By then, the British position had significantly improved thanks to the fact that the conflict in Europe seemed at last to be coming to a close. Napoleon had disastrously retreated from Russia, and after four years of grueling combat in the Iberian Peninsula, British forces had swept the French out of Spain. Emboldened by these events, British commanders determined to end the war in America decisively. Thousands of Peninsular War veterans sailed to North America as reinforcements, Phil Robinson among them. He reached North America with new facings on his uniform and new medals on his chest, promoted to brigadier general for his valiant service in Spain. It was his first visit to the continent of his birth since the evacuation of New York City in 1783.
British strategists planned to finish the war where it started, on the Canadian frontier. If things had gone according to plan, Robinson would have played a big role in winning it. He commanded one brigade in a bid to dominate Lakes Champlain and Ontario, but the planning was botched and the offensive ended in disgrace.58 And so it was that the last act of the War of 1812 unfolded, instead, in what William Augustus Bowles might have hailed as a dream come true, when a British fleet appeared in the Gulf of Mexico to take control of the Mississippi. In the last days of 1814, British soldiers disembarked in the bayous around New Orleans. They advanced into the city on January 8, 1815, against an American force commanded by Andrew Jackson. Relentless American fire mowed down the British attackers, line after redcoated line falling mangled to the ground. At the end of the battle more than two thousand British troops were dead, missing, or wounded, as compared with a mere seventy-one American casualties. The appalling carnage awed Jackson’s backwoods fighters. “I never saw the like of that!” exclaimed a Kentucky militiaman. A Scottish soldier snapped back, “That’s nowt, man; if you’d been wi’ us in Spain, you would ha’ seen summat far war!”59
The grizzled veteran’s dismissive remark served as an effective epitaph for the Battle of New Orleans. The American victory had come too late to matter. Two weeks earlier, with Britain feeling confident in its victory over Napoleon, British and American negotiators had signed a peace treaty at Ghent, ending the War of 1812 and reaffirming the status quo ante bellum. The Anglo-American war was over. After at least fifteen thousand combatants had been killed or wounded, on paper it had barely changed a thing.
THE TERMS of the peace treaty confirmed the way the British generally interpreted the War of 1812, as an ultimately inconsequential (if bloody) affair, an unwanted sideshow to the primary struggle against France and its allies. But for its participants in North America this second Anglo-American conflict had more lasting significance. Fought in and among communities divided by civil war just thirty years earlier, the War of 1812 crystallized the legacies of the American Revolution for three groups of sometime loyalists: black slaves, British-allied Indian nations, and white British North American refugees.
The clearest way in which the War of 1812 replayed a revolutionary script took place in the spring of 1814, when Admiral Cochrane issued a proclamation inviting Americans to defect. Any takers, he promised, would be welcomed into the British armed forces or have the chance to go “as Free Settlers to the British possessions in North America or the West Indies where they will meet with due encouragement.”60 Though Cochrane did not say it in so many words, everyone who saw his fleet lurking in Chesapeake Bay knew what type of volunteers he meant to attract: this was an invitation to slaves. Neither blacks nor whites had forgotten Lord Dunmore’s 1775 proclamation; indeed, American-owned slaves had been running to the British since at least 1813, in some cases as far as Nova Scotia. As Cochrane cruised along the same inlets where Dunmore had recruited Daddy Moses, Harry Washington, and hundreds of other blacks forty years earlier, more than three thousand slaves made their way to the British. What happened to them after the war also followed the revolutionary precedent. The British government resettled two thousand “Refugee Negroes” in the very same Nova Scotia villages that had been founded by the black loyalists. Other slaves who joined the British military took up land grants in the newly acquired British colony of Trinidad, becoming colonial pioneers much as their black loyalist counterparts had done in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
The management of these runaway slaves vividly illustrates how, in spite of all the ways that freedom had been compromised for black loyalists in the British Empire, British promises still held at least some attraction for American slaves thirty years after the revolution.61 There was one instructive difference, however. In the American Revolution, Sir Guy Carleton had resisted George Washington’s demands that Britain should either give back or pay for the black loyalists. In the War of 1812, doubtless mindful of the revolutionary controversy, the British government distanced itself from Cochrane’s declaration. When the United States lodged a compensation claim for evacuated slaves, Britain did not return the runaways—that would be a violation of promises too far—but after a process of international arbitration, it agreed to pay American slaveholders approximately $1.2 million for the 3,601 liberated slaves.62 Paying for the slaves’ freedom in this instance underscored the novelty of Britain’s refusal to do so during the American Revolution. It adhered instead to the contemporary norm of paying for manumission, an example that would be followed on a giant scale in 1833 when slavery was abolished in the British Empire and the government compensated slaveowners to the tune of £20 million. Here was a powerful demonstration, as if slaves needed one, of how the British “empire of liberty,” like the United States—where all the New England states, New York, and New Jersey had abolished slavery by 1804—might honor black freedom in some domains, while underwriting enslavement in others.
