Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Samuel Lewis, A Correct Map of the Seat of War, 1815. (illustration credit 1.12)

  CHAPTER TEN

  Empires of Liberty

  AT THE TURN of the century loyalist refugees spanned the British Empire, from tens of thousands settled across the revivified provinces of British North America to a tiny handful in Australia, the empire’s remotest edge. Wherever they had moved, by the early nineteenth century all had been touched in some way by the “spirit of 1783.” They had also seen the empire tested anew by war with France. For the Sierra Leone colonists, among others, war led to a tightening of imperial rule. For the scattered members of a single refugee family—the Robinsons of New York—it occasioned a remarkably immediate appreciation of the empire’s global reach.

  Beverley Robinson, the family patriarch, had retired to England in 1783 to seek compensation for his confiscated estate, and position his children on promising career paths. He died in 1792, in the placid Gloucestershire village of Thornbury, near Bath. But had the New Yorker survived into the new century, he would have been thrilled to see how well his investment in his children paid off. Imperial service carried the Robinsons around the world in a diaspora of their own. Robinson’s fourth son, Frederick Philipse “Phil” Robinson, now acted effectively as head of the family in England. A career soldier, Phil had participated in the last act of the American Revolution, by marching out of New York City on Evacuation Day, and was in from the beginning of the French Revolutionary wars, fighting in a 1793 offensive in the West Indies. Invalided home in 1794, Phil had since then enjoyed unusual stability for a soldier in wartime, stationed in England as an officer in charge of recruiting. While his mother and two unmarried sisters resided quietly at Thornbury, his brothers dispersed. Two circulated about the empire on military service. Two others lived in New Brunswick, including the eldest, Beverley Robinson Jr., on his large estate outside Fredericton, a confirmed member of the provincial elite.1

  One evening in November 1799, Phil Robinson sat in the glow of a good fire at home in Bedford with his wife, mother, and sister, who were visiting from Thornbury. As the Robinsons gossiped in the parlor, a young man arrived at the door. He was a stranger to them—yet he looked somehow familiar too. The caller turned out to be Phil’s own nephew Henry, Beverley Jr.’s second son. The last time any of them had seen “Hinky Pinky”—as his grandfather fondly used to call him—he had been learning to take his first steps in British-occupied New York City. Now, sixteen years later, here was Henry Clinton Robinson all grown up and fresh off the boat from New Brunswick. For a moment they froze in mutual shock, Henry tongue-tied, and old Mrs. Robinson “rather overcome at first” at the startling, wonderful sight of her grandson. “But a plentiful shower of tears relieved her,” Phil wrote excitedly to Beverley, “and allowed her to join us in ten thousand enquiries.” “Henry could not answer us fast enough,” filling them in on all the news from North America, about his parents and many siblings. “We are all delighted with him,” reported the proud uncle, “and will endeavor to supply the place of those he left behind.”2

  The domestic contentment around the hearth at Bedford contrasted with an external reality the Robinsons could never forget. The British Empire was at war. Phil encountered its demands almost every day as he strove to find healthy volunteers to fill the army’s ranks in this ever-widening conflict. Even Henry’s forty-five-year-old father, Beverley Jr., had been called up on militia duty in New Brunswick, an experience that brought him back with a jolt to his first days as a soldier, in the American Revolution. Now Henry carried a new generation of Robinsons into a new revolutionary war. With help from his well-connected relatives, he secured an ensigncy in a good regiment and was promptly swept up into a career that captured the global dimensions of combat.

