Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
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for our expulsion.” They dressed in a motley assortment of salvaged clothes, gathered up their bedding and “the shattered remains of our fortune,” and made their way to a boat that would carry them to Nova Scotia, the nearest British sanctuary. In spite of all they had suffered, Jacob and Sally Bailey could not hold back their “bitter emotions of grief ” on leaving their native country. Neither could they contain their relief, two weeks later, when they sailed into Halifax harbor and saw “the Britanic colours flying.”12 Bailey gave thanks to God “for safely conducting me and my family to this retreat of freedom and security from the rage of tyranny and the cruelty of opposition.” Now they were in the British Empire; now they were secure. But the Baileys had landed “in a strange country, destitute of money, clothing, dwelling or furniture,” and their future was in the hands of chance.13
This book follows refugees like Jacob Bailey out of revolutionary America to provide the first global history of the loyalist diaspora. Though historians have probed the experiences of loyalists within the colonies (and especially the ideology of articulate figures like Bailey), the international displacement of loyalists during and after the war has never been described in full.14 Who were these refugees and why did they leave? The answers came in as many forms as the people themselves. Loyalists are often stereotyped as members of a small conservative elite: rich, educated, Anglican, and with strong ties to Britain—qualities captured by the pejorative label “tory,” the nickname for the British Conservative Party.15 In fact, historians estimate that between a fifth and a third of American colonists remained loyal to the king.16 Loyalism cut right across the social, geographical, racial, and ethnic spectrum of early America—making loyalists every bit as “American” as their patriot fellow subjects. Loyalists included recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants alike. They could be royal officials as well as bakers, carpenters, tailors, and printers. There were Anglican ministers as well as Methodists and Quakers; cosmopolitan Bostonians and backcountry farmers in the Carolinas.
Crucially, not all loyalists were white. For the half million black slaves in the thirteen colonies, the revolution presented a striking opportunity when British officers offered freedom to slaves who agreed to fight. Twenty thousand slaves seized this promise, making the revolution the occasion for the largest emancipation of North American slaves until the U.S. Civil War. For native American Indians, too, the revolution posed a pressing choice. Encroached on by generations of land-hungry colonists, several Indian nations—notably the Mohawks in the north and the Creeks in the south—opted to ally themselves with the British Empire. The experiences of loyal whites, blacks, and Indians have generally been segregated into distinct historical narratives, and of course there were important differences among them.17 But loyalists of all backgrounds confronted a common dilemma with Britain’s defeat—to stay or go—and all numbered among the revolution’s refugees. Their stories were analogous and entangled in significant ways, which is why they will be presented together here.
Perhaps the most surprising truth about loyalist refugees was how varied a role ideology might play in their decision-making. Though they shared an allegiance to the king and a commitment to empire, their precise beliefs otherwise ranged widely. Some, like Bailey, expressed sophisticated intellectual reasons for their position. For others, loyalism stemmed from a personal commitment to the existing order of things, a sense that it was better to stick with the devil you knew. Also widespread was a pragmatic opinion that the colonies were economically and strategically better off as part of the British Empire.18 The extent and depth of loyalism points to a fundamental feature of this conflict that the term “revolution” belies. This was quite simply a civil war—and routinely described as such by contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic.19 Polarizing communities, destroying friendships, dividing families—most famously Benjamin Franklin, the founding father, from his only son William, a loyalist—this was the longest war Americans fought before Vietnam, and the bloodiest until the Civil War of 1861–65. Recovering the contingency, coercion, and sheer violence of the American Revolution explains why so many loyalists chose to depart—driven, like Jacob Bailey, by fear of harassment as much as by commitment to principle. By the same token, self-interest could be as powerful a motivator as core beliefs, as the cases of runaway slaves and Britain’s Indian allies perhaps make most clear.
A range of reasons, ideological and otherwise, led all the people in these pages to the same defining choice: to leave revolutionary America.20 This book sets out to explore what happened to them next. Of the sixty thousand loyalists who fled, about eight thousand whites and five thousand free blacks traveled to Britain, often to find themselves strangers in a strange land. The majority of refugees headed straight for Britain’s other colonies, taking up incentives of free land, provisions, and supplies. More than half relocated to the northern British provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec, helping to transform regions once heavily French to the English-dominated Canada of today.* A further six thousand or so migrants, especially from the American south, traveled to Jamaica and the Bahamas—carrying the vast majority of the fifteen thousand exported slaves with them. Some ranged still farther afield. The East India Company army would soon be sprinkled with American-born officers, including two sons of the notorious turncoat Benedict Arnold. An unlucky few ended up among the first convicts sent to Botany Bay, in Australia. And in perhaps the most surprising migration, nearly twelve hundred black loyalists moved to Africa, under the sponsorship of British abolitionists, to found the utopian settlement of Freetown, in Sierra Leone. In short, loyalists landed in every corner of the British Empire. Within a decade of the peace, the map of the loyalist diaspora looked much like the map of the empire as a whole.
A handful of studies have looked at specific figures and sites within this migration. But the loyalists’ worldwide dispersal has never been completely reconstructed.21 A key reason for this lies in the fact that history is so often framed within national boundaries. In the United States, the history of the American Revolution was written by the victors, who were chiefly interested in exploring the revolution’s many innovations and achievements. Loyalist refugees simply fell outside the bounds of American national narratives. They received scant attention from British historians in turn, as embarrassing reminders of defeat—especially given the great triumphs in the Seven Years’ War and the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars that Britons could focus on instead. Loyalists loom largest, instead, in Canadian history, where they were hailed by some nineteenth-century conservatives as the “founding fathers” of a proudly imperial Anglo-Canadian tradition, and honored as “United Empire Loyalists,” a title conferred by the imperial government on refugees and their descendants. But such treatments reaffirmed the “tory” stereotype and may well have contributed to later scholarly neglect.
There is also a practical reason that nobody has written this global history before. In the 1840s, Lorenzo Sabine, the first American historian who delved into this subject, lamented that “Men who . . . separate themselves from their homes . . . who become outlaws, wanderers, and exiles,—such men leave few memorials behind them. Their papers are scattered and lost, and their very names pass from recollection.”22 In fact, it is remarkable how much does survive: personal letters, diaries, memoirs, petitions, muster rolls, diplomatic dispatches, legislative proceedings. The challenge is putting it all together. Fortunately for twenty-first-century scholars (privileged with funding and access), technology has made it possible to pursue international histories in new ways. One can search library catalogues and databases around the world at the touch of a button, and read digitized rare books and documents on a laptop in one’s living room. One can also travel with increasing ease, to piece together paper trails scattered across continents,