Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Later generations of Ontario conservatives hailed Simcoe for the very things that many of his loyalist contemporaries condemned: they saw him as the founding father of a particularly British, and anti-American, version of Canadian government.91 Yet for all that he came bearing a set of metropolitan British attitudes, Simcoe made one fundamental concession to his North American context. He helped make Upper Canada more “American” still. Simcoe recognized that the secret to economic success and security lay in increasing the province’s population—especially with flourishing New York State to compete with just over the border. In the way that Nova Scotia’s governors had once looked to New England for colonists, Simcoe sought to attract new residents for Upper Canada from the United States. With so many Americans migrating west in those years, he thought, surely some could be drawn to settle in Upper Canada if the land prices were right. He could hardly hope for better pioneers. In their ethnic range, their religious beliefs, their familiarity with the climate and the land, they differed not at all from the loyalist refugees. All they had to do was accept the British monarchy in place of the American republic. And that, Simcoe congratulated himself, ought to be easy to do. “There are thousands of the inhabitants of the United States whose affections are centered in the British Government & the British Name,” he believed.92 Besides, what was the Canada Act if not a perfected version of a British constitution tried, tested, and found true? The United States was so young it had barely stumbled through its first steps; its constitution had only just been ratified, and its future shape remained unclear.

  Just weeks after landing in North America, Simcoe issued a proclamation inviting Americans across the border. In exchange for a simple oath of allegiance to “the King in his Parliament,” settlers could receive grants of two hundred acres for a third the cost associated with land in the American west.93 “A great many settlers come daily from the United States, some even from the Carolinas,” noted Elizabeth Simcoe.94 Ultimately some twenty thousand “late loyalists” streamed into the region, part of the huge surge of white settlement into the North American west, and helping to shift British North America’s own Anglophone population center away from the Maritimes. Upper Canada might be a British province, but as this influx from the United States demonstrated, its people remained emphatically continental American in origin. (Only after 1815, with the border closed to Americans, would immigrants from the British Isles outnumber U.S. arrivals in British North America.)95 To be sure, some American loyalists returned permanently to the United States; but no evidence suggests that this occurred in anything like the great numbers for the immigration to Canada.96 More often, loyalists paid temporary visits to the United States and kept up relationships with family, friends, and business associates—further reinforcing the ties among North American kin and neighbors. War had divided Americans into patriots and loyalists, and a new border divided empire from republic. But peace drew divided communities together as well, around a common quest for land, profit, stability, and security. As pioneers on a North American frontier, Upper Canadian loyalists shared more with their counterparts south of the border than they did with the British officials who ruled them—a position that would be complicated and sharpened by the War of 1812.97

  At the same time, Canadian residents prided themselves on having achieved under British rule a comfort their U.S. counterparts had not. “When any stubborn Difficulty occurs here, we have one general Remedy which we use on every Occasion,” reflected the missionary John Stuart in Kingston; “that is, ‘How happy are we, compared with the Subjects of the distressed, & divided States?’ And the great Influx of Inhabitants from the american Frontiers (with melancholy Complaints of Taxes, Poverty & Tyranny) confirms us in an opinion which ’tis our Interest to cherish.”98 Stuart had a point. American patriots had waged a war against taxation without representation. Yet here in British North America, it seemed that American loyalists had won that very struggle. With the creation of New Brunswick and Upper Canada, loyalists had nominally gained greater representation through the formation of two new administrations and assemblies. That there were decided limits on popular participation, in turn, seemed only an advantage to loyalists when they compared their situation with conditions south of the border, replete with rampant electioneering, libelous newspapers, and sporadic political violence. (All of which phenomena encouraged some U.S. leaders to become more authoritarian themselves.)

