Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Fredericton was intentionally distant, in more ways than one, from the hoi polloi of the port. The rank-and-file refugees in Saint John had been growing restive at the government’s autocratic style. They took early umbrage at the “petition of fifty-five” elite New Yorkers, including Charles Inglis, who requested giant 5,000-acre land grants, which they said they needed to maintain their positions of social prominence.19 The ordinary men and women who composed the majority of refugees said this arrogant demand would force everyone else “either to content themselves with barren or remote Lands Or submit to be Tenants to those, most of whom they consider as their superiors in nothing but deeper Art and keener Policy.”20 As a satirical verse in an early Saint John newspaper decried, “A seven years war, a shameful peace / Brings us no nearer a release … / No recompense for service past, / The future too, an airy blast; / A piece of barren ground that’s burnt, / Where one may labour, toil, and grunt.”21 Many refugees saw the establishment of New Brunswick itself as just another concession to the interests of the loyalist elite. And Carleton’s failure to call an election for a provincial assembly did little to reassure them that their needs would be well met.

  Early in his tenure, Carleton sought to assuage popular discontent by incorporating Parrtown and Carleton into the “City of St. John (which name has … been adopted in compliance with the desire of the Inhabitants),” under a charter modeled on that of pre-revolutionary New York City. The move (which Winslow reported “has prevented a serious representation from the people”) gave Saint John its own municipal government with authority to legislate over trade, as well as establishing a court of common pleas and a local police force.22 Many city residents, however, might have been worried on learning the attitude with which their governor had adopted the measure. “I think on all accounts it will be best that the American Spirit of innovation should not be nursed among the Loyal Refugees,” Carleton observed to his London superiors. Why open the door to popular debate in matters where “the Crown alone is acknowledged to be competent”? He contemned the situation of neighboring Nova Scotia, in thrall, as he saw it, to an assembly composed of fractious New Englanders. In New Brunswick, “where a great proportion of the people have emigrated from N York and the Provinces to the Southward,” Carleton hoped instead to “take an early advantage of their better Habits, and, by strengthening the executive powers of Government discountenance its leaning so much on the popular part of the Constitution.” “A firm and orderly Government,” he felt, would soon work its magic “in the manners of the people, & the introduction of the habits of decorum & Industry over the remains of dissipation so long maintained among them by the late war.”23

  Yet even Governor Carleton had been in North America long enough to know that executive authority had its limits. He “cautiously avoided” taking steps that “could lead to the belief of an intention to govern without an Assembly.” Sooner or later, he would actually have to summon one. In October 1785, almost a year after he took up his post, Carleton issued the writs for New Brunswick’s first election. In eighteenth-century Britain and America, the right to vote was usually granted only to men who met a minimum property qualification. Because all New Brunswick’s settlers had arrived so recently and so many land claims were still pending, however, Carleton took the unusual step of extending the franchise to “all Males of full age who have been Inhabitants of the Province for not less than three months.” (All white males, that is: New Brunswick’s free blacks were bluntly excluded.)24

  The governor may have hoped this unusually democratic measure would ease the “violent party spirit” that had long plagued Saint John.25 But for ten years now, most of the refugees had lived through war and often martial law, without any semblance of political participation. The 1785 election seemed to release a collective sigh of relief. Benjamin Marston superintended the voting at Miramichi, on the far northern edge of the province, where he now acted as sheriff and surveyor. No friend of democracy, Marston saw shades of Shelburne in a community where “most of the People are illiterate & ignorant & much given to drunkenness.… They want two Things—Law to keep them in order & Gospell, to give them some better information than they seem to have.” He was chagrined, if not surprised, when the residents returned “an ignorant cunning fellow” and a notoriously radical lawyer as their chosen representatives.26

  In Saint John, especially, the election unleashed resentments that had been mounting since the earliest weeks of settlement. The geography of the city itself reinforced social and political divisions. In the streets around the waterfront, the so-called Lower Cove, lived shopkeepers, carpenters, laborers, and seamen who had tended to resent the authoritarian style of the governor and council. They produced a slate of candidates headed by a New York military veteran who had been one of the leading opponents of the “petition of fifty-five.” On the higher ground sloping up toward Fort Howe, the Upper Cove, dwelt the provincial officeholders, lawyers, and educated professionals, who sponsored a government ticket anchored by the New Brunswick attorney general.

