Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  In the fall of 1782, a new governor arrived in Halifax to assume the reins of command. John Parr, like so many other colonial officials of the period, was an Irish-born army officer, blooded on the battlefields of Culloden and Minden.38 Nearing sixty, Parr expected the job to be just the sinecure he desired at the end of a long military career. He reached his post in October in a moment of unusual calm, suspended between the cessation of hostilities with American patriots and the great influx of refugees to come. Settling comfortably into one of three governor’s residences, he beamed with pleasure at his handsome income, his accomplished French chef, and well-stocked cellar, “determind to be happy and to make everyone so who comes within my line.”39 Within a matter of months, his vow would be tested to an extraordinary degree.

  No sooner did Parr take office than he received a letter from Sir Guy Carleton informing him of the imminent arrival of more than six hundred loyalist refugees. Following Carleton’s advice, Parr planned to give three hundred acres to every individual man, five or six hundred acres to each family, and to provide the newcomers with food, wooden boards, and other supplies. New townships were to be laid out with two thousand acres set aside for the church, and another thousand acres for a school.40 Parr looked forward to welcoming these additions to the population, “especially to the Working people of whom there is great want.”41 It was a good thing he did, since the early trickle quickly swelled. In January 1783, the agents for the Port Roseway Association in New York came to scout out their settlement, for which they then had some fifteen hundred subscribers.42 Refugee fleets began arriving from New York in April. By June 1783, Parr reported that “there have arriv’d in different places upwards of seven thousand persons including men women and children”; ten weeks later, the figure had become “upwards of 12,000 Souls.” By the end of September, he said, “by Conjecture the whole already arriv’d may amount to upwards of 18,000 persons.”43 In late November he had revised his estimate upward to “venture to say, they considerably exceed 25000 souls,” crowding into Halifax, Annapolis, and the new settlements at Port Roseway and Saint John.44 When surveys of the Nova Scotia population were completed in the late summer of 1784, they counted more than twenty-eight thousand new inhabitants—twice the number of prewar settlers established in the province.45 By the end of the migration, at least thirty thousand refugees had come into Nova Scotia, including approximately three thousand free blacks and twelve hundred slaves.46

  Only a minority of the newcomers, mostly merchants and professionals, lived in Halifax. Few of them warmed quickly to the provincial capital. A Boston lawyer grumbled to another exile, “The weather is … abominably dull and the Town looks as Solitary compared with New York as Newport used to do when we were there. Every thing is intollerably dear and the old Inhabitants are accumulating wealth at a great rate by the exorbitant prices which they extort from the Strangers.”47 He did not wish on anybody “this stupid insipid, extravagantly dear and horrid rainy stormy hole.”48 As in Britain, many relied on friendship to lighten the hardships of exile. Mayflower descendant Edward Winslow, formerly the muster-master general of loyalist regiments in America and one of the most prominent leaders of the Nova Scotia refugee community, wrote cheerfully to his best friend in London that “we are now making regular arrangements for the Winter’s amusement—Whist Club, Saturday’s Club, &c &c &c.” to tide them through the long December nights.49 “This is a Young Climate,” Winslow reported, “it has all the marks of Virginity about it. It breaks wind furiously. Spits a little. We however contrive to manage it.”50

  Much as some loyalists complained about Halifax, however (and it must be noted that Winslow and his friends were both remarkably privileged and rather curmudgeonly by temper), life for the refugees in other parts of the province presented far more serious challenges. Arcadia this was not, decided Colonel Robert Morse, chief British military engineer in North America, sent by Sir Guy Carleton in 1783 to scout out Nova Scotia’s potential for loyalist settlement. The coast alone, with its “high, bold, rocky” cliffs, looked so “stony and barren” it was “commonly called an Ironbound Shore.” As for “the interior of this country,” Morse opined, it was “so much unknown that very little description can be given of it.” Only a handful of real roads traversed the forests; the rest of the byways were “simply cuts through the Wood, with Trees marked to discover them.” “From bad Weather, and other Obstructions common through a Country entirely in Wood,” it took Morse fully two weeks to struggle across the one hundred miles separating Port Roseway on the south shore from Annapolis Royal on the opposite coast—and that was in congenial summer weather. There was promise in the land, to be sure, and some of Morse’s findings echoed the optimistic reports circulating in New York newspapers in the summer of 1783. He envisioned sprawling orchards of apples, plums, and pears, pointed to bounteous wild fruits and nourishing populations of moose and black bear, and admired acre upon wooded acre of strong, straight timber. Yet so much of the terrain remained unbroken wilderness that it was hard to see how it could be turned quickly into farmland, while those areas already settled seemed to be in a sorry, “neglected state,” a problem he attributed to “want of Industry, Money, and perhaps … protection.”51

