The other side of revolution: Loyalists in the British empire

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 65, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 205-232

  Jasanoff, Maya ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949901273     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/25096784     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. Jacob Bailey, "A Journal containing a variety of incidents, "vol. 4: 4-31, in Jacob Bailey Fonds, MG 1, vol. 95 (reel 14900), Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia, Halifax.
2. Paul H. Smith, "The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organizationand Numerical Strength, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 25, no. 2(April 1968): 259-77 (quotation, 261). Smith uses the strength of loyalistregiments to develop a plausible estimate that 19.8 percent of the whitepopulation remained loyal.
3. For the Nash label, see Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
4. The marginal status of the topic of loyalism is underscored by thepredominance of antiquarian and genealogically oriented studies. Some are goldmines, however, from the first serious study of the loyalists, Lorenzo Sabine's Biographical Sketches of the Loyalists of the American Revolution with an Historical Essay (Boston, 1864),
5. to "The On-Line Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies, "maintained by Nan Cole and Todd Braisted, http://www .royalprovincial.com.
6. Major scholarly treatments include Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974);
7. Carol Berkin, Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist (New York, 1974);
8. John E. Ferling, The Loyalist Mind: Joseph Galloway and the American Revolution (University Park, Pa., 1977);
9. Janice Potter, The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1983);
10. and the indispensable work of Robert McCluer Calhoon, including Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America (New York, 1973);
11. Calhoon et al., The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays (Columbia, S.C., 1989);
12. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and George A. Rawlyk, eds., Loyalists and Community in North America (Westport, Conn., 1994).
13. But there is little on loyalists in works that have looked in detail atthe British response to the war: H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the American Revolution (Harlow, Eng., 1998);
14. Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence(Oxford, Eng., 2000);
15. Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture inthe Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000).
16. More work has addressed British radicalism in this period than Britishconservatism, such as John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769-1782 (Kingston, Ontario, 1987),
17. but see Linda Colley, "The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760-1820, " Past and Present, no. 102(February 1984): 94-129;
18. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995);
19. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660-1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 2000).
20. For David Armitage's lament, see Armitage, "Greater Britain: AUseful Category of Historical Analysis?" American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 427-45. esp. 435.
21. See for instance a published response by G. Fiske Brown to my essay, "Loyal to a Fault" (New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2007), takingissue with the attempt "to foment sympathy for what amounted to America'sfirst losers" (Letters, New York Times Magazine, July 15, 2007).
22. On Benjamin Franklin and William Franklin, see Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 2004), 160-63.
23. On contemporary perceptions of the Revolution as a civil war, see amongothers T. H. Breen, "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising, " Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (June 1997): 13-39;
24. Dror Wahrman, "The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution, " American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (October 2001): 1236-62;
25. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (New York, 2003), chap. 7;
26. Edward Larkin, "What Is a Loyalist? The American Revolution as Civil War, " Common-Place 8, no. 1 (October 2007), http://www.common-place.org/ vol-08/no-01/larkin. An estimated nineteen thousand loyalistsserved in forty-two different provincial regiments and militias.
27. See Smith, WMQ 25: 266;
28. Calhoon, Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 502;
29. Stephen Conway, The War of American Independence, 1775-1783 (London, 1995), 46.
30. Legal measures against the loyalists are summarized in Claude Halstead Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution (1902; repr., Bowie, Md., 1989), app. B-C.
31. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 61 (quotation). Standard estimates of the loyalists who left range fromsixty to one hundred thousand. My research thus far has allowed me to documentthe migration of roughly thirty thousand loyalists to the Maritimes (includingthree thousand black loyalists), six thousand to Quebec (including severalhundred Mohawk), five thousand to Florida (from whence many would later move tothe Bahamas or the Caribbean), three thousand to Jamaica, one thousand to the Bahamas, and seven thousand to Britain; to this total must be added a furtherfive to seven thousand black loyalists not included in these tallies. I havealso found evidence to support an estimate of fifteen to seventeen thousandslaves exported by loyalists. Slaves were not loyalists but should be counted inaggregate figures of the number of people dislocated by the war. (I will supplyfull documentation for my estimates in my forthcoming book on the loyalistdiaspora.)
