It would take another book to express my gratitude for the sustaining friendship—in the ether, the airwaves, and locations too numerous to itemize—of Duncan Chesney, Anna Dale, Josiah Osgood, Marco Roth, Neil Safier, Jesse Scott, Kirk Swinehart, Megan Williams, Nasser Zakariya, and Julie Zikherman. Indeed, I might never have formulated this topic without Kirk, who introduced me to Molly and Joseph Brant in my first week of graduate school. I can only hope that the years ahead will hold ample chances for me to return at least some of these accumulated favors.
This book is about families dispersed and displaced—a theme that must have attracted me in part because of my own mixed and immigrant heritage. So it has been a marvelous accident of history to find myself completing it with my immediate family all living within the same square mile. Alan, Luba, and Nina have given me fresh perspectives and many happy hours of domestic distraction. My parents Jay and Sheila have again been unfailing sources of everything from home-cooked meals to editorial input—and the title—as well as bed-rocks of understanding and support. Sadly the journeys of my grandmothers Edith Jasanoff and Kamala Sen ended before this book was done. Their tales of earlier lives in other worlds kindled my own first instincts as a storyteller, and I dedicate this result to their memory.
NOTES
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AO Archives of Ontario, Toronto
APAC Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London
BL Department of Manuscripts, British Library, London
DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Online Edition, http://www.oxforddnb.com
LAC Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa
LOC Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
NA The National Archives [United Kingdom], Kew
NAB National Archives of the Bahamas, Nassau
NAJ National Archives of Jamaica, Spanish Town
NASL National Archives of Sierra Leone, Freetown
NBM New Brunswick Museum, Saint John
NLJ National Library of Jamaica, Kingston
NYHS New-York Historical Society, New York
NYPL New York Public Library, New York
PANB Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Saint John
PANS Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia, Halifax
RMC Massey Library, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario
UNB Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton
Introduction: The Spirit of 1783
1. The order of procession was printed in a broadside, November 24, 1783, Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 44426. See, among other newspaper accounts, Pennsylvania Evening Post, November 28, 1783, pp. 261–62.
2. There was one small glitch in the proceedings, when the American soldiers found the British royal ensign billowing at the top of Fort George’s flagpole. The British troops had not only refused to strike their flag: they had actually nailed it to the post, cut its halyards, and greased the flagpole. After several comic efforts by soldiers to shimmy up the pole, a nimble captain used cleats to scramble up and tear off the offending ensign. James Riker, “Evacuation Day,” 1783, Its Many Stirring Events: with Recollections of Capt. John Van Arsdale of the Veteran Corps of Artillery (New York: Printed for the Author, 1883).
3. Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 183.
4. Toasts listed in Rivington’s New-York Gazette, November 26, 1783, p. 3.
5. New-York Packet, January 15, 1784, p. 3.
6. Clifton Hood, “An Unusable Past: Urban Elites, New York City’s Evacuation Day, and the Transformations of Memory Culture,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 883–913.
7. A contemporary newspaper account commented on the unsettling “compound of joy and pity” felt by patriots on seeing “so many hundreds made immediately happy” by the evacuation contrasted with “others made wretched by having new habitations to seek, in a comfortless region, and at a stormy season.” New-York Packet, January 15, 1784, p. 3.
8. Historians widely cite the figure of 2.5 million as an estimated colonial population in 1775. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the population of the future United States in 1780 stood at about 2,780,000, while the first U.S. census, performed in 1790, recorded a population of 3,929,625. See Robert V. Wells, “Population and Family in Early America,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., A Companion to the American Revolution (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), p. 41.
9. “Rev. J. Bailey’s explanation of his Conduct in sending political notice,” March 1, 1775, LOC: Jacob Bailey Papers. See also James S. Leamon, “The Parson, the Parson’s Wife, and the Coming of the Revolution to Pownalborough, Maine,” New England Quarterly 82, no. 3 (September 2009): 514–28.
10. William S. Bartlet, The Frontier Missionary: A Memoir of the Life of the Rev. Jacob Bailey, A.M. (Boston: Ide and Dutton, 1853), p. 111.
