Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  But this harmonizing of interests between white loyalists and patriots, and between Britain and the United States, conspicuously left out one group of Britain’s revolutionary allies: Indian nations. For the Mohawks and the Creeks, among others, the end of the revolution had brought no end to violence; it bled into an ongoing series of frontier conflicts.29 Some British officials, notably Upper Canada governor John Graves Simcoe, wanted to continue using Indian allies to defend British North American borders against the United States. But by agreeing in the Jay Treaty to pull out of the Great Lakes forts, British metropolitan policymakers essentially sold out the Indians to the larger objective of Anglo-American reconciliation. When American troops marched against Joseph Brant’s western Indian confederacy, Simcoe was unable to send British soldiers to assist. Defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the confederacy ceded most of present-day Ohio to the United States.

  From his reserve at Grand River, Joseph Brant continued to maneuver between empires. Britain’s withdrawal from Fort Niagara by the terms of the Jay Treaty left him staring unprotected at an American army on the border of Iroquois land. His fragile autonomy seemed to be splintering. A tragedy within the bosom of his own family only compounded the sense that things were falling apart. In 1795, Brant’s troublesome son Isaac flew at him in a drunken rage, wielding a knife. Brant deflected the blow, only to end up striking his son in the head with the blade. Isaac died of the wound two days later. For years afterward, Brant kept the dagger on his bedroom mantelpiece, a haunting reminder of how hopes could go horribly wrong.30 He began to drink. He tried to lease or sell Iroquois land to white loyalist settlers, to raise much-needed revenue for the Mohawks. But the British would not let him: after the cession of the forts, imperial authorities in North America sought to tighten their control around Indians, hoping thus to ensure their loyalty in the event of any future conflict with the United States. Brant repeatedly talked about going to London once more to make his case, as he had in 1775 and 1785. But he was losing his leveraging power as well as his health, and never made the trip.31

  While Brant felt his influence ebb away in the north, another test for the potential of British-Indian alliances took place among the Creeks in the south, spearheaded once again by William Augustus Bowles. The self-appointed Director-General of the Creek Nation made his way from Freetown to London in 1798—courtesy of a £10 loan from Zachary Macaulay to pay his passage—to find British ministers once more receptive to plans to oust the Spanish from North America.32 Bowles quickly revived his scheme for Muskogee, the would-be Creek loyalist state in the southwest. Renewing his London connections (Lord Dunmore, now living in Britain, insisted that Bowles come to dinner “dressed as Eastajoca ought to be”), Bowles made the rounds at Whitehall and garnered a new set of half-promises of support. In 1799, he set off across the Atlantic again, at British government expense.33

  He returned to his Creek wife’s village after an absence of seven years. Things had changed in Creek country: his old rival Alexander McGillivray was dead; now the U.S. superintendent for Indian affairs actively worked to “civilize” the Creeks and turn them into slaveowning planters and consumers.34 Bowles’s message, though, was the same that it had always been. Unite behind Muskogee, he urged his peers, unite behind Britain, and earn real autonomy in the face of U.S. settler incursion and Spanish rule. In the spring of 1800, Bowles and three hundred Indians struck a major blow for Muskogee by seizing the Spanish fort at St. Mark’s on the Gulf of Mexico. At the swampy Seminole village of Miccosukee, near present-day Tallahassee, Bowles began to build his long-dreamed-of capital, with plans for a newspaper, a university, and more. He plotted the terms of Muskogee’s constitution. Though the document was never finished, it offered a fine expression of Bowles’s commitment to a broadly British version of constitutional rule, charting a middle course between republicanism and absolutism. He also hoped to attract a new kind of loyalist to Muskogee. The French Revolution had sent about 200,000 French émigrés into exile, while a further fifteen thousand refugees had arrived in the United States from Saint Domingue.35 As Bowles envisioned it, Muskogee could be a haven for any and all such displaced persons who wanted good land under a liberal government.36

