Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  The lobbying worked. In July 1783, Parliament passed an act formally appointing a commission “to enquire into the Losses and Services of all such persons who have suffered in their Rights, Properties, and Professions, during the late unhappy Dissensions in America, in consequence of their Loyalty to His Majesty, and Attachment to the British Government.” MPs John Eardley Wilmot and Daniel Parker Coke were obvious choices to serve as commissioners, given their prior experience with claims; they were joined on the committee by two veterans of the war, who had served at Saratoga and Yorktown respectively, and by an ambitious civil servant called John Marsh.27 Together the five men were to verify each claimant’s loyalty, ascertain the value of his or her property, and recommend an amount for compensation. (The final decisions for payment rested with Parliament.) The act gave loyalists nine months in which to submit claims, and allowed the commission two years to process them. In mid-September 1783, the Loyalist Claims Commission opened the doors of its office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and welcomed in its first deponents.28

  For all that loyalist agents volunteered precedents, the Loyalist Claims Commission was actually just as unprecedented in scale as all the other provisions—land grants, free passages, rations, and supplies—already made for refugees. This relief program was born in a period when public welfare scarcely resembled its modern forms. Military pension schemes were just taking shape; the central plank of state charity, the Poor Law, dated to the days of Queen Elizabeth I; and many other kinds of aid, such as orphanages, depended primarily on private initiative. Private support had proved just as important as government assistance in coping with the only two previous refugee crises Britain had faced on anything like the same scale: the influx of fifty thousand or so French Huguenots in the late seventeenth century (who introduced the word “refugee” into the English language), and that of thirteen thousand destitute Palatine Germans who fled to England in 1709.29 Never before 1783 had the British government itself accepted financial responsibility to this extent for refugees. Now it assumed a burden of potentially millions of pounds when the British national debt had never been higher—underscoring the extraordinary nature of this commission.

  Of course, American loyalists differed from Huguenot and Palatine refugees in a crucial respect: they were British subjects. Those earlier refugee crises had triggered debates about immigration and the rights of aliens. The reception of the loyalists, though, touched on a different question—one that had partly underpinned the American Revolution itself. Was there any distinction between the rights of British subjects at home and those of subjects abroad? American loyalists said no. They grounded their case for compensation in the presumption that British subjects were all the same no matter where they resided. But British authorities offered a more equivocal answer. Though British law traditionally distinguished only between subjects and aliens, Article V of the peace treaty referred to “real British subjects”—implying some sort of differentiation among kinds of subjects. Loyalists bridled at this logic: “To affirm of a person, that he is more a subject or less a subject is to speak neither good English, nor good law,” observed one.30 British officials, however, did not see loyalists as being “as perfectly British subjects as any in London or Middlesex.” As Parliament framed it, loyalists got compensated not because they had a right to such aid, but because Britain had a moral responsibility to provide it. Parliament sought to uphold “the honor of the nation,” protect the “national character,” and fend off “national disgrace.” This overarching moral concern helps explain why so many politicians who had earlier condemned the loyalist lobby for obstructionist behavior during the war now turned around in support of loyalist compensation.

  If the claims commission thus made an unusual intervention in support of British subjects, it made an equally important statement about how the state conceived of its responsibilities. This was not a broad-based declaration about subjects’ rights; it was an assertion of the state’s paternalistic duties. As such, it represented another variation on what was fast becoming a familiar theme, in which colonial demands sat uneasily with metropolitan provisions. And it paved the way for a claims process that ended up frustrating many of those loyalists whom it had been designed to help.

  MORTLAKE, once a quiet village on the south bank of the Thames and now enveloped by the suburban terraces of greater London, was far in all senses from Beverley Robinson’s Dutchess County estate, but the colonel and his family put the best face on their new situation.31 Arriving in England in the late summer of 1783, they decided to settle outside London to keep their costs down. Even in Mortlake, the once wealthy Robinsons could only afford to rent “a small old fashion house or rather part of a Bake house ready furnished for 12/pr week.” In one half of the humble dwelling lived the baker who “supplys the whole village [with] bread.” In the other half lived the colonel, his wife Susanna, and their daughters Joanna and Susan. Inelegant though their new surroundings were, Robinson wrote to his daughter-in-law Ann that “we have been very comfortable in it.… We are in a very good neighbourhood, & have got acquainted with several very Polite & agreeable families who treat us with a great deal of respect & Hospitality.”32 It helped to know the boys were reasonably well provided for. The eldest, Beverley Jr., had settled in Nova Scotia with Ann and their children. The youngest son, William, bunked on the spare bed in Mortlake until he went to Geneva to train for a career as a military commissary. Twenty-year-old Phil Robinson was now camped with his regiment in Staffordshire, enjoying a riotous life with his rakish brother officers. The young lieutenant was “quite as wild as ever,” Joanna Robinson noted. “He is yet a most intolerable gallant he has made great devastation in the hearts of the Stafford fair. It is impossible for the Leopard to change its spots.”33

