Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

In 1815, the Napoleonic Wars ended in Europe: “Britain’s greatest age of global hegemony” began, and the “loyalist exodus was over” (343).

Elizabeth Johnston, after experiencing multiple displacements, established a comfortable life in Nova Scotia. By the time she began her memoirs in 1837, her descendants ranked among Nova Scotia’s social elite.

Beverley Robinson’s son and grandsons returned to New York. The fortune the family lost in the Revolutionary War reestablished, the Robinsons met old friends and reintegrated into New York society.

Dunmore lived his last days in England. His daughter married a son of King George III, without royal permission. When the king derided their mutual grandchildren, Dunmore wanted to strike him for the insult, and he never saw his king again.

Dunmore’s Bahamian rival, William Wylly, caused a crisis when he refused to allow a loyalist planter to take an enslaved person to the United States in 1817. Wylly moved to St. Vincent, but the ruins of his Bahamian plantation still stand.

The dreams of independent Native nations expressed by William Augustus Bowles and Joseph Brant died with them. In his last years, Brant lost faith in the British alliance.

George Liele, who died before it occurred, may not have agreed with the revolt of the enslaved, known as 1831 Baptist War in Jamaica. As the first Black Baptist preacher on the island, though, Liele helped set into motion cultural forces that made the uprising possible.

David George died in the thriving community of Freetown. Black American linguistic influences remain apparent in Sierra Leone.

Jasanoff refers to an idealized image of the relationship between loyalists and the British Empire by painter Benjamin West, The Reception of the American Loyalists by Great Britain (1812), reproduced in the book. As much as loyalists embodied the positive aspects of the “spirit of 1783,” their lives also showed the negative consequences of remaining loyal to Britain. Loyalists proved their fealty to the British monarch during the Revolutionary War but repeatedly resisted imperial authority throughout the loyalist diaspora.

Divergent loyalist experiences reflect the contradictions within the relationship loyalists had with Britain. Britain freed Black loyalists, but new settlements constrained their freedom, sometimes brutally. The British military relied upon Native allies in war, but the government failed to establish independent Native polities. Although they remained British subjects, loyalists reflected American political culture. British promises of land and food often fell short, loyalist expectations of popular political representation clashed with autocratic attitudes of British officials, and dissent was a prominent part of the diaspora experience.