  The issue of taxation presented a still more favorable contrast with the United States, in their view. In Upper Canada, with an administration and defense forces heavily subsidized by Britain, loyalists and immigrants received ample grants of cheap land and paid virtually no taxes. In the United States, saddled with war debt, state governments charged far more for land, and demanded substantially higher taxes in turn: New Yorkers in the 1790s paid five times more tax on their land than their peers in Upper Canada. In short, to be an American gave you purchase on active citizenship—but you literally paid for it. To be a British subject in Canada meant acquiescing to imperial authority, but cost you little in terms of tax burden.99 (And when those tax burdens did change in the 1820s, it helped foment rebellion in Upper and Lower Canada just as it had in the thirteen colonies in the 1770s.) A century later, loyalist descendants in Canada would still take pride in being “the lightest-taxed and the freest people on the American continent.”100 The equation of freedom from taxes with freedom more generally remains a resonant definition of liberty in Anglo-American political culture.

  Of course, Stuart knew there was no such thing as an easy life on the frontier. He had seen crop failures plunge the community into need; he had lost one of his own children in frigid Montreal, in the harsh conditions of exile.101 As a refugee himself and minister to so many more, he also knew how displacement and loss could haunt the mind even after the body moved on. British rule was no panacea. In Kingston and York, as in Saint John and Shelburne—as in pre-revolutionary Philadelphia and Boston—loyalists bridled against perceived infringements of their rights and alien policies imposed from outside. Simcoe soon clashed with loyalists in the Upper Canada assembly who wanted to hold New England–style town meetings. His plan to phase out slavery in Upper Canada met resistance from loyalists in turn, many of whom had brought slaves from America, and had little sympathy for the abolitionist ideology so rapidly winning converts among metropolitan Britons, Simcoe among them.102 The Canada Act in some ways sowed as many problems as it solved, enshrining commitments to Anglicanism and a tendency toward oligarchical rule that provoked intensifying opposition in the years to come.103 Imperial rule could always make enemies out of its own loyal subjects.

  So what, then, did loyalism mean in post-revolutionary British North America? The answer came down to the core tenet around which loyalists had always coalesced. However “American” loyalist refugees remained in political temperament, they were not ultimately anti-imperial: they did not want to break their ties with the king or British Empire. By the time Simcoe founded York, a decade after the British evacuation of New York, white, black, and Indian refugees had fashioned viable, enduring alternatives in British North America. They had, for a start, survived. From conditions of serious deprivation—hunger, homelessness, exposure in harsh climes—they had built houses, docks and mills, churches and schools. They enjoyed a clarified and expanded provincial government. They were united under a monarchy that offered protection; they had access to ample land at low cost. Indeed, for the most marginal of British subjects, imperial authority could be a welcome thing, by offering protection against white colonial neighbors. Black loyalists like David George, persecuted by racist fellow refugees, could turn for defense to British laws upholding his freedom. The Mohawks could appeal to the crown in pursuit of land and a degree of sovereignty much harder to achieve in the majoritarian republic to the south.

  In some sense post-revolutionary British North America presented an answer to the great “what if” question of the American Revolution: how might the th
irteen colonies have looked without independence? British North America witnessed neither reactionary reversal nor mere status quo. An influential interpretation of the genesis of Canadian political culture portrayed loyalists as importing American liberalism into Canada, only with a “tory touch” that delayed the emergence of popular democracy.104 But the refugees’ quests for political place in 1780s British North America suggest a less teleological way of understanding their impact. What really distinguished British North America from the United States was not the pursuit of liberty, but the persistence of loyalty. Both polities shared a commitment to life, liberty, and property; both polities had vigorous internal disputes about how best to achieve such goals.105 In British North America, loyalty to the monarch and the empire provided an important foundation for unity on the eve of another revolutionary war, with France. At the same time, in British North America as in the United States, a diverse, multiethnic population struggled to find common ground. (The War of 1812 would soon test togetherness on both sides of the border.) And in British North America as elsewhere in the British world, popular expressions of liberty were contained by rule from above. Loyalists in British North America discovered what their peers in Britain were also learning—that what refugees wanted from the British Empire was not always what they got. It remained to be seen whether their counterparts to the south, in the Bahamas and Jamaica, would fare any better.

