Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  97. Philip Beaver, African Memoranda: Relative to an Attempt to Establish a British Settlement on the Island of Bulama (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1805), pp. 115–16. Deirdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 80–89.

  98. On black loyalism as a process, see Byrd, pp. 245–46.

  99. “Memoir of the Life of Boston King,” in Carretta, ed., pp. 365–66.

  100. “Memoir of the Life of Boston King,” in Carretta, ed., p. 360.

  101. Journal of Zachary Macaulay, May 28, 1798, Zachary Macaulay Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library [Harvard College Library: Microfilm A 471, reel 3]. This was the version of events Bowles presented to Macaulay, though another story suggested that his ship was attacked by the Royal Navy. J. Leitch Wright, William Augustus Bowles: Director General of the Creek Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967), pp. 93–94.

  102. This image is reproduced as the frontispiece in Thomas Winterbottom, Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, 2 vols. (London: C. Whittingham, 1803).

  Chapter Ten: Empires of Liberty

  1. For the later careers of Morris, John, and Phil Robinson, see Julia Jarvis, Three Centuries of Robinsons: The Story of a Family (Toronto: T. H. Best, 1967), pp. 85–111. William Henry Robinson’s career is described in Catherine Skinner Robinson, Lady Robinson’s Recollections (London: Barrett, Sons and Co., Printers, 1842).

  2. F. P. Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., December 3, 1799, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 14.

  3. Henry Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., October 10, 1801, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 7.

  4. F. P. Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., May 1, 1801, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 14.

  5. Henry Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., April 21, 1802, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 7.

  6. Henry Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., April 21, 1802, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 7.

  7. Henry Robinson to Ann Barclay Robinson, May 27, 1802, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 8.

  8. F. P. Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., n.d. [Autumn 1804], NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 14.

  9. Henry Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., June 1, 1803, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 7.

  10. Henry Robinson to Ann Barclay Robinson, June 11 and August 22, 1804, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 8.

  11. R. Burnham Moffat, The Barclays of New York: Who They Are, and Who They Are Not (New York: Robert Grier Cooke, 1904), p. 106.

  12. Ann Barclay Robinson to Susan Robinson, August 20, 1805, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 10.

  13. F. P. Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., May 1, 1805, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 14.

  14. F. P. Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., July 3, 1805, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 14.

  15. Beverley Robinson III to Ann Barclay Robinson, October 29 [1796], NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 5.

  16. Henry Robinson to Ann Barclay Robinson, March 12, 1802, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 8.

  17. Jonathan J. Bean, “Duer, William”; http://www.anb.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/articles/10/10–00470.html; American National Biography Online, February 2000, accessed March 14, 2010. Craig Hanyan, “Duer, William Alexander”; http://www.anb.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/articles/11/11–00259.html; American National Biography Online, February 2000, accessed March 14, 2010. Devonshire-born William Duer Sr. had served as Robert Clive’s secretary in India before immigrating to New York. Their maternal grandfather was William Alexander, Lord Stirling.

  18. Beverley Robinson III to Beverley Robinson Jr., July 21 and August 6, 1806, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 4.

  19. The absence of violence against loyalists in particular might also be partly explained by the presence of violence in the early republic more generally. See Allan Kulikoff, “Revolutionary Violence and the Origins of American Democracy,” Journal of the Historical Society 2, no. 2 (March 2002): 229–60.

  20. James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 173–209, 245–46.

  21. Aaron Nathan Coleman, “Loyalists in War, Americans in Peace: The Reintegration of the Loyalists, 1775–1800” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2008), p. 90. On loyalist reintegration see also David Edward Maas, “The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1972), chapters 8–11; Robert M. Calhoon, “The Reintegration of the Loyalists and Disaffected,” in Robert M. Calhoon, et al., The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 195–215; Rebecca Nathan Brannon, “Reconciling the Revolution: Resolving Conflict and Rebuilding Community in the Wake of Civil War in South Carolina, 1775–1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2007).

  22. Coleman, pp. 89–116.

  23. 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), p. 192.

  24. Hulsebosch, pp. 192–202.

  25. “Letters from Phocion,” Letter II, in Alexander Hamilton, The Works of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Henry Cabot Lodge, 12 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), IV, p. 289.

  26. George Washington to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, August 24, 1795, in George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford, 14 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), XIII, p. 95.

  27. On debts, see Kettner, pp. 186–87.

  28. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 67.

  29. Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), chapter 9.

  30. Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984), pp. 564, 601.

  31. Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006), pp. 326–41.

