Colin Woodard (24 page)

The loyalists, by contrast, lacked any sort of cultural cohesion. The vast majority arrived as part of a single massive wave as the British abandoned their stronghold of New Netherland in late 1783. At that time Greater New York City had become the final American refuge for opponents of independence, attracting families and militia units from all over the colonies. Almost 70 percent of the emigrants to New Brunswick came from New Netherland or the Midlands, an eclectic group including Philadelphia Quakers, Anglican merchants from Manhattan, farmers and tradesmen from New Jersey, and German-speaking pacifists from the Pennsylvania “Dutch” country. Seven percent were from the Chesapeake and Deep Southern lowlands, and many brought household slaves with them. Another 22 percent were New Englanders who, politics aside, had more in common with the “old settlers” than with their fellow refugees; the only cohesive loyalist settlements were those on the peninsulas and islands of Passamaquoddy Bay, settled by Yankees from Maine. The loyalist mix in Nova Scotia was similar, but with the addition of 3,000 African Americans, most of them slaves who'd responded to the British offer to fight for the king in return for their freedom. Bereft of leadership and lacking natural cohesion, the loyalists splintered into rival religious, professional, class, and ethnic factions. Far from absorbing the Yankees in their midst, they were themselves largely assimilated into an expansive Yankee culture, their trade and cultural life oriented more toward nearby Boston than faraway London. Indeed, when Britain and the young United States clashed in the War of 1812, the people of southwestern New Brunswick not only refused to fight their neighbors, cousins, and friends in eastern Maine, they loaned them gunpowder to ensure the popular July 4th fireworks display wasn't canceled.
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The loyalist project had better initial prospects in the Great Lakes region, where a new colony was created for their benefit. Upper Canada was hacked off from British-controlled Québec to give loyalist refugees exactly what they lacked in the Maritimes: a clean slate on which to create a new society, free from Euro-American competitors. The colony would later be known by a different name, Ontario, and host the seat of the government of the Canadian federation, with its Westminster-style Parliament and the British crown emblazoned on its automobile license plates. Its landscape would become dotted with place-names worthy of the British Empire: Kingston, London, Windsor, and York. But loyalist it was not. For despite getting there ahead of their North American rivals, these “loyalists” also discovered they had little in common, not even politics.

Ontario's initial wave of “true” loyalists in 1783–1784 was small: about 6,000 Yankee farmers from upstate New York, along with British and Hessian soldiers whose units had been disbanded. But they were soon joined by 10,000 “late loyalists” who arrived in a steady stream between 1792 and 1812. British authorities and latter-day mythmakers liked to imagine that these latecomers were also good, monarchy-loving British subjects who'd happened to take an extra decade or two to flee the abhorrent American republic. In reality they were poor, opportunity-seeking immigrants attracted by British offers of dirt-cheap land and extremely low taxes. Traveling overland from their old homes in the middle states, three-quarters of the “late loyalists” were farmers, less than a fifth were craftsmen, and almost all the rest were impoverished laborers or sailors; only 1 in 250 was a gentleman. “In Canada, the settlers are more humble in their views,” a visitor to upstate New York and Ontario reported in 1798. “They are mostly poor people, who are chiefly concerned to manage, in the best manner, the farms which have been given them by the government.” But unlike the real loyalists, these settlers actually did have a shared culture. They were Midlanders, and their tolerant, pluralistic cultural heritage would take hold on the northern shores of the Great Lakes.
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British records from the period indicate that nearly 90 percent of these immigrants came from the “middle states” of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and contemporary accounts indicate that vast numbers were from the pacifist sects of the Delaware Valley. Persecuted for their refusal to choose sides or take up arms in the wars of liberation, thousands of English-speaking Quakers and German-speaking Mennonites and Dunkers (Church of the Brethren) decided to find a place where they would be left alone and in peace. Many of their countrymen would later move westward into the Ohio Valley, exporting Midlands society across the American Heartland. But in the 1790s, the Indians of the Iroquois Confederacy were violently resisting incursions onto their land. Ontario, by contrast, was peaceful because the British had learned a diplomatic lesson in the thirty years they'd occupied New France, and had come to treat the Indians as valued strategic partners. Imperial officials also offered to grant the Midlanders entire townships and a promise not to interfere in their day-to-day affairs. Thousands relocated before the War of 1812 interrupted immigration, settling in ethnically distinct towns alongside smaller numbers of New Netherland Dutch, New England Yankees, and Scots highlanders. Early Midland emigrants wrote their friends at home that in Ontario “they will find a second edition of Pennsylvania, as it was before the American War.” Tolerant, diverse, and apathetic about the wider world, Ontario's founding settlers were happy to let imperial officials bother with the politics and messy affairs of state. By the 1820s, when large numbers of Irish, English, and Ulster Scots began moving to the province from the British Isles, Ontario's cultural norms were already in place. The densely populated southern tier of this vast province remains essentially Midlander to this day.
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One caveat in this account: unlike their American countrymen, neither the Yankee sections of the Maritimes nor the Midlander swaths of Ontario had much say in the development of their political institutions. In the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, officials in London dictated how and by whom the king's provinces would be governed. Stung by the American revolt, British officials took measures to ensure that these colonies would not develop distinctive political institutions, values, and practices. Government followed the Tidewater model, only with imperial appointees standing in for the local gentry. Voting rights were extremely limited, and the press was tightly controlled. The actions of the elected legislative assemblies had to be approved by councils of crown-appointed grandees who served for life as well as by the crown-appointed governor and the imperial administration in London. The governor—always a Briton, never a colonial subject—could dissolve the local legislatures at any time, and his budget was not subject to their review. It was a system that, in the words of Ontario's first governor, aimed “ultimately to destroy or to disarm the spirit of democratic subversion.”
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Ontario, Québec, and the Maritimes were culturally distinct from one another, but they shared the experience of being controlled by a distant power. Another century would pass before any of them would reclaim control of their destiny.