For Britain’s Indian allies, the War of 1812 marked a far bleaker contrast for the worse with the aftermath of the American Revolution. After the revolution, British officials had sought to use Iroquois as allies against the United States in the north, and offered limited support to Indian initatives in the south. Brant and Bowles had felt personally the whittling down of British aid in the early 1800s. Though some British officials championed an Indian buffer state under Tecumseh at the outset of the War of 1812, by the end of the war all such talk had ceased. For the truth was that by 1815 the British no longer needed Indians as buffers against the United States. Peace confirmed national boundaries, and effectively laid to rest all those earlier expectations that the United States might fragment. Britain gave up its territorial aspirations to control the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. Instead, as white settlement on both sides of the Canadian-American border became more entrenched, earlier patterns of collaboration and negotiation between whites and Indians got fixed on a map of lands divided and claimed.63 On the southern U.S. frontier, the War of 1812 had a similarly conclusive effect on British designs. The Creeks bore especially painful witness to what happened when Britain withdrew support. In 1814 Andrew Jackson forced them into the humiliating Treaty of Fort Jackson, by which they ceded more than half their territory to the United States and agreed to move west. Retreating British forces on the Gulf coast did try to leave one thing behind for their embattled allies: a well-built fort on the Apalachicola River, right in the heart of Bowles’s Muskogee. For a short time after the peace, “Negro Fort,” as this site came to be known, attracted a cosmopolitan community of Choctaws, Seminoles, and especially runaway slaves, a bastion of self-government against the forces of U.S.-sponsored “civilization.” But this little haven was destroyed on Jackson’s orders in 1816.64
For a third group of participants, white loyalists in British North America, the War of 1812 consolidated the revolutionary inheritance most explicitly of all. Americans have conventionally understood the War of 1812 as a crucible for national identity, a position cemented in 1931 when “The Star-Spangled Banner”—penned by Francis Scott Key during Britain’s bombardment of Baltimore—was adopted as the U.S. national anthem.65 But it was in British North America, as much as in the United States, that the war could really be said to have transformed a colle
ctive identity—in something of the way the American Revolution had achieved south of the border. For Upper Canadians, especially, the War of 1812 posed several analogies with the position of American colonists during the revolution. It made them choose between imperial and republican regimes; it asked them to fend off invasion by a substantially larger power; and it required many residents to balance their personal, local loyalties with their allegiance to the state. Only this time, the supporters of the empire won. The conquest of Canada, the major U.S. war aim, ended in defeat.66 Canadian nationalist historians folded the “loyal” defenders of Upper Canada in 1812 together with the United Empire Loyalists of the revolutionary era, thus effectively rewriting the earlier story of defeat with a redemptive tale of resistance and unity.67 As a rallying point for postwar identity, the War of 1812 helped make “loyalty” to empire—rather than, say, “freedom” or “liberty”—the central concept in British North American political discourse for at least a generation to come.68
But the privileging of loyalty also opened up a contest over its meanings. For some, loyalty formed the basis for an inclusive definition of who could belong in British North America. U.S.-born “late loyalists,” French Canadians, and Indians could all be comfortably embraced into the fold of British subjecthood as long as they were loyal. For others, loyalty served as a litmus test for excluding precisely such groups from full British rights. Not long after the war, these opinions collided in an Upper Canadian controversy called the “alien question,” over whether or not Americans who immigrated after 1783 could become naturalized British subjects.69 One of the leading spokesmen against naturalizing Americans was John Beverley Robinson, the precocious attorney general of Upper Canada and a distant cousin of the New York Robinsons. Robinson’s attitudes epitomized an emerging sense of Anglo-Canadian distinctiveness rooted in hostility toward the United States. A second-generation loyalist and a first-generation Canadian patriot, Robinson was born in Upper Canada in 1791 to refugee parents, fought with Brock at Queenston, and spent two years studying law in England. (Phil Robinson was “most exceedingly happy” to meet him there and hoped “to have the pleasure of introducing you to some more Robinsons e’er we both quit this country.”)70 The stay in the imperial heartland confirmed young Robinson’s patriotic (not to say chauvinistic) sensibility, as he made clear when a British friend “chose to Twit me with the term Yankee, seeming to think it applied to all [North] Americans.” “My being born in Canada made me just as much a Yankee as if I had come from the Orkneys,” he snapped back, horrified that “the people of Canada” might be “so confounded with the people they so detest, & with whom they have so long been fighting.”71
John Beverley Robinson’s attitudes typified the Canadian “tory” vision of loyalism that took shape after 1812. He and his fellow conservatives celebrated loyalists—whether the United Empire Loyalists or the loyal fighters of the War of 1812—as founding fathers of a tub-thumpingly imperial Canada. Theirs wasn’t just the British North America of light taxes and stable government many loyalists championed before 1812. Their British North America was a stalwart defender of empire, fiercely monarchical, and thoroughly anti-American.72 Loyalism, to them, had some of the resonances associated with the term today (and its use in Northern Ireland in particular), connoting die-hard support for empire. So effectively did Upper Canadian conservatives rebrand the meaning of loyalism after the War of 1812 that they helped entrench an abiding perception of revolutionary era loyalists as conservatives. But this portrayal was misleading at best, and captured only a subset of the opinions that American refugees might have recognized as their own.
