Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Rodney Memorial, Spanish Town, Jamaica. This structure, commemorating Britain’s triumph in the 1782 Battle of the Saintes, can justly be considered the largest British victory monument of the Revolutionary War. (illustration credit 1.13)

  Sierra Leone Company handbill, 1791. To help recruit volunteers, this document, laying out the terms of the proposed West Africa settlement, was circulated among black loyalists in Nova Scotia. (illustration credit 1.14)

  Sketch of Freetown, ca. 1798. Virtually no pictures show Freetown in its very first years, so it is all the more remarkable that this one was produced by William Augustus Bowles during his brief sojourn in the African capital. (illustration credit 1.15)

  Gardner family tomb, Kasganj. This mausoleum, in late Mughal style, was erected by New York–born William Linnaeus Gardner for his eldest son. Gardner and his wife are buried in the foreground. (illustration credit 1.16)

  Benjamin West, The Reception of the American Loyalists by Great Britain, ca. 1812. This engraving, published as the frontispiece to a book about the Loyalist Claims Commission, beautifully illustrates the “spirit of 1783” as rendered by the most famous British history painter of his day, Pennsylvania native Benjamin West. (illustration credit 1.17)

  INTRODUCTION

  The Spirit of 1783

  THERE WERE TWO SIDES in the American Revolution—but only one was on display early in the afternoon of November 25, 1783, when General George Washington rode on a grey horse into New York City. By his side trotted the governor of New York, flanked by an escort of mounted guards. Portly general Henry Knox followed close behind, leading officers of the Continental Army eight abreast down the Bowery. Long lines of civilians trailed after them, some on horseback, others on foot, wearing black-and-white cockades and sprigs of laurel in their hats.1 Hundreds crammed into the streets to watch as the choreographed procession made its way down to the Battery, at Manhattan’s southern tip. Since 1776, through seven long years of war and peace negotiations, New York had been occupied by the British army. Today, the British were going. A cannon shot at 1 p.m. sounded the departure of the last British troops from their posts. They marched to the docks, clambered into longboats, and rowed out to the transports waiting in the harbor. The British occupation of the United States was officially over.2

  George Washington’s triumphal entrance into New York City was the closest thing the winners of the American Revolution ever had to a victory parade. For a week, patriots celebrated the evacuation with feasts, bonfires, illuminations, and the biggest fireworks display ever staged in North America.3 At Fraunces’s Tavern, Washington and his friends drank rounds of toasts late into the night. To the United States of America! To America’s European allies, France and Spain! To the American “Heroes, who have fallen for our Freedom”! “May America be an Assylum to the persecuted of the Earth!”4 A few days later one newspaper printed an anecdote about a brief shore visit made by a British officer. Convinced that New York would be racked by unrest following the transfer of power, the officer was surprised to find “that every thing in the city was civil and tranquil, no mobs—no riots—no disorders.” “These Americans,” he marveled, “are a curious original people, they know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”5 Generations of New Yorkers commemorated November 25 as “Evacuation Day”—an anniversary that was later folded into the more enduring November celebration of American national togetherness, Thanksgiving Day.6

  But what if you hadn’t wanted the British to leave? Mixed in among the happy New York crowd that day were other, less cheerful faces.7 For loyalists—colonists who had sided with Britain during the war—the departure of the British troops spelled worry, not jubilation. During the war, tens of thousands of loyalists had moved for safety into New York and other British-held cities. The British withdrawal raised urgent questions about their future. What kind of treatment could they expect in the new United States? Would they be jailed? Would they be attacked? Would they retain their property, or hold on to their jobs? Confronting real doubts about their lives, liberty, and potential happiness in the United States, sixty thousand loyalists decided to follow the British and take their chances elsewhere in the British Empire. They took fifteen thousand black slaves with them, bringing the total exodus to seventy-five thousand people—or about one in forty members of the American population.8

  They traveled to Canada, they sailed for Britain, they journeyed to the Bahamas and the West Indies; some would venture still farther afield, to Africa and India. But wherever they went, this voyage into exile was a trip into the unknown. In America the refugees left behind friends and relatives, careers and land, houses and native streets—the entire milieu in which they had built their lives. For them, America seemed less “an Assylum to the persecuted” than a potential persecutor. It was the British Empire that would be their asylum, offering land, emergency relief, and financial incentives to help them start over. Evacuation Day did not mark an end for the loyalist refugees. It was a fresh beginning—and it carried them into a dynamic if uncertain new world.

