Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  With one big difference: this wasn’t an empire of settlement, like British North America and now Australia. It was an empire in disguise. Even at the peak of British rule, around 1900, there were only about a hundred thousand Britons living in India—a tiny minority in a population of nearly 250 million. Until 1858, British interests were managed by the East India Company, a private trading company accountable to its directors and shareholders—albeit subject to increasing parliamentary oversight. The company also maintained a private army of 200,000 Indian sepoys, making it one of the largest standing armies in the world. And the biggest fiction of British rule in India was that it wasn’t really there. The Mughal emperor in Delhi and his subordinates nominally governed most of north India; the rest of the subcontinent was divided into hundreds of independent principalities. Indian courts seduced Britons with their exotic opulence, especially once they were safely folded into British suzerainty. One by one, indigenous states fell under more or less direct British control, beginning with Bengal in the 1750s, and moving into the Mughal provinces of Awadh, Hyderabad, and Arcot. Tipu Sultan of Mysore, once Britain’s most serious challenger in south India, was killed in a spectacular storming of his capital city in 1799. The largest threat to British power in western India, the Maratha confederacy, was subdued by 1818 in a series of bitter wars.

  Parliamentary regulation in the 1780s had helped end the rampant fortuneering of the “nabobs” (Anglicized from the Persian term nawab), the Anglo-Indian counterpart to the sugar barons of the Caribbean. But India became the location of choice to make a reputation, holding pride of place on the imperial career ladder. Revolutionary war veterans Alured Clarke and Archibald Campbell both held high offices in India after serving as governors of Jamaica. John Graves Simcoe was promoted from his position in Upper Canada to commander in chief of India, though he died before he took up the post. Most famously, Lord Cornwallis redeemed his embarrassing loss in America with an influential term as governor-general of India from 1786 to 1793. (Just five years after Yorktown, when an East India Company captain founded Britain’s first outpost in Malaysia, he named its fort Cornwallis after the new governor-general.) Cornwallis’s tenure was rated such a success by the East India Company that he was reappointed and returned to India in 1805, where he died soon afterwards.

  James Rennell, A Map of Bengal, Bahar, Oude, & Allahabad, 1786. (illustration credit 1.13)

  As an attractive if risky arena for upward mobility, India particularly appealed to ambitious but somewhat marginalized individuals, like down-at-heel gentry, Scots, Irish Protestants—and American loyalist refugees. The East India Company army was soon sprinkled with American-born officers—as Maria Nugent saw firsthand.78 In 1811, six years after leaving Jamica, she accompanied her husband to India, where he had just been named commander in chief. She had at least two nephews in company service, and also enjoyed a reunion in Calcutta with her elder brother Philip Skinner, a general in the British army.79 At Mathura, outside of Agra, she spent a pleasant evening with the Company paymaster Edward Arnold and his sister Sophia. What she didn’t note in her journal was that the Arnolds were also children of loyalists: their parents were none other than Benedict Arnold and his second wife Margaret (Peggy) Shippen.80 In 1799, Benedict had sent Edward to Bengal “under the Patronage of Lord Cornwallis.” Peggy was “much distressed in parting with her eldest Son,” but the parents thought it a “necessary” step—necessary to make money—“and we have no doubt of his doing well If he retains his health.”81 Three years later, Edward’s younger brother George also joined the Bengal army.

  Sophia Arnold may have come to India for a piece of social positioning of her own, as part of what was uncharitably called the “fishing fleet” of women who went to find a husband in India’s male-dominated white society. The strategy tended to be successful: even eighteen-year-old William Robinson, garrisoned at Surat in western India, cruelly thought about marrying a white widow in the vicinity, “not, because I like her, but because she has a d—n’ large Fortune.”82 Sophia married one of Edward’s fellow officers in 1813.83 But the shortage of marriageable European women was one reason that many white men developed long-term relationships with Indian companions.84 Edward Arnold provided comfortably in his will for “Mahummedy Khaunum a native Woman living with me.”85 When George Arnold died in India in 1828, he left a substantial inheritance for his British widow and child, but he also bequeathed an annual income for “Settural Khanum a Native woman who lived in my House for ten years & a half,” and a large legacy for their nearly fifteen-year-old daughter.86 Benedict Arnold’s half-Indian granddaughter, baptized Louisa Harriet Arnold, enjoyed about the best future a Eurasian girl in those years could. In the 1830s Louisa went to Ireland as the ward of her aunt Sophia’s widower and married a British architect in 1845. Her name by then had been changed from Arnold to Adams, and her dubious ancestry was not spoken of.87