  His campaigning started in the Mediterranean. He sailed into the “most Grand” harbor of Valletta, Malta, marveling at the fortifications that jutted into the water like shark’s teeth.3 From there, his regiment traveled onward to a more stunning destination still: Egypt, which had been occupied by the French since 1798. Henry there participated in Britain’s first major military offensive in the Middle East. He wrote to his uncle Phil, breathlessly describing his adventures. “His astonishment at every thing he saw seemed to have been excessive, and with reason,” Phil reported to Beverley Jr., “for so many, rapid, and striking changes of situation perhaps never before happened to a lad of his age; from the banks of peaceable St Johns river, through scenes of warfare to Egypt!”4 The heat, robed and wrapped figures billowing down parched streets, the dryness, muezzins calling, camels chewing, the sun, more heat, and so much glaring sand: New Brunswick could not be farther away. But whenever Henry spent time with another loyalist’s son in his regiment, “we would always Transport ourselves to America” in the imagination.5

  Henry returned to Malta to hear of the impending Treaty of Amiens, signed by Britain and France in 1802. But it was an uneasy, short-lived peace, soon broken by Napoleon Bonaparte’s ambitious plans for French expansion. Henry meanwhile went on to Gibraltar, as hateful a posting now as it had been forty years earlier when Thomas Carleton did his best to get away from it.6 “This is a miserable Hole des[titute] of all kinds of society except [a] variegated Assemblage of those Red Coated Beings who pass for Votives of Mars but may more properly be nominated Disciples of Bacchus,” Henry complained.7 A new governor had just been appointed to clean things up, in the person of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. The duke had spent much of the last decade in British North America, where he befriended many loyalists; Phil Robinson “once was a favorite with him.”8 Henry also earned the duke’s positive notice. Unfortunately his regiment did not. The duke’s crackdown on indiscipline ended up provoking a mutiny, led by members of Henry’s regiment. While the duke was recalled to England for his actions, the regiment suffered a worse reprimand. They were sent to the deadliest posting in the British world: the West Indies.

  Henry put the best face on it: “The pleasing Idea of being so much nearer my Beloved Parents & the fair Prospect of my soon seeing them bears down every objection I should have in going.” With luck, he told his parents, “the Regiment may have the good fortune to be Quarterd in Jamaica,” where “Uncle William writes me he can be of more service to me there than any other place” and “General Nugent is Governor who you know married Aunt Williams Sister.”9 Stationed in Tobago, Henry sent cheerful reports (and boxes of pineapples) back home: “I am well & in high spirits,” he told his mother. “The Island is very healthy & so am I.”10 But by early 1805, Henry was dead, victim of the “Fatal West Indies.” His death came on the heels of that of a younger brother, also in military service, who had drowned in New Brunswick.11 His anguished mother wrote to her sister-in-law in England, “I have yet scarcely firmness enough to speak upon subjects which rend my heart asunder … how is our once happy Family disjointed, two of the most flourishing Branches cut off forever.… I feel at this moment as if every prospect I had of happiness was Buried with my Children.”12

  Phil Robinson suffered too, for he considered both his nephews as sons, and “this second loss so recently after the first, is a more severe trial than the strictest & coldest philosophy can bear up against.”13 And yet, while he grieved over the double tragedy, he could also report good news to his brother Beverley. “A very great change has taken place in the fortunes of the Robinsons in this country.” Their brother Morris earned a lucrative appointment as assistant barrack master at Gibraltar, effectively chief of staff. The youngest brother, William Henry Robinson, landed the position of commissary-general in Jamaica, which was so well paid that Phil could “look upon William as established for life.”14 Phil, for his part, had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and would later set off on a career-making tour of his own as a leader of British forces in the Peninsular War. Jamaica, Portugal, Gibraltar, Egypt—this was just the beginning for the Robinson family. Between 1800 and 1815 they served in virtually every major theater of the Napoleonic Wars—inclu
ding the one that encompassed their former home. In 1812, war broke out between Britain and the United States, reprising the conflict that had scattered the Robinsons three decades before. Phil Robinson sailed for North America to fight for the British, even as some of his nephews had moved back to settle in New York.

