The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire Author(s): Maya Jasanoff Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 2008), pp. 205-232 Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096784 . Accessed: 17/01/2011 21:44 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=omohundro. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire Jasanoff

Maya

ON the first day of summer 1779, a small merchant vessel bobbed canoes and the around Chebucto Head, drifting past Micmac of George's Island into the crowded port of fortifications Halifax, Nova Scotia. It had survived a buffeting two-week voyage from Maine across the Bay of Fundy, and its passengers?the Reverend Jacob to touch his land and family?were Bailey again. They were grateful to reach a land where they saw "the Britanic colours relieved especially were refugees from revolutionary America: flying" because the Baileys to Nova Scotia after years of persecution. They who had fled loyalists reached British safety with just the rags on their backs. Bailey vividly described his costume of rusty black trousers speckled with lint and pitch stains,

a

stockings

threadbare

an

lattice,

coat

oversize

loose

swinging

around his ankles, and a "jaundise coloured" wig topped by a limp beaver came

So many people an impromptu

cap. ered

to

speech

at

gape

from

the

the

strange

deck:

that

party

we

"Gentlemen,

. . . driven pany of fugitives by famine and persecution and

you,

among excuse

I must

therefore

the meaness

and

intreat

singularity

of

candor your our dress." He

Bailey are

deliv a com

to take refuge

and

compassion thanked God,

to

he

laterwrote, for guiding "me and my family to this retreat of freedom and security from the rage of tyranny and the cruelty of opposition." But he had

also

"landed

in a

or furniture,"

dwelling

strange and his

country, was

destitute

future

of money,

in the hands

clothing,

of chance.1

at Harvard in the History Jasanoff is an associate professor Department She would like to thank the anonymous readers for the William and Mary on earlier versions who offered suggestions of this piece, and Quarterly, colleagues at Cornell audiences Harvard the Johns Hopkins University, University, University, New School and the New York Public Library for their com for Social Research, ments. The author is also grateful to her former colleagues and graduate students at on this topic. the University for many of Virginia conversations illuminating 1 a variety of incidents," "A Journal containing in vol. 4: 4-31, Jacob Bailey, Maya

University.

Provincial 1, vol. 95 (reel 14900), Archives of Nova Scotia, Jacob Bailey Fonds, MG see "Letters to Various Halifax. On in Maine, Persons March persecution Bailey's 21st 1777 to Deer 30 1778," ibid., vol. 91, item no. 21 (reel 14895); "Rev. J. Bailey's in of his conduct 1, 1775, in Jacob Bailey notice," Mar. explanation sending political Papers,

Library

William

of Congress,

and Mary

Washington,

Quarterly,

D.C.

3d Series, Volume

LXV,

Number

2, April

2008

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

2o6

Bailey belonged to a large yet little-studied group of British subjects in revolutionary North America: loyalists who were exiled or fled from the

colonies

thirteen

and

sought

a haven

in Britain

and

its

Loyalists have long been relegated to the margins of mainstream are

they

seen

often

as

losers,

and

backward,

wrong.

empire.

history;

Books

on

the

American Revolution usually mention that one in five members of the white colonial population sympathized with Britain during the war, over with little them further notice. Even the number of loyalists passing will likely always remain elusive, since "loyalism meant different things to different persons in different situations." Though academic interest in loyalism seems to be on the rise, the bulk of scholarship on the topic was on the produced in the bicentennial 1970s and tends to focus ideology of well-known figures such as Thomas Hutchinson and Joseph Galloway rather than the everyday experiences of ordinary loyalists. Similarly, and loyalist?emanated from though the labels applied to them?Tory British politics (like so much American revolutionary discourse) and to

continued

on

resonate

the

eastern

side

of

the Atlantic,

loyalists

have

figured little in the major treatments of British politics and identity in the war. (Nor, as David Armitage justly laments, have British historians engaged with American historiography in anything like the way that his torians of colonial America have with that of contemporary Britain.) To bend Gary B. Nash's label for the Revolution-era slave population, the constitute

loyalists

of

history

2 Paul

these

another,

perhaps

even

more

"forgotten

fifth"

in

the

years.2

on Their "The American Notes and Smith, Loyalists: Organization and Mary 3d ser., 25, no. 2 (April 1968): Strength," William Quarterly, a to 259-77 261). Smith uses the strength of loyalist regiments (quotation, develop estimate that 19.8 percent of the white population remained plausible loyal. For the Nash The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of label, see Gary B. Nash, status of the Revolution Mass., 2006). The marginal (Cambridge, topic of loyalism is underscored of antiquarian and genealogically oriented studies. by the predominance Some are gold mines, from the first serious study of the loyalists, Lorenzo however, Sabine's Sketches Revolution with an of the Loyalists Biographical of the American Historical for Advanced Institute (Boston, 1864), to "The On-Line Essay Loyalist maintained Cole and Todd Studies," Braisted, by Nan http://www treatments include Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal Major .royalprovincial.com. scholarly H.

Numerical

Sewall: Mass., Berkin, Jonathan 1974); Carol of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, an American The Loyalist (New York, 1974); John E. Ferling, Odyssey of Loyalist Mind: and the American Revolution Park, Pa., 1977); Joseph Galloway (University The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist in Colonial New York and Janice Potter, Ideology Massachusetts work of Robert Mass., 1983); and the indispensable (Cambridge, McCluer

The Loyalists in Revolutionary America Calhoon, (New including Calhoon, et al., The Calhoon and Other Essays (Columbia, Loyalist Perception and George A. Rawlyk, S.C., eds., Loyalists and 1989); Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, inNorth America 1994). But there is little on loyalists Community (Westport, Conn., in works at the British in detail to the war: H. T. that have looked response and the American Revolution Dickinson, ed., Britain (Harlow, 1998); Stephen Eng., York,

1973);

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

207

Indeed, for all that scholars have attempted to correct bluntly patri of American portrayals in the United States troversial

otic

It must

chauvinism.

of republican American

independence, to count today

Revolution

really

was

it remains loyalists

be remembered,

a civil

war

and

was

con surprisingly victims the among

though, clearly

seen

that the as

such

by contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, some of whom experi enced its divisive effectswithin their own families, as in the conspicuous Franklin, loyalist governor of New Jersey, and his example ofWilliam patriot father, Benjamin. Loyalists expressed their views passively and actively: they refused to swear loyalty oaths to the new assemblies; they to

moved

cities

and

regions

under

British

control;

and

nineteen

thou

sand joined loyalist regiments to fight for their vision of British colonial In

America.

retaliation

they

faced

harassment

from

their

peers?most

sanctions from state leg vividly, if rarely, by tarring and feathering?and or islatures, which could strip them of their land and possessions or banish them.3 formally imprison The British Isles and the War (Oxford, Conway, of American Independence Eng., H. Gould, The Persistence in the Age Culture 2000); Eliga of Empire: British Political Revolution work has addressed Hill, N.C., 2000). More (Chapel of the American

in this period than British conservatism, such as John Sainsbury, London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769-1782 (Kingston, "The Apotheosis III: Loyalty, of George 1987), but see Linda Colley, 102 Past and Present, no. and the British Nation, 1760-1820," Royalty (February The Sense of the People: Kathleen Culture and Wilson, 94-129; Politics, 1984): in England, iji$?ij8$ 1995); J. C. D. Clark, English Society, Imperialism (Cambridge, British

radicalism

Disaffected Ontario,

Patriots:

and Politics the Ancien 2d ed. Religion, Ideology during Regime, For David "Greater Britain: A lament, see Armitage, 2000). (Cambridge, Armitage's of Historical Useful Category American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April Analysis?" 1999): 427-45, esp. 435. 3 See for instance a to my essay, response by G. Fiske Brown published "Loyal to a Fault" (New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2007), taking issue with the attempt to America's "to foment for what amounted first losers" (Letters, New sympathy 1660?1832:

York Times Magazine, Franklin and William Franklin, July 15, 2007). On Benjamin see Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization Franklin (New York, 2004), of Benjamin as a civil war, see among of the Revolution 160-63. On contemporary perceptions on the Eve of the American others T. H. and Nationalism Breen, "Ideology Revisions Revolution: in Need Once More of Revising," Journal of American History "The English in Problem of Identity 84, no. 1 (June 1997): 13-39; Dror Wahrman, the American American Historical Review Revolution," 106, no. 3 (October 2001):

Linda Britain, 1236-62; Captives: Colley, York, Larkin, 7; Edward 2003), chap. as Civil War," Revolution Common-Place

and the World, (New i6oo-i8$o Empire, Is a Loyalist? "What The American 8, no. 1 (October 2007), http://www.com An estimated nineteen thousand mon-place.org/vol-08/no-01/larkin. loyalists served in forty-two different See Smith, WMQ 25: 266; provincial regiments and militias. in The War Calhoon, America, 502; Stephen Loyalists Revolutionary Conway, of American the (London, 1775-1783 1995), 46. Legal measures Independence, against are summarized in Claude Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Halstead loyalists Revolution (1902; repr., Bowie, Md., 1989), app. B-C.

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

208

Ultimately, at least sixty thousand loyalists with fifteen thousand slaves in tow left the thirteen colonies to build new lives elsewhere in the British world. This figure represents roughly one in fortymembers of the population (compared with one in two hundred who emigrated from revolutionary

France).