  But the same shifting regimes that had facilitated Bowles’s ascent would also bring about his downfall. Policy and administration changes on both sides of the Atlantic, compounded by the 1802 peace of Amiens, brought his lattice of international support tumbling down. Ultimately, the Creeks themselves lost faith in this flamboyant character. Sensing the weakening of local backing for Bowles, the U.S. Indian agent decided to eliminate this troublesome rival once and for all. He struck a deal with the Creeks granting them debt forgiveness in exchange for a cession of land—and for their agreeing to turn over William Augustus Bowles. At an Indian council in May 1803, a Creek contingent seized Bowles, clapped him into handcuffs (forged specially for the purpose by a local blacksmith), and transferred him to the Spanish. In a sinister piece of déjà vu, Bowles was shipped back to Havana’s Morro Castle, where he had been jailed eleven years before. This time, though, there would be no miraculous escape. Whether through illness, poisoning, or self-inflicted starvation, Bowles wasted into a skeleton of his former self. He died in Havana in late 1805. His adopted people, the Creeks, would end up paying a terrible price for their relationship with the American republic, when they fractured into civil war.37 U.S. forces, partly under the command of Tennessee colonel Andrew Jackson, swooped into the middle of the conflict, using it as an excuse to expand into Indian country. With Americans hysterically denouncing their enemies as “British savages,” just like a generation before, Jackson commenced his ascent to the status of national icon on a pile of Creek bodies.38

  Bowles’s project proved the last great attempt to carve out a pro-British loyalist state in what would soon be U.S. territory, the end of a line that ran back to John Cruden and Lord Dunmore. Two years after Bowles’s death, Joseph Brant also died, wrestling with the British imperial government.39 Though Brant’s vision of a western Indian confederacy would endure under the leadership of Shawnee chief Tecumseh, the Mohawks’ subordination to the imperial government steadily increased. The deaths of Bowles and Brant closed an era in which it looked like the Creeks or Iroquois might effectively operate as autonomous powers between empires.

  And as they fell victim to growing American ambitions and waning British support, the Indians gestured toward the greatest convergence between Britain and the United States of all: a resemblance in imperial ambitions. The same spring Bowles was captured, the United States bought the Louisiana Territory from France, practically doubling the country’s size overnight. The purchase sealed the transformation of the world’s largest republic into a striving continental empire—an “empire of liberty,” as Thomas Jefferson described it, united in language, belief, and culture, an empire of free trade, self-government, and natural rights.40 To Jefferson and his contemporaries there was no contradiction at all between the concepts of republic and empire. They lived in a world of empires, and their nation was every bit as much the product of an imperial age as it was the harbinger of a republican one.

  Yet what was the British Empire if not a self-perceived “empire of liberty” too? Parallels are often drawn between American and French forms of republicanism. American imperialism, though, despite its distinctive features as a continental power, drew on no model more strongly than the British. American and British imperialists alike saw themselves as spreading a less coercive form of liberty than Napoleon, for instance, with his tyranny of the sword. The Indians’ fate underscored the contradictions built into the very concept of an empire of liberty. But it also helped explain why America and Britain, and patriots and loyalists, could appear to reconcile so rapidly after their civil war. Differences of style aside, their aspirations toward dominion and liberty were, in substance, very much the same.

  IT HAD seemed natural enough to Bev Robinson in the first decade of the ninetee
nth century—flourishing in New York City while his brothers fought and died for the British Empire—that Britain and the United States should enjoy harmonious relations and common interests. He believed that “every American must find his security in the welfare & stability of the British Government.”41 How, then, could it be that just a few years later these apparently natural partners found themselves at war? Perhaps Bev could have turned to his younger brother Morris for insight. Morris had also moved to New York and done well for himself, and married a sister of Bev’s (patriot-descended) wife. But while Bev proudly called himself “an American,” the Nova Scotia–born Morris never forgot that in New York he was living “in a strange Country.”42 And while Bev confidently predicted great things ahead for the United States if it remained allied with Britain, Morris gloomily observed (in 1806), “I should not be at all surprised if in a few years the United States should be involved in a Civil War.”43 The war that did break out, in 1812, confirmed and qualified the effects of the American Revolution for white loyalist descendants such as himself, for North American blacks, and for Indians alike.

