And so the paperwork, the inquiries, and the judgments ground forward. By the time the commissioners prepared to announce their first set of recommendations for payment, in the spring of 1785, “the poor Exiles here are in status quo, waiting their Day of Judgment, more in anxious, then sure & certain, hope. Many of them, so streighten’d, ’tis a wonder how they rub through.”89 Parliament accepted the commission’s report and voted £150,000 to settle the claims already examined. Loyalists eagerly pored over the results. The big winner from the first round of payments was Susanna Robinson’s brother, Frederick Philipse, awarded nearly £17,000. Joseph Galloway and Cortlandt Skinner received several thousand pounds each. Isaac Low, like many others, briefly took heart from the news of these handsome payments, thinking it boded well for his own pending case. But a darker clue lay in the sums awarded to his brothers-in-law: Hugh and Alexander Wallace received little more than £1,500 between them, despite having been among the most prosperous merchants in prewar New York City.90 “Fine doings,” Alexander raged to Nicholas Low in New York. “It cost me double the sum to bring myself & family to England & to support them in London to prove my losses.… Damn them all & your good people who passed the law to deprive us of our property.”91
From one slow season to the next the claims commission deliberated over its recommendations, and the dividends awarded seemed, to once prosperous loyalists, less and less satisfactory. Loyalist agents wheeled out familiar arguments in protest: “under the fundamental laws of the British Constitution,” they asserted they had “not only an equitable but a lawful right to a just compensation for their estates and property.” But instead of gaining a fair settlement, “it is impossible to describe the poignant distress under which many of the American Loyalists now labour.… [T]en years have elapsed since many of them have been deprived of their fortunes, and with their helpless families reduced from independent affluence to poverty and want; some of them are now languishing in British Gaols … others have already sunk under the pressure and severity of their misfortunes.”92 In the meantime, a New York refugee complained, “the Americans here help to keep up one anothers spirits, they have little else to do.”93 Little else but wait for more of the commission’s reports to come through—and more disappointments. “If you have one that is satisfied with his dividend on your side of the Water, it is more than I can say on this,” wrote another London-based loyalist to his brother in New Brunswick; “the pittance is so small to many that they refuse, & despise it with contempt, while others die with broken hearts, and the smallness of their dividends. Some have run mad with dispair & disappointment. Many that were men of repute, good livers, & had a right to expect from £500 to £1000 were reported for £7 10., £8, £9, £10, £11, £12 & so on up to £40 or £50.”94
Melodramatic though these laments might sound, they accurately described the reality experienced by Isaac Low and his brothers-in-law the Wallaces. By 1785, Alexander Wallace had settled with his family in Waterford, Ireland: “I cannot say I like it so well as I once liked N. York: but this place answers with me & I am perfectly content & happy.”95 His brother Hugh stayed with them, ardently hoping to win compensation soon so that he could rejoin his beloved wife in New York. But Hugh was “far from the person he was when you last see him,” Alexander informed Nicholas Low, “his mind is much troubled, with his Misfortunes.”96 “If ever man was to be pitied, he is, his losses hang heavy on him & his being from his wife hurts him much.”97 By the summer of 1786, with only £300 compensation in hand and the prospect of being able to travel back to America fast receding, Hugh Wallace found his health collapsing. “Another attack of his disorder”—perhaps a small stroke?—left him unable to walk or ride; soon he could barely sit up for more than half an hour at a stretch.98 His family watched this once vigorous man simply dissolve away. By autumn 1787, Hugh was so frail that “his man servant carries him from Room to Room in his arms as a Child. Indeed he is in every respect as helpless as a Child & his memory very bad.” The next winter he was dead, his losses unrewarded, his widow left to grieve on the other side of an ocean.99
Back in Mortlake, Isaac Low waited for news of his own dividend. It would be £1,700, he learned, a handsome sum by anybody’s reckoning (worth about one hundred times that in today’s purchasing power)—but as with his earlier pension, far less than he had counted on. He responded first with despair, ready to “set myself down for a ruined Man,” then with anger at the “palpable Injustice” done him.100 Low thought he had presented unimpeachable witnesses and testimony (so much, indeed, that the commissioners found his papers “to be too voluminous and not sufficiently clear”), and could only explain the disappointing result by conjuring spectral visions of “insidious” enemies whispering “Malice” in the commissioners’ ears.101 Yet there was one blot Low could never erase: “I found on my own previous Examinations, that my having been in Committee and Congress, was a great stumbling Block.” Condemned as a loyalist in New York, now that Low was in Britain the former congressman found himself discriminated against as a seeming onetime patriot.102
