The Loyal Opposition

This is a transcript from an earlier broadcast of this episode – there may be slight differences in language.

PETER ONUF: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

ED AYERS: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory. We’re the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN BALOGH: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th century guy. I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED AYERS: 19th century guy.

BRIAN BALOGH: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER ONUF: 18th century guy, which is where we’re going to start this show today, right around 1778, in the midst of the American Revolution. It’s there that we’ll meet Jacob Bailey, a missionary for the Anglican Church. And he’s living in New England.

MAYA JASANOFF: On what at the time was a really wild Northern frontier. This is in the border lands between Massachusetts and Maine. So think of Maine as a wild frontier.

BRIAN BALOGH: Which is not that hard. This is Maya Jasanoff, an historian at Harvard.

MAYA JASANOFF: And while Jacob Bailey is acting as a missionary, meanwhile further down south in the Boston area, of course the different revolutionary tumults are erupting.

ED AYERS: Now this poses a problem for Jacob Bailey who again is living in Maine.

MAYA JASANOFF: Because he is a guy who has, as a member of the Church of England, has sworn his allegiance to the King as the head of his Church. So for him to break his trust with the King, his oath with the King, is both treasonous and sacrilegious.

PETER ONUF: And so Jacob Bailey refuses to join the Revolution. He remains loyal to the King. And the patriots don’t take kindly to that.

MAYA JASANOFF: He goes out into the field one day. And he finds that seven of his sheep have been slaughtered and one of his cows has been shot in the fields. He is attacked by a mob. The patriots in the region he’s in, Pownalborough, threatened to put a liberty pole up in front of his church And whip him in front of it if he doesn’t bless it. And by 1779, Bailey, who remains totally reluctant to renounce the King, finds that he has no real choice but to lead his family with him into exile.

Before dawn one day in June of 1779, they all pack up. They grab the clothes that they can carry with them. They grab their bedding. They grab what he describes as the “shattered remains of our fortune.” And they make their way up to Nova Scotia.

And as they’re doing it, they feel very directly and painfully and personally the sense of loss and departure from a world that they had known as their home. And Bailey is very upset and feels great grief at leaving, which he describes. And yet it’s when he sails into the harbor of Halifax, and he sees what he describes as the Britannic colors flying that he realizes that he has arrived. And he gives thanks to God quote “for safely conducting me and my family to this retreat of freedom and security, from the rage of tyranny, and the cruelty of opposition.”

PETER ONUF: We often think of America as a land of opportunity, a place to which people flocked to start over, to begin new lives, and for the most part, that’s a true story.

BRIAN BALOGH: But what about the Jacob Baileys of history? The people who have left? Today on the show, with immigration reform again in the headlines, we’re looking at the flip side of the Ellis Island story. Emigration– that’s emigration with an E at the beginning. Scattered throughout our history, our stories of people who’ve walked away from this land of opportunity for places like Canada, the Soviet Union, or an experimental colony in West Africa. Today their journey is ours.