Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  But if you toured the Canadian provinces in the 1780s, as Inglis did, you would also see change impressed on the land itself. This transformation would be most evident in Nova Scotia, which received the largest infusion of refugees by far. The loyalist community at Port Roseway, in particular, consisting of the largely white town of Shelburne and the adjacent black village of Birchtown, became the shock city of the exodus, springing up virtually overnight. How did loyalist refugees make the wilderness a new world? In its effects on Nova Scotia’s human and environmental landscape, the loyalist influx resembled white expansion elsewhere in North America, as well as the contemporary colonization of Australia.13 Yet this wasn’t just any colonial undertaking. It was also a major refugee crisis that posed particular challenges for government, and heightened tensions between settlers and authorities. And the refugees’ imprint was all the more notable when set in the context of earlier British efforts to colonize Nova Scotia. For this province had already been altered by a British imperial project one generation before—an episode not of settlement, but of displacement.

  ON THE OLD European maps they called the place Arcadia, for the first explorers who charted the shores had seen its tall pine forests and verdant marshes as pastoral fantasy made real. In pure if apt coincidence, the native Micmac Indians used the suffix -akadie to indicate a “place of abundance”—making it so much the easier for “Arcadia” to slip, on the tongues of the French who settled there, into the simpler l’Acadie. They planned to make this corner of North America into a New World idyll.14

  In the first years of the seventeenth century, French colonists established a settlement called Port Royal on the gentle shore of the Annapolis Basin, notched into the coast behind the Bay of Fundy. They dyked and sluiced the marshes into farms and orchards, protecting their crops from the eighteen-foot tides of the bay. They protected their settlement also, with a stone fort surrounded by star-shaped earthworks, to resist any attack from the sea. Their hamlets were humble, but the smallness of their numbers and simplicity of their circumstances belied the wealth that surrounded them. Under the glinting surface of the North Atlantic waters swam silvery cod, millions of them. Pulled in seemingly endless abundance from the ocean, the fish were slit, dried, packed into barrels with salt, and shipped to Europe and the West Indies, where they nourished rapidly growing slave populations. The land hosted fortunes, too, in the scampering creatures of the woods. Indians brought bundles of sleek beaver furs and other pelts to trade with the Europeans for kettles and hatchets, needles and knives.

  Resource-rich and with long, accessible coasts, French-settled Acadia quickly attracted the attention of the ambitious and more numerous colonists in Massachusetts, just a few days’ sail to the south. Opportunistically acting against the backdrop of European war between Britain and France, New England adventurers conquered Port Royal twice in the space of fifteen years and renamed it Annapolis Royal (after Queen Anne). By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Britain formally won possession of most of Acadia from the French. In British eyes, this rough, bluff terrain had less the look of an Arcadia than of Scotland: on English maps it was named Nova Scotia, appropriately enough for the northern neighbor of New England. And just as residents of Hanoverian Britain worried about forging a union with Jacobite-leaning Scotland, Nova Scotia’s eighteenth-century colonizers also had to come to terms with a white population of suspect loyalties.15

  Considering how large the rivalry between Protestant Britain and Catholic France loomed in European and imperial politics, it was only to be expected that the relationship between Nova Scotia’s new Anglophone rulers and their French Acadian subjects should prove tense. Acadians insisted on their neutrality in the face of British and French pressures, recognizing the authority of the British government while refusing to swear undying loyalty to the crown. But neutrality did not always count for much in the calculations of competing European empires. Acadia remained a focal point of French colonial desire. To the British and New Englanders, meanwhile, Nova Scotia looked like the natural extension of the colonies along the eastern Atlantic seaboard. They hoped to turn it into a beacon for Protestant emigrants from the British Isles and beyond. Such settlement would of course come at the expense of indigenous peoples—as North American colonization invariably did.16 But its sponsors also championed a program of settlement as a self-conscious effort to assert Protestant Anglophone dominance over the Acadians.