  What if—an ambitious loyalist officer like Phil Robinson might have asked himself—what if he had turned farther east, and joined the East India Company army instead? What would his fortunes and his life course have looked like then? One of his most celebrated contemporaries in India, General Sir David Ochterlony, had been born in Boston in 1758. His maternal relatives became prominent loyalists, while David sailed to India as a cadet in 1777. Instead of marching to defeat on American battlefields, Ochterlony expanded the frontiers of British rule in Asia, most famously by leading the conquest of Nepal in 1814–16. He earned a baronetcy for his success, but he often preferred to go by the Persian title he had gotten from the Mughal emperor—Nasir ud-Daula, or “Defender of the State”—during his years as British resident in Delhi. There wasn’t a trace of New England puritanism about Ochterlony, who giddily embraced the habits of a Mughal nobleman. Legend held that this hookah-smoking, turban-wearing, chutney-eating Bostonian had thirteen Indian wives, who processed around the city with him every evening on thirteen elephants.88 Even if it had become less common for Europeans to return from India and live like “nabobs” in the West, Ochterlony was one of many westerners who stayed in India and chose to live like a Mughal nawab in the East.89

  But Phil Robinson could have discerned an even closer parallel in the career of a loyalist refugee raised not eighty miles away from him, William Linnaeus Gardner, born in 1771. Gardner’s mother, Alida Livingston, hailed from the grandest of the old New York landed families; in fact, Robinson and Gardner were distantly connected through marriage.90 At Livingston Manor, north of the Robinsons’ Hudson Valley estate, Gardner’s maternal grandfather presided over hundreds of square miles of land, approximating the European aristocracy so closely that he bore the informal title of “lord.” Several of the Livingstons were active patriots; one even signed the Declaration of Independence. But others leaned toward loyalism, including Alida, who had married a British army officer, Major Valentine Gardner. By 1779, Valentine Gardner was campaigning with the British through South Carolina, and Alida left her father’s house with young William to join him. The family tried to sail to Britain later that year, but was captured en route and remained in America until the evacuation of New York.91 At the end of the war the Gardners joined the loyalist exodus out of America, and William earned his first commission in the British army, aged just thirteen years old. Before he reached twenty he decided to pursue his military ambitions where he had the best chance of advancement. With some obliging string-pulling by Lord Cornwallis, Gardner transferred regiments and reached India in 1790.92

  Gardner spent his twenties in a peripatetic, fitful military career. Maybe it was the uprootedness of his wartime childhood that made him keep casting about for something different. With his mother’s death in 1791 he inherited land in New York, and considered returning to the United States. He also contemplated settling in Britain, where his father now lived in some style. But around 1798, in Surat, Gardner’s life took a decisive turn. The young officer had undertaken to help the family of the deceased nawab of Cambay (Khambat) recl
aim their position from a usurper. As Gardner sat through tiresome diplomatic negotiations, he noticed a curtain at the end of the council room twitch aside. Behind it “I saw, as I thought, the most beautiful black eyes in the world.” They belonged to the nawab’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Mah Munzel ul-Nissa. Her eyes “haunted my dreams by night and my thoughts by day.” Obsessed, Gardner “demanded the princess in marriage”; her relatives, recognizing his official status, grudgingly consented to this white Christian’s proposal. Because of the restrictions of purdah, Gardner never saw his wife’s face until their wedding day. When at last he raised her veil and “beheld the bright eyes that had so bewildered me,” he was not disappointed. “I smiled: the young Begum [noblewoman] smiled too.”93