  Morris’s prophecy—echoed by others on both sides of the Atlantic—reflected rising tensions between Britain and the United States. By 1807 the Jay Treaty had expired and efforts to negotiate a replacement failed. Three chief problems beset Anglo-American relations. First, Britain provoked the United States by imposing the Orders in Council in 1807, which banned neutral powers (the United States of course among them) from trading with France. Second, there was ongoing disagreement about the definition of American citizens and British subjects. Britain claimed that twenty thousand British subjects were serving in the American merchant marine, many of them carrying dubious citizenship papers issued by American officials.44 It felt fully justified in ordering the overstretched Royal Navy to intercept American ships and impress sailors on board on the grounds that they were British subjects—even though to the United States such actions seemed an outright violation of national sovereignty. A third concern centered around the status of Indian nations on U.S. frontiers, whose initiatives and autonomy the United States assumed Britain continued to support (with reason, in the case of Tecumseh).

  By the early 1810s, resentment against Britain inspired a loud faction of republicans in Congress to call for war—making them America’s original “war hawks.” The majority of Britons wanted nothing less than war with the United States. They were more than otherwise engaged. Napoleon’s empire by then reached from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, from Andalucia to the borders of Russia. Britain was dragged down by a bitter campaign in Spain, and was stretched thin trying to protect its possessions in the West Indies, Africa, and Asia. Things on the home front were not much better. In a blow to national confidence, the immensely popular (albeit half blind and rheumatic) King George III definitively lost his mind in 1810, leading to the appointment of his notoriously debauched eldest son as prince regent. Economic distress ran high; in 1811–12, disgruntled workers unleashed a wave of attacks on mills and factories, smashing mechanical looms in the name of a mysterious “Captain Ludd.” Then, on a May day in 1812, Prime Minister Spencer Perceval walked into the lobby of the House of Commons and a man stepped out from a doorway and coolly fired a pistol into his chest. Perceval died almost instantly, the only British prime minister ever to be assassinated. His successors promptly repealed the controversial Orders in Council, hoping to ease relations with the United States. But they were too late. Five days earlier, President James Madison had signed a declaration of war against Britain.

  The U.S. war hawks hailed the War of 1812 as a second war of independence. (Given that the American population had roughly tripled since 1775, a high percentage of Americans would not even have remembered the first one.) Many Britons, by contrast, regarded it as a stab in the back. But in some ways Morris Robinson came closer to the mark with his prediction that the United States would erupt into a “civil war.” Indeed, New England Federalists were so opposed to the war that they threatened to secede. In British North America, meanwhile, the war would crucially test the loyalties of imperial subjects. And though this was a war between the United States and Britain, it was also, like the American Revolution, a war fought by and among North Americans, white, black, and Indian. It would have pronounced effects for all these groups, and on forging a sense of togetherness in the United States and British North America alike.

  The United States and the British Empire shared a poorly fortified land border thousands of miles long: “all frontier and little else,” groaned the Duke of Wellington.45 In 1812, as in 1775, conquering Canada was a primary U.S. objective. With only a few thousand British regulars on hand, British North America had to rely heavily on Indian auxiliaries and local militia units for its defense.46 The Maritime provinces, fortunately, were well protected by the Royal Navy and unlikely to be attacked; they provided much-needed supplies to the rest of British North America. Lower Canada’s Francophone majority appeared to share British hostility to the United States, and as in 1775, they remained tacitly loyal.47 Anglophone Upper Canada, however, was another story. Its strategic location, embracing the Great Lakes, meant that it would receive the brunt of an American invasion. Yet 80 percent of its 100,000 or so residents had been born south of the border. Could these so-called late loyalists be counted on to fight for the empire? For that matter, what about the original loyalists? In 1789 Lord Dorchester had conferred upon them the title of “United Empire Loyalists,” intended to be a mark of distinction, and extended free land grants to their children, thereby hoping to secure another generation’s attachment to the empire.48 Nevertheless, the province had been rocked by vigorous if inchoate popular challenges to government. An example of the kind of trouble rulers feared came when the Upper Canada assembly voted down a request by British general Isaac Brock to suspend habeas corpus in the interests of wartime discipline—a measure that had already been authorized in both Britain and the United States.49

