Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  The fraught business of land allocation continued to catalyze tensions among the refugees, and would have particularly negative consequences for the blacks. Severely short-staffed, Marston could not keep up with the need and demand for lots; yet in Shelburne as elsewhere, “many of the Refugees refus’d to carry the [surveying] Chain to lay out their own Land without exorbitant payment.”105 Every time he held a land lottery the complaints piled up. Some loyalists kept selling their lands at speculative prices, violating the terms of the royal bounty; others fraudulently entered children into the drawings. Still others resented restrictions placed by Wentworth on cutting clearings in nearby forests. Given the hostilities swirling about this place of hardship, it was dismally predictable that many whites especially resented the sight of former slaves receiving the same kinds of concessions they themselves were struggling to realize. Shortly after Marston began to survey Birchtown, “the People” of Shelburne appointed a surveyor of their own, who tramped about the area “with a pocket compass & codline” laying out fifty-acre lots. Blithely absorbing Birchtown into his assessment, the rival surveyor sold off lots to white loyalists “on ye Black men’s ground” without “even a shadow of a license.”106

  Marston might have taken some grim satisfaction at knowing he’d seen trouble coming all along—if not, perhaps, anticipating exactly what form it would take. On July 26, 1784, “a Great Riot” burst out in Shelburne: “the disbanded soldiers have risen against the free Negroes to drive [them] out of Town because they labour Cheapr [than] they (ye soldiers) will.” In scenes reminiscent of the revolution they all had fled, more than forty former soldiers stormed onto David George’s land, swinging hooks and chains seized from ships. In the space of a few hours, they demolished George’s house and twenty or so others belonging to free blacks, and threatened to burn the Baptist meeting house to the ground. Benjamin Marston rushed to the barracks for information and discovered that he too—the focal point of so much loyalist discontent—was imminently “threatned by the Rioteers.” Before the day was out he clambered onto a boat among the newly constructed wharves and pushed off for Halifax and safety. For days afterward, he learned, the rioters would comb the countryside in search of the hated surveyor, ready to hang him on sight.107

  While the town erupted around him, David George stood his ground. From his freshly built pulpit he continued to preach, undaunted when the mob came in “and swore how they would treat me if I preached again.” He went on preaching until they returned with sticks and clubs; they struck and beat the pastor until they “drove me into a swamp.” Under cover of night, George returned to Shelburne to collect his family and together they slipped across the river on the town’s western edge—as he had slipped away so many times in his runaway years—and over to Birchtown, where he hoped they might be safe.

  Robert Campbell, Map of the Great River St. John & Waters, 1788. (illustration credit 1.8)

  CHAPTER SIX

  Loyal Americas

  SHELTERING UNDER TENTS, subsisting on government-issued rations, and waiting impatiently for land of their own, Nova Scotia refugees discovered with exceptional immediacy what loyalists had been finding ever since the outbreak of war: their expectations from the British did not always square with the reality. What happened in Shelburne would be replayed in various versions around the sites of loyalist exodus. Land grants, at the heart of the Shelburne troubles, proved to be the single most potent source of discontent among loyalist refugees already severely tested by deprivation. Tensions over race formed another recurring theme, and would later inspire a dramatic sequel for the black loyalists of Birchtown, when the opportunity arose to emigrate to Sierra Leone. Most of all, the problems in Shelburne demonstrated how the formation of a new settlement wasn’t just a physical challenge. It was a political one as well. Refugees had fled north united by their loyalty to the king and searching for continued security under British rule. Yet as the case of Shelburne showed, they could also sharply diverge between loyalists who favored centralized authority (like Benjamin Marston) and those who resented it (like the rioters who threw him out); and American loyalists could easily fall into conflict with imperial agents (of whom Marston was one). When opinion ranged so widely among loyalists—when even loyalists could become rebels, as Marston saw it—how could the British Empire actually manage to govern them? Nowhere would this question become more pressing, or be more systematically addressed, than in the provinces of British North America west of the Bay of Fundy.

