Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.

(#litres_trial_promo) This attested to a deep skepticism among European powers about the territorial integrity of the United States. If the United States fell apart, as many people expected it would, Britain, France, and Spain all wanted to scoop up the fragments. What Cruden essayed in Florida was just the first in a series of British projects to assert control in this region. Soon Cruden’s shoes would be filled by a Maryland loyalist called William Augustus Bowles, who solicited British support for another loyal independent state, to be peopled primarily by the Creeks. And within less than a decade, Cruden’s suggestion of an imperial coalition against republicanism would become real when the French Revolutionary wars brought Britain and Spain together as allies against the French republic.

Throughout 1784 loyalists and slaves migrated out of East Florida on flatboats, in ships, and through back ways in the wilderness. An official estimate counted 3,398 whites and 6,540 blacks leaving East Florida for other British domains. A further five thousand were “imagined to have gone over the Mountains to the States &c.,” where most of them disappear from historical view.

(#litres_trial_promo) Governor Tonyn’s own drawn-out departure played out in miniature the strains and reluctance with which the evacuations had taken place. The eighteen months allotted for withdrawal by the treaty expired in March 1785, at which time Tonyn expected that “this arduous and vexatious business, will be fully and completely accomplished in the course of a few weeks.” But he required (and received) a four-month extension actually to finish the work, and it was only in August 1785 that he could report, from on board the Cyrus at the port of St. Mary’s, that “I have discharged my mind of a heavy burden, by the dismission of the last division of Evacuists.” Tonyn continued impatiently to wait to “emerge, out of this most disagreeable situation” and sail for England. And then, it was as if Florida itself held him back. On September 11, 1785, the wind picked up enough to carry the Cyrus over the first sandbar, then shifted direction suddenly, dashing the ship against the bar. Taking in water at a rate of six inches per hour, the frigate crawled back to shore for repairs. Tonyn spent an uncomfortable two months at St. Mary’s until new vessels arrived from the Bahamas to fetch him.

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On November 13, 1785—two years after Evacuation Day in New York, four years after Yorktown—Tonyn and the last of the Florida refugees finally put out to sea. “It is shocking and lamentable,” Tonyn had written on leaving St. Augustine, “to behold a Country once in a flourishing state now in desolation—a once beautiful City lying in ruins; these . . . may be compared to my own misfortunes, and those of a deserving, considerable Loyal People, who from a condition of happiness and affluence . . . are by a cruel reverse in human affairs reduced to indigence and affliction.”

(#litres_trial_promo) If he and his fellow passengers looked back to shore, they might have seen heaps of cast-off planks scattered over the sand. Unable to sell their houses to incoming Spaniards, loyalists had dismantled the frames, hoping to take them away for reassembly in the Bahamas or elsewhere—but there was not enough room for them on the ships.

(#litres_trial_promo) Rebuilding a house would be hard enough. Rebuilding lives and communities posed an altogether more daunting task. But when the last Florida refugees faced the Atlantic before them, at least they were heading in a promising direction. They were bound for Britain, where the blueprints for reconstructing loyalist fortunes—and imperial ones—were being drawn up.

PART II

Settlers

Thomas Kitchin, A Compleat Map of the British Isles, 1788.

Chapter Four

The Heart of Empire

“HOW SHALL I describe what I felt, when I first set my foot on British ground?” soliloquized Louisa Wells, a young loyalist refugee from Charleston, when she disembarked on the shores of Kent in 1778. “I could have kissed the gravel on the salt Beach! It was my home: the Country which I had so long and so earnestly wished to see. The Isle of Liberty and Peace.” After what she had endured, Wells had good reason to feel relieved. The daughter of Charleston’s leading printer, a loyalist, she had stayed in the war-torn city to protect the family property against confiscation “as long as one stone stood upon another,” while her relatives fanned out in a loyalist diaspora in miniature.

(#litres_trial_promo) Her parents went to England; her brothers William and James to East Florida, bringing the family press with them; and her fiancé, a former apprentice of her father’s, to Jamaica. Wells painstakingly liquidated family assets in Charleston and invested the proceeds in easily transportable indigo, only to have her cargo seized by patriots as she prepared to sail for England. Then her ship itself was captured as a suspected privateer. She finally made it across the Atlantic, five months after leaving Charleston, plagued by bad weather and fear of French attack.