11. Jacob Bailey to John Pickering, August 26, 1778, and Jacob Bailey to Mrs. [?], November 24, 1778, “Letters to various persons March 21st 1777 to Decr 30 1778,” PANS: Jacob Bailey Fonds, MG 1 (reel 14895), item 21, pp. 59–74, 112–14.
12. Bartlet, pp. 129–31. Jacob Bailey, “A journal containing a variety of incidents,” June 21, 1779, PANS: Jacob Bailey Fonds, MG 1 (reel 14900), vol. IV, p. 13.
13. Jacob Bailey, “A journal containing a variety of incidents,” June 21, 1779, PANS: Jacob Bailey Fonds, MG 1 (reel 14900), vol. IV, pp. 6, 21–22.
14. Two classic studies remain indispensable to understanding revolutionary loyalism: Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), and Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973). For non-elite loyalists, see, e.g., Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and George A. Rawlyk, eds., Loyalists and Community in North America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994); Joseph S. Tiedemann, Eugene R. Fingerhut, and Robert W. Venables, eds., The Other Loyalists: Ordinary People, Royalism, and the Revolution in the Middle Colonies, 1763–1787 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).
15. Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson noted how “tory” was “always the term of reproach.” Quoted in Wallace Brown, The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1969), p. 30. A good analogy would be the use of the term “aristo” to label French émigrés, despite the fact that they were overwhelmingly non-aristocratic. While loyalist refugees and their slaves accounted for about one in forty members of the American population, the number of émigrés leaving revolutionary France was closer to one in two hundred.
16. The estimate of one in five is supplied by Paul H. Smith, based on enrollment in loyalist regiments: Paul H. Smith, “The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,” William & Mary Quarterly 25, no. 2 (April 1968): 259–77. The figure of one in three, frequently used as a benchmark by historians, is sometimes traced to an 1815 letter by John Adams in which he famously suggested that at the start of the revolution a third of the population was loyal, a third patriots, and another third “rather lukewarm.” John Adams to James Lloyd, January 1815, in John Adams, The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1856), X, p. 110. There is some debate over whether Adams was referring to the American or to the French revolution in that particular letter. In other writings, however, Adams repeated the estimate, saying that “about a third of the people of the colonies were against the revolution” (quoted in Thomas McKean to Adams, January 1814, in Adams, X, p. 87), and that British ministers had “seduced and deluded nearly one third of the people of the colonies” into supporting them (Adams to Dr. J. Morse, December 22, 1815, in Adams, X, p. 193). Describing the membership of the First Continental Congress in 1774, Adams said, “To draw the characters of them all … would now be considered as a caricature-print; one
-third tories, another whigs, and the rest mongrels.” (John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 12, 1813, in Adams, X, p. 79.)
17. A valuable recent exception is Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).
18. Attempts to generalize a social and psychological profile of loyalists include: William Nelson, The American Tory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); Kenneth S. Lynn, A Divided People (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977); N. E. H. Hull, Peter C. Hoffer, and Steven L. Allen, “Choosing Sides: A Quantitative Study of the Personality Determinants of Loyalist and Revolutionary Political Affiliation in New York,” Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (September 1978): 344–66.
19. Although the portrayal of the revolution as a civil war has not deeply penetrated American popular consciousness, it has been widely described as such in historical works ranging from John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), to Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999). See also Robert M. Calhoon, “Civil, Revolutionary, or Partisan: The Loyalists and the Nature of the War for Independence,” in Robert M. Calhoon et al., The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 147–62; Allan Kulikoff, “Revolutionary Violence and the Origins of American Democracy,” Journal of the Historical Society 2, no. 2 (March 2002): 229–60.
20. Thus, where Barry Cahill has sharply contested the idea that runaway slaves can be termed “loyalists,” on the grounds that they did not necessarily share loyalist ideology, I nevertheless include such figures within the category of loyalist refugees. See Barry Cahill, “The Black Loyalist Myth in Atlantic Canada,” Acadiensis 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1999): 76–87; James W. St. G. Walker, “Myth, History and Revisionism: The Black Loyalists Revised,” Acadiensis 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1999): 88–105.
