Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Inglis hoped that Paine’s pamphlet, “like others, will sink in oblivion.”28 Instead it was a runaway sensation. Said to have sold half a million copies in 1776 alone—enough for one in every five Americans to own one—the pamphlet helped convert Americans en masse to the idea of independence.29 Copies of Inglis’s pamphlet, by contrast, were seized from the printer and burned in what Inglis condemned as “a violent attack on the Liberty of the Press.” More outrages followed. The New York committee of safety ordered the loyalist-leaning governors of King’s College—today’s Columbia University—to empty out the college library so the facility could be turned into a barracks for Continental Army troops. In May 1776, suspected New York loyalists were rounded up and forced to hand over any weapons in their possession; the next month, more were seized by a mob, “rode on Rails, their Cloth’s torn off, & much beaten & abused. Many were obliged to fly out of the City, & durst not return.” By summer, Inglis and his friends were living in “the utmost Consternation and Terror” in the wake of a rumored plot to assassinate George Washington.30

  And then, on July 4, 1776, Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence. All patriot talk of union, reform, and British liberties was swept away, replaced by Thomas Jefferson’s crystalline presentation of universal, “self-evident,” and “unalienable rights.” On paper, the declaration transformed thirteen British colonies into independent and “united States of America.” It would take a lot more to make the United States real in practice, but the declaration had a critical effect on consolidating patriot and loyalist positions. From now on, independence was the dividing line: either you were for it or you were against it. Independence made anybody who aided or abetted the British into a traitor against the United States. It also came with a symbol attached. The language of the declaration turned King George III into the embodiment of everything patriots hated about British rule. For loyalists, by contrast, the king provided a focal point of unity; supporting him was the one thing they all believed in.

  No more king, no more Parliament, no more British Empire: as news of the declaration whipped across America, people instantly understood its significance. Emblems of the king’s authority came crashing down in an iconoclastic frenzy. Patriots marched through the streets of Boston tearing down inn signs, placards, and anything else bearing royal insignia. In Baltimore, they wheeled a statue of the king through the streets like a condemned man headed for execution and set it ablaze before a crowd of thousands. On Bowling Green in New York City, a crowd of soldiers and eager civilians looped ropes around a monumental equestrian statue of King George III, toppled it from its marble pedestal, chopped off the statue’s head, and planted it on a spike of iron fence. Inglis recorded how the decapitated remains were paraded through the city to the Continental Army camp, where “the Declaration of Independency was read at the Head of several Regiments.” Its valuable lead would be melted down into more than forty thousand bullets.31

  Inglis remained frightened by “the critical situation of affairs” and “the most violent threats flung out against any who would presume to pray for the King.” Fortunately for him, a deliverance of sorts was at hand. Preparing for an invasion of New York City, Royal Navy ships crowded into the harbor “as thick as trees in a forest.”32 In the last week of August 1776, thirty thousand British troops landed in Brooklyn in great red waves. They routed Washington’s Continental Army on Brooklyn Heights and crossed the East River to seize Manhattan. Britain’s comprehensive victory in New York almost ended the war on the spot—though through bad British decisions and good American luck, Washington escaped to fight another day. Instead, New York City became the central British base of operations for the rest of the war. It also became the largest loyalist stronghold in the colonies. Loyalists surged into this safe haven from surrounding war-torn areas.33 In September 1776, when the British occupation began, the city contained a mere five thousand residents, many patriots having fled in the face of the British advance. Less than six months later, loyalist refugees had doubled the population, and soon New York played home to twenty-five to thirty thousand loyalists, making it the second largest city in the colonies.34

  Refugees came to New York City in search of protection and stability, but these, they found, had a price. A few nights after the British arrival, a fire broke out on one of the slips at Manhattan’s southeastern tip. Sheets of flame blazed up Broadway, consuming as many as a quarter of the city’s buildings in its wake. British commanders concluded that the fire had been started by patriot arsonists, and promptly placed New York City under martial law; it remained under military rule until the end of the war.35 Loyalists deeply resented living under military occupation, subordinated to the whims of raucous British troops.36 (Not for nothing had the quartering of British soldiers in American homes been a long-standing colonial grievance.) In the fall of 1776, the disgruntled New York refugees presented a petition to the British commanders in chief complaining about martial law. “Notwithstanding the tumult of the times, and the extreme difficulties and losses to which many of us have been exposed, we have always expressed, and do now give this Testimony of our Zeal to preserve and support the constitutional supremacy of Great Britain over the Colonies,” the petitioners stressed. “[S]o far from having given the least countenance of encouragement, to the most unnatural, unprovoked Rebellion, that ever disgraced the annals of Time; we have on the contrary, steadily and uniformly opposed it, in every stage of its rise and progress, at the risque of our Lives and Fortunes.” In return for their loyalty, they argued, they deserved to be treated with “some line of distinction”—not the imperial iron fist that clenched them more tightly than ever.37

  A frank declaration of dependence, this document conspicuously lacks the rhetorical grace and inspiration of the Declaration of Independence. But it gives clear insight into what a large cross section of American loyalists wanted from the British Empire. They had no wish to “dissolve the political bands” with Britain, as the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed. On the contrary, they sought “a speedy restoration of that union” between Britain and the colonies that had produced so much “mutual happiness and prosperity.” At the same time, these New Yorkers were not backward-looking reactionaries. Their quest for a civil reunion with Britain would have inclined them toward plans like Joseph Galloway’s, in which the colonies would gain greater autonomy. Nor were they unthinkingly “loyal” to what was effectively an army of occupation.

