24. Norton, pp. 54–55, 111–15, 119; John Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission for Enquiring into the Losses, Services, and Claims of the American Loyalists, intr. George Athan Billias (Boston: Gregg Press, 1972), pp. 15–22. Samuel Curwen described the procedure in his diary entries for late October 1782: Curwen, II, pp. 864–66.
25. Francis Green to Ward Chipman, February 7, 1783, LAC: Ward Chipman Fonds, Reel C-1179, p. 608.
26. The Case and Claim of the American Loyalists, Impartially Stated and Considered, Printed by Order of their Agents (London, 1783). Galloway raised very similar points in his Observations on the Fifth Article of the Treaty with America, and on the Necessity of appointing a Judicial Enquiry into the Merits and Losses of the American Loyalists, Printed by Order of their Agents. (London: G. Wilkie, 1783)—hence my suggestion that he may have had a hand in writing The Case and Claim.
27. On the Marsh family, see Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History(London: HarperPress, 2007).
28. The Parliamentary Register, 112 vols. (London: J. Debrett, 1775–1813), vol. 10, pp. 204–5, pp. 308–9; Norton, p. 192; Eardley-Wilmot, p. 45.
29. H. T. Dickinson, “The Poor Palatines and the Parties,” English Historical Review 82, no. 324 (July 1967): pp. 464–85; Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), chapters 5–6.
30. George Chalmers, Opinions on Interesting Subjects of Public Law and Commercial Policy, Arising from American Independence (London, 1784), p. 8.
31. On Robinson’s land: Peter Wilson Coldham, American Migrations: The Lives, Times, and Families of Colonial Americans Who Remained Loyal to the British Crown (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2000), p. 327. This volume serves as an invaluable index to the loyalist claims.
32. Beverley Robinson to Ann Barclay Robinson, February 24, 1784, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 2.
33. Joanna Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., February 6, 1784, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 7; Joanna Robinson to Ann Barclay Robinson, March 9, 1784, and October 29 [1784], NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 10.
34. Frederick Philipse Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., n.d. NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 14.
35. Joanna Robinson to Ann Barclay Robinson, October 29 [1784], NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 10.
36. Joanna Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., February 6, 1784, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 7.
37. Beverley Robinson to Ann Barclay Robinson, November 29, 1784, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 2.
38. Joanna Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., February 6, 1784, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 7.
39. Joanna Robinson to Ann Barclay Robinson, October 29 [1784], NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 10.
40. See, e.g., Bourdieu, Chollet, and Bourdieu to Alexander Wallace, September 27, 1783, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 3.
41. Shoemaker Diary, January 30 and February 17, 1784, NYHS, pp. 42, 55.
42. Shoemaker Diary, January 17, 1784, NYHS, p. 28. Another loyalist remarked that “by contrary winds & calms we were tossed on the Ocean for Six Weeks before we reach’d Dover, & must now add that ever since my arrival I have been equally disagreeably toss’d about from one public office to another, & Heaven only knows when I shall get safe into Harbour.” (Jonathan Mallet to Robert Watts, July 12, 1784, NYHS: Robert Watts Papers, Box 2.)
43. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, March 3, 1784, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
44. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, February 6, 1784, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
45. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, March 3, 1784, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
46. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, April 7, 1784, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
47. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, August 4, 1784, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
48. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, September 1, 1784, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
49. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, November 30, 1784, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
50. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, January 31, 1784. Isaac Jr. showed off his fancy education in a letter to his uncle Nicholas—written in French. There were only eight boys in the select academy, he said, “deux desquels sont Américains & avec qui j’étois dans la même Classe à la nouvelle Yorke.” Isaac Low Jr. to Nicholas Low, May 4, 1785, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
51. Petition of Alicia Young, December 23, 1785, NA: AO 13/67, f. 633. Claim of Alicia Young, in Coldham, p. 375.
52. Claim of Sarah Baker, in Coldham, p. 46.
53. Claim of Donald McDougal, in Coldham, p. 629.
54. Claim of Archibald McDonald, in Coldham, p. 770.
55. Memorial of Shadrack Furman, NA: AO 13/59, ff. 658–59.
56. Claim of Benjamin Whitecuffe, in Coldham, p. 368; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), pp. 79–81; Schama, pp. 174–77.