Britain may not have been the closest place, geographically, for American loyalists to seek asylum, but as the center of the imperial world, it was in some ways the most obvious. During the war, Britain served as a primary destination for loyalist refugees. It commanded a strength of attachment that no other locale could match, based in language, religion, culture, and for many white loyalists, blood. Yet few if any expressed sentiments resembling Wells’s when they got there. Far more often, they echoed the paradox embedded in her statement.

(#litres_trial_promo) Her “home,” as she put it, lay in a locale she had “long and so earnestly wished”—but never yet actually managed—to see. For all that many “ Americans had been raised to consider Britain as “home,” this was emphatically a foreign country.

(#litres_trial_promo) The tension between familiarity and difference would be the first of several paradoxes loyalists encountered in Britain, as their dearest, most trusted refuge proved an oddly alienating place.

What a new world this was! Nothing in America could prepare the provincial newcomers for the sensory experience of Georgian London, one of the largest, most diverse cities on earth. “[I]t is absolutely impossible for any American, who has never lived in London, to have any idea of it,” pronounced one colonial visitor.

(#litres_trial_promo) “[N]otwithstanding the grand Ideas I had formed of it,” a Massachusetts exile explained, London “far exceeded my expectation”—for better and for worse. The best of the city showed itself in elegant squares and town houses and in the graceful greenswards of St. James’s Park, often “throng’d by loyalists.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The capital offered an inexhaustible series of things to see and do. You could squeeze into a crowd of theatergoers to watch David Garrick play Hamlet.

(#litres_trial_promo) You could visit the British Museum and handle ancient manuscripts, peer at fossils, and wonder at the curiosities recently brought from the South Seas by Captain James Cook. You could pay your respects at the tomb of General Wolfe in Westminster Abbey, and admire grand historical canvases by Benjamin West and other prominent painters at the Royal Academy. You could make the rounds of London churches to hear celebrated divines preach, or visit the law courts and listen to eminent jurists try cases. You could fill your ears with the swelling choruses of Handel’s Messiah, “the most sublime piece of music in the whole world.”

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But as loyalists reveled in all these activities, they found London to be overwhelming too. Refugees felt buffeted by the crush of humanity in the streets as they navigated among “coaches, carts and waggons etc. continually passing repassing, meeting and jostling,” and swerved around beggars and hawkers, constantly alert for pickpockets.

(#litres_trial_promo) In London’s East End—where the majority of black loyalists ended up—“Whores Rogues & Sailors” clogged the filthy lanes, while cargoes from India, America, and Africa were unloaded onto docks as busy as whole villages.

(#litres_trial_promo) Unrelenting grey skies and saturating damp left the Americans depressed and prone to illness. One complained that very few Britons upheld “ancient Hospitality” and “pittied the fate of the Refugees.”

(#litres_trial_promo) “The shyness reserve and unconversibility of native Englishmen is notorious,” grumbled another.

(#litres_trial_promo) London seemed an altogether pushy place, where everyone looked out for themselves and foreigners were incidental distractions. Partly for this reason, many loyalists chose to reside in Bristol, Bath, and smaller towns, where prices were lower and the pace of life slower. Loyalists also tended to keep their own company, living near one another and frequenting common haunts. A refugee from Maine found quarters in South Kensington with three Massachusetts exiles, and dined regularly with an “American club” of fellow New England loyalists. Coffee houses—the New England, New York, Carolina, and others—served as their life-lines to America, sources of news, debate, gossip, and convenient places to receive precious letters from home.

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During the war loyalist refugees sadly recorded the anniversaries of their departures from America, and looked forward to a peace that would let them go home.

(#litres_trial_promo) But the war’s end and the unsatisfying treaty seemed to slam the door to return shut. Instead thousands more refugees arrived on British shores. Because of the high cost of living in Britain, its distance from America, and the incentives offered for settlement in British North America and the Bahamas, only about 15 percent of white loyalist refugees, or around eight thousand, chose to migrate to Britain—less than twice the number of black loyalists who ended up there, often as a result of their military service. The majority of white loyalists crossing the Atlantic were of middle-class status or higher. Their central objective was to win compensation for their lost and confiscated American assets. Joseph Galloway and William Franklin, formerly advocates for imperial union, became leading lobbyists for government relief. Loyalists also leaned on patrons to try to secure new jobs, and endeavored to place their children in good schools and on promising career paths. Unsure about how much financial support they might win, or where they might profitably settle, even privileged loyalists found life in Britain uncomfortable. Still, they were fortunate compared to the smaller number of refugees who arrived in Britain in more desperate straits. For hundreds of indigent newcomers—the disabled, the illiterate, single mothers, and former slaves—relief could make the difference between starvation and survival.

