Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  For many other loyalists in Britain (though the historical record is not detailed enough to allow for precise estimates), compensation helped propel new journeys. Some looked back across the Atlantic for fresh opportunities. In 1786, Sir Guy Carleton was named governor in chief of Canada, and William Smith followed his patron to Quebec, to serve as chief justice. Reverend Charles Inglis had years of lobbying rewarded with an appointment as the first bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787. Hundreds of humbler refugees left to become farmers, tradesmen, and lawyers in British North America among their friends and former neighbors from the thirteen colonies. Benedict Arnold joined this reverse migration, exchanging his costly life in Britain for what he hoped would be a profitable commercial career in Saint John, New Brunswick.121 And for a few loyalists, including Samuel Shoemaker, the stay at “home” in Britain ended in a return to the “home” they had fled. Despite off-putting reports of chaotic conditions in the early American republic, and lingering fears about punitive action, they braved the dangers and headed for the United States.

  The experiences of the Johnston family provide especially good insight into the choices made by middle-class refugees in Britain. Since their departure from East Florida in 1784, they had been living in Edinburgh, where William completed his medical education and Elizabeth enjoyed setting up, at last, something resembling a family home. In the spring of 1785 she bore another “fine boy,” while William went to London “to form some plan as to where he should finally practice.” He may never have seen his new son, for just three months later the baby was dead of thrush—lifted by God, Elizabeth consoled herself, “from a world of sin and sorrow.” She had given birth to four children in four different cities in about as many years. Now she planted her first gravestone in Scotland’s alien soil. With William’s training finished and the claims payments made out (their fathers were rewarded with about £1,000 each), the Johnstons contemplated a fresh set of options for their future.122 Lack of money and access to positions compromised their prospects for a comfortable life in Britain. William Johnston turned to his patrons for help. One “handsome offer” came from Archibald Campbell, William’s commanding officer at the capture of Savannah.123 Campbell had just been appointed governor of Madras: would William like to join him in India? It was a tantalizing prospect. India tended to mean one thing to the hard-up, ambitious British men who sailed there: the chance to live richly overseas and retire with a tidy fortune. That made getting into East India Company service highly competitive, and an appealing option for loyalists who could manage it. But then, the chances of not coming back at all were considerably higher, for India also had a well-earned reputation as a white man’s grave.

  A different lead was dangled by another of Johnston’s wartime patrons, former Savannah commandant Alured Clarke. Clarke was due to travel out to Jamaica as its new governor. How would William like to set up a practice there?124 Jamaica, too, had sickness aplenty, and fewer legends about incredible wealth to offset its risks. It was also, though, a much more familiar possibility for the Johnstons than Asia. Its slave-based plantation society resembled the one they had left in Georgia and shared cultural and social ties with the American south. William Johnston’s own parents had met and married on St. Kitts.

  So which was it to be, the Indies east or west? The Johnstons could pick between two distinct spheres of opportunity within a single global empire. In October 1786, Elizabeth traveled to the Scottish port of Greenock, where she had landed just over two years before, to take passage for another unknown. She was sad to leave Edinburgh, where she had “met with much kindness and affection”; and she must have felt a tighter tug on leaving her firstborn son Andrew, who stayed behind to get a good Scottish education in his grandfather Dr. Johnston’s care. But this departure signaled an important step toward self-sufficiency. No longer forced to move by war, and no longer dependent on William’s father, the Johnstons could stay together and—at last—stay put. Boarding the ship with her children Catherine and Lewis, Elizabeth especially welcomed her impending reunion with William, who had gone on ahead, leaving her racked by familiar fears that they were “never to meet again.”125 But on the other side of the indigo Atlantic he was waiting for them, in the white-shuttered governor’s house of Spanish Town, Jamaica.126

  Jedidiah Morse, A New Map of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Cape Breton, 1794. (illustration credit 1.6)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A World in the Wilderness

  THE LYON keeled and swayed from Gravesend across the roiling Atlantic, no sooner cleared of one storm than thrown into the churning belly of the next. Charles Inglis, the former rector of New York’s Trinity Church, monitored the “violent Tempests” through deep-sunk eyes, his hollow cheeks tight with strain, as he held close his children Peggy and Jack and clenched his hands together in prayers for safe passage. Six weeks and three thousand miles later, a purple strip of land lined the horizon, and the coves and cusps of the Nova Scotia shoreline came into view: a forbidding contrast to the gentle downs and crumbling chalk cliffs they had left behind. Inglis sailed into Halifax in October 1787, offering up “Praise to the Almighty for thus bringing me in safety to my destined place of residence”—much the same language used by another loyalist clergyman, Jacob Bailey, eight years before.1