Low strenuously protested the commission’s judgment for as long as he could: he asked his brother in New York to “muster all my Friends, and to cram Mr. Anstie with Evidence (as they do Turkeys in this Country with Paste) to prove … that all my Efforts, in all Situations, was to conciliate and preserve Peace … and above all, to prevent a Separation of the two Countries.”103 Grudgingly he took his money, resigned himself to the thought that he would never return “to breath my native air,” and started a new career in London as an insurance underwriter.104 After four years in Britain, at least “the Gloom which oppressed me begins to dispel as the prospect opens of earning a subsistence, and passing away the Remainder of my Days in this Land of true Liberty.”105 But the black beast of “Despondency” trailed him as surely as his own shadow; and Low could never really quiet a mind agitated by need, smarting from injustice, and troubled afresh by the high risks of his new profession. Low literally worried himself sick. On a visit to the Isle of Wight to recover his health, he died, crushed by loss. “To see all the fruits of his Industry, set at to nought through the cruell treatment he experiencd on both sides [of] the Atlantic brought on an anxious mind, which hurried him to the Grave,” Isaac Jr. wrote to his uncle in New York. He lifted his father’s concerns onto his own capable, Kensington-educated shoulders instead.106
All told, the British government awarded loyalists £3,033,091—worth about £300 million today—on a total volume of losses claimed amounting to £10,358,413. Receiving compensation for lost property were 2,291 loyalists; a further 588 earned pensions to make up for lost income.107 Hundreds of loyalists began and ended the claims process with far fewer resources, and far fewer chances of winning help, than Isaac Low. Yet for all that those disadvantaged claimants received minimal payments, it was Low and his peers who came away from the experience with the greatest sense of disappointment. Their dissatisfaction hinged on that discrepancy between loyalist and metropolitan attitudes that had underpinned the commission from the outset. Inadequate compensation just opened afresh the wounds of being a refugee, and enhanced the sense most refugees had of being strangers in Britain. They saw compensation as a right. What they got instead was charitable relief from a self-consciously paternalistic (and penny-pinching) state. How much happier must have been broken, blind, and confused Shadrack Furman, awarded an annual pension of £18 for life: enough, perhaps, to shelve his catgut fiddle for a while and stay off the streets, with a fire and a fresh loaf of bread.
AS THE CLAIMS commission wound down its business in the late 1780s, many loyalist refugees had discovered Britain to be a disappointment. But though they may not have recognized it as clearly, they also sat at the center of an empire reshaped by the “spirit of 1783.” In June 1788, Prime Minister William Pitt rose in the House of Commons to open the debate on the liquidation of the last remaining loyalist claims. He addressed a legislature in the middle of a thrilling session, pre
occupied by affairs that well reflected the changes under way in the post-revolutionary British world. The most significant issue was reforming the East India Company, the commercial body that had effectively morphed into an imperial state by administering Bengal. Since the American Revolution, Company activities had fallen under increasing scrutiny and parliamentary oversight. In March 1788, regulatory efforts culminated in a spectacular impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, on a charge of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Hundreds of spectators filed into Westminster Hall to watch Edmund Burke, who spearheaded the prosecution, launch a gripping piece of political theater. For four consecutive days, Burke held his audience transfixed with a speech detailing Hastings’s alleged rapacity, corruption, blackmail, and worse. As he described alleged British torture of Indian women, using terms “more vivid—more harrowing—and more horrific—than human utterance on either fact or fancy, perhaps, ever formed before,” the MP Richard Sheridan’s wife fainted dead away in shock; Burke himself was seized with a stomach cramp and had to retire for the day.108 A few days later, when Sheridan took to the boards, tickets to the trial were said to be selling for fifty guineas each.