Seven

thousand

or

so went

to Britain,

often

to

find themselves strangers in a strange land. By far the largest group, more than half the total, fled to Canada and settled in the present-day the of and Maritimes, Ontario, Quebec. Notably, about three provinces some of the thousands of for thousand black loyalists moved to Canada, mer slaves who had gained freedom by fighting for the British. Among the immigrants to the north were also several hundred of Britain's long of upstate New York. Another large standing Indian allies, theMohawk to of traveled the Caribbean, chiefly Jamaica, and to loyalists contingent the

In

Bahamas.

perhaps

the most

intriguing

migration,

nearly

twelve

hundred black loyalists moved a second time in 1792 from Nova Scotia to the experimental free black colony of Sierra Leone. Loyalists scattered as far afield as India: the East India Company soon be army would two with American-born of Benedict officers, sprinkled including Arnold's sons. And some black loyalists would even travel to the end of the

earth,

among

the first

convicts

transported

to Australia's

Botany

Bay.

Following Bernard Bailyn's observation that "Atlantic history is the story of a world inmotion," loyalist refugees remind readers that the history of themodern British Empire involved an even wider world inmotion.4 4 Bernard and Contours Mass., Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept (Cambridge, 61 (quotation). estimates of the loyalists who Standard left range from sixty 2005), to one hundred to document thousand. My research thus far has allowed me the to the Maritimes of roughly three thirty thousand loyalists migration (including to Quebec six thousand thousand black several hundred loyalists), (including to Florida to the five thousand later move Mohawk), (from whence many would

or the Caribbean), to Jamaica, one to the three thousand thousand to Britain; to this total must be added a further five to and seven thousand Bahamas, seven thousand not included in these tallies. I have also found evi black loyalists dence to support an estimate of fifteen to seventeen thousand slaves exported by loy in aggregate alists. Slaves were not loyalists but should be counted figures of the number of people dislocated for my (I will supply full documentation by the war. in my forthcoming estimates book on the loyalist diaspora.) For comparison with see R. R. Palmer, The A Political Revolution: France, Age of the Democratic History of The Challenge (Princeton, N.J., 1760-1800: 1959), 188. For black Europe and America, see Cassandra The Question of "Jefferson's Faulty Math: loyalist numbers, Pybus, in the American Slave Defections 62, no. 2 (April 2005): Revolution," WMQ recorded nearly three thousand black 243-64. The Book ofNegroes loyalists embark Simon Schama indicates that thirty Scotia, whereas ing from New York for Nova five hundred blacks ultimately settled there. See Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution 223. For Mohawk (London, 2005), loyalists, see Alan The Divided Ground: Borderland Indians, Settlers, and theNorthern Taylor, to the Revolution On the loyalist immigration (New York, 2006). of the American see Wilbur H. to the The Legacy Revolution Caribbean, Siebert, of the American Bahamas

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE Some have explored The

Beth Norton's

these individual episodes. Mary

offers

British-Americans

209

an

account

unsurpassed

of

the

loyalist

exiles

in Britain; Simon Schama and Cassandra Pybus have traced the black to movements Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone; and the loyalist loyalist are in hailed Canada?where by some as founding loyalists experience fathers?has nineteenth

been

since of numerous works the mid subject no ever been made of has study comprehensive

the Yet

century.

the diaspora as a whole. The result is that historians of this period have not yet appreciated the full imperial extent of these migrations around and beyond the Atlantic. Nor have scholars looked in detail at white, black, and Indian loyalists together to consider where their experiences has converged or differed. Only one recent essay, by Keith Mason, a context. in As Mason the exodus Atlantic wider, placed loyalist rightly the loyalists' place in the historiography observes, "outside Canada" resembles that of the Jacobites: "a people whose storymerits inclusion in the larger narrative but who are usually represented as having little on

impact own

the course

of

Anglo-American

Loyalist ?migr?s demand that

formative

majority Leone?and

as

extends, effect

on

the those

a

shared

did,

refugees parts

of

of the population?the parallel

history."5

more larger, the

significant narrative of their

across

the

empire

globe. where

Maritimes,

experiences

across

a trans had They constituted the they

the Bahamas, those

greater value as historical subjects lies in the perspective British

and Sierra

domains.

Their

they grant onto

West Indies A Chapter and Bahamas: Out of the History of the American "'To the Torrid Zones': Ohio, (Columbus, 1913); Michael John Prokopow, Loyalists The Fortunes in the and Misfortunes of American Basin, Loyalists Anglo-Caribbean to diss., Harvard (Ph.D. 1774-1801" 1996). The black loyalist migration University, Sierra Leone has most recently been studied by Schama, Rough Crossings; Pybus, Epic Slaves Revolution and Their Global Journeys of Freedom: Runaway of the American sons Edward Benedict Arnold's and George 2006). Quest for Liberty (Boston, appear in V. C. P. Hodson, List of the Officers of the (London, 1927), Bengal Army, 1758?1834 1: 52. Arnold's son Edward went to India "under the Patronage of Shippen Arnold Lord Cornwallis," and his son James (born just after the Revolution in Saint John) to Jonathan Bliss, followed three years later. See Benedict Arnold Sept. 19, 1800, in Benedict Arnold Brunswick Saint John. For loyalists in Museum, Papers, New see Australia, Pybus, Epic Journeys. 5 Keith "The American and the of Mason, Loyalist Diaspora Reconfiguration the British Atlantic World," in Empire and Nation: The American in the Revolution Atlantic World, ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore, 2,39?59 2005), see For in Britain, Beth Norton, The British 239). (quotation, loyalists Mary Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, (London, 1774-1789 1974). For loyalists in see Alan United and the American Revolution Canada, Skeoch, Empire Loyalists This Unfriendly Soil: The Loyalist Ontario, (Toronto, 1982); Neil MacKinnon, in Nova Scotia, Ontario, 1783?1791 Experience 1986); Janice Potter (Kingston, While the Women MacKinnon, (Montreal, Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women the Loyalists: The Ontario Knowles, 1993); Norman Quebec, Inventing Loyalist Tradition and the Creation 1997). of Usable Pasts (Toronto, Ontario,

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

2IO

the wider British world in a moment of crisis and change. For American historians the loyalist diaspora should offer an important reminder that the story of American independence cannot be confined within the bor

ders of the nation. As such it extends the argument made by Alan Taylor, whose work on "the late loyalists" has situated the early Republic in its continental context.6 Simply acknowledging the scale of the postrevolutionary with messy,

exodus rippling

that American

emphasizes international and

human

was

independence

consequences.

the same time, loyalist migrants help shed new light on an old in British imperial historiography: how did the American question no Revolution affect the British Empire? Historians longer routinely as a neat view the Revolution line between a first, marking dividing a of trade and settlement and territorial second Atlantic, empire largely in of direct anchored India and millions of rule, empire encompassing nonwhite subjects. Indeed, as R J.Marshall has compellingly demon At

strated,

the

collapse

of British

rule

in

the

thirteen

was

colonies

under

pinned by the same metropolitan policies that encouraged the creation of that multiethnic land empire, which survived and grew after 1783.Most imperial historians would agree, however, that the loss inAmerica clarified and strengthened empirewide impulses toward increasingly authoritarian rule,

as well

accommodating

as

supplying non-British

new

rhetoric subjects.

and "Never

in some

cases

again,"

Eliga

new

H.

means

Gould

of has

observed, "would the British think of any part of their empire as an exten sion of their own nation." Colonial subjects were henceforth to be embraced in a humanitarian, ostensibly inclusive empire but subordinated tometropolitan Britons, partly by elaborate hierarchies of difference.7 a concrete population offer Loyalist ?migr?s through which to see how these changes developed across the British world. How neatly did 6Alan

"The Late Loyalists: Northern Reflections of the Early American Taylor, 27, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 1-34. Journal of the Early Republic Republic," 7 Persistence Gould, 181-214 214). P. J. Marshall's of Empire, argu (quotation, ment is laid out in Marshall, The Making and Unmaking India, of Empires: Britain, c. 1750-1783 and America, and (Oxford, Eng., 2005), esp. 353-79. On authoritarianism see Linda Britons: Forging the Nation, inclusion, (New Haven, 1707?1837 Colley, Sense of the People, chap. 5; "A Virtual Conn., 1992), chap. 3;Wilson, Eliga H. Gould, Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial of the American Revolution," Legacy American Historical Review Leslie 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 476-89; Christopher Foundations Brown, Moral 2006). Capital: of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., a Brown argues that the American Revolution played key role in crystallizing British abolitionism. On the notion see esp. Catherine of difference in the empire, Hall, in the and Metropole Civilising 1830?1867 Subjects: Colony English Imagination, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in 2002); Kathleen Wilson, (Chicago, the Eighteenth "Introduction: (London, Histories, 2003); Wilson, Century Empires, in A New in Britain Modernities," Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity and the Empire, 1660-1840, ed. Wilson 1-26. 2004), (Cambridge,

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

211

new metropolitan ideas of colonial subject they actually conform to the one the of British hood? As migrants from part Empire to others?at home

nor

States

in the United

neither

for

the most

in Britain?loy

part

alist refugees constitute an especially intriguing group through which to think about the meanings of imperial belonging. By explicitly affiliating themselves with Britain, they help illuminate a defining peculiarity of Britishness: its unusually portable and flexible quality. The loyalists, like millions of imperial subjects well into the twentieth century, laid claim to being British though they did not live within the British nation-state. is why Bailey's heart swelled when he saw the British flags in This Halifax harbor. But what did loyalists mean and expect by associating themselves with the empire and how did the British respond? Looking at a decided refashioning loyalists suggests that, though the 1780s marked of

the

empire's

extent,

contests

about

population,

for persistent

the groundwork

how

far

to

and

self-image,

tensions within and

incorporate

how

the

also

decade

laid

that empire. Enduring to assimilate,

far

about

who did and did not count as British and how to make such a determi nation would inflect conceptions of British subjecthood and imperial governance

for at

least

a century

to come.

to Following the loyalists into the British Empire affords the chance consider how Britain coped with thismass migration and how successful itwas at accommodating different types of refugees. Fitting the picture scholars

many

have

drawn

of

the

the

empire,

late-eighteenth-century

benevolent treatment of some loyalists certainly bolsters an image of the British Empire as a diverse, multiethnic entity. Yet the experiences of other loyalists point to the limits and self-contradictions built into such an

empire:

differences

between

who

mattered

and who

not

did

and

ques

tions of how British rights and liberties at home might differ from rights and

liberties

blacks,

white

abroad. loyalists,

Britain made Though in some Indians and

an

areas,

effort

to

reach

in others

it

out

to

appeared

to fall short of its seemingly inclusionary mission. Meanwhile loyalists in several settings explicitly challenged imperial authority in terms uncan nily like those of their rebel peers. This political disposition was the most striking of several American inheritances they (or provincial) to their new British (and also provincial) homes. with them brought as itwas in aggregate, this migration was composed of thou Significant sands of individual lives disrupted, dispossessed, or displaced. Probing one

family's

experiences

on

the move

demonstrates

how

this

migration

to Britain cost thou affected the people caught up in it. Attachment sands their homes and livelihoods, but might they have gained anything from their British affiliations as well?

