Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
Читать онлайн книгу.
true. By rejecting his plan—the last concerted American attempt to preserve ties with the British Empire—Congress moved inexorably closer to civil war. With tensions already near breaking point, it was mostly a matter of time before something touched off outright conflict.
The alarm came before dawn on the morning of April 19, 1775, when militia members in Lexington, Massachusetts, were rustled out of bed with news that British soldiers were coming from Boston to seize a patriot weapons store in nearby Concord. The militia mustered on Lexington Green as fast as they could and hastily readied their muskets as seven hundred well-disciplined British regulars marched, wheeled, and advanced toward them. Then a gun went off. Nobody knew who fired the “shot heard ’round the world” (as the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson would famously dub it), British redcoat or American militiaman.20 But that didn’t really matter. For despite their differences in power and purpose, the two groups of men were more alike than any other enemies they had faced. To them and thousands more now engulfed by war, the American Revolution did not look like a world-historical drama about the forging of a new nation. This was a bitter civil war about the division of an old empire. It accelerated a painful process in which British subjects were increasingly divided into opposing camps, as Americans and Britons.21 The problem for loyalists was that they had affiliations to both, being at once rooted American colonists and committed British subjects.
FOR THE CONGRESSMEN meeting in Philadelphia, ideas and beliefs were an explicit subject of debate. But for the two and a half million Americans caught up in a civil war, ideas were hardened—if not superseded—by violence. The beginning of conflict was enough to push even some former congressmen to the other side, including prominent New York merchant Isaac Low. Though Low had resisted the abuse of imperial authority since the 1760s, he felt progressively alienated by the steps toward war. When the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, Low resigned his seat and stayed home; and when asked to purchase gunpowder for patriot troops a short time later, he withdrew entirely from government and soon lent his support to the British.22 Within weeks of the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, colonies established committees of safety that administered loyalty oaths to newly formed patriot legislatures. These oaths became a crucial marker of difference between patriots and loyalists. People who refused to swear them could be jailed, punished with property confiscation, or banished outright. Popular justice also followed those who failed to comply. Jacob Bailey, the Pownalborough minister, was comparatively fortunate that only his sheep and cows were attacked. At least two dozen others in 1775 shared the fate of Thomas Brown, by being tortured and publicly humiliated with tarring and feathering.23
Then there was the spreading violence of the war itself. Revolution reached five-year-old Catherine Skinner one night when soldiers broke into her house, yanked her from her bed, and plunged their bayonets into her mattress to see if her father was hiding underneath. Catherine’s father, Cortlandt Skinner, New Jersey’s last royal attorney general, had rebuffed patriot overtures (like Brown) and escaped to British lines, leaving his family in the New Jersey countryside. Rebel raids trapped the Skinner family as prisoners in their own house; they hid in the cellar from gunshots, famished to the point of pain and tears. At last Catherine’s mother managed to lead her ten youngest children to safety on her eldest daughter’s farm. The days grew sharp and short, winter coming on. Every time they went into the fields they found another outbuilding burned, another of their pigs or cows poisoned by the rebels. The Skinners scraped through the winter of 1776–77 on stores of buckwheat buried beneath the hard-frozen ground. One frigid day the youngest of the family, a smiling boy of fourteen months, died. For days they kept the tiny body inside the house, unable to let him go with no priest to perform a funeral and no church accessible. In the end, Catherine’s eldest siblings “carried the poor little thing out in the night and buried him in the corner of a field.”24 Traumatic scenes like this imprinted Catherine—and probably her younger sister Maria too—powerfully enough for her to recall them vividly more than sixty years later.
Loyalists closely monitored the progress of the war, sometimes hiding out to avoid confrontations, sometimes moving to seek shelter within British lines. Of course, at the outset it was reasonable to think that Britain would win the conflict handily. But a worrying indication to the contrary came when the British decided to evacuate Boston in March 1776 in the face of a patriot attack. In the orders to abandon the city, British general William Howe offered free passage to any loyalist civilians who wished to follow—unwittingly setting a precedent for many more evacuations to come. At least eleven hundred loyalists sailed with the departing troops for Halifax in Nova Scotia.25 “By all accounts, there never existed a more miserable set of beings, than these wretched creatures now are,” said George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army. “Conscious of their black ingratitude, they chose to commit themselves . . . to the mercy of the waves in a tempestuous season, rather than meet their offended countrymen.”26 Washington’s contempt aside, the refugees would have agreed with his portrayal of their woeful condition. Leaving behind almost all their property and personal connections, the Boston refugees were the first loyalists to experience mass evacuation—and the first group to discover the hardships of imperial exile.
In New York City, where British military efforts now concentrated, the assistant rector of Trinity Church, Charles Inglis, anxiously watched the situation deteriorate around him. As an ordained priest in the Church of England, Inglis (like Jacob Bailey) could not brook the prospect of forswearing his allegiance to the king who stood at the head of his church. But he felt sick at the sight of his country at war. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published the pamphlet Common Sense, a strident and hugely compelling argument in favor of American independence and republicanism. Inglis quickly scribbled out a deeply felt, intellectually grounded rebuttal called The True Interest of America, Impartially Stated. “I find no Common Sense in this pamphlet but much uncommon phrenzy,” Inglis wrote. “Even Hobbes would blush to own its author for a disciple.” Inglis vividly described the devastating consequences that he thought Paine’s vision would have for America: “Ruthless war... will ravage our once happy land....Torrents of blood will be spilt, and thousands reduced to beggary and wretchedness.” What America needed instead, Inglis argued, was a reformed imperial relationship to secure American “Liberties, Property, and Trade.” “No person breathing has a deeper sense of the present distresses of America, than I,” he insisted, “or would rejoice more to see these removed, and our liberties settled on a permanent, constitutional foundation.” But republicanism truly did seem to him a formula for anarchy, and independence a recipe for decline. He owed it “to God, to my King and Country” to resist. Where Paine had presented his text as the anonymous work of “an Englishman,” Inglis—who was born in Ireland—published his pamphlet under the proud label of “an American.”27
Inglis hoped that Paine’s pamphlet, “like others, will sink in oblivion.”28 Instead it was a runaway sensation. Said to have sold half a million copies in 1776 alone—enough for one in every five Americans to own one—the pamphlet helped convert Americans en masse to the idea of independence.29 Copies of Inglis’s pamphlet, by contrast, were seized from the printer and burned in what Inglis condemned as “a violent attack on the Liberty of the Press.” More outrages followed. The New York committee of safety ordered the loyalist-leaning governors of King’s College—today’s Columbia University—to empty out the college library so the facility could be turned into a barracks for Continental Army troops. In May 1776, suspected New York loyalists were rounded up and forced to hand over any weapons in their possession; the next month, more were seized by a mob, “rode on Rails, their Cloth’s torn off, & much beaten & abused. Many were obliged to fly out of the City, & durst not return.” By summer, Inglis and his friends were living in “the utmost Consternation