Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Despite the brutality that had unfolded at Yorktown, Cornwallis and Washington agreed quickly on mutually acceptable terms for the surrender and the fate of British prisoners of war—often a sticking point in such negotiations. But one group of Yorktown survivors found themselves entirely unprotected. In the draft terms of capitulation he sent to Washington, Cornwallis specified that “Natives or inhabitants of different parts of this country, at present at York[town] and Gloucester, are not to be punished on account of having joined the British army.” In his view, the surviving loyalists who stumbled out of the ravaged encampment had already been punished enough. But Washington bluntly replied that “this article cannot be assented to.”95 It was the only one of Cornwallis’s requests that he rejected outright. Loyalists had chosen the British. Now they would have to cope with the consequences of their choice.

  William Faden, A Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia, 1780. (illustration credit 1.3)

  CHAPTER TWO

  An Unsettling Peace

  A CROSS THE ATLANTIC, when news of Cornwallis’s surrender reached the embattled British prime minister Lord North, he took it “as he would have taken a ball in his breast.” “Oh god! It is all over,” he exclaimed, throwing his arms into the air and pacing frantically about the room.1 He was—at one level—right. Yorktown is conventionally understood as the endpoint of the war. It was the last pitched battle between the British and Continental armies, and led directly to the peace negotiations that resulted in British recognition of American independence.

  But as even North must have known, it would take more than surrender to end this war. Beyond America, Britain’s global conflict against France and Spain raged on. Yorktown did not pull back the British forces sweating it out in southern India against French-allied Tipu Sultan. It did not relieve the British soldiers defending Gibraltar and Minorca against the Spanish. Crucially, it did not stop the French fleet that had trapped Cornwallis in Virginia from cruising into the Caribbean and threatening Britain’s valuable sugar islands. Within America, too, hostilities continued to an extent not often appreciated in standard histories of the revolution. The war between Lord Cornwallis and George Washington may have ended in the trenches outside Yorktown, but Thomas Brown’s war was not over, nor was Joseph Brant’s. From the outskirts of New York City to the Florida borderlands, partisan fighting nagged and gnawed at American communities. After Britain ceased offensive operations in January 1782, this was more than ever a civil war, waged by loyalists, patriots, and Indians.

  Loyalists responded to news of Yorktown very differently from North. At first, some didn’t even believe it. “A Hand Bill from Jersey of the Surrender of Lord Cornwallis … shocks the Town,” wrote New York’s loyalist chief justice William Smith in his diary six days after Yorktown. “I give no Credit to it,” he comfortably concluded, “but suspect an Artifice to prevent the Insurrection of the Loyalists or some Operations on our part.”2 The fifty-three-year-old jurist was a skeptic by nature, which was one reason that he, like Beverley Robinson, had delayed taking a public stand until he was summoned before a patriot committee and forced to choose between swearing allegiance to the republic or moving to British-occupied New York City. When push came to shove, Smith moved to New York. Of course, he quickly recognized the awful truth about Yorktown when veterans arrived in New York bearing eyewitness accounts of the battle and the miserable “Fate of the [loyalist] Refugees left there to the Mercy of the Usurpers.” But as Smith and other influential loyalists saw it, there was still no reason to consider the war over or lost. Smith and his friends concocted various strategies to “balance the Southern Disaster” with further British attacks. “There are 40 Thousand Men … here, including Canada and [St.] Augustine,” insisted one, and “if we had made a right Use of them all would have been well, and … there is still no Cause to despair.”3 A somewhat different plan for a troop surge was suggested by John Cruden, the commissioner for sequestered estates in Charleston. Raise an army of ten thousand freed slaves, he said, and America could yet “be conquered with its own force.” Cruden sent the proposal to his patron Lord Dunmore, who enthusiastically forwarded it to General Henry Clinton.4