32. For comparison with France, see R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800: The Challenge(Princeton, N.J., 1959), 188.
33. For black loyalist numbers, see Cassandra Pybus, "Jefferson's Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution, " WMQ62, no. 2 (April 2005): 243-64.
34. The Book of Negroes recorded nearly three thousand black loyalistsembarking from New York for Nova Scotia, whereas Simon Schama indicates thatthirty-five hundred blacks ultimately settled there. See Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London, 2005), 223.
35. For Mohawk loyalists, see Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York, 2006).
36. On the loyalist immigration to the Caribbean, see Wilbur H. Siebert, The Legacy of the American Revolution to the British West Indies and Bahamas: AChapter Out of the History of the American Loyalists (Columbus, Ohio, 1913);
37. Michael John Prokopow, "'To the Torrid Zones': The Fortunes and Misfortunes of American Loyalists in the Anglo-Caribbean Basin, 1774-1801"(Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1996).
38. The black loyalist migration to Sierra Leone has most recently beenstudied by Schama, Rough Crossings; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2006).
39. Benedict Arnold's sons Edward and George appear in V. C. P. Hodson, Listof the Officers of the Bengal Army, 1758-1834 (London, 1927), 1: 52. Arnold'sson Edward Shippen Arnold went to India "under the Patronage of Lord Cornwallis, " and his son James (born just after the Revolution in Saint John) followed three years later.
40. Keith Mason, "The American Loyalist Diaspora and the Reconfigurationof the British Atlantic World, " in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf(Baltimore, 2005), 239-59 (quotation, 239).
41. For loyalists in Britain, see Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans:The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789 (London, 1974).
42. For loyalists in Canada, see Alan Skeoch, United Empire Loyalists and the American Revolution (Toronto, Ontario, 1982);
43. Neil Mac Kinnon, This Unfriendly Soil: The Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia, 1783-1791 (Kingston, Ontario, 1986);
44. Janice Potter-Mac Kinnon, While the Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women (Montreal, Quebec, 1993);
45. Norman Knowles, Inventing the Loyalists: The Ontario Loyalist Traditionand the Creation of Usable Pasts (Toronto, Ontario, 1997).
46. Alan Taylor, "The Late Loyalists: Northern Reflections of the Early American Republic, " Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 1 (Spring 2007):1-34.
47. Gould, Persistence of Empire, 181-214 (quotation, 214).
48. P. J. Marshall's argument is laid out in Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750-1783 (Oxford, Eng., 2005), esp. 353-79.
49. On authoritarianism and inclusion, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), chap. 3;
50. Wilson, Sense of the People, chap. 5;
51. Eliga H. Gould, "A Virtual Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial Legacy of the American Revolution, " American Historical Review 104, no. 2(April 1999): 476-89;
52. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006). Brown argues that the American Revolution played a key role in crystallizing British abolitionism.
53. On the notion of difference in the empire, see esp. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867(Chicago, 2002);
54. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003);
55. Wilson, "Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities, " in ANew Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840, ed. Wilson (Cambridge, 2004), 1-26.
56. Colley, Britons, esp. 132-45.
57. For an excellent concise analysis of the war's effects, see John Cannon, "The Loss of America, " in Dickinson, Britain and the American Revolution, 233-57.
58. Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolutionand the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), xii, 238;
59. Brown, Moral Capital, 26-27.
60. James Mario Matra, "A Proposal for establishing a Settlement in New South Wales, " Aug. 23, 1783, in Alan Frost, The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra: Voyager with Cook, American Loyalist, Servant of Empire (Carlton, Australia, 1995), 111-16.
61. Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain (London, 1985), 1 ("refugee"), 5, 24;
62. H. T. Dickinson, "The Poor Palatines and the Parties, " English Historical Review 82, no. 324 (July 1967): 464-85.
63. See "Memorandum by Brook Watson, commissary general, " June 14, 1783, in Wallace Brown, The Good Americans (New York, 1969), 199-201.
64. In Jamaica local authorities' efforts to cope with the refugee influx arereflected in the Kingston Parish Vestry's expenditures of £2131 8s. 2d.in 1783 and 1784 in pensions and other support for loyalists. See Kingston Vestry Minutes 2/6/6, fol. 118, Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town.