  Nor were the Robinsons short of company. They quickly discovered one chief consolation of exile: being able to share it with friends. American friends, relatives, and connections lived all around them. Fellow New York loyalist Isaac Low (who had been a delegate to the First Continental Congress), took a house in Mortlake with his wife; and nearby in East Sheen lived some of the Robinsons’ only British friends, Helen and Brook Watson, who had been commissary-general in New York. Susanna Robinson’s brother Frederick Philipse was in London, while her sister’s family lived “very comfortably” in London and later Bath.34 Though the Robinsons rarely traveled up to London themselves, they received frequent visitors, including Samuel Shoemaker, William Smith, and Peggy Arnold, Benedict Arnold’s wife, who rode out to Mortlake on horseback. “She is grown amazingly lusty but it becomes her better than I thought it did when I first saw her in London,” Joanna decided.35

  Yet there was no compensating for the loss of the nearest connections of all. The permeating February chill seemed to have seeped into Joanna Robinson’s spirits the day she wrote to her brother Beverley Jr. in Nova Scotia, aching with images of what she had left behind: “Our parting scene at New York will never be effaced from my memory, it is needless to tell you the pain it gave me, if you will judge of me by your own feelings.”36 She and her parents desperately tried to preserve their emotional bonds with the younger Beverley and his family. “Mama never sees a fine child but it costs her a sigh and sometimes a tear on the recollection of her seperation from her sweet grandchildren,” Joanna told her brother, while the colonel pleaded with his daughter-in-law: “Pray take all methods in your power to prevent Hinky Pinky [Henry] from forgeting me, tell the dear little fellow I think of him day & night, and often all night for he is constantly before me in my dreams.” The English Robinsons were delighted to learn of the birth of Beverley and Ann’s third son in Nova Scotia. “God bless him I love him dearly already, but not so as to endanger my Hinkys nose,” glowed the colonel. Their pleas for every detail of “who he is like, what signs & tokens happened at his birth, what assistance you had, how long you was Ill, what friends with you, & who nursed you” had to serve as surrogates for the grim fact that they might never see the newest Robi
nson in their lifetimes.37

  “What a charming country this would be if we had but the means of living well in it, as it is it requires a great deal more philosophy than I am Mistress of to be content,” concluded Joanna.38 Her words captured a sentiment shared right across the loyalist exile community. Cut off from their old jobs and sources of income, unable easily to find substitutes in Britain, and unsure whether they would win enough compensation to make staying there viable, “the American Loyalists,” Joanna reported, “are dispersing themselves about the kingdom some are gone to Chester some to … Yorkshire and some wandering about uncertain of their fate.”39

  Fate, for many hundreds of refugees, now rested in the Loyalist Claims Commission’s office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Rumors that the government might compensate loyalists had reached New York City before the evacuation, which allowed some refugees to hit the ground running with their claims.40 Just a month after Samuel Shoemaker arrived in London, he found himself waiting in the foyer of the home secretary Lord Sydney’s office with Sir Guy Carleton and “a number of those calld Refugees attending to be introduced.” Beverley Robinson was there. So were the Wallace brothers, Hugh and Alexander, wealthy Irish-born merchants who had settled in New York in the 1750s and married sisters of fellow businessman Isaac Low. Reverend Charles Inglis, erstwhile rector of Trinity Church in New York, was another face familiar to all. All these men were seeking preferment of some kind; Shoemaker, for instance, wanted Sydney’s recommendation in securing “a genteel allowance for my support until the matter respecting compensation for my losses is determined.”41 Over the months to come he interspersed his frequent visits to the Treasury and Loyalist Claims office by socializing with his American friends and touring the London sights.

  The drawn-out process of filing claims, giving evidence, and waiting for a response held many loyalists in an anxious state of suspended animation. The former congressman Isaac Low articulated the strains of this nerve-racking predicament more fully than anyone. Attainted by the state of New York, Low and his wife Margaret sailed for Britain on the last evacuation fleet. The “violent rough passage” they endured served as gloomy omen for what followed.42 Margaret was nearly constantly ill in London, while Isaac found “Nothing but Disorder and Confusion here which is very discouraging to us poor wanderers.”43 Their only joy was being reunited with their son, Isaac Jr., whom they had sent on to England ahead of them. A “robust,” lively adolescent, the younger Isaac was “of great Use as a Guide in returning the Visits of our Friends and I really believe he knows more of London the few months he has been here than I should in as many Years.” Low’s own thoughts, though, were “so much engrossed with our present embarassed Situation, that I can’t attend to the Course, or remember the names of the Streets two Days together.” He struggled to support his family on a sum so small it would “soon take wings and fly away.”44 “To have nothing to do and to live altogether upon the little stock I can rake together are most disagreeable Circumstances.”45 While he waited for a response from the claims commissioners, he relied on loans from his younger brother Nicholas, a successful businessman still in New York, and on Nicholas’s help in selling off what little American property he had managed to preserve.

