies of New England".15 In 1802 when assembly asserted
its right to appoint its own clerk, rather than governor and council controlling
that position, Carleton again believed he was confronted by "one of those
usages of the late New England Provinces, of which, from the first execution
of New Brunswick, it was thought, by the Assembly as well as the council, of
importance to avoid the imitation".16 But was the enemy only this vaguely
defined American/ republican/ democratic tendency?
To understand loyalist thinking and adjustment as well as other
currents of thought at work both within and beyond their new colonial
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GODFREY: LOYALIST STUDIES
homes,to again borrow from American historiography dealing with this
period, "we need to know what historical actors were talking about. - how
they defined their situation and what they hoped to accomplish - as well as
what they 'mean' as speakers of particular languages".17 In Nova Scotia and
New Brunswick all loyalists did not share the ideology of the elite and the
persistence as well as the content of dissenting loyalist political views deserve
further discussion. Indeed, the possible contribution of the pre-loyalists to
this discourse as well as that of the non-loyalist newcomers badly need
development and consideration. Some of the most prominent spokesmen for
New Brunswick's opposition faction fall into this category. At the peak of the
assembly battle with Carleton and his council, Daniel Lynman analyzed the
assembly members daring to challenge carleton. The leading figure was a
Scotland former military officer, James Glenie, who "is know to be in
correspondence with some of the most violent members of the opposition in
the British Parliament - at least, he avows himself so- and his sentiments or
declarations are such as tend to the subversion of all government of church and
State." 18 At times, particularly in writing for a British home audience, Glenie
took softer Portland Whig approach. In 1794 while critical of the lack of
careful parliamentary scrutiny of defence expenditures, he explained why at
this time it was so necessary:
Such instances of inattention in the representative body of the people to things of so
much national importance and expenditure, are always much to be lamented,
particularly in times like the present, as the violent advocates for parliamentary reform
may artfully bring them forward, and invidiously urge them as the strongest arguments
for its necessity that can possibly be adduced.19
Speaking to his New Brunswick audience, however, the same Glenie was very
much a Foxite Whig, vigilant and aggressive on parliamentary [i.e.assembly]
rights. To a council suggestion that the assembly had no right to question
expenditures recommended by the executive, Glenie responded that this was
"tantamount to an absolute surrender of your purses, property, rights and
liberties, into the hands of the council...It is a proposition, to which I hope in
God no House of Assembly will ever give its assent. For it is a parliamentary
maxim as old as parliament itself, that those who have the sole right of
granting have an unquestionable right to dispose of what they grant". The
institutional structure in the colony, he continued, was "widely different" from
that of the mother country in that the provincial appointed council certainly
was not the equal of the "dignified, opulent and independent" House of Lords.
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If therefore and attentive, watchful and vigilant opposition has ever been found
necessary in the House of Commons to preserve the rights and liberties of the
people in Great Britain, it must certainly be doubly requisite here, where tow
Branches of the Legislature are in great measure thrown into one scale,"20.
If one relied heavily on James Glenie's writings and the political
battle he fought, his crusade becomes a Foxite Whig opposition struggle
against what J.C.D. Clarke describes as a "conservative Whig ideology,"
dominant in England and committed to Anglicanism, aristocracy and the
monarchy. Clarke, it should be pointed out, interprets the Canada Act of 1791
as the Pitt government's attempt to promote a landed aristocracy, an hereditary
upper house, an established Anglican church in Upper Canada and, thus, social
stability in British North America. It was "an affirmation of their
commitment to an Anglican aristocratic establishment at home, then so
powerfully challenged." 21 To the loyalist elite in New Brunswick, however,
there was little evidence the Pitt government had any commitment to helping
them in their struggle. Intensive decisions such as freezing land grants in the
colony, allowing American entry into the West Indies trade, removing regular
regiments and shifting the centre of Maritime defence to Halifax, as well as
failing to intervene properly in disputes between assembly and council,
brought economic stagnation and an erosion of the elite's confidence in the
mother country's sensitivity to New Brunswick's needs. No wonder some
looked to their former homeland, the United States and praised the
Hamiltonian Federalists for their open affirmation that government functioned
well "only if it was firmly in the hands of those with superior skills: in
education,in finance and in natural ability." 22 For J.G.A. Pocock, moreover,
the Jeffersonian critics of Hamiltonian Federalism saw a plot "to restore the
English constitution" and believed Hamilton's emphasis on "rule by a strong
executive, wielding influence and supported by a monied interest, led logically
to rule, at once corruptive and dictatorial, by a standing army." As a result we
shifted back to English political discourse and, as Pocock points out, "to a
quite startling extent a replay of the debates of Court and Country as much as a
hundred years before." 23 It is this court-country concept which Gordon
Stewart lucidly applies in analyzing the origins of Canadian politics.
Admitting that it is a somewhat anachronistic theory and defensively, but
persuasively, excluding the Maritimes from his analysis in favour of a focus on
Upper and Lower Canada, he concludes that by the 1820s the "court" had won
in Britain, the "country" had triumphed in the United States, while Canada's
"local constitution was, in fact, even more 'court' in its assumptions and
operation than that of Britain itself." 24 These conclusions could be correct
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GODFREY: LOYALIST STUDIES
and might be applicable to the Maritimes25 but we should be careful to produce
indigenous evidence in support of imported paradigms.