  Voting began one November afternoon at McPherson’s Tavern in the Lower Cove, with men filing into the room six at a time to register their votes. Two days later, in the interests of balancing out the tally, the sheriff shifted the polling place to the Mallard House Tavern in the Upper Cove, a stronghold of government support. Meanwhile at McPherson’s, the Lower Cove voters continued to swig ale and talk politics. Talk became debate, debate turned into taunts and threats, threats provoked a brawl between rival supporters. Angry words flew around the tavern: “Let’s go up—they are at Mallard’s. Damn ’em—we’ll Mob them.” Seizing canes and pickets, somewhere between forty and one hundred Lower Covers left the tavern and marched up the streets to Mallard’s. “Huzza for the Lower Cove!” they shouted, and tried to force their way past the government supporters guarding the door. “Come on, my boys, we’ll soon dislodge ’em!” yelled one, hitting the man who held him back. Within moments, the protest became a riot: stones hurled through windows, clubs and fists smashed into faces, shattered glass, crockery, bones. The melee ended only when troops rushed down from Fort Howe, pulled the sides apart, and carted the protestors off to jail.27

  Governor Carleton blamed the election riot on radicals bent on “intoxicating the lowest Class,” and congratulated himself on the “decisive measures” he had taken to “check this licentious spirit.” After a temper-cooling pause of one week, the polls reopened “and the Election is now conducted in the most peaceable manner.”28 Authority could suppress a riot easily enough. But when the sheriff counted up the votes, the result was less easily contained: the Lower Cove candidates had won by a margin of more than 10 percent. This was hardly the outcome Carleton and his circle had expected—and they had no intention of letting it stand. Instead of admitting the six Lower Cove candidates into the assembly as an opposition party, the government decided on a different tactic. They held a recount. Across a cheerless Christmas week of 1785, the sheriff pared through the returns, disallowed almost two hundred votes in favor of the Lower Covers, and installed the government ticket.

  To supporters of the opposition, the news came like a knife in the back. “The House of Assembly … ought to be tore limb from limb,” raged one distressed voter—who was promptly arrested for inflammatory speech, and made to apologize to the house on his knees.29 Writing in the Saint John Gazette, a self-styled “Americanus” offered an emotional plea to his countrymen. “I … have been all my life a Loyalist,” he insisted, yet how bleak this asylum had become: “We scarcely dare view tomorrow. Our Provisions almost gone. Our lands not brought into Cultivation. Our Loyalty suspected.” “My distressed Countrymen,” he urged, “Be firm in the protection of the Birth Right handed down to you, and supported by our happy Constitution … upon no Account … lose sight of what you are. In Fine, let the world know, as you know, the Rights you are jealous of” as “Descendants of Britons.” The identity of “Americanus” would never be revealed, but the print
ers were charged with seditious libel and the newspaper shut down.30

  Petitions against the election results promptly circulated around the province. The largest, signed by 327 men—nearly one-third of the electors of Saint John—sounded a clarion of discontent. “We have proven ourselves to be the most faithful and Loyal Subjects to the best of Governments,” the petitioners insisted, and yet

  we have publicly seen British Subjects confined in Irons.… The Military introduced & unnecessarily & unlawfully patrolling the streets, during an Election.… Taxes levied by the Incorporation Contrary to Law.… The freedom of Election violated … in the most public manner.…

  We most positively affirm these Proceedings to be unjust, Injurious to the Freedom of Election, manifest Violations of the Rights of the People & Subversive of the first Privileges of the British Constitution.

