If the loyalists were really a majority, as they professed to be, the rebels were determined to break them up. Loyalists were ridden and tossed on fence rails, gagged and bound for days at a time, stoned, fastened in rooms with a fire and the chimney stopped on top, advertised as public enemies so that they would be cut off from all dealings with their neighbors; they had bullets shot into their bedrooms, their horses poisoned or mutilated; money or valuable plate extorted from them to save them from violence and on pretence of taking security for their good behavior; their houses and ships were burnt; they were compelled to pay the guards who watched them in their houses; and when carted about for the mob to stare at and abuse they were compelled to pay something at every town. For the three months of July, August and September of the year 1774, one can find in the American Archives alone, over thirty descriptions of outrages of this kind.
In short, lynch law prevailed for many years during the revolution, and the habit became so fixed that we have never given it up. As has been recently shown the term lynch law originated during the revolution and was taken from the name of the brother of the man who founded Lynchburgh in Virginia.
The revolution was not by any means the pretty social event that the ladies of the so-called patriotic societies suppose it to have been. It was on the contrary a rank and riotous rebellion against the long established authority of a nation which had saved us from France, built us up into prosperity and if she were ruling us to-day would, I am entirely willing to admit, abolish lynch law, negro burning, municipal and state legislative corruption and all the other evils about which reformers fret.
But feeling that we were a naturally separated people, the rebel party among us insisted that we had the inalienable right to rule ourselves. We were seized with the spirit of independence, or as the people of your way of thinking at that time called it "a chimera of patriotism." Against this natural and inalienable right no authority, we declared, no matter how meritorious and venerable need be respected.
The Boers, though receiving far greater provocation than we received, have behaved much better. They have not tarred and feathered Englishmen as we did or ridden them on rails, or suffocated them with smoke, or burnt their houses or hazed or tortured them in any way. Their conduct in the whole war has been most fair, honorable and meritorious, showing the high character of their intelligence and morals and their superiority to the British.