  In April 1784, Low received a glimmer of good news from the commissioners. He had been awarded “the handsome allowance of £140 St[erling] Pr annum untill my Claims are considered”—but he underscored “handsome” sarcastically, for this was not enough to help him decide “how to dispose of myself. At present I am all Suspense.”46 Now and then, that summer in Mortlake, Low had bright moments when he could persuade himself that “a moderate Share of the one Thing needful”—money—“and we should regret nothing but the absence of the dear Friends we left behind us.”47 But “how, where, or when” he might reestablish his position “are Questions which I cannot for a moment banish from my thoughts”; and at times he could not hold back the crashing waves of despair “least all should be lost.”48 It is hard not to hear Low’s personal experience speaking between the lines of some advice he delivered to two married slaves he had left behind in New York. Though the Lows had taken care not to separate the couple, placing them with friends who would treat them “more like Children than Servants,” the pair had “express[ed] a Desire of being free unless they could live with us again.” “I certainly think they would be great Fools at their Time of Life to be set adrift in the world to seek a precarious Subsistence,” Low cautioned. “If they could but see … how much better they live than the poor white Labourers in this Country, they would bless their lucky Stars, and not have a wish to alter their Condition.”49

  Of course, Low’s disappointments stood in proportion to his expectations. Plenty of people would have regarded an income of £140 as a princely sum. For all his apparent poverty, Low did manage to maintain his residence at Mortlake, and kept at least one servant, Anne, a slave brought from New York. Low also made it a priority, as many loyalists in Britain did, to further his child’s career no matter what the cost, and placed Isaac Jr. in a first-rate school in Kensington “at the extravagant price of £100 pr annum.”50 What so tormented refugees like Low was not just the palpable fact of having slipped from affluence, it was the paralyzing fear of falling still further, into bankruptcy and the social wilderness of disrepute.

  While the Robinsons and Lows adjusted to modest suburban living, other refugees must have found it hard to imagine how things could get any worse. Across the congested slums of Mile End, Wapping, Stepney, and Southwark hundreds of desperately poor refugees struggled simply to get by. In plaintive letters and memorials, refugees who had any access to influential figures—or just to pen and paper—detailed their troubles to the Loyalist Claims Commission. The worries that plagued Isaac Low, for instance, had already come true for one New Yorker whose husband, a merchant, had lost his fortune to the vicissitudes of war, and fled from both his creditors and his family. His wife found him in London two years later, in “very distressed circumstances,” and soon, with the threat of prison hanging over him, he vanished once more, leaving his wife and three small children down to their last shift of clothes and “in daily pursuit of bread.”51 Even worse off was a Boston woman, also abandoned by her husband, who tried to scrape by with her children “on two pennyworth of bread a day and 1 lbs. of beef a week,” but got hauled off into the miasmatic wards of Newgate Prison for debt.52

  A number of the poorest white refugees in Britain had actually been born in the British Isles, but typically on its geographical margins, and turned up in London as dispossessed and disconnected as many a native-born North American. One Irishman spent the first months of his exile struck down with “ague” in County Londonderry, and when he traveled to London to pursue his quest for compensation, he too got locked up in Newgate for debt. An illiterate Highlander filed a claim for three houses and land he had lost in North Carolina; but, aged over seventy, sweating on a mattress in a London slum with a fever he could not shake, he must have doubted he would live to see government aid come his way.53 Another Highland Scot arrived in London lamed, without his wife—who died a refugee in Nova Scotia—and without the estate he had built for himself outside Savannah. This native Gaelic speaker could not even file his own claim: he barely understood English and needed an interpreter to help him.54

  But of all the poor loyalists eking out a living in postwar Britain, the largest group was in many ways the most conspicuous: black loyalists, as many as five thousand of whom, overwhelmingly male, arrived in England as demobilized sailors, soldiers, servants, and more. After what some had been through in the war, it was a miracle they made it there at all. Shadrack Furman, a free black Virginian, had worked as a provisioner for British troops and then as a guide and informant, in which role he was captured by patriot troops. Refusing to disclose intelligence, Furman was sentenced to five hundred lashes. For many victims this spelled certain death, but the unlucky Furman survived, flayed down to the muscle, deranged by an ax blow to the h
ead, blind in both eyes and lame in one leg. This scarred and knotted wreck of a man staggered to Nova Scotia and then to England, where he fiddled on the streets for spare change.55 Benjamin Whitecuffe of New York had an equally dramatic tale of wartime survival. He too had been born free, the offspring of an American dream: Whitecuffe’s mulatto father traded in his own sloop around Long Island Sound and managed a good-sized pasture and orchard besides. During the war his father and brother joined the patriots; but Benjamin volunteered as a British spy. Captured by the rebels, it was straight to the gallows for him. For fully three minutes, with the blood pounding in his head and blotting out his sight, Whitecuffe swung heavily above the ground while his neck, amazingly, withstood the tug of the rope. Cut down by passing British troops, the hardy young Whitecuffe went on to elude another brush with execution, to capture by a privateer, and naval service off Gibraltar, before finding himself in London, with a white English wife and no work.56