Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  With the American invasion repelled, and the habitants having rejected a diplomatic overture from Congress to join the revolution, Carleton launched a counteroffensive into New York. In October 1776 he smashed the patriots at Lake Champlain and joined forces with Burgoyne. But, seeing “the severe season approaching very fast,” he withdrew into Canada for the winter.21 Burgoyne and others chastised him for not proceeding farther south to Fort Ticonderoga, a fatal blunder (they said) that allowed the Americans to get away. Whether or not they were right, the decision proved fatal for Carleton’s career. He had already made an enemy out of the influential colonial secretary Lord George Germain. Fortified by Burgoyne’s hostile reports, Germain fired Carleton from his military command and tried to recall him from the governorship. Carleton preemptively resigned his positions in 1777 and returned to England in disgust.

  His sixth Atlantic crossing carried him toward an uncertain future, his reputation tarnished and position reduced. Yet leaving North America ultimately put Carleton in the most advantageous situation he could have hoped for. One by one British generals fell in America, while Sir Guy and Lady Maria, comfortably distant from a badly managed war, made the rounds of London society, cementing their connections among the British elite. Carleton, without knowing it, had also landed in a fortunate political position. His abilities had made him an enduring favorite of the king, and now his feud with Germain endeared him to the parliamentary opposition as well. The appointment as commander in chief of British forces in North America offered an especially sweet satisfaction after his earlier dismissal from military command. And it must have been even better to know that his rehabilitation had helped force his hated rival Germain out of office.22

  So as he faced America again in the spring of 1782, Sir Guy had much to reminisce about. But it was time to confront the challenges ahead. He cracked open the seal on his instructions from the prime minister and read about his mission. The most “immediate object to which all other considerations must give way” sounded deceptively simple: Carleton was to withdraw “the garrison, artillery, provisions, stores of all kinds, every species of public property” from New York, Charleston, and Savannah, as well as St. Augustine in East Florida if he saw fit. Meanwhile, in his role as a peace commissioner, he was to placate the Americans as much as possible in order “to revive old affections and extinguish late jealousies”—part of a hearts-and-minds offensive designed to separate the Americans from the French. There was one group of people who were to command his closest attention. Carleton must extend his “tenderest and most honourable care” to the loyalists, by helping them move to “whatever other parts of America in His Majesty’s possession they choose to settle.”23

  The mission was defined clearly in outline, but executing it would be daunting indeed. He had up to 100,000 soldiers and civilians in British-held cities to evacuate. Yet he possessed scant resources with which to provision them, no clear instructions on where actually to send them, and fewer than fifty ships at his disposal. And for all that hostilities had officially ceased, Carleton discovered a different reality on the ground. From New York to the swamps and forests of the lower south, the civil war continued, clouding over the impending evacuations with violence.

  TO RECOVER the conflicts that continued in America during the months after Yorktown is to understand the passion with which some loyalists clung to, and fought for, their version of British America. Equally important, it helps explain why so many loyalists chose to follow the departing British. Wartime violence had pushed thousands of loyalists into British lines, for what they hoped would be a temporary stay. But as internecine conflict continued into peacetime, present danger and the threat of future reprisals made loyalists fear for their long-term welfare in the United States. It transformed their displacement into an international diaspora.

