Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
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Britain may not have been the closest place, geographically, for American loyalists to seek asylum, but as the center of the imperial world, it was in some ways the most obvious. During the war, Britain served as a primary destination for loyalist refugees. It commanded a strength of attachment that no other locale could match, based in language, religion, culture, and for many white loyalists, blood. Yet few if any expressed sentiments resembling Wells’s when they got there. Far more often, they echoed the paradox embedded in her statement.2 Her “home,” as she put it, lay in a locale she had “long and so earnestly wished”—but never yet actually managed—to see. For all that many Americans had been raised to consider Britain as “home,” this was emphatically a foreign country.3 The tension between familiarity and difference would be the first of several paradoxes loyalists encountered in Britain, as their dearest, most trusted refuge proved an oddly alienating place.
What a new world this was! Nothing in America could prepare the provincial newcomers for the sensory experience of Georgian London, one of the largest, most diverse cities on earth. “[I]t is absolutely impossible for any American, who has never lived in London, to have any idea of it,” pronounced one colonial visitor.4 “[N]otwithstanding the grand Ideas I had formed of it,” a Massachusetts exile explained, London “far exceeded my expectation”—for better and for worse. The best of the city showed itself in elegant squares and town houses and in the graceful greenswards of St. James’s Park, often “throng’d by loyalists.”5 The capital offered an inexhaustible series of things to see and do. You could squeeze into a crowd of theatergoers to watch David Garrick play Hamlet.6 You could visit the British Museum and handle ancient manuscripts, peer at fossils, and wonder at the curiosities recently brought from the South Seas by Captain James Cook. You could pay your respects at the tomb of General Wolfe in Westminster Abbey, and admire grand historical canvases by Benjamin West and other prominent painters at the Royal Academy. You could make the rounds of London churches to hear celebrated divines preach, or visit the law courts and listen to eminent jurists try cases. You could fill your ears with the swelling choruses of Handel’s Messiah, “the most sublime piece of music in the whole world.”7
But as loyalists reveled in all these activities, they found London to be overwhelming too. Refugees felt buffeted by the crush of humanity in the streets as they navigated among “coaches, carts and waggons etc. continually passing repassing, meeting and jostling,” and swerved around beggars and hawkers, constantly alert for pickpockets.8 In London’s East End—where the majority of black loyalists ended up—“Whores Rogues & Sailors” clogged the filthy lanes, while cargoes from India, America, and Africa were unloaded onto docks as busy as whole villages.9 Unrelenting grey skies and saturating damp left the Americans depressed and prone to illness. One complained that very few Britons upheld “ancient Hospitality” and “pittied the fate of the Refugees.”10 “The shyness reserve and unconversibility of native Englishmen is notorious,” grumbled another.11 London seemed an altogether pushy place, where everyone looked out for themselves and foreigners were incidental distractions. Partly for this reason, many loyalists chose to reside in Bristol, Bath, and smaller towns, where prices were lower and the pace of life slower. Loyalists also tended to keep their own company, living near one another and frequenting common haunts. A refugee from Maine found quarters in South Kensington with three Massachusetts exiles, and dined regularly with an “American club” of fellow New England loyalists. Coffee houses—the New England, New York, Carolina, and others—served as their lifelines to America, sources of news, debate, gossip, and convenient places to receive precious letters from home.12
During the war loyalist refugees sadly recorded the anniversaries of their departures from America, and looked forward to a peace that would let them go home.13 But the war’s end and the unsatisfying treaty seemed to slam the door to return shut. Instead thousands more refugees arrived on British shores. Because of the high cost of living in Britain, its distance from America, and the incentives offered for settlement in British North America and the Bahamas, only about 15 percent of white loyalist refugees, or around eight thousand, chose to migrate to Britain—less than twice the number of black loyalists who ended up there, often as a result of their military service. The majority of white loyalists crossing the Atlantic were of middle-class status or higher. Their central objective was to win compensation for their lost and confiscated American assets. Joseph Galloway and William Franklin, formerly advocates for imperial union, became leading lobbyists for government relief. Loyalists also leaned on patrons to try to secure new jobs, and endeavored to place their children in good schools and on promising career paths. Unsure about how much financial support they might win, or where they might profitably settle, even privileged loyalists found life in Britain uncomfortable. Still, they were fortunate compared to the smaller number of refugees who arrived in Britain in more desperate straits. For hundreds of indigent newcomers—the disabled, the illiterate, single mothers, and former slaves—relief could make the difference between starvation and survival.