21. Notes throughout this book cite the relevant regional literature. One valuable essay, however, sets the loyalist emigration in a wider Atlantic context: Keith Mason, “The American Loyalist Diaspora and the Reconfiguration of the British Atlantic World,” in Peter Onuf and Eliga Gould, eds., Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 239–59.
22. Lorenzo Sabine, The American Loyalists, or, Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in the War of Revolution, 1st ed. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1847), p. iii.
23. The classic statement of this kind is R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959–64). Leading recent efforts to internationalize U.S. history include David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), and Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
24. Judge Peter Oliver carried a treasured family sugar box with him to England, now in the Winterthur collection. (On loyalist material culture, see the 2009 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation by Katherine Rieder.) Frances Wentworth, wife of Nova Scotia governor John Wentworth, used American recipes in Halifax. (“Memorandum of Cash Expended for the use of Mrs. Wentworth’s House,” September 1786, PANS: RG1, vol. 411 [reel 15457], item 10.) John and William Charles Wells used the printing press in Florida and the Bahamas. (Wilbur Henry Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785: The Most Important Documents Pertaining Thereto, Edited with an Accompanying Narrative, 2 vols. [Deland: Florida State Historical Society, 1929], I, p. 189.)
25. I do not mean to suggest that these principles sprang fully formed from the American Revolution; the Seven Years’ War had already made the British Empire indisputably multiethnic, while many of these features were clarified in the French Revolutionary–Napoleonic wars ahead. See especially P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989).
26. I draw my understanding of the revolution’s consequences for the British Empire in part from: Marshall, Making and Unmaking; Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the American Revolution (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
27. Alan Frost, The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra: Voyager with Cook, American Loyalist, Servant of Empire (Carlton, Victoria: Miegunyah Press, 1995).
28. Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (April 2008): 319–40. For a fascinating early comparison of the American and French revolutions, which characterizes the former as “defensive” and legitimate and the latter as “offensive” and violent, see Friedrich Gentz, The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: Asbury Dickins, 1800).
29. Cf. Peter S. Onuf, “Federalism, Democracy, and Liberty in the New American Nation,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 132–59; David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Alison LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
30. On constitutionalism in India, see Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Of course American constitution-making itself had thoroughly British antecedents: see Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
31. The 1707 Act of Union with Scotland created the “United Kingdom of Great Britain,” while the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland enlarged this to the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” A precedent for these “United” entities may have been found in the name of the Dutch United Provinces, constituted in 1581, though Americans did not invoke the Dutch example in formulating the Declaration of Independence: Armitage, pp. 42–44.
32. On migration, slavery, and revolution in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, see especially Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986); Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of British North America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986); Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Chapter One: Civil War
1. The celebrated naturalist William Bartram described this as “the most magnificent forest I had ever seen.” William Batram, Travel
s through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791), pp. 53–56, 259–62.
2. “The Supplemental Memorial of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Brown,” Nassau, April 21, 1788, NA: AO 13/34 (Part 1), f. 100.
3. “The Supplemental Memorial of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Brown,” Nassau, April 21, 1788, NA: AO 13/34 (Part 1), f. 100.
4. Thomas Brown to Lord Cornwallis, July 16, 1780, NA: PRO 30/11/2, f. 308.
5. Edward J. Cashin, The King’s Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 28–29.
6. The black legend of Brown entered history books as early as 1784, with Hugh McCall’s The History of Georgia (Atlanta: A. B. Caldwell, 1909 [1784]), and was sustained by the eminent nineteenth-century historian Charles Colcock Jones. “Of all the inhuman characters developed during this abnormal period so replete with murder, arson, theft, brutality and crimes too foul for utterance,” said Jones, “none can be named more notorious than Thomas Brown.” Charles Colcock Jones Jr., The History of Georgia, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), II, p. 475. For reappraisals, see Cashin, passim; Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1988), pp. 555–58; Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), pp. 4–5.
7. These include Bernard Bailyn’s classic The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991). For a rowdier, bottom-up perspective, see, e.g., Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: New Press, 2001); Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005); T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).
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