And yet as loyalists across the kingdom clamored for assistance, Britain was in a poor position to grant it to them. “Nothing can be worse than this rich, devoted, ill govern’d Island,” growled one fed-up refugee as he approached the tenth anniversary of his exile in 1784.

(#litres_trial_promo) Parliament seemed in perennial tumult, with a series of ministries undercut by rivalry and infighting. The costs of war had brought the national debt to its highest level ever, at £232 million (or £25 billion in current terms). Britain’s territorial concessions in the Peace of Paris appeared to its critics to reveal weakness in the face of European rivals. American independence also raised troubling metaphysical questions about what the relationship between nation and empire would look like in the future.

(#litres_trial_promo) With the loss of the thirteen colonies, fewer and fewer imperial subjects resembled the British, in ethnicity, religion, culture, or language: Bengal, in eastern India, with perhaps twenty million inhabitants, was easily the largest domain in the British Empire. Nor, as the war had demonstrated, could Parliament claim to represent virtually its white settler colonists in the same manner it represented those in the British Isles. Imperial government had been shaken, but it remained to be seen how it would adapt.

Loyalist refugees brought the social and material consequences of defeat straight to the empire’s heart. Having lost their personal property, livelihoods, and homes, they put a human face on Britain’s own loss of the thirteen colonies. How would the refugees, and the empire to which they adhered, manage to regroup? Postwar Britain became the center of a parallel process of reconstruction. Individual loyalists sought to reestablish themselves with financial aid and new positions, while British authorities set about reforming imperial government and expanding into new domains—laying the foundations of the “spirit of 1783.” But for all that these projects harmonized in many ways, loyalists in Britain ran up against one contradiction after another. Though they strongly identified as British subjects, they felt estranged in this foreign land. Convinced that they deserved compensation, they grew frustrated in their quest for support. And while a newly expanding empire presented them with a panoply of career opportunities overseas, they struggled to make a go of it in Britain itself. The refugees in Britain benefited from imperial recovery, while experiencing firsthand the challenges that went with it.

AMERICANS IN LONDON frequently commented on the spectacular trappings of state power. From the palace of Westminster to St. James’s Palace, from the offices lining Whitehall to the grim brown bulk of the Tower, it was hard not to be awed by the government’s sheer architectural heft. Then there were its personalities. A number of loyalists attended debates in the House of Commons to watch gifted politicians in action, men like the eloquent Edmund Burke, the passionate Charles James Fox, and the precocious William Pitt the Younger, who in December 1783 became Britain’s youngest prime minister at the age of twenty-four. Some caught sight of Queen Charlotte at the theater, with her “lustures of Diamonds” glittering by candlelight. Others spotted King George III riding through the streets in a state coach, pulled by eight white horses bedecked in royal blue ribbons.

(#litres_trial_promo) A select few loyalists even had the chance to be presented to the royal family at court levees. No other refugees, however, encountered the monarch in quite the way that Samuel Shoemaker did, one day at Windsor Castle.

Shoemaker was a Pennsylvania Quaker, former mayor of Philadelphia, and a pillar of the New York City loyalist community during the war. (He had served with Beverley Robinson as an inspector of refugees in the occupied city.) Shoemaker left New York in the last evacuation fleet, with Carleton, William Smith, and a number of other associates, and arrived in Britain to find many of his refugee friends already getting settled. He had not seen his fellow Pennsylvanian Benjamin West, however, in at least twenty years, not since the painter had moved to Britain in 1763 to further his career. In the intervening decades, as Shoemaker lived through the breakdown of imperial relations in Pennsylvania, his old friend West surged to prominence as the greatest image-maker of British imperial might. A founder of the Royal Academy, of which he would be president for nearly thirty years, West was now history painter to the king, with whom he was a personal favorite.