  There was no question of going west now. Instead, Gardner became more and more deeply embedded in India, when he resigned his British commission and joined the Maratha warlord Jaswant Rao Holkar, becoming one of dozens of white officers recruited into indigenous armies. After the Maratha defeat, Gardner raised a cavalry regiment for the East India Company called Gardner’s Horse.94 He led the unit behind his fellow American Ochterlony into Nepal, commanded it on operations against the Pindaris in central India, and joined the British invasion of Burma in 1825. Between imperial campaigns, Gardner returned to his family at Kasganj, on the Ganges southeast of Delhi, where they lived on an estate given to his wife by the Mughal emperor. Here the Anglo-American officer became “half an Asiatic,” hung up his uniform and put on pyjamas, banished European food from his table, and reveled in the happy disorder of a “house filled with Brats … from Blue Eyes and fair hair to Ebony and Wool.”95 His favorite granddaughter was named “the Morning Star” in Hindustani; but whenever they used her English name—Alida, after William’s mother, and a popular Livingston family name—he heard a little echo from New York. He determined never to leave India, “a country far preferable to the cold climate, and still colder hearts of Europe.”96

  Maria Nugent would have been shocked to see her fellow American thus “gone native” in Mughal India. It had been startling enough to meet Gardner’s cousin Edward in Delhi—whose perfectly English brother Lord Alan Gardner was renting the Nugents’ house in Buckinghamshire—dressed in Indian clothes and “immense whiskers,” and refusing to eat beef or pork, “being as much Hindo[o] as Christia[n], if not more.”97 But Fanny Parkes, the wife of an East India Company civil servant, spent time with Gardner in the 1830s and was utterly captivated by this “kind, mild, gentlemanly, polished, entertaining companion” … “such a high caste man!”98 Parkes kept pressing Gardner to write an autobiography. “If I were to write it,” he said, “you would scarcely believe it; it would appear fiction.”99 Though he did not often talk about “my Yankee country,” the first chapter of his personal epic would, of course, have begun with the American Revolution.100 Without it he might have been an heir on the Hudson. Yet here he was, a squire in Hindustan—New York lost and India found.

  Gardner died in 1835, not long after Parkes met him, and his beloved begum passed away just one month later. They were buried side by side (her head toward Mecca) next to the tomb they had raised for their eldest son a few years before: an onion-domed Mughal mausoleum encased in white marble. The marble has been stripped away now, but the monument rises still above Gardner’s old farmlands, an enduring memorial to the merging of cultures across continents. Gardner’s journey from America to Asia followed the larger trajectory of British imperial expansion during his lifetime. It was, of course, a relatively rare one among American loyalist refugees. But for all that Gardner may have traveled farther than most, he was in another sense a representative member of the American exodus. Absorbed, like so many others, into an expanded global dominion, he was another colorful piece in the kaleidoscope of empire, refracting and revolving its subjects in an interconnected world.

  CONCLUSION

  Losers and Founders

  ON JUNE 18, 1815, Britain and its Prussian allies defeated the French at Waterloo, bringing the Napoleonic Wars to an end. Everything about that June day—from the magnitude of the triumph to the magnitude of the costs, with casualty figures (typically for these wars) in the tens of thousands—presented a different spectacle from the closing scene of Britain’s last big war, the dolorous march out of New York City in 1783. Victory in 1815 helped usher in Britain’s greatest age of global hegemony. Peace talks held at the Congress of Vienna restored constitutional monarchies and empires in and beyond Europe rather in line with British liberal ideals, charting a middle way between republicanism and absolutism.1 Moreover, Britain and the United States forged a relationship that brought Britain many of the benefits of imperial rule in America without the costs. Around the empire, Britain seemed to have consolidated a form of imperialism able to withstand republican (and totalitarian) challenges. Around the world, Britain’s international ascendancy looked unrivaled. All told, it was a remarkable vindication of the “spirit of 1783.” Loyalist refugees, too, seemed to have reached an analogous peace. By 1815, major loyalist migrations had stopped. From North America to India, surviving refugees and their children were absorbed into the British Empire, and even in some cases reintegrated in the United States. The loyalist exodus was over.