  On a July day in 1749, the newly appointed governor of Nova Scotia, Colonel Edward Cornwallis (uncle of Charles, Lord Cornwallis), sailed in a sloop of war around the Chebucto promontory on Nova Scotia’s eastern shore, followed by thirteen transports loaded with more than twenty-five hundred colonists. The site had been promoted by Massachusetts lobbyists because of its deep-water harbor. (“Chebucto” means “big harbor” in Micmac.) The emigrants got to work cutting down trees, putting up tents and huts, and laying lines for the streets of a new town. They called it Halifax, for the president of the board of trade who authorized the scheme.17

  A few days after the British disembarked, Acadians from nearby villages came to investigate the activity in the harbor. Cornwallis had been given a declaration to deliver to them. “In His Majesty’s Name,” Cornwallis told the Acadians that “in hopes … to induce them to become for the future True and Loyall Subjects, [the king] is graciously pleased to allow that the said Inhabitants shall continue in the free exercise of their Religion.” But imperial tolerance rarely came without strings attached. Freedom of worship would be granted to the Acadians “provided” that they “take the oaths of Allegiance appointed … by the Laws of Great Britain,” submit to the new government’s “Rules and Orders,” and “give all possible countenance and assistance” to British-sponsored colonists.18

  Cornwallis’s speech to the Acadians contained the seeds of a fast-growing conflict. With Anglo-French war a more common state of affairs than peace, the Acadians refused to agree to British demands that they take up arms in defense of the province—in defense, that is, against their own Francophone Catholic neighbors in Quebec. Resisting the British oath of allegiance, some Acadians began to flee the province. Others began to fight back. Faced with organized Acadian protest, British officials decided to adopt a policy similar to one recently prosecuted in Scotland, where after the Jacobite rising of 1745, British forces had swept through the Highlands confiscating land, destroying villages, and deporting suspected insurgents. The same would now be inflicted on Nova Scotia’s “rebel” Catholics. In the late spring of 1755, British troops seized the French fort of Beauséjour, strategically poised on the isthmus that links peninsular Nova Scotia to the mainland. Renamed Fort Cumberland—after the royal duke in charge of slashing and burning the Highlands—the fort became the headquarters of anti-Acadian operations. Their land, houses, and livestock would be confiscated, and, a British colonel informed the shocked residents of the Acadian community at Grand Pré, “you yourselves are to be removed from this province.”19 In groups of no more than one thousand people each, the Acadians were to be scattered across the American colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia.

  The roundups started in the summer of 1755, a season when even a warm day in Nova Scotia may be clipped by a crisp maritime wind, and rain often mists over the waterlogged land. Hundreds of Acadians were held prisoner in the cellars of Fort Cumberland, awaiting forced shipment. From nearby Fort Lawrence, a lucky few dozen prisoners successfully escaped through a tunnel dug out with smuggled-in knives and spoons. In the vicinity of Annapolis Royal, British officers had to sift through a mixed Anglo-French community picking out Acadians to deport. When the transports appeared off Grand Pré, men were sent on board first, “praying, singing, and crying,” followed some weeks later by the women and children, who were packed onto the ships in “a scene of woe & Distress.”20 In the wake of the evacuations, British and New England troops plundered Acadian hamlets, wrecked property, and burned whatever was left, thereby denying shelter to any escapees. By the end of
1755 alone, seven thousand people—about half the Acadian population—had been shipped off from Nova Scotia for the thirteen colonies. Despite an official dictum that whole families should travel together, the twenty-year-old commissary at Fort Cumberland, Brook Watson, lamented that “I fear some families were divided and sent to different parts of the globe, notwithstanding all possible care was taken to prevent it.”21 Nearly three decades later, as commissary-general in British-occupied New York, Watson worked hard to provision the loyalist refugees and help stave off, for them at least, the worst of the sufferings he had witnessed among the Acadians.