  Inglis’s journey from England to Nova Scotia had been as rough as it was roundabout. He had never even expected to be in Britain in the first place. Though he and his wife had both been attainted by the state of New York, when news of the peace treaty reached the city in the spring of 1783, Inglis sought to have the judgments against his family reversed so they could safely remain there. But the New York assembly denied his request: after all, Inglis had been one of the city’s most outspoken loyalists throughout the war. Effectively banished from New York, Inglis made plans to travel to Nova Scotia, where he hoped to serve as a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Along with fifty-four other prominent loyalist civilians “desirous of continuing to enjoy the benefits of the British Constitution,” he signed a petition asking Sir Guy Carleton for land grants in Nova Scotia on the same generous terms (five thousand acres each) granted to veteran officers. (This document, known as the “petition of fifty-five,” attracted outrage from humbler loyalists, who saw it as an arrogant assumption of privilege by the elite.)2 He packed up his library and household furniture and dispatched them to Annapolis Royal with his servants, preparing to follow shortly himself. But then, as New York seethed around him during the last weeks of British occupation, Inglis’s plans took a terrible set of turns. His wife Margaret had been bedridden for several months with a mysterious but lingering illness. As she languished in discomfort during those squalid August days, every one of the three Inglis children suddenly contracted measles, which was often fatal. Inglis faced the horrifying prospect of his entire family being wiped out. What was worse, precisely this had happened to him twenty years earlier, when his first wife died in childbirth, followed by their twins. This time fortunately the children recovered; but on the last day of summer, the long-suffering Margaret was dead.3

  By now the only ships Inglis could find out of New York were heading not for Nova Scotia but for England. Hurriedly rearranging his plans through the haze of mourning, Inglis dispatched one daughter to England ahead of him and arranged to leave another daughter, too weakened by sickness to travel, with her grandmother in New York. On October 21, 1783, he stepped into the pulpit of St. George’s Church to preach his last sermon in New York City. “Finally Brethren Farewell,” read his chosen text. “Be perfect; be of good comfort; be of one Mind; live in peace; and the God of Love and Peace be with you.” A few days later, he boarded a Britain-bound ship with his six-year-old son.4

  With so many New York friends also in Britain, including the Robinsons, the Lows, and William Franklin, Inglis’s exile was by no means solitary. Like them, he took advantage of the move to Britain to place his children in good schools, investing in their future while his own
remained uncertain. Armed with testimonials from Carleton and William Smith, Inglis secured a pension of £175 from the Treasury until his loyalist claim could be reviewed. But even with the pension in hand, London life was far from easy. His children got sick again, and he himself endured nearly a year of debilitating illness. Still, he tirelessly pursued a new objective: to establish a bishopric for the growing province of Nova Scotia—and to be appointed to that position himself. In Britain he held numerous meetings with the archbishop of Canterbury and others, patiently working to build support for the plan. After more than two years of urging, Inglis insisted that “the State of Things in the Colonies called for the immediate Presence of the Bishop,” and pleaded, “If I was not appointed, I wished to know it soon, because I had a Family (two Children) to remove, & adjust my Affairs for leaving London, which became absolutely necessary for sake of my Health, & on other accounts.”5 He waited fully four years before the Privy Council approved the episcopate. At last, one summer Sunday in 1787, all that hardship was crowned with success when Inglis was consecrated at Lambeth Palace as bishop of Nova Scotia, the first colonial bishop ever created in the British Empire. Two weeks later, the Inglises sailed back to North America.6

  Going to Halifax was not quite going home for the Inglis family, but under the circumstances of exile, it was the next best thing. They were quickly welcomed by friends old and new. The bishop and his children stepped off the ship and straight into the governor’s own carriage, which drove them through the unfamiliar streets to a friend’s house. Inglis dined with Governor Parr, received calls from loyalist connections, and promptly wrote to his friend in Annapolis Royal to reclaim “my servants & furniture,” which he had sent on from New York four years earlier.7 He was especially excited to renew his acquaintance with a distinguished visitor to Halifax, Prince William Henry, the king’s third son (and future King William IV). In 1783, New York loyalists had gone weak at the knees when the teenage prince, a midshipman in the Royal Navy, arrived with his ship in Manhattan. Now in Halifax, a seasoned lieutenant fresh from Caribbean service with Horatio Nelson, the prince inspired equal devotion among the local loyalist elite. Bishop Inglis fawned anew over the “slender, genteel, affable, and sprightly” prince, and in a long private conversation “assured him of my inviolable attachment to his Majesty & personal affection. That I loved the man, whilst I reverenced the sovran [sic]—that no circumstance in my appointment gave me more pleasure, than thereby having it in my power to diffuse more extensively principles of loyalty.”8

  The new bishop wasted little time widening the reach of the Church of England in the province. In the summer of 1788, he set off on a tour of his new dominion. Traveling first to Windsor, about forty miles northeast of Halifax, he scouted out appropriate plots for a new church and a school. He then crossed the peninsula to Cornwallis, near Annapolis Royal, where he found the church on a rudimentary footing, within a largely dissenting community. Even at Annapolis itself, the oldest European town in Nova Scotia, and one of the largest sites of loyalist settlement, Inglis found “things not duly prepared for administering Confirmation.… The Church here is of a moderate size, built by the Inhabitants, & is just a finishing—the Chancel, pews & pulpit not yet built.” He conversed at some length with Jacob Bailey, who had been minister at Annapolis since 1782. Though Bailey had supported a rival candidate for the bishopric, Inglis observed he “appears to be a meek, inoffensive man,” and decided not to chastise him for this error in judgment. At least in Annapolis Inglis was reassured to find that the “inhabitants appear to be the most decent & regular I have yet seen in the province. Their behaviour in time of Divine service very proper. They sing well.”9