  Despite Commissary-General Brook Watson’s best efforts in New York to provide loyalists with food and supplies, most refugees arrived with few possessions to prepare them for the conditions in which they now found themselves. Jacob Bailey in Annapolis—population approximately twelve hundred—watched nine shiploads of New Yorkers disembark into a town barely able to contain them: “Every habitation is crowded, and many are unable to procure any lodgings.” Remembering his own flight, he felt particular sympathy for the higher-class individuals who had “left large possessions in the colonies” only to find themselves in a “destitute condition, render[ing] them very affecting objects of compassion.”52 It did not help that so many of the New York refugees arrived in the late autumn, leaving Parr scrambling to get them “under Cover, before the severity of Winter setts in.”53 The Nova Scotian weather delivered a particularly nasty shock to arrivals from St. Augustine, “the poorest and most distress’d of all Beings, without a Shilling, almost Naked, and destitute of every necessary of life.” “Charity has made me venture to give them warm Cloathing, with other things to prevent them from perrishing by the severity of this Climate,” said Parr.54

  During the war, the most “Sickly & Naked” refugees had been placed in the Halifax poor house and provided with clothes at municipal expense.55 The sheer number of needy loyalists now swarming over the province called for response on a much larger scale. Carleton had promised Nova Scotian migrants twelve months’ food rations, at the end of which time, it was hoped, they would be able to support themselves from their own crops. But the magazines at New York held only six months’ worth of food for the émigrés, while Nova Scotia’s farms could not alone make up the shortfall.56 By the beginning of the winter of 1783–84, a provisioning crisis loomed. Though ministers in distant Whitehall seemed oblivious to the problems of supply, provincial officials confronted dearth up close in the refugees’ drawn, hungry faces. Thousands of loyalists “must suffer extreme distress if deprived,” wrote Major General John Campbell, one of the officials most closely involved in refugee relief, and “it becomes a very unpleasant task to refuse them, especially as the refusal has the appearance of a violation of public faith.” As an emergency measure, at the height of winter he made the executive decision to buy an extra month’s worth of provisions to distribute. He also dispatched a team of muster agents to travel through the settlements “to examine the Claims of every individual and to discriminate between such as are able to obtain a subsistence and the real objects of distress.”57 Through the spring and summer of 1784, the muster agents journeyed from one village to the next, counting residents and vigilantly separating out the small number of apparent fraudsters from among the thousands of loyalists who had a legitimate claim on government provisions.58 In
this as in other enumerative exercises (the assessment of loyalist claims and the registration of black loyalists, to name two), government relief was closely allied with government caution.

  By April 1784, Nova Scotians had still not heard anything from Britain on how to resolve the food shortage, while the situation on the ground grew “serious and alarming.” “Multitudes … will inevitably perish, unless the Royal Bounty of Provisions should be continued for some time longer,” Campbell exclaimed, and forwarded an impassioned petition from New York loyalists complaining that “the condition of the poorer people who compose the bulk of the Loyalists is more pityable than when they quitted New York.” “The sudden stoppage of the rations of so many thousand indigent people, most of whom are destitute of any trade or employment by which they can gain a livelyhood,” he warned, “will raise commotions of the most dangerous tendency, especially as they considered the national faith pledged to them by the Commander in Chief at New York, for at least one years provisions from their landing.”59 Only in the late summer of 1784 did Campbell receive instructions from Whitehall approving of his purchase and extending the offer of government-supplied provisions by one further year.60