  From the comfortable distance of Whitehall, British ministers surveyed the development of British North America with pleasure. “His Majesty feels great satisfaction that the disputes and disagreements which had subsisted amongst the New Settlers have entirely subsided,” Lord Sydney, the home secretary, wrote approvingly to Governor Parr of Nova Scotia in early 1785. He was pleased to see that the region fulfilled its primary goal of providing “a comfortable Asylum” for loyalists. Even better, Sydney harbored great ambitions “that they will, under the Protection of His Majesty’s Government, become the Envy of the Subjects of the Neighbouring States.”1

  Some of Sydney’s loyalist subjects shared his optimistic vision for British North America. “Lord Sidney’s declaration quoted in your letter, ‘That he will make Nova Scotia the envy of the American States,’ has excited a kind of general gratitude,” reported Massachusetts loyalist Edward Winslow from Nova Scotia. Winslow had recently returned from his depressing visit among the disbanded soldiers in the Saint John River valley, where he had witnessed firsthand the refugees’ winter deprivation and hardship. But Winslow was also the sort of person who saw crisis as an opportunity for change:

  Such an event as the present, never happen’d before—perhaps never will happen again. There are assembled here an immense multitude (not of dissolute vagrants such as commonly made the first efforts to settle new countries,) but gentlemen of education—farmers, formerly independent & reputable mechanics, who by the fortune of war have been deprived of their property. They are as firmly attached to the British constitution as if they never had made a sacrifice. Here they stand with their wives and their children looking up for protection, and requesting such regulations as are necessary to the weal of Society.

  With proper government, he averred, “Yes—By God! We will be the envy of the American States.”2 In his view it wasn’t the United States that would inspire the world with visions of liberty and prosperity. It was the loyal, imperial provinces of British North America that could stand as a model, and Winslow laid out one of various projects for how.

  His primary concern rested with the refugees he knew best, the struggling veterans along the Saint John River. Winslow placed the blame for their trying conditions squarely on the shoulders of Governor Parr in Halifax, whom he thought a remote and unsympathetic figure, who wasn’t working fast enough to provide assistance. “The only possible means of effectual relief,” Winslow believed, was to divide Nova Scotia in two and give the refugees on the western side of the Bay of Fundy a government of their own. The creation of a new province, he argued, would let loyalists in the Saint John River valley enjoy a government both physically closer to hand (getting to Halifax entailed an arduous voyage by land and sea) and more responsive to their needs than Governor Parr appeared to be. And it wouldn’t hurt that a new provincial administration would also conveniently produce a fresh slate of salaried offices that Winslow and his officer-class friends were busily positioning themselves to fill.3

  In a lobbying effort that resembled earlier loyalist initiatives for financial compensation, Winslow successfully mobilized transatlantic support for his plan. Sir Guy Carleton, in particular, was won over by the scheme, which he hoped would form part of a larger restructuring of British North American government. Key ministers in London also gradually came around, despite the resistance mounted by Parr and his associates and the fall of the Fox-North administration, which was relatively sympathetic to loyalist interests. After seeing the parliamentary oppo
sition effectively use the abandonment of the loyalists to bring down the Shelburne ministry, the new government under William Pitt could not afford to ignore the ever louder loyalist protests from across the Atlantic.4 In June 1784, the Privy Council passed an order splitting Nova Scotia, just as Winslow wanted. Henceforth, Nova Scotia ended at the Bay of Fundy and the isthmus of Chignecto, which connected the peninsula to the mainland. The territory west of the bay, up to the borders of Quebec, became the province New Brunswick. (The same order also constituted Cape Breton Island as a separate province, but few loyalists migrated there and it would be united with Nova Scotia in 1820.) The partition of Nova Scotia—a strategy that in other, later contexts became a preferred British solution to colonial tensions—provided striking evidence of the loyalists’ transformative impact in the north. They had succeeded in redrawing the map.

