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

The troubles in the colonies all started, strangely enough, with Britain’s greatest imperial victory. Triumph in the Seven Years’ War in 1763 brought the empire French Canada, Spanish Florida, valuable Caribbean islands, and an important foothold in India. But Britain had also racked up an enormous debt. To offset the costs, Parliament passed a series of measures in the colonies designed to promote imperial security and prosperity. Instead, it unintentionally provoked colonial resistance. Most notoriously, the Stamp Act of 1765, a seemingly innocuous tax on paper products, spectacularly backfired when Americans (and many Britons) denounced it as an abuse of imperial power, imposed by a parliament that did not adequately represent colonists. Many future loyalists were vocal opponents of the Stamp Act, though these protests also saw the first systematic attacks against American “tories,” suspected of wanting to enhance royal and aristocratic power. Street gangs like the self-described Sons of Liberty smashed property and assaulted individuals—most vividly by tarring and feathering, a new hallmark of patriot justice.

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Violence was a familiar colonial phenomenon by the time a 1773 tax on tea touched off the worst trouble yet. One December night, Boston’s Sons of Liberty, their faces streaked to resemble Indian warriors, stormed onto British tea ships anchored in Boston harbor and tipped the valuable cargo overboard. Parliament responded by passing the so-called Coercive Acts, closing the port of Boston and demanding repayment for the tea. Americans swiftly branded these the “Intolerable Acts.” Delegates from around the thirteen colonies decided to convene a continental congress in Philadelphia and develop a coordinated response.

A few congressmen arrived in Philadelphia in September 1774 already primed for war. They must have cheered enthusiastically at a congressional dinner when the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine—who had recently arrived from England to throw his support behind the patriot cause—raised a toast, declaring, “May the collision of British Flint and American Steel produce that spark of liberty which shall illumine . . . posterity”! But the majority of delegates would have cheered more comfortably when the company drank to the “Union of Britain and the Colonies on a constitutional foundation.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The prospect of war seemed to most congressmen an unnecessary, not to say suicidal, extreme. Far preferable was finding a way to assert colonial rights and liberties while remaining within the imperial fold.

The speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly, Joseph Galloway, offered Congress a compelling plan to achieve this.

(#litres_trial_promo) Galloway agreed with most of his colleagues that the colonies—while they held “in abhorrence the idea of being considered independent”—could not adequately “be represented in the Parliament of Great Britain.” Instead, Galloway suggested that America have a parliament of its own: a “Grand Council,” to be headed by a president general. Made up of representatives from each colony, this American parliament would “hold and exercise all the legislative rights, powers, and authorities” required for running colonial affairs. It would also have the power to veto any legislation bearing on America produced by the British parliament. The colonies would thereby enjoy domestic self-government while retaining the benefits of imperial trade and protection. Such a “Plan of Union,” Galloway argued, was the only way forward if the colonies wanted to stave off “all the horrors of a civil war” and the inevitable “ruin of America.”

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Galloway’s plan was the most significant colonial reform project on the eve of the revolution, though it did not come out of a vacuum. Galloway’s mentor Benjamin Franklin had proposed a very similar idea himself twenty years earlier (developed with the governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson, later reviled as a “tory”), the Albany Plan of Union of 1754.

(#litres_trial_promo) “Join, or Die,” Franklin had inscribed under a memorable political cartoon showing the colonies as segments of a cut-up serpent—indicating the importance of continental union to American prosperity.

(#litres_trial_promo) Galloway sent his own plan of union to Franklin, then living in London, who circulated the scheme among high-ranking British officials; Franklin’s only objection was that it might embroil America in too many British imperial wars. Franklin’s son William, the governor of New Jersey, wholeheartedly endorsed it. After all, it had much to commend it to American sensibilities. By granting the colonies control over virtually everything but the ability to go to war, Galloway’s plan proposed a greater degree of autonomy for the American colonies than any other British domain enjoyed, including Scotland. His proposed American legislature would have fewer constraints than the Irish parliament, too. Most important, Galloway argued, his plan would aid the development of America itself. If the colonies were going to continue to grow and flourish, there had to be some overarching authority binding them together, in the spirit of Franklin’s “Join, or Die”; perhaps, he suggested, an “American constitution.”