  As the American Revolution receded into a previous century, how did loyalists fit into a changing imperial world? The Robinson family’s transcontinental mobilization suggested an answer. By the early nineteenth century, many loyalist refugees had become assimilated into the British Empire to the point that their own American origins were largely obscured. Less and less distinguished them as American loyalists but the fact that they had been born in the colonies as British subjects and opted to move elsewhere in order to remain so. The refugees’ absorption into the enlarged empire would be most vividly personified by the handful of loyalists who made their way to India. There, they entered a domain so vast and varied as to constitute an empire in itself, and became in some cases so bound up in what they found as to “go native” altogether. Their routes out of America paralleled the empire’s own eastward turn, as India supplanted the American colonies as the economic and strategic center of the British Empire.

  Yet while a smattering of loyalists participated in the empire’s Asian ascent, most refugees had remained in the Atlantic world, half of them in North America alone. Their experiences underscored how, despite the increasing importance of South Asia, the Atlantic remained a vital part of this global empire, especially for framing modes of governance. For loyalists in North America, the early nineteenth century brought its own version of closure. It wasn’t so much that their ties to home loosened over time—indeed some (the Robinsons included) returned to the United States. It was that the political and social landscape of North America itself was being transformed, on both sides of the U.S. border. How much had changed since the revolution—and how much had not—was driven home in 1812 when Americans and British subjects were once again divided by war. The War of 1812, in part a legacy of the American Revolution, stemmed from enduring tensions between Britain and the United States. Like that earlier conflict, it called on British subjects to assert their allegiance to empire, and sharpened the distinctions between British subjects and American citizens. But where the revolution had triggered mass migration, the War of 1812 had a consolidating effect among whites, blacks, and Indians in British North America. It put a period on the journeys of the majority of refugees, while altering the resonance of loyalism in North America henceforth.

  By definition, the loyalists’ divergent paths trailed off in many directions. But if one wanted to take stock of where they stood a generation after their dispersal, one could gain excellent perspectives from the poles of the once and future empire: North America and India. Seen from these vantage points, at opposite ends of a global empire, it was clear how far both individual loyalists and the British Empire had come since 1783. But neither the empire, nor what it meant to be a loyalist, was quite the same.

  IN HIS BRIEF LIFE, Henry Clinton Robinson had crossed continents in British service, from North America to North Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. His eldest brother, though, crossed a significant if nearer imperial frontier. “After a quick tho very blustering passage, my dearest mother, I arrived here … in perfect health,” Beverley “Bev” Robinson III wrote home to New Brunswick in 1796, “and found my native City and future home in a situation to receive its fugitives again.”15 His “native city” was of course New York, where he was born and baptized by Charles Inglis in 1779. He probably did not remember much of the place he had left at the age of four, and in any case he returned to a city transformed. The United States’ population had roughly doubled since his birth, and New York City’s had doubled in just the last decade. The city had served briefly as the new nation’s political capital, and stood out as its commercial center. Ships for Europe, the West Indies, and points east packed the harbor; brokers trading stocks and bills filled the rooms of Tontine Coffee House on Wall Street, precursor to the New York Stock Exchange.

  Bev had come to New York to study law, and within a few years he had qualified and considered himself “an Independent Citizen,” able to support himself comfortably.16 (His success encouraged another brother, Morris, to join him in New York in 1802.) In 1805, Bev married Fanny Duer, the sister of his law partner William Duer. Their union marked the bridging of an earlier generation’s reluctant divide. Where Bev Robinson’s father and grandfather had raised their own loyalist regiment during the revolution, the Duers’ father was a New York congressman and their grandfather was a prominent patriot general.17 As Bev and Fanny eagerly awaited the birth of their first child, Bev urged his father to come to New York for a visit. He longed “to ride with you over one of the finest countries in the world,” and fantasized about family reunions in blooming bowers and orchards. And when days grew short and cold, “the winter evenings we should pass most delightfully round my little fire side, and in the day time you could indulge your curiosity in visiting the haunts of your youth, and observing the vast growth and improvement of your native City.”18

  That his father had fled New York at the end of a civil war, attainted by his “native” state, did not seem to faze Bev. He was too young to remember those tense last months of British occupation, when loyalists worried they would be ostracized, prosecuted, or worse. His bright outlook demonstrated just how much had changed since then. Violence against loyalists largely tapered off by 1784—thanks in part to the fact that so many in the British-occupied cities had actually left, but testament, too, to the ideological flexibility and allegiances that had made so many colonial Americans hesitant to take sides to begin with.19 Instead, old oppositions between patriots and loyalists became subsumed by party political divisions, with former loyalists identifying overwhelmingly with the Federalists, who favored a strong central government. (Their Republican opponents, tellingly, accused them of wishing to reinstate a monarchy.)