  British anxieties about North American loyalty did not easily subside, and recruiting Upper Canadians into the militia remained a problem throughout the war. Inevitably some British subjects did defect to the Americans; others (a reversal of the more familiar twentieth-century phenomenon) moved to the United States to avoid military service. Many simply stayed quiet, uninterested in taking sides in this unwanted war.50 But the threat of enemy invasion drew Canadians together too. British North Americans took heart from the knowledge that Federalists and New Englanders opposed the war (a fact heavily emphasized in the Canadian press), and championed the merits of their orderly government over America’s republican mayhem.51 A proclamation from the U.S. army promising that Upper Canadians would be “emancipated from Tyranny and oppression and restored to the dignified station of freemen” left Canadians scoffing at the hypocrisy. Theirs was the free government; republicanism imposed the tyranny of the majority, and a high tax bill to boot.52

  Though Thomas Jefferson, among others, assumed that the U.S. conquest of British North America would be “a mere matter of marching,” the campaigns quickly proved him wrong.53 An American offensive against Montreal was abandoned when militiamen, who were not required to fight outside their states, refused to cross the border. At Detroit and Niagara, General Brock stopped American advances with help from Indian allies. In October 1812, at Queenston just below Lake Ontario, Brock faced a U.S. invading army three or four times larger than his own. The New York militia poured across the Niagara River in boatload after unstoppable boatload—until the sight of the returning dead and wounded reminded the soldiers that they were not obliged to cross, and they stayed back. The day ended in victory for the British, though it also ended the life of General Brock. Shot down as he rushed up Queenston Heights, Brock became a latter-day General Wolfe, earning apotheosis as one of British North America’s first great heroes.54

  These early victories helped rally an initially diffident Upper Canadian population behind the war. So did a memorable defeat. In April 1
813, the Americans launched a raid across Lake Ontario to York. John Graves Simcoe’s dreamed-of “second London” had not developed much beyond a small town, but York was nevertheless the provincial capital, complete with public buildings, a substantial garrison, and weapons stores. Overwhelmed by the assault, the British decided to retreat, blowing up the fort’s powder magazine as they left. Hundreds of Americans were killed and wounded in the explosion. Enraged American soldiers went on a looting spree, ransacking every unoccupied house they could find and vindictively burning the Upper Canada parliament to the ground. The sight of the flames engulfing the seat of government proved hard to forget—especially when it became the first of many demonstrations of the “burning system of the Americans.”55

  What happened in York served in turn as precedent for an iconic episode in American national mythology, when the British admiral Alexander Cochrane ordered his forces to “lay waste” coastal towns in the Chesapeake until the United States compensated Upper Canada for damages. In August 1814, the British decided to march directly on the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C. Washington’s terrified residents could hear the guns pounding from a few miles away, and fled in anticipation of the British attack. In the White House, First Lady Dolley Madison insisted on taking a full-length portrait of George Washington with her for safekeeping. Finding it too cumbersome to unscrew from the wall, she ordered the frame broken and the canvas taken out and rolled up. The talismanic image offered her scant protection in turn, though: at a tavern outside the city, she was turned away by Washington refugees angry at her husband for dragging them into this mess.56 The battle-worn British stumbled into the abandoned city in darkness and got to work visiting upon Washington the same treatment that the Americans had inflicted on York. Army pyrotechnic experts supervised the burning of the Capitol by firing Congreve rockets through the windows. British forces entered the White House, where they discovered—and happily consumed—a dinner for forty, before going from room to room, setting the trappings and furnishings alight. All night the city burned. Even to the troops who performed it, watching “the pride of the Americans” go up in flames was a disturbing spectacle. But war was a disturbing thing—and the British never forgot that the Americans had started this one.57