57. Quoted in Schama, pp. 179–80.
58. Gilbert Francklyn, Observations, Occasioned by the Attempts Made in England to Effect the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Shewing the Manner in which Negroes are Treated in the British Colonies, in the West Indies (Kingston and Liverpool: A. Smith, 1788), p. vi.
59. Stephen J. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786–91 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1994), pp. 64–66.
60. Braidwood, pp. 63–69.
61. Braidwood, pp. 70–93.
62. Braidwood, pp. 97–102.
63. Eardley-Wilmot, p. 50. For pound sterling value conversions, I have used the purchasing power calculator at http://www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk/, which estimates that £1 in 1784 had the purchasing power of £97.44 in 2007.
64. It must be noted that different figures available for the total number of loyalist claims do not always square with one another. The figure of 3,225 comes from the commission’s “Statement of the Claims and Losses of the American Loyalists up to the 25th of March 1790” presented to Parliament in that year (Eardley-Wilmot, p. 90). This number seems in keeping with the figure of 3,157 claims presented in the commission’s last formal report, of June 1789 (Eardley-Wilmot, appendix VIII, pp. 196–97). But a “general statement” of the number of claims submitted to the commission lists 5,072 “Claims including those in Nova Scotia and Canada,” of which 954 were “withdrawn, or not prosecuted” (Eardley-Wilmot, appendix IX, p. 199). And Coldham’s summary of claims by province yields 5,656 claims for the thirteen colonies (Coldham, appendix IV, p. 834).
65. For a thorough analysis see Wallace Brown, The King’s Friends: The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1965).
66. Eugene R. Fingerhut, “Uses and Abuses of the American Loyalists’ Claims: A Critique of Quantitative Analysis,” William & Mary Quarterly 25, no. 2 (April 1968): 245–58.
67. Traveling to London to file a claim served as the opening gambit for a picaresque novel about the American Revolution, Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, loyal American refugee (London, 1787).
68. Mary Beth Norton, “Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33, no. 3 (1976): 388; Mary Beth Norton, “The Fate of Some Black Loyalists of the American Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 4 (October 1973): 417. Pybus puts the number of black claimants at forty-five (Pybus, Epic Journeys, p. 81).
69. I counted 281 based on the précis of claims provided in Coldham.
70. One pair in County Down who filed late pleaded illiteracy and the fact that they lived “in remote parts where newspapers were seldom received.” Claims of Thomas Burns and William Henry, in Coldham, pp. 452–53, 464.
71. Claim of
Lewis Johnston Jr., NA: AO 13/36A, ff. 82–89.
72. “A Loyalist,” Directions to the American Loyalists, in Order to Enable Them to State Their Cases, by Way of Memorial, to the Honourable the Commissioners Appointed (by Statute the 23. Geo. III. C. 80.) to Inquire into the Losses and Services of Those Persons Who Have Suffered, in Consequences of Their Loyalty to This Majesty, and Their Attachment to the British Government, by a Loyalist (London: W. Flexney, 1783), pp. 22–24.
73. Eardley-Wilmot, pp. 45–49, 58. Their notes have been published in Alexander Fraser, Second Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario, 2 parts (Toronto: L. K. Cameron, 1904–5).
74. William Smith, The Diary and Selected Papers, 1784–1793, ed. L. F. S. Upton, 2 vols. (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1963–65), I, pp. 34–35.
75. Thomas Coke, A History of the West Indies, 3 vols. (Liverpool: Nutter, Fishall, and Dixon, 1808), pp. 132, 246–47, 353–54.
