Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  An assessment of such refugees’ lives as charting a course from defeat to success continues to be compelling, because it helps, among other things, to explain a notable difference between the American refugees and other conspicuous groups of “losers” and exiles. As the revolution receded, so too did the refugees’ rich language of lament. They and their descendants did not spawn a transnational discourse of having participated in a common upheaval. They did not maintain a folklore of loss in songs or poems, in the manner of the Acadians. They did not raise secret toasts, like Jacobites, to the restoration of the monarchy in America. They did not collectively nurture an equivalent of the “lost cause” ideology so prevalent among southerners after the American Civil War. Nor did all refugees, even in British North America, share the anti-Americanism articulated by some. For unlike other refugee communities, the loyalists began and ended their journeys as subjects of the same crown. Their position as British subjects was the one thing they had never lost. The absence of mournful voices in later generations speaks, in its eloquent silence, to the loyalists’ absorption into an empire able to quiet them.

  At the same time, it would be facile to suggest that the image of empire presented by West (or the perspective of any single loyalist, such as Elizabeth Johnston) was the only way to look at the results of the exodus. West might use loyalist refugees to portray the “spirit of 1783” as a positive compound of hierarchical rule, liberal ideals, and transcontinental reach. But many refugees had also gained visceral understanding of the flip side of the “spirit of 1783”: authority could be oppressive, promises could go unfulfilled, and global expansion might facilitate recurring displacement. Indeed, every one of the things celebrated in this image has a darker aspect. The Loyalist Claims Commission, to name the most obvious, was indeed a notable manifestation of humanitarian impulses—but it left many loyalists frustrated, and left the majority out altogether. Black loyalists did get their freedom, as the picture proudly conveys, letting British authorities claim the high ground of principle over their American peers—but black freedom had been constrained in all kinds of ways in practice, and slavery, of course, endured. As for the Indians, by the time this was painted, the British Empire may still have looked more benign on the whole than the United States, but prospects for real Indian sovereignty under Britain’s aegis were fast disappearing.

  Finally, while West foregrounded loyalists’ ethnic and social diversity—and by extension the centrality of such inclusiveness in British self-perceptions—his image completely obscurs a preeminent form of diversity among the loyalist refugees. Loyalists had never been uniformly “loyal.” Their political beliefs did and would continue to range widely, in ways that defied the suggestion of placid obedience implied in this image. To the extent that loyalists had left the colonies believing in the king and the preservation of empire, Britain’s postwar ascent and triumph in 1815 was something they both welcomed and benefited from. But many loyalist refugees also sought reform and expanded rights within the empire, only to find themselves time and again clashing with imperial authority. Importing political sensibilities from colonial America into the postrevolutionary British Empire, loyalist refugees turned out to be vectors of imperial dissent as conspicuously as they embodied loyal consent.

  While loyalists’ personal laments may have faded, their languages of protest lived on. In the Bahamas, for instance, conflicts over the regulation of slaves continued to divide American refugee planters and imperial officials. In 1817 Lord Dunmore’s onetime antagonist William Wylly, now attorney general, precipitated a three-year standoff between planters and authorities when he blocked a loyalist planter from exporting a slave to the United States—precisely the sort of issue that, back in 1772, had led to the demise of slaveowning in Britain.5 (Wylly himself moved to St. Vincent some time later; but the ruins of his New Providence plantation, strewn along a modern highway, are a rare surviving vestige of the loyalist planter period in the Bahamas.) In Jamaica, another loyalist legacy reverberated through the massive slave rebellion that rocked the western part of the island in 1831. One of the revolt’s leaders was a self-taught black Baptist preacher who had done just what white authorities had always feared George Liele would do, and used his prayer meetings to help organize the rising. Liele himself probably would not have approved of the Baptist War, as the episode became known, had he lived to see it. (He died in the 1820s.) But as the first black Baptist preaching to Jamaican slaves, he had played a pivotal role in inspiring it.6 There was poetic justice in the fact that this rebellion, drawing on rhetoric introduced by a freed American slave, accelerated the abolition of slavery in the British Empire as a whole.

