It would serve no good purpose to attempt here an exhaustive account of the printed sources relating to the United Empire Loyalists. All that can be done is to indicate some of the more important. The only general history of the Loyalists is Egerton Ryerson, The Loyalists of America and Their Times (2 vols., 1880); it is diffuse and antiquated, and is written in a spirit of undiscriminating admiration of the Loyalists, but it contains much good material. Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution (2 vols., 1864), is an old book, but it is a storehouse of information about individual Loyalists, and it contains a suggestive introductory essay. Some admirable work on the Loyalists has been done by recent American historians. Claude H. Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution (1902), is a readable and scholarly study, based on extensive researches into documentary and newspaper sources. The Loyalist point of view will be found admirably set forth in M. C. Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution (2 vols., 1897), and The Party of the Loyalists in the American Revolution (American Historical Review, I, 24). Of special studies in a limited field the most valuable and important is A. C. Flick, Loyalism in New York (1901); it is the result of exhaustive researches, and contains an excellent bibliography of printed and manuscript sources. Other studies in a limited field are James H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution (1910), and G. A. Gilbert, The Connecticut Loyalists (American Historical Review, IV, 273).
For the settlements of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the most important source is The Winslow Papers (edited by W. O. Raymond, 1901), an admirably annotated collection of private letters written by and to Colonel Edward Winslow. Some of the official correspondence relating to the migration is calendared in the Historical Manuscript Commission’s Report on American Manuscripts in the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1909), Much material will be found in the provincial histories of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, such as Beamish Murdoch, A History of Nova Scotia or Acadie (3 vols., 1867), and James Hannay, History of New Brunswick (2 vols., 1909), and also in the local and county histories. The story of the Loyalists of Prince Edward Island is contained in W. H. Siebert and Florence E. Gilliam, The Loyalists in Prince Edward Island (Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3rd series, IV, ii, 109). An account of the Shelburne colony will be found in T. Watson Smith, The Loyalists at Shelburne (Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, VI, 53).