  Carleton landed in New York on May 5, 1782, to find himself immediately swept up in a controversy that revealed the depth of factional animosity still raging in the colonies. It centered in part around one of New York’s leading loyalists, William Franklin, the last royal governor of New Jersey, and the only son of patriot statesman Benjamin Franklin. How long ago it seemed that father and son had flown a kite together, the wet string twirling and pulling in William’s hands as the square of stretched silk bobbed, fluttered, and caught the currents up toward the storm clouds. For thirty years the Franklins had been close partners in life and work, moving together to London and back and sharing in the early upbringing of William’s son, Temple. But the coming of war opened an unbridgeable rift between them. Benjamin Franklin broke with British authority, signed the Declaration of Independence, and moved to Paris, where he now served as a peace commissioner and one of the United States’ most revered public figures. William Franklin, though no friend to arbitrary power, and a champion of imperial reform, could not bring himself to renounce his loyalty to the king—and endured two years as a patriot prisoner for his refusal. During his time in jail, his beloved wife Elizabeth fell dangerously ill, but Washington denied Franklin permission to visit her. She “died of a broken heart” before her husband could see her. Equally painful for William, Benjamin had essentially adopted Temple Franklin as his own and taken the lad to Paris, where Temple acted as secretary to the American peace commission. The relationship between Benjamin and William Franklin would never be restored, and stands out as the highest-profile example of how this civil war tore families apart.24

  William Franklin arrived in New York City after his release from jail, battered, disappointed, and ready to fight back. His efforts to organize loyalists were formalized in 1780 with the creation of a so-called Board of Associated Loyalists, which sponsored paramilitary “companies of safety”—a counterpart to patriot committees of safety—to protect loyalists in the hinterland.25 Under the board’s patronage, partisan fighting ravaged the greater New York area well after Yorktown. On an early spring day in 1782, a patriot captain named Joshua Huddy, notorious for his rampages through central New Jersey, was found swinging from a tree at Sandy Hook. A paper pinned to his chest declared, “We, the Refugees, have with grief long beheld the cruel murders of our brethren, and … determine to hang man for man, as long as a refugee is left existing.… UP GOES HUDDY FOR PHILIP WHITE.” A loyalist captain had ordered the execution—apparently on William Franklin’s instructions—in retaliation for the summary killing of another loyalist, Philip White, some days earlier. Outraged by the incident, George Washington demanded that the perpetrator be handed over for punishment or else he would order a British prisoner of war executed in his stead. To make matters worse, the officer selected for American retribution—a Yorktown prisoner—turned out to be the poignantly young and impressively well-connected Charles Asgill, heir to a baronetcy. Before long the New York spat had become an international incident, with Prime Minister Shelburne asking Benjamin Franklin to intercede personally on Asgill’s behalf.26

  When the new commander in chief arrived in New York City, patriots were screaming for justice, loyalists were up in arms to protect their own, and British regulars were incensed at the idea of an innocent officer falling victim to Washington’s lex talionis. On his very first day on shore, Carleton spent two hours closeted with William Franklin and William Smith discussing the case. Asgill was ultimately relieved thanks to a direct appeal from his mother to a different American ally, Queen Marie Antoinette. Washington did not come out well from the affair: his unforgiving stance verged on downright cruelty. But William Franklin came out looking worse. As the sordid details of the case emerged before boards of inquiry and a court-martial, Franklin appeared vengeful and injudicious, denting his reputation as a sage leader. It was a thoroughly souring experience for the former governor. The news, which reached America in midsummer 1782, that Britain had agreed to recognize American independence—that Franklin’s father had won—only compounded his despair. In August 1782, William Franklin sailed to England for a life in exile, carrying with him—“for a Pretext,” thought Will
iam Smith—“a Petition to the King from the Loyalists, deprecating the Separation of the Empire and imploring Protection,” a list of grievances against the government whose asylum he sought.27

