Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Part of a confederacy of Iroquois nations known as the Six Nations, the Mohawks had an alliance with Britain dating back to well before the revolution. The “Covenant Chain,” as the Anglo-Iroquois alliance was called, was anchored both in treaties and in transformative personal relationships. For nearly twenty years it had been nurtured by Sir William Johnson, the enormously influential superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern department. The archetype of a successful Irish immigrant, Johnson had arrived in New York in 1738 with little more than a good connection (his uncle was a prominent admiral) and a dozen families he had recruited to settle on his uncle’s lands. He ended up building a sprawling personal empire of 400,000 acres stretching across the Mohawk Valley. At his manor house, Johnson Hall, Sir William lived in neo-feudal splendor surrounded by hundreds of tenant farmers. At the same time, in partnership with his third wife, Mary “Molly” Brant, a prominent Mohawk, he presided over a multicultural domain. The couple raised their eight half-white, half-Mohawk children in a house built in the best Georgian style, where they were served by black slaves and surrounded by white and Indian visitors. At regular Indian councils the Johnsons hosted sumptuous feasts for hundreds, to negotiate and seal deals around the council fire. Johnson’s commanding influence among colonists and Indians alike allowed him to broker the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, which established a firm boundary between British and Indian lands in New York and Pennsylvania.

  Johnson died in 1774, on the eve of his world’s disintegration. But “Johnson” remained a name to conjure with in upstate New York. The office of superintendent would be assumed by his son-in-law Guy Johnson and his son Sir John Johnson in turn; another son-in-law acted as deputy superintendent. And while the Johnsons privileged the Mohawks in British policy, the Mohawks privileged the British in turn. When war erupted just months after Sir William’s death, Molly Brant, the powerful doyenne of Johnson Hall, actively worked to rally the Iroquois to the British cause. Loyalism, to her, was the obvious stance: personal connections and anti-settler animosity, as well as considered self-interest, all pointed toward the British. The other Six Nations members followed the Mohawks’ choice—with one notable exception. Acting on a calculation that the patriots might win the war, the Oneida Indians opted to join the other side. The American Revolution thus divided the Iroquois confederacy against itself, breaking the Six Nations into five versus one; it also split nations from within, with some villages remaining neutral while others went to war.50

  Molly Brant’s actions convinced the British that “one word from her is more taken Notice of by the five Nations than a thousand from any white Man without exception.”51 As such, the British repeatedly offered her special favors, such as houses and allowances to the tune of three to four thousand pounds per year.52 New York patriots, meanwhile, provided different testament to Brant’s influence. “Mary Brant (alias Johnson)” was one of only five women recorded on a list of loyalists formally stripped of their property under the New York State confiscation act. (The other four women were all Johnsons.)53 However she may have characterized her own position, these British and American actions clearly portrayed Molly Brant as a loyalist.

  But the relationship between the British and the Mohawks would be embodied most visibly in Molly’s forty-year-old brother Thayendanegea—or as his non-Indian friends preferred to call him, Joseph Brant.54 In Mohawk Thayendanegea means “two sticks,” or “he who places two bets,” and it was an apt name for a man who had come of age between cultures, welcomed into the mixed community of Johnson Hall by his sister Molly and treated almost as an adoptive son by Sir William. At the age of eighteen, Joseph, already a decorated veteran of the Seven Years’ War, set out under Johnson’s patronage for the well-known “Indian school” in Connecticut run by missionary Eleazer Wheelock. He later self-deprecatingly described his command of English, which he perfected at the school, as “half English half Indian,” but there was some truth to the label, for Wheelock’s school also helped Brant cement a double status.55 Thanks to his ancestry and marriages, Brant enjoyed a high position in Mohawk society and politics, and lived in comfort on his parents’ farm in the Mohawk Valley. At the same time, he associated easily with whites, became a devout Christian, and acted as interpreter to the Anglican missionary to the Mohawks, John Stuart.56