  The expulsion and dispersal of the Acadians held a mirror up to the experience of the refugee loyalists, to reveal a pattern of transcontinental migration recognizable in outline, but terribly distorted and reversed. The whole scheme stood in stunning contrast to the image of a tolerant, multiethnic British Empire increasingly promoted in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. Like American loyalists, Acadians refused to swear loyalty oaths; but their refusal was met with organized state-sponsored violence. The majority of Acadians relied on the charity and goodwill of hosts in the thirteen colonies who were very like their original antagonists, though more than a thousand Acadian refugees ultimately found asylum in their soi-disant mother country, France. Like the Black Poor in London a generation later, these refugees—packed into the slums of French Atlantic port cities—were tapped as colonial pioneers and shipped off to populate outposts as far afield as the Falkland Islands. A more successful venture took shape on the Gulf coast of Louisiana, where Acadians became “Cajuns,” rebuilding their community in a subtropical wetland thousands of miles from the northern arcadia they had left. From Louisiana’s nouvelle Acadie to old Acadie in the north, later generations remembered the expulsion as le grand dérangement, embedded in an oral tradition of stories and songs.

  The Acadian removals left an ominous shadow over the land reached by loyalist refugees thirty years later, as well as tangible legacies. In 1758, the Nova Scotia assembly legalized the government’s confiscation of Acadian lands and restricted the role Catholics could play in provincial civil society. Instead, Acadian land was used to attract Protestant colonists, chiefly from New England. Each head of family who settled there was offered a thousand acres, free of quitrent for ten years. This land redistribution formed a clear precedent for the grants later extended to loyalist refugees. Nova Scotia, like East Florida, became the site of a land rush, as colonial and British officials issued 3.5 million acres to speculators. (Several individuals invested in both colonies.) The Proclamation of 1763, by which Britain prohibited North American settlement west of the Appalachians, further encouraged colonial migration to the north: Nova Scotia’s population more than doubled in a dozen years.22 These settlers, known as the planters, put a British colonial stamp on Nova Scotia that would be extended and deepened by the loyalists.23

  On the eve of the American Revolution, two Yorkshire farmers visited this “Land of Liberty and Freedom” to investigate its potential for British emigration.24 They judged the terrain promising for growing corn and rearing cattle. Halifax, recently a frontier outpost struggling through snowbound winters, had become a respectable capital, with a crown of stone fortifications, state buildings, and fine homes with large, leafy gardens. In place of the Acadians, now a largely Protestant white population approaching twenty thousand lived scattered across the province in small villages—among several thousand Micmac, Abenaki, and other Indians.25 A small number of Acadians had actually returned, invited back to work on the dikes that only they knew how to maintain. Yet with such a small population on so much land, Nova Scotia remained far from flourishing, its promise as the next big thing of British North America still largely unfulfilled. Such was the landscape—depopulated in one imperial tragedy—that would provide a home for the subjects of another imperial upheaval in 1783. Could loyalist refugees turn this underdeveloped province into a thriving, profitable colony?

  NOVA SCOTIA often made a poor first impression on Anglo-American arrivals, and the refugee Reverend Jacob Bailey and his family were no exceptions. As they sailed toward Halifax in June 1779, in flight from Maine, they winced at the altogether “unpleasing aspect” of this windy, barren region, with its “starving and misshapen” trees. But the Baileys were quite a sight themselves. They had escaped from New England with little more than the rags on their backs. Bailey vividly described his costume of battered shoes “which sustained the marks of rebellion and independence,” rusty black trousers, an oversized coat so stained “that it might truly be stilled [styled] a coat of many colours,” and a “jaundise coloured wig” topped with a limp beaver cap. When their boat tied up at the Halifax quayside, so many people stopped to gape at the strange new arrivals that Bailey delivered an impromptu speech from the quarterdeck: “Gentlemen we are a company of fugitives from … New England, driven by famine and persecution to take refuge among you, and therefore I must intreat your candor and compassion to excuse the meaness and singularity of our dress.”26