  Even if Britain stopped fighting, loyalists believed that British rule in the colonies could still be saved. Britain could refuse to grant the colonies independence and instead offer them some kind of self-rule, rather like Joseph Galloway’s plan of union, or an analogous proposal by William Smith to create an American parliament.5 This had been the thrust of British peace initiatives during the war, which had granted virtually everything the colonists had requested up to 1775, and even floated the possibility of admitting American representatives into the House of Commons. Though Congress had dismissed the most significant British overture, the Carlisle peace commission of 1778, insisting on independence as a prerequisite for further talks, Smith, Galloway, and others still held out for an imperial federal union.6 Loyalists could perhaps take some comfort in knowing that King George III himself was so strongly opposed to independence that he threatened to abdicate if it were granted. “A separation from America would anihilate the rank in which the British empire stands among European States,” he declared, “and would render my situation in this country below continuing an object to me.”7

  Partly because of the range of possibilities still in play after Yorktown, it took a year for British and American negotiators to work out a preliminary peace treaty, and another year until a definitive peace was signed and British troops evacuated. Historians tend to fast-forward through these two years as if their outcome were inevitable. But for loyalists in America, especially those who had already fled to British-occupied cities, these years of peacemaking proved just as stressful as the years of war. Loyalists saw their hopes for a continued British relationship with the colonies dashed, one after another. They wanted renewed military offensives; but Britain declared a cessation of hostilities. They wanted the colonies to remain part of a confederated empire; Britain acknowledged U.S. independence. They wanted protection from reprisals and security of property; the Anglo-American treaty left many feeling just as “abandoned” by the British as the Yorktown loyalists had been. They wanted to preserve the British Empire, and instead they watched the British start to leave. By the middle of 1782, loyalists in British-occupied New York, Charleston, and Savannah confronted urgent choices about where to vest their own futures: in the United States or in other quarters of the British Empire. In a climate of persistent violence and uncertainty, the majority chose to evacuate with the British. Yet the wrenching results of the peace also left them feeling deeply frustrated with the British authorities who brokered it. Loyalists thus often went into exile harboring grievances against the very same government they relied on for support. Their disheartening final months in America laid the groundwork for a recurring pattern of discontent elsewhere in the British Empire, with repercussions as far afield as Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone.

  It was to be as much in European political and diplomatic councils as on a Virginia battlefield that loyalist dreams came crashing down. Back in Westminster, support crumbled for the war effort and the wavering government of Lord North. After all, many Britons had never wanted to go to war in the colonies in the first place. The “friends of America” included some of the greatest politicians of the age, such as the eminent political philosopher Edmund Burke. They also included future leaders William Pitt the Younger, elected to Parliament in 1781 at the tender age of twenty-one, and Charles James Fox, a radical aristocrat, who ostentatiously dressed in buff and blue, the colors of Washington’s army. Though North’s political adversaries had long been stymied by their own internal rifts, the opposition regrouped after Yorktown and emerged determined to bring the war in America to an end.8

  Late one February night in 1782, a venerable general rose from the narrow wooden benches of the House of Commons to speak out against a war “marked in the best blood of the empire,” “traced … by the ravaging of towns
and the murder of families; by outrages in every corner of America, and by ruin at home.”9 He went on to propose a motion to end “the farther prosecution of the offensive war on the continent of North America, for the purpose of reducing the revolted colonies to obedience by force.” At half past one in the morning, Parliament voted in favor of the motion by a slim margin of nineteen votes.10 Two weeks later, North failed a vote of “no further confidence” (the first use of such a measure in British history) and submitted his resignation.11 In North’s leavetaking meeting with King George III the next day, the king, resistant to the bitter end to the idea of American independence, dismissed his prime minister coldly, saying, “Remember, my Lord, that it is you who desert me, not I you.”12

  In June 1782, the new prime minister, William Petty, Earl of Shelburne—another friend of America—took the critical decision to acknowledge American independence. This concession made sense from a metropolitan British perspective, because the future of the thirteen colonies was only part of a larger strategic picture involving France and Spain. It mattered less to Britain whether the United States was independent than whether it remained in a British, as opposed to French, sphere of influence. For loyalists, though, this was the worst news yet, ending any prospect of continued imperial ties. It also raised the next major challenge for administrators. How would the colonial relationship actually be dismantled? This question had two distinct parts. One was addressed in Paris, where British and American peace negotiators began to hash out the details of U.S. independence. There were borders to be drawn. There were economic relationships to be untangled, from trade privileges to the resolution of transatlantic debts. Then there was the issue that most gripped the loyalists’ attention. What provisions would be made to protect them from legal and social reprisals, and compensate them for their confiscated property?

