Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  What came next he would reconstruct later, from flashes of recollection in a semiconscious haze. Shattered head throbbing, body bleeding, he rattles over a track. They reach Augusta. He is tossed to the ground, his arms lashed around the trunk of a tree. He sees his bare legs splayed out in front of him, funny-looking foreign things, and he sees hot brown pitch poured over them, scalding, clinging to his skin. Under his feet the men pile up kindling and set it alight. The flame catches the tar, sears his flesh. His feet are on fire, two of his toes charred into stubs. The attackers seize his broken head by the hair and pull it out in clumps. Knives take care of the rest, cutting off strips of scalp, making the blood run down over his ears, face, and neck. Half scalped, skull fractured, lamed, slashed, and battered, Brown—remarkably—survives. Later, a doctor comes to the place where he is confined and bandages him up, setting his broken bones on course to heal. A sympathetic guard, moved by the spectacle of this badly damaged man, agrees to let Brown get away. He slips out of custody and rides over the border into South Carolina to take shelter with a loyalist friend.4

  In years to come Brown frequently recalled how the patriots “tortured him in the most inhuman manner.” He did not choose to describe how he was then carted through the streets of Augusta for public mockery—and how he, like many victims of such assaults, ultimately broke down and agreed to sign the association (an action he promptly renounced after his escape).5 But the personal humiliation of giving in to his attackers could only have contributed to the passion of Brown’s response. The incident turned him from a noncombatant into a militant enemy of the revolution. Within a matter of weeks, his feet so badly injured he could not walk, his head still wrapped in bandages, Brown rallied hundreds of backcountry residents to form a loyalist militia, the King’s Rangers, and fight back. Physically and mentally brutalized by the patriots, Brown in turn earned notoriety as a particularly ruthless, vindictive loyalist commander.6

  A rich historical tradition has portrayed the American Revolution first and foremost as a war of ideals—not a war of ordeals.7 Yet for Brown and thousands more civilians caught in the conflict, this was what the revolution looked like: mobs on the march, neighbors turned enemies, critical decisions forced under stress. As the revolution gathered momentum across the colonies, one American after another faced a choice. Would they join the rebellion or stay loyal to the king and empire? Their answers had to do with a host of factors, including core values and beliefs, self-interest, local circumstance, and personal relationships. But no matter how contingent, their responses could have unexpectedly far-ranging results.

  WHAT WAS a loyalist, and what kind of America and British Empire did loyalists want?8 It is important to note at the outset that, as fellow American colonists, loyalists and patriots had more in common with one another than they did with metropolitan Britons. Both loyalists and patriots shared preoccupations with access to land, the maintenance of slavery, and regulation of colonial trade. Nor did their places of origin necessarily serve as a leading indicator of political difference. While Thomas Brown remained loyal, for instance, one of the indentured servants he brought from the Orkney Islands promptly ran off and joined a patriot militia.9 Ultimately choices about loyalty depended more on employers, occupations, profits, land, faith, family, and friendships than on any implicit identification as an American or a Briton. At the start of the war, colonists often saw themselves both as American, in the sense that they were colonial residents, and as British, in the sense of being British subjects.

  What truly divided colonial Americans into loyalists and patriots was the mounting pressure of revolutionary events: threats, violence, the imposition of oaths, and ultimately war. By 1776, the patriots renounced the king’s authority, and developed fresh political and philosophical justifications for doing so—whereas loyalists wanted to remain British subjects, and wanted the thirteen colonies to remain part of the British Empire. On these fundamental points, loyalists could largely agree. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think loyalists were ideologically uniform—or that they simply wanted to preserve the status quo. In fact, many leading loyalists sought to reform the imperial relationship. They resisted the prospect of authoritarian rule, and were quick to defend their rights to representation. Indeed, during the colonial protests of the 1760s and 1770s, future loyalists and patriots alike spoke out in unison against perceived British tyranny. They tended to share provincial perspectives on rights and liberties, and a common language of grievance against the abuse of imperial authority. This would have important repercussions in the postwar years, when loyalist refugees found their expectations as British subjects to be at odds with those of their metropolitan British rulers.