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

212

are intrinsically depressing, and British historians have tradition in ally painted the immediate aftereffects of the American Revolution dismal colors: sunk morale, spiraling deficits, and a king reduced to as Linda Colley has shown, the loss inAmerica blubbering madness. Yet,

Losses

a

encouraged

sense

stronger

of

British

national

a

and

unity

similar

as British administrators concluded strengthening of imperial purpose, that government authority in the colonies had if anything been too weak. In keeping with the emerging scholarly consensus that discards a tidy division between first and second British empires, the diffusion of underscores loyalist refugees at once Atlantic that was

the war

how and

Pacific,

a

reinvigorated American and

global

Asian,

empire and was

supervised increasingly from a British center.8 As a forceful reminder of why the American Revolution should be set in global context, consider the astonishing range of imperial reforms that unfolded in itswake. The end of the war was rapidly followed by a

remarkable series of changes in British imperial policy and public per ceptions of empire. In 1782 the Irish Patriots, led by Henry Grattan, suc a measure of parliamentary for cessfully established independence a major overhaul of Indian Ireland. In 1784 Parliament undertook at

in part

aimed

administration,

staving

off

the

abuses

of

that

power

Edmund Burke and others had identified at the heart of the American crisis. Continuing anxieties about the nature of imperial rule in India were a out few years later in the dramatic impeachment trial of played Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal. In 1787 the British antislavery movement with the founding of the Society for the consolidated Abolition of the Slave Trade. American independence cut the number of as in half, but equally slaves in the British Empire important, Leslie Brown has the Revolution Christopher splendidly demonstrated, allowed United

to draw

abolitionists States.9

Meanwhile,

activity opened with together

these

1788,

contrast

an

between

entirely

new

Britain arena

of

and

the

imperial

the arrival of the first convicts in Australia. Taken

developments

authority coupled

a moral

in

demonstrated

in places with

a

the promotion

turn

toward

centralized

of humanitarian

inclu

siveness.

The loyalist migration not only took place against this backdrop but also directly intersected with it, most tangibly across Canada, whose population,

political

structures,

and

civic

institutions

were

transformed.

8 concise of the war's Britons, esp. 132-45. For an excellent Colley, analysis "The Loss of America," in Dickinson, Britain and the effects, see John Cannon, American Revolution, 233-57. 9Andrew An Empire Divided: The American Revolution Jackson O'Shaughnessy, and the British Caribbean xii, 238; Brown, Moral 2000), (Philadelphia, Capital, 26-27.

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

213

and Britons easily forget that the loss of America was actually a of Anglophone Canada, demographic and cultural shift in the Constitutional Canada Act, which divided 1791 clearly expressed two into and extended the reach Quebec parts formerly French-majority in the empire, loyalists of English law and Protestantism. Elsewhere doubled the population of the Bahamas and the arrival of black loyalists in Sierra Leone revived the fortunes of the faltering colony. And it seems

Americans

the making

no

that

coincidence

an

of Australian

proponent

early

was

settlement

himself a loyalist who suggested relocating his fellow refugees there.10 out the loyalist migration emphasizes how Britain responded Mapping to

lost war

the

with

expansion,

and

restructuring,

senses

renewed

of

national and imperial purpose. to gauge these effects in detail by inspecting how It is possible Britain coped with themass migration. Though itwas not the first such the exodus the constituted loyalist episode, widest-ranging and probably the largest refugee crisis Britain had ever faced. The word "refugee" entered the English language with the arrival of up to fifty thousand in England after 1685; thousands more immigrated to Ireland Huguenots and North America. A more concentrated refugee influx descended on in

England Palatines"

summer

the sought

naturalization

of

1709,

more

than

under

a new

when

in Britain

settle

to foreign Protestants. They were

and

government

to

private

were

charity?some

ten

thousand

law

easy

allowing

by ad hoc

supported in

housed

"Poor

tents

army

pitched on the various commons south of the Thames?before being mostly dispersed to Ireland and the transatlantic colonies. The naturali zation

act was

Where

repealed these earlier

from

England

soon

thereafter.11

refugee

the Continent,

populations to settle often

had or

most

made

their

emigrate

from

way

to

there,

loyalist migrants began and ended their journeys on British colo nial soil. Many of the loyalist exiles in England had left the colonies in 1775 with the fall of Boston. But tens of thousands of civilians had

moved

during

the war,

either

fleeing

over

northern

and

southern

borders

10 a Settlement "A Proposal for in New South James Mario Matra, establishing Matra: Wales," Frost, The Precarious 23, 1783, in Alan Aug. Life of James Mario (Carlton, Australia, Voyager with Cook, American 1995), Loyalist, Servant of Empire 111-16. 11Robin D. Gwynn, The History and Contribution Huguenot Heritage: of the in Britain "The (London, 5, 24; H. T. Dickinson, 1985), 1 ("refugee"), Huguenots Poor Palatines and the Parties," English Historical Review 82, no. 324 (July 1967): I am to Noah McCormack for the Dickinson reference. Loyalist 464-85. grateful as also referred to themselves status conforms to emigres routinely refugees. Their s first definition the Oxford English of refugee as "one who, to reli Dictionary owing or s.v. troubles, seeks refuge in a foreign country" (OED, gious persecution political "refugee").

214 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY like Jacob Bailey or traveling to the British strongholds of New York, Savannah,

and

from

to

Charleston, those

cities

1782

Saint

1784,

With Augustine. British authorities

the

evacuations

of

assume

to

decided

in Chief responsibility for the loyalists' relocation. While Commander Guy Carleton coordinated this massive effort from his headquarters in New York, officials on the receiving end, from Nova Scotia to Jamaica, shelter and food for the new and impending struggled to produce arrivals. In Quebec, for instance, more than fifty-six hundred loyalists settled in townships formed so hastily theywere known only by number. the refugees (a Government-appointed inspectors regularly mustered practice followed across Canada as well as in Florida and the Bahamas), tallied them by gender and age, and distributed rations with parsimo nious

One

exactitude.

was

inspector

unless

never

urged

to

give

excess

supplies

"necessities absolutely require it" and advised that considerable savings might be made "by striking off many young people who ought to earn their Livelyhood and Girls who marry." Such savings had their own price; the end of a winter found many Quebec long refugees "very sickly," and "several died owing as they think for the want of provision & Cloathing."i2 A longer-term challenge of apportionment concerned distributing land, which the Crown had promised to loyalist settlers. Ex-soldiers received

to

lots according to seven hundred

private enclosures

common

of

Canadian

was

land

rank,

for a lands

escheated

from

ranging

captain.

In an

occurring from large

one

almost in

absentee

acres

hundred direct

contemporary owners

reversal

for of

a

the

Britain, and

redistrib

uted to thousands of small proprietors. Faced with some thirty thousand for

applications

lots,

the

surveyor

of Nova

general

Scotia

unsurprisingly

saw his job as "next to Egyptian Slavery." During the long winters of the teams of surveyors mid-i78os, struggled through woods clogged by snow to

assess

the

Whitehall

forests,

dispatched

12Robert

Mathews

measure

lots,

and

issue

warrants

nails and hammers as well as wood to Abraham

of

survey.

rasps and hoes

Nov. 18, 1782, in Haldimand Cuyler, Quebec, 21825, fol. 25 ("necessities it"); require absolutely 26, 1784, ibid., fols. 233?234 Stephen Apr. ("very sickly"). Some with supplies in advance: wool and linen, shoes lucky refugees were equipped and mittens, and an ax and spade for men. See "Memorandum by Brook Watson, The Good Americans Brown, June 14, 1783, inWallace commissary (New general," In Jamaica local authorities' York, efforts to cope with the refugee 1969), 199-201. influx are reflected in the Parish Vestry's of ?2131 8s. 2d. in Kingston expenditures and other for loyalists. See Kingston 1783 and 1784 in pensions support Vestry Minutes For loyalist settlement in 2/6/6, fol. 118, Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town. see "Return of & disbanded settled upon the Lands Quebec, Troops Loyalists King's in the Province of Quebec in the Year in Haldimand 1784," Papers, Add. MSS 21828, fol. 141. Papers,

British

Library, Add. MSS to Mathews, DeLancey

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

215

by the hundreds. New sawmills churned out boards and shingles for houses. By the spring of 1785, refugees such as New Yorker Henry Nase had

their

rediscovered

lives

old

as farmers,

sowing

rye,

nearly

every

"blue

nose"

pota

soil.13 toes, butter beans, and cabbages in the Canadian The hardest consideration was what to do about the property losses, from

vast

estates

to humble

oxcarts,

that

loyalist

refugee

had sustained. In hundreds if not thousands of instances, the American states had officially confiscated loyalist property. To what extent could or should the United States indemnify loyalists? This question turned out to be a major stumbling block in the Treaty of Paris peace talks. The heavily negotiated result, enshrined in article 5 of the provisional Anglo American

treaty,

that

determined

shall

"Congress

recommend

earnestly

it to the Legislatures of the respective States, to provide for the Restitution of all Estates, Rights, and Properties, which have been con fiscated, belonging to Real British Subjects."14 In other words Congress would ask the states nicely to restore British property, but itwas entirely up

to the

states

to decide

whether

to

comply.

