Every Independence Day we celebrate the founding of the world’s most powerful — and for some, inspirational — nation. Yet for several months after July 4, 1776, the self-proclaimed United States of America looked set to go down in history as a nation that never was. That August, in the biggest battle of the Revolution, the British trounced the Continental Army on Long Island, nearly forcing an American surrender.
As Washington’s beleaguered soldiers retreated through New Jersey, thousands of Americans loyal to King George III surged into New York City — where they would remain under British protection for the rest of the war. These loyalists had no desire “to dissolve the political bands” with Britain, as the Declaration of Independence demanded. Instead, as they explained in a petition to British authorities, they “steadily and uniformly opposed” this “most unnatural, unprovoked Rebellion, that ever disgraced the annals of Time.” While the rebels sought to sever the connection between Britain and the colonies, the loyalists “most ardently wish[ed] for a restoration of that union between them.” Where the rebels challenged the king, the loyalists staunchly upheld royal authority: they had “borne true Allegiance to His Majesty, and the most warm and affectionate attachment to his Person and Government.”
During three days in November 1776, this petition sat in Scott’s Tavern, on Wall Street, to be signed by anyone who wished. A frank declaration of dependence, it completely lacks the revolutionary genius and rhetorical grace of our hallowed July 4 document. Yet in all, more than 700 people put their names to the parchment — 12 times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence. Among the signatories were pillars of New York society: wealthy merchants like Hugh Wallace, who commanded vast tracts of land and capital; members of some of New York’s most prominent families, the DeLanceys, the Livingstons and the Philipses; and the clergymen Charles Inglis and Samuel Seabury, who published articulate rebuttals to rebel pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” But most of the names belonged to the ordinary people who made New York run: tavern keepers and carpenters; farmers from the Hudson Valley or New Jersey; men like the baker James Orchard, who supplied bread for British troops; the Greenwich blacksmith James Stewart, who joined the British Army; and the hairdresser and perfumer James Deas.
Loyalists are the American Revolution’s guilty secret: rarely spoken of, hauntingly present. At least one in five Americans is believed to have remained loyal to Britain during the war. They expressed their opinions passively and actively: refusing to forswear allegiance to the king, signing petitions or joining loyalist military regiments — as nearly 20,000 men did — to defend their vision of British America. In retaliation, they faced harassment from their peers, most vividly (if rarely) by tarring and feathering. Some would suffer for their loyalty in open battle; others faced sanctions from state legislatures, which could strip them of their land and possessions, imprison them or formally banish them.
The Tories, as the patriots pejoratively called them, are still often caricatured as elitist and out of touch, foreign, even treacherous. Granted, their dream of a continued imperial relationship with Britain had none of the political innovation that gave rise to the new republic. And yet it bears stressing that our “self-evident” founding principles were not seen that way by fully one-fifth of the population. Many of the United States’ first and most passionate critics were Americans themselves.
After the Revolutionary War ended, thousands of loyalists blended into the nation, and their descendants participated in shaping American society. But many — as many as 1 in 30 Americans — did not. Feeling insecure and unwelcome in the United States, and attracted by British promises of land and compensation, some 80,000 loyalists left their homes to build new lives elsewhere in the still-vigorous British Empire. About half fled north to Canada, among them more than 3,000 black loyalists — former slaves who had been granted freedom in exchange for fighting for the British — and several hundred Mohawk Indians, longstanding British allies. Many loyalists entered Jamaican society as doctors, printers, merchants and planters — or tried their luck at cotton planting on the out-islands of the Bahamas. In perhaps the most intriguing migration, a contingent of just under 1,200 black loyalists relocated in 1792 from Nova Scotia to the experimental free black colony of Sierra Leone. Some of their black peers wound up yet farther afield, among the first convicts shipped out to Australia’s Botany Bay. And a few loyalists made their way to India — including two of Benedict Arnold’s sons, who found love, war and death as officers in the East India Company’s army.
The scale and range of this exodus point to a gap in popular understandings of the American revolutionary tradition. We pride ourselves on the freedom and tolerance embedded in our founding principles. We have also recently begun to acknowledge the discrepancy between the nation’s vaunted commitment to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the gross abuse of these principles in practice — through slavery above all. (Compared with the United States, the British Empire looked like a good bet if you were an enslaved black or a Native American.) But the loyalist émigrés had experienced a form of exclusion that is less familiarly American: one based on political affiliation. Unlike slaves and Native Americans, who were never assumed to be part of the republic’s political fabric, the majority of loyalist families were headed by white, property-owning men, who if not for their allegiances would otherwise have been enfranchised members of the new polity. In opting for the king, they were motivated not only by economic interests and trans-Atlantic cultural ties but also by a coherent set of political beliefs.
Loyalists believed they already lived under a constitution — a British Constitution — directed by the supreme figure of the king. Republicanism was treason; it heralded descent into anarchy and violence. As the minister Charles Inglis explained in his rejoinder to Paine’s “Common Sense,” under a republic “all property . . . would be unhinged,” “the old Constitution would be totally subverted,” thousands would be forced to “wound their conscience” by renouncing the king, “torrents of blood will be spilt and thousands reduced to beggary and wretchedness” — and after all that, judging from history, chances were high Americans would end up in “thralldom” to an individual despot. “Even Hobbes would blush,” he said, to acknowledge Paine as “a disciple.”
Though many loyalists technically left by choice, freedom meant little if your property had been confiscated or your person threatened. It is no wonder, then, that the loyalist migrants routinely referred to themselves as refugees, since like many modern asylum seekers they moved under a shadow of trauma and fear. Their accounts of their plight — in letters, diaries, claims and petitions for support — form a wrenching archive of woe. Even the wealthy Hugh Wallace, the first person to sign the New York declaration, was reduced to loneliness, illness and deprivation. “If ever man was to be pitied, he is,” his brother reported, not long after the war’s end. “His losses hang heavy on him & his being from his wife hurts him much.” So effectively did the loyalists articulate their distresses that the British government established a commission to reimburse them for their losses (though few were satisfied with the ultimate rewards they received).
Still, even as the loyalists put down roots in the British Empire, it seemed that they had not left every trace of America behind. For what should they promptly express abroad but an uncannily American desire for greater political representation — much to the chagrin of British officials. Fired up by an “American spirit of innovation,” as one disgruntled British governor put it, loyalists clamored for participation everywhere from the Canadian Maritimes to the Bahamas to Sierra Leone. In some settings, they achieved it. Thanks in part to the loyalists’ political legacy, Canada gained limited self-government earlier than any other British colony, providing a template for later home rule and decolonization. Apparently you could take the colonists out of America, but something American in them endured.
The American Revolution went well, as revolutions go: no guillotines, no gulags. But the democratic revolution was nonetheless violent. The American way was established by force, and those who did not renounce their old allegiances in favor of the new government paid a price. Then again, there may be a cue to be taken from the surprising way in which loyalists, victims of the American idea, became unwitting emissaries of American values. American-ness comes in many shapes and forms and holds a peculiar appeal, even to some of its critics. After all, despite its imperfections, our most successful exercise in nation-building continues to be our own.
Maya Jasanoff is an associate professor of British history at Harvard University. She is the author of “Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850”