The Forces in Conflict 153
An experience of Colonel Thomas Randolph of Virginia well illustrates the
same spread of democracy. Randolph, one of the many Virginia aristocrats who
fought for the Revolution, was entertaining a captured British officer in his home.
Three farmers came in, sat down, took off their boots, did a little spitting, and
talked business with the colonel. After they left, Randolph commented to his guest
on how “the spirit of independency was converted into equality, and everyone who
bore arms esteemed himself on a footing with his neighbor.” He added, with dis-
taste: “No doubt, each of these men conceives himself, in every respect, my equal.”^26
War, and a citizen army, had somewhat the same effects as in France after 1792.
Leaders who did not fight for equality accepted it in order to win.
On the other hand, the American loyalists, who were in any case the Ameri-
cans most inclined to favor hierarchic ideas, were made more so by the necessities
of their position. William Eddis of Maryland, as early as 1770, thought that no-
blemen and bishops should be established in America as soon as possible. The
commonest of all loyalist ideas was that the democratic branch, under the mixed
British constitution in America, had gotten out of control. Their commonest alle-
gation, during the war, was that the Revolution was the work of their social inferi-
ors—“mechanics and country clowns,” who had no right to dispute “what Kings,
Lords, and Commons had done,” as a South Carolina clergyman expressed it. He
was driven out by his congregation.^27
The loyalists fully expected the British army to put down the rebellion very
soon. They believed that the whole disturbance had been caused by a few trouble-
makers, from whom the bulk of the people in America were patiently awaiting
liberation. Hence, they had plans ready for the government of America after the
restoration of order. These plans parallelled some of the British ideas mentioned in
the last chapter. Like them, they called for the setting up in the colonies of some-
thing like a nobility. They expressed the idea that I have tried to show was so com-
mon in the eighteenth century, the idea of Blackstone and Gibbon and Montes-
quieu and the French parlements and many others, that some sort of nobility was
a prerequisite to political liberty. There must be, in this view, an intermediate order
of men having the personal right to take part in government, neither elected and
hence under the influence of constituents, nor yet too amenable to influence by a
king, so that they should be hereditary if possible, and at least hold office for life.
Loyal Americans congregated in New York, which was occupied by the British
during most of the war. Here, as they talked over the sad state of their country,
they found much on which they could agree. David Ogden of New Jersey was
typical. He had served for twenty- one years on the New Jersey governor’s council.
After he fled to New York in January 1777, the revolutionary government in New
Jersey confiscated from him twenty- three pieces of real estate, which he himself
later valued at £15,231. He was one of the more prominent of the fugitives in
New York, becoming a member of the Board of Refugees established there in
- He proposed that, after suppression of the rebellion, an American parlia-
ment be set up for all the colonies, subordinate to that of Great Britain, to consist
26 Labaree, op.cit., 117.
27 Ibid., 114, 135–36.