And yet as loyalists across the kingdom clamored for assistance, Britain was in a poor position to grant it to them. “Nothing can be worse than this rich, devoted, ill govern’d Island,” growled one fed-up refugee as he approached the tenth anniversary of his exile in 1784.14 Parliament seemed in perennial tumult, with a series of ministries undercut by rivalry and infighting. The costs of war had brought the national debt to its highest level ever, at £232 million (or £25 billion in current terms). Britain’s territorial concessions in the Peace of Paris appeared to its critics to reveal weakness in the face of European rivals. American independence also raised troubling metaphysical questions about what the relationship between nation and empire would look like in the future.15 With the loss of the thirteen colonies, fewer and fewer imperial subjects resembled the British, in ethnicity, religion, culture, or language: Bengal, in eastern India, with perhaps twenty million inhabitants, was easily the largest domain in the British Empire. Nor, as the war had demonstrated, could Parliament claim to represent virtually its white settler colonists in the same manner it represented those in the British Isles. Imperial government had been shaken, but it remained to be seen how it would adapt.
Loyalist refugees brought the social and material consequences of defeat straight to the empire’s heart. Having lost their personal property, livelihoods, and homes, they put a human face on Britain’s own loss of the thirteen colonies. How would the refugees, and the empire to which they adhered, manage to regroup? Postwar Britain became the center of a parallel process of reconstruction. Individual loyalists sought to reestablish themselves with financial aid and new positions, while British authorities set about reforming imperial government and expanding into new domains—laying the foundations of the “spirit of 1783.” But for all that these projects harmonized in many ways, loyalists in Britain ran up against one contradiction after another. Though they strongly identified as British subjects, they felt estranged in this foreign land. Convinced that they deserved compensation, they grew frustrated in their quest for support. And while a newly expanding empire presented them with a panoply of career opportunities overseas, they struggled to make a go of it in Britain itself. The refugees in Britain benefited from imperial recovery, while experiencing firsthand the challenges that went with it.
AMERICANS IN LONDON frequently commented on the spectacular trappings of state power. From the palace of Westminster to St. James’s Palace, from the offices lining Whitehall to the grim brown bulk of the Tower, it was hard not to be awed by the government’s sheer architectural heft. Then there were its personalities. A number of loyalists attended debates in the House of Commons to watch gifted politicians in action, men like the eloquent Edmund Burke, the passionate Charles James Fox, and the precocious William Pitt the Younger, who in December 1783 became Britain’s youngest prime minister at the age of twenty-four. Some caught sight of Queen Charlot
te at the theater, with her “lustures of Diamonds” glittering by candlelight. Others spotted King George III riding through the streets in a state coach, pulled by eight white horses bedecked in royal blue ribbons.16 A select few loyalists even had the chance to be presented to the royal family at court levees. No other refugees, however, encountered the monarch in quite the way that Samuel Shoemaker did, one day at Windsor Castle.
Shoemaker was a Pennsylvania Quaker, former mayor of Philadelphia, and a pillar of the New York City loyalist community during the war. (He had served with Beverley Robinson as an inspector of refugees in the occupied city.) Shoemaker left New York in the last evacuation fleet, with Carleton, William Smith, and a number of other associates, and arrived in Britain to find many of his refugee friends already getting settled. He had not seen his fellow Pennsylvanian Benjamin West, however, in at least twenty years, not since the painter had moved to Britain in 1763 to further his career. In the intervening decades, as Shoemaker lived through the breakdown of imperial relations in Pennsylvania, his old friend West surged to prominence as the greatest image-maker of British imperial might. A founder of the Royal Academy, of which he would be president for nearly thirty years, West was now history painter to the king, with whom he was a personal favorite.