InWestminster, which had been fiercely factionalized throughout the war, this article struck many as a complete betrayal of British inter ests, proving so controversial that it helped bring down the Earl of

Shelburne's

government

in

the winter

of

1783.

But

even

those

sympa

thetic to the loyalists soon found that pushing thematter furtherwould lead to a total breakdown of negotiations. The article stood. Instead, in a rare (and quite of financial assumption possibly unprecedented) overseas to supply for Parliament undertook responsibility subjects, British government compensation for the loyalists. In June 1783 a com mission

of five

Circumstances

members and

former

was

of Parliament Fortunes

of

such

set up

Persons

"to Enquire as are

into

the

reduced

to

13 This Unfriendly Soil, 96 ("next to Egyptian of MacKinnon, Diary Slavery"); 20 ("blue nose"), in Nase For Henry Nase, Family Papers, New Brunswick Museum. see "Muster Roll of the officers, Discharged acreage allotments, following Disbanded and Disbanded soldiers and their respective families of His Majestys late First to settle in the Island Battalion of Kings Rangers that are now settled and preparing of Saint John, taken 12th day of June 1784," in RG 1, vol. 376, pp. 83-87 (reel Archives Scotia. A list of escheats in Nova of Nova Scotia and 15436), Provincial can be found enclosed New Brunswick in a letter from Governor John Parr to Lord

CO travails of sur Archives, 217/58, fol. 159. The Sydney, June 3, 1786, in National are documented in the letters of Sir John Wentworth, of veying Surveyor General the King's Woods, in Letter-book of Sir John Wentworth, 1, vol. 49 1783?1808, RG see "List of Nova Archives Scotia. For supplies from Britain, (reel 15237), Provincial of items sent out to Nova Scotia" Lord North's letter to Parr of May (accompanies no. 7631, New York Public 1783), in Carleton Papers, box 32, item Library. 14 Historical View of the Commission into the John Eardley-Wilmot, for Enquiring at the Close Losses, Services, and Claims between of the American Loyalists, of the War Great Britain and Her Colonies, in 1783 (1815; repr., Boston, 1972), 38.

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

2l6 Distress Claims

as

it was

it received

months,

of

losses

property

just

took

known,

from loyalists and determined nine

in America."

by the late unhappy Dissentions Commission,

two

than

more

than

?7

and

The

Loyalist

written

evidence

its first

recompense. Within

appropriate

more

oral

claims

thousand million?"an

to

amounting sum,"

alarming

more recalled one of the commissioners, John Eardley-Wilmot?and com were to file. Parliament extended and widened the loyalists waiting mission's brief: in 1785 two of the commissioners even traveled to Nova to take evidence there. An agent was also dispatched Scotia and Quebec to the United

to research

States

ended up consuming more 3,225

claims,

lion,

or

examined

in detail,

2,291

one-third

about

The

values.

property

commission's

than six years, inwhich total

the

and

more

awarded

amount

of

work

time it had received

losses

?3 mil

than

the

with

claimed,

funds supplied in part by national lotteries.15 Historians are indebted to the Loyalist Claims Commission for the tes timony it gathered. Now housed in two huge series in the British National Archives, the evidence accumulated by the commission forms the biggest on loyalist refugees. Most of the loyalist single collection of material claimants

were

less

grateful:

at

unhappiness

the

small

most

amounts

of

them received forms a sad thread through theirwritings. "If you have one that is satisfiedwith his dividend on your side of theWater," reported one loyalist in London to his brother inNew Brunswick, "it ismore than I can say on this, the pittance is so small tomany that they refuse, & despise it with

while

contempt,

others

die

with

broken

. . . Some

hearts

have

run

mad with dispair & disappointment."16 But the point iswhat the very existence of this institution suggested about how the British state conceived of its responsibilities. It deserves note

as

simply

schemes,

for

an

early

instance,

example were

more

of only

state welfare

just

beginning

at a

to

time when take

shape.

pension Even

of overseas land, the Loyalist strikingly than the distribution Commission reflected a sense that Crown and Parliament had a duty to protect British subjects and their property at home and abroad. As such the commission foreshadowed the kind of Pax Britannica later envisioned Liberal Henry John Temple, 3d Viscount by Victorian Palmerston, who asserted the rights of British subjects to receive British Claims

protection

no

matter

where

in

the

empire

they

were

or

of what

back

it also foreshadowed later Eardley-Wilmot, ground. (For Commissioner relief efforts on behalf of French revolutionary emigres: he established a committee that raised more than ?400,000 for French refugees.) The

15 View of the Commission, Historical into the 37-40 Eardley-Wilmot, ("Enquire Circumstances," sum"), 90?91. 40), 50 ("alarming 16 William folder Jarvis to Munson Jarvis, July 9, 1787, in Jarvis Family Papers, 27, New Brunswick Museum.

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

pulled a sort of victory from the jaws of words, "Whatever may be said of this

Loyalist Claims Commission defeat. In Eardley-Wilmot's unfortunate

to account

either

war,

217

for,

to

or

justify,

to

for

apologize

the

in all the world has been unanimous of either Country; ... com in of Great Britain the and the humanity justice applauding a liberal hand, the Losses of those who suffered so pensating, with to the British Govern much for their firm and faithful adherence conduct

ment."17

Britain

may

showed

that,

in

subjects

from

the

have

principle

lost at

the war,

but

it would

least,

its treatment try

to

of

protect

the

loyalists its overseas

consequences.

In 1812, about the time he wrote his Historical View of the Commission some twenty-five years after concluding his work on it, John a sat for American-born renowned Eardley-Wilmot portrait by history painter Benjamin West. For historians the most striking feature of the portrait is a picture on the wall behind him: an Eardley-Wilmot and

allegorical painting, also byWest, titled Reception of theAmerican Loyalists by Great Britain in the Year 1783. The painting itself no longer survives (and

never

may

have

existed),

but

a

contemporary

engraving

as

appears

the frontispiece to Eardley-Wilmot's memoir (Figure I). It shows Bri her hand to a throng of loy bland, benevolent?extending tannia?big, Franklin alists led by William and Sir William of Pepperell Massachusetts.

To

Britannia's

left

stand

West

and

his

wife,

their

tected position in Britain well

pro

perhaps reflecting that they had established themselves before the war began. Allegories usually need explana tion, and the average viewer probably would not guess that the figures holding

Britannia's

mantle

represent

"Religion"

and

"Justice"

or

that

the

cherubs at the top left are binding up the fasces of the Anglo-American relationship. (This image was created in 1812.) Another emblem speaks for itself: a crown, lodged prominently beneath Britannia's shield, repre sents that focal point of imperial loyalty, the king. Equally legible on the

axis is the central representa engraving's preferred eighteenth-century a tion of America: some in this case Indian chief, statuesque resembling one an electric a "Widow He shock. shelters and jolted by Orphans,

rendered so by the civil war" and behind him huddle figures apparently

17 Historical View of the Commission, A par 98-99 Eardley-Wilmot, (quotation). allel may be drawn, however, with the distribution of ?60,000 than among more five thousand officers in the Restoration. See P. R. Newman, Royalist "indigent" as a "The 1663 List of Indigent Royalist Officers Considered for the Primary Source no. the of Historical 4 ?o, (December Journal Royalist Army," 1987): 885-904. Study On John Eardley-Wilmot's see Robert Tombs later support for French and refugees, That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British Isabelle Tombs, to Sun the from King the Present (New York, 2007), 213.

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

2l8

Figure I Benjamin West pictures the loyalists in British care. Engraving by H. Moses, circa 1815, after an inset in the portrait of John Eardley-Wilmot from 1812. Frontispiece from John Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of theCommissionfor Enquiring into theLosses, Services, and Claims of theAmerican Loyalists, at the Close of theWar between Great Britain and Her Colonies, in 1783 (1815; repr., Boston,

1972).

of African origin, "looking up to Britannia their

emancipation

from

Slavery."18

One

in grateful remembrance of presumes

they

also

remem

bered, gratefully, the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. An Indian chief, war widows, and former slaves all under the loom a ing protection of Britannia and the Crown: it is hard to imagine more an inclusive British Empire that had straightforward image of managed to mint moral capital out of itswartime defeat. At some level this alle 18On

the portrait of Eardley-Wilmot on the wall behind him,

image depicted Paintings 565-67.

of Benjamin

West

(New

Haven,

and the Reception Loyalists of the American see Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Conn.,

1986),

219-22

(quotations,

219),

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

219

gory corresponds with documented reality. The identifiable white loyal ists in this picture, for instance, each got money from the Loyalist of widows and orphans got material Claims Commission. Hundreds the received their land British government. The Mohawk support from however much and black loyalists made their exodus, against the odds, to In American British freedom. all these from ways, asWest's slavery a out the held British Empire tangible promise of life, image celebrates, to of and the whites, blacks, and Indians liberty, pursuit happiness excluded from the political life of the nascent United States.19 and West's But self-images can be misleading, image of Britannia was itself a construct. If the treatment of some loyalists shows British as

conduct

humanitarian

and

the

liberal,

of

fates

demonstrate

others

ways inwhich it rested on and perpetuated forms of exclusion. Scholars have not fully explored these cases. Consider the figure of the Indian. If West had any individual in mind for this image, itwas likely Joseph chief who presided over his tribe's Canadian reloca Brant, theMohawk tion and whom West may well have met when Brant visited London in was

Brant

1776.

an

effective

and

negotiator,

his

success

demonstrates

the

importance of indigenous leadership in extracting concessions from the British. Yet theMohawk experience was not shared by Britain's southern Indian allies. West could not have had them inmind because Britannia did not "receive" those loyalists at all. At a conference in Saint Augustine inMay 1783, Creek and Cherokee chiefs were horrified to learn that, according to the terms of the peace, Britain had agreed to cede Florida . . .The to their enemy Spain. "We took up the Hatchett for the English us never have told forsake us," King and his Warriors they would lamented abandon

one

Us?

chief. . . .Do

"Is

the Great

you

think we

conquered? King can turn our faces

Or

does

to our

he mean

Enemies[?]

to

. . .

