Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (review)

For obvious reasons, scholars and popular writers often turn to the year 1776 when describing the birth of the United States. Less often chronicled in what are too often modern hagiographic accounts is the fate of the roughly sixty thousand colonials who remained Patriots to the British Empire and fanned out across the globe in the years after the Continental Congress broke with the Crown. Maya Jasanoff, the author of the admired Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850, here combines her own archival research with hundreds of monographs, articles, contemporaneous pamphlets, published diaries, and memoirs to explore the myriad reasons why colonists opted for a life of exile rather than remain part of the new American republic.

Such a complicated story requires a large canvas, as Jasanoff demonstrates again and again that no single rationale explains why tens of thousands of Loyalists made the difficult choice they did. Some found the new republican order dangerously egalitarian, while others simply sought liberty and freedom in a different manner. Indeed, the stories told here of the brutality inflicted on many of those who resisted independence reveals that the Revolution often silenced dissenting voices as much as it encouraged free debate. Since colonists routinely identified themselves as both Americans and British subjects, the question of who opted to remain loyal, she observes, generally depended on region, occupation, land, religion, friendships, and family connections.

The exception, and the one group that fits but uneasily into Jasanoff’s analytical framework, was those Africans and black Americans enslaved in what, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, were fifteen British mainland colonies. Jasanoff frequently writes of “choices,” but of the approximately twenty thousand blacks who took up arms during the conflict, only a minority had anything approaching an option. In the slave societies of Georgia and South Carolina, where state assemblies stubbornly voted not to arm slaves—even after the cities of Savannah and Charles Town were occupied by British forces—those slaves who wished to become free rightly saw only one path to liberty. Native Americans, Jasanoff observes, had more of “a choice” (p. 37), although here too not as much of one as white Americans. A Patriot victory was sure to erase the Proclamation Line of 1763, although some Natives had as little faith in policy makers in London as they did in Philadelphia and suspected that the ban on white settlement was temporary regardless of the war’s outcome. Yet the Mohawks, Jasanoff argues, saw themselves not as “allies” but as “Loyalists,” and their connection with the British—exemplified by men such as William Johnson and Joseph Brant—was old enough to eliminate any discussion in their settlements.

One of the many virtues of this book is that Jasanoff does not merely tell stories of individuals or groups of Loyalists. She examines the impact this diaspora had on imperial policy. The loss of so much real estate forced a reevaluation on Parliament, and the result was what Jasanoff dubs “the Spirit of 1783.” In London’s view, their empire needed constitutional restructuring along the lines of what had already been done in India and Ireland. That meant reasserting the authority of the crown and its advisors over provincial assemblies. But it also meant governing with a light enough touch to avoid further episodes such as those faced in North America in the 1770s. In Canada, that required privileging the British community over the French, but also to assisting the Mohawks at Grand River or the black Loyalists in Nova Scotia while, ironically, protecting them from angry white Canadians. The new variety of “imperial liberty in contrast to the republican liberty of the United States,” Jasanoff insists, helped forge the foundation “of the distinctive liberal order discernible in Canada to this day” (p. 180).

There were limits to this new form of liberty. After Saint Domingue erupted in revolt in 1791, free blacks in the British Caribbean faced constant reminders that their...