As if the Hastings trial were not dramatic enough, in May 1788 Pitt introduced into Parliament a contentious subject that had been sweeping through the nation’s churches, coffee houses, and drawing rooms. For generations, slave ships had cruised in and out of Liverpool, Bristol, and other British ports as part of a triangular trade with Africa and the Americas. The British public had seemed little bothered. But starting in the 1770s, abolitionists circulated tales of the ghastly conditions on board these ships, portraying the slave trade as a national disgrace. Suddenly, after the war, it was as if thousands of heads looked up together, recoiled, and spoke out at once. Petitions poured into Parliament from every corner of Britain, calling for an end to the transatlantic slave trade. In 1788, Pitt secured a unanimous resolution from Parliament to debate the matter in its next session, and in April 1789 the Yorkshire MP William Wilberforce introduced the first abolition bill in British history.109
Disparate though these proceedings might seem, the Hastings trial and the rise of abolitionism were both every bit as closely related to the loss of America as the issue of loyalist compensation. Though both reform efforts predated the American Revolution, the loss of the colonies injected them with fresh relevance and ethical force. The secession of more than two million white American subjects drove home the fact that the British Empire was a majority nonwhite enterprise. Bengal and other areas ruled by the East India Company were the empire’s most populous domains, and the company itself was one of the empire’s largest governing institutions. With the memory of American mismanagement still raw, it seemed more vital than ever, especially to “friends of America” like Burke, to reform Indian government to prevent corruption and abuse of power. At the same time, the American Revolution removed half a million slaves from the British Empire, and a major interest group in the form of American slaveowners. Abolitionists were able to draw a moral contrast between Britain, where slaveowning was unenforceable following the 1772 Somerset case, and a United States in which slavery would be constitutionally protected. Together these causes illustrated the paternalistic impulses of the “spirit of 1783,” toward increasingly centralized authority and clarified ideals of liberty and moral purpose.110
By 1788 the transformative effects of the American Revolution for the British Empire were also discernable in a third arena, reflecting the final element of the “spirit of 1783.” This one could be traced on the imperial map. For while Britain compensated loyalists for their losses, it began to compensate for its own loss of the thirteen colonies by expanding into new territories. And while thousands of loyalist refugees built new settlements around the Atlantic, one loyalist in Britain helped launch what was perhaps the period’s most consequential colonial undertaking, on the other side of the earth.
New York–born James Mario Matra had arguably seen more of the world than any American alive. As an able-bodied seaman in the Royal Navy, Matra had circumnavigated the globe with Captain James Cook from 1768 to 1771 on the Endeavour, a pioneering voyage of “discovery” widely understood today to have initiated British imperialism in the Pacific. But no active steps had yet been taken to colonize the most promising territory Cook identified for settlement: Australia. “We almost universally have a strong affection for our Native Soil,” Matra recognized, and “few of any Country, will ever think of settling in any foreign part of the World, from a restless mind, & from romantick views.”111 But when he saw his fellow loyal Americans become refugees, Matra spotted an opportunity to achieve two goals in one. With so many exiles questing for a new home, he suggested, why not settle them in New South Wales, on Australia’s east coast? Temperate and sparsely inhabited, New South Wales was like an antipodean reflection of North America. And the American refugees would make ideal colonists. They were already uprooted, self-evidently loyal, and in many cases familiar with the kinds of labor needed to create a settlement. Matra assured British ministers that “the most intelligent, and candid Americans … all agree that under the Patronage, and Protection of Government, it offers the most favourable Prospects that have yet occurred, to better the Fortunes, and to promote the happiness, of their fellow Sufferers, & Countrymen.”112
“Matra’s Plan,” as authorities termed it, became the template for Britain’s colonization of Australia—though in the event, his scheme took another turn. Before the revolution, Britain had been transporting convicts to the American colonies as indentured laborers, but U.S. independence made it impossible to continue this practice. Officials desperately needed a fresh outlet for Britain’s disgustingly overcrowded prisons. Recognizing an even better opening, Matra swiftly modified his plan for a loyalist “asylum” in Australia, and proposed that New South Wales be developed as a penal colony instead. So Australia was not to be a loyalist haven in the end—though the First Fleet that sailed for Botany Bay in 1787 carried seven unlucky black loyalists among the prisoners.113 But as the convicts cut back the gum trees and fragrant eucalypts to pitch their tents at Sydney Cove in the spring of 1788, they enacted a version of the same process loyalist refugees performed from the banks of the Saint John River to the Sierra Leone estuary.