  Armies in the streets, unlawful arrest, unfair taxation, unjust elections: the scene might as well have come straight out of the thirteen colonies on the eve of the revolution. So might the loyalists’ rhetoric. In much the way that American patriots invoked the British constitution in pleading for just representation, Saint John loyalists protested recent events as a violation of their rights as British subjects. Their outrage was directed at the king’s colonial representatives, not against the king himself: to this extent they remained loyal (as had the majority of Americans before 1776). Indeed, their best hope for redress rested precisely with King George III. They called on the monarch to dissolve the assembly and call a new election, thus ensuring that their “most essential Rights can be preserved.”31

  In substance and in language, it was as if the proto-revolutionary rumblings of the 1760s had migrated with the loyalists from the thirteen colonies to New Brunswick. But Governor Carleton had no intention of backing down. Swiftly branding the opponents of government as disloyal, he pitted loyalist against loyalist. To stop antigovernment petitions from gaining momentum, the assembly passed “An Act against Tumults and Disorders, upon pretence of preparing or presenting Public Petitions … to the Governor”—effectively making such petitions illegal. When four men came to present the protest document to the assembly, they were duly arrested. They went to trial together with the detained Mallard House rioters and the seditious newspaper printers, and were “severally convicted and punished” for their insolence.32 “I can venture to assure your Lordship that faction is at an end here,” Carleton declared in the spring of 1786. The important difference between loyalist Saint John and revolutionary America was not so much in the content of the protest. It was that this time, imperial government won. Authority, it seemed, trumped a popular call for liberty. The falls had been reversed.

  The 1785 election in Saint John would be one in a series of vivid political clashes around the empire between American loyalist refugees and British authorities. What lessons did its participants take away? To Lord Sydney in Whitehall, the whole thing could have been avoided if Carleton had not been so democratic in the first place, and “had confined the Electors to such Persons only as were in Possession of lands … as by that means many of the more refractory and disorderly of those (who I suppose were of the lowest orders of the People) would have been excluded.”33 The upheaval appeared to offer further proof—as if the American Revolution had not been proof enough—that a little democracy could be a dangerous thing. Carleton, in retrospect, would doubtless have agreed. To him, the unrest thoroughly vindicated an authoritarian response to protest. “Considering the motly description of persons collected here from the various departments of the Army, and the disorderly conduct many of them have been habituated to during a long Civil war,” he observed, “it seems of the last consequence to hold the Reins of Government with a strait hand, and to punish the Refractory with firmness.”34

  Yet the tumults in New Brunswick also plainly revealed that political schisms among British subjects did not simply end with the war. They highlighted an important continuity, forged by loyalist refugees, from the pre-revolutionary into the post-revolutionary British Empire. A commitment to “British rights” could be held with equal sincerity by people with otherwise divergent views of what those rights actually were.35 Such differences continued to split British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Decades later, one of the British sergeants at Fort Howe—who may have helped break up the Mallard House riot—remembered the 1785 election as a milestone in his own political genesis. He described how, in an effort to tip the election further in favor of the government ticket, Upper Covers had considered extending the vote to the soldiers in the garrison (a measure of dubious legality). “Our Officers were, of course, of the Upper Cove party,” the sergeant recalled, but when the enlisted men were asked which side they supported, “my six grenadiers thundered out from under their great hairy caps, ‘for the Lower Coves, Sir, to be sure!’ ” “It was odd enough,” he reflected, “that we should have had this unanimous feeling in favour of the popular party in the Province; but we had it, and all the cats o’nine tails at the command of the Holy Alliance would not have rooted it out of our hearts.”36 The sergeant’s name was William Cobbett, and when he recorded this memory in the years after Waterloo, he had emerged (after many years as a staunch conservative) as one of the leading English radicals of his age. However much he may have distorted his recollections to suit, Cobbett mobilized these memories of the 1785 election in the service of the ideals for which he would become famous, as a champion of parliamentary reform in Britain itself.37

