Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  On March 25, 1783, Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer reported that a ship had arrived at Philadelphia, “in thirty-five days from Cadiz, with dispatches to the Continental Congress, informing them that … the preliminaries to a general peace … was signed at Paris, in consequence of which hostilities by sea and land were to cease.” When the news became official a few days later, instead of cheers there were “groans and hisses … attended by bitter reproaches and curses upon their kind for having deserted them.”17

  Finally came the details: The new residents of Florida learned that Spain, which had entered the war as an ally of France, was rewarded by getting back its former possession, Florida. British subjects living there had until March 1785 to clear out. The Indians along the frontier, who had expected rewards of lands for helping the British, learned that the treaty gave the United States virtually all the land east of the Mississippi River, except for British possessions in Canada and Spanish territory in Florida. And Loyalists learned that the treaty’s words dealing with their future were meaningless. Congress, the treaty said, would “earnestly recommend” to the states that Loyalists’ “estates, rights, and properties” be restored. But the states had alreadyconfiscated the property of tens of thousands of Tories and, because there was no national government, the states had no need to accept any recommendations from Congress.

  New York City and Long Island, which had been Tory citadels, now became exits to exile. The wealthiest Tories had gone to England long before, and most reports of life there were dire. Transplanted Americans were treated as Americans, not former or new Britons. Hannah Winslow, who had left Boston with the evacuation ships in 1776 and had expected to return when the war ended, had a typical lament: She did not like where she was living but knew she could not return because “my unhappy fate is fix’d.”18 One outstanding Loyalist who did not leave was James Rivington, the Tory publisher. Beginning around the time that France became a Rebel ally, Rivington became an ally, too—a secret one, spying for Washington, who personally paid him in gold at the end of the war. He lived in New York until his death in 1802.19

  Some wealthy Loyalists chose exile in England, though they knew Loyalists were not welcome there. Still, merchants, expecting an awakening of transatlantic trade, chartered ships, loaded them with the contents of their warehouses, and sailed off with their families. The merchants had no worries about breaking any trade laws. Carleton had ordered port officials to grant the evacuees “particular permissions” to leave New York and make whatever profits they could.20 Carleton had assured the Loyalists that his troops would not leave New York City until the departure of all of the civilians who wanted to go. And Carleton knew where they should go: Canada. The land that awaited them in Nova Scotia had once been the land of the Acadians, a French people expelled in the 1750s in a cruel deportation. By pouring Loyalists into sparsely populated Nova Scotia, Britain would assure the creation of an English-speaking region that would offset the French-speaking, Roman Catholic Quebec region.

  The Reverend John Sayre had run off from his church and home in Fairfield during Tryon’s raids on the Connecticut coast. He andhis wife and eight children, “destitute of food, house, and raiments,” joined the refugees in New York, and he became a propagandist for Carleton’s Canadian plan.21 In April 1783, he went to the large Loyalist refugee community at Eaton’s Neck, Long Island. During a worship service in a schoolhouse, he preached about Nova Scotia. Each Loyalist family, he told the congregation, would get two hundred acres of land. They would also receive warm clothing, a year’s worth of provisions, and a house—which would be in the form of planks, nails, and even window glass, all waiting for them in storage in Nova Scotia. Along with those supplies would come an iron plow and other farming equipment. A world anew.

  Within days dozens of people in Lloyd’s Neck decided to go, joining the official evacuation, which would begin in April and for which Carleton had found 183 ships to sail in fleets from New York. On Long Island 471 heads of families were divided into sixteen companies and assigned to Royal Navy transport ships. Each company had a captain and two lieutenants. They were to maintain order on the ship and, when the ship arrived in Nova Scotia, apportion tracts in a land they had never seen. That would basically be the system used for the entire evacuation, which would last until November.22

  Soon after Sayre preached, HMS Union sailed into Huntington Bay and, on April 11, began taking on 209 passengers—108 of them children. About half of the passengers were from Connecticut. The rest were from Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Only twelve of the sixty-one white males had served in Loyalist regiments. One of them was Tom Hyde, a twenty-seven-year-old ex-slave who had run away from his master in Fairfield, Connecticut, and joined British forces.23 Hyde was traveling as the servant of Fyler Dibblee, a Connecticut lawyer who had fled to Long Island only to be kidnapped in a whaleboat raid. He had been held for several months and then released in a prisoner exchange, one of the rituals of the whaleboat war.

