It was also solemnly agreed by the sixth article of the treaty that there should be no future confiscations or prosecutions, and that no person should “suffer any future loss or damage, either in his person, liberty or property,” for the part he might have taken in the war.  Now was the time for generous terms, such terms as were even shown by the triumphant North to the rebellious South at the close of the war of secession.  The recommendations of congress were treated with contempt by the legislatures in all the states except in South Carolina, and even there the popular feeling was entirely opposed to any favour or justice being shown to the beaten party.  The sixth article of the treaty, a solemn obligation, was violated with malice and premeditation.  The Loyalists, many of whom had returned from Great Britain with the hope of receiving back their estates, or of being allowed to remain in the country, soon found they could expect no generous treatment from the successful republicans.  The favourite Whig occupation of tarring and feathering was renewed.  Loyalists were warned to leave the country as soon as possible, and in the south some were shot and hanged because they did not obey the warning.  The Loyalists, for the most part, had no other course open to them than to leave the country they still loved and where they had hoped to die.

The British government endeavoured, so far as it was in its power, to compensate the Loyalists for the loss of their property by liberal grants of money and land, but despite all that was done for them the majority felt a deep bitterness in their hearts as they landed on new shores of which they had heard most depressing accounts.  More than thirty-five thousand men, women and children, made their homes within the limits of the present Dominion.  In addition to these actual American Loyalists, there were several thousands of negroes, fugitives from their owners, or servants of the exiles, who have been generally counted in the loose estimates made of the migration of 1783, and the greater number of whom were at a later time deported from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone.  Of the exiles at least twenty-five thousand went to the maritime colonies, and built up the province of New Brunswick, where representative institutions were established in 1784.  Of the ten thousand people who sought the valley of the St Lawrence, some settled in Montreal, at Chambly, and in parts of the present Eastern Townships, but the great majority accepted grants of land on the banks of the St. Lawrence—­from River Beaudette, on Lake St. Francis, as far as the beautiful Bay of Quinte—­in the Niagara District, and on the shores of Lake Erie.  The coming of these people, subsequently known by the name of “U.E.  Loyalists”—­a name appropriately given to them in recognition of their fidelity to a United Empire—­was a most auspicious event for the British-American provinces, the greater part of which was still a wilderness.  As we have seen in the