In cementing the legacies of the American Revolution for loyalists in North America, the War of 1812 also seemed to replace certain tensions with a kind of truce. Both British North America and the United States of America emerged from the conflict thinking it had won, with fortified self-images as realms of liberty. South of the border, the United States promised its citizens an empire of individual liberty and democratic government—while continuing of course to exclude slaves and in most cases Indians from full participation. North of the border, British North America presented an empire of ordered liberty, anchored in hierarchy and constitutional monarchy, and ostensibly inclusive of multiethnic difference. Whatever their future disputes, these rival empires, reflecting each other across a lengthening land border, would never formally go to war again.
For however firmly the War of 1812 divided the British Empire and the United States, reprising aspects of the American Revolution, it was neither a war of independence nor a revolution. At its end there were no mass migrations of refugees. Instead, there were individual homecomings. With his tour of duty in Upper Canada complete, Phil Robinson—recently knighted for his valiant service—decided to visit his childhood home. As he traveled down the Hudson Valley for the first time since adolescence, the primal familiarity of the landscape came rushing back over him, the smell of known earth, the rustling creeks, reddening autumn leaves. Staying with long-lost cousins, Phil continued his pilgrimage into the past by searching out the wet nurse who had cared for him in infancy. The old woman, now eighty, did not recognize him, “but when I made myself known to her she was quite overcome.”73 Then he went to find the house. How would it look after all these years, if indeed it even stood? His sister-in-law Catherine Skinner Robinson had gone to visit her own birthplace in Amboy, New Jersey, “but no trace remained of my father’s house—not one stone was left upon another. It was a grass plain!”74
Then he saw it: the long white wooden house in three connected parts, with neat shutters and a tidy pair of dormers, nestled at the base of rugged Sugarloaf Mountain. The cherry tree was noticeably taller now, and the willows on the road (dubbed “Arnold’s willows” for his father’s infamous friend) looked blasted and weathered.75 Otherwise, the scene stood “so little altered” from his memory that “it brought tears into my eyes and many a heavy sigh from my heart.” Phil felt like he was thirteen again, “when I left that Vale of Peace and Comfort.” He remembered those low-ceilinged rooms when they rang with the voices of his parents and their friends; he remembered how he and his siblings had enjoyed “the most perfect Domestic Happiness” of a kind he had never felt since.76 How insouciant they had been then, and comfortable, as befitted the children of a confident colonial elite, tucked safely into a world little larger than this ring of hills.
But it was 1815 now, and those were glimpses from another century. The British Empire had changed as much as he had, now as palpably an Asian entity as an Atlantic one, more centralized in its structures, more purposefully liberal in its governing style. General Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson turned to his own son beside him, and together they walked away.
WHILE THE WAR of 1812 served as a conclusion of sorts to the story of loyalist refugees in North America, the routes of a handful of other loyalist migrants pointed toward a broader reorientation of the British Empire in this period. These figures, like the empire that employed them, turned to the east, to South Asia.
Phil Robinson’s mother Susanna was at home in Thornbury one February evening in 1810 when she heard another unexpected knock on the door, and saw another half-familiar youth step into the room. A decade after Henry Clinton Robinson had turned up from North America, here was her grandson William Robinson, another of Beverley Robinson Jr.’s sons from New Brunswick. “O how happy Grandmama was to see me she cryed like a Child,” William wrote home on his first evening in Thornbury. “You my Dear Father is her first thought, notwithstanding the length of time that you have been separated, her affections are as strong as when you first left her.” Following in the footsteps of his deceased elder brother Henry, William, barely sixteen years old, had also come to Britain on his way to war. He too was swept up into his large family’s capacious embrace. His grandmother and aunts regaled him with old family stories. “Uncle Phill is the most agreeable man I ever met with he keeps us constantly on the laugh,” and his uncle William Henr
y Robinson so “very much like papa in every thing he is always cracking his jokes” that the lad felt instantly at home.77 Then Phil did the same thing he had once arranged for Henry, by placing young William in a good regiment. William set off in his smart new blue uniform for war. But he would travel to where no Robinson had gone before. He sailed for India.
Since at least the 1750s, India had been the coming concern in the British Empire. The loss in America made it the primary investment. That wasn’t to say that the British Atlantic empire was finished—as loyalist refugees knew better than most. British North America, in particular, continued to provide templates for colonial government that would be employed as far away as Australia. Yet by the end of the century it was plain that imperial interests in the Atlantic world were being offset by increasing commitments in and around India—a trend the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars would only confirm. Within India, fear of French rivalry provided an excellent pretext for British military expansion. Beyond India, Britain won a strategic chain of way stations to the subcontinent: Malta, the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, and Singapore. By 1815 India was to the British Empire pretty much everything the North American and Caribbean colonies had been forty years earlier: the largest, most economically valuable, and strategically significant domain, and the one most influential in turn on metropolitan politics and culture.
Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World Page 42