Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

Chapters 4-6 compare lives of loyalist refugees in Britain and Canadian territories including Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and what is now Ontario. Jasanoff highlights patterns in loyalist experiences in these parts of the British Empire; while she emphasizes loyalists’ diversity, she is nevertheless dedicated to discerning commonalities. An especially thematic commonality, which the text explores at length, was loyalists’ frequent confrontation with the British government’s failure (and, at times, perhaps refusal) to live up to their hopeful expectations.

Due to the scale of the exodus, loyalist refugees often lived near people they knew from their former homes in the American colonies. The British government promised to help loyalist refugees, not because loyalists had rights but out of a sense of paternalistic benevolence born of British pride. However, this assistance often failed to placate loyalist refugees, causing tension among and outbursts from the loyalist masses. In response, officials turned to increasingly authoritarian tactics to control local populations. This situation carries one of the text’s broader overarching themes: reality contradicting expectation. Not only does the loyalists’ conflict with the British government undermine romanticized historical narratives of the harmonious relationship between loyalists and their government, but it shows the disillusionment of the loyalists themselves.

Even British culture itself was sometimes a complicated reality for incoming refugees who expected a smooth transition. Though Britain was a foreign country to American-born loyalists, their British cultural and linguistic connections made it a natural destination for loyalist refugees—but even while loyalists felt an initial sense of safety when they arrived in the center of the British Empire, they found London expensive and unfriendly. The influx of loyalist refugees, however, meant they often had old friends from America as neighbors, exemplified by Beverley Robinson, who established his family close to fellow New Yorkers Isaac Low and Charles Inglis. Black loyalists who moved to Britain also tended to live near one another, in east London, in difficult conditions that drew attention from philanthropists who developed resettlement plans.

Due to a successful lobbying campaign by displaced loyalists, the British government established the Loyalist Claims Commission to compensate loyalists forced to abandon property in America. However, further highlighting certain British realities’ disparity with idealistic expectations, Jasanoff emphasizes that the government felt it did not have a legal obligation to help loyalists but chose to do so to uphold British pride (a fact subtly suggesting the empire’s nationalistic proclivities). In practice, the commission often failed to provide fair compensation to refugees, frustrating loyalists. There is the sad fate of Isaac Low, who died worrying about his finances, as an example of loyalist disappointment with the commission. The author also relates how Samuel Shoemaker obtained an informal visit with the royal family but struggled to make his case for compensation to the Loyalist Claims Commission, showing how difficult it was for loyalists to access government assistance.

Loyalist refugees in Nova Scotia had similar negative experiences with the British government. Describing the arrival of Jacob Bailey in Halifax, Jasanoff shows that loyalists in Nova Scotia lived among old friends from the American colonies, but refugees and British officials came into conflict over the distribution of land. Jasanoff details this tension from the perspective of Benjamin Marston, working as a surveyor in the new settlement of Shelburne, and points out the value of Marston’s journals as primary sources. Marston found the loyalists unruly and disrespectful. New Brunswick, too, showed a divisive relationship between loyalists and the British government. Jasanoff argues that the kind of populism displayed in the 1784 riot in Nova Scotia frightened New Brunswick officials, who came to regard average loyalists as incapable of engaging in peaceful self-rule. Further west, in what was then Quebec and is now Ontario, Joseph Brant worked to establish Brant’s Town. Brant visited London in 1785 to petition the British government for support for this project—however, using the monarch’s own words to give readers a sense of the attitude he conveyed, Jasanoff highlights how King George III denied the government owed Mohawks or any other loyalists for their sacrifices in the Revolutionary War but granted support in the name of upholding national dignity. This is, by now, a well-established pattern: The British government’s beneficence, far from its idealized image, is most often motivated by some angle of nationalistic self-interest rather than genuine care for the loyalists.

Jasanoff contends that the Constitutional Act of 1791, known as the Canada Act, furthered the trend toward authoritarian rule. She argues that the Act was a reaction against the democratic culture of the United States. The Act created the territory of Upper Canada, which John Simcoe sought to govern as though it were part of Britain itself rather than a colonial outpost, hoping to avoid the populism evidenced in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Jasanoff notes the irony, though, that Simcoe actively sought to draw settlers from the United States, ensuring that American political attitudes would continue to shape Canadian history.

As with the latter scenario, an element of irony pervades much of the text’s narrative as part of the broad theme of reality contradicting expectations. One of the deeper ironies, however, goes relatively acknowledged: white supremacy’s thriving coexistence with the humanitarian “spirit of 1783.” For example, Marston fled Shelburne during the riot of 1784 in which white loyalists violently drove Black settlers from their homes. This chaos reflected racial animosity toward Black fellow loyalists such as David George, whose narrow escape from mob violence Jasanoff recounts, using his own words to convey the resolve he showed in the face of extreme personal danger. Additionally, the next chapters reference some of the brutalities of chattel slavery. While Jasanoff maintains that “spirit of 1783” was marked by humanitarian ideals and that, by the end of the 1780s, this spirit “had demonstrably marked the refugees’ world” (141), such strident racism—also seen in certain imperialist sentiments—seems to fly in the face of that spirit. Part of this complex, ironic contradiction is rooted in the ideals of the Enlightenment era in which the narrative takes place.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement celebrating humanism and progress, but the fixation on both progress and the greatness of humanity led some Europeans to envision themselves as “enlightened” figures at the fore of an evolving human history. Such an inflated self-image underpinned a sense of European superiority and, these Europeans imagined, consecrated them as the great cartographers of humanity; in a 1777 correspondence, seminal Enlightenment philosopher Edmund Burke famously remarked on the European exploration of other peoples (whom he implied were inferior to Europeans) and asserted that “the great map of mankind is unrolled at once.” Thus, through gravely ironic distortions, Enlightenment humanist ideals became the dehumanizing ideological foundations of British imperialism and other expressions of white supremacy. Still, Jasanoff sees nuance in the milieu and outlines some of the loyalists’ truly humanitarian efforts; in the next chapter, she recounts how Dunmore (John Murray) became controversial by criticizing loyalist enslavers’ abusiveness.