  32. The Venezuelan creole Francisco de Miranda was also in London again, wooing American and British support for his plan to foment a revolution across Spanish America. Alexander Hamilton suggested that “a fleet of Great Britain, an army of the U. States” could collaborate in assisting Miranda. (Alexander Hamilton to Francisco de Miranda, August 22, 1798, in Charles R. King, The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, 6 vols. [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894–1900], II, p. 659.) When Miranda finally did launch his expedition to liberate Venezuela, he did it not from London but New York, and recruited volunteers among former patriots and loyalists alike. James Biggs, The History of Don Francisco de Miranda’s Attempt to Effect a Revolution in South America, in a Series of Letters (Boston: Edward Oliver, 1812), identifies a number of the participants, who included John Adams’s grandson William Steuben Smith, acting as Miranda’s aide-de-camp, as well as several loyalists. See also James Leitch Wright, William Augustus Bowles, Director General of the Creek Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967), pp. 98–99.

  33. Wright, pp. 96–106.

  34. Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 139.

  35. For a comparison of these diasporas, see my “Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and French Émigré Diasporas,” in David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), chapter 3.

  36. Wright, pp. 124–41, 146–49.

  37. Saunt, pp. 233–72.

  38. Quotations from Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 29; Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008), p.
31. See also Anthony Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).

  39. Taylor, pp. 357–65; Kelsay, pp. 564, 601, 615–52.

  40. For the centrality of imperial models in early U.S. political thought, see Hulsebosch, esp. pp. 213–19; David Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). On Jefferson and empire, see Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), esp. chapter 2; Tucker and Hendrickson, esp. part III.

  41. Beverley Robinson III to Beverley Robinson Jr., November 5, 1809, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 4.

  42. Morris Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., February 14, 1806, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 13.

  43. Morris Robinson to Beverley Robinson Jr., April 5, 1806, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 13.

  44. Latimer, pp. 17, 32.

  45. Latimer, p. 42.

  46. Latimer, pp. 45–46.

  47. J. I. Little, Loyalties in Conflict: A Canadian Borderland in War and Rebellion, 1812–1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

  48. Norman Knowles, Inventing the Loyalists: The Ontario Loyalist Tradition and the Creation of Usable Pasts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 21. The idea was that loyalists would place the initials “U.E.” after their names as an honorific. The provincial Land Boards started keeping lists of United Empire Loyalists, but these were not systematically maintained.

  49. Gerald M. Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784–1841 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), pp. 57–70; Elizabeth Jane Errington, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology (Kingston, Ont.: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1987), pp. 64–67; George Sheppard, Plunder, Profits, and Paroles: A Social History of the War of 1812 in Upper Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), pp. 27–29, 41–42.

  50. Sheppard, pp. 56–65; Latimer, p. 107.

  51. Errington, pp. 70–80.

  52. Craig, p. 72.

  53. A. J. Langguth, Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 174.

  54. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 80–90; Errington, p. 80; Latimer, pp. 51, 64–83.

  55. Hickey, pp. 129–30; Latimer, pp. 131–33. Quote from Sheppard, Plunder, Profit, and Paroles, p. 102.

  56. Duncan Andrew Campbell, Unlikely Allies: Britain, America and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), p. 29.

  57. Latimer, pp. 304–22.

  58. Latimer, pp. 349–60. For excerpts from Robinson’s account of the battle, see C. W. Robinson, “The Expedition to Plattsburg, Upon Lake Champlain, Canada, 1814,” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution 61 (August 1916): 499–521. Published in the middle of World War I, when large numbers of Canadian volunteers joined the British on the Western Front, this article offers a good statement of how later generations of Canadians responded to the War of 1812, seeing it as a moment when “those links of loyalty and devotion which bind Canada to the Mother Country were cemented with blood” (p. 499).

  59. Latimer, pp. 386–87.

  60. Quoted in Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860 (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006), p. 33.

  61. Whitfield, pp. 31–40; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1997), pp. 114–16. The Times of London described Cochrane’s proclamation as “addressed to Negro Slaves in Southern States,” even though the actual text did not mention slaves at all. Malcolm Bell Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 171.

  62. Winks, p. 115.

  63. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. chapters 10–12; Taylor, passim. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron also interpret the War of 1812 as “the last gasp of the Great Lakes borderland” (p. 823): Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): pp. 814–41.

  64. William S. Coker and Thomas D. Watson, Indian Traders of the Southeastern Borderlands: Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company, 1784–1847 (Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1986), pp. 302–9; Saunt, pp. 273–90.