  The revolution set Brant’s cross-cultural role on an international stage. Soon he became chief sachem of the Mohawks, as Thayendanegea, and held a military commission as Captain Joseph Brant, the highest-ranking Indian in British service. He also learned to play the part of Anglo-Mohawk to dazzling perfection. In late 1775, Brant accompanied the superintendent of Indian affairs, Guy Johnson, to London, hoping to earn support for Mohawk land claims through a direct appeal to the king. “When he wore the ordinary European habit,” a contemporary newspaper noted, “there did not seem to be anything about him that marked preeminence.” But he knew how to make himself stand out. He sat for the popular society portraitist George Romney, crowned with a plume of scarlet feathers, cloak balanced over his left hand and tomahawk in his right, crucifix and gorget glinting around his neck. He charmed James Boswell, was presented at court, and was inducted into a celebrated Masonic lodge. As for his own impressions of London, it was the ladies that impressed him most, he said—and the sleek, swift horses.57

  Spearheaded by the Brants, and building on the Johnson legacy, Mohawk participation in the Revolutionary War represented a genuine merging of multinational interests under the banner of the British Empire. As loyalists, the Mohawks would be able to call on a larger degree of support and patronage from the British than any other Indian nation. The British in turn relied on them to help secure the Canadian borderlands, the longest Anglo-American frontier. But loyalism did not ultimately shield the Mohawks when the war started to go against them.

  The summer of 1777 was a savage one in the Mohawk Valley, as ferocious battles ripped the Iroquois confederacy apart. Patriot and Oneida forces sacked Molly Brant’s home village of Canajoharie and looted her house; one officer made repeated visits to haul off wagonloads of her silk gowns and gold and silver ornaments. Patriots moved into the Mohawks’ handsome houses and feasted on their stores of corn, cabbage, and potatoes.58 But that year would be remembered more for another British offensive in New York. This campaign, led by General John Burgoyne, was designed to divide the colonies and win the war for Britain. In the event, things turned out quite differently. An unfortunate incident during the course of the British advance portended worse to come, when a young American woman was killed and scalped by British Indian allies. The episode fueled patriot hysteria against the British, linking the redcoats ever more closely with the red-skinned “savages” they deployed.59 Volunteers massed to the patriots, while Burgoyne’s position steadily deterioriated. By October, the British army had dwindled from about eight thousand men to five thousand, and was confronted by an American force twice the size. Chased and bothered by American attacks, they reached the New York village of Saratoga, near Albany, so exhausted that they dropped to the sodden ground and slept through a heavy rain. On October 17, 1777, completely surrounded and under constant fire, General Burgoyne surrendered his army to the patriots.60

  The British surrender at Saratoga was a turning point in the American Revolution. The top British commanders resigned in humiliation; the British government in Westminster became irreversibly divided. Most significantly, Saratoga brought America a crucial European ally, when France entered the war on America’s side. Spain followed suit a year later. Suddenly, Britain was no longer simply fighting the patriots in North America. It was fighting its two biggest imperial rivals in a war around the world. The entry of foreign powers also had critical effects in deepening the sense of division between patriots and loyalists, Americans and Britons. It was no coincidence that persecution of loyalists measurably increased after Saratoga, manifested in a series of anti-loyalist laws. Within six months of the battle, six states had stiffened and expanded their tes
t laws, enforcing loyalty oaths. In 1778 New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina all passed punitive laws allowing loyalists to be arrested or banished. Pennsylvania passed an act of attainder against “divers traitors.” New Jersey established a committee of safety. Delaware prohibited trade with the enemy. Georgia implemented a vague but sinister law against “the dangerous consequences that may arise from the practices of disaffected … persons within this state.”61 And when the British strategically abandoned Philadelphia in June 1778, just nine months after they had captured it, thousands more loyalists became refugees—including Joseph Galloway and his daughter Betsy, bound for Britain.

