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131 five • Abiding Ambitions, 1781–1796 Even accepting that American loyalists came in all shapes and sizes, with backgrounds and motives as disparate as the colonies themselves, those who populate Dunmore’s story are something of a revelation. Mainly from the South and West,they possessed none of the staid rationality,reverence for tradition, or moderation of mind that define familiar icons of loyalty. Hardly hidebound, they were quick to challenge authority and perfectly willing to break with the past in order to advance the empire and their place in it. Some betrayed republican leanings after the war by agitating for stricter standards of representation and decrying political corruption. A few even formed business partnerships with Catholic Spain—something that many Protestants considered a deal with the devil. Most striking of all were those who, like Dunmore, continued to pursue expansion in North America in the wake of Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris. With worldviews more Romantic than Enlightened, they were the last to give up on the war and the first to attempt to roll back its losses. They shared an openness to new strategies, a propensity for risk, high levels of personal ambition, and a passion for promoting not only“the British Name” but also“the Scale of the Empire.” Plenty of Britons held out hope for redemption inAmerica after the war.The counterrevolutionaries who restructured colonial government in Canada in the 1780s, for instance, had more in mind than preventing future rebellions; they sought to create a model mixed government, a beacon of order and liberty that would inspire the thirteen colonies to rejoin the empire upon their inevitable descent into anarchy. While certainly sympathetic to this project, Dunmore and his associates took a more aggressive approach. They sought to reconquer the United States and expand into the West, forming what North Carolina loyalist John Cruden predicted would be “the greatest Empire that ever was on Earth.” To dismiss such hopes as delusional, as some historians have, is to 132 dunmore’s new world underestimate the power of contingency and undersell the loyalist political imagination. Favorable conditions for a British resurgence in North America persisted into the nineteenth century,particularly in the Old Southwest,where Creeks and Cherokees still predominated. That all of Anglo-America did not develop along the path of Dominion,as Canada did,is partly an accident of history . A committed counterrevolutionary imperialist, Dunmore did everything in his power to restore British rule in what is now the United States. Despite his ultimate failure,these efforts illustrate,often with spectacular vibrancy,just how uneven, uncertain, and undeniably interesting Great Britain’s turn away from the West truly was. • In the downcast days following Yorktown, there was a sense in Charleston that all had not been lost—not quite. A British garrison town, the city was now a refuge for the low country’s most devoted loyalists. When Dunmore arrived there in late 1781, he fell in with a group of men with big dreams and little influence, including Cruden, the commissioner of sequestered estates for the Carolinas. Like many in Charleston, Cruden felt the world he knew slipping away. Desperate but not defeated, he and others met the gloom with bold proposals for getting the war back on track. They had no illusions about what they were up against. In a letter to Dunmore, Cruden acknowledged the probability that “the Nation at large will insist on the American War being relinquished.” Parliament would indeed vote to end offensive operations less than two months later, but Cruden believed a window for “Vigorous Steps” still existed. As commissioner, he was responsible for managing confiscated rebel property,including slaves,whom he employed to protect captured estates. Based on this experience, Cruden devised a plan to arm ten thousand South Carolina bondsmen. With the help of the British forces then at Charleston, he believed the slave soldiers could drive the rebels out of the colony and go on to reconquer North Carolina and Virginia. The strategy was bound to appeal to Dunmore. As little success as he had had in the Chesapeake, he remained convinced that black troops could turn the tide. In a letter to General Henry Clinton, then in New York, he recommended Cruden’s plan wholesale, save for one point. Cruden had no intention of emancipating the slaves he enlisted.“Let it be clearly understood,” he told Dunmore,“that they are to Serve the King for Ever, and that...

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