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For one long late-September day in 1774, Congress debated Galloway’s plan of union. The New York delegation was particularly well disposed toward it, with the respected lawyer John Jay speaking out clearly in its favor. It was “almost a perfect plan,” declared an upstanding young South Carolina planter. Galloway congratulated himself that “all the men of property, and many of the ablest speakers, supported the motion.” But not all his colleagues were convinced. “We are not to consent by the representatives of representatives,” insisted Patrick Henry of Virginia.

(#litres_trial_promo) Samuel Adams, the founder of the Sons of Liberty, believed the colonies would do better by withdrawing from the British Empire altogether. When Galloway’s plan came to a vote, five colonies voted in its favor versus six against—and the plan was tabled.

(#litres_trial_promo) Instead of moving toward closer union with Britain, Congress issued a set of resolutions asserting Americans’ entitlement to “all the rights, liberties, and immunities” of British subjects, in terms anticipating those of the Declaration of Independence.

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The closeness of the vote on Galloway’s plan poses an intriguing “what if ” for historians. What if one vote had gone the other way? What would have happened to the thirteen colonies if Galloway’s scheme had been adopted? Ireland might provide one answer: following a series of reforms in 1782, the Irish parliament received something of the legislative freedom Galloway sought for America. In 1800, Ireland would be united with Great Britain outright and its parliament absorbed by Westminster. But a better answer would take shape in North America itself, in 1867, when the provinces of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia united to become a federal, self-governing dominion within the British Empire. Canada—as this confederation was called—was the first example of “home rule” (autonomy over domestic policy) in the empire, and provided a template for self-government movements in later-nineteenth-century Ireland and India. In 1774 Philadelphia, Galloway advanced a model of imperial reform that anticipated home rule by generations. It was a prime example of how loyalists possessed dynamic political visions of their own.

Galloway could not have taken much comfort in seeing one part of his prophecy come true. By rejecting his plan—the last concerted American attempt to preserve ties with the British Empire—Congress moved inexorably closer to civil war. With tensions already near breaking point, it was mostly a matter of time before something touched off outright conflict.

The alarm came before dawn on the morning of April 19, 1775, when militia members in Lexington, Massachusetts, were rustled out of bed with news that British soldiers were coming from Boston to seize a patriot weapons store in nearby Concord. The militia mustered on Lexington Green as fast as they could and hastily readied their muskets as seven hundred well-disciplined British regulars marched, wheeled, and advanced toward them. Then a gun went off. Nobody knew who fired the “shot heard ’round the world” (as the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson would famously dub it), British redcoat or American militiaman.

(#litres_trial_promo) But that didn’t really matter. For despite their differences in power and purpose, the two groups of men were more alike than any other enemies they had faced. To them and thousands more now engulfed by war, the American Revolution did not look like a world-historical drama about the forging of a new nation. This was a bitter civil war about the division of an old empire. It accelerated a painful process in which British subjects were increasingly divided into opposing camps, as Americans and Britons.

(#litres_trial_promo) The problem for loyalists was that they had affiliations to both, being at once rooted American colonists and committed British subjects.

FOR THE CONGRESSMEN meeting in Philadelphia, ideas and beliefs were an explicit subject of debate. But for the two and a half million Americans caught up in a civil war, ideas were hardened—if not superseded—by violence. The beginning of conflict was enough to push even some former congressmen to the other side, including prominent New York merchant Isaac Low. Though Low had resisted the abuse of imperial authority since the 1760s, he felt progressively alienated by the steps toward war. When the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, Low resigned his seat and stayed home; and when asked to purchase gunpowder for patriot troops a short time later, he withdrew entirely from government and soon lent his support to the British.