  So famine would be averted. But a larger structural obstacle to loyalist settlement remained: the allocation of land grants. The promise of land had been the most powerful incentive luring refugees to Nova Scotia to start with. Yet as administrators and refugees alike discovered, it was one thing to offer every loyalist a certain number of acres—and quite another thing actually to dole the acreage out. Not least, preexisting territorial claims had to be resolved before any new allotments could be made. Fortunately for loyalists, few of the huge land grants made in Nova Scotia in the 1760s had been developed according to the stipulated terms, but surveyors still had to determine which ones could now be forfeited or escheated for noncompliance and reassigned.61 A further claim on the land had been staked in the name of the king himself. The region’s rolling forests of balsam fir allow one Nova Scotia county today to dub itself the “Christmas tree capital of the world.” In the eighteenth century, dense evergreen woods made this region a valuable source for naval timber. By act of Parliament, “all White Pine Trees in Nova Scotia” and other valuable trees were “reserved to the Crown.”62 No forested areas could be cleared without a license from the surveyor-general of the king’s woods, Sir John Wentworth.

  As loyalist refugees spilled off their transports, two types of surveyors worked their way across the province, assessing land on both sides of the Bay of Fundy. Wentworth and his deputies tracked through the forests deciding which areas would be reserved, which opened for settlement. This was arduous work even in what turned out to be a relatively mild winter of 1783–84, as they dragged their boots through slush and clinging mud and sailed from point to point around the shore through incessant squalls. In later winters they would push through snow as high as their waists, stinging their faces when the sharp winds blew. After one such foray Wentworth’s team staggered back into Halifax “having consumed all our provisions, and worn out the Men, to such a Degree, that they fell sick.”63

  The job of identifying lands to escheat and drawing up new townships fell to the surveyor-general of Nova Scotia, Charles Morris. Morris’s father had held the position before him, but even the elder Morris—who had laid out the city of Halifax and helped mastermind the Acadian expulsions—had not faced the kinds of challenges confronted by his son in 1783.64 Severely short of staff, supplies, and support, Morris advanced more than £1,000 of his own money and all his personal stamina to fulfill his mandate. By the end of 1784, he and his subordinates had defined nearly 1.2 million acres for escheating, approximately one-fifth of the land that had been granted during the midcentury boom. It was little wonder he found the job “next to Egyptian Slavery,” and his gargantuan task would only be compounded by complaining loyalists and deputies clamoring for pay.65

  Yet as rapidly as the surveyors worked, and as fully as government authorities tried to provide food and shelter, conditions for many refugees that first winter in the north remained rudimentary. In Annapolis Royal, Jacob Bailey fitted out his church “for the reception of hundreds, and multitudes are still without shelter in this rigorous and stormy season. Nearly four hundred of these miserable exiles have perished in a violent storm, and I am persuaded that disease, disappointment, poverty, and chagrin, will finish the course of many more before the return of another spring.”66 On Christmas Day 1783, one loyalist veteran, who had arrived at the mouth of the Saint John River with his regiment earlier in the summer, noted sadly that it was “the seventh Christmas since I left my beloved parents,” the seventh since he had been “driven from my native home.” He himself had much to be thankful for: already settled on a good lot, a few miles from the river’s mouth, he counted his blessings “that I am now comfortable, where I daily see those who have neither house nor home, and scarcely nourishment or clothing to guard them against the attacks of this rigorous season of the year.”67 Farther upriver a girl from New York huddled under a government-issued tent and remembered how “the melting snow and the rain would soak up into our beds as we lay.”68 “Amazing discontents” swept across the camps on the Saint John River mouth for the simple reason that the blankets distributed to the refugees—rejected army surplus—were burned and full of holes, none “whole to cover the space of twelve inches.”69 Even in Halifax, comparatively well equipped with housing stock and food, loyalist veterans were “Daily & Nightly picked Up in the Streets in a perishing State & sent to the poor House afflicted with various Disorders.”70