No. If he has any Land to receive us (We will not turn to our Enemies) but go [to] itwith our friends in such ships as he may send for us." So to the cession that the British briefly vigorous was Indian opposition floated the idea of relocating them to the Bahamas, though Sir Guy Carleton

scotched

the

scheme

on

the

grounds

that

the

islands

would

not

suit theirway of life.Unfortunately for the southern Indians, their loyalty to Britain, unlike that of theMohawk, ended in relative abandonment to the pressing encroachments of theUnited 19

States.20

to 588 said that pensions were granted John Eardley-Wilmot "chiefly people, and Merchants, who had no means of livelihood, but had lost no Orphans, Estate." See Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission, 95. personal Keith Mason and Christopher Leslie Brown the sense interpret the image in much See Mason, "American conveyed by Eardley-Wilmot. 245-46; Loyalist Diaspora," Brown, Moral 313. Capital, 20On treatment see "Substance the of the southern of Talks delivered Indians, at a conference to His Governor Colonel by the Indians Excellency Tonyn,

Widows, real or

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

220

A similar reality needs to be exposed regarding the other nonwhite group featured byWest: African Americans. Eight to ten thousand black loyalists went on to enjoy their freedom in the British world; hundreds even received small acreages in Nova Scotia. historians have Though of it celebrated these tales remarkable should be stressed freedom, justly that at least as many blacks also discovered firsthand how slavery was domains where it preserved if not reinforced in the British Caribbean most.

mattered

As

as

many

two

thousand

blacks

even

were

to

taken

as slaves, a offering moving counterpoint to those black loyalists out in the frozen ground. Far more slaves were their shelters digging to the and the Bahamas. Records of British Caribbean, Florida, exported

Canada

evacuations from

the

and

Jamaica,

that

suggest former

colonies,

the

slave

at

least

fifteen as

most

of

population

thousand to

slaves.

Up the Bahamas,

were

blacks eight

thousand

according

removed to

went to contem

porary figures, increased by at least thirty-six hundred with the loyalist influx. A list of 129 loyalists who filed for tax exemption in Jamaica under a 1783 law gives a telling insight into patterns of loyalist slave exportation. Of these loyalists, 51 slave owners brought a total of 1,522 slaves

from

owner,

the

a ratio

consigned

colonies;

due

in part

that to

is, an

the

fact

average that

of

30

slaves

per white

slave

some

of

these

slaves

been

had

to loyalists by their friends for sale.21

and the Superintendent," CO 15, 1783, in National Archives, 5/560, May to Conde with the report in Bernardo del Campo pp. 617-18 (quotations). Compare de Floridabianca, East Florida, London, 9, 1783, in Joseph Byrne Lockey, Aug. and Many ed. John Assembled, 1783?178$: A File of Documents of Them Translated, sat for a Walton 1949), 138-39. Joseph Brant (Berkeley, Calif, Caughey portrait by and his Mohawk inWest's David Hill appeared companion George Romney, portrait of Guy See Leslie Kaye Reinhardt, in a "British and Indian Identities Johnson. Studies West," 31, no. 3 (Spring 1998): by Benjamin Painting Eighteenth-Century the misbegotten Bahamas scheme, seeWilbur Sieben, 283-305. On Henry Loyalists in East Florida, Thereto, Edited 1774 to 178$: The Most Important Documents Pertaining with an Accompanying Narrative too, were Fla., 1929), 1: 139. Many (Deland, Iroquois, on the American abandoned side of the border. See Taylor, Divided Ground, 111-13. 21 Slaves were as "servants" to stave off listed on musters property help possible from the United claims States. records that loyalists brought suggest Incomplete some 300 slaves to and 441 to Saint John. See Canada, Scotia, 1,269 to Nova Upper McArthur,

Robin W.

The Blacks in Canada: A 2d ed. (Montreal, Quebec, Winks, 1997), History, to H. Siebert 5,000 blacks went 37). Wilbur says that about (quotation, from Savannah and 2,613 from Charleston. See Siebert, Jamaica Legacy of the to the Bahamas American House of Assembly Revolution, 7-8, 15. A report presented in April that twelve hundred whites and thirty-six hundred blacks 1789 estimated in 1784 and 1785. See Journal of the House arrived in the Bahamas of Assembly of the Bahamas, of Archives, I draw Nassau. Apr. 28, 1789, p. 248, in Department fig ures for Jamaica owners from "A List of in Jamaica, loyalist slave Loyalists prepared F. Judah," in MS The list 1841, National by George Library of Jamaica, Kingston. to have been for Wilbur H. Siebert. appears prepared 34-43

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE Even

conservative estimates, by as slaves of loyalists than

colonies

British government loyalists,

giving

them

sanctioned

loyalist

ships,

more

percent

and facilitated

on

passage

50 as

221 blacks

left

Moreover

freemen.

the the

the export of slaves by the

granting

slave

owners

land,

Indies. (When Lord Dunmore, and maintaining slavery in theWest as governor of whose 1775 proclamation Virginia had inspired many slaves to run to the British for freedom, became governor of the loyalist dominated Bahamas in 1787, however, he promptly managed to alienate some white loyalists by honoring the claims of black loyalists who had been

wrongly

For

reenslaved.)

every

case

of British

Freedom

(the

stun

ningly self-named black loyalist featured in Simon Schama's Rough Crossings), the loyalist emigrants carried with them more than one human reminder of persisting British slavery.22 Britons could (and did) congratulate themselves that slavery had been effectively abolished in Britain proper in 1772, as itwould be in

Canada by the century's end. But comparing different sites of exodus makes clear that though the expanding British Empire may in some land to theMohawk and freedom ways have acted inclusively?granting to black loyalists?it also practiced forms of exclusion: neglecting its subjects and allies in Florida; enabling continued slave ownership; and even,

for

that matter,

to meet

failing

the

expectations

of

so many

peti

tioners to the Loyalist Claims Commission. Local imperatives could explain such differences between British practices in various domains. The Mohawk lived on the new Anglo-American frontier, so their alle

giance remained of palpable strategic importance, whereas the Creek to retain their and Cherokee, however much British agents wanted in in the valuable Indian and trade goodwill general particular, now lived in a Spanish province bordering the United States. By the same token,

slavery

operated

on

a

vastly

greater

scale

in the West

Indies

than

or to Sierra it ever had in Canada, and sending free blacks to Canada Leone did not seriously compromise the institution in the islands where 22 also tried to smuggle slaves out of the United States, which was one Loyalists of the points of conflict between Governor in the and the loyalists John Maxwell to Bahamas. Maxwell feared that runaway slaves were being sold in the Bahamas loy an Act, which "the poor Slave his Freedom all alists, when [had] obtained by doing most Nations of these Wretches from their masters in the deserted is, protect, which our General Field: them Protections, in and for themselves, the gave Shifting owners would Masters deceive them." He also worried that the slaves' true American cause trouble to get them back. See Maxwell to 10, trying Assembly, "Message," May see CO in the Bahamas, Archives, 1784, in National 23/25, fol. 205. On Dunmore B. Johnson, Race Relations in the Bahamas, The Nonviolent 1784?1834: a Slave to a Free Ark., 4, 42, 69. 2000), Transformation from (Fayetteville, Society Lord Dunmore's to restore his did nothing rampant self-aggrandizement popularity. See Michael Craton, A History (London, 1968), 173-80. of the Bahamas

Whittington

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

222

most.

to Britain

it mattered

one

Indeed

of poor black loyalists from London to

attempt

serving

remove

mainland British soil. As these examples do

tice, sition:

an

awkward,

the hasty

interpret

export

as a somewhat self from

minority

conspicuous

imply, image and reality, like theory and prac

not

match up. British always was as West either Britain it was

accommodating?or

could

to Sierra Leone

not.

policy showed

It was

was

an

not

either-or

both.