  On April 16 the Union sailed down Long Island Sound to New York City and ten days later joined a fleet of twenty ships headed for Nova Scotia. On May 11, the Union entered the port of Paartown(now Saint John, New Brunswick) on the north shore of the Bay of Fundy, at the mouth of the Saint John River. Three scouts left the ship in search of suitable home sites, followed a week later by the rest of the passengers. Most of them settled on a long peninsula at a village called Kingston. “A happier people never lived upon the globe,” one of the passengers later wrote. “… Here with the protection of kind providence we were perfectly happy, contented and comfortable.”24

  Back in New York City, Rear Admiral Robert Digby, who had recently arrived to command the Royal Navy in America, became Carleton’s close ally. Digby supervised the sailing of the armada carrying Tories out of America. An admiral who had often commanded warships in battle, he now found himself shepherding voyages of transports like the Union because, as he said in one of his orders to a ship captain, “I think too much cannot be done for their [Loyalists’] assistance.”25 He reminded another captain about a phrase in article 7 of the peace treaty: “… his Britannic Majesty shall with all convenient speed, and without causing any destruction, or carrying away any Negroes, or other property of the American inhabitants, withdraw all his Armies, Garrisons, and Fleets from the said United States.” The phrase Digby cited was about “not carrying away Negroes.”

  Thousands of slaves and ex-slaves were pouring into New York. Many of them found shelter in Canvas Town, an area burned out in the 1775 fire. All were claiming the right to sail to Nova Scotia because they were Loyalists who had served in British forces and had been freed. But white masters had no interest in article 7; they wanted their slaves back.

  Slave catchers went to New York to claim their property, even seizing ex-slaves on the streets. Boston King, born a slave on a plantation near Charleston, had joined the British, carrying dispatches and working aboard a Royal Navy warship. As the war was ending, King made his way to New York City, where he married Violet, a fellow runaway who had fled a master in North Carolina. Along with all theother ex-slaves in New York, they were terrified when “we saw our old masters coming from Virginia, North Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.”26 And then the word began to spread: Ships were sailing off to Nova Scotia with ex-slaves aboard.27 Carleton had his own interpretation of article 7: Negroes who had served British forces were not property. They were the king’s subjects.

  Carleton ordered Brig. Gen. Samuel Birch, commandant of New York, to arrange for the certification of any black who claimed British service and thus the right to join the Nova Scotia fleets. Birch had a printer (probably Rivington) produce passes that could be issued to freed blacks. A typical pass said:

  This is to certify to whomsoever it may concern, that the Bearer hereof, ______, a Negro, resorted to the British Lines, in consequence of The Procl
amations of Sir William Howe, and Sir Henry Clinton, late Commanders in Chief in America; and that the said Negro has hereby His Excellency Sir Guy Carleton’s Permission to go to Nova-Scotia, Or wherever else may think proper.

  By Order of Brigadier General Birch28

  George Washington, a fourth-generation slave owner, was shocked to learn how Carleton was interpreting article 7. The topic came up at the first and only meeting of the two men, on May 6, 1783, at a house at Washington’s headquarters in Tappan, New York. Washington said he had three points to raise: the timetable for the withdrawal of British forces from New York, the release of prisoners, and the point that he wished to raise first: “The Preservation of Property from being carried off, and especially the Negroes.” Carleton said that some Negroes had already left—660 black men, women, and children—on April 27. Washington “appeared to be startled.”29

  Washington told Carleton he was violating the treaty. Carleton countered that the former owners of the former slaves could be compensated, and he described what became known as The Book of Negroes, then consisting of a handwritten list of black passengers leaving New York. Each one was identified by name, age, and physical description.

