Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Still, it seemed clear to Brant that living in the midst of the British Empire as allies or subjects was a better option than dwelling in the reach of the republic, ravenous for Indian land. In the mid-1780s, he had only to compare the Mohawks’ situation with that of the Oneidas who had chosen to stay on the American side of the border. They returned to their scorched homelands but proved unable to fend off New York speculators. The British Empire had one major thing to recommend it to the Mohawks: it provided a nominally protective umbrella for Indian interests. And for all the limits placed on Indian expansion in the empire, Brant’s vision of a British-allied Indian confederacy became an influential forerunner for subsequent attempts to assert Indian sovereignty—from the well-known ambitions advanced by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh in the Great Lakes, down to plans for a loyal Indian state in the Mississippi Valley promoted by the loyalist and adoptive Creek William Augustus Bowles. The step away from the United States remained, for the Mohawks, a step forward. What they did not yet know was how limited the prospects for real power would be in the British Empire too.

  WITH NOVA SCOTIA’S boundaries redrawn to accommodate loyalists, and the Mohawks resettled on new land, a third cluster of settlements—in the province of Quebec—invited a further question about the governance of British North America after the loyalist influx. How would the increase in English-speaking Protestant residents affect a province with a French Catholic majority population? In some ways this would have the most far-ranging consequences of all. For British administrators it slotted into a broader concern about how best to organize and govern what now remained of Britain’s empire in North America. Primary responsibility for addressing it fell to the one man who had already done so much to accommodate habitants and aid loyalist refugees alike. Guy Carleton’s challenge now was to see if he could achieve both goals at once.

  Each time Carleton returned to North America he arrived in a grander station than before. He had first set foot on the continent as a young colonel; next he came as a general and colonial governor; and then he arrived as Sir Guy, knight of the Bath and commander in chief. After the war, Carleton hoped to advance another step. Joining the circle of loyalist refugees lobbying for reform of British North America, he promoted the partition plan for Nova Scotia and the creation of an all-powerful governor-general to superintend all the provinces. While Thomas Carleton was dispatched to New Brunswick, Sir Guy intended to claim the premier position for himself.66

  The job as such was Carleton’s for the taking, but there were two snags. First, the Pitt ministry resisted the idea of creating a governor-generalship with the extensive authority Carleton had in mind, which would have given him virtual autonomy from London. (At exactly the same time, the powers of the governor-general in India were being hotly debated in connection with East India Company reform.) Second, more intractably, Carleton set a stiff asking price for accepting the post: he wanted an aristocratic title to go with it. It was more than mere vanity that motivated Carleton’s demand. He knew that a title was the best way to assert power in the British world: “An English peer had a more eligible Standing than any crowned Head.”67 If he was going to be responsible for rebuilding the postwar empire in America, he needed all the authority he could muster. This task, he felt, demanded more than a general; it required an aristocrat. Through two drawn-out years of negotiations, he insisted on a peerage while the king and government equally persistently refused. At last, Carleton’s stubborn patience prevailed. Though he did not get all the powers he had hoped for as a governor-general, he did get the aristocratic title he craved, to become the first Baron Dorchester. He chose his style to evoke a semi-imagined ancestral connection to a small Oxfordshire village (not the better-known Dorchester in Dorset); selected a motto to underscore his military accomplishments; and devised a coat of arms with a pair of beavers rampant, acknowledging his ties to North America. Fortified with the accoutrements of aristocracy, the newly minted Lord Dorchester sailed west once again, as governor in chief of Britain’s continental North American empire.68

  Dorchester (as he would henceforth be known) understood the contours of his position about as well as anyone. In a light moment in London, he and his former secretary Maurice Morgann “had been amusing themselves with the Probability of the Restoration of the Empire” in America. “It was their Idea that no Government was the Offspring of Theoretic Premeditation but of Accident, Contingency & Distress.”69 Like many Europeans at the time—to say nothing of his loyalist friends—Dorchester thought it likely that the United States would break up, and that parts of it might fall back into European hands. Even if the nation did survive, nobody could yet predict which power—the United States, Britain, Spain, or France—would gain control of the strategically vital regions of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. At the same time, Dorchester recognized the intrinsic challenges that the independent United States posed to British North America. In population and economic development, British North America compared very unfavorably with the United States. New York State alone had about two and a half times more people in it than all of neighboring Quebec.70 Dorchester also knew, as the architect of the Quebec Act, how difficult it could be to reconcile the competing interests of British North America’s ethnically diverse population. The arrival of more than thirty-five thousand refugees made British North America into even more of a mosaic of white, black, and Indian residents, speaking several tongues and worshipping in many churches. All that the newcomers seemed to share were varying degrees of deprivation and discontent. Now Dorchester had to assimilate these embodiments of “accident, contingency & distress” along with British North America’s prewar residents to form a stable, viable imperial state.

