mmissioners
to carry out the terms of three statutes which were passed to effect
these purposes.

"In _North Carolina_, the Confiscation Act embraced sixty-five specified
individuals, and four mercantile firms, and by its terms not only
included the 'lands' of these persons and commercial houses, but their
'negroes and other personal property.'

"The law of _Georgia_, which was enacted very near the close of the
struggle, declared certain persons to have been guilty of treason
against that State, and their estates to be forfeited for their
offences."[112]

"_South Carolina_ surpassed all the other members of the confederacy,
Massachusetts excepted. The Loyalists of the State, whose rights,
persons, and property were affected by legislation, were divided into
four classes. The persons who had offended the least, who were
forty-five in number, were allowed to retain their estates, but were
amerced twelve per cent. of their value. Soon after the fall of
Charleston, and when disaffection to the Whig cause was so general, 210
persons, who styled themselves to be 'principal inhabitants' of the
city, signed an address to Sir Henry Clinton, in which they state that
they have every inducement to return to their allegiance, and ardently
hope to be re-admitted to the character and condition of British
subjects. These 'addressers' formed another class. Of these 210,
sixty-three were banished and lost their property by forfeiture, either
for this offence or the graver one of affixing their names to a petition
to the royal general, to be armed on the royal side. Another class,
composed of the still larger number of eighty persons, were _also
banished and divested of their estates_, for the crime of holding civil
or military commissions under the Crown, after the conquest of South
Carolina. And the same penalties were inflicted upon thirteen others,
who, on the success of Lord Cornwallis at Camden, presented his lordship
with congratulations. Still fourteen others were _banished and deprived
of their estates_ because they were _obnoxious_. Thus, then, the
'addressers,' 'petitioners,' 'congratulators,' and 'obnoxious
Loyalists,' who were proscribed, and who suffered the loss of their
property (in South Carolina), were 170 in number; and if to these we add
the forty-five who were fined twelve pounds in the hundred of the value
of their estates, the aggregate will be 215.

"Much of the legislation of the several States appears to ha