  Meanwhile in North America, British officials had to figure out how to phase out Britain’s physical presence on the ground. There were about thirty-five thousand British and Hessian troops to be withdrawn, and substantial British garrisons in three cities—New York, Charleston, and Savannah—to be dismantled. These cities also held at least sixty thousand loyalists and slaves living under British protection, whose welfare had to be taken into account. A further difficulty was that Sir Henry Clinton had resigned his position as commander in chief immediately after Yorktown, leaving nobody actually in charge of superintending this huge task. The job description for his successor was as awe-inspiring as it was unenviable: it required nothing short of deconstructing the apparatus of an empire from the bottom up. Who could be entrusted with it? Fortunately the king and his ministers, despite their many differences, readily agreed on whom to appoint. Sir Guy Carleton, veteran military officer and colonial administrator, was their man.

  OF ALL the British officials who influenced the fate of refugee loyalists, Sir Guy Carleton was far and away the most significant, and also the most trusted and well liked. (Lord Dunmore, for instance, who continued to be involved in loyalist affairs, rarely commanded either trust or affection.) As the primary manager of Britain’s evacuation from the United States, Carleton bore the brunt of responsibility for the refugees and slaves under British protection. His actions determined their futures to an extent unrivalled by any other policymaker, and his ideas defined the shape of the loyalist migration in crucial ways. So what sort of a person was the new commander in chief? Horace Walpole, one of Georgian Britain’s sharpest commentators, estimated Carleton to be “a grave man, and good officer, and reckoned sensible”—a sight better than any of the ineffectual commanders who had preceded him.13 Many of those who met the general agreed with Walpole’s assessment. Stiff and closed in demeanor, Carleton may well have chilled less commanding souls when he looked down his long, severe nose at them from an imposing height (for the era) of six feet. But if anybody could have glimpsed behind the general’s ungiving façade as he traveled down to Portsmouth on April 1, 1782, and waited for the Ceres to sail to New York, they would surely have detected confidence and at least a whiff of self-congratulation. For Carleton had been to North America before, three memorable times—and this appointment, coming on the heels of a long period in the political wilderness, represented a personal vindication.

  Carleton was himself a creation of the British Atlantic world, and his pre-revolutionary experiences in North America shaped the attitudes he brought to his later career. Born outside Londonderry in 1724 into the ranks of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry, Carleton, like so many other boys from ambitious families on the margins of the British Isles, joined the army as a teenager—a path chosen by his brothers as well. He soon became close friends with another officer two years his junior, James Wolfe. While Carleton doggedly served out his lieutenantcy, Wolfe shot up through the ranks, impressing his seniors and fighting in some of the period’s key battles. Soon Carleton’s friend had become his most important patron. In 1758, Wolfe got Carleton appointed quartermaster-general on a campaign the younger man was to command against the French in Canada. They sailed out in 1759—Carleton’s first voyage to North America—and together spent a frustrating summer laying siege to the city of Quebec. In September 1759, Wolfe plotted a daring assault on the fortified capital, hoping to take it by storm. As the morning mist rose on the day of the attack, Carleton stood in the front line of redcoats on the Plains of Abraham, outside the city walls, commanding an elite detachment of grenadiers. By afternoon, he had fallen wounded in the head. His friend Wolfe lay dead. But the battle had been won, and it proved a significant victory indeed. Thanks to the capture of Quebec, the whole of French Canada was ceded to the British Empire in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. In his will, Wolfe left “all books and papers” to Carleton, and a handsome legacy of £1,000.14