  But it was British North America, which had absorbed the majority of refugees, that became the most vigorous arena for loyalist-influenced debate. In 1837–38, ongoing struggles about rights and liberties erupted in linked antigovernment rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. Though they were triggered by local circumstances, at base these protests turned on complaints that sounded strikingly similar to those of American patriots—and disgruntled loyalist refugees. Both the rebellions and the British response—the Durham Report of 1839, which promoted the concept of “responsible government”—are seen as foundational to the Canadian liberal tradition. But they had still wider repercussions, by framing ideas of provincial governance that would eventually culminate in calls for home rule. For neither the first nor the last time, British North America thus served as a laboratory for imperial reforms.7

  So how does one square the loyalists’ participation in the “spirit of 1783” with these more contentious legacies? The answer is that while refugees were often successfully assimilated into a refurbished British Empire, making up for their losses by finding—and founding—imperial alternatives, they also widened (if not introduced) cracks in the postrevolutionary empire’s foundations. Provincial understandings of rights had prevailed over metropolitan ones in the American Revolution. Analogous discourses of rights, inflected in part and in places by loyalist refugees, would eventually prevail once more. And there was one further way that loyalist refugees anticipated future imperial upheavals. Dispersed by the British Empire’s first great war of independence, they anticipated the still larger and more violent displacements caused by twentieth-century decolonization.

  Unsurprisingly, the endings of many of the lives in these pages present a similarly mixed picture of things lost and found. By 1815 many refugees had died, while others settled into place, like Elizabeth Johnston and Phil Robinson, both of whom died in comfortable retirement in their eighties, in Nova Scotia and Britain respectively. Of all the imperial officials who influenced the loyalists’ fate, Lord Cornwallis—the man who lost America—died in the best position, professionally speaking, as governor-general of India in 1805. He rests in a beautifully proportioned neoclassical mausoleum that looks more like something one would expect to find on the grounds of an English stately home than on the edge of the provincial Indian town of Ghazipur, where it stands. The lengthy epitaph praises Cornwallis’s feats in India, and says nothing at all of his time in America. There, in the new center of British imperial power, it simply didn’t need to. Yet as with so many such British monuments in India, the structure’s grandiose heft seems also a rather sad attempt to compensate for its locale, so far from home.

  Guy Carleton, first Baron Dorchester, died on one of his three English estates in 1808, old (eighty-four), rich, if somewhat embittered by his clashes with political rivals. His hard-won barony became extinct by the end of the century, though his political legacies in Canada arguably endured longer. Lord Dunmore died the following year—of “decay,” aged seventy-eight—significantly less rich, and likely more bitter. He spent his last years in the seaside resort of Ramsgate, Kent, supported in part by his daughter Augusta, who had married one of King George III’s sons without permission and been cut off by the royal family in disgrace. In what turned out to be Dunmore’s final meeting with King George III, in 1803, the e
arl grew so enraged when the king denounced their joint grandchildren as “Bastards! Bastards!” that it took all the self-control he could muster to refrain from assaulting his own sovereign.8

  Dunmore’s loyalist protégés John Cruden and William Augustus Bowles both died prematurely (in 1787 and 1805 respectively), their visionary ambitions for new states in the American southwest unfulfilled. Their own “loyal” projects had seen them branded at times as traitors, at others as hopeless dreamers. What their stories captured best, however, was the dynamism and possibility created by a world of warring empires. Had they lived into later middle age, they would have seen American and British filibusters undertake initiatives similar to theirs—to say nothing of a wave of revolutions that brought down most of the Spanish American empire by the end of the 1820s.