  65. Key’s uncle, Philip Barton Key, had been a loyalist who had served as one of Ensign Bowles’s commanding officers in the Maryland Loyalists. Philip Key noted in his loyalist claim that his brother (Francis Key’s father) “was a firm Rebel. It was not recommended to the two Brothers to take different sides.” He returned to the United States in 1785 and was later a Federalist congressman. Daniel Parker Coke, The Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American Loyalists, 1783–1785, ed. Hugh Edward Egerton (New York: B. Franklin, 1971), pp. 387–88; “Philip Barton Key,” q.v., Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=K000159, accessed July 22, 2009.

  66. This is not to say that the border remained undisturbed—witness the Canadian rebellions of 1837–38, which included raids launched from the United States, and the Fenian raids of 1866 and later. The United States maintained well-developed plans for the invasion of Canada until the 1930s: Latimer, pp. 407–8.

  67. In the words of Egerton Ryerson, for instance, the War of 1812 “illustrate[d] the Loyalist spirit and courage of the Canadians, French as well as English, and even true Americans; for the American settlers in Canada were, with a few exceptions, as loyal subjects and as bold defenders of their adopted country as the U.E. Loyalists themselves.” Egerton Ryerson, The Loyalists of America and Their Times: From 1620 to 1816, 2 vols. (Toronto: William Briggs, 1880), II, p. 317.

  68. Though there is broad consensus about the war’s foundational role in popular memory, there is a rich literature on how precisely its effects played out during the nineteenth century. See among others, David Mills, The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 1784–1850 (Kingston, Ont.: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 12–33; S. F. Wise, “The War of 1812 in Popular History,” in S. F. Wise, God’s Peculiar Peoples: Essays on Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993), pp. 149–67; Errington, pp. 55–86; Little, pp. 11–56; Knowles, pp. 14–25.

  69. Mills, pp. 34–51.

  70. Frederick Philipse Robinson to John Beverley Robinson, January 4, 1816, AO: Sir John Beverley Robinson Papers, MS 4, Reel One.

  71. John Beverley Robinson Diaries, October 31, 1815, AO: Sir John Beverley Robinson Papers, MS 4, Reel Two, pp. 62–63.

  72. Knowles, p. 14; S. F. Wise, “Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition,” in Wise, pp. 169–84. On the loyalist tradition see also J. M. Bumsted, Understanding the Loyalists (Sackville, N.B.: Centre for Canadian Studies, Mount Allison University, 1986).

  73. Diary of Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson, RMC, pp. 278–79.

  74. Catherine Skinner Robinson, Lady Robinson’s Recollections (London: Barrett, Sons and Co., Printers, 1842), pp. 24–25.

  75. Benson John Lossing, The Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852), II, pp. 140–41. Charles A. Campbell, “Robinson’s House in the Hudson Highlands: The Headquarters of Washington,” Magazine of American History 4 (February 1880): 109–17. The house, later owned by New York senator Hamilton Fish, burned down in 1892.

  76. Diary of Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson, RMC, pp. 279–80.

  77. William Henry Robinson to Susan Robinson, February 6, 1810, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 9.

  78. About twenty officers serving in
this period born in various parts of America are listed in V. C. P. Hodson, List of the Officers of the Bengal Army, 1758–1834, 4 vols. (London: Constable, 1927–47).

  79. Maria Nugent, A Journal from the Year 1811 till the Year 1815, Including a Voyage to and Residence in India, 2 vols. (London: T. and W. Boone, 1839), I, p. 126. The nephews were Cortlandt Skinner Barberie, a son of her sister Euphemia, and Philip Kearny Skinner, a son of her eldest brother. For their cadet papers, see APAC: L/MIL/10/25/255 and L/MIL/12/70/1.

  80. Nugent, I, pp. 386–87.

  81. Benedict Arnold to Jonathan Bliss, September 19, 1800, NBM: Arnold Papers, Folder One.

  82. He then imagined packing the poor woman off to New Brunswick, where with “the first snow storm she will kick the Bucket or the devil is in her.” William Henry Robinson to Susan Robinson, June 20, 1811, NBM: Robinson Family Papers, Folder 9.

  83. Sophia’s husband Pownall Phipps had an unusual background of his own, raised largely in France and spending several years under virtual house arrest in Caen during the French Revolution; his first wife was French, he spoke English with a French accent, and he was sent to India because his family wanted to put him “beyond the reach of French fascination” (that is, of defecting to the French side). He was already engaged to Sophia Arnold by the time Nugent met her in 1812. Pownall William Phipps, The Life of Colonel Pownall Phipps (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1894), pp. 43–44, 90.

  84. On these relationships see Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006); William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (New York: Viking, 2003); Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Knopf, 2005), chapters 2–3.

  85. Will of Lt. Edward Shippen Arnold, APAC: L/AG/34/29/26, Bengal Wills 1814, p. 193.