  Carleton would not figure in the phenomenally popular 1771 painting The Death of General Wolfe produced by the American-born artist Benjamin West, which catapulted Wolfe (and West) to stardom—and Carleton must have felt the loss of his friend’s patronage power at least as much as the loss of his companionship. By then, Carleton had returned to Quebec as imperial governor and brigadier general. He took up his post within the stone-walled capital almost seven years to the day after he had fought on the battlefield outside it. As he surveyed the city from the windows of the crumbling old Château Saint-Louis, Carleton might have felt he had returned full circle in one further respect. As a colony overwhelmingly composed of white but Catholic, non-Anglophone subjects, Quebec resembled no part of the British Empire so much as his native Ireland. Carleton applied himself to learning French, and to managing the competing interests of the majority French Catholic population (the habitants) and the small but vocal community of Anglophone Protestant merchants. British forms of government “never will produce the same Fruits as at Home,” Carleton decided, “chiefly because it is impossible for the Dignity of the Throne, or Peerage, to be represented in the American Forests.” As such, he systematically supported preserving French systems in place of introducing British laws and institutions “ill adapted to the Genius of the Canadians,” and equally strongly upheld the power of authoritarian direct rule.15 In 1770, he traveled to England to consult with the government on how to reform Canadian administration. These discussions culminated in the Quebec Act of 1774, widely understood as a milestone in British imperial legislative efforts to accommodate culturally and ethnically alien subjects.

  Carleton returned to his post later that year, bringing with him a charming new wife—aristocratic, French-educated, and thirty years his junior—their two small sons, and clarified powers under the Quebec Act. While maintaining French civil law and ensuring freedom of worship for Catholics, the Quebec Act also ostensibly protected French Canadian interests by entrusting sole legislative authority to the governor and council. There was to be no elected assembly, no trial by jury, no habeas corpus—measures, according to Carleton, that French Canadians had no wish for. Edmund Burke, among others, condemned the measure as despotic, but as one minister quip
ped back, “if despotic government is to be trusted in any hands … I am persuaded it will be as safe in [Carleton’s] as in anybody’s.”16 Carleton himself, highly satisfied with an act drawn up in large part to his own design, was pleased to find that most Québécois welcomed its terms.17

  The trouble was that Anglo-Canadians—to say nothing of British subjects in the thirteen colonies—did not. They saw it as both overly authoritarian and an affront to their own rights and interests. The discontents tearing apart the American colonies to the south soon made their way into the coffee houses of Canada. Reports told of travelers from Boston being intercepted and searched on the roads by Canadian dissidents who were trying to sever communication between British officials. Agents from Massachusetts infiltrated the province to organize antigovernment resistance. A few days after the battles at Lexington and Concord, Anglo-Canadian patriots in Montreal poured black paint over a bust of George III, topped it with a mitre, and hung a rude sign around it reading, “Behold the Pope of Canada or the English Fool.”18 Though the habitants did not rally en masse to the patriots, much to Carleton’s relief, they also appeared unresponsive to his efforts to form a militia for provincial defense.19

  Neutrality is all well and good until you get invaded. Ill-equipped, and reluctant to recruit large numbers of Indians (as some British officials encouraged him to do), Carleton had just about managed to fend off guerrilla raids with his limited troops. But in September 1775 the Continental Army invaded Canada, under the command of Generals Benedict Arnold and Richard Montgomery, and sped against the onset of winter toward Quebec. Would it have encouraged or chastened the governor to know that he himself had successfully besieged the city he now endeavored to defend? Before dawn on the last day of 1775, the hungry, half-frozen Americans assaulted the city with a stinging blizzard blowing at their backs. By the time the late sun curved into the sky, it was all over. As in 1759, the leading attackers had fallen outside the walls: Arnold with his left leg shattered, Montgomery dead in the snow. But the American painter John Trumbull’s attempt to immortalize the episode with The Death of General Montgomery enjoyed less success than his teacher Benjamin West’s depiction of Wolfe. Because this time it was Quebec’s defenders who won, securing the province in the British Empire. Years later, Carleton would find himself lending the lamed Arnold a supportive arm, as the American limped into his first audience with the king.20