BOOKS BRIAN MORTON


LOYAL BUT LARGELY FORGOTTEN


Liberty’s Exiles: the loss of America and the remaking of the British Empire Maya Jasanoff


HARPER PRESS, 460PP, £30 ■Tablet bookshop price £27


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once interviewed Noam Chomsky for a radio programme. At one point, the great showman leaned in close to the microphone and


murmured, chillingly, “The thing you have to remember about the American Revolution … is that the crazies won.” Later, we talked about a particular bee in my bonnet, the fate of the loyalists who rejected the Declaration of Independence and remained on the side of the Crown. I had written my senior school dis- sertation on the subject, picked it up again at university, and nursed an ambition to write the definitive book on what Chomsky called “an obliterated story … a narrative genocide”. It’s slightly crushing but also wonderful to read here that very book, done by a real his- torian whose previous book, Edge of Empire, established her as an important voice in current historiography, and as a fine writer of prose. The most important thing to know about the American War of Independence is that it was, in every meaningful sense, a civil war. The much later “War Between the States” (in Southern parlance) was precisely that, a con- flict drawn along geographical, economic and political lines. The American Revolution was a “brothers’ war”, dividing families and com- munities in a way that only happened, and for special reasons, in Kentucky during the Civil War. And not just brothers: Benjamin Franklin was a founding father of the United


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George Romney’s portrait of the Mohawk Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), who sat for the artist on a visit to London in 1775-76


States who helped redraft Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration; his son William remained loyal to the Crown, just the most public example of a story repeated many times after 1775. It is definitive of civil wars that the victors massacre or displace the losers. Perhaps because the American Revolution is rarely so defined, few ever ask what happened to those who chose not to join the new and “more perfect Union”. There were massacres before and after the surrender at Yorktown, and much cruelty besides, but more important still was the flight and evacuation from the new nation of more than 60,000 loyalists. Their subsequent story has not been satisfactorily told until now, even though it provides the motor for the next stage of British imperialism. “Loyalism” has a curious reputation. It is usually assumed that American loyalists were prosperous, middle-class, essentially conser- vative and impatient with “liberty” as concept or practice. The historical portrayal of American loyalists as victims is partially jus- tified, just as Chomsky’s portrayal of the patriots as “crazies” gains some weight and credibility when one reads of the vicious tor- tures – scalping, tarring and feathering, often lynching – visited on loyalist officials. However, it’s important to remember that loyalist nar- ratives were often prepared with an eye to compensation, one of the first major post- war issues concerning the loyalist diaspora, and there was no profit in making light of personal suffering or economic loss. Maya Jasanoff corrects that picture significantly, and in doing so reminds us that up until 1775 there was no hard and fast distinction between


loyalists and patriots. There was a clear and growing divide between Englishmen and that new and particular thing J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur tried to define as “an American”. As always, the smallest ideological differences are promulgated and defended with the great- est violence. Circumstance, not blood, or locale, or religion, or even economic standing (though many loyalists, like many anti- nationalist Scots today, felt that America was better off as part of the Empire) dictated sides in the civil war. Those who fled at its end thought very differ- ently from those they had fought for back in Britain, or in Canada, Florida, the Caribbean islands and India. They were newly shaped by American ideas about personal freedom and representation and those ideas in turn influenced the shape of the new British Empire, which began to emerge after 1782. In June of that year, Britain recognised the


new United States, a decision that removed for ever the possibility of a compromise situ - ation in which the United States acquired dominion status within the British Empire. It also cut the ground from under loyalist feet, polarising and ossifying what had been a fluid situation rather than a settled ideology. Differences widened more quickly after Yorktown than during the war. This wouldn’t be an American story if race and colour were not prominent. For patriots, the British recruitment of Mohawks, Creeks and Choctaws to fight against the rebels, and the apparent promise of emancipation for slaves who elected to fight for the Crown added a stratum of deep ethnic hatred to revo - lutionary propaganda; loyalists were portrayed as rapists, abductors, scalpers, cannibals, atavistic bogey figures. Jasanoff brilliantly detaches human indi- viduals from the stereotypes. From the 60,000 loyalists who fled or were taken from the new nation, she has selected a group of represen- tative stories, often poignant, always indicative of how the Empire and indeed the whole world changed with the emergence of the United States. There is Elizabeth Johnson, who spends the next 30 years of her life as an imperial vagrant, searching for a home in England, Canada, Jamaica. There is the black Baptist convert David George, a freedman, who tries to establish a New Jerusalem at Freetown in Sierra Leone. Others settled in Bengal and consolidated British authority there. Most affectingly, there is the Mohawk Joseph Brant (or Thayendanegea) who takes his people north into Ontario. The name means “gambler”, or “one who plays two sides”, and it stands for much in this remarkable book, which serves once again as a reminder that it is always the winners – crazies or otherwise – who write the history, and always with a scalpel and an airbrush. Jasanoff restores life and dignity to the victims of a long-standing narrative genocide.


5 February 2011 | THE TABLET | 19


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