OK, cain't help myself, here just one.
Janet Schaw described the method of coercion in North Carolina (although she
writes about the coastal area, her observations were generally perceptive), as the officer
of member of the Committee of Safety visited the plantation and proposed two
alternatives: join us and you and your property will be safe, refuse and “we are directly to cut up your corn, shoot your pigs, burn your houses, seize your Negroes.”
8
Loyalists were afforded little protection when the local governments made the threats.
Increased regulation disenfranchised and penalized the loyalists, however the first
blood shed by the British heightened the need to completely subdue dissenting segments
of the population. The military action defined an enemy for specific action to be taken
against. In his study of propaganda of the period, Davidson asserts that hate is the most
important factor in war psychosis, “An unreasoning hatred, a blind disgust, is aroused not against policies, but people.”
9
Alexander Chesney and Tarleton Brown, loyalist and patriot respectively, each wrote about his experience in the American Revolution and justified his actions in the civil war.
Chesney provides some insight into the life of a loyalist in 1775. He fit the pattern
of new immigrants tending be loyalists, having arrived from Ireland in October of 1772.
From 1773 to 1775 his family increased in prosperity on their tract of land on the upper
reaches of the Pacolet River, “without any particular occurrence . . . until 1775 that
resolution were [sic] passed for signatures at the meeting House by the Congress Party,
and I opposed them.” He discussed the Treaty of Ninety-Six, followed by the
imprisonment of Fletchall and Mayfield--although under the protection of a truce. He
tells of Richardson’s expedition to Ninety-Six, imprisoning some of the loyalist leaders
and disarming the remainder under similar circumstances.10