  The Asgill affair was just the first instance of the violence still haunting America that Carleton had to contend with. On the western edges of New York and Pennsylvania, Britain’s Indian allies had been caught up in another ongoing partisan struggle. After Saratoga, Molly Brant had moved to Niagara with the other Mohawks from her village. Like many a refugee, she found herself “not at all reconciled to this place & Country,” for it “at first seemed very hard for her to leave her old Mother … & friends behind and live in a Country she was an entire Stranger in.”28 Still, she continued to muster support for the British, and was rewarded in turn with a house built for her on Carleton Island, at the far eastern tip of Lake Ontario. Joseph Brant fought in an intensifying series of offensives and counteroffensives: patriots led a scorched-earth campaign across the Finger Lakes region; Indian war parties and loyalist militias swooped down on patriot outposts ranging all the way from the Mohawk to the Ohio rivers.29 Brant’s raids in one month alone resulted in ninety people captured and killed, more than a hundred houses destroyed, and five hundred cattle and horses seized.30 Such vicious frontier war attested to an animosity between white colonists and Indians too entrenched for a formal Anglo-American cease-fire to eliminate. These hatreds boiled over in what was probably the largest massacre of civilians during the entire American Revolution, five months after Yorktown. In far western Pennsylvania, patriots captured a village of pacifist Moravian Delaware Indians and methodically murdered every one, striking each male victim first with a blow to the head, as livestock were stunned before slaughter, then tearing off their scalps.31 Carleton’s ability to neutralize frontier violence would have special bearing on the future of the refugee Mohawks.

  Of all the theaters of continuing conflict, however, the fiercest was also the one of most immediate importance to Carleton. In the deep south, loyalists fought desperately to preserve British power. William Johnston and his father-in-law John Lichtenstein remained at the forefront of these efforts, by commanding cavalry brigades that patrolled the swampy outskirts of Savannah. Two weeks after Yorktown, Johnston and his men were relaxing at their base when they saw three hundred patriots advance from the woods. Rapidly surrounded—and doubtless not eager to follow the fate of his brother Andrew, slain at Augusta—Johnston was on the verge of surrendering his sword to the opposing commander when a patriot soldier struck out at one of Johnston’s men. Fired up by the insult, Johnston promptly began a vigorous defense of their position. Fortunately the outnumbered loyalists were soon rescued by a detachment of Thomas Brown’s Rangers, commanded by a Johnston family friend named William Wylly.32

  Johnston’s brush with death was just one of many such episodes in the southern civil war. “The rage between Whig and Tory ran so high, that what was called a Georgia parole, and to be shot, were synonyms,” recalled one American officer.33 Patriots and loyalists struck truces that held only as long as tempers. Brown may never have embraced his reputation for savagery, but another loyalist officer described with positive pride how he ranged through the Carolina borderlands burning his enemy’s houses, stringing up deserters from trees, taking hostages, and stealing slaves and horses.34 All this fighting left the Carolina and Georgia backcountry “so completely chequered by the different parties” that no livestock, not even any squirrels or songbirds, animated the land; just the bald, red-headed turkey vultures, tearing at the corpses.35 In the spring of 1782, American forces encamped a few miles outside Savannah, busily fomenting desertion from the British ranks. Thomas Brown sortied from the city, intending to link up with three hundred Indian allies and drive the Americans back. But Brown failed to make the connection and his skirmish ended in stalemate. A few weeks later, the Indians were also rebuffed and the surviving warriors streamed into the safety of British lines. The struggle to save British rule in Georgia was over.36

  This was the backdrop against which Carleton set in motion a momentous train of events: the evacuations of British-held Savannah and Charleston. Carleton saw this step as “not a matter of choice, but a deplorable necessity in consequence of an unsuccessful war.”37 There simply were not enough British troops to hold these cities, let alone send badly needed reinforcements to the Caribbean. In early June, 1782, a letter from Carleton marked “Secret” reached British headquarters in Charleston. “A day or two after the receipt of this letter,” it warned the commanding officer Alexander Leslie, “you may expect off the bar of Charles-Town a fleet of Transports: these I send for the evacuation of Savannah, and of St. Augustine; to bring off not only the Troops, with the Military and public Stores of all sorts; but the Loyalists who choose to depart with their effects.”38 General Leslie immediately forwarded the news to Savannah, asking Georgia governor Sir James Wright to notify “the King[’s] Loyal subjects … to provide for whose ease and accommodation on this distressing occasion … has been an object of prime consideration with the Commander-in-Chief.”39 Two months later Leslie faced exactly the same task when he was ordered to evacuate Charleston.