  JACOB BAILEY, for one, could give a vivid account of what led him to flee revolutionary America. Massachusetts born and bred, Bailey had since 1760 been an Anglican missionary in the frontier district of Pownalborough, Maine. While he ministered in what was then remote wilderness, in Boston his Harvard classmate John Adams voiced the colonies’ grievances against Britain, and became a forceful advocate for independence. But Bailey had sworn what he regarded as a sacred oath to the king, the head of his church, and to renounce that allegiance appeared to him to be an act of both treason and sacrilege. Bailey struggled to maintain his loyalty in the face of mounting pressure to join the rebellion. When he refused to honor a special day of thanksgiving declared by the provincial congress, Pownalborough patriots threatened to put up a liberty pole in front of the church and to whip him there if he failed to bless it.9 Another frightening omen came when he found seven of his sheep slaughtered, and a “fine heifer” shot dead in his pasture.10 By 1778, the clergyman had been “twice assaulted by a furious Mob—four times haulled before an unfeeling committee.… Three times have I been driven from my family.… Two attempts have been made to shoot me.” He roved the countryside to elude arrest, while his young wife and their children tried to get by with “nothing to eat for several days together.” To Bailey the patriots were persecutors, plain and simple, a “set of surly & savage beings who have power in their hands and murder in their hearts, who thirst, and pant, and roar for the blood of those who have any connection with, or affection for Great Britain.”11

  Bailey certainly had a flair for sensational language. His melodramatic prose, however, spoke to genuine fear for his family’s safety. Still unwilling to renounce the king—yet equally unwilling to risk imprisonment for refusing to do so—he saw only one more option before him, unappealing though it was. Before dawn one June day in 1779, the Baileys grimly “began to prepare for our expulsion.” They dressed in a motley assortment of salvaged clothes, gathered up their bedding and “the shattered remains of our fortune,” and made their way to a boat that would carry them to Nova Scotia, the nearest British sanctuary. In spite of all they had suffered, Jacob and Sally Bailey could not hold back their “bitter emotions of grief” on leaving their native country. Neither could they contain their relief, two weeks later, when they sailed into Halifax harbor and saw “the Britanic colours flying.”12 Bailey gave thanks to God “for safely conducting me and my family to this retreat of freedom and security from the rage of tyranny and the cruelty of opposition.” Now they were in the British Empire; now they were secure. But the Baileys had landed “in a strange country, destitute of money, clothing, dwelling or furniture,” and their future was in the hands of chance.13

  This book follows refugees like Jacob Bailey out of revolutionary America to provide the first global history of the loyalist diaspora. Though historians have probed the experiences of loyalists within the colonies (and especially the ideology
of articulate figures like Bailey), the international displacement of loyalists during and after the war has never been described in full.14 Who were these refugees and why did they leave? The answers came in as many forms as the people themselves. Loyalists are often stereotyped as members of a small conservative elite: rich, educated, Anglican, and with strong ties to Britain—qualities captured by the pejorative label “tory,” the nickname for the British Conservative Party.15 In fact, historians estimate that between a fifth and a third of American colonists remained loyal to the king.16 Loyalism cut right across the social, geographical, racial, and ethnic spectrum of early America—making loyalists every bit as “American” as their patriot fellow subjects. Loyalists included recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants alike. They could be royal officials as well as bakers, carpenters, tailors, and printers. There were Anglican ministers as well as Methodists and Quakers; cosmopolitan Bostonians and backcountry farmers in the Carolinas.