  It was not only whites who took flight. Saratoga very nearly sounded the death knell for Iroquois support of the British. “Upon the News of General Burgoynes Disaster,” Molly Brant “found the five Nations very wavering & unstable.” Still, she rallied her allies, reminding a Seneca chief “of the former great Friendship & Attachment which subsisted between him and the late Sr Wm Johnson, whose Memory she never mentions but with Tears in her Eyes” and of his promise “to live and die a firm Friend & Ally to the King of England and his Friends.” So persuasive were her arguments on the chief “and the rest of the 5 Nations present, that they promised her faithfully to stick up strictly to the Engagements to her late worthy Friend, and for his & her sake espouse the Kings Cause vigorously and steadily avenge her wrongs & Injuries.”62 Mohawk loyalism prevailed. But Molly Brant and most of the Mohawks had by now become refugees themselves by fleeing west to the Canadian frontier for safety, sharing in a common loyalist fate.

  EVER SINCE 1775, British officials had hoped for—if not expected and counted on—a large popular turnout among loyalists to bring the war swiftly to an end. About nineteen thousand loyalists joined provincial regiments, which compared reasonably well with the Continental Army’s maximum force of twenty-five thousand, but fell considerably short of the combined American strength including patriot militias, to say nothing of the hordes of men required by the consistently troop-starved British.63 After Saratoga, mustering loyalist manpower became more urgent than ever. Joseph Galloway and other prominent refugees in England persuaded British ministers, notably the colonial secretary Lord George Germain, that loyalists would still flock to the British flag if given the right support. The best prospects for this lay in the southern colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. Demographically, economically, and culturally, these colonies resembled the neighboring colonies of East and West Florida and the British West Indies—all of which remained loyal—about as much as they did those of New England, the hotbed of revolution. They had the highest ratio of slaves to whites in the colonies (hovering at about one to one), which tended to encourage a commitment to social stability among whites fearful of slave uprisings. Georgia, in particular, established in 1733, had a white population of only about thirty-five thousand, many of whom had close ties to Britain and the British Caribbean.64 So it made good sense for Britain to turn its strategic attention south after the disaster of Saratoga.

  John Lichtenstein (or Lightenstone, as he often Anglicized it) was exactly the kind of southern loyalist the British hoped would help. In 1762 Lichtenstein had immigrated to Georgia from the eastern fringe of Europe: he had been born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a German Protestant minister. In Georgia he married Catherine Delegal, the daughter of one of the colony’s first settlers, a Huguenot. Lichtenstein acquired a modest indigo plantation on Skidaway Island, south of Savannah, and a dozen slaves; he also earned a commission as captain of a government scout boat, patrolling coastal waterways. The Lichtensteins’ only child, Elizabeth, born in 1764, remembered her Skidaway home as a veritable eden of “figs, peaches, pomegranates, quinces, plums, mulberries, nectarines, and oranges.” But the idyll did not last. When Elizabeth was ten her mother died; and two years later, the outbreak of war upset her world again. Lichtenstein continued to command the scout boat until patriots demanded that he turn it over to them. He refused, staying loyal to the government to which he owed his livelihood. But the patriots confiscated the boat anyway, and Lichtenstein retreated to Skidaway.65

  One morning in 1776, while he was shaving, Lichtenstein looked out the window to see a group of armed men approaching. Fortunately for him, one of his slaves valiantly distracted the party, giving him time to dress hurriedly and slip away in a small boat along with three slaves. The fugitives made their way to a British man-of-war anchored off Savannah. Lichtenstein sailed with the ship (which was also carrying Georgia’s now deposed colonial governor, Sir James Wright) to the safe haven of Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax, he joined the 1776 expedition against New York City, and there was formally commissioned in the quartermaster’s office of the British army.

  It was in this capacity that Lichtenstein became one of three thousand British and loyalist soldiers who, in the last days of 1778, landed in the swamps outside Savannah to commence Britain’s southern offensive. For him and many of the men squelching through the rice fields, this was a homecoming. Lichtenstein knew the area so well that he helped the commanding officer, Highlander colonel Archibald Campbell, choose the spot to disembark. The British swiftly captured Savannah and established it as a bridgehead for further operations. Campbell marched toward Augusta to secure the backcountry, with the help of Thomas Brown’s Rangers and other loyalist reinforcements. Sir James Wright returned to his post as governor, making Georgia the only revolting colony formally restored to crown control.