(#litres_trial_promo) Within weeks of the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, colonies established committees of safety that administered loyalty oaths to newly formed patriot legislatures. These oaths became a crucial marker of difference between patriots and loyalists. People who refused to swear them could be jailed, punished with property confiscation, or banished outright. Popular justice also followed those who failed to comply. Jacob Bailey, the Pownalborough minister, was comparatively fortunate that only his sheep and cows were attacked. At least two dozen others in 1775 shared the fate of Thomas Brown, by being tortured and publicly humiliated with tarring and feathering.

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Then there was the spreading violence of the war itself. Revolution reached five-year-old Catherine Skinner one night when soldiers broke into her house, yanked her from her bed, and plunged their bayonets into her mattress to see if her father was hiding underneath. Catherine’s father, Cortlandt Skinner, New Jersey’s last royal attorney general, had rebuffed patriot overtures (like Brown) and escaped to British lines, leaving his family in the New Jersey countryside. Rebel raids trapped the Skinner family as prisoners in their own house; they hid in the cellar from gunshots, famished to the point of pain and tears. At last Catherine’s mother managed to lead her ten youngest children to safety on her eldest daughter’s farm. The days grew sharp and short, winter coming on. Every time they went into the fields they found another outbuilding burned, another of their pigs or cows poisoned by the rebels. The Skinners scraped through the winter of 1776–77 on stores of buckwheat buried beneath the hard-frozen ground. One frigid day the youngest of the family, a smiling boy of fourteen months, died. For days they kept the tiny body inside the house, unable to let him go with no priest to perform a funeral and no church accessible. In the end, Catherine’s eldest siblings “carried the poor little thing out in the night and buried him in the corner of a field.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Traumatic scenes like this imprinted Catherine—and probably her younger sister Maria too—powerfully enough for her to recall them vividly more than sixty years later.

Loyalists closely monitored the progress of the war, sometimes hiding out to avoid confrontations, sometimes moving to seek shelter within British lines. Of course, at the outset it was reasonable to think that Britain would win the conflict handily. But a worrying indication to the contrary came when the British decided to evacuate Boston in March 1776 in the face of a patriot attack. In the orders to abandon the city, British general William Howe offered free passage to any loyalist civilians who wished to follow—unwittingly setting a precedent for many more evacuations to come. At least eleven hundred loyalists sailed with the departing troops for Halifax in Nova Scotia.

(#litres_trial_promo) “By all accounts, there never existed a more miserable set of beings, than these wretched creatures now are,” said George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army. “Conscious of their black ingratitude, they chose to commit themselves . . . to the mercy of the waves in a tempestuous season, rather than meet their offended countrymen.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Washington’s contempt aside, the refugees would have agreed with his portrayal of their woeful condition. Leaving behind almost all their property and personal connections, the Boston refugees were the first loyalists to experience mass evacuation—and the first group to discover the hardships of imperial exile.

In New York City, where British military efforts now concentrated, the assistant rector of Trinity Church, Charles Inglis, anxiously watched the situation deteriorate around him. As an ordained priest in the Church of England, Inglis (like Jacob Bailey) could not brook the prospect of forswearing his allegiance to the king who stood at the head of his church. But he felt sick at the sight of his country at war. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published the pamphlet Common Sense, a strident and hugely compelling argument in favor of American independence and republicanism. Inglis quickly scribbled out a deeply felt, intellectually grounded rebuttal called The True Interest of America, Impartially Stated. “I find no Common Sense in this pamphlet but much uncommon phrenzy,” Inglis wrote. “Even Hobbes would blush to own its author for a disciple.” Inglis vividly described the devastating consequences that he thought Paine’s vision would have for America: “Ruthless war... will ravage our once happy land....Torrents of blood will be spilt, and thousands reduced to beggary and wretchedness.” What America needed instead, Inglis argued, was a reformed imperial relationship to secure American “Liberties, Property, and Trade.” “No person breathing has a deeper sense of the present distresses of America, than I,” he insisted, “or would rejoice more to see these removed, and our liberties settled on a permanent, constitutional foundation.” But republicanism truly did seem to him a formula for anarchy, and independence a recipe for decline. He owed it “to God, to my King and Country” to resist. Where Paine had presented his text as the anonymous work of “an Englishman,” Inglis—who was born in Ireland—published his pamphlet under the proud label of “an American.”