  PART III

  Subjects

  G. H. van Keulen, A New and Correct Chart of the Coast of East Florida (detail), 1784. (illustration credit 1.9)

  CHAPTER 7

  Islands in a Storm

  FROM HIS NEW vantage point on the Bahamian island of Exuma, John Cruden, the former commissioner of sequestered estates in South Carolina, could see great things brewing on the horizon. Despite his best efforts to carve out an independent state for loyalists in East Florida, his fellow refugees had dispersed around the Atlantic. Cruden traced many of their routes himself. He had visited Britain to seek payment for expenses incurred on the sequestered estates. He had been to the West Indian island of Tortola—not a site of white loyalist refuge, but a well-known center of slave traffic—as part of his righteous crusade to chase down patriot-owned slaves stolen by departing loyalists. He had gone to Nova Scotia to file a claim with the loyalist claims commissioners sitting in Halifax, and to pursue business ventures with American friends resettled in Shelburne. And together with a thousand of the refugees from East Florida, he had found himself a new home at last, in the Bahama Islands. As a multiply displaced person, Cruden understood intimately, and from many vantage points, the trials and strains that dislocation wrought on loyalist refugees. But “the keen blasts of Adversity that I have Experienced for years,” he felt, had “given vast scope to my mind … my reason is aided by Revelation Misfortune has matured my judgment.”1 “It requires no Spirit of Prophecy, nor gift of Divination, to foretell Events,” Cruden declared. “We are on the eve of a grand Convulsion,” and it was critical for Britain, and the loyalist refugees, to “make the most of the times & of Circumstances.”2

  As he sat on arid little Exuma in 1785, Cruden penned schemes for imperial renewal of ever more ambitious proportions. He had already tried his hardest to hang on in America, with his attempt to cling to a corner of East Florida. In an “Address to the Monarchial and Thinking Part of the British Empire,” dedicated to Lord North, Cruden suggested several new ways Britain might turn the loyalist exodus to its imperial advantage. Refugees in the Bahamas could develop the islands’ valuable salt ponds, and utilize their strategic location for Atlantic trade. Free blacks could travel to Central America and revive British possessions there, while the abolitionist project to settle black loyalists in West Africa, he glowingly declared, could let Britain prove “to the whole World, that we are worthy of the most dignified title on Earth … Friend & protector to ye Liberties of mankind.”3 It might seem contradictory that a man who so avidly worked to return stolen slaves to their former masters should also safeguard black freedom. But both these causes—protecting private property on the one hand, and personal liberty on the other—conformed entirely with the “spirit of 1783” and stood as pillars of the emerging political philosophy of liberalism.

  Cruden’s most passionate crusade, though, reflected another element of the “spirit of 1783”: a drive toward geographical expansion. He urged British ministers to compensate for the loss of the thirteen colonies by pouncing on territory elsewhere in North America. Indeed, tapping into the widely held opinion that the United States might quickly disintegrate, Cruden believed that if Britain played its cards right, it could yet “bring the Americans back again.”4 The plausibility of such proposals surely helped explain why high-placed figures such as Lord North and Lord Cornwallis kept Cruden’s screeds among their papers rather than promptly discarding them. Similar ideas would only gain momentum when Cruden’s prediction of a “great Convulsion of Empire” actually came to pass, with the beginning of the French Revolution and the outbreak of Anglo-French war in 1793.5

  Each of the plans John Cruden set forth in the Bahamas indicated the islands’ particular place in the geography of loyalist exodus. In the Bahamas as in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, loyalist refugees formed the majority of the population, with pronounced effects on the islands’ landscape, economy, and demography. Also as in British North America, refugees regarded imperial authorities with mistrust. But there were several points of divergence between the loyalist societies north and south. Unlike British North America, in the Bahamas the twenty-five hundred or so white refugees were significantly outnumbered by the movable property many had struggled so hard to secure: some six thousand slaves. This demographic imbalance added a racial dimension to political conflicts in the islands, when white slaveowners found that their views on how to manage slaves stood in contradiction with the more paternalistic opinions of their rulers. Furthermore, where loyalists in British North America fashioned a sort of imperial reflection to the United States, some loyalists in the Bahamas—Cruden among them—envisioned a quite different relationship with their prominent neighbor. They wanted to use the Bahamas, a mere sixty miles or so off the coast of Florida at their closest point, as a staging post for seizing parts of North America back. Competing positions on slavery and expansion etched a fault line among loyalist refugees in the Bahamas, between those who aimed to establish a plantation society much like what they had left behind in the American south, and those who advocated the entrenchment and extension of a more paternalistic style of rule. These latter attitudes would gain a powerful advocate in the governor of the Bahamas from 1786, Cruden’s old patron and former Virginia governor Lord Dunmore.

