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 previous chapters, there was in the
Acadian provinces, afterwards divided into New Brunswick and Nova
Scotia, a British population of only some 14,000 souls, mostly confined
to the peninsula. In the valley of the St. Lawrence there was a French
population of probably 100,000 persons, dwelling chiefly on the banks of
the St. Lawrence between Que