  Some names included a former owner’s name and residence. At least one once belonged to Thomas Jefferson.30 Three appear to have run away from Washington’s Mount Vernon.31 The list was compiled by General Birch’s men, who also gave out the passes. American “commissioners” were supposed to be present for the embarking of all ships. So presumably they, unlike Washington, were aware of the passes and the list.32 Copies of the list that Carleton referred to were bound, creating The Book of Negroes. One copy of the book is in the British National Archives, another in the Nova Scotia Archives.*

  In a formal letter to Carleton, written on the day of the meeting, Washington said it was not up to him to decide whether the treaty had been violated. But he added that he was ready “to enter into any Agreements, or take any Measures, which may be deemed expedient to prevent the future Carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.”33

  No measures were taken, and the sailing of ex-slaves continued. Eventually, nearly three thousand ex-slaves would sail to Nova Scotia and be granted land, usually small, hardscrabble tracts, in contrast to the better, and usually bigger, tracts granted to white Loyalists.

  Many of the black Loyalists settled on the outskirts of a landing that became Shelburne. By the end of 1783, Shelburne’s population was 7,922, of whom 1,521 were freed slaves. They named their community Birchtown, after the general who signed the ship passes. One of its leaders was Colonel Stephen Blucke, the man who succeeded Colonel Tye in the New Jersey raiders.34

  The last recorded black evacuees were former members of those New Jersey raiders known as the Black Brigade, along with their kin: fortyseven men, thirty-seven women, and sixteen children. They are listed in The Book of Negroes as “Inspected on the 30th of November … on Board the fleet laying near Statten Island.”35

  In 1792, unhappy about their treatment in Nova Scotia, 1,196 black Loyalists decided, with British help, to seek a new life in Sierra Leone, a West Africa territory controlled by Britain. Sixty-seven people died during the voyage. The rest of the African returnees, including Boston King and his wife Violet, landed at Freetown and began a new country.

  Within a year after the war ended, about one hundred thousand Americans left their homes. Most of them went to Canada. The rest chose England, Scotland, or British possessions in the West Indies. Within a generation the new Canadians had spread across the vast British dominion, taking with them the virtues and the visions that they and their ancestors had had as American colonists. Granted large tracts of land, they transformed a wilderness into a vibrant nation. Many became prosperous farmers or started mercantile dynasties. “Seldom had a people done so well by losing a war,” a Canadian historian wrote.

  Today, four to six million Canadians—about one-fifth of the population—claim a Tory ancestor. Many Canadians believe that their nation’s traditional devotion to law and civility, the very essence of being a Canadian, traces back to being loyal, as in Loyalist.

  Below the border live the people who started another country, built by Rebels. Within a generation, those Rebels would begin to forgive—and forget—the Tories. They would call the Revolution a war between Americans and the British, losing from their collective memory the fact that much of the fighting had been between Americans and Americans.

  * There is no copy of The Book of Negroes in the National Archives in Washington. Copies of the lists exist in a file containing miscellaneous records of the Continental Congress.

  Notes

  PREFACE: “LITTLE LESS THAN SAVAGE FURY”

  1. Charles B. Todd, The History of Redding (New York: Grafton Press, 1906), pp. 35—36. Todd publishes a gruesome account of the hanging but concludes that it was based on faulty memory.

  2. Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 529.

  3. Jared Sparks, The Writings of George Washington, vol. 5 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1855), p. 222. Letter to Col. Walter Stewart, January 22, 1778.

  4. William Spohn Baker, Itinerary of General Washington June 15, 1775 to December 23, 1783 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892; reprint, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007), p. 101.

  5. W. O. Raymond, The United Empire Loyalists (Saint Stephen, NB: Saint Croix Printing and Publishing Co., 1893), p. 5.

  6. Stephen Jarvis, “An American’s Experience in the British Army,” Connecticut Magazine 11 (Summer-Autumn 1907), pp. 191–215, 477–490. Note that the magazine treats Jarvis’s service in Tory regiments as being in “the British Army.”