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Inglis hoped that Paine’s pamphlet, “like others, will sink in oblivion.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Instead it was a runaway sensation. Said to have sold half a million copies in 1776 alone—enough for one in every five Americans to own one—the pamphlet helped convert Americans en masse to the idea of independence.

(#litres_trial_promo) Copies of Inglis’s pamphlet, by contrast, were seized from the printer and burned in what Inglis condemned as “a violent attack on the Liberty of the Press.” More outrages followed. The New York committee of safety ordered the loyalist-leaning governors of King’s College—today’s Columbia University—to empty out the college library so the facility could be turned into a barracks for Continental Army troops. In May 1776, suspected New York loyalists were rounded up and forced to hand over any weapons in their possession; the next month, more were seized by a mob, “rode on Rails, their Cloth’s torn off, & much beaten & abused. Many were obliged to fly out of the City, & durst not return.” By summer, Inglis and his friends were living in “the utmost Consternation and Terror” in the wake of a rumored plot to assassinate George Washington.

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And then, on July 4, 1776, Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence. All patriot talk of union, reform, and British liberties was swept away, replaced by Thomas Jefferson’s crystalline presentation of universal, “self-evident,” and “unalienable rights.” On paper, the declaration transformed thirteen British colonies into independent and “united States of America.” It would take a lot more to make the United States real in practice, but the declaration had a critical effect on consolidating patriot and loyalist positions. From now on, independence was the dividing line: either you were for it or you were against it. Independence made anybody who aided or abetted the British into a traitor against the United States. It also came with a symbol attached. The language of the declaration turned King George III into the embodiment of everything patriots hated about British rule. For loyalists, by contrast, the king provided a focal point of unity; supporting him was the one thing they all believed in.

No more king, no more Parliament, no more British Empire: as news of the declaration whipped across America, people instantly understood its significance. Emblems of the king’s authority came crashing down in an iconoclastic frenzy. Patriots marched through the streets of Boston tearing down inn signs, placards, and anything else bearing royal insignia. In Baltimore, they wheeled a statue of the king through the streets like a condemned man headed for execution and set it ablaze before a crowd of thousands. On Bowling Green in New York City, a crowd of soldiers and eager civilians looped ropes around a monumental equestrian statue of King George III, toppled it from its marble pedestal, chopped off the statue’s head, and planted it on a spike of iron fence. Inglis recorded how the decapitated remains were paraded through the city to the Continental Army camp, where “the Declaration of Independency was read at the Head of several Regiments.” Its valuable lead would be melted down into more than forty thousand bullets.

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Inglis remained frightened by “the critical situation of affairs” and “the most violent threats flung out against any who would presume to pray for the King.” Fortunately for him, a deliverance of sorts was at hand. Preparing for an invasion of New York City, Royal Navy ships crowded into the harbor “as thick as trees in a forest.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In the last week of August 1776, thirty thousand British troops landed in Brooklyn in great red waves. They routed Washington’s Continental Army on Brooklyn Heights and crossed the East River to seize Manhattan. Britain’s comprehensive victory in New York almost ended the war on the spot—though through bad British decisions and good American luck, Washington escaped to fight another day. Instead, New York City became the central British base of operations for the rest of the war. It also became the largest loyalist stronghold in the colonies. Loyalists surged into this safe haven from surrounding war-torn areas.

(#litres_trial_promo) In September 1776, when the British occupation began, the city contained a mere five thousand residents, many patriots having fled in the face of the British advance. Less than six months later, loyalist refugees had doubled the population, and soon New York played home to twenty-five to thirty thousand loyalists, making it the second largest city in the colonies.

