Maya Jasanoff - Liberty’s Exiles - The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.

Loyalist refugees also illuminate a second feature of the “spirit of 1783”: a clarified commitment to liberty and humanitarian ideals. Although the American Revolution demonstrated that British subjects abroad would not be treated exactly as British subjects were at home, at least when it came to political representation, the revolution also had the effect of deepening an imperial guarantee to include all subjects, no matter what their ethnicity or faith, in a fold of British rights. Loyalist refugees became conspicuous objects of paternalistic attention. Black loyalists got their freedom from authorities increasingly inclined toward abolition, in self-conscious contrast to the slaveowning United States. Needy loyalists of all kinds received land and supplies in an empire-wide program for refugee relief that anticipated the work of modern international aid organizations. Loyalists even received financial compensation for their losses through a commission established by the British government—a landmark of state welfare schemes.

Yet liberal values had their limits, as loyalists discovered at close range. British officials after the revolution by and large concluded that the thirteen colonies had been given too much liberty, not too little, and tightened the reins of administration accordingly. This enhanced taste for centralized, hierarchical government marked the third component of the “spirit of 1783”—and one that loyalist refugees consistently found themselves resisting. Confronted with top-down rule, they repeatedly demanded more representation than imperial authorities proved willing to give them, a discrepancy that had of course undergirded the American Revolution in the first place. And for all that loyalists profited from humanitarian initiatives, they also ran up against numerous seeming contradictions in British policy. This was an empire that gave freedom to black loyalists, but facilitated the export of loyalist-owned slaves. It gave land to Mohawk Indian allies in the north, but largely abandoned the Creeks and other allies in the south. It promised to compensate loyalists for their losses but in practice often fell short; it joined liberal principles with hierarchical rule. Across the diaspora, the refugee loyalist experience would be marked by a mismatch between promises and expectations, between what subjects wanted and what rulers provided. Such discontents proved a lasting feature of the post-revolutionary British Empire—and another line of continuity from the “first” into the “second” empire, from the first major war of colonial independence to later anti-colonial movements.

Few could have predicted just how quickly the “spirit of 1783”—committed to authority, liberty, and global reach—cemented in the aftermath of one revolution would be tested by another. In early 1793, less than a decade after Evacuation Day, Britain plunged into war with revolutionary France in an epic conflict that lasted virtually uninterrupted till 1815. Fortunately for Britain, already tested by republican dissent in America, the “spirit of 1783” provided a ready set of practices and policies to pose against French models. In contrast to French liberty, equality, and fraternity, Britain offered up its own more limited version of liberty under the crown and hierarchical stability. This wasn’t so much a counter-revolutionary vision as it was a post-revolutionary one, forged in part from the lessons of the war in America. In the end, it prevailed. Britain’s comprehensive victory over France in 1815, on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, served to validate the “spirit of 1783” over French republican and Napoleonic alternatives, and to make liberalism and constitutional monarchy a defining mode of government in and beyond Europe. 28

To this day, legacies of the British Empire’s liberal constitutionalism endure alongside American democratic republicanism—making the “spirit of 1783” arguably just as important an influence in twenty-first-century political culture as the spirit of 1776. And yet, from some angles, maybe the spirit of 1776 and the spirit of 1783 didn’t look so different. The post-revolutionary United States tussled with ambitions and problems remarkably like those faced by the British Empire from which it broke away: a drive for geographic expansion, competition with European empires, management of indigenous peoples, contests over the limits of democracy and the morality of slavery. 29While the United States drafted its constitution, British imperial authorities developed constitutions for their colonial domains, from Quebec to Bengal. 30While the British Empire made up for the loss in America by expanding into new colonies, the United States quickly embarked on empire-building itself, pushing west in a thrust that more than doubled the nation’s size in just a generation. Though their political systems revolved around a fundamental divergence—one a monarchy, the other a republic—the United Kingdom and the United States shared ideas about the central importance of “liberty” and the rule of law. 31

In 1815, Britain and its allies won at Waterloo; the British Empire was on top of the world. Loyalist refugees by then had carved out new homes and societies in their sites of exodus. After all the deprivation, the upheaval, the disappointment, and the stress, many surviving refugees, and even more of their children, eventually discovered a kind of contentment. Their trajectories from loss to assimilation mirrored the ascent of the British Empire as a whole, from defeat to global success. Loyalists who had left the United States for the British Empire were subjects of the world power that enjoyed international preeminence for the next century or more. They were, in this sense, victors after all.

THIS BOOK RECOVERS the stories of ordinary people whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events. To chronicle their journeys is also to chart them. The first three chapters describe the American Revolution as loyalists experienced it; the factors that caused them to leave; and the process by which most of them departed, in mass evacuations from British-held cities—an important yet little-known piece of revolutionary history. Chapters 4–6 follow the refugees to Britain and British North America (the eastern provinces of present-day Canada), to look at three features of loyalist settlement: how the refugees were fed, clothed, and compensated; how they formed new communities; and how they influenced the restructuring of imperial government after the war. Chapters 7–9 turn farther south, to explore the fortunes of refugees in the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone. Loyalists in these settings struggled against adverse environmental and economic conditions at the best of times, and the onset of the French Revolutionary wars only made things worse, by heightening conflicts over political rights and tensions around issues of slavery and race. The final chapter moves through the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 to consider where loyalists stood a generation after their migrations began, from the place where they started—the United States—to the place that had overtaken America in imperial significance, India.

Since no one volume can contain sixty thousand stories, I have chosen to focus on a cluster of figures who capture different varieties of the refugee experience. Together they provide an intimate sense of what this exodus actually meant and felt like to its participants. The refugees belonged at once to a very big world—an expanding global empire—and to a surprisingly small one, in which scattered individuals retained personal connections over enormous distances of space and time. Remarkably many of these figures also moved more than once. Moving was part of the job for the imperial officials who recur in these pages, notably Sir Guy Carleton, commander in chief in New York and governor in Canada; and Lord Dunmore, governor of pre-revolutionary Virginia and the post-revolutionary Bahamas. For displaced civilians, however, repeated migrations underscored the dislocating effects of war, as well as the capacity of empires to channel human populations along certain routes. 32