  And what about the loyalists? What the election demonstrated most strikingly of all was that “loyalists” could come in many political shapes and sizes. They agreed on one thing: they upheld the authority of the king—at least as long as the king did his part by them in turn. In this key respect, loyalists were loyal; and this was one vital reason why the government did prevail. But monarchism would be about the only principle binding together a disparate population of American refugees. Edward Winslow and his friends were delighted to see dissent suppressed and “gentlemanlike government” confirmed. They wanted loyalist New Brunswick to be a stable, hierarchical alternative to the seeming anarchy of the republican United States. But the “envy of the American States” did not look so appealing to the denizens of the Lower Cove, or to the veterans in their makeshift dwellings upriver—or to black loyalists like the former sergeant Thomas Peters, squeezed onto poor lots on the fringes of Saint John and Fredericton and excluded from voting altogether. Faced with government repression reminiscent of the pre-revolutionary thirteen colonies, one of the printers convicted of seditious libel decided to return to the United States—which was, at least, his home. Such political differences make it entirely impossible to portray all refugee loyalists as convinced “tories.” Rather, in testing the limits of government power, they waged contests over liberty and authority that would continue to inflect the region’s political culture and find echoes elsewhere in the loyalist diaspora.

  THE MEMBERS of the New Brunswick elite were not the only loyalists to cultivate bright expectations of what the post-revolutionary British Empire could provide. On and around Lake Ontario, another group of refugees—the Mohawks—pioneered their own alternative to the United States, and in the process articulated another variation on the theme of liberty and sovereignty within the empire. As Joseph Brant and his followers saw it, the attraction of resettling in Quebec wasn’t just about land. It also had the potential to provide the foundation of a new Indian confederacy in and around the Great Lakes, linking the Iroquois with nations ranging far to the west. Here, Brant and others hoped Indians might establish an autonomous domain between the empire and the republic. Might, that is, if they played their hand right, as the British Empire’s independent allies and as its loyal subjects.

  To the Iroquois nations allied with Britain, the peace treaty of 1783 had appeared as devastating as it had to so many white loyalists. Not only did it make no special provisions for Indians against the menacing, land-hungry Americans; it simply did not me
ntion them at all. Furthermore, the treaty required Britain to abandon its forts among the Great Lakes, an act that would remove an important bulwark of protection for Indians against U.S. expansion. Worst of all, the borders fixed between Quebec and the United States ceded extensive Indian territory to New York State, in flat contravention of the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Recognizing how appalling these terms would be to the Iroquois, British officials tried to keep the news secret from their allies for as long as possible—and when at last they revealed the awful truth, they attempted to dull the blow by issuing the Indians with eighteen hundred gallons of rum.38 As one Mohawk spokesman declaimed, the king “had no right Whatever to grant away to the States of America, [the Mohawks’] Rights of properties without a manifest breach of all justice and Equity, and they would not submit to it.”39 “England had Sold the Indians to Congress,” said Joseph Brant.40 So much for being loyal.

  The Iroquois saw the peace as an even greater betrayal of their interests than southern Indians had regarded the cession of Florida. For as alarmed as the Creeks, and others felt at being surrendered into Spanish hands, that was still better than falling directly under the rule of the United States. Decades of conflict over land had been capped by eight years of a war that, in Indian country, seemed little better than a catalogue of what later generations might dub war crimes. Unremitting violence had sent hundreds of Iroquois over the border into Quebec in exactly the way black and white loyalists fled to British-held cities for security. At the war’s end at least two hundred Mohawks from New York’s Fort Hunter lived at La Chine, below Montreal, while another large community clustered on the western frontier, near Niagara, at a place dubbed “Loyal Village” by British authorities.41 Now these Iroquois migrants performed the same depressing calculations as other loyalist refugees about where to settle permanently.