65. For loyalist settlement in Quebec, see "Return of disbanded Troops& Loyalists settled upon the King's Lands in the Province of Quebec in the Year 1784, " in Haldimand Papers, Add. MSS 21828, fol. 141.
66. Mac Kinnon, This Unfriendly Soil, 96 ("next to Egyptian Slavery");
67. Diary of Henry Nase, 20 ("blue nose"), in Nase Family Papers, New Brunswick Museum.
68. For supplies from Britain, see "List of items sent out to Nova Scotia" (accompanies Lord North's letter to Parr of May 1783), in Carleton Papers, box 32, item no. 7631, New York Public Library.
69. John Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission for Enquiring intothe Losses, Services, and Claims of the American Loyalists, at the Close of the War between Great Britain and Her Colonies, in 1783 (1815;
70. Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission, 37-40 ("Enquireinto the Circumstances, " 40), 50 ("alarming sum"), 90-91.
71. Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission, 98-99 (quotation). Aparallel may be drawn, however, with the distribution of £60, 000 amongmore than five thousand "indigent" Royalist officers in the Restoration.
72. See P. R. Newman, "The 1663 List of Indigent Royalist Officers Considered as a Primary Source for the Study of the Royalist Army, "Historical Journal 30, no. 4 (December 1987): 885-904.
73. On John Eardley-Wilmot's later support for French refugees, see Robert Tombs and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (New York, 2007), 213.
74. On the portrait of Eardley-Wilmot and the Reception of the American Loyalists image depicted on the wall behind him, see Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 219-22(quotations, 219), 565-67.
75. John Eardley-Wilmot said that pensions were granted to 588 people, "chiefly Widows, Orphans, and Merchants, who had no means of livelihood, but had lost no real or personal Estate." See Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission, 95. Keith Mason and Christopher Leslie Brown interpretthe image in much the sense conveyed by Eardley-Wilmot.
76. See Mason, "American Loyalist Diaspora, " 245-46;
77. See Leslie Kaye Reinhardt, "British and Indian Identities in a Painting by Benjamin West, " Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 3 (Spring1998): 283-305.
78. On the misbegotten Bahamas scheme, see Wilbur Henry Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785: The Most Important Documents Pertaining Thereto, Edited with an Accompanying Narrative (Deland, Fla., 1929), 1: 139. Many Iroquois, too, were abandoned on the American side of the border.
79. See Taylor, Divided Ground, 111-13.
80. Slaves were listed on musters as "servants" to help stave offpossible property claims from the United States. Incomplete records suggest thatloyalists brought some 300 slaves to Upper Canada, 1, 269 to Nova Scotia, and441 to Saint John. See Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2d ed.(Montreal, Quebec, 1997), 34-43 (quotation, 37).
81. Wilbur H. Siebert says that about 5, 000 blacks went to Jamaica from Savannah and 2, 613 from Charleston. See Siebert, Legacy of the American Revolution, 7-8, 15. A report presented to the Bahamas House of Assembly in April 1789 estimated that twelve hundred whites and thirty-six hundred blacksarrived in the Bahamas in 1784 and 1785.
82. On Dunmore in the Bahamas, see Whittington B. Johnson, Race Relations inthe Bahamas, 1784-1834: The Nonviolent Transformation from a Slave to a Free Society (Fayetteville, Ark., 2000), 4, 42, 69. Lord Dunmore's rampantself-aggrandizement did nothing to restore his popularity.
83. See Michael Craton, A History of the Bahamas (London, 1968), 173-80.
84. See for example Catherine Hall, "The Nation Within and Without, " in Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867, ed. Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall(Cambridge, 2000), 179-233.
85. On the citizenship status of loyalists, see James H. Kettner, "The Development of American Citizenship in the Revolutionary Era: The Idea of Volitional Allegiance, " American Journal of Legal History 18, no. 3 (July1974): 208-42.
86. For more perceptual distinctions, see Stephen Conway, "From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa1739-1783, " WMQ 59, no. 1 (January 2002): 65-100.