  Spem Reduxit read the motto for the new province: Hope Restored. At Shelburne and Birchtown, and along the Fundy shores and Saint John River banks, loyalists had constructed new towns in the woods. New Brunswick gave them—or to be more precise, an elite among them—the chance to construct a whole colonial state along their preferred lines. American loyalists had never simply been reactionaries; many had advocated imperial reform in the thirteen colonies. The newly populous British North America now provided an arena for loyalist refugees and British authorities alike to advance fresh schemes for imperial government. So what would this loyal America look like? Three different answers could be found in the settlements west of the Bay of Fundy. The creation of New Brunswick presented one clear expression of loyalist ambitions, with the establishment of a loyalist-majority state. An instructive point of comparison developed among the Mohawk refugees in Quebec. Receiving grants of land around the Great Lakes, the Mohawks sought not just to rebuild their villages, but to reestablish a confederation of Indian nations under the protection of the British Empire. Meanwhile, the emigration of approximately six thousand white loyalists into Quebec, though less numerically significant than the thirty thousand refugees who flooded into the Maritimes, inspired British authorities to reform government in that province, too, in an attempt to ward off the problems that had undone imperial rule in the thirteen colonies. The result was a piece of constitution-making with far-reaching consequences for the structure of British North American government.

  Each of these projects made manifest a consequence of the American Revolution long recognized in Canada but less often noted in the United States: the revolution inspired the consolidation not of one country but of two.5 While a republican America took shape to the south, loyalists and British authorities refashioned an imperial America in the north. These schemes for British North America shared the features of the “spirit of 1783” articulated across the British Empire, committed to territorial expansion and paternalistic government. In particular, they elucidated forms of imperial liberty in contrast to the republican liberty of the United States. As such, the loyalist migration helped lay the foundations of the distinctive liberal order discernible in Canada to this day.6 Yet just as the process of nation-making in the United States provoked intense internal conflict, so the postwar development of British North America proved a highly contentious process. For all that loyalists coalesced around a generic commitment to monarchy and empire, they held widely varying views about what the empire should actually do. These three visions for the North American provinces, at once experiments in imperial possibility, opened up three contests over the nature and limits of imperial power, centering around popular representation, Indian sovereignty, and Anglo-Protestant hegemony in turn.

  IF YOU STAND above the bend in the river, on the north side of the city of Saint John, you can watch a peculiar phenomenon overcome the water below. The whitecapped rapids rushing down toward the Bay of Fundy gradually calm and flatten, then begin to swirl up again—only this time flowing upstream instead. These so-called reversing falls are produced by the massive Fundy tides, which surge so high here (more than twenty-five feet) that they actually have the power to change the river’s course. The Saint John’s churning currents provided a fitting backdrop for the unsettled fortunes of the loyalist refugees living along its banks.

  Loyalists had first thrown up their tents, wigwams, and rudimentary cabins at the river mouth in the summer of 1783. When New Brunswick’s first governor sailed into the harbor less than eighteen months later, he saw an impressive town of nearly fifteen hundred frame houses. It was called Parrtown, at Governor John Parr’s desire.7 The new governor might have been equally pleased by the smaller settlement on the other side of the harbor, which was named Carleton, in honor of loyalists’ hero Sir Guy. For the governor not only shared widespread loyalist skepticism of Parr; he was a Carleton man through and through. He was Sir Guy’s younger brother, Thomas.

  Just shy of forty years old, Thomas Carleton had enjoyed a more cosmopolitan if less glittering career than his brother. After serving in the European campaigns of the Seven Years’ War, Thomas was sent to Gibraltar, a dreadful posting where he felt “shut up with a set of Gourmands” in a “horrid Prison.”8 Instead he secured leave to travel and embarked on an unusual circuit around the Mediterranean, visiting Minorca and Algiers, Italy and France—a tour that must also have honed his notable linguistic fluency: Carleton spoke Spanish, French, Italian, and German. In 1773, Carleton followed the lead of other adventurous Western military officers by volunteering in the Russian army, which was then fighting a major war against the Ottoman Empire. On the banks of the Danube, he had the chance to watch imperial history in the making, when the Russians repelled the Ottomans and forced them into the humiliating Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji—widely recognized as the first serious blow to Ottoman stability. Entering the Turkish camp after the defeat, and then journeying on to Constantinople, Carleton saw firsthand how even the mightiest empires could be shaken.9