  So what did all those losses, displacements, and overturned lives amount to in the end? Was it fair to see the loyalists’ trauma, like the empire’s (with the loss of the thirteen colonies), ending a generation later in a kind of triumph? A vivid reply in the affirmative was provided by Benjamin West, the celebrated American-born painter of British imperial scenes, in an allegorical image called The Reception of the American Loyalists by Great Britain. Though it may never have existed in freestanding form, the image appeared as a painting within a painting in an 1812 portrait of the loyalist claims commissioner John Eardley Wilmot, and an engraving of it was published in 1815 as the frontispiece to a memoir by Wilmot about the commission’s work.2

  West presents a flattering picture of the loyalists’ place in a resurgent empire. At the right of the frame, a larger-than-life Britannia extends her benevolent hand over a diverse throng of refugees. (An elderly West and his wife, though they had immigrated well before the revolution, stand at Britannia’s knee.) Among the figures are prominent white loyalists, such as William Franklin. The group also includes an American Indian, every inch the “noble savage” with a statuesque physique and costume of skins, feathers, and beads. Under his right arm, he shelters (in the words of the accompanying text) a “Widow and Orphans, rendered so by the civil war,” while behind him huddle a number of blacks, “looking up to Britannia in grateful remembrance of their emancipation from slavery.” The key explains that the two figures holding up Britannia’s mantle represent “Religion” and “Justice.” Cherubs floating above the scene busily bind up the fasces of the Anglo-American relationship, tested anew by the War of 1812. But another emblem requires no clarification: the crown, focal point of imperial loyalty, caressed by a refugee’s outstretched hand.

  Here was the British Empire as its rulers in 1815 wanted it to be seen, a clear expression of the “spirit of 1783” triumphant. This was a hierarchical empire, with the king at the helm, the law and the church close behind. White men stand closest to the seat of power, and women and nonwhite subjects obediently follow. This was a benevolent and multiethnic empire: an empire ostensibly protective of black freedom and inclusive of indigenous peoples, an empire extending humanitarian relief to the poor and powerless. This was an empire suffused with national pride, and an empire that seemed able to heal the breaches of war with the United States (an issue of personal concern to West). Anyone who turned past the frontispiece to read Wilmot’s book would discover in its pages an account of the Loyalist Claims Commission that suggested how compensating loyalists had been a way for Britain to compensate for defeat. But those who did not look beyond West’s image might well be forgiven for failing to recognize that there had ever been a defeat in the first place. The loyalist refugees, in hi
s depiction, were poster children for British imperial success.

  Many refugees, especially in British North America, could probably identify with this happy picture. Elizabeth Johnston, at last, was among the contented. By the time Johnston rehearsed the events of her life for her memoirs in 1837, she was seventy-three years old. Her sight was dimmed by cataracts, and her memory twisted around old traumas like a tree growing around barbed wire: all those movements, all those separations, and so many deaths (including William’s, in Jamaica in 1807). She had come of age during a civil war, and spent decades of her adult life coping with dislocation and bereavement. Yet there was no anger in Johnston’s recollections, nor any nostalgic longing for her lost home; if anything, she sounded rather self-satisfied. For she had rooted herself in a new home now. “Little did I … think that I and all my family would ultimately settle in Nova Scotia,” she recalled. While she achieved a stability and social comfort she had never before known, her surviving children became prominent members of Nova Scotia’s professional and political elite, in some cases achieving positions of higher status than they could ever have plausibly enjoyed had they remained in the United States.3 After all their trials and migrations, the Johnstons had arrived—and evolved from American loyalists into British North American patriots. To follow Johnston’s narrative, in keeping with Canadian tory interpretations of the loyalist influx, these losers were winners in the end.4