  Crucially, not all loyalists were white. For the half million black slaves in the thirteen colonies, the revolution presented a striking opportunity when British officers offered freedom to slaves who agreed to fight. Twenty thousand slaves seized this promise, making the revolution the occasion for the largest emancipation of North American slaves until the U.S. Civil War. For native American Indians, too, the revolution posed a pressing choice. Encroached on by generations of land-hungry colonists, several Indian nations—notably the Mohawks in the north and the Creeks in the south—opted to ally themselves with the British Empire. The experiences of loyal whites, blacks, and Indians have generally been segregated into distinct historical narratives, and of course there were important differences among them.17 But loyalists of all backgrounds confronted a common dilemma with Britain’s defeat—to stay or go—and all numbered among the revolution’s refugees. Their stories were analogous and entangled in significant ways, which is why they will be presented together here.

  Perhaps the most surprising truth about loyalist refugees was how varied a role ideology might play in their decision-making. Though they shared an allegiance to the king and a commitment to empire, their precise beliefs otherwise ranged widely. Some, like Bailey, expressed sophisticated intellectual reasons for their position. For others, loyalism stemmed from a personal commitment to the existing order of things, a sense that it was better to stick with the devil you knew. Also widespread was a pragmatic opinion that the colonies were economically and strategically better off as part of the British Empire.18 The extent and depth of loyalism points to a fundamental feature of this conflict that the term “revolution” belies. This was quite simply a civil war—and routinely described as such by contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic.19 Polarizing communities, destroying friendships, dividing families—most famously Benjamin Franklin, the founding father, from his only son William, a loyalist—this was the longest war Americans fought before Vietnam, and the bloodiest until the Civil War of 1861–65. Recovering the contingency, coercion, and sheer violence of the American Revolution explains why so many loyalists chose to depart—driven, like Jacob Bailey, by fear of harassment as much as by commitment to principle. By the same token, self-interest could be as powerful a motivator as core beliefs, as the cases of runaway slaves and Britain’s Indian allies perhaps make most clear.

  A range of reasons, ideological and otherwise, led all the people in these pages to the same defining choice: to leave revolutionary America.20 This book sets out to explore what happened to them next. Of the sixty thousand loyalists who fled, about eight thousand whites and five thousand free blacks traveled to Britain, often to find themselves strangers in a strange land. The majority of refugees headed straight for Britain’s other colonies, taking up incentives of free land, provisions, and supplies. More than half relocated to the northern British provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec, helping to transform regions once heavily French to the English-dominated Canada of today.* A further six thousand or so migrants, especially from the American south, traveled to Jamaica and the Bahamas—carrying the vast majority of the fifteen thousand exported slaves with them. Some ranged still farther afield. The East India Company army would soon be sprinkled with American-born officers, including two sons of the notorious turncoat Benedict Arnold. An unlucky few ended up among the first convicts sent to Botany Bay, in Australia. And in perhaps the most surprising migration, nearly twelve hundred black loyalists moved to Africa, under the sponsorship of British abolitionists, to found the utopian settlement of Freetown, in Sierra Leone. In short, loyalists landed in every corner of the British Empire. Within a decade of the peace, the map of the loyalist diaspora looked much like the map of the empire as a whole.

  A handful of studies have looked at specific figures and sites within this migration. But the loyalists’ worldwide dispersal has never been completely reconstructed.21 A key reason for this lies in the fact that history is so often framed within national boundaries. In the United States, the history of the American Revolution was written by the victors, who were chiefly interested in exploring the revolution’s many innovations and achievements. Loyalist refugees simply fell outside the bounds of American national narratives. They received scant attention from British historians in turn, as embarrassing reminders of defeat—especially given the great triumphs in the Seven Years’ War and the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars that Britons could focus on instead. Loyalists loom largest, instead, in Canadian history, where they were hailed by some nineteenth-century conservatives as the “founding fathers” of a proudly imperial Anglo-Canadian tradition, and honored as “United Empire Loyalists,” a title conferred by the imperial government on refugees and their descendants. But such treatments reaffirmed the “tory” stereotype and may well have contributed to later scholarly neglect.