  Returning to the Château Saint-Louis for his third tenure as governor, Dorchester looked out over a familiar view of rooftops and weathered stones and the vertiginous drop down to the river below. Yet he encountered in 1780s Quebec a reconfigured political and social scene. Although the habitants still outnumbered Anglophone settlers by a ratio of five to one—and more like forty to one in the St. Lawrence River valley—the six thousand or so loyalist refugees in the province formed an influential interest group.71 As in New Brunswick, the loyalist elite was especially well represented in the governor’s own entourage. Notably, Dorchester’s longtime collaborator William Smith accompanied him to Quebec to serve as chief justice, and provided an influential source of policy advice. Dorchester’s official instructions reflected the changed priorities of post-revolutionary British North America. Whereas in the 1770s he had been told to ease Anglo-French relations, and attended closely to the interests of the French Catholic majority, now he held an almost diametrically opposed assignment: to propose reforms to government that would cater to the increased Anglophone population.

  This commission reflected a central lesson that British officials drew from the American Revolution. The empire needed reform, constitutional reform. Government had already been restructured in Ireland and India; similar reformist impulses influenced the rising opposition to the Atlantic slave trade. Dorchester and his advisers now brought the reforming mandate to British North America. William Smith had a clear diagnosis of Quebec’s problems: “This Country by a Mistaken Policy had been locked up from the State Physicians: King Lords & Commons.”72 British North America, he thought, should become the seat of a strengthened and revamped British constitution, designed to prevent the problems that had brought down the empire to the south. That meant, at base, strengthening the authority of the crown (and the king’s executive representatives) over and above the power of colonial assemblies—a desideratum already manifested in New Brunswick, among other sites of loyalist exodus. In the case of Quebec, in particular, it also meant privileging the British community over the French. In the courts, Smith promptly set about asserting the primacy of English civil law over French Canadian law in cases involving loyalists. Charles Inglis’s confirmation as bishop of Nova Scotia cemented the institutional significance
of the Church of England in the provinces, despite the fact that the white population was largely composed of Catholics and dissenting Protestants. Dorchester and Smith also put forward a new system of free primary school education in Quebec designed to raise the habitants out of their “State of base Barbarism.”73 In one arena after another, the powers of the establishment were reinforced, and British interests trumped French.74

  Both these priorities would be enshrined in the reform that Parliament ultimately passed into law, the Constitutional Act of 1791—also known as the Canada Act—a foundation stone in modern British imperial government. Largely authored by the secretary of state in London, Canada’s new constitution transparently represented the authoritarian attitudes of the Pitt administration. The act reads in part like a retort to the American Revolution—and to the fresh troubles brewing in revolutionary France—by explicitly bolstering the powers of church, aristocracy, and king. In particular, it directed that a full one-seventh of land in all new townships would be reserved for the Church of England, a source of future concern not just to French Catholics but to Methodists and other Protestant nonconformists. Although it provided for elected assemblies, it also established influential legislative bodies, modeled on the House of Lords, to be composed of appointed members. It even allowed the king to create a hereditary aristocracy in Canada. For all these reasons, the act has been interpreted as a counter-revolutionary measure, of a piece with turns to authoritarianism around the empire.75 (In British political history, the debate over the bill would best be remembered as the moment when the longtime friendship between the radical Charles James Fox and the increasingly conservative Edmund Burke—already strained by conflicting views on the French Revolution—definitively ruptured in a dramatic showdown on the floor of the House of Commons.)76

  In the event, Dorchester himself played a relatively small role in fashioning the terms of this legislation as compared with the Quebec Act, which he had effectively drafted. This was telling, since the Canada Act countered the spirit of the Quebec Act in one vital way. (Officially, indeed, it repealed parts of the Quebec Act, deemed “in many Respects inapplicable to the Present Condition and Circumstances of the said Province.”) Whereas the Quebec Act had provoked Anglo-Americans by extending civil liberties to French Catholics, the Canada Act made a clear statement in favor of Anglophone—and specifically loyalist—interests. Following the model of partition in Nova Scotia, it divided Quebec in two. Henceforth the eastern part of the region became Lower Canada (present-day Quebec), retaining its overwhelmingly French Catholic population. In the west, the new province of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) was dominated by Anglophone, Protestant settlers, most of them loyalist refugees. Under the old provincial boundaries these colonists had languished on the thinly settled fringe of a province dominated by Catholic habitants. With the creation of Upper Canada, loyalist refugees earned an administration of their own—making Upper Canada the western equivalent of New Brunswick. In a further concession to loyalist interests, land tenure rules in Upper Canada were defined so as to facilitate settlement with very low fees attached. The division of the provinces took a major step toward transforming this frontier, within a generation, into the heartland of Anglophone Canada.

  But perhaps the most revealing way to understand the Canada Act is in relation to the emerging United States. It was not so much a counter-revolutionary gesture, in the conventional meaning of “reactionary,” but a post-revolutionary response to a changed political landscape.77 Famously, the “British constitution” remains an unwritten one, resting not in a single foundational text but in an evolving series of documents and precedents. The Canada Act stands out as one of several instances where post-revolutionary British administrators sought to make explicit the constitutional terms for imperial rule, over white as well as nonwhite subjects. Nor was it coincidental that Britons wrote this constitution for Canada at exactly the same time that Americans fashioned a republican constitution for the United States. Civil war made Britons and Americans alike rethink the basis of North American government, and record those thoughts in foundational documents.