  The troubles in the colonies all started, strangely enough, with Britain’s greatest imperial victory. Triumph in the Seven Years’ War in 1763 brought the empire French Canada, Spanish Florida, valuable Caribbean islands, and an important foothold in India. But Britain had also racked up an enormous debt. To offset the costs, Parliament passed a series of measures in the colonies designed to promote imperial security and prosperity. Instead, it unintentionally provoked colonial resistance. Most notoriously, the Stamp Act of 1765, a seemingly innocuous tax on paper products, spectacularly backfired when Americans (and many Britons) denounced it as an abuse of imperial power, imposed by a parliament that did not adequately represent colonists. Many future loyalists were vocal opponents of the Stamp Act, though these protests also saw the first systematic attacks against American “tories,” suspected of wanting to enhance royal and aristocratic power. Street gangs like the self-described Sons of Liberty smashed property and assaulted individuals—most vividly by tarring and feathering, a new hallmark of patriot justice.10

  Violence was a familiar colonial phenomenon by the time a 1773 tax on tea touched off the worst trouble yet. One December night, Boston’s Sons of Liberty, their faces streaked to resemble Indian warriors, stormed onto British tea ships anchored in Boston harbor and tipped the valuable cargo overboard. Parliament responded by passing the so-called Coercive Acts, closing the port of Boston and demanding repayment for the tea. Americans swiftly branded these the “Intolerable Acts.” Delegates from around the thirteen colonies decided to convene a continental congress in Philadelphia and develop a coordinated response.

  A few congressmen arrived in Philadelphia in September 1774 already primed for war. They must have cheered enthusiastically at a congressional dinner when the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine—who had recently arrived from England to throw his support behind the patriot cause—raised a toast, declaring, “May the collision of British Flint and American Steel produce that spark of liberty which shall illumine … posterity”! But the majority of delegates would have cheered more comfortably when the company drank to the “Union of Britain and the Colonies on a constitutional foundation.”11 The prospect of war seemed to most congressmen an unnecessary, not to say suicidal, extreme. Far preferable was finding a way to assert colonial rights and liberties while remaining within the imperial fold.

  The speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly, Joseph Galloway, offered Congress a compelling plan to achieve this.12 Galloway agreed with most of his colleagues that the colonies—while they held “in abhorrence the idea of being considered independent”—could not adequately “be represented in the Parliament of Great Britain.” Instead, Galloway suggested that America have a parliament of its own: a “Grand Council,” to be headed by a president general. Made up of representatives from each colony, this American parliament would “hold and exercise all the legislative rights, powers, and authorities” required for running colonial affairs. It would also have the power to veto any legislation bearing on America produced by the British parliament. The colonies would thereby enjoy domestic self-government while retaining the benefits of imperial trade and protection. Such a “Plan of Union,” Galloway argued, was the only way forward if the colonies wanted to stave off “all the horrors of a civil war” and the inevitable “ruin
of America.”13

  Galloway’s plan was the most significant colonial reform project on the eve of the revolution, though it did not come out of a vacuum. Galloway’s mentor Benjamin Franklin had proposed a very similar idea himself twenty years earlier (developed with the governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson, later reviled as a “tory”), the Albany Plan of Union of 1754.14 “Join, or Die,” Franklin had inscribed under a memorable political cartoon showing the colonies as segments of a cut-up serpent—indicating the importance of continental union to American prosperity.15 Galloway sent his own plan of union to Franklin, then living in London, who circulated the scheme among high-ranking British officials; Franklin’s only objection was that it might embroil America in too many British imperial wars. Franklin’s son William, the governor of New Jersey, wholeheartedly endorsed it. After all, it had much to commend it to American sensibilities. By granting the colonies control over virtually everything but the ability to go to war, Galloway’s plan proposed a greater degree of autonomy for the American colonies than any other British domain enjoyed, including Scotland. His proposed American legislature would have fewer constraints than the Irish parliament, too. Most important, Galloway argued, his plan would aid the development of America itself. If the colonies were going to continue to grow and flourish, there had to be some overarching authority binding them together, in the spirit of Franklin’s “Join, or Die”; perhaps, he suggested, an “American constitution.”16