CHAPTER 14

W
e've been taught to think of the ratification of the 1789 Constitu tion as the crowning achievement of the American Revolution. Most people living in the United States at the time, however, didn't see it in quite those terms.

Outside Tidewater and the Deep South, many were alarmed by a document they regarded as counterrevolutionary, intentionally designed to suppress democracy and to keep power in the hands of regional elites and an emerging class of bankers, financial speculators, and land barons who had little or no allegiance to the continent's ethnocultural nations. Indeed, the much-celebrated Founding Fathers had made no secret of this having been one of their goals. They praised the unelected Senate because it would “check the impudence of democracy” (Alexander Hamilton), and stop the “turbulence and follies of democracy” (Edmund Randolph), and applauded the enormous federal electoral districts because they would “divide the community,” providing “defense against the inconveniences of democracy” (James Madison).
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Many in Yankeedom were not enthusiasts of the new United States. During the war the Yankee settlers of northeastern New York had seceded to form an independent republic called Vermont, governed by a constitution that banned slavery and property requirements for voting. Disgusted by the machinations of New York land speculators and new confederal policies that taxed poor people to bail out already wealthy war bond speculators, Vermont's leaders had refused to join the confederation. After the war they even tried to negotiate an alliance with Great Britain to safeguard their residents from the federal elite. Farmers in western Massachusetts and northwestern Connecticut, in turn, lobbied to have their territories annexed by the little mountain republic. Only after Alexander Hamilton pressured the New York land barons to settle their claims judiciously did Vermonters reluctantly agree to join the United States.

It was in Greater Appalachia that resistance to the constitutional changes was most intense. The new constitution trespassed on the Borderlanders' belief in natural liberty and overturned the radical 1776 constitution they'd forced on Pennsylvania. Effectively unrepresented at either the Continental Congress or the Constitutional Convention, Appalachian people regarded both bodies with considerable suspicion. Their representatives in Pennsylvania—the only state where Borderlanders had any real political power at the time—opposed ratification, and stormed out of the assembly when they learned Midlanders intended to force a statewide vote on the measure before copies of the proposed constitution had even reached the western counties. These delegates were later dragged out of their beds by a posse of “volunteer gentlemen,” taken to the assembly hall, and literally dumped into their seats to create the necessary quorum. Ratification passed in Pennsylvania only after Midlander postal authorities destroyed all anti-Constitutional newspapers, pamphlets, and letters they found in the mails; in the end, only 18 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, most of them in the Midlands. In other states, Appalachian sections had few polling places, ensuring the turnout would be lower than in the elite-controlled Tidewater or Deep Southern sections. In 1789 Appalachian people were dead set against the creation of a strong, elite-controlled federal government. Many of them feel the same way today.
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The Borderlanders' uprisings were long dismissed as the thuggish behavior of backcountry louts too ignorant to understand the merits of taxation or the need to settle their debts. In reality, the Borderlanders weren't against taxation or creditworthy behavior but were resisting a scheme so corrupt, avaricious, and shameless it ranks with those of Wall Street in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In the dark hours of the wars of liberation, the Continental Congress had no money to pay salaries to their soldiers or to compensate farmers for requisitioned food and livestock. Instead Congress gave all these people government IOUs. This practice continued for years until, under the financial administration of the notoriously unethical banker Robert Morris, the state of Pennsylvania announced it would no longer accept the congressional IOUs as payment for taxes. With no other form of money in circulation in much of the countryside, many poor families had no choice but to sell the notes for whatever they could get, and wealthy speculators purchased them for one-sixth to one-fortieth of their face value. Soon just over 400 individuals held over 96 percent of Pennsylvania's war debt, and nearly half was controlled by just twenty-eight men, most of whom were Robert Morris's friends and business partners. Shortly thereafter, Morris and his protégé Alexander Hamilton took control of federal financial policy, rigging it so as to literally turn their friends' worthless paper into silver and gold. Under Morris and Hamilton, the federal government would buy back the bonds for face value, plus 6 percent interest, paid in precious metals raised by assessing new federal excise taxes designed to fall most heavily on the poor people who'd been forced to take the worthless congressional scrip in the first place.

But, wait—there's more. Most people in Appalachia hadn't seen hard cash in years. The closest thing to cash that Borderlander farmers could create was whiskey, which was nonperishable, marketable, and easy to transport. Knowing this, Morris and Hamilton cynically imposed a sharp tax on this all-important Appalachian product, even as they discouraged their underlings from collecting taxes owed by merchants on the coast. Meanwhile, they used their influence to give themselves and their private banker friends effective control over the new nation's currency supply—much of it printed by Morris's private Bank of North America—but with federal taxpayers on the hook to clean up their mess if things went wrong. It's also worth noting that Morris and Hamilton were both immigrants without ethnoregional allegiances; English-born Morris and Barbadosborn Hamilton both saw North America as the British had: as a cow to be milked for all it was worth.
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But unlike in 1929 or 2008, the victims of this scheme were well aware of what was going on, and it was the people of Appalachia who resisted the federal elite's machinations most strongly. The greatest uprising that followed would come to be known, derisively, as the Whiskey Rebellion. But what it was really about was the fact that enlisted war veterans had gone unpaid and had been forced to sell the government's IOUs to pay government taxes, only to then be taxed again to allow vultures to make a 5,000 percent profit on their misery. Those taxes had to be paid in gold and silver, which nobody in the countryside had seen in years. When they couldn't pay, their farms and possessions would be seized and liquidated to further enrich Morris, Hamilton, and their speculator friends from the coastal nations.
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