  There is also a practical reason that nobody has written this global history before. In the 1840s, Lorenzo Sabine, the first American historian who delved into this subject, lamented that “Men who … separate themselves from their homes … who become outlaws, wanderers, and exiles,—such men leave few memorials behind them. Their papers are scattered and lost, and their very names pass from recollection.”22 In fact, it is remarkable how much does survive: personal letters, diaries, memoirs, petitions, muster rolls, diplomatic dispatches, legislative proceedings. The challenge is putting it all together. Fortunately for twenty-first-century scholars (privileged with funding and access), technology has made it possible to pursue international histories in new ways. One can search library catalogues and databases around the world at the touch of a button, and read digitized rare books and documents on a laptop in one’s living room. One can also travel with increasing ease, to piece together paper trails scattered across continents, and to see what remains of the refugees’ worlds: the houses loyalists built on out-islands of the Bahamas, the precipitous slopes they cultivated above Freetown, or their gravestones, weathered in the Canadian maritime wind.

  To look at the American Revolution and the British Empire from these vantage points is to see the international consequences of the revolution in a completely new way. The worldwide resonance of the American Revolution has traditionally been understood in connection with the “spirit of 1776” that inspired other peoples, notably the French, to assert their own rights to equality and liberty.23 Tracing loyalist journeys reveals a different stamp of the revolution on the world: not on burgeoning republics, but on the enduring British Empire. Loyalist refugees personally conveyed American things and ideas into the empire. The fortunate brought treasured material objects: a finely wrought sugar box, a recipe book, or, more weightily, the printing press used by one Charleston family to produce the first newspapers in St. Augustine and the Bahamas.24 But they carried cultural and political influences too—not least the racial attitudes that accompanied the loyalists’ mass transport of slaves. One transformative export was the Baptist faith taken by black loyalist preachers from a single congregation in the Carolina backcountry, who went on to estab
lish the first Baptist churches in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone. In the most striking “American” transmission of all, loyalist refugees brought with them a discourse of grievance against imperial authority. In British North America, the Bahamas, and Sierra Leone, loyalist refugees beset hapless British governors with demands for political representation that sounded uncannily like those of their patriot peers. “Loyalist” these days often connotes a die-hard supporter of a cause, but American loyalists were certainly not unblinking followers of British rule.

  Considering these kinds of revolutionary legacies brings into focus a remarkable period of transition for the British Empire, and helps make sense of a seeming paradox. The American Revolution marked the empire’s single greatest defeat until the era of World War II. Yet in the space of a mere ten years, it bounced back to an astonishing extent. Building on earlier precedents, British power regrouped, expanded, and reshaped itself across the world—in Ireland and India, Canada and the Caribbean, Africa and Australia.25 All told, the 1780s stand out as the most eventful single decade in British imperial history up to the 1940s. What was more, the events of these years cemented an enduring framework for the principles and practice of British rule. This “spirit of 1783,” so to speak, animated the British Empire well into the twentieth century—and provided a model of liberal constitutional empire that stood out as a vital alternative to the democratic republics taking shape in the United States, France, and Latin America.

  What did this postwar restructuring involve, and what role did refugee loyalists play in the process? The “spirit of 1783” had three major elements.26 First and most visibly, the British Empire significantly expanded around the world—and loyalists were both agents and advocates of imperial growth. Historians used to portray the American Revolution as a dividing line between a “first” British Empire, largely commercial, colonial, and Atlantic, and a “second” empire centered in Asia and involving direct rule over millions of manifestly foreign subjects. But loyalist refugees bridged the two. As pioneer settlers in British North America, the Bahamas, and Sierra Leone, they demonstrated the continued vitality of the Atlantic empire alongside what has been described as the empire’s “swing to the east.” They also promoted ambitious expansionist projects elsewhere in the world, championing schemes to extend British sovereignty into Spanish America, or around the western borders of the United States. Far-fetched though some of these ideas can seem in retrospect, they hardly seemed so at a time when the future shape of the United States was very unclear, and Britain (among other European empires) was successfully establishing footholds in some of the most remote quarters of the globe. The first serious proposal to colonize Australia was put forward by none other than an American loyalist.27