  For one long late-September day in 1774, Congress debated Galloway’s plan of union. The New York delegation was particularly well disposed toward it, with the respected lawyer John Jay speaking out clearly in its favor. It was “almost a perfect plan,” declared an upstanding young South Carolina planter. Galloway congratulated himself that “all the men of property, and many of the ablest speakers, supported the motion.” But not all his colleagues were convinced. “We are not to consent by the representatives of representatives,” insisted Patrick Henry of Virginia.17 Samuel Adams, the founder of the Sons of Liberty, believed the colonies would do better by withdrawing from the British Empire altogether. When Galloway’s plan came to a vote, five colonies voted in its favor versus six against—and the plan was tabled.18 Instead of moving toward closer union with Britain, Congress issued a set of resolutions asserting Americans’ entitlement to “all the rights, liberties, and immunities” of British subjects, in terms anticipating those of the Declaration of Independence.19

  The closeness of the vote on Galloway’s plan poses an intriguing “what if” for historians. What if one vote had gone the other way? What would have happened to the thirteen colonies if Galloway’s scheme had been adopted? Ireland might provide one answer: following a series of reforms in 1782, the Irish parliament received something of the legislative freedom Galloway sought for America. In 1800, Ireland would be united with Great Britain outright and its parliament absorbed by Westminster. But a better answer would take shape in North America itself, in 1867, when the provinces of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia united to become a federal, self-governing dominion within the British Empire. Canada—as this confederation was called—was the first example of “home rule” (autonomy over domestic policy) in the empire, and provided a template for self-government movements in later-nineteenth-century Ireland and India. In 1774 Philadelphia, Galloway advanced a model of imperial reform that anticipated home rule by generations. It was a prime example of how loyalists possessed dynamic political visions of their own.

  Galloway could not have taken much comfort in seeing one part of his prophecy come true. By rejecting his plan—the last concerted American attempt to preserve ties with the British Empire—Congress moved inexorably closer to civil war. With tensions already near breaking point, it was mostly a matter of time before something touched off outright conflict.

  The alarm came before dawn on the morning of April 19, 1775, when militia members in Lexington, Massachusetts, were rustled out of bed with news that British soldiers were coming from Boston to seize a patriot weapons store in nearby Concord. The militia mustered on Lexington Green as fast as they could and hastily readied their muskets as seven hundred well-disciplined British regulars marched, wheeled, and advanced toward them. Then a gun went off. Nobody knew who fired the “shot heard ’round the world” (as the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson would famously dub it), British redcoat or American militiaman.20 But that didn’t really matter. For despite their differences in power and purpose, the two groups of men were more alike than any other enemies they had faced. To them and thousands more now engulfed by war, the American Revolution did not look like a world-historical drama about the forging of a new nation. This was a bitter civil war about the division of an old empire. It accelerated a painful process in which British subjects were increasingly divided into opposing camps, as Americans and Britons.21 The problem for loyalists was that they had affiliations to both, being at once rooted American colonists and committed British subjects.

  FOR THE CONGRESSMEN meeting in Philadelphia, ideas and beliefs were an explicit subject of debate. But for the two and a half million Americans caught up in a civil war, ideas were hardened—if not superseded—by violence. The beginning of conflict was enough to push even some former congressmen to the other side, including prominent New York merchant Isaac Low. Though Low had resisted the abuse of imperial authority since the 1760s, he felt progressively alienated by the steps toward war. When the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, Low resigned his seat and stayed home; and when asked to purchase gunpowder for patriot troops a short time later, he withdrew entirely from government and soon lent his support to the British.22 Within weeks of the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, colonies established committees of safety that administered loyalty oaths to newly formed patriot legislatures. These oaths became a crucial marker of difference between patriots and loyalists. People who refused to swear them could be jailed, punished with property confiscation, or banished outright. Popular justice also followed those who failed to comply. Jacob Bailey, the Pownalborough minister, was comparatively fortunate that only his sheep and cows were attacked. At least two dozen others in 1775 shared the fate of Thomas Brown, by being tortured and publicly humiliated with tarring and feathering.23