Shoemaker enjoyed a fond reunion with his long-lost friend and visited the Wests at their residence in Windsor Castle. One afternoon, he was loitering outside in hopes of catching a glimpse of the royal family on their way to chapel when West popped out from the castle with surprising news: the king had just asked to meet Shoemaker personally. Flustered, Shoemaker had no time to overcome his shock before West whisked him into the royal presence. And suddenly there he was: the leader of the empire, the personification of loyalist hopes and patriot hatred, goggle-eyed King George III himself, with Queen Charlotte and four of their daughters in tow. “Mr. S. you are well known here, every body knows you,” said the king, instantly calming Shoemaker’s nerves. Why, the king wanted to know, was “the Province of Pennsylvania … so much further advanced in improvement than the neighbouring ones” that had been settled earlier? Shoemaker, “thinking it wd. be a kind of compliment to the Queens countrymen &c,” generously suggested that it was due to hardworking German colonists. The king returned the favor, saying that Pennsylvania’s prosperity must be “principally owing to the Quakers.” For another forty-five minutes Shoemaker happily chatted with the king and queen—partly in German—about America, his family, and more. The Hanovers swished away, leaving their loyal subject smitten. “I cannot say but I wished some of my violent countrymen could have such an opportunity as I have had,” Shoemaker reflected in his diary. “I think they would be convinced that George the third has not one grain of Tyrany in his Composition, and that he is not, he cannot be that bloody minded man they have so repeatedly and so illiberally called him, it is impossible, a man of his fine feelings, so good a husband, so kind a Father, cannot be a Tyrant.”17
Shoemaker’s unusually long, informal encounter with the king brought him as close as any loyalist to a man so many Americans had only fantasized about, for good and ill. His positive impression of his sovereign gestured toward an important if perhaps surprising outcome of the American Revolution for the monarchy. Although King George III had fervently opposed recognizing American independence, the secession of the thirteen colonies—along with those former subjects who condemned him as a “tyrant”—actually strengthened his symbolic power in the rest of the empire. The king’s popularity surged in Britain in the years immediately following the war.18 Imperial officials overseas, in turn, increasingly used ceremonies, symbols, and celebrations to cultivate emotional connections to the monarchy.19 In many domains royal authority would be fortified at the expense of elected legislatures, a palpable manifestation of the “spirit of 1783.”
But loyalists’ connection to the king overlaid a more ambivalent relationship to Parliament and other branches of government. Their quest for compensation brought these tensions to the fore. In Britain as in America, loyalist concerns centered on the noxious Article V of the peace treaty. The prime minister during the treaty negotiations, Lord Shelburne, had feared that failing to provide adequately for loyalists might give ammunition to his political opponents. He was right. When the treaties with the United States, France, and Spain came up for debate in the House of Commons, the opposition fiercely denounced their terms. Britain’s generous territorial concessions were bad enough. Even worse, Lord North (now in opposition) opined, the poor treatment of loyalists “awakens human sensibility in a very irresistible and lamentable degree”: “Never was the honor of the nation so grossly abused as in the desertion of those men, who are now exposed to every punishment that desertion and poverty can inflict.” His allies promptly chimed in. This “gross libel on the national character,” proclaimed Edmund Burke, “in one flagitious article plunged the dagger into the hearts of the loyalists.” One MP’s “heart bled.… It was scandalous, it was disgraceful!” It was, another asserted, “a lasting monument of national disgrace.” The MP and playwright Richard Sheridan read aloud woeful petitions from loyalists in Florida, theatrically “breathing in the most animated style,” to underscore their outrage. In short, as an opposition member passionately summed up:
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, beheld the dismemberment and diminution of the British empire. But this, alarming and calamitous as it was, was nothing when compared with another of the crimes of the present peace—the cession of men into the hands of their enemies, and delivering over to confiscation, tyranny, resentment, and oppression, the unhappy men who trusted to our fair promises and deceitful words.20
Few could have doubted where all this invective would lead. In the winter of 1783, the House voted to censure the peace treaties, delivering a crippling declaration of no confidence in the ministry. Shelburne promptly announced his resignation, leaving another government broken on the wheel of civil war. (He would be replaced in April 1783 by a coalition anchored by the unlikely duo of Lord North and the radical Charles James Fox.21 This government also proved short-lived and fell at the end of 1783, leading to the premiership of William Pitt.)