  How well did the new imperial constitution sit with its North American subjects? In pre-revolutionary British America, the idea had been that colonial subjects were virtually represented in the British parliament at Westminster. This act, instead, effectively cloned Westminster and transplanted it in Canada. But not all loyalists embraced what, in legislative terms, was a distinctly metropolitan British creation. As one Kingston loyalist grumbled, “A Government should be formed for a Country, not a country strained and distorted for the Accommodation of a preconceived and speculative scheme of Government.”78 Dorchester himself had mixed feelings about the act. Although he “agreed the Colony could not rise but upon British Principles,” he balked at the pace and nature of change. “Doucement, doucement,” he urged an eagerly reformist Smith.79 Dorchester especially resisted dividing the province, partly on the grounds that this would estrange French Canadians. Throughout his twenty years of governing in North America, he had promoted a kind of rule that sheltered varied ethnic groups under a canopy of imperial authority. These were the values he saw enshrined in the Quebec Act, and the principles he upheld when he superintended the evacuation of the black loyalists. The Canada Act seemed, though, to marginalize this priority. Dorchester—who shared his brother Thomas’s taste for oligarchy—also objected to the formation of another provincial assembly, as partition would entail. Instead, he continued to advocate creating a single overarching governor-general, and coauthored a proposal to this effect with Smith, which partly resembled Smith’s earlier idea for an American parliament.80

  Their rival plan for reform to some extent anticipated the recommendations of the Durham Report of 1839 for “responsible government” and the union of Upper and Lower Canada—a key moment in the ascent of liberalism in British North America.81 But it was a telling reflection of Dorchester’s lack of influence over the 1791 Canada Act that he was not even in North America when it came formally into effect. Nor did he approve of the man appointed to serve as Upper Canada’s first lieutenant governor. Dorchester had favored his old friend Sir John Johnson for the post—a natural choice given Johnson’s ties to the Mohawks and his prominence among the white settlers of Upper Canada, many of them veterans from his own disbanded loyalist corps. The British government chose instead John Graves Simcoe, a thirty-seven-year-old Revolutionary War veteran and member of Parliament. Simcoe had seen extensive service in North America as colonel of the Queen’s Rangers, but had few ties to the loyalist elite. This was an advantage, as far as British administrators were concerned—it made him more likely to promote the metropolitan version of government than to indulge in provincial variations—but the appointment came as another slap in the face to Dorchester. Chagrined by these events, Dorchester sailed home on leave before Simcoe reached Canada. The two men would clash repeatedly in years ahead over issues of policy and chain of command, culminating in Dorchester’s resignation in 1794.82

  Unlike Dorchester, with his vision of an authoritarian, multiethnic empire, Simcoe came to Canada committed to building a new Britain in the west.83 He proudly declared that “this province is singularly blessed, not with a mutilated Constitution, but with a Constitution … [that] is the very image and transcript of that of Great Britain.”84 The land might be undeveloped, the people poor, but with British constitutional principles guiding his hand he could shape, he hoped, an imperial utopia.85 Distancing himself yet further from the American refugees, Simcoe decided to locate the capital of Upper Canada not at Kingston, the largest town in the province, but to found a new town altogether, and camp at Niagara in the meantime. Before leaving Britain, he had prepared for this wilderness government by buying (from the estate of Captain James Cook) a “canvass house similar to that sent with the Governor of Botany Bay.”86 Elizabeth Simcoe, his wife, animatedly documented their western progress in a journal she kept for four of their young daughters,
whom they had left behind in Devon. She described how the “canvas house” became almost comfortable with partitions raised and a stove to warm it. Between its stretched fabric walls, the Simcoes held quasi-viceregal court. They hosted visitors from Joseph Brant—charismatic as ever, sporting an English coat smartly draped with a crimson blanket—to Prince Edward, the king’s fourth son, then stationed in Canada with his regiment. They played endless rubbers of whist, and drank tea from a china service shipped from England. While John Simcoe toured the western reaches of the province, Elizabeth spent her days at Niagara much as she might in England, drawing, riding, reading the latest works on chemistry and art, and collecting plants and butterflies to send to her daughters.87

  In the summer of 1793, the Simcoes crossed Lake Ontario to the site the governor had chosen for his capital. Elizabeth admired the landscape of vine-covered poplars and firs, giving way to sparkling sandbanks along the lakeshore. As she explored the creeks and inlets around the Toronto peninsula, only the quiet plash of canoe paddles interrupted the bustle of the living wilderness, with loons howling and wild ducks flapping out from the rushes.88 To loyalists in Kingston, Governor Simcoe’s dream of building “a second London” on this remote spot looked like a “piece of political Quixotism … perfectly Utopian.”89 But the governor would not be dissuaded: soldiers of the Queen’s Rangers (Simcoe’s old regiment) set to work clearing the forests and laying down roads, preparing a military base that could double as an administrative capital. Simcoe named the frontier settlement York.90 By the time the city was incorporated as Toronto in 1834, it had become the cultural and commercial center of Upper Canada.