  What looked like a strategic necessity to Carleton looked like a disaster to the thousands of loyalists in both cities. News of evacuation prompted outcry and anguish. A mere five hundred more troops, Governor Wright believed, could “have drove the Rebels entirely out of the Province.”40 Yet instead the British were abandoning it. “The distress and misery brought on His Majesty’s Loyal Subjects here, you cannot conceive,” Wright reported, “and the very great property given up … I apprehend your Excellency has no idea of.”41 In Charleston, a handbill authored by a self-styled “Citizen” (not, notably, a “subject” of the British crown) wryly proposed various ways loyalists might try to curry favor with the incoming patriots:

  [O]ne man intreats his wife or some friend to write letters intercessory for him;—then, there is another person has a cousin of his wife’s aunt now in the American camp; … and last of all, one pleases himself with the charming thought, that he was always a friend to the American cause in his heart—though perhaps he now and then does duty at the City Guard in a Red Coat.42

  But British withdrawal was no jesting matter for most loyalists. They heard terrifying reports of what was happening outside the city limits, of loyalists hunted down and murdered by vindictive patriots.43 Confiscation acts passed by the Georgia and South Carolina patriot legislatures in 1782 expelled some five hundred prominent loyalists as traitors on pain of death, taking their property, and subjecting “divers other persons” who “did … traiterously assist abet and Participate in … treasonable Practices” to similar penalties.44 And when delegations of loyalist merchants went to meet with patriot authorities to find out what treatment they might expect if they stayed on, the answers were far from encouraging. Savannah loyalists were told they could take “reasonable time … to dispose of their property and settle their pecuniary concerns,” but that the Continental Army could not promise total protection, and of course “traitors” (vaguely defined) could always be prosecuted under the Confiscation and Banishment Act.45 Similar terms in South Carolina convinced Charleston merchants that the patriots were “retaliating upon & punishing the innocent.”46 Prospects hardly seemed any brighter for the hundreds of humbler refugees, such as those dwelling in Charleston’s makeshift camp of “miserable huts.” Eight hundred “distressed refugees” were dependent on cash handouts from the British army, and had scant hopes of finding much better if they returned to their war-ravaged homes.47

  What were they to do? Here was a country coming out of civil war, with the possibility of anti-loyalist reprisals, and the good chance that their property had been seized or destroyed in their absence. There were the British ships, offering free passage to fresh domains. Amid so much confusion, one thing at least was clear. Loyalists who left would enjoy the security of remaining in the British Empire. Within a matter of weeks
of the evacuation orders, the majority of civilians in Savannah and Charleston made up their minds to go.

  In the twenty-first century, such scenes of mass human displacement, of cities emptying out, have come to seem depressingly common consequences of war. But in the 1780s there were simply no British precedents for civilian evacuations on this scale. Nor have any histories of the American Revolution described the British withdrawals in detail. Yet what unfolded on the ground during the last months of British power in America held up a startling mirror to the familiar images of United States nation-making. For while American patriots considered how to fashion the thirteen colonies into a United States of America, following Thomas Paine’s injunction to “begin the world over again,” thousands of refugees set off into the British Empire, as one loyalist put it, “to begin the world anew.”48

  SO WHERE would they go? For many white loyalists in Savannah and Charleston, the choice of destination hinged on one overriding consideration to do with a very special kind of property, at once portable, valuable, and alive: slaves. The question of how best loyalists might sell or employ their slaves crucially influenced decisions about whether and where to go into exile. During the war, most refugees who had left the colonies had traveled to Britain or Nova Scotia. But in Britain, slaveowning had been effectively illegal since the early 1770s, while Nova Scotia, a preferred locale for New England and New York refugees, was seen as climatically unsuitable for southern plantation slaves. Jamaica and other British West Indian islands seemed a better option, but these well-settled islands had little uncultivated land available, and were known for their high cost of living and high chance of dying of tropical disease.