87. On the Wells family, see Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1: 189, 205;
88. Louisa Susannah Wells, The Journal of a Voyage from Charlestown to London(New York, 1968), 87, 111-12. For Baptists, the central figures in Jamaica were George Liele and Moses Baker.
89. See David Benedict, A General History of the Baptist Denomination in America, and Other Parts of the World (Boston, 1813), 2: 189-92, 194-206;
90. Clement Gayle, George Liele: Pioneer Missionary to Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica, 1982);
91. John W. Pulis, ed., Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World(New York, 1999). In Nova Scotia Baptist congregations were established by David George, who moved to Sierra Leone (George had been baptized by, and takenhis name from, George Liele).
92. John Marrant, a free black who had been a missionary to the Cherokeebefore the war and pressed into naval service as a musician during it, founded Methodist congregations. See Marrant, A Narrative of the Lord's wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black . . . , 6th ed. (London, 1788).
93. See also Alexander Pringle, Prayer for the Revival Of Religion In All The Protestant Churches, and for The Spread Of The Gospel Among Heathen Nations, Recommended . . . (Edinburgh, Scotland, [1796]), 101-11, 127-50.
94. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution(Cambridge, Mass., 1967).
95. Thomas Hutchinson, in Brown, Good Americans, 30 ("Tory");
96. Benjamin Marston, in Mac Kinnon, This Unfriendly Soil, 118("explained");
97. Taylor, Journal of the Early Republic 27: 7 ("we cast the Loyalists").
98. Gail Saunders, Bahamian Loyalists and Their Slaves (London, 1983), 58("not bound"); printed handbill enclosed in John Maxwell to Lord Sydney, June 29, 1784, in National Archives, CO 23/25, fol. 154 ("topreserve and maintain");
99. Saunders, Bahamian Loyalists and Their Slaves, 45, 68-69.
100. For William Cobbett in Saint John, see D. G. Bell, Early Loyalist Saint John: The Origin of New Brunswick Politics, 1783-1786 (Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1983), 130-31, 142-44. The election is treated in detail on 104-15.Neighboring Nova Scotia also suffered considerable disruption in its November1785 elections; the first result was nullified, the second conducted in anenvironment of great "bitterness [and] rancour, " though the centralline of tension in that province was between loyalists and preloyalists(settlers who were there before the loyalists).
101. On Sierra Leone government and rebellion, see Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 38-87;
102. Pybus, Epic Journeys, xiii-xvi, 169-202.
103. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 87 ("thorough Jacobins");
104. On Henri Christophe, see O'Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 181.
105. For the evacuation of Saint Augustine, see Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1: 177. Siebert's description is wonderfully evocative, though, alas, not footnoted.
106. See Carole Watterson Troxler, "Loyalist Refugees and the British Evacuation of East Florida, 1783-1785, " Florida Historical Quarterly 60, no. 1 (July 1981): 1-28, esp. 28. The list indicates "Lewis Johnston, Jr., " but given that Lewis Johnston Jr. went to the Bahamas and Lewis Johnston Sr. went to Glasgow, the entry must surely be an error. William Johnston's subsequent journey to Jamaica was clearly not unique.
107. Another Scottish doctor in Jamaica complained in 1787 about the"overabundance of physicians, " which he attributed to the "vastnumber of Medical people who were . . . refugees." See Alan L. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992). 55.
108. Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist, 85 (" muchexhausted"), 90 ("On the morning").
109. Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist, 110.
110. For loyalist women's responses to migration, see Mary Beth Norton, "Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists, " WMQ 33, no. 3 (July 1976): 386-409. The Johnston family memberswho presented claims to the Loyalist Claims Commission were Elizabeth's father, John Lightenstone; her father-in-law, Lewis Johnston Sr.; her husband, William Martin Johnston; and her brother-in-law Lewis Johnston Jr., who settled in the Bahamas and filed the largest claim of all, for a house in Savannah, 1, 650acres, and 400 cattle.
111. See Peter Wilson Coldham, American Loyalist Claims (Washington, D.C., 1980), 263-64, 288-89.
112. On Canada's role as a template for decolonization, see Robin W. Winks, The Relevance of Canadian History: U.S. and Imperial Perspectives (Toronto, Ontario, 1979). 38-39.
113. Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires, 161.