Peter Burroughs has rather mischievously commented that "Situated
uneasily between Britain and the United States, with a dual inheritance and
conflicting pressures, Upper Canadians gained the independence to adopt the
worst of both possible worlds."26 Both loyalists and non-loyalists in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century Maritimes were shaping by selective
borrowing an Anglo-American-Canadian political culture which requires a
careful dissection to be better understood and linked with political currents
swirling in Great Britain and the United States. To J.M. Bumsted the loyalists
did help both Anglicize and Americanize in subtle and less subtle ways the
political culture of British North America" but it was the American tendencies
which were more critical and thus they remained "His Majesty's Americans."27
But the reality was that the American loyalist presence was being rapidly
absorbed in Nova Scotia and would soon swamped in New Brunswick by
immigrants from Great Britain. Already in the 1790s, at least in New
Brunswick and particularly in the opposition rhetoric and practice but on both
sides of the political spectrum, a dominant British political orientation was at
work, not necessarily because of the arrival of an elitist loyalist ideology but
in an opposition attempt to check and reverse it. Maybe that Tory touch
approach mentioned at the outset deserves reconsideration: in the reactions
some loyalists sparked we find contributions they hardly expected to make.
Endnotes
1 J.M. Bumsted, Understanding the Loyalists (Sackville, N.B.,1986), pp. 9-10.
2 For a review of the literature on Gad Horowitz's contentions, see H.D. Forbes, "Hartz-Horowitz
at Twenty: Nationalism, Toryism and Socialism in Canada and the United States," Canadian
Journal of Political Science, XX (June,1987), pp.287-315.
3 W.G. Godfrey, "Thomas Carleton," and "James Glenie," in F.G. Halpenny (ed) Dictionary of
Canadian Biography (Toronto, 1983),Vol.V, pp. 155-163 and 347-358.
4 Elwood Jones, "the Loyalist and Canadian History," Journal of Canadian Studies, 20 (Fall,
1985), p.156.
5 Adele Hast, Loyalism in Revolutionary virginia: The Norfolk Area andthe Eastern Shore (Ann
Arbor, 1982) p.2.
6 An Excellent summary of loyalist studies is provided by Bumstead, Understanding the Loyalists.
7 Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journalof American History, 79
(June, 1992),p. 18.
8 Janice Potter, The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and
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Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.,1983).
9 Neil MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil: the Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia 1783-1791
(Kingston and Montreal,1986); Neil MacKinnon, "This Cursed Republican Spirit: The Loyalists
and Nova Scotia's Sixth Assembly," Humanities Association Review, 27 (1976), pp. 129-141.
10 D.G.Bell Early Loyalist Saint John: The Origin of New Brunswick Politics, 1783-1786
(Fredericton, 1983).
11 Ann Gorman Condon, The Envy of the American States: The Loyalist Dream for New
Brunswick (Fredericton, 1984).
12 Carleton to Sydney, 25 November 1784 and 25 June 1785, N.B. "A" Series, 1/92-93 and 2/133
Public Archives of Canada.
13 Condon, pp. x,169.
14 Carleton to Sydney, 25 June 1785, N.B. "A"Series, 2/132-137.
15 Carleton to Portland, 23 March 1796, C.O. 188, 1/58-62, Public Records Office.
16 Carleton to Hobart, 27 April 1802, N.B. "A"Series,11/133-135.
17 Peter S.Onuf, "Reflections on the Founding:Constitutional Historiography in Bicentennial
Perspective," William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XLVI (April, 1989), p. 346.
18 Daniel Lyman to John King, 15 April 1795 and Lyman's "Names of Members who voted for the
Declaratory Bill," C.O. 188, 6/138-139, 141-142.
19 James Glenie, Observations On The Duke of Richmond's Extensive Plansof Fortification And
The New Works He Has Been Carrying on Since These Were Set Aside By The House of Commons
In 1786 (London, 1794),p. v.
20 "Substance of Mr. Glenie's Address to the Freeholders of the County of Sunbury, At the
Opening of the Poll in Tuesday the 1st of September [1795] instant: Explanatory of the
Proceedings of the late House of Assembly, &c.&c., Glenie Family, Cb 1, New Brunswick
Museum.
21 J.C.D.Clarke English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, social structure and
political practice during the ancient regime (Cambridge,1985), pp. 7,200, 216.
22 George Rawlyk, "The Federalist-Loyalist Alliance in New Brunswick,
1784-1815," Humanities Association Review 27 (1976), p.147.
23 J.G.A.Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment : Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.1975), pp.528-529.
24 Gordon Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics: A Comparative Approach (Vancouver,
1986),pp.viii,20.
25 The country-court terminology has been applied briefly by Philip Buckner to Nova Scotia and
New Brunswick politics in the 1830s and 1840s, and by Brian Cuthbertson to Nova Scotia in the
1790s and 1800s. See Philip A. Buckner, The Transition to Responsible Government: British
Policy in British North America, 1815-1850 (Westport, Conn. and London, 1985), pp. 69-71; Brian
C. Cuthbertson, The Loyalist Governor: Biography of Sir John Wentworth (Halifax, 1983)
pp.112-123. In both instances it is quickly reduced to a battle between the "ins" and "outs"
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GODFREY: LOYALIST STUDIES
basically over patronage. New Brunswick political discourse in the 1784-1804 period might, with
careful investigation and reconsideration, be considerably more complex.
26 Peter Burroughs, "Loyalists and Lairds: The Politics and Society of Upper Canada
Reconsidered," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19 (January, 1991), p.82.
27 Bumsted, Understanding the Loyalists, p.35.
12