So by the time Parliament debated the outstanding loyalist claims in June 1788, the “spirit of 1783” had demonstrably marked the refugees’ world. Just five years earlier in the peace treaty debates, MPs had wrung their hands at the division of the empire, Britain’s loss of international standing, and the betrayal of national honor. Now relief efforts showcased British humanitarianism while administrative reforms sought to ward off colonial discontent from India to Ireland. Widened geographical expansion made the empire a Pacific entity as well as an Atlantic one. And while in 1783 the “abandonment” of the loyalists had seemed to encapsulate everything that went wrong with British America, by 1788 Britain’s treatment of the loyalists seemed to exemplify the virtues of this rejuvenated empire. Summing up the work of the Loyalist Claims Commission, Edmund Burke reminded his colleagues that “the loyalists had no claim upon the House founded in strict right”; rather “the House was bound in honor and justice to take their claims into consideration.” Compensating loyalists did “the country the highest credit.… It was a new and noble instance of national bounty and generosity.”114
Burke’s use of the adjective “new” deserves notice. The American Revolution made clear that overseas subjects—even white ones—would not necessarily be considered as extensions of those in the metropolis, in the way that American colonists had once hoped to be treated (though that did not stop overseas subjects from seeking enhanced rights and representation). What they got instead was embedded in Burke’s idea of “national bounty,” a phrase that touched on the fundamental ethos of this post-revolutionary empire. British officials self-consciously advertised their moral responsibility toward overseas subjects. It did not matter if
you had white skin or black, the logic went, wore saris or moccasins, kneeled in a mosque or took Catholic communion: you would still win imperial protection and responsible government. As loyalists discovered, you could even win freedom and financial support. The refugees got paid for their losses for the same reasons some politicians hoped to protect Bengali subjects from rapacious governors, and abolitionists hoped to protect African slaves from death on British ships. “Whatever may be said of this unfortunate war, either to account for, to justify, or to apologize for the conduct of either Country,” the claims commissioner John Eardley Wilmot wrote with satisfaction decades later, “all the world has been unanimous in applauding the justice and the humanity of Great Britain … in compensating, with a Liberal hand, the Losses of those who suffered so much for their firm and faithful adherence.”115 Thanks to the Loyalist Claims Commission, loyalists had gone from reminders of defeat to points of pride, testaments to British munificence. And though there were no real precedents for the Loyalist Claims Commission, it provided a meaningful example in turn when the French Revolution brought thousands more refugees to British shores for asylum. Wilmot helped form a committee for émigré relief, many of whose members had previously been involved in aiding American loyalists.116
Debates concluded, payment schemes drawn up, the Loyalist Claims Commission presented its twelfth and final report to Parliament in 1789, and the Treasury duly paid out the final dividends. No matter how much loyalist refugees received, simply finishing the claims process marked the end of a long road. To a few of the most fortunate, substantial payments meant that they could continue living in Britain in relative comfort. Yet even Beverley Robinson, who received a magnificent £25,000, one of the largest sums awarded, felt disappointed by his settlement.117 The resolution “seems to have affected him very much in his spirits, pray God it may not injure his Health,” his youngest son William observed. Too old now for military service or government positions, if any were even available, Robinson could only hope that “possibly from constant application & dancing attendance he may get some addition to his allowance.”118 The best compensation for privileged loyalists like Robinson and his friends came from seeing their children succeed. His eldest son Beverley Jr. was becoming a pillar of the British North American elite. Three other sons were well placed in trade and military administration. Phil Robinson, though prevented by lack of money from fulfilling an ambition to study in Germany, continued his romping career through the ranks of the British army.119 Beverley Robinson’s successes with his children notably contrasted, though, with the fate of another disappointed refugee, William Franklin. Now permanently settled in London, Franklin took little pleasure from his reunion with his only son Temple in 1792. Raised for many years by Benjamin Franklin, the young man had become a stranger to William, shiftless and dissolute. Father and son became about as estranged as William and Benjamin had been. William found pleasure instead in raising Temple’s illegitimate daughter as his own.120
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