Although the issue of loyalist compensation helped bring down the Shelburne government, it must be said that the loyalists’ own sturmund-drang rhetoric did not always win them friends. In the later years of the war, many politicians had grown weary of loyalists’ chimerical visions of faithful Americans rallying to the British flag; British opponents of the war increasingly blamed the loyalist lobby (and especially Joseph Galloway) for unnecessarily prolonging an unsuccessful conflict. “They talked and acted like foolish gamesters,” said one MP, “whose passions bound them more strongly to persevere the more their losses galled them.”22 In a notably measured speech closing the treaty debate, the Derbyshire lawyer John Eardley Wilmot vowed that he would “share with them my last shilling and my last loaf” but cautioned against paying too much attention to loyalists who continued to inveigh against the peace. “I do not think it was to be expected,” he said, “that at the end of a successful rebellion, in which this country had been beaten, that those who were victorious should on any terms give up their estates and possessions again to those with whom they had been contending.” Since the majority of loyalists remained within the United States, the stipulation (in Article VI) that no punitive action be taken against them seemed to Wilmot to “provide effectually and completely for much the greatest part of the American loyalists.” As for loyalist refugees who failed to get adequate compensation in the United States, he presumed that “the honour and justice of the [British] nation” would see to it that they were provided for by other means.23
Wilmot had closer insight into the predicament of loyalist refugees in Britain than just about anyone. During the war, the Treasury had been making ad hoc pension payments to hundreds of refugees, rising in some years to nearly £70,000. These allowances had been intended for “temporary” relief. But the end of the war opened up a s
eemingly endless vista of further spending. Shortly after taking office, Lord Shelburne had appointed Wilmot and another MP, Daniel Parker Coke (both of whom opposed the war but were otherwise independent of party affiliations), to assess the merit of the individual claims. Working late into winter nights, they filtered through hundreds of cases, interviewing loyalists and vetting their testimonials—a task made the more “difficult as well as invidious” by having to weigh up “the relative Claims, losses, and situations of so many persons” whose property lay “in a remote part of the world.” They finished their job at the end of January 1783 as debates on the peace treaty were about to commence, having pared down pension payments by a third.24
Short-term subsistence payments, though, were a quite different matter from compensation for property confiscated, damaged, or abandoned. What should or would any ministry do about this? Loyalist refugees were quick to supply an answer: the government should provide restitution from Treasury funds. In a well-coordinated lobbying initiative, refugees appointed a board of agents, headed by former Georgia governor Sir James Wright and composed of Galloway and other well-known figures to represent each colony. The agents set about arguing for “their Right to receive compensation from this Government.”25 An anonymous pamphlet entitled The Case and Claim of the American Loyalists, Impartially Stated and Considered, published by the loyalist agents—and probably authored at least in part by Galloway—laid out their rationale. The social contract, the pamphlet observed, mandated that “protection and allegiance are reciprocal duties between the State and the subject.” “As perfectly subjects of the British State, as any man in London or Middlesex,” loyal Americans were “as much bound by all the obligations and duties of the society, and consequently as much entitled to the protection and justice of the State” as any other Briton. The king’s failure to protect loyalists, they contended, entitled them to financial compensation in return. And since the British government had decided to acknowledge American independence “without securing any restitution whatever to the Loyalists,” then “natural justice” dictated that British taxpayers should assume the costs. The pamphlet went on to argue that loyalist losses also fell under the principle of eminent domain, citing influential eighteenth-century political theorists as support. In closing, they produced (rather strained) precedents of analogous British government compensation: to planters on St. Kitts and Nevis after a French invasion in 1706; and to Hanoverian loyalists for property destroyed in the Jacobite rising of 1715.26