  They were not to remain outsiders for long. No sooner had Bailey delivered his off-the-cuff introduction to the curious onlookers than he spotted a familiar face: one of the Baileys’ neighbors from Maine pushed through the crowd, hailing his long-lost friends. Escorted by their countryman, the Baileys looped through Halifax’s impressively “wide and regular” streets, taking in the “singular appearance” of the buildings about them, to the home of another former neighbor. Within hours of their arrival, they sat cheerfully around a hospitable table, fortifying themselves with hot tea and fresh white bread, and receiving visits from a series of old acquaintances and local dignitaries. Bailey’s hostess promptly ordered him a new pair of shoes and stockings—“the sight and possession” of which “British manufactures gave pleasure to my inward man”—and the next day, the family found lodgings of their own on Pleasant Street, “the most elegant street in the town,” in a tidy house with a wallpapered parlor.27 Flanked by hawthorn trees and giving onto verdant groves “extremely pleasant to the sight and grateful to the smell,” the Baileys’ new residence made them feel as if they were more “in the midst of a woody country, than in the heart of a populous town.”28 The Nova Scotia assembly promptly voted fifty pounds for the family’s relief, nicely completing their first week’s welcome in this northern “land of freedom.”29

  Jacob Bailey found much to praise in his new home. “Notwithstanding the inhabitants are a mixture of several nations,” he remarked, “besides english, scotch, Irish, Hessian and American soldiers with a large number of Indians, yet I was never in a town so regular and well governed. You may walk the streets all night without perceiving the least disturbance or noise, and what will astonish the New England puritans, you will scarce hear an oath as you are passing the street.”30 But his enthusiastic portrayals concealed the difficulties faced by this city in wartime. Despite the hopes imperialists vested in the harbor city, Halifax’s moment of greatness (like Nova Scotia’s more generally) had always seemed to be somewhere around the next corner. By the 1770s its population was actually shrinking. And the civic order Bailey so admired reigned in part because since 1775 Halifax, like the British garrison towns in the thirteen colonies, had been under martial law. Prices, always high because of the city’s relative remoteness, shot up under the pressures of wartime dearth; the arrival of troops and loyalists following the 1776 evacuation of Boston had doubled rents.31 Residents complained that “their Fields and Gardens had been plunder’d, the enclosures pulled down by the Soldiers.”32 Few refugees shared Bailey’s positive assessment of the place, and many left as soon as possible for the apparently more congenial climes of Britain. Halifax was “a place I heartily wish none of my Friends may be driven to against their Wills,” wrote one Bostonian, “As for those who chuse to come here I have Nothing to say to them.”33

  While Halifax residents found plenty to complain of, war made conditions even more difficult for those in the isolated settlements along t
he coast, regularly raided by New England privateers. They cruised into harbors, stole small boats, and sometimes landed to loot the towns—actions that some patriots deplored as likely to “occation more Torys than 100 such Expeditions Woud make good.” In Liverpool, on the south shore, repeated attacks succeeded in frightening a relatively neutral population into action. It wasn’t just that the Americans seized boats and guns—it was the shamelessness with which they did it, coasting into the harbor “with Drum and fife going, and whuzzaing.” Liverpool’s magistrate organized his fellow townsmen into posting night guards and coming up with a response plan for attack. By 1780, Liverpool had been fortified with a small detachment of regulars and fitted out a privateer of its own.34

  With so many of its inhabitants having come from New England in recent decades, Nova Scotia might have seemed, on the face of things, to be a likely candidate for becoming a fourteenth American state. In 1775, the residents of Yarmouth petitioned the Nova Scotia government for formal neutrality, pointing out, “We were almost all of us born in New England, we have Fathers, Brothers & Sisters in that country, divided betwixt natural affection to our nearest relations, and good Faith and Friendship to our King and Country.” (The government rejected their request as “utterly Absurd and inconsistent with the duty of Subjects.”)35 Bailey, who was appointed to a parish near Annapolis soon after his arrival, complained about the suspect loyalties of the “true sons of New England” he encountered there.36 But Nova Scotia, geographically detached from the lower North American colonies, did not catch the revolutionary fire. Trade relationships bound the province far more tightly to Britain than to the thirteen colonies, making the prospect of joining the Americans economically unattractive. Then too, Nova Scotia’s political culture, forged in a later, less politically conflictual era than New England’s, made provincial governors more willing to negotiate and reach compromise with British authorities. (Similar factors help account for why the British West Indies also did not join the revolution.) So Nova Scotia remained loyal—but more by default than by declaration. This meant that though it offered a plausible asylum for loyalist refugees, the assertive loyalism of newcomers like Bailey stood in contrast to the more neutral sentiments of many prewar inhabitants.37