  Through all this time, Elizabeth Lichtenstein had been tucked away from conflict on an aunt’s plantation in the country. Now back in Savannah, Lichtenstein immediately sent a passport for his long-lost daughter to join him. She entered a city still marked by battle: the streets were strewn with papers torn from books and ledgers; feathers ripped from bedding skimmed across the dirt. So much seemed new to her—her father, for a start, whom she had not seen in three years, and whom she regarded with reverence and awe. City life, too, presented unfamiliar scenes to an “unsophisticated girl, quite new to the world, its customs and usages,” who had spent the last few years effectively in hiding. Still, Elizabeth was no longer a child of twelve. At fifteen, she mixed with her father’s new loyalist friends as a young adult. Indeed, much to her father’s alarm, she promptly fell in love.66

  Elizabeth stayed in Savannah with the family of Dr. Lewis Johnston, a Scot who had immigrated to Georgia in the early 1750s via a short sojourn on St. Kitts, where he had married the niece of a planter. Johnston managed an impressively varied career as a medical doctor, a wealthy planter, and a public servant, as a member of the governor’s council and speaker of the assembly. When war broke out, the doctor and his family refused to break their allegiance and emerged among Savannah’s most prominent loyalists. One of Johnston’s younger brothers was Savannah’s leading printer and refused to print patriot declarations in his newspaper. To protect himself and his precious typefaces, he shut down the press and took his materials into the backcountry for safety.67 Dr. Johnston’s sons carried the family politics onto the battlefield. One son, Andrew, joined Brown’s Rangers and saw tough service on the Florida frontier. Another son, William Martin Johnston, escaped from Savannah on the same ship as John Lichtenstein—with whom he became good friends—and joined a loyalist regiment in New York. Before the war, “Billy” had been a popular if feckless medical student (studying under Philadelphia’s celebrated doctor and patriot Benjamin Rush), more given to gaming than books. Stationed in occupied New York, the captain quickly became one of the city’s “dashing fashionables,” a charmer, flirt, and gambler. So it was no wonder that when Lichtenstein’s twenty-five-year-old friend began paying court to young Elizabeth, ten years his junior—and when Elizabeth appeared responsive—the protective father promptly packed her back off to her aunt’s secluded estate. William Johnston left Savannah on a military expedition into South Carolina; Elizabeth pined for him in silence.68

  But a war that had divided so many others brought th
is couple together again. In early September 1779, a French fleet appeared off Savannah, and a Franco-American force laid siege to the city, outnumbering the defenders by five to one. William’s regiment rushed to Savannah’s defense. Elizabeth by then had returned to the city and was again staying with Dr. Johnston’s family. When the shelling began, she and the elder Johnstons retreated to an island just offshore and huddled in a barn with fifty-eight women and children “who had each one or more near relatives in the lines.” Fortunately for the besieged civilians, the bombs sailed straight over the defenders’ heads and fizzled out in Savannah’s sandy unpaved streets. After six days of bombardment, the French and Americans tried to take the city by storm, but were resoundingly repulsed. Loyalist civilians returned after the battle to find the roads “cut into deep holes by the shells,” and their houses “riddled with the rain of cannonballs.” But the Lichtensteins and Johnstons had made it through the ordeal untouched. Perhaps having survived the siege encouraged John Lichtenstein to relax his concerns about his daughter’s personal future. The next month, Elizabeth Lichtenstein and William Johnston got married.69 The union marked an enormous step up socially for the new Mrs. Johnston, from the middling plantocracy into a highly educated, politically influential, and well-off segment of the Georgia loyalist elite. In the years ahead William’s family connections determined the course of the couple’s life in significant ways.