  He passed the winter of 1774–75 in St. Petersburg, far from the rumblings of revolution that Sir Guy was handling in Quebec. But the American Revolution called Thomas across the Atlantic soon enough. Thanks to his brother’s sponsorship, he served as quartermaster-general of the northern army and lived in New York City during the last months of the British occupation. After the war, Thomas joined his brother and influential loyalists in lobbying for a reconfiguration of North American government. While Sir Guy trained his sights on the top, aiming to be the first governor-general of a restructured British North America, Thomas worked the same circle of patrons to nab a junior office for himself. Thanks to his connections and the peerless Carleton name, he earned the appointment of lieutenant governor of New Brunswick, a position he would hold until his death in 1817.10

  Carleton disembarked at Parrtown to a seventeen-gun salute and huzzahs from an eager crowd. “Long live the king and the governor!” they roared, and presented him with an address congratulating him on his “safe arrival to this new world.” The city residents welcomed him as the very man to “check the arrogancy of tyranny, crush the growth of injustice, and establish such wholesome laws as are and ever have been the basis of our glorious constitution.” What they did not necessarily expect was that the governor’s vision of the best way to achieve all this was to rule from the top down, in concert with a small circle of appointed advisers.11 Carleton’s council was composed entirely of officer-class and landowning loyalists, men like and including Edward Winslow. Together they set about fashioning the neo-feudal oligarchy of their dreams, crafting a government that would be, in Winslow’s revealing phrase, “the most Gentlemanlike one on Earth.”12

  Authorized by Whitehall to rule without an elected assembly for as long as necessary, Carleton and his council laid down the foundations of provincial order, issuing proclamations, answering petitions, clamping down on cross-border smuggling. Finding that “many families are yet unsettled,” Governor Carleton extended the royal bounty of provisions to loyalist refugees for a further two years.13 He continued to make land grants, taking care “to prevent any Persons disa
ffected to us and our Government from becoming settlers” by issuing lots only to those who took a loyalty oath.14 Edward Winslow’s cousin Benjamin Marston was one of several refugees attracted to the new province from Nova Scotia. In January 1784, Marston had celebrated the queen’s birthday in Shelburne by noting his satisfaction at the great progress of settlement. Exactly one year later, he celebrated the same holiday in newly built Parrtown by attending the governor’s “Ball & Supper at the Assembly Room” with “Between 30 & 40 Ladies near 100 Gentlemen.… The business was as well conducted as such an Entertainment could be—where so large a Company were to be entertained in so small a Room.”15

  The oligarchy’s approach to government was underlined by Carleton’s choice of a capital. In the winter of 1785, he went to investigate the settlements about seventy-five miles upriver at a place called St. Anne’s Point. Loyalists there had endured a brutal winter. One eleven-year-old refugee vividly remembered the “oh, so cold” morning when her father guided them from their tent through the snow-choked woods, to the shelter he had raised in the forest. “There was no floor laid, no windows, no chimney, no door, but we had a roof at least,” and with “a good fire” they survived into spring.16 Many of her peers did not; a handful of their weathered grave markers still jut from the ground like broken teeth. But Carleton saw great potential at this bend in the river, and determined to fix the capital on the spot. In a stroke, St. Anne’s Point became the city of Fredericton, “the Metropolis of New Brunswick.”17 There were two strategic reasons for Carleton’s decision. By setting up an inland capital, the governor ensured the development of the provincial hinterland and a steady traffic up and down the Saint John River. He also created a capital suited to the “gentlemanlike government” he and his friends craved, dominated not by the merchants at the river mouth but by a landed elite. Beverley Robinson Jr. became an archetypal member of this group when he and his family moved to Fredericton in 1787 and, on their new estate opposite the city, resumed the genteel lifestyle the Robinsons had enjoyed in colonial New York.18 Robinson was duly appointed to the governing council himself.