Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

Opening with George Washington leading patriot forces into New York City on November 25, 1783, Jasanoff follows a common trope in American history writing, portraying the Revolutionary War as a glorious victory. The author then asks readers to consider the alternative perspective, the way that moment looked to loyalist Americans. This rhetorical strategy not only begins her uncommon history of the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, but it blazons one of her central scholarly motivations: challenging dominant historical narratives. The densely informative Introduction outlines the main themes of the book.

Initiating a thematic focus on correcting simplistic loyalist stereotypes, Jasanoff informs readers of the human scale and, especially, the diversity of the diaspora, involving approximately 75,000 people from varied backgrounds. While addressing popular academic misconceptions of the diaspora is part of the author’s motivation, her work’s importance also derives from how the topic is relatively unexplored; scholarship on the diaspora, as a hugely influential global phenomenon, is sorely lacking. Addressing this context for her work, she considers ideological and practical reasons why historians have not fully investigated the diaspora as a global phenomenon. For example, only recent technological advances, relating to archival access, have made her study possible. Noting that she traveled throughout the historical British Empire to visit archives, Jasanoff highlights useful primary sources, a practice she maintains throughout the book.

Describing the travails of John Bailey, an Anglican missionary harassed by patriots for his refusal to break a sacred oath to the British monarch, Jasanoff introduces a richly descriptive narrative form of writing to complement exposition of historical facts. Rendering events in lifelike detail, she portrays events from the perspectives of specific people, making experiences more personal and conveying the nuanced and varied motivations loyalists had for remaining loyal to the British and fleeing the United States.

Introducing the strategy of examining the lives of the loyalist diaspora, Jasanoff also outlines a pattern of common values in the diversity of loyalist experiences. She calls these values “the spirit of 1783,” playing on the concept of the “spirit of 1776,” commonly used by historians to describe the global effects of the Revolutionary War. The “spirit of 1783” has three key features. First, American loyalist refugees helped expand the British Empire. Second, the diaspora spread a distinctive set of humanitarian ideals. Third, loyalist refugees often came into conflict with British imperial authorities over issues of political representation and self-rule, the same issues that caused the Revolutionary War in the first place.

The Introduction outlines the geographical areas covered in subsequent chapters. Given the global nature of the loyalist diaspora, and Jasanoff’s representation of so many characters across the British Empire, this geographical outline proves a useful orientation device.