Reluctant Revolutionaries?

BRIAN BALOGH: When Jacob Bailey left America, he previewed what was to come when the Revolutionary War wrapped up for good. Hundreds of thousands of colonists remained loyal to the British. And for many of them, the end of war was terrifying– a new government, a fear of backlash from the patriots.

75,000 Loyalists from all walks of life joined in the diaspora. Some were educated white men like Jacob Bailey. Others were African-Americans and Indians. Large parts of New York City were clearing out entirely. Maya Jasanoff says it looked a lot like a big moving sale.

MAYA JASANOFF: The British have to get rid of all of the extra supplies that they have that they don’t need. And so the British are selling off all their surplus stock. They’re selling off tens of thousands of pairs of shoes and stockings and buckles and needles and all kinds of supplies. They auction off the wagons and livestock and everything.

And then individuals also have to do this. They have to kind of liquidate their property as best they can. And so you see all of these advertisements for people selling their stuff. And then by contrast, you see all of these advertisements for ships that are trying to fill up and get the refugees to go with them.

And ads kind of attracting them to different parts of the British world. So there are these advertisements saying things like come to the Bahamas! It’s really great here. Or come to Port Roseway, Nova Scotia. It’s really wonderful. It’s just full of all of this land and game and fish and everything. And you can have a wonderful life here.

And so there’s this just huge transfer of property as everybody is wildly selling off their stuff, getting themselves berths on ships, and getting ready to set off for the unknown.

PETER ONUF: And where were they sailing to, Maya?

MAYA JASANOFF: So the British held out to the Loyalists the possibility of relocating in any one of a variety of British domains. Of course, there was Britain itself. But Britain itself was by and large a foreign country to most Loyalists who of course were Americans, just like the rest of us. And it was pretty far away. It was expensive. It was a place that most of these Americans had no real connection to.

So much more appealing for them were destinations that were rather closer at hand. Those included, particularly for people in the South, places in the Caribbean, such as the Bahamas and Jamaica in the Caribbean. And for people in the North, particularly coming from New York, the provinces of Canada. So Nova Scotia and the future province of New Brunswick were particularly significant destinations for the Loyalists.

BRIAN BALOGH: Now, among these Loyalists, sometimes as enslaved property and sometimes as free neighbors, would have been African-Americans. Can you describe what their emotions and options were in this situation?

MAYA JASANOFF: So during the war, the British held out a really attractive offer to the enslaved African Americans, particularly of course on the plantations in the South. And the British said to them why don’t you run away from your masters and come join us. And if you join us and fight for us, then we’ll give you freedom.

And inspired by those promises, some 20,000 slaves ran away from their American masters to join the British forces. And at the end of the war, a lot of those now freed slaves who are known as black Loyalists, had found their way up to New York City. And for these guys who had run away to the British, there was no question which kind of freedom meant most to them.

They had their patriots– the patriot leaders were talking about liberty and freedom from British tyranny. But the patriots were the people who kept these men and women enslaved. Instead for them, what the British were promising was freedom they could believe in, which was freedom from enslavement.

And so as this transfer of power is taking place at the end of the war from the British to the Americans, for the black Loyalists, in particular, this is a transfer that completely inverts our understanding, I think, of the way that America became independent. Because for them, to half the patriots coming into power and coming into New York City, basically means the prospect of being re-enslaved. And a lot of them, including for example, there’s a black Loyalist called Boston King, who writes a memoir about his experiences.

And he remembers this sense of being in the streets of New York with his black freed slave peers and being really worried about seeing their former masters coming to New York City and looking for them to take them back. And so for them, There’s really an obvious, better path, which is to jump on those British ships and sail off wherever they’re going to take them, because at least they’re going to be free.

ED AYERS: What tied people together from such disparate backgrounds? What made them Loyalist?

MAYA JASANOFF: Well, that’s a great question. When you consider the extent of loyalism in the colonies, which ranges across something like a fifth to a third of the population, you realize quickly that loyalism was actually something that spread really far and wide among the American colonial population. So you have people, all kinds of different social profiles, involved.

I think that it’s very difficult to find sort of one overarching thing under which you can classify the Loyalists. But if there had to be one, I think it’s certainly that they felt that their loyalty to the King was more important to them than surrendering that over to a very– to their mind– untested, unformed, often pretty untrustworthy kind of government of the sort that the patriots were holding out.

I should also say, by the way, that many of the Loyalists were actually themselves quite opposed to some of the manifestations of British government that they had run up against. So, for example, at the time of the Stamp Act in 1765, you find lots of people resisting the Stamp Act, who a decade later will end up remaining loyal. But they nevertheless wanted to see reform of the representative system and the taxation system.

And this will turn out to be a big headache for the British after the war. Because when these Loyalist refugees go off to Canada and the Bahamas and elsewhere, they bring with them this, as it were, colonial American perspective on British government. And they often want lower taxes and more representation from British authorities than the British turn out to be willing to give them.

BRIAN BALOGH: The American contagion of aversion to taxes– it’s a virus, right?

MAYA JASANOFF: Exactly.

BRIAN BALOGH: So our standard image, then, of these people as conservative and backward-looking does not seem to be the case.

MAYA JASANOFF: No. I really don’t think it is. Because many times they were actually advocating imperial reform. And I think the case of Canada is really interesting here. We need to remember that the American Revolution gave rise not only to the United States, but also turned out to be quite transformative for Canada.

As a result of all of these Loyalist refugees going up over the border, they basically doubled the population of Nova Scotia overnight. They create the province of New Brunswick. And it’s in Canada that the British can basically try out a new form of government for colonial settlements in the wake of the American Revolution.

And it’s there that they decide you know what? We’re going to modify things a little bit. We’re going to lower the taxes, but we’re also going to change the representative system so that we no longer have this idea that the people in the colonies are exactly the same as the people in Britain in political terms. We’re going to acknowledge the fact that they’re colonial subjects, and they’re living at a distance. And they’re going to have a different type of colonial government.

And so Canada becomes, as it were, the sort of poster child for the post-revolutionary British empire. And in Canada, you’ll find Loyalists getting less representation maybe, but lower taxes and a pretty decent deal that a lot of them are pretty happy with going forward.

ED AYERS: Maya Jasanoff is an historian at Harvard. Her book is “Liberty’s Exiles– America Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.”

BRIAN BALOGH: We’re going to take a short break. When we get back, 19th century slave holders dream up a little America on the West Coast of Africa.

PETER ONUF: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.