  The scattered hamlets above the marshes might well have reminded Inglis more of his birthplace in Ireland than of his adult home in New York City. But though the surroundings were new to him, many of the faces were familiar. A few miles outside Annapolis, Inglis stopped to visit Cornelia DeLancey, the sister of Beverley Robinson Jr.’s wife Ann. Mrs. DeLancey’s pious mother, one of Inglis’s dearest New York friends, had just died. Grieving her mother (and perhaps unleashing the pent-up stresses of her notoriously unhappy marriage), DeLancey was so overcome by the visit of her former pastor that “on seeing me, [she] bursted into tears.” Together the pair mused on where the years had taken them since New York, and where they might lead yet; DeLancey’s husband had just been appointed chief justice of the Bahamas.10 The next day, Inglis sailed down the Annapolis Basin to Digby, nestled on the southern curve of a shimmering bay. There he “was most affectionately received by the Inhabitants, who were all Loyalists. Many of them were formerly members of my congregation, & seemed to vie with each other in manifesting their affection & esteem,” although he was disappointed to note “they are very poor, & I fear will continue so, unless they disperse, & settle on farms.”11

  The spectacle on the opposite shore of the Bay of Fundy, recently constituted as the province of New Brunswick, presented an impressive contrast. Inglis cruised into the city of Saint John, a craggy town with busy wharves at the harbor mouth and fine houses lining the ridge above. And to think it was all brand-new! “Scarcely five years have elapsed since the spot on which it stands was a forest,” Inglis marveled; yet with “upwards of 1000 houses … it affords a striking instance of what industry is capable of doing.” With a population composed almost entirely of loyalists, and revolving around the Atlantic trade, Saint John seemed like a miniature New York, a city transplanted. Inglis again paid many calls on “my old acquaintance.… Here as at Digby the Congregation is made of Loyalists—many of them were my former parishioners.”12

  The bishop rounded off his tour by proceeding up the meandering Saint John River to the capital of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Late summer, when rich sunlight haloed the overripe trees, was the perfect season to visit this place, as tranquil as the river that flowed gently past the barracks square. As the guest of Governor Thomas Carleton—Sir Guy’s younger brother—Inglis enjoyed the best of what the small capital could offer, from casual walks on the riverbank to genial dinners with the local elite. One day Inglis crossed over to Nashwaaksis, opposite Fredericton, to visit “my old acquaintance & friend” Ann Robinson. She and Beverley Jr.—whose wedding ceremony Inglis had performed in New York—had arrived in Fredericton a year earlier from Nova Scotia and carved out an impressive estate. Ann had just delivered the couple’s seventh child, and because of her recent confinement, Beverley had shielded her from the bad news of her mother’s death. Perhaps it mitigated the shock to hear of it now, from the trusted minister’s lips. Inglis left the British Empire’s newest capital thoroughly impressed with its potential: “All seemed to be busily employed. Each thought his own employment, & his farm the best.”

  What Bishop Inglis saw on his summer tour in 1788 was a colonial society created almost overnight. Thirty thousand loyalist refugees—with about twelve hundred slaves—had flooded into these provinces in the space of eighteen months. As he noted, their work was far from done: churches unfinished, schools not built, farmlands in the first seasons of cultivation. But many of the settlements Inglis visited had been virgin woods just five years earlier; the rest had been demographically changed by the great loyalist immigration. Business partners from New England and New York reestablished their concerns in Halifax, Shelburne, and Saint John. Veterans of disbanded regiments traded swords for spades and settled as neighbors on adjacent land grants. Inglis’s parishioners from New York prayed together in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—retaining communities of faith, though Inglis may not have known it, in the same way that black loyalists did in their villages on the edges of white settlements.

  Nowhere did loyalist refugees transform their surroundings on the same scale or with the same enduring significance as in the provinces of British North America. Later historians would come to see them quite simply as the “founding fathers” of British Canada. This characterization has to do in large measure with their influence on politics
and government. Their impact in these spheres became apparent as early as 1784, when British authorities responded to the mass immigration by dividing Nova Scotia in two, to create the province of New Brunswick. With a white population overwhelmingly composed of refugees, New Brunswick was the closest thing loyalists had to their own state; and elite loyalists hailed it as an opportunity to fashion their own imperial answer to the United States. Meanwhile, refugee Mohawks essayed a new settlement around Lakes Erie and Ontario, where Joseph Brant tried to establish an autonomous Indian domain between the American republic and British Empire. In these arenas west of the Bay of Fundy, refugees helped shape a loyal America, as it were, in contrast to the republican America they had fled.