  7. A true copy from the Minutes of the Committee of Inspection for the Town of Stamford, attested by John Haight, Jr., committee clerk. http://www.stanklos .net/index.php?act = para&psname = C0RRESP0NDENCE%2C%20 PR0CEEDINGS%2C%20ETC&pid = 4392; accessed 1/12/2009.

  8. Jarvis Munson, Petition for Indemnity as a Loyalist, presented in Saint John, New Brunswick, March 27, 1786. (Courtesy of Bill Jarvis.)

  9. Robert McCluer Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America 1760—1781 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 282.

  10. Wallace Brown, “Loyalist Military Settlement in New Brunswick,” in The Loyal Americans: The Military Role of the Loyalist Provincial Corps and Their Settlement in British North America, gen. ed. Robert S. Allen (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, 1983), pp. 81–90.

  11. David H. Villers, “Loyalism in Connecticut, 176–1783” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut 1976), p. 280. Villers bases his estimate of one thousand on the reports of Loyalist recruiters and on testimony in Connecticut courts.

  12. Jarvis-Powell Family Papers 1767–1919, Loyalist Collection, University of New Brunswick, Canada, MIC-Loyalist FC LFR.J3P5P3.

  13. He is identified in Royal Ralph Hinman, A Historical Collection from Official Records, Files, &c., of the Part Sustained by Connecticut, During the War of the Revolution (Hartford, CT: E. Gleason, 1842), p. 137. He is not named in James Shepard, “The Tories of Connecticut,” Connecticut Quarterly 1, no. 3 (July, August, and September 1895).

  14. Jarvis Munson petition.

  15. Jarvis, “Experience.” (Unless otherwise stated, information about Stephen Jarvis’s life comes from this source.)

  16. Shepard, “The Tories of Connecticut.”

  17. Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), p. 10.

  18. These are some of the occupations listed in documents showing the confiscation of properties of Pennsylvania Loyalists accused of treason. Samuel Hazard, ed., “Minutes of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania,” Colonial Records of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Theo Fenn & Co., 1852), vol. 11, p. 353.

  19. W. Stewart Wallace, The United Empire Loyalists (1914; reprint, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 26; Walter Bates, Kingston and the Loyalists of the “Spring Fleet” of 178
3 (1899; reprint, Fredericton, NB: Nonentity Press, 1980), p. 28.

  20. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 176.

  21. The estimate of eighty thousand appears consistently in writings in Canada, the repository of innumerable Loyalist documents. For example, United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada: http://www.learnquebec.ca/export/sites/learn/en/content/curriculum/social_sciences/documents/loyalistoverview.pdf; accessed 4/13/2009. Also, Canadian National Army Museum, “The War for America,” http://www.national-army-museum.ac.uk/exhibitions/warForAmerica/page5 .shtml; accessed 4/13/2009. Some Loyalist historians favor the “not less than 100,000 souls” estimate because it comes from an influential eyewitness. The source is Thomas Jones, The History of New York During the American Revolution (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1879), vol. I, p. 260.

  22. Author’s count of the battles in the War Chronology of the On-Line Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies, http://www.royalprovincial.com/history/chronology/chrono.shtml; accessed 3/5/2009.

  23. James Srodes, Franklin (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Co., 2002), p. 276.

  24. Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution: With an Historical Essay (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1864), p. 65.

  25. Paul H. Smith, “The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,” William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968): 259—277.

  26. 2,205,000: U.S. Bureau of the Census (1998 World Almanac and Book of Facts, p. 378); 2,780,4000: Digital History online (http://digitalhistory2.uh.edu/eta .cfm?eralID=3&smtID = 4). Accessed 3/23/2010.

  27. Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, vol. 10 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), pp. 193–197.

  28. Ibid., Letter to Morse, December 22, 1815, p. 193.