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58 Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston (1764–1848) “Shot Round the World but Not Heard” ben marsh    “No one could possibly claim,” explained Rev. Arthur Wentworth Eaton in his 1901 preface, that Elizabeth Johnston and her Recollections “are of very wide historical or even biographical interest.” She did not fire any cannons or act heroically, did not enter into personal correspondence with great figures, did not influence the course of political events, or in any other way stake a claim to historical significance. Indeed, Eaton felt the need to justify her significance through her progeny, reeling off a long chain of her descendants who had subsequently held weighty positions in Canada—chief justices and Supreme Court judges, reverends, senators, and physicians “of the highest professional and social standing.”1 Now, more than a century after Eaton’s pronouncement, scholars have successfully challenged the kinds of assumptions and biases in his definition of what constitutes “interesting” history. Reaching out beyond the highprofile powerful men has brought immense rewards in better understanding the everyday workings of societies in the past: their organization, their interior values, their evolution—in short, their history. The rich rewards to be gained from this widening of historical and biographic “interest” are often hard earned and contested, mined, as they must be, from limited deposits in the historical record. Historians of women, gender, families, and households in the colonial South first struck on quantitative sources to explore social relationships and have since been meticulously panning and filtering qualitative sources—diaries, letters, and wills, among others—in search of answers to a host of questions about the nature of early southern family life, women’s roles in society, and the significance of gender and sexuality to individual and communal identities.2 Placed in the context of this new scholarship, Elizabeth Johnston’s Recollections Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston 59 can tell us much about the shifting social boundaries of life in colonial and revolutionary Georgia. Johnston was seventy-two years old in 1836 when, principally for her grandchildren , she wrote her memoirs, which comprised a loose narrative interspersed with retrospective observations and memorable vignettes. To these eleven chapters, three of which were devoted to her youth in Georgia, she appended a set of precious family letters dated between 1769 and 1784. She chose the title Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist, a notable statement of identity in light of her residency in Nova Scotia from 1806 until her death in Halifax in 1848.3 This indicated that Johnston carried with her for the rest of her life, like thousands of her contemporaries, the physical and psychological traumas of the American Revolution. Of all the groups touched by the Revolution, migrant Loyalist women (whether white or black) arguably experienced the most radical transformation in their life prospects. On top of the widespread dislocation wrought by war, Loyalists were more likely than others to experience periods as fugitives or forced migration, to endure close association with a transient military (complete with physical, sexual, and epidemiological dangers), to come under legal pressures about their status and rights, and to suffer separation from family and institutional support mechanisms.4 Had the Revolution never happened , Elizabeth Johnston might have reasonably expected, given her background , to go on to become a plantation mistress, socialite, and slave owner in Georgia. But things were different in Nova Scotia, with many more free blacks than slaves, courtesy of the manumission and relocation policies adopted by self-interested British authorities during the War for Independence. When Johnston alighted at Annapolis Royal in the 1800s, the baggage carters working at the dock included one such freed black, a Rose Fortune, who reportedly held a monopoly in the local trucking business, charged modest prices, and wore “a white cap with the strings tied under her chin, surmounted by a man’s hat . . . a man’s coat, a short skirt and high legged boots.”5 For better or worse, some thirty thousand Loyalists, including the Fortunes and the Johnstons, would ultimately have to start lives afresh as “pioneers” in Nova Scotia, a long way from the homes and the futures that might have been theirs. Elizabeth Johnston, née Lichtenstein (or anglicized as Lightenstone), was born ten miles or so from Savannah, on the Little Ogeechee River, on May 28, 1764. Her parentage reflected the diverse origins of Georgia’s fledgling population, for since the colony’s founding and in spite of its problematic infancy during the trusteeship (1732–52), immigrants had been arriving from across the...

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