Maya Jasanoff’s “Liberty’s Exiles,” on British Loyalists after the revolution

LIBERTY’S EXILES

American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

(LIBERTY’S EXILES American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World By Maya Jasanoff Knopf. 460 pp. $30)

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By Maya Jasanoff

Knopf. 460 pp. $30

by Pauline Maier

What happens to people who take the losing side in a revolution or a civil war?

In this ambitious, empathetic and sometimes lyrical book, Maya Jasanoff tells the story of the Loyalist exiles of the American Revolution — the 60,000 people who fled the 13 colonies of North America after their countrymen had declared their independence, had founded a republic and had successfully defended their revolution in a war that set friends, neighbors and family members against one another. Those stalwart, loyal defenders of British rule eventually dispersed into far-flung parts of the world. Although other historians have studied the Loyalists and parts of their widespread migration, “Liberty’s Exiles” justly claims to be “the first global history of the Loyalist diaspora.”

Historians estimate the total number of Loyalists at about 20 percent of the population of the United States at the time of the Revolution, or roughly a half-million men, women and children. Most of them managed to remain in the new nation. The exiles were the outer fringes of the category, people so committed to the Crown or so alienated from the “patriots” that they had to leave. Why?

Jasanoff says the exiles acted from “a range of reasons, ideological and otherwise,” although, as the Cornell historian Mary Beth Norton argued in a classic essay almost 40 years ago, most Loyalists shared the same basic 17th-century English “Whig” ideas that moved the revolutionaries. Unlike other colonists, however, they refused to embrace the republic. Royal office-holders instinctively sided with the king; slaves fled to the British in search of freedom; recent English immigrants like Georgia’s Thomas Brown could not “take up arms against the Country which gave him being.”

In describing pre-war conditions, Jasanoff sometimes accepts questionable Loyalist views uncritically. The “Sons of Liberty,” in fact, were not “street gangs” that “smashed property and assaulted individuals,” but an organized resistance movement that worked to contain violence while opposing the Stamp Act. Nor was the plan of union proposed by Loyalist Joseph Galloway in 1774, which would have made an American Congress a subordinate part of the British Parliament, either a “compelling” solution to the Anglo-American conflict or “the last concerted American attempt to preserve ties with the British Empire.” Galloway’s plan was incompatible with both Britain’s unwillingness to compromise Parliamentary sovereignty and the colonists’ emergent conviction that Parliament had no right to govern them.

It was “wartime violence” — between cadres of “patriots” and Loyalists in the countryside, and between contending armies — that “pushed thousands of Loyalists into British lines” for what they thought would be a temporary stay. At the war’s end, they were clustered in New York, Charleston and Savannah, where they “heard terrifying reports . . . of loyalists hunted down and murdered by vindictive patriots.” They also learned that some state legislatures had confiscated Loyalist property and banished hundreds of prominent Loyalists on pain of death for “treasonable Practices.” When the British offered land and free passage to other parts of the empire, the decision to accept was, for many, painful but obvious.