Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

American political commentators since Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) have described the effects of the American Revolution in terms of the “spirit of 1776,” which spread values of liberty and equality around the world. However, exploring the varied lives of loyalist refugees, Jasanoff discerns a set of patterns in the diaspora that she calls the “spirit of 1783,” a similar but distinct set of values, transmitted to the world not by the example of the United States but by loyalist refugees within the British Empire. Among the text’s central intentions is to illustrate this spirit’s distinctiveness as well as some of its counterintuitive and even paradoxical qualities; the loyalists, despite their loyalty, ultimately challenged the empire.

Jasanoff explains that this spirit “had three major elements” (12). First, the loyalist exodus expanded the British Empire. Second, the diaspora spread a “clarified commitment to liberty and humanitarian ideals” (12). Third, the loyalist diaspora caused British officials to call for an increasingly “centralized, hierarchical government” (13). This authoritarianism caused a backlash in which loyalist refugees “demanded more representation than imperial authorities proved willing to give them” (13).

The exodus of approximately 75,000 American loyalists during and after the Revolutionary War expanded the British Empire. Loyalists served as “both agents and advocates of imperial growth” (12). Loyalist refugees were “pioneer settlers” in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, the Bahamas, and Sierra Leone (12), and bolstered populations in Jamaica and even Britain itself. Loyalists also participated in “ambitious expansionist projects elsewhere in the world” (12), including India, the empire’s most important colonial territory.

The loyalist diaspora promoted a set of humanitarian values consciously distinct from views espoused by American revolutionaries. Colonists wanted to expand west of the Appalachian Mountains, but the British government defended the Proclamation of 1763 that blocked expansion into Native lands. While the Proclamation was not wholly humanitarian and was also deeply motivated by other, self-interested sociopolitical considerations (for example, Britain wanted total control over the colonists, and colonist conflict with Native Americans and French settlers would be exceedingly costly to the British Empire), its ramifications nevertheless benefited Natives and further diversified the loyalist population. For generations, Anglo-American colonists antagonized Native Americans, “produc[ing] excruciatingly savage forms of warfare” and deep fear of Native violence among white settlers (37). In contrast, British officials welcomed Native allies to their cause and even encouraged quasi-independent Native communities such as the settlement created by Mohawk Joseph Brant in what is now Ontario and Muskogee, which William Augustus Bowles attempted to develop among Creek people in Florida.

British officials also undermined the American institution of slavery with Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775, offering freedom to the enslaved people who joined the British military effort. Again, this Proclamation was motivated by military strategy perhaps more than humanitarian ideals—and, importantly, it offered freedom only to those who would serve Britain—but it nevertheless had a profoundly destabilizing impact on American slavery. Though white loyalist refugees often retained their racism, evidenced by the Nova Scotia race riot of 1784, the British government encouraged Black and Native American loyalists to settle as free people within the British Empire.

Finally, the loyalist diaspora created tension between official and popular ideas about government in British colonies. Wary of potential chaos among loyalist refugees, officials attempted increasingly authoritarian approaches to local administration. For instance, the unrest among loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia in 1784 prompted New Brunswick’s administrators to establish a class-segregated, aristocratic enclave at Fredericton and suppress the political power of working-class loyalists in Saint John. Faced with criticism from a free press and efforts by loyalist planters to control the Bahamian assembly, Dunmore wished to assert martial law. Freetown residents who enthusiastically followed John Clarkson to Sierra Leone later engaged in political insurrection and outright rebellion. The Baptist faith George Liele brought to Jamaica inspired the Baptist War of 1831, in which the enslaved rebelled. In transmitting “political sensibilities from colonial America” throughout the British Empire, “loyalist refugees turned out to be vectors of imperial dissent as conspicuously as they embodied loyal consent” (346).