Such

propo and

tolerant,

it?liberal,

contradic

apparent

inclusion and exclusion resurfaced time and again in as nineteenth-century British history, and scholars have identified them a central paradox of British liberalism from the 1830s.23 Yet as mapping out the loyalist diaspora indicates, similar tensions were already evident in the aftermath of the American Revolution. They emerged in tandem tions between

with

the

postwar

empire,

that

suggesting

the

And what of the white citizens

or

subjects,

good

sives or as good Americans Leaving

value

tend to be portrayed as either bad

loyalists? They as

judgments

British

counterrevolutionaries

and

subver

refused to betray the British Crown.

who to one

of

pressures

competing

imperial liberty and authority boast a long genealogy.

these

side,

characterizations

correctly

indicate that loyalists were two things at once, both British and were British subjects in their own eyes, in American. Formally, they British long-term

even in some and opinion, residents of the American

following

widespread

or

American

courts.24

As

natives

colonies,

they were and usage,

also

American,

late-eighteenth-century

often

referred

to themselves as such. This double identification meant that loyalist refugees carried a mixed legacy with them, infusing their new British

colonial nial

settlements

with

inheritances

from

their

former

American

colo

homes.

to the spiritual. In Loyalist imports extended from the material Nova Scotia they ranged from the pancake and codfish recipes used by the governor's wife (who had come from New Hampshire with her hus first chartered university by emi band) to the founding of Canada's in New from York. Some loyalist transmissions can grants King's College 23 See for Catherine in "The Nation Within and Without," Hall, example the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867, Defining ed. Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall 2000), 179-233. (Cambridge, 24 On see James H. status the citizenship of loyalists, "The Kettner, in the Revolutionary of American Era: The Idea of Development Citizenship American Volitional 18, no. 3 (July 1974): Journal Allegiance," of Legal History see For more "From Fellow distinctions, 208-42. perceptual Conway, Stephen to Nationals British of the Americans, circa 1739-1783," Perceptions Foreigners: 59, no. 1 (January 2002): 65-100. WMQ

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

223

be traced back to single points of origin. The Wells brothers, loyalist to printers of Charleston, South Carolina, fled with their printing press the Charles Wells Saint Augustine, where William published region's first newspaper, and then to Nassau, where JohnWells did the same; their brother-in-law Alexander Aikman settled in Kingston and became the publisher of the Royal Gazette and printer to the Jamaica House of emanated from the black Assembly. Another remarkable minidiaspora the First African Baptist that into coalesced later Baptist community Church in Savannah. This single flock produced black loyalist preachers went on including David George, George Liele, and Moses Baker, who to establish congregations in Canada and Sierra Leone and founded the first Baptist churches in Jamaica and the Bahamas some twenty years before

the arrival

missionaries.25

of white

con The most striking and perhaps unexpected American legacy cerned politics. As Bernard Bailyn has demonstrated, American debates of the 1760s and 1770s echoed contemporary British contests about vir tual

were

arbitrary

representation,

power,

and

perceived

tyranny.26

Loyalists

formed

a consis

contrast to the radical rebel Whigs. accordingly styled Tories in some basic traits with Tories across the ocean: Anglican shared They as in America (such Jacob Bailey) were overwhelmingly loyal clergy and, fundamentally, all loyalists upheld the supremacy of the king and Parliament.

Allegiance

to

the monarch,

in

particular,

tent link?probably the only one?among white, black, and Indian with the humble rank and educated elite and loyalists loyalists joined file, whose expressions of support for the king survive in their some times barely literate petitions pleading for support. The Crown sits 25 "Memorandum for the use of Mrs. Wentworth's of Cash Expended House," to the Town in "Records of Halifax, RG 1, 1786, 1758-1828," September Relating vol. 411, item no. 10 (reel 15457), Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia. On theWells 1: 189, 205; Louisa The Susannah Wells, family, see Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, a to London (New York, Journal 1968), 87, 111-12. For Voyage from Charlestown of in Jamaica were the central figures Liele and Moses Baker. See Baptists, George David in America, and Other Benedict, A General History of the Baptist Denomination Parts Clement (Boston, 1813), 2: 189-92, 194-206; Gayle, of the World George Liele: to Jamaica Pioneer Missionary Pulis, ed., Moving Jamaica, 1982); John W. (Kingston, in the Afro-Atlantic In Nova On: Black Loyalists World Scotia (New York, 1999). were established to Sierra Leone who moved David Baptist congregations by George, name had been baptized from, George Liele). John by, and taken his (George a free black who had been a to the Cherokee before the war and Marrant, missionary into naval service as a musician it, founded Methodist pressed during congregations. A Narrative See Marrant, A Black with John Marrant, of the Lords wonderful Dealings . . . , 6th ed. (London, 1788). See also Alexander Pringle, Prayer for the Revival Of In All The Protestant and for The Spread Of The Churches, Religion Gospel Among . . Heathen Nations, Recommended. Scotland, [1796]), 101-11, 127-50. (Edinburgh, 26 Bernard The Ideological Revolution Bailyn, Origins of the American (Cambridge,

Mass.,

1967).

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

224 in

prominently

Revolution so

proper,

West's

Benjamin

ultimately

strengthened

it bolstered

the

role

of

a

for

picture

reason.

the image of the king as

the monarch

as

Just

the

in Britain

a

emperor,

position

that if anything outpaced and outlasted the monarch's significance as a figurehead at home. Yet "Tory," still widely used as a synonym for loyalist, is a mislead (It was also "always the term of reproach," as Thomas ing designation. Hutchinson

and

observed,

its

meant

connotations

negative

that

loyalists

rarely applied it to themselves.) Most people's choices in times of stress do not come down to pure ideologies alone, and the political label Tory to obscure

tends

the

personal,

factors

pragmatic

that may

have

influ

enced their decisions. It also corresponds only loosely with the diverse range of opinions loyalists held. For evidence of the variations in loyalist one need only point to that majority of loyalists thought and practice, who did not leave the United States or to those who returned to the United States in later years. Among loyalist refugees who left, pledging loyalty to the king was just about the only thing they could be counted on to accept. Even in Shelburne, Nova Scotia?the veritable loyalist more ten thousand of founded and settled than by refugees capital, by them?an oath of allegiance to the king had to be "explained as not to to

extend the

taxation,"

town's

observed,

residents.

we

"Although

some

suggesting In the cast

long

tion

while

governors

remaining

within

as

losers,

they

ultimately

to their

acutely won

resistance: exemption from British taxa

the

empire."27

And

in many

loyalists turned out to be far from English Tories,

learned

among

un-Tory principles as Alan has Taylor

the Loyalists

the original goal of the colonial American

rather run,

settings,

the

as imperial

peril.

contest between The most pronounced loyalists and imperial authorities unfolded in the Bahamas. Not long after arriving from East Florida, a group of refugee "Gentleman Loyalists" beset Governor John Maxwell with demands formore provisions, better land allocation, and greater political voice. How appropriate that the motto of loyalist John

Wells's

Bahama

Gazette

should

be

"not

bound

in

loyalty

to any masters,"

since the loyalists evinced little allegiance toMaxwell. Forming a com mittee "to preserve and maintain those Rights and Liberties, for which they left theirHomes and their Possessions," they proceeded to circulate libelous handbills, run riot through the streets of Nassau (ringing the church bell at eleven o'clock at night "as if the Town had been on Fire"), and let loose "a Torrent of Billingsgate Language" when challenged in 27 Thomas in Brown, Good Hutchinson, in MacKinnon, This Marston, Unfriendly Soil, the Early Republic 27: 7 ("we cast the Loyalists").

Americans, 30 118 ("explained");

("Tory"); Taylor,

Benjamin Journal of

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

225

court. Driven to his wit's end by these "most tormenting, dissatisfied over the gov People on Earth," Maxwell may have been relieved to hand at to the end of 1784. Powell fared no better James Powell ernorship the with loyalists, whose mounting demands for political representation he found as "seditiously mad" as ever those of the American colonists had been. Only under Lord Dunmore did the "violent spirit of Party" in the islands begin to subside, and the loyalists gained seats in the assem bly. By the early 1790s, they had helped introduce racial laws on par those in the old southern American colonies; in 1807, Bahamian loyalists vehemently opposed the ending of the slave trade.28

with

Severe

between

clashes

settlers

loyalist

and

also

government

took

a new province place in New Brunswick, split off from Nova Scotia in If American the Revolution 1784. inspired an authoritarian turn among was personified by New Brunswick's turn that administrators, imperial

first governor, Sir Guy Carleton's decidedly unpopulist brother Thomas, who believed "that the American Spirit of innovation should not be nursed among the Loyal Refugees" and held off on calling elections until the fall of 1785.Whereas the rowdy loyalists in the Bahamas were pri well-off

marily nents

were

owners

slave

in his

chiefly, conduct

"disorderly

. . .

from

the American

words, during

South,

Carleton's

Civil

war."

oppo to

"habituated"

ex-soldiers,

"motly" a long

A

"violent

party

Spirit" erupted among them, cultivated by agitators who plied them with liquor, promised redress "for all their former Grievances & sup posed wrongs," another observer,

and

riots, triggered William Cobbett,

or

at

later

least recalled

so Carleton the

saw

it. But

as

election

an

all

too-familiar effort by a ruling elite to suppress the voices of ordinary Cobbett,

people.

who

had

just

arrived

in New

as

Brunswick

an

army

corporal, went on to be one of the leading British radicals of his genera tion.

In

the

event

promptly passed 28 Gail

the

Carleton

faction

a bill suppressing mass

won,

and

petitions

the

new

assembly

and, by extension,

Bahamian Saunders, (London, 1983), 58 ("not Loyalists and Their Slaves to Lord in John Maxwell enclosed printed handbill Sydney, June 29, 1784, in to Maxwell Archives, CO 23/25, fol. 154 ("to preserve and maintain"); Sydney, 9, 1784, ibid., fols. 165 ("as if the Town"), 171 ("Torrent"), 229; Aug. 26, Sept. 4, Oct. to Maxwell 17, 1784, ibid., fol. in ("most tormenting"); James Powell to Sydney, May to Maxwell, 11, 1785, ibid., p. 193 ("seditiously mad"); Grey Elliott, May June Sydney see their the loyalists' political demands, 1786, ibid., fol. 418 ("violent spirit"). On petition to Powell, enclosed in Powell to Sydney, May 11, 1785, ibid., pp. 321-24. "It is not a little to have suffered for their Men who "that extraordinary," replied Sydney, profess Loyalty to the Crown, to the British Constitution, and adherence should so far forget themselves, to His owe as to and the Duty be guilty of the most they Majesty, daring attempts against His Royal authority, and that Constitution" to Maxwell, June 1786, ibid., fols. (Sydney 418-19). On 31-32; loyalists and race laws, see Siebert, Legacy of theAmerican Revolution, Saunders, Bahamian Loyalists and Their Slaves, 45, 68-69. bound"); National

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

226 public with

dissent.

itwas

So

a confrontation

that Britain's newest colonial

between

ideals

political

that were

province dealt at once

emphati

cally American and familiarly British.29 Even in utopia loyalists struggled with British authority. The black loyalists who traveled from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792 landed in a mock-Saxon polity dreamed up by abolitionist Granville Sharp where

they

were

In

"tithingmen."

represented practice,

community-chosen were however, they governed

and its agents, which

based Sierra Leone Company make

on

good

From

promises.

their

first months

and

"hundredors"

by

the London

by

repeatedly failed to

on African

settlers

soil,

plagued the colony's superintendent, John Clarkson, with demands to honor their "civil rights" and the promise that "all should be equal." Extended delays about land allotment sparked a riot in 1794, compe tently

who Nova

suppressed

by

set up cannon

a

Scotia?on

Governor

twenty-six-year-old

outside his house former

slave

Macaulay,

Zachary

and offered free passage anybody

ship?for

who

to

back to

wished

go.