  Joseph Brant, meanwhile, experienced a different sort of afterlife. He died in 1807, at his house at Burlington Bay on Lake Ontario, thoroughly disillusioned with the British Empire. In 1850 his body was exhumed and carried by relay to Grand River, where he was formally reburied in “a proper tomb” next to the white clapboard church in Brantford (as Brant’s Town had been renamed). It was the beginning of a sort of apotheosis. At the centennial of the loyalist exodus, some twenty thousand people assembled in Brantford’s Victoria Park to see a statue of Brant unveiled, cast from the bronze of donated British cannon.9 While his name continued to signify savagery in the United States, Brant was taken up in Canada as a national hero and celebrated for his loyalty to empire, his “civilizing” influence among the Indians, and his contribution to the Canadian ethnic mosaic.

  David George died in Freetown in 1810. There is no trace today of his church, though a living reminder of the black loyalists’ influence can still be heard in the American-inflected creole they developed, Krio, the lingua franca of Sierra Leone today. Of all the sites of loyalist emigration, Freetown has had by far the most violent and tragic subsequent history. But at the time of George’s death, it was positively flourishing compared to the place he had left: Shelburne, Nova Scotia. When government subsidies ended in the 1790s and cheap labor fell away (notably with the black migration), this onetime rival to Halifax collapsed almost as quickly as it had risen. Within a decade of its founding, the boomtown had become a ghost town, and some of its residents returned to New York.10

  The very range of these endings makes an important concluding statement about the diversity of these American refugees, and the varied traces they left in the British Empire. That said, looked at together they also reveal a strikingly consistent pattern. If there is something bittersweet about many of these people’s stories, that surely owes something to the tensions embedded in the “spirit of 1783” that shaped their world, an empire in which what they wanted was not always what they got. It also stems from contradictions inherent in the loyalist refugee condition. They were provincial settlers who became international migrants. They were British subjects who proved their loyalty in one setting and resisted imperial authority in others. They were Americans who failed or refused to find a place in the republic. They were refugees who never became stateless persons in the modern sense. And they were exiles who could go home again, thanks to postwar reconciliation, by later returning to the United States.

  So it was that in 1816, with peace restored between the British Empire and the United States, Beverley Robinson Jr. at last fulfilled his sons’ oft-repeated invitations to visit them in New York City. His brother Phil had recently gone to the Hudson Highlands to see their childhood home, and Beverley Jr. eagerly anticipated his own excursion to those familiar spots where he and his siblings had “gambolled and gallopped a thousand times.” He enjoyed his reunion with his sons, spending time with a bevy of American-born grandchildren he barely knew, and receiving visits from old friends he had not seen in thirty years or more. But Robinson’s homecoming was abruptly cut short when he fell ill in New York and within days was dead. In his sixty-two years, Robinson had traveled from privilege through privation to fortune restored. He had seen two of his sons killed in the service of the British Empire, and two others flourish in the United States. He was buried in his “native city”—under a tablet that described him as “late of Fredericton in the Province of New Brunswick.”11 Robinson died as he was born, at once an American and a British subject. As his life’s full circle suggests, for all that loyalists lost, they found some consolations too.

  APPENDIX: MEASURING THE EXODUS

  STANDARD ESTIMATES cited by historians for the size of the loyalist migration range from 60,000 to 100,000—but nobody has ever provided justification for these numbers.1 How can one come up with a plausible figure of the number of loyalists and slaves who left? There are no documents that systematically record how many civilians evacuated from the British-held cities at the end of the war. Nor are there comprehensive registers of arrivals in different sites. It is especially hard to count the refugees who fled individually or in clusters throughout the war; while the fact that so many loyalists moved more than once further complicates reckonings.