  The “declaration of dependence” also nicely illustrates who these loyalists actually were. For three days in late November 1776, the petition sat on a table at Scott’s Tavern in Wall Street, to be signed by anybody who wished. In all, more than seven hundred people came to put their names to the parchment—twelve times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence. The list of signatories ranged from grandees fat with land and capital to small-time local farmers and artisans. The very first signer, Hugh Wallace, counted among the wealthiest traders in the city; he and his brother Alexander, émigrés from Ireland, had cemented their self-made success by marrying two sisters of Isaac Low, the former congressman. Charles Inglis and New York’s other principal clergymen followed immediately below. Representatives of New York’s great landed families, the DeLanceys, the Livingstons, and the Philipses, also inscribed their names to the petition. The majority of signatures, though, belonged to the ordinary people who made New York run: tavern-keepers and carpenters, farmers from the Hudson Valley and New Jersey, Germans, Dutch, Scots, and Welsh. Here was the baker Joseph Orchard, who supplied the British army with bread, and the hairdresser and perfumer James Deas. Many signatories later joined up to fight: men like Amos Lucas, who left his farm on Long Island to join a loyalist regiment, and the Greenwich blacksmith James Stewart, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, who enlisted in the British army in 1777. While the petition recorded the social hierarchy of the times—with “leading citizens” at the top and their clients and subordinates below—it also demonstrated th
e social diversity of loyalism.38

  As patriots united around the idea of an independent nation, loyalty to the king helped a parallel America coalesce around an ideal of enduring empire. Yet these New York loyalists confronted an ominous portent of what would become a recurring loyalist predicament. They found a place of safety, yes, but it was not necessarily a comfortable one. What they wanted from Britain was not always what British authorities would give them. And though they were not prepared to abandon the imperial connection altogether, they had no desire to be treated as supplicant minions either. It was one thing to experience such treatment in a time of war. But many would find, to their chagrin, that such disjunctures between loyalist expectation and British practice stretched on well into the peace.

  It was no wonder, then, that colonists inclined toward the king could feel pressed between a rock and a hard place, reluctant to commit themselves openly to a loyalist cause that might bring nothing but punishment, property confiscation, dislocation, and discomfort in its wake. This was the dilemma that New York landowner Beverley Robinson wrestled with in the winter of 1777. The war had been going on for nearly two years, yet Robinson still could not figure out what to do. Born in Virginia, Robinson had come to New York in the 1740s as an officer in a colonial regiment—along with his childhood friend and brother officer, George Washington. There he met and married a member of one of New York’s great landed families, Susanna Philipse. (Washington unsuccessfully courted Susanna’s sister, who passed him over for a future loyalist.) The marriage made Robinson one of the largest landed magnates in the region. The Robinsons lived in style in the Hudson Highlands, sixty miles north of New York City. Collecting ample rents from contented tenants, surrounded by good friends and neighbors, and raising a spirited brood of two daughters and five sons, Beverley Robinson had every reason to believe that the 1770s would be some of the best years of his life. “Since the time of the golden age there never was more perfect domestic happiness and rural life than that which he and his family enjoyed,” Robinson’s fourth son, Frederick Philipse “Phil” Robinson, glowingly recalled.39 Instead, Beverley Robinson found himself confronting the biggest decision he would ever have to make.

  Would he openly declare his loyalty to the king, to whom he had sworn repeated oaths of allegiance as a militia officer and county judge? Could he continue to stay quiet? Or would he join many of his acquaintances in rejecting an imperial relationship gone sour? The stakes of his choice could not have been higher. In his heart of hearts, Robinson did not want his world to change—and why should he? As a patrician landowner he enjoyed a life as close to that of an English aristocrat as America could offer. Yet coming out as a loyalist would carry substantial risks for himself, his family, and his property. Besides, he cared deeply for his country and its future. If the colonies won the war and the United States became independent, he was not necessarily prepared to abandon New York in consequence.