(None did.) Discontent mounted again with the imposition of quitrents in 1796. Then a dispute over the appointment of judges in 1800 trig to a loyalist coup. Some of the hundredors and gered what amounted tithingmen ernment

issued independent

their

own

from

setting legal code, the company-appointed

themselves

up

governor

as

a

and

gov coun

cil. An armed uprising followed and for one steamy week in September black loyalists had to choose again between staying loyal or joining the rebels. But the British company soon prevailed; a month later, a formal charter strengthened the imperial grip in the colony. Among the rebel leaders banished was one Henry Washington, who had run away from George

Washington's

Mount

Vernon

twenty

years

earlier.30

The great abolitionist William Wilberforce snidely commented that black loyalists in Sierra Leone were "as thorough Jacobins as if they had been

trained

and

educated

in Paris,"

a

reminder

that

by

1800

the

con

29 Thomas to Lord Carleton Carleton June 25, 1785, in Thomas Sydney, ser. A, RG of New Brunswick 1, RS33, Provincial Archives Letterbooks, ("American to For William in Cobbett 20, 1785, ibid, ("motly"). Spirit"); Carleton Sydney, Nov. Saint John, see D. G. Bell, Early Loyalist Saint John: The Brunswick ofNew Origin is Politics, 1783-1786 (Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1983), 130-31, 142-44. The election treated in detail on 104-15. Neighboring Nova Scotia also suffered considerable disrup tion in itsNovember the first result was nullified, the second conducted 1785 elections; in an environment

ten of great "bitterness [and] rancour," though the central line of in that province was between there (settlers who were loyalists and preloyalists before the loyalists). See MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil, 120-21 (quotation, 120). 30 "Clarkson's to Africa," Mission 319 ("all should be pp. 222 ("civil rights"), in John Clarkson New-York Historical Sierra equal"), Manuscripts, Society. On see Leone and rebellion, government 38-87; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, Pybus, 169?202. Epic Journeys, xiii?xvi, sion

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE suming contest with British consciousness. one

Domingue:

of

227

France

in superseded the American Revolution to better have Saint (Wilberforce might pointed

the

leaders

ex-slave

the Haitian

of

Henri

Revolution,

Christophe, had been armed by the French to fight in the American the African rebellion, echoing the disturbances in war.) Nevertheless New Brunswick and the Bahamas, reflected an important and enduring colonial legacy among these British subjects. The loyalists had chosen to remain British and were happy where possible to reap the "passive bene fits of British subjects: cheap land and low taxes."31 But as these inci dents

showed,

they

continued

to demand

actively

or

assert

what

they

saw as the rights of British subjects too.

The theme of loss hangs heavily over the loyalists' story: Britain lost the colonies and the loyalists lost their possessions and homes. Great histo ries are made up of small ones, and to understand the full effects of the loyalist

those

migration,

stories

small

examination.

deserve

of

One

the

lives disturbed by this war was that of a middle-class many documented from Johnston, who wrote up her refugee Georgia named Elizabeth in 1836. experiences it is one because of vive

but

also

because

is a valuable

narrative

Johnston's

few

relatively refugee she the experienced

source

not

a woman

accounts

by of migration

trauma

to

in more

places than most by moving to Florida, Scotland, Jamaica, and Nova Scotia. And yet, mirroring the way that in a larger sense bounced back from the loss, the fortunes of the Johnston family how, for some individual loyalists, the empire forwhich they had much could also supply longer-term rewards. Johnston

spent

most

of

the war

in Savannah

while

only sur

her

finally Britain suggest lost so

husband,

fought in a loyalist regiment.When Savannah was evacuated in to Charleston with a toddler son in tow, July 1782, she moved eight

William, months

Charleston Saint

pregnant was

and

just

evacuated,

Augustine,

years eighteen the Johnstons and

twelve

among

thousand

old.

Six

moved and

loyalists

months again, slaves

later south who

to had

flocked to the British province of East Florida expecting it to be a per manent new home. So when news reached them in the spring of 1783 that Florida was to be handed over to Spain?that they would have to

move

yet

again?they

felt

utterly

betrayed.

"The

war

never

occasioned

half the distress which this peace has done, to the unfortunate Loy alists," she wrote to her husband. Loyalists frantically tried to sell off their houses and land, glutting the market when there were only a few 31

Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 87 ("thorough On Henri 27: 18 ("passive benefits"). Republic 181. Empire Divided, Early

Jacobins"); Christophe,

Taylor, Journal ofthe see O'Shaughnessy,

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

228

Spanish buyers. Some dismantled their houses hoping to carry them to the Caribbean, only to find therewas not enough room on the crammed transport

ships

to accommodate

away from beaches The

Lewis

Johnstons

them.

So

the

twice-over

refugees

sailed

strewnwith the lumber of their broken homes.32 were

comparatively

lucky:

Elizabeth's

father-in-law,

of Assembly, Johnston, formerly speaker of the Georgia House was to evacuate his slaves with and William's sold and able successfully at least some money in hand. The family returned to "his native land," it was the best place in the Anglophone Scotland, not least because to resume the medical training he had commenced in world forWilliam Philadelphia before the war. But like so many loyalists, the Johnstons found life in Britain expensive, uncomfortable, and depressing. Old Dr. Johnston, "a poor Loyalist who had lost so much by thewar," could not even afford a carriage to take him to church. And when William fin ished his training, he does not even seem to have considered practicing in Scotland. Instead he accepted an offer from one of his wartime

patrons

another

to

go

to Jamaica.

(He

turned

down

an

offer

to

go

to

India

from

patron, Archibald governor of just appointed Campbell, to in The moved Madras.) 1786, leaving their eldest Johnstons Kingston children to be educated in Scotland, and William became the attending on estates of the physician prominent planter JamesWildman.33 Elizabeth had by now given birth to four children in four places? Saint Augustine, and Edinburgh?and would Savannah, Charleston, 32 Elizabeth

toWilliam Martin Johnston Johnston, Apr. 20, 1783, in Elizabeth a Recollections (New York, 1901), 211 (quo of Georgia Loyalist of this book, with letters between tation). The many original manuscript along some of which are published, Elizabeth and William in abbreviated form, with (only can be found in Almon the memoir), reel 10362, Provincial Archives Family Papers, were com of Nova Scotia. The letters document their wartime travails, which Lichtenstein

Johnston,

see of Saint Augustine, For the evacuation byWilliam's problem. gambling 1: 177. Siebert's evoca in East Florida, is wonderfully Loyalists description tive, though, alas, not footnoted. 33 a Johnston, Recollections land"), 78 ("poor of Georgia Loyalist, 75 ("his native The Johnstons' is described from Florida in Elizabeth Johnston Loyalist"). departure toWilliam Martin Johnston, Jan. 2, 15, Feb. 3, 12, 1784, in Almon Family Papers, reel 10362. William's slaves were sold for ?450 the convoys (ibid.). Among leaving in 1784 and 1785 for Nova Saint Augustine and the Scotia, Jamaica, England, one for Glasgow records list with the property of Bahamas, Admiralty ship headed pounded Siebert,

Lewis

See Carole Watterson aboard. and the Troxler, Johnston "Loyalist Refugees Evacuation of East Florida, 60, no. 1 1783-1785," Florida Historical Quarterly list indicates "Lewis Johnston, Jr.," but given that (July 1981): 1-28, esp. 28. The to the Bahamas Lewis Johnston Jr. went to and Lewis Johnston Sr. went Glasgow, the entry must surely be an error. William to Jamaica Johnston's subsequent journey was not Another in Jamaica Scottish doctor in 1787 clearly unique. complained to the "vast number about the "overabundance of physicians," he attributed which . . . were of Medical in the Sun: people who refugees." See Alan L. Karras, Sojourners Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, (Ithaca, N.Y., 1740-1800 1992), 55. British

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

229

bear five more in Jamaica. But alongside this living record of exodus would come a trail of gravestones. A son died of thrush in Scotland at three months. A two-year-old daughter died of scarlet fever in Jamaica, and another baby girl died of smallpox. These losses weighed severely on Elizabeth, who felt profoundly isolated in Jamaica's alien environment. "I was much exhausted in mind and body," she recalled, "having no In 1796 the female relation to be with me, only black servants." to for William the difficult decision made stay in Jamaica Johnstons while Elizabeth returned to Scotland with the children. "On the morn was come to take us on ing of that sad day when I heard that the boat ...

board

I

think

hardly

I was

in my

she wrote.

senses,"

"I

uttered

screams that distressed my poor husband to such a degree that he . . . me ... to let him go on board and bring our things back, but all begged I could saywas, Tt is too late!'"34 Separation had become a defining feature of the Johnstons' family life. It also cast long, unanticipated shadows. Elizabeth was reunited in two eldest children, who were eighteenth-century Edinburgh with her stylewayward teenagers. Andrew was now fifteen and had run off to join the navy only to be marched home again by a family friend and cajoled into studying medicine, but his heart was not in it, and he regularly cut classes to go ice skating. Elizabeth packed him off to his father in Jamaica for disciplining. Her daughter Catherine, meanwhile, was now a "wild and fourteen and had developed giddy" streak encouraged, access to to a lending library and an her unfettered mother, by according unsuitable

taste

for novels.35

returned to Jamaica to joinWilliam,

In 1801 Elizabeth was

failing.