76. Smith, I, p. 207.
77. Shoemaker Diary, July 16, 1784, NYHS, p. 177.
78. Shoemaker Diary, December 9, 1784, NYHS, 292; Coke, pp. 283–84.
79. William Jarvis to Munson Jarvis, May 23, 1787, NBM: Jarvis Family Collection, Folder 27.
80. Nine, according to the 1789 report (Eardley-Wilmot, appendix VIII, p. 188). A conspicuous fraud was the claim of John Ferdinand Dalziel Smyth, author of the 1784 A Tour in the United States of America, known for his predilection for exaggeration. Smyth later adopted the surname Stuart and purported to be a descendant of Charles II. (“John Ferdinand Smyth Stuart,” q.v., DNB; Coke, pp. 127–32.) Shoemaker Diary, July 31, 1784, p. 191.
81. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, September 3, 1785, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
82. Shoemaker Diary, December 9, 1784, NYHS, p. 292.
83. Smith, II, pp. 36, 63–64.
84. Claim of William Cooper, in Coldham, p. 672.
85. Pybus, Epic Journeys, pp. 76–79.
86. Norton, “Eighteenth-Century American Women,” pp. 396–97.
87. Coke, pp. 53–55; Claim of Jane Gibbes, NYPL: Loyalist Transcripts, vol. 52, pp. 365–85.
88. Claim of Jane Stanhouse, in Coldham, p. 649.
89. John Watts to Robert and John Watts, February 2, 1785, NYHS: Robert Watts Papers, Box 2.
90. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, September 3, 1785, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
91. Alexander Wallace to Nicholas Low, September 15, 1785, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 2.
92. Quoted in Eardley-Wilmot, pp. 142–44.
93. John Watts to Robert Watts, March 26, 1787, NYHS: Robert Watts Papers, Box 2.
94. William Jarvis to Munson Jarvis, July 9, 1787, NBM: Jarvis Family Collection, Folder 27.
95. Alexander Wallace to Nicholas Low, August 18, 1786, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 2.
96. Alexander Wallace to Nicholas Low, June 14, 1785, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 2.
97. Alexander Wallace to Nicholas Low, September 15, 1785, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 2.
98. Alexander Wallace to Nicholas Low, August 17, 1786, and February 16, 1787, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 2.
99. Alexander Wallace to Nicholas Low, October 2, 1787, and February 4, 1788, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 2.
100. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, August 15 and October 3, 1786, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
101. Coldham, p. 277.
102. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, September 7, 1786, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
103. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, September 7, 1786, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
104. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, June 28, 1790, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
105. Isaac Low to Nicholas Low, October 16, 1787, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
106. Isaac Low Jr. to Nicholas Low, September 5, 1791, LOC: Papers of Nicholas Low, Container 1.
107. Eardley-Wilmot, pp. 90–91; Norton, The British Americans, pp. 227–29.
108. The Trial of Warren Hastings, Late Governor-General of Bengal (London, 1788), pp. 7–8.
109. Parliamentary Register, vol. 23, pp. 597–609.
110. On continuities with the pre-revolutionary empire, see P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. chapter 11. I am expanding on the concept of “moral capital” advanced by Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
111. James Mario Matra, “A Proposal for establishing a Settlement in New South Wales,” BL: Add. Mss. 47,568, f. 244.
112. Matra, ff. 242–43. On Matra’s life see Alan Frost, The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra: Voyager with Cook, American Loyalist, Servant of Empire (Carlton, Victoria: Miegunyah Press, 1995).
113. Pybus provides the only in-depth treatment of loyalists in Australia in Epic Journeys.
114. Parliamentary Register, vol. 24, pp. 51, 55.
115. Eardley-Wilmot, pp. 98–99.
116. Kirsty Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Emigrés in London, 1789–1802 (Basingstoke, U.K.: MacMillan, 1999), pp. 45–47. The committee assisted Catholic priests in particular, a group whom an earlier generation of Britons would have regarded with great suspicion, but who looked positively good to Britons anxious about the threat of godless Jacobins. The Loyalist Claims Commission was explicitly cited as the model for a “Commission for the Relief of Suffering Loyalists” established by the Irish parliament after the rebellion of 1798. See Thomas Bartlett, “Clemency and Compensation: The Treatment of Defeated Rebels and Suffering Loyalists after the 1798 Rebellion,” in Jim Smyth, ed., Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and Union: Ireland in the 1790s (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 119–27.