Shoemaker enjoyed a fond reunion with his long-lost friend and visited the Wests at their residence in Windsor Castle. One afternoon, he was loitering outside in hopes of catching a glimpse of the royal family on their way to chapel when West popped out from the castle with surprising news: the king had just asked to meet Shoemaker personally. Flustered, Shoemaker had no time to overcome his shock before West whisked him into the royal presence. And suddenly there he was: the leader of the empire, the personification of loyalist hopes and patriot hatred, goggle-eyed King George III himself, with Queen Charlotte and four of their daughters in tow. “Mr. S. you are well known here, every body knows you,” said the king, instantly calming Shoemaker’s nerves. Why, the king wanted to know, was “the Province of Pennsylvania . . . so much further advanced in improvement than the neighbouring ones” that had been settled earlier? Shoemaker, “thinking it wd. be a kind of compliment to the Queens countrymen &c,” generously suggested that it was due to hardworking German colonists. The king returned the favor, saying that Pennsylvania’s prosperity must be “principally owing to the Quakers.” For another forty-five minutes Shoemaker happily chatted with the king and queen—partly in German—about America, his family, and more. The Hanovers swished away, leaving their loyal subject smitten. “I cannot say but I wished some of my violent countrymen could have such an opportunity as I have had,” Shoemaker reflected in his diary. “I think they would be convinced that George the third has not one grain of Tyrany in his Composition, and that he is not, he cannot be that bloody minded man they have so repeatedly and so illiberally called him, it is impossible, a man of his fine feelings, so good a husband, so kind a Father, cannot be a Tyrant.”

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Shoemaker’s unusually long, informal encounter with the king brought him as close as any loyalist to a man so many Americans had only fantasized about, for good and ill. His positive impression of his sovereign gestured toward an important if perhaps surprising outcome of the American Revolution for the monarchy. Although King George III had fervently opposed recognizing American independence, the secession of the thirteen colonies—along with those former subjects who condemned him as a “tyrant”—actually strengthened his symbolic power in the rest of the empire. The king’s popularity surged in Britain in the years immediately following the war.

(#litres_trial_promo) Imperial officials overseas, in turn, increasingly used ceremonies, symbols, and celebrations to cultivate emotional connections to the monarchy.

(#litres_trial_promo) In many domains royal authority would be fortified at the expense of elected legislatures, a palpable manifestation of the “spirit of 1783.”

But loyalists’ connection to the king overlaid a more ambivalent relationship to Parliament and other branches of government. Their quest for compensation brought these tensions to the fore. In Britain as in America, loyalist concerns centered on the noxious Article V of the peace treaty. The prime minister during the treaty negotiations, Lord Shelburne, had feared that failing to provide adequately for loyalists might give ammunition to his political opponents. He was right. When the treaties with the United States, France, and Spain came up for debate in the House of Commons, the opposition fiercely denounced their terms. Britain’s generous territorial concessions were bad enough. Even worse, Lord North (now in opposition) opined, the poor treatment of loyalists “awakens human sensibility in a very irresistible and lamentable degree”: “Never was the honor of the nation so grossly abused as in the desertion of those men, who are now exposed to every punishment that desertion and poverty can inflict.” His allies promptly chimed in. This “gross libel on the national character,” proclaimed Edmund Burke, “in one flagitious article plunged the dagger into the hearts of the loyalists.” One MP’s “heart bled. . . .It was scandalous, it was disgraceful!” It was, another asserted, “a lasting monument of national disgrace.” The MP and playwright Richard Sheridan read aloud woeful petitions from loyalists in Florida, theatrically “breathing in the most animated style,” to underscore their outrage. In short, as an opposition member passionately summed up:

Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, beheld the dismemberment and diminution of the British empire. But this, alarming and calamitous as it was, was nothing when compared with another of the crimes of the present peace—the cession of men into the hands of their enemies, and delivering over to confiscation, tyranny, resentment, and oppression, the unhappy men who trusted to our fair promises and deceitful words.

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Few could have doubted where all this invective would lead. In the winter of 1783, the House voted to censure the peace treaties, delivering a crippling declaration of no confidence in the ministry. Shelburne promptly announced his resignation, leaving another government broken on the wheel of civil war. (He would be replaced in April 1783 by a coalition anchored by the unlikely duo of Lord North and the radical Charles James Fox.

(#litres_trial_promo) This government also proved short-lived and fell at the end of 1783, leading to the premiership of William Pitt.)

Although the issue of loyalist compensation helped bring down the Shelburne government, it must be said that the loyalists’ own sturmund-drang rhetoric did not always win them friends. In the later years of the war, many politicians had grown weary of loyalists’ chimerical visions of faithful Americans rallying to the British flag; British opponents of the war increasingly blamed the loyalist lobby (and especially Joseph Galloway) for unnecessarily prolonging an unsuccessful conflict. “They talked and acted like foolish gamesters,” said one MP, “whose passions bound them more strongly to persevere the more their losses galled them.”

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