  Then there was the spreading violence of the war itself. Revolution reached five-year-old Catherine Skinner one night when soldiers broke into her house, yanked her from her bed, and plunged their bayonets into her mattress to see if her father was hiding underneath. Catherine’s father, Cortlandt Skinner, New Jersey’s last royal attorney general, had rebuffed patriot overtures (like Brown) and escaped to British lines, leaving his family in the New Jersey countryside. Rebel raids trapped the Skinner family as prisoners in their own house; they hid in the cellar from gunshots, famished to the point of pain and tears. At last Catherine’s mother managed to lead her ten youngest children to safety on her eldest daughter’s farm. The days grew sharp and short, winter coming on. Every time they went into the fields they found another outbuilding burned, another of their pigs or cows poisoned by the rebels. The Skinners scraped through the winter of 1776–77 on stores of buckwheat buried beneath the hard-frozen ground. One frigid day the youngest of the family, a smiling boy of fourteen months, died. For days they kept the tiny body inside the house, unable to let him go with no priest to perform a funeral and no church accessible. In the end, Catherine’s eldest siblings “carried the poor little thing out in the night and buried him in the corner of a field.”24 Traumatic scenes like this imprinted Catherine—and probably her younger sister Maria too—powerfully enough for her to recall them vividly more than sixty years later.

  Loyalists closely monitored the progress of the war, sometimes hiding out to avoid confrontations, sometimes moving to seek shelter within British lines. Of course, at the outset it was reasonable to think that Britain would win the conflict handily. But a worrying indication to the contrary came when the British decided to evacuate Boston in March 1776 in the f
ace of a patriot attack. In the orders to abandon the city, British general William Howe offered free passage to any loyalist civilians who wished to follow—unwittingly setting a precedent for many more evacuations to come. At least eleven hundred loyalists sailed with the departing troops for Halifax in Nova Scotia.25 “By all accounts, there never existed a more miserable set of beings, than these wretched creatures now are,” said George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army. “Conscious of their black ingratitude, they chose to commit themselves … to the mercy of the waves in a tempestuous season, rather than meet their offended countrymen.”26 Washington’s contempt aside, the refugees would have agreed with his portrayal of their woeful condition. Leaving behind almost all their property and personal connections, the Boston refugees were the first loyalists to experience mass evacuation—and the first group to discover the hardships of imperial exile.

  In New York City, where British military efforts now concentrated, the assistant rector of Trinity Church, Charles Inglis, anxiously watched the situation deteriorate around him. As an ordained priest in the Church of England, Inglis (like Jacob Bailey) could not brook the prospect of forswearing his allegiance to the king who stood at the head of his church. But he felt sick at the sight of his country at war. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published the pamphlet Common Sense, a strident and hugely compelling argument in favor of American independence and republicanism. Inglis quickly scribbled out a deeply felt, intellectually grounded rebuttal called The True Interest of America, Impartially Stated. “I find no Common Sense in this pamphlet but much uncommon phrenzy,” Inglis wrote. “Even Hobbes would blush to own its author for a disciple.” Inglis vividly described the devastating consequences that he thought Paine’s vision would have for America: “Ruthless war … will ravage our once happy land.… Torrents of blood will be spilt, and thousands reduced to beggary and wretchedness.” What America needed instead, Inglis argued, was a reformed imperial relationship to secure American “Liberties, Property, and Trade.” “No person breathing has a deeper sense of the present distresses of America, than I,” he insisted, “or would rejoice more to see these removed, and our liberties settled on a permanent, constitutional foundation.” But republicanism truly did seem to him a formula for anarchy, and independence a recipe for decline. He owed it “to God, to my King and Country” to resist. Where Paine had presented his text as the anonymous work of “an Englishman,” Inglis—who was born in Ireland—published his pamphlet under the proud label of “an American.”27