117. Twelfth Report and Liquidation of Claims, NA: AO 12/109, ff. 112–13.
118. William Henry Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., July 22, 1789, NBM: Robinson Family Fonds, Box 1, Folder 6.
119. Diary of Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson, n.d., RMC, pp. 17–22.
120. Sheila L. Skemp, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 274–76.
121. Claire Brandt, The Man in the Mirror: A Life of Benedict Arnold (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 259–64.
122. Twelfth Report and Liquidation of Claims, NA: AO 12/109, ff. 73–74, 79–80.
123. Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist (New York: M. F. Mansfield and Company, 1901), pp. 78–80.
124. Johnston, p. 79.
125. Elizabeth Johnston to William Johnston, September 11, 1785, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362.
126. Johnston, p. 80.
Chapter Five: A World in the Wilderness
1. Charles Inglis, “Journal of Occurrences, beginning, Wednesday, October 12, 1785,” October 16, 1787, LAC: Charles Inglis and Family Fonds, Microfilm A-709.
2. Petition to Sir Guy Carleton, July 22, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 35, no. 8500. Neil MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil: The Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia, 1783–91 (Kingston, Ont.: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1986), pp. 87–88.
3. Brian Cuthbertson, The First Bishop: A Biography of Charles Inglis (Halifax, N.S.: Waegwoltic Press, 1987), pp. 15, 60–61.
4. Cuthbertson, p. 62.
5. Inglis, “Journal,” May 30, 1786, LAC: Charles Inglis and Family Fonds, Microfilm A-709.
6. Cuthbertson, pp. 79–89. Judith Fingard, The Anglican Design in Loyalist Nova Scotia, 1783–1816 (London: SPCK, 1972), chapter 2.
7. Inglis, “Journal,” October 16, 1787, LAC: Charles Inglis and Family Fonds, Microfilm A-709.
8. Inglis, “Journal,” October 27 and November 5, 1787, LAC: Charles Inglis and Family Fonds, Microfilm A-709.
9. Inglis, “Journal,” July 16, 26, 27, 1788, LAC: Charles Inglis and Family Fonds, Microfil
m A-709.
10. Cornelia’s brother wrote movingly about how “My dear Sister DeLancey is tossed about at the will and pleasure of an unfeeling man, first to the Bahamas and then to cross that wide Atlantic ocean, never I suppose more to behold that man to whom she has place her affection, and Good God who is he a savage who dispises her, who treates her with Disdain.” Anthony Barclay to Ann Barclay Robinson, September 15, 1792, NBM: Robinson Papers, Folder 21.
11. Inglis, “Journal,” July 28–29, 1788, LAC: Charles Inglis and Family Fonds, Microfilm A-709.
12. Inglis, “Journal,” August 1–2, 1788, LAC: Charles Inglis and Family Fonds, Microfilm A-709.
13. The classic treatment of this process remains William J. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
14. John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 6.
15. The name was bestowed by King James I in 1621, in a grant to its first (Scottish) proprietor, Sir William Alexander. For fresh perspectives on Anglo-French rivalry in Acadia, see John G. Reid, Maurice Basque, Elizabeth Mancke, Barry Moody, Geoffrey Plank, and William Wicken, The “Conquest” of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
16. John G. Reid has made the case, however, that indigenous power remained a serious force to be reckoned with in Nova Scotia well into the eighteenth century (later than has conventionally been recognized), and was only swept away decisively by the loyalist influx. See John G. Reid, “Pax Britannica or Pax Indigena? Planter Nova Scotia (1760–1782) and Competing Strategies of Pacification,” Canadian Historical Review 85, no. 4 (December 2004): 669–92; and Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, “Amerindian Power in the Early Modern Northeast: A Reappraisal,” William & Mary Quarterly 61, no. 1 (January 2004): 77–106.
Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World Page 50