  The visionary quality of John Cruden’s thinking pointed suggestively toward a final defining characteristic of refugee life in the Bahamas. By 1785, Cruden, long manic, had become a maniac. His acquaintances commented on the signs. “John Cruden is here, for what purpose God knows,” one of his friends in Halifax told another. “I think him mad.… He seems to be the same good hearted sensible Man we once knew him, but too wild in his politicks, which have turned his Head.”6 A male business partner must have been at least mildly surprised to receive letters from Cruden expressing the hope that “Providence will enable me soon to prove how much, and how ardently I Love you” (“as David loved Jonathan,” he explained elsewhere) “and that the day will yet come, when we shall meet to part no more.”7 His strangest fantasies, though, or at least his most widely repeated, flew off into the realms of millenarianism. For Cruden’s ambitions for the British Empire did not stop with reconquering the United States. “If the Jews could be brought to unite in Earnest,” he continued, “& assist the Emperor & the Empress of Russia against the Turks, it is impossible to say what we might do.”8 Reestablishing British power in America, as Cruden began to see it, would pave the way for the restoration of the Jews—not in the Holy Land, but along the Mississippi. From imperial renewal to the Second Coming: now that would be a �
��grand Convulsion” indeed.9

  All this, to be sure, was the product of a single, rattled mind. Still, social outliers can help cast light on social norms. As Cruden grasped ever more frantically at ways to piece together a world that had been shattered, his mad meditations presented a striking case study in the psychological effects of displacement. He noted himself how his ordeals had “matured” his thinking. Almost half of the Bahamas’ refugees had, like him, been multiply unsettled by the cession of East Florida. They arrived in the islands mentally marked by the strains of repeated migration, aching with a sense of betrayal, and primed for discontent. The legacy of trauma among these refugees set the stage for an especially dramatic clash between loyalists and rulers in the Bahamas, a clash of opinions about what the British Empire should stand for. What had appeared in British North America to be a spectrum of loyalist political views became in the Bahamas a polarized opposition between those who contested imperial authority and those who sought to assert it. How did these factions take shape, and which one would prevail?

  IT DID NOT look like much from the sea, this new world—a strip of limestone and coral peeping up from water so clear you could trace the ripples of sand in the ocean floor. But after five punishing weeks riding the uncharted swell, land was land to the approaching sailors, land was life. They stumbled off the ship and fell to their knees on the beach, praying and planting banners emblazoned with green crosses and crowns. The admiral called it San Salvador, for it must have seemed to them like salvation indeed.10

  Christopher Columbus and his crew thought they had landed in India on October 12, 1492, when in fact they had navigated into the reefs of the Bahamas. Largely flat, unprepossessing, and without any sources of fresh water, the Bahama Islands have nothing of the spectacular tropical lushness of the West Indies. (They lie in the Atlantic Gulf Stream, not the Caribbean, and are mostly above the Tropic of Cancer.) But Columbus would not be the only outsider to see something providential in these stony protrusions from the sea. In the 1640s, the Bahamas’ first Anglophone settlers, a group of self-styled adventurers from Bermuda, colonized an island they named Eleuthera—from the Greek word for “free”—aiming to establish a model republic with freedom of worship. A later wave of Bermudans renamed one of the larger islands of the archipelago New Providence, on which they founded the Bahamas’ capital, Nassau.11