Loyalist Rebellion in New Brunswick: A Defining Conflict for Canada’s Political Culture by David Bell (review)

This book is basically a condensed version of David Bell’s Early Loyalist Saint John, published in 1983, written in the hope of reaching a ‘wider audience’ (p. 6). Bell has kept abreast of more recent scholarship and the first few chapters do contain a useful summary of the exodus of Loyalists from New York City and their resettlement in what would become New Brunswick. Bell convincingly argues that Britain ‘stumbled into’ the policy of resettling the Loyalists. Indeed, when Britain made the offer to transport the New York refugees to Nova Scotia, it had no idea of the scale of that commitment since it was not clear that ‘Patriot persecutions would make escape necessary’ for so many (pp. 29–30). As Bell points out, the logistics of resettlement were badly handled, so badly that many gave up life in New Brunswick and returned to the United States. Indeed, this return migration is, as Bell asserts, the least-studied aspect of the Loyalist diaspora and one wishes he had given it more attention here. I also found a bit oversimplified Bell’s conclusion that most of the refugees in New York City would have remained if they could have done so and that they were driven into exile ‘not so much by political principle as by accident of geography and war. They left because they could not stay.’ But many could not stay because they had chosen for ideological reasons to become ‘active’ Loyalists rather than remain quiescent ‘loyal-leaning colonists’ (p. 19). The second part of the book describes the conflict among the Loyalists who settled in New Brunswick. Bell rightly points out that ‘the Saint John of the 1780s was not special’, that its political character was not very different from the other centres of Loyalist resettlement, and that Loyalists ‘entered their exile not as future Canadians but as colonial Americans set down in a wilderness’. Even its literary warfare echoed ‘the political ways of pre-revolutionary New York, Philadelphia and Boston’ (p. 135). One wishes he had done more to develop these points, especially the comparison with the other areas of Loyalist resettlement. But Bell’s focus is quite narrowly on the struggle between the entrenched conservative minority in Saint John and those who unsuccessfully challenged their authority in the 1780s, and there is not much here that was not in Bell’s earlier book. It is also hard to see how or why this was a defining conflict for Canada’s political culture. It is true that the ‘loyalty cry’ would be used again and again in Canadian history but in very different contexts that had little do with New Brunswick in the 1780s. Indeed, the memory of what had happened in New Brunswick in the 1780s had been all but forgotten until Bell rediscovered the story – a story which at best makes a minor addition to the vast and growing literature on the Loyalists.