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Refugees came to New York City in search of protection and stability, but these, they found, had a price. A few nights after the British arrival, a fire broke out on one of the slips at Manhattan’s southeastern tip. Sheets of flame blazed up Broadway, consuming as many as a quarter of the city’s buildings in its wake. British commanders concluded that the fire had been started by patriot arsonists, and promptly placed New York City under martial law; it remained under military rule until the end of the war.

(#litres_trial_promo) Loyalists deeply resented living under military occupation, subordinated to the whims of raucous British troops.

(#litres_trial_promo) (Not for nothing had the quartering of British soldiers in American homes been a long-standing colonial grievance.) In the fall of 1776, the disgruntled New York refugees presented a petition to the British commanders in chief complaining about martial law. “Notwithstanding the tumult of the times, and the extreme difficulties and losses to which many of us have been exposed, we have always expressed, and do now give this Testimony of our Zeal to preserve and support the constitutional supremacy of Great Britain over the Colonies,” the petitioners stressed. “[S]o far from having given the least countenance of encouragement, to the most unnatural, unprovoked Rebellion, that ever disgraced the annals of Time; we have on the contrary, steadily and uniformly opposed it, in every stage of its rise and progress, at the risque of our Lives and Fortunes.” In return for their loyalty, they argued, they deserved to be treated with “some line of distinction”—not the imperial iron fist that clenched them more tightly than ever.

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A frank declaration of dependence, this document conspicuously lacks the rhetorical grace and inspiration of the Declaration of Independence. But it gives clear insight into what a large cross section of American loyalists wanted from the British Empire. They had no wish to “dissolve the political bands” with Britain, as the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed. On the contrary, they sought “a speedy restoration of that union” between Britain and the colonies that had produced so much “mutual happiness and prosperity.” At the same time, these New Yorkers were not backward-looking reactionaries. Their quest for a civil reunion with Britain would have inclined them toward plans like Joseph Galloway’s, in which the colonies would gain greater autonomy. Nor were they unthinkingly “loyal” to what was effectively an army of occupation.

The “declaration of dependence” also nicely illustrates who these loyalists actually were. For three days in late November 1776, the petition sat on a table at Scott’s Tavern in Wall Street, to be signed by anybody who wished. In all, more than seven hundred people came to put their names to the parchment—twelve times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence. The list of signatories ranged from grandees fat with land and capital to small-time local farmers and artisans. The very first signer, Hugh Wallace, counted among the wealthiest traders in the city; he and his brother Alexander, émigrés from Ireland, had cemented their self-made success by marrying two sisters of Isaac Low, the former congressman. Charles Inglis and New York’s other principal clergymen followed immediately below. Representatives of New York’s great landed families, the DeLanceys, the Livingstons, and the Philipses, also inscribed their names to the petition. The majority of signatures, though, belonged to the ordinary people who made New York run: tavern-keepers and carpenters, farmers from the Hudson Valley and New Jersey, Germans, Dutch, Scots, and Welsh. Here was the baker Joseph Orchard, who supplied the British army with bread, and the hairdresser and perfumer James Deas. Many signatories later joined up to fight: men like Amos Lucas, who left his farm on Long Island to join a loyalist regiment, and the Greenwich blacksmith James Stewart, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, who enlisted in the British army in 1777. While the petition recorded the social hierarchy of the times—with “leading citizens” at the top and their clients and subordinates below—it also demonstrated the social diversity of loyalism.

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As patriots united around the idea of an independent nation, loyalty to the king helped a parallel America coalesce around an ideal of enduring empire. Yet these New York loyalists confronted an ominous portent of what would become a recurring loyalist predicament. They found a place of safety, yes, but it was not necessarily a comfortable one. What they wanted from Britain was not always what British authorities would give them. And though they were not prepared to abandon the imperial connection altogether, they had no desire to be treated as supplicant minions either. It was one thing to experience such treatment in a time of war. But many would find, to their chagrin, that such disjunctures between loyalist expectation and British practice stretched on well into the peace.