Loyalty that cost lives

HISTORY tends to be written by the winners but Maya Jasanoff, professor of history at Harvard and author of the much-praised Edge of Empire that covered British and French experiences of empire in Egypt and India, has decided it is time to tackle the struggles of one set of losers.

In what she fairly claims to be “the first global history of the loyalist diaspora”, Jasanoff describes what happened to those who, because of their pro-British views, chose to depart the North American colonies that became the United States.

The loyalists were almost expunged from history, depicted by the Americans as Redcoats sent out from Britain, rather than — as was usually the case — their own neighbours. In reality, the War of Independence was as much a civil war as an anti-colonial one.

Both sides claimed respect for the law and representative government. Both revelled in the glory of the British Empire.

“What really distinguished them,’’ Jasanoff writes, “was not the pursuit of liberty, but the persistence of loyalty.’’ Moreover, American patriots rebelled, in part, because London was not imperialist enough and reluctant to colonise the American west.

For some time, the loyalists had every reason to hope for success in their goal of keeping the 13 colonies British, with a mighty empire pitted against colonial tax dodgers. They saw the opposition of Boston merchants to pay their taxes as ingratitude for the huge debt that British taxpayers had run up protecting America during the French and Indian War.

They reckoned without the zeal of the rebels, however, the involvement of the French and the Spanish, and the ineptitude of the British generals. With the war concluding, the cities of Savannah, Charleston, and New York teemed with loyalists seeking to escape the retaliations that would follow the departure of the Hanoverian forces.

Although about a quarter of all American colonists had decided to stay loyal in 1776, after seven years of struggle, only 3% volunteered to go into exile rather than make their lives in the new republic. Around 60,000 crammed on to Royal Navy vessels and sailed to Canada, Florida, the Caribbean, and even Sierra Leone, as well as back to these islands. Most of them were white, but many were black, former slaves who had won their freedom through service in George III’s forces. The Westminster parliament appointed a commission to examine their losses, eventually awarding more than £3 million in compensation, some to blacks as well as whites.

Although on the losing side in the American revolutionary war, they continued to be subjects of the world’s most powerful empire and had options to remain British subjects in every continent.

The refugees were also a formidable demographic arsenal in the struggle to build what would later be known as the Second British Empire. To make up for the lost 13 colonies, London expanded in India, the Pacific, in the Caribbean and in Africa. Loyalist settlers played an important role in the shaping a regenerated British empire.

This really is a global history. The British Empire in India was partly won by the efforts of first and second-generation loyalists such as the American patriot Benedict Arnold’s sons. Freetown in Sierra Leone was founded by 1,200 black loyalists. The first serious proposal to colonise Australia came from an American loyalist.

Jasanoff’s skill at blending analysis with absorbing personal accounts makes Liberty’s Exiles a highly readable book as well as an enlightening one. Weaving family experiences with the grander narratives, she follows the loyalists through the era of genuine hope into their time of despair, putting a human face on the events.

One such story is that of Elizabeth Johnston. “In her late teens when the war ended,’’ Jasanoff writes, Johnston “was acutely aware of living in a world in motion”. From her native Georgia, Johnston “led her growing family through the emptying British outposts of the south: Savannah, Charleston, and St Augustine”.

Later she would follow her doctor husband to Jamaica where two of their children and her husband succumbed to tropical diseases. Eventually, she settled in Nova Scotia. In old age, Jasanoff writes, Johnston found “her memory twisted around old traumas like a tree growing around barbed wire’’.

Jasanoff also details the case of Thomas Brown of Georgia. When, in the summer of 1775, he refused to disavow his beliefs, he was dragged to Augusta. “The attackers seize his broken head by the hair and pull it out in clumps. Knives take the care of the rest, cutting off strips of scalp, making the blood run down over his ears, face and neck.”

Brown somehow survived but, unsurprisingly, decided to leave rather than stay on in America. Another who chose to go was Shadrack Furman, a free black Virginian who worked for the British as a guide. He was captured by patriot troops, given 500 lashes, and then blinded and made mad by an axe blow to the head.

In general, the loyalists were brave and hard people caught on the wrong side of history. The American empire, on the other hand, constituted one of the great acts of dispossession of world history, pushing aside the Native Americans and destroying their cultures and economies within a century.

No matter how keen they were to leave, the loyalists had, however, been marked by their time in America. Like the rebels, they too wanted a new relationship between Britain and the colonies, constantly disquieting the British establishment with their calls for representative government.

Liberty’s Exiles is both intellectually impressive and a compulsively readable work. Jasanoff’s text flows easily while her dense endnotes attest to the depth of her research. She has skilfully woven together a mass of recent revisionist research and analysed acutely the loyalists’ significance in global history. The book richly deserves a wide readership.