Loyalism

[1] American loyalists included royal officials, Anglican clergymen, wealthy merchants with ties to London, demobilised British soldiers, and recent arrivals (especially from Scotland), as well as many ordinary colonists who were conservative by nature and/or felt that the protection of Britain was needed.

[citation needed] Of the 62,000 who left by 1784, almost 50,000 sought refuge elsewhere in the British North American colonies of Quebec (partitioned into the Canadas in 1791), New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and St. John's Island;[7][note 1] whereas the remaining loyalist migrants went to Jamaica, the Bahamas and Britain, often with financial help from the Crown.

They were joined by 30,000 or more "Late Loyalists" who settled in Ontario in the early 1790s at the invitation of the British administration and given land and low taxes in exchange for swearing allegiance to the King,[8] for a total of 70,000+ new settlers.

There were in fact four waves of emigration: in the years 1774 through 1776 when for example 1300 Tories were evacuated with the British fleet that left Boston for Halifax; the large wave of 50,000 in the years 1783; some few thousands who had stayed in the new Republic but left disenchanted with the results of the revolution for Upper Canada between 1784 and 1790; and the large number 'Late Loyalists,' 30,000, who came in the early 1790s for land, many of them neutrals during the War, to Upper Canada; they soon outnumbered the original truly committed anti-Republicans, 10,000, who had earlier arrived: some Loyalists about 10 per cent maybe from New Brunswick returned to the States as did an unknown number from Nova Scotia.

To one degree or another, from ideological reasons or less so mixed with prospects of a better life, "All the Loyalists had taken a stand for the Crown and the British Empire"...whether "from a rigorous toryism to some vague sense that royal government was hardly so evil as its enemies claimed.

[13] The Sydney and Parramatta Loyalist Associations, with approximately 50 members each, were formed in 1804 to counter radical societies in those counties, and subsequently helped to put down the Castle Hill convict rebellion later that year.

Although Irish loyalist paramilitaries have claimed to speak on behalf of their communities and unionists in general, their electoral support is minimal and exclusively based in the urban working class.

[citation needed] The Scottish loyalist movement originated during the Industrial Revolution when a significant number of Ulster Protestants migrated to Scotland from Ireland.

Loyalists in Scotland mostly live in small working-class enclaves in the major urban centres or industrial villages, notably Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Edinburgh, Renfrewshire, Fife, West Lothian and Ayrshire.