  The chief conflicts over loyalist reintegration took place not in the streets but in the courts. One thorny issue concerned how to define who was an American citizen and who was a British subject. Because British law held that all natural-born subjects (including Americans born in the colonies before 1776) were perpetually bound to their sovereign, it was difficult to disaggregate American citizens from the mix. Loyalists became a crucial test population for defining citizenship in American courts, as a series of cases established a principle of volitional allegiance, whereby individuals born before 1776 gained the right to choose between citizenship and subjecthood. (Controversies around these definitions would swirl up again in the years leading up to the War of 1812.)20 Another, more immediate legal matter had to do with reprisals against loyalists. Article VI of the Treaty of Paris mandated that no state was allowed to prosecute loyalists for their wartime affiliations. The treaty also stopped short of including a measure, advocated by Congress, to prevent exiled loyalists from returning.21 Many states, however, objected to these articles as unfair federal violations of state sovereignty and passed anti-loyalist laws anyway, in direct contravention of the treaty’s terms.22 New York, the largest British stronghold during the war, witnessed especially intense disputes over what rights and protections former loyalists might enjoy. Property confiscations from loyalists actually increased in New York after the Treaty of Paris was signed.23 Alexander Hamilton, coauthor of the Federalist Papers, began his career as a lawyer in New York City in 1782 defending former loyalists against hostile laws.24 “The world has its eye upon America,” Hamilton declared in an influential essay, and insisted that the new republic “justify the revolution by its fruits” by accommodating its former dissenters.25 This type of argument ultimately prevailed. By the time Bev Robinson returned to New York in the late 1790s, legal sanctions had largely been repealed or suspended. He, like many relatives of attainted loyalists, fought for years in state courts for the restitution of confiscated property and unpaid
prewar debts, with some success.

  The reintegration of loyalists into the United States mirrored a larger process of reconciliation taking place between Britain and the United States. Britain had always wanted to preserve good relations with the United States, partly so as to prevent the republic from falling into a French orbit. The United States, for its part, relied on Britain as its most important trading partner and literally could not afford to compromise the relationship. The outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1793 added new urgency to both sides’ concerns. Though the United States declared neutrality, hoping to be spared the costs of war, the conflict pressed the young republic, as George Washington put it, “between the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis, for more pains were never taken … to embroil us in the disputes of Europe.”26 War brought to the fore a number of issues between Britain and the United States that had lingered unresolved since 1783. Americans were especially aggrieved that Britain maintained its forts in the Great Lakes, instead of having withdrawn from them as the Treaty of Paris mandated. (Britain justified this on the grounds that the United States had not provided adequate compensation for loyalists.) American slaveowners continued to clamor for compensation for slaves stolen during the evacuations, while British merchants and loyalists still wanted their prewar debts properly paid back.

  In 1794, the former peace commissioner John Jay (now chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) traveled to London to negotiate a compromise. He worked out an agreement in which Britain gained sought-after trading privileges and agreed to withdraw from the western forts, and that established commissions to adjudicate border issues and war debts. (An abolitionist, Jay did not press the matter of compensation for stolen slaves.)27 Because of its perceived generosity to Britain, the Jay Treaty was one of the most provocative documents in early American history. Thomas Jefferson denounced it as “nothing more than a treaty of alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country against the legislature and people of the United States.”28 And yet the fact was that the United States had more to gain economically and strategically from conciliation with Britain than it did from conflict. By the end of the 1790s, Americans were no longer calling for war with Britain—instead the United States hovered on the brink of war with France.