The history of Upper Canada begins with the Loyalists, but they remain misunderstood and sometimes misrepresented. In this episode, Dr. Timothy Compeau, an expert on the cultural history of the Revolutionary period, joins us to delve into the enigma, dispel some of the myths and consider what understanding the Loyalists can teach us about the present and future.
The history of Upper Canada begins with the Loyalists, but they remain misunderstood and sometimes misrepresented. In this episode, Dr. Timothy Compeau, an expert on the cultural history of the Revolutionary period, joins us to delve into the enigma, dispel some of the myths and consider what understanding the Loyalists can teach us about the present and future.
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:12] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Open Door, where we work to create a brighter future by understanding the past. Presented by The Brown Homestead in the heart of the beautiful Niagara Peninsula.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:29] AH: Conversations about the early history of upper Canada or Ontario begin with the loyalists, but they remain largely misunderstood and often misrepresented. Their story has been regularly rewritten, sometimes casting them as heroes, sometimes as villains. Usually, to serve as a mythology supporting the values and goals of later groups and people.
I’m Andrew Humeniuk, your host. Today, we’re going to try to begin to answer that elusive question, who were the loyalists? And we’re going to examine why understanding them is important to understanding our own place in the continuum of history. Joining me to do the heavy lifting on this one is historian Dr. Tim Compeau from the University of Western Ontario. Welcome, Tim.
[00:01:12] TC: Thanks for having me, it’s great to be here.
[00:01:14] AH: Before we jump in, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and your work in this area?
[00:01:20] TC: Sure. I’m an assistant professor of history, like you said, at Huron University College. We’re a liberal arts affiliate of Western, here in London, Ontario. I study and I teach public history, sort of global history and the history of 18th and 19th Century, British Empire, Atlantic World. That kind of thing. My last project was very different from this. I was working on augmented reality for museum and educational applications and co-edited a volume with Kevin Kee called Seeing the Past with Computers, which your listeners can find at University Michigan Press website.
Right now, I’m working on a book project called Dishonoured Americans: The Political Death of a Loyalist in the American Revolution, which is under review right now. I also am working on a mapping project called Loyalist Migrations. That’s loyalistmigrations.ca. That’s a partnership between Huron University College’s Community History Centre and the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada along with the Map and Data Centre at Western. What we’re doing there is mapping the loyalist migrations and trying to visualize the disruptions and the human movement caused by the American Revolution. All the kind of stuff that we’re going to talk about today.
[00:02:33] AH: Yeah. Definitely a remarkable project and ties in to a lot of what we’re going to talk about today. On our end, part of our interest stems from our own history. The Brown Homestead was settled by the loyalist, John Brown, a private in Butler’s Rangers. Before the revolution, he was a simple German farmer in the Schoharie Valley in New York. Somehow, that doesn’t quite fit with the popular conception of the loyalist though, does it?
[00:02:55] TC: That’s right, yeah. Traditionally, when people think of loyalists they think of British people. But in fact, over the last 50, 60 years of historical search, historians have kind of blown up the old myth of a loyalist as these Anglican, conservative, sort of blue-blooded kind of British imperialists that fled their persecutors in the states. Instead, we can see that loyalists came from really all walks of life. They are German like you mentioned, American colonial settlers that became loyalists, came from all over Germany. There’s also Dutch, and of course, African-American, indigenous allies.
What we really see is that loyalists come from all walks of life. They fit into every category of American colonists at the time. If you look at the numbers, and these numbers are kind of old, but Paul Smith back in the 1960s did this study and provided estimates of how many loyalists actually were in the revolution, not necessarily who left. But if 20,000 American colonist men put on uniforms and fought in provincial regimens for the British, another 10,000 were sort of privateers or cattle rustlers or whoever else that was fighting for the British. Then you add in their families and everybody else that’s sort of in their orbit, then you’re kind of getting to the point where you got about one in five Americans, or American colonists rather, are allied with the British. That’s a big number. That’s probably about half a million people.
But of course, what came down in history and in memory were the surviving documents of wealthy merchants, Anglican clergymen who were speaking out against the revolution, government officeholders, people who wrote stuff down, kept diaries and whose grandkids saved all the letters. They loom really large in the historical record and they contributed to the creation, in both the United States and in Canada, of the myth of these wealthy aristocrats, but that’s a very, very small, slim minority of loyalists in general.
[00:05:02] AH: Part of it was just that their lives were better documented but there were other elements of it as we’ll touch on in a minute that was cultivated. That mythology persisted for quite a long time and I believe it was William H. Nelson who wrote The American Tory in 1961. He was one of the first to reject the idea that the loyalists were the British upper-class of American society. Is that right?
[00:05:25] TC: Yeah, that is. He gave us quite a few good working ideas to use. The myth, there was these two myths that you see in American memory and American pop culture, one is the tory aristocrat with his wig looking down his nose at the colonists. You see that in, if you’ve ever seen the Swamp Fox, the Disney show starring Leslie Nielsen from back in the ’60s. The tory is this colonel and he’s very, very aristocratic and very snooty. But then on the other side, there’s these tory outlaws. They kind of lurk in the background and they have no real principles. That is an idea that hangs around and William H. Nelson points that out in his book.
The other thing he talks about and this is from 1965 or so, is the idea that loyalists come from conscious minorities. If we go to the, for example, the Mohawk Valley or other parts of northern New York, then we see a lot of Germans that are signing on to the loyalist cause. If you go to the Carolinas, a lot of Scottish Highlanders who feel besieged by the Anglo-American sort of majority. There’s some merit to this, but at the same time, all of these communities we’ve seen since 1965 and the research has been done, we can see that these communities are divided and that just as many Scottish Highlanders and Germans are fighting for the patriots as they are for the loyalists.
[00:06:43] AH: An interesting example of that is the Palatine German contacts that the Browns come from because they had a pretty abrasive relationship with the New York colonial government and a historic sense that their home in the colonies was largely due to the patronage and the protection of the crown, so they tend to fall into that classification.
[00:07:04] TC: Yeah. That’s a really good point. When you are sort of besieged by these settlers that really want your land, and the crown is offering you support and protection, that’s a real strong inducement to support the crown and to hope the crown wins. We see some of that thinking at play amongst the Haudenosaunee, and the six nations, Joseph Brant, Thayendanegea. They were really worried about the encroaching land-hungry settlers. The crown, from 1763 on is really trying to maintain some order and make sure that there isn’t this free-for-all of all the settlers coming out and taking them. They want to ensure peace with the indigenous nations of the West.
It’s not necessarily that they love the crown, that they love the British constitution, that they think the British are the greatest thing ever. It’s more of a pragmatic approach to preserving your own land, your own rights and your own future for your kids.
[00:08:01] AH: Absolutely, and what’s interesting, I’m glad you brought up the Haudenosaunee because there’s a really interesting parallel here. As early as the 