Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
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Being to inhabit. Tories are vexed with Tories; they curse the Powers to whom they owe Allegiance, and thus render themselves rebellious.”25 Advertisements crowded the columns of the Royal Gazette announcing sales and business closures, and informing loyalists when and at which wharf to board their ships. British regulars and Hessians packed their gear and began to leave by the regiment-load. Cannon came down from the ramparts, munitions were crated up. The commissary’s office sold off its surplus stock: 63,596 pairs of shoes and 68,093 pairs of worsted stockings, 10,100 shoe buckles, 21,000 needles.26 On summer Wednesdays and Saturdays, the Wagon Office auctioned its draught and saddle horses, carts, and equipage.27
Colonel Beverley Robinson had an especially close look at the loyalist plight during these last hectic months of British occupation. As one of three inspectors of refugees, he and his colleagues visited and assessed the needs of hundreds of “distressed Loyalists” who had poured into the city from as far away as Florida. The inspectors distributed nearly £9,000 (New York currency) to 529 refugees for the first quarter of 1783 alone.28 He surely knew personally some of the 212 New Yorkers on that list, reduced to destitution from positions of perfect comfort. Now he, like them, had to decide where to locate his family in future.
The Robinsons had fought a good war. Colonel Robinson himself played a role in one of the revolution’s most notorious incidents, the 1780 defection of Continental Army general Benedict Arnold to the British. As patriot commander of West Point, Arnold had taken up residence in Robinson’s confiscated house, just across the Hudson River from the fort, and there plotted to surrender West Point to the British. Robinson was the perfect British decoy to establish contact with Arnold. Sailing up to West Point on the British warship Vulture, he solicited a meeting with Arnold on the pretext of personal business related to the house, and Arnold made his infamous escape to the British on the Vulture a short time later. Soon enough, Robinson’s eldest son Beverley Jr. was campaigning behind the turncoat general in Virginia. Meanwhile his sons Morris and Phil Robinson had become patriot prisoners of war. The colonel spent eighteen months trying to get the boys released and succeeded at last “in consequence of the embers of friendship that still remained unextinguished” between himself and George Washington.29
American independence, Robinson could see, would force “the Loyalists of America to depend on the mercy of their enemies for the restoration of their possessions, which we are well assured they will never grant.” The terms of the peace treaty only confirmed his view that a future in the United States would be untenable. Robinson’s Loyal American Regiment had been promised land grants in Nova Scotia. His men, like the majority of loyalist veterans, traveled north together to settle tracts assigned by regiment, trading in their comradeship in arms for neighboring farms. The colonel himself preferred to go to Britain, “with the hopes that the government . . . will not suffer us to starve but allow us a small pittance.”30 (His New Jersey counterpart Cortlandt Skinner made the same choice, moving his large family to England while his former regiment settled in the Saint John River valley.)31 But as Robinson confessed in an embarrassed memorial to Carleton, “my circumstances are so very distressing that I cannot leave this place, without some assistance from Government.” He required a six-month advance on his pay to actually make the move.32 In the late summer of 1783, Robinson set off for England with his wife, daughters, and some of his sons. Beverley Jr. went to Nova Scotia with the Loyal Americans, while Phil remained garrisoned in New York City with his British infantry unit. This parting of the ways scored a painful line in the Robinson family, one among many clans dispersed by emigration. In years to come, the scattered relatives remained connected through affectionate, newsy letters—but several would never meet again.
Of course, in New York as in other British-held cities, not all loyalists left. Some families chose to split the challenges of staying and going, with female family members remaining in situ to pursue property claims (in some states, dower property had been excluded from confiscation) and men going on ahead to scout out new places of residence. Yet considering how much stronger the pull of stasis can be over change, the striking thing is just how many people did choose to go. Ultimately the total recorded exodus of New York loyalists to Nova Scotia alone amounted to nearly thirty thousand. A further twenty-five hundred or so traveled to Quebec and to Abaco, in the Bahamas.33 All told, the evacuation of New York City may represent the largest (proportionate to population) civilian transfer in American history.
Not many loyalist civilians were left in New York by November 1783, when Carleton fixed the date for his own departure. The fleet waiting off Staten Island on Evacuation Day was Britain-bound, carrying government personnel, along with the remaining troops and refugees. Nineteen-year-old Phil Robinson was among the last British troops to march out of the city on Evacuation Day, “the only one of the family that witnessed that most humiliating scene.”34 Carleton’s confidant William Smith also lingered till the bitter end. He wrote up a power of attorney for his wife, Janet, who was staying on to manage family affairs, drafted his last will and testament, packed his trunks, and rowed out with Carleton to the Ceres—the same ship that had carried the commander in chief to America eighteen months before. Crammed into a cabin “where five pens are scribbling around one Table,” Smith wrote fondly back to Janet on shore. “Give yourself not a moment’s uneasiness,” he reassured her. “Every Comfort is to be found here.” Still, Smith could not hide his impatience to set off, especially when they remained inexplicably at anchor a week later and he watched the celebratory fireworks exploding over Bowling Green. Writing yet “another Farewell” to his wife, he hoped that “no Accident happens by the Fireworks which I see. . . . Adieu to you all. Imbrace Harriet, and tell her I shall never forget to love her, if she loves you and obeys all your commands. Yours ever ever WS.” Two days later the Ceres rounded Sandy Hook and headed into the open sea.35
With it, the British occupation of the United States officially ended. Henceforth the story of loyalist refugees would continue in other parts of the British world, from Halifax to Nassau, to London and to cities yet to be founded. But even with New York City formally surrendered, the loyalist exodus was not finished. For at the southern tip of British North America, on the beaches of East Florida, loyalists were about to perform the last, least expected, and most vigorously contested evacuation of all, as they learned in horror that their asylum was to be ceded to Spain. From hopeful place of refuge to last point of departure, East Florida bridged two phases of the refugee experience, linking the displacements initiated by war to the ongoing quest for a haven in peace.
IT HAD TAKEN Elizabeth Johnston three tedious weeks to travel down the Georgia coast to St. Augustine, boxed up on shipboard, always in motion, even in her sleep. When at last they turned into the St. Augustine inlet, they felt a stomach-dropping thud as their boat struck a sandbar. Fortunately, they managed to clear the obstruction, which was more than could be said for another Charleston convoy, wrecked against the shoals and ruining many refugees’ carefully exported property. Half a dozen ships keeled askew on the sand, sentinels of loss. Johnston’s first impressions of this flat, foreign place were not good. She found all her in-laws “much dissatisfied with their situation,” grumbling over their future prospects. Little Andrew had been sick; the weather seemed “constantly wet or cloudy,” and as she wrote her husband, she “repent[ed] sincerely of not going with you to New York... for what is life when separated from my kind William.”36
But a touch of sun and time to settle in soon awakened Johnston to the charms and curiosities of this “very salubrious” spot. She would have recognized dozens of familiar faces from Savannah there, though Georgia this was not: she could see that much in the compressed