  Triangulating among a variety of extant documents, however, one can nevertheless construct a reasonable estimate of the proportions of the exodus as it stood in about 1785. The most informative records by far are the various musters compiled by government inspectors of refugees in British North America. These musters listed loyalists by place of settlement, gender, and age group (adult or child); they also denoted “servants,” a term often (but not always) used to describe black slaves. Nothing so thorough exists for refugees settled in other regions. Another vital source lies in the surviving evacuation records from New York, Savannah, Charleston, and East Florida. These provide tallies of emigrants broken down by race (black and white), and list their stated destinations. There are also some lists that denote the ships used during these evacuations; but correlating these against ship muster books yields at best haphazard information about loyalist passengers traveling as supernumeraries.2

  The migration of black loyalists can be documented at least as well as the flight of whites.3 (The vast majority of blacks listed on the evacuation returns were of course enslaved, making these the best sources for calculating the loyalist export of slaves.) Both the evacuation of blacks from New York in 1783 and the movement of black loyalists from the Maritimes to Sierra Leone can be quantified not only in aggregate but also parsed by categories such as place of origin and reasons for leaving. Historians have previously estimated the number of runaway slaves to be as high as 80–100,000. Through careful analysis of the Book of Negroes and British military records, though, Cassandra Pybus has authoritatively replaced these reckonings with a far more modest but supportable figure of 20,000 black runaways, 8,000 to 10,000 of whom survived to evacuate in freedom with the British.4

  Given the difficulty of establishing the sum total of loyalist migrants to each destination, it is hardly surprising that coming up with more detailed demographic breakdowns (by amount of property owned, occupation, religion, or more) proves considerably more difficult. The files of the Loyalist Claims Commission, though the best single archive relating to the loyalist experience during the war, are also—as discussed in chapter 4—a very unreliable guide to refugee demographics because the procedures involved in lodging claims privileged certain kinds of people. Wherever possible in this book, I have drawn on the few extant records that do give insight into the social profile of migrants, such as the certificates filed for tax exemption by loyalists in Jamaica. But analyzing the refugee population in concrete quantitative categories—to say nothing of measuring the statistical incidence of multiple migration—remains an elusive goal, especially for Jamaica and Britain, where loyalists did not compose a majority of the population.

  The Maritimes

  The majority of refugees settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and almost all of them arrived there from New York City at the end of the war. An evacuation return from New York produced in October 1783 counted 27,009 people going to Nova Scotia (14,
162 of whom were bound for what became New Brunswick). A return dated November 24, 1783, the day before Evacuation Day, raised the total to 29,244.5

  Not everybody listed on the registers necessarily sailed (although the higher figure was made just a day before the last ships headed out), but the numbers correlate well with records produced on the ground in the Maritimes. Musters of loyalists performed across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick between May and July 1784 counted a total of 26,757 men, women, and children entitled to receive provisions from government stores—a bounty granted only to loyalist refugees.6 At the end of the summer of 1784, the surveyor Colonel Robert Morse used these musters to report that 28,347 loyalists had settled in the region.7 This also conforms to the estimate delivered by Governor John Parr to Lord Shelburne, in December 1783, that “the great emigration of Loyalists from New York” did “not fall short of 30,000 souls.” In August 1784, Parr repeated this figure to Lord Sydney, saying that “the number of souls located amount to near thirty thousand.”8 The figure of 26,757 also corresponds closely to a 1785 muster of loyalists in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Cape Breton Island, and Saint John’s Island (now called Prince Edward Island), which listed 26,317 individuals still receiving government rations.9

  These musters noted only those loyalists entitled to receive provisions. There were also refugees who had settled in the Maritimes and did not get rations. A comment on the 1785 muster explains that 942 “Loyalists and Disbanded Soldiers have been struck off the Provision List … being considered as unworthy of a Continuance of the Bounty.” The lists do not account, either, for all the refugees who would already have migrated to Nova Scotia during the war. At least 1,100 traveled to Halifax following the British evacuation of Boston in 1776, while others such as Jacob Bailey made their way there later. The evacuation of East Florida brought a further 725 white refugees to the Maritimes after these musters were completed.10