Back

in

the

family

house

at

their

Halfwaytree,

whose

health

Jamaican

tra

vails began again. Two daughters barely survived yellow fever, the Caribbean killer.William's own health was so bad that they arranged this time

for him

to

leave;

he

stayed

away

two

years.

once

For

the

family

was

all together in December 1805, when Andrew, now a qualified doctor, traveled from his practice in the mountains of Clarendon Parish to visit. But the day before he arrived he felt unwell, and he vomited black in the night, the fatal sign of advanced yellow fever.Within a week he was dead. Shortly afterward Catherine lapsed into a complicated "nervous illness, combined also with symptoms of yellow fever," for which the only cure

was

a

change

of climate.

"Worn

down

as

I was

with

sorrow

of various

and

. . . hard as another trying kinds," wrote Elizabeth, "I told her father that him I from and beloved was, my separation myself would go."36 boys 34 a Johnston, Recollections of Georgia Loyalist, 85 ("much the morning"). 35 Ibid., 91-95, 105-7 (quotation, 105). 36 Ibid., 107, 108 ("nervous ("Worn down"). illness"), no

exhausted"),

90

("On

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

230

to the docks and arranged a passage for his family to

William

went

Scotia,

much

frozen

to death?"

Nova to be

to Elizabeth's Jamaica

alarm:

was

one

us

"Send

to Nova

Canada

thing;

Scotia!

really

What,

seemed

like

she had not considered, however, was that Nova Scotia had exile. What become home to so many loyalist exiles that itwould be the most conge nial haven she had yet encountered. Though they arrived there nearly one to in that every "perfect strangers place," they promptly made friends among the large community of fellow loyalists.William died in Jamaica in 1807 while the rest of the family flourished in Canada. Two of Elizabeth's younger daughters soon married loyalists and produced seventeen children between

them,

careers

hold

and

of whom

many offices

in

on

went

to

successful

enjoy

Elizabeth's

government.

provincial

professional three surviv

ing sons also came to Nova Scotia, where they traced glittering paths in medicine and the law; one ascended briefly to the position of governor.37 "Little did I . . . think that I and all my children would ultimately settle in Nova Scotia," Elizabeth later observed. After decades on the comes move, she had reason to be surprised. What through clearly in Johnston's

in the

narrative?as

writings

of other

loyalist

women?is

the

sheer physical and psychological hardship of migration. Whereas four male members of her family detailed their property losses to the Loyalist Claims Commission, Elizabeth's memoir illuminates the extended emo tional consequences of losing a home and a homeland.38 Moving affected the relationships between parents and children and precipitated illness and death. The Johnstons' story also foregrounds a feature of refugee

life

multigenerational reverberated

that may

not

occur

to

of

consequences across

three

generations

readers

upheaval. of the

at first War

glance, and

family.

Their

the namely its aftermath parents

had

chil propelled them into the loyalist cause, yet Elizabeth and William's dren, especially the two eldest, born during the war, paid the price of migration at least as heavily as they had. It is easy when reading loyalist letters, petitions, and memoirs to be overwhelmed by the tragedies of refugee lives and to get caught up in 37

108-111 Ibid., (quotations, entries on Elizabeth detailed

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography sons-in-law Thomas Ritchie and Johnston's Bruce Almon William (and their fathers) as well as several of their sons and grand herself (s.v. "Elizabeth sons; there are also entries for Elizabeth and Lichtenstein") for her son James William Johnston. 38 a no. Recollections For Johnston, Georgia loyalist women's of Loyalist, to see Beth Norton, American responses migration, Mary "Eighteenth-Century Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists," 33, no. 3 Quly 1976): WMQ The Johnston family members who presented claims to the Loyalist Claims 386-409. were Elizabeth's Commission her father-in-law, Lewis father, John Lightenstone; Martin and her brother-in-law Lewis Johnston Sr.; her husband, William Johnston; includes

in).

in the Bahamas settled and filed the largest claim of all, for a Jr., who Johnston in Savannah, house American Coldham, 1,650 acres, and 400 cattle. See Peter Wilson D.C., 1980), 263-64, 288-89. Loyalist Claims (Washington,

LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

231

the emotional language loyalists used to describe their plight. Johnston's narrative, like Jacob Bailey's, speaks to migration as the loyalists felt it: vivid, poignant, and real. And yet many tales of loyalist loss, especially those of middle-class families, had constructive, even happy, endings. The Johnston family unquestionably attained a degree of prominence inNova Scotia theywould not have had if they had remained in Britain or returned to the United States. Even Bailey was recognized in his rags within moments of his arrival, taken in by friends, and awarded a Nova Scotia contrast parish by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. This between the vicissitudes of empire and its rewards is reminiscent of theway that imperial servants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often talked about suffering for the empire when that empire was the source of their family's success. By moving on to other British colonies and rebuild some cases con ing lives, these loyalist imperial pioneers paralleled and in to the

tributed

larger

arc of Britain's

ascent.

postrevolutionary

All aspects of these loyalist migrations?how Britain materially coped with the exodus; how it incorporated, and saw itself incorporating, vari ous kinds of others; how the refugees responded to new settings?offer war. insight into how Britain and the empire rebounded from the lost All underline the value of a global and comparative study of this topic. Only by looking at the exodus across different settings can one fully appreciate the innovations that the Revolution sparked in British state of conceptions responsibility. Only by comparing regions such as Canada and the Caribbean can one identify the coexistence of inclusive multiculturalism

in

some

places

with

exclusive

practices

or

in others

ideas. fully see the collision of provincial and metropolitan political a can one account for the and describe Only by taking global approach transnational

intrinsically

experiences

of many

loyalist

refugees,

such

as

Johnston. In all these respects, the loyalist migrants are an valuable group through which to investigate imperial history unusually in this decade of change, particularly as itwas lived and experienced. of the They also suggest two ways in which the historiography American Revolution and the British Empire needs revisiting. One con cerns the global nature of the Revolution, which has for so long been Elizabeth

treated

best

a

by Americanists one. transatlantic

in an

almost

Loyalist

exclusively direct refugees

national

attention,

context rather,

or

to

at

the

repercussions of American ideology elsewhere in the British world and to the circulation of colonial political, religious, and cultural influences around the British Empire. Looking forward into the nineteenth cen tury, it seems plausible to speculate that such connections might have relevance

for

understanding

the

resilience

of

the

Anglo-American

tionship and the emergence of the concept of a greater Britain would include Americans as well as Anglophone subjects overseas.

rela

that

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

232

other area for reappraisal

The

state.

imperial

the

support

treatment

The

an

of

picture

of

the nature of the British

involves

loyalist

at one

appears

refugees

and

centralized,

authoritarian,

increasingly

to

level

expansionist imperial regime, trends that the French Revolutionary Wars would magnify. Indeed the existence and extent of the Napoleonic loyalists' empire-wide diaspora call attention to the widening networks of war,

commerce,

colonies

to one

and opportunities to Britain. Yet the

culture,

peoples, as well as

another

ad

that

linked

hoc

and

the

varied

receptions loyalists encountered also signal the continued significance of in the modern British Empire, contingency and local circumstance which could behave differently in different places as metropolitan poli cies confronted colonial realities. And as the clashes between loyalists British

and

authorities

suggest,

rule

imperial

no

was

more

an

uncon

than it had been tested top-down affair after the American Revolution in the Historians of British interested power relation Empire previously. to at resistance have of nonwhite sub tended look forms by posed ships as well as for the jects. Yet templates for home rule and decolonization idea of a federal greater Britain were established not in Ireland or India theAmerican loyalist stronghold.39 but in Canada, The degree to which loyalist claims to British rights echoed those of their American

nuity between Indian

peers

patriot

to another

points

important

loyalists

encountered

together

several

of

line

the pre- and postwar British empires. White,

conti

black, and in

contradictions

emerging

the British Empire: gaps between liberal promises and paternalist reali ties, competing impulses toward liberty and authority, and tensions it meant

between

what

century

historical after

championed contradictions the

exercise

it be

free."40

So

of

the

proved that older

of

perhaps

seems

only

too

to oppositions

eighteenth

larger

anti-imperial 39On

apt

no

more

empire, over

that

the

century?should

twentieth

such

over "how struggle with the empire aspiration that these emigres?postcolonial concerns have voiced

with

its

empire internal to rec that

that

range of other imperial subjects. As they of Britain's first major imperial defeat, it

loyalist

refugees

in the greater British world and

to overcome

able

the

As

abroad.

the multiethnic

demonstrate,

authority it is no wonder

anticipated those of a wide lived out the consequences

or

at home

British

would

1783

than

oncile

migrants

to be

events

postcolonial

should

alert modern

that would

movements

contribute

readers

to the

to come.

see Robin W. Winks, Canada's role as a template for decolonization, The U.S. and Imperial Ontario, (Toronto, of Canadian Perspectives History: 1979), 38-39 40 and 161. Marshall, Making ofEmpires, Unmaking

Relevance