  As Colonel Morse, the engineer, traveled from one refugee encampment to the next, he saw much that made him nervous: “If these poor People, who from want of Land to Cultivate and raise a subsistence to themselves, are not fed by Government for a considerable time longer, they must perish. They have no other country to go to. No other asylum.”71 Edward Winslow, the former muster-master from Massachusetts, formed an equally dismal view when, acting as land agent for loyalist regiments, he toured the communities of ex-soldiers on the banks of the Saint John River. He described to an old friend how

  I saw all those Provincial Regiments, (which we have so frequently mustered) landing in this inhospitable climate, in the month of October, without shelter and without knowing where to find a place to reside. The chagrine of the officers was not to me so truly affecting as the poignant grief of the men. Those respectable serjeants of Robinson’s, Ludlow’s, Cruger’s Fannings &c, (once hospitable yeomen of the country) were addressing me in a language which almost murdered me as I heard it.

  “Sir, We have served all the War. Your honor is witness how faithfully! We were promised land, we expected you had obtained it for us, we like the country—only let us have a spot of our own, and give us such kind of regulations as will hinder bad men from reigning us.”72

  On receiving another of Winslow’s angst-ridden reports about “the distressing State of the unfortunate Loyalists,” Brook Watson in London forwarded it to an able Home Office secretary with the simple plea: “For Godsake see these matters effectually done away and guarded against for the future.”73

  For those who witnessed it—to say nothing of those who composed it—the flood of loyalists transformed Nova Scotia by doubling its settler population, filling forests with tent camps. It juxtaposed hopeful visions of colonial prosperity against spectacles of appalling hardship; it set the generosity of official promises against the cold reality of the possible. “This year is the crisis and in it Nova Scotia will take its cast,” declared Sir John Wentworth in April 1784, “either to be a Noble Substitute to Britain for those lost [colonies] or it will become an Addition to her burthens, and the Source of future troubles.” Wentworth could not yet predict any better than anyone else which outcome it was to be.

  OF ALL the loyalist communities hastily developed in British North America, the most impressive was the one at Port Roseway, south of Halifax. This project was unusual among r
efugee settlements insofar as the prospective migrants had taken great pains, before leaving New York, to prepare for their exodus by sending scouts to investigate the site, and assembling boatloads of supplies. But no amount of advance preparation could stave off the sheer physical difficulties of creating a new town from scratch. To this extent what unfolded at Port Roseway served as a representative example of the material challenges confronted by so many refugees to British North America and beyond. It proved typical in a further respect too. For the refugees brought more than tools, horses, and grain with them from America. They brought a set of attitudes, chiefly about land and about relations between black and white, that sparked conflict both between loyalists and British authorities and among loyalists themselves. The settlement of Port Roseway provides a remarkable case study in problems and tensions that would be reprised across the loyalist diaspora.74

  In the spring of 1783, while Carleton and Watson attended to the refugees’ final pre-departure demands in New York, officials in Nova Scotia prepared for their arrival. On April 21, Charles Morris appointed a doughty fifty-three-year-old Massachusetts loyalist called Benjamin Marston to survey the new town at Port Roseway. The job made Marston a pivotal figure in the site’s development, and gave him keen insight into the travails of settlement—all of which he recorded in a sharply observant diary, the best single source documenting these events. A Harvard-educated merchant and cousin of fellow loyalist refugee Edward Winslow, Marston actually had no prior experience as a surveyor. If experience as a loyalist refugee were any qualification, though, he had earned the position many times over. Chased by a patriot mob from his home at Marblehead in 1775, Marston had fled to Boston and in the space of just one year “lived in a town beseiged, on board ships, both of war & others, have been at sea, in ye West Indies, have lain in ye woods, have travelled by land & carried my baggage on my back,” was captured by a privateer, and endured a stint in jail.75 In the coming years he undertook numerous risky trading voyages from Halifax to the West Indies, in the course of which he was captured and jailed twice more. But a simple expedition around Nova Scotia in 1781 triggered his greatest ordeal of all.