This post is part of the Kluge Center’s 25 for 25, in honor of the Kluge Center’s 25th anniversary, celebrating 25 books that were written thanks to the Kluge Center’s support. Read the introductory post to the series here.
Close to 60,000 loyalists, about one in forty of the American population, left the newly formed country following the Revolutionary War. In New York City, when the last of the British Forces departed on November 25th, 1783, patriots held feasts, bonfires, and celebrated with the “biggest fireworks display ever staged in North America” up to that point, writes Maya Jasanoff in her book, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf, 2011). But, for those who had not wanted the British to leave, and were now scared for their future in a new country whose formation they had opposed, this was a time of fear and uncertainty. They were faced with a difficult choice: should they stay, or should they leave with the British?
Jasanoff’s book is the first global history of the loyalist diaspora. This civilian exodus, the largest one in the history of the United States, was worldwide. Loyalists moved to Britain, Canada, the Bahamas, the West Indies, Africa, Australia, and India, often leaving behind friends, family, houses, and lives.
Loyalists, recounts Jasanoff, were as diverse in their demographics as they were in their reasons for supporting Britain and leaving the United States. Elizabeth Johnston, for example, a very young mother, followed her husband, a loyalist army captain, from Georgia to Savannah, then on to Charleston, St. Augustine, Scotland, Jamaica, and finally to Nova Scotia. She faced hardships and isolation, losing three children to disease along the way.
David George, another loyalist, was born enslaved in Virginia. Along with roughly 20,000 other enslaved individuals, he took advantage of the Dunmore Proclamation, which promised freedom to any slaves who joined the British side.
George travelled to Savannah, Georgia, with British forces and worked as a preacher. After the war, George moved his family to Nova Scotia and established a church that served multiracial congregants. Then, in 1792, he became one of the founding settlers of Freetown, a settlement for freed slaves in Sierra Leone.
The Revolutionary War, Jasanoff reminds us, often separated family, friends, and neighbors. Even Benjamin Franklin became estranged from his only living son, William Franklin, a loyalist who was imprisoned during the war and afterward lived in exile in England until his death. The two never reconciled.
Although their journeys were difficult, Jasanoff found that these so-called “losers” of the Revolutionary War often successfully found homes and stability elsewhere in the British Empire.
In Liberty’s Exiles, Jasanoff shatters long-held stereotypes of loyalists. She highlights, among other features, their role in spreading American ideas and influence worldwide. For instance, loyalists in the Bahamas and Sierra Leone demanded political representation from their British governors, demands which sounded “uncannily like those of their patriot peers,” according to Jasanoff. Liberty’s Exiles encourages Americans to reevaluate their history, looking at the Revolutionary War as a part of world history not confined to national boundaries.
Jasanoff researched and wrote Liberty’s Exiles as a Kluge Fellow in 2006. In the Library’s Manuscript Division, she found loyalist writings, including those from East Florida, that proved invaluable to her research. These refugees were devastated to learn Florida would be ceded to Spain in the 1783 Paris Peace Treaty, which ended the war and recognized the Thirteen Colonies as sovereign. This meant refugees would be forced to swear allegiance to the Spanish crown or leave. One account by John Cruden, president of the Assembly of the united loyalists, described how at a toast to the King of England a few days after the news, “two of the Gentlemen were so much agitated that they covert their faces with handkerchiefs, but they could not conceal the Tears that trickled down their Loyal Cheeks.”
Jasanoff also used maps from the Geography and Map Division to support her research and illustrate Liberty’s Exiles including a map of the Middle British Colonies in America, from 1776; and a map of North America After the Peace of Paris, from 1783.
Among many awards, Liberty’s Exiles received the prestigious Cundill History Prize in Excellence; the George Washington Prize for the best book on America’s founding era; and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. It was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Jasanoff returned to the Kluge Center in 2019 to serve as the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North.
You can hear Jasanoff discuss her research on the loyalists at the 2011 National Book Festival here and at the Kluge Center here.
This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.