  Robinson was lucky that the rebels did not show up on his doorstep, as they had at Thomas Brown’s. But in February 1777, matters came to a head when Robinson was summoned before a “Committee to Detect Conspiracies” and interrogated about his neutrality. One of the examiners was Robinson’s old friend John Jay, the New York lawyer and congressman. “Sir,” Jay told him soberly, “we have crossed the Rubicon and it is now necessary for every man [to] Take his part, Cast off all allegiance to the King of Great Britain and take an oath of allegiance to the States of America or go over to the Enemy for we have Declared our Selves Independent.”40 The dilemma cut Robinson to the core. “I cannot yet think of forfeiting my allegiance to the King,” he wrote to Jay in distress after their meeting, and yet “I am as unwilling to remove myself or family from this place.” He would take counsel one last time with his friends, he said, “on the unhappy & distracted state of my poor Bleeding Country.” “If I am convinced that a Reconciliation cannot be had upon just & reasonable terms,” Robinson concluded, “I will … content myself to share the same state as my Country. Nothing shall ever tempt or force me to do any thing, that I think … will be prejudicial to my Country.”41

  Robinson’s struggle was agonizing for Jay too. Jay had long hoped for peaceful reconciliation with Britain himself—hence his support of Galloway’s plan of union. Facing the Rubicon of independence, he crossed; but several close friends stayed back.42 Hoping to prevent another ruptured friendship, Jay addressed a heartfelt appeal to Susanna Robinson, entreating her to persuade her husband to back down from declaring his loyalism. “Mr. Robinson has put his own & the Happiness of his Family & Posterity at Hazard—and for what? For the Sake of a fanciful Regard to an Ideal Obligation to a Prince … who with his Parliament … claim a Right to bind you & your Children in all Cases whatsoever.” He invited her to consider what would become of the Robinsons if they remained loyal. “Remember that should you carry your numerous Family to New York Famine may meet you & incessant anxiety banish your Peace,” he warned:

  Picture to your Imagination a City besieged, yourself & Children mixt with contending Armies—Should it be evacuated, where, with whom & in what Manner are you next to fly? Can you think of living under the restless wings of an Army? Should Heaven determine that America shall be free, In what Country are you prepared to spend the Remainder of your Days & how provide for your Children? These Things it is true may not happen, but dont forget that they may.43

  Jay’s warnings proved astonishingly prescient. But such visions could not change his friends’ ultimate refusal, even in the face of civil war, to renounce the king. In March 1777, Beverley Robinson took his stand and joined the British outright. Though the Robinsons had long sat on the sidelines of the conflict, the family now threw themselves into war. Robinson raised a new provincial regiment (one of the brigades of loyalist soldiers attached to the British army), called the Loyal American Regiment, and served as its colonel. His eldest son, Beverley Robinson Jr., acted as the regiment’s lieutenant colonel, and his second son as a captain.44 When his fourth son Phil Robinson reached fighting age—thirteen—the youth took up a commission in a British infantry unit. Susanna Robinson and the other children retreated into occupied New York City for safety. There, at a small ceremony performed by Charles Inglis, the younger Beverley married Anna Barclay, the sister of another Loyal American officer. While the Robinson family fought to preserve their vision of imperial America, the state of New York confiscated Robinson’s estates in the name of independence. In later years, Washington and his officers used the Robinson house as a headquarters, directing offensives against the British from the very same rooms in which he had dined and drunk as his loyal friend’s guest.45

  AS BEVERLEY ROBINSON wavered over whether to take a stand in the war, a neighboring population of New Yorkers was already actively engaged in the British cause. They were Mohawk Indians, one of the many indigenous nations drawn into the American Revolution. For all that their experiences manifestly differed from those of colonists and slaves, they belong in the same frame as white and black loyalists for several reasons. Not least, Indian participation in the war loomed large in colonists’ perceptions, and had some influence on their own choice of sides.46 But this was not just a civil war among whites. It aligned and divided North America’s native peoples too. For the Mohawks among others, fighting with the British led to outcomes that resembled and intersected with those of white and black loyalists—and ultimately pulled them, too, into the ranks of loyalist refugees.

  On the frontiers of white settlement, the American Revolution did not look like a war about taxation and representation. This was a war about access to land, and it was triggered less by revenue-raising measures such as the Stamp Act than by the Proclamation of 1763, by which Britain banned colonial settlement west of the Appalachians.47 British officials passed the measure in part to stave off the inevitable violence between whites and Indians that accompanied expansion. To land-hungry settlers nothing could be more noxious. Decades of warfare between colonists and Indian “savages”
had produced excruciatingly savage forms of warfare in turn—epitomized, for whites, by the practice of scalping.48 (When Thomas Brown described “my head scalped in 3 or 4 places” on that August day in 1775, he deployed the worst slur available to colonial Americans: he likened his attackers to Indians.)49 The violent history of Indian-white relations had important repercussions for frontier colonists’ decisions about loyalty. One of the reasons Brown and his neighbors stayed loyal was because they counted on the British government to protect them from Indians. Yet one of the grounds patriots cited for rebellion was that the British had failed to protect them.

  The coming of revolution presented Indians, too, with a choice. European powers had long relied on Indians to fight alongside them in colonial wars, and this was no exception. Both British and patriot agents worked to recruit Indians into their service, leaving Indians to weigh up their own questions of belief, conscience, and collective interest. Which side would enable them to protect their autonomy best? For no native population would such calculations be better documented, and perhaps more shrewdly measured, than the Mohawks. Because Indian nations in this period remained autonomous powers, historians have often resisted labeling those who fought for the British as “loyalists” instead of “allies.” But the Mohawks’ connection with Britain ran especially long and deep. In their own telling and that of their white peers, they could be considered loyalists too.