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The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire
Maya Jasanoff
| ON the first day of summer 1779, a small merchant vessel bobbed around Chebucto Head, drifting past Micmac canoes and the fortifications of George's Island into the crowded port of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It had survived a buffeting two-week voyage from Maine across the Bay of Fundy, and its passengers—the Reverend Jacob Bailey and his family—were grateful to touch land again. They were especially relieved to reach a land where they saw "the Britanic colours flying" because the Baileys were refugees from revolutionary America: loyalists who had fled to Nova Scotia after years of persecution. They reached British safety with just the rags on their backs. Bailey vividly described his costume of rusty black trousers speckled with lint and pitch stains, stockings a threadbare lattice, an oversize coat swinging loose around his ankles, and a "jaundise coloured" wig topped by a limp beaver cap. So many people came to gape at the strange party that Bailey delivered an impromptu speech from the deck: "Gentlemen, we are a company of fugitives ... driven by famine and persecution to take refuge among you, and therefore I must intreat your candor and compassion to excuse the meaness and singularity of our dress." He thanked God, he later wrote, for guiding "me and my family to this retreat of freedom and security from the rage of tyranny and the cruelty of opposition." But he had also "landed in a strange country, destitute of money, clothing, dwelling or furniture," and his future was in the hands of chance.1 |
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Bailey belonged to a large yet little-studied group of British subjects in revolutionary North America: loyalists who were exiled or fled from the thirteen colonies and sought a haven in Britain and its empire. Loyalists have long been relegated to the margins of mainstream history; they are often seen as losers, backward, and wrong. Books on the American Revolution usually mention that one in five members of the white colonial population sympathized with Britain during the war, passing over them with little further notice. Even the number of loyalists will likely always remain elusive, since "loyalism meant different things to different persons in different situations." Though academic interest in loyalism seems to be on the rise, the bulk of scholarship on the topic was produced in the bicentennial 1970s and tends to focus on the ideology of well-known figures such as Thomas Hutchinson and Joseph Galloway rather than the everyday experiences of ordinary loyalists. Similarly, though the labels applied to them—Tory and loyalist—emanated from British politics (like so much American revolutionary discourse) and continued to resonate on the eastern side of the Atlantic, loyalists have figured little in the major treatments of British politics and identity in the war. (Nor, as David Armitage justly laments, have British historians engaged with American historiography in anything like the way that historians of colonial America have with that of contemporary Britain.) To bend Gary B. Nash's label for the Revolution-era slave population, the loyalists constitute another, perhaps even more "forgotten fifth" in the history of these years.2 |
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Indeed, for all that scholars have attempted to correct bluntly patriotic portrayals of American independence, it remains surprisingly controversial in the United States today to count loyalists among the victims of republican chauvinism. It must be remembered, though, that the American Revolution really was a civil war and was clearly seen as such by contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, some of whom experienced its divisive effects within their own families, as in the conspicuous example of William Franklin, loyalist governor of New Jersey, and his patriot father, Benjamin. Loyalists expressed their views passively and actively: they refused to swear loyalty oaths to the new assemblies; they moved to cities and regions under British control; and nineteen thousand joined loyalist regiments to fight for their vision of British colonial America. In retaliation they faced harassment from their peers—most vividly, if rarely, by tarring and feathering—and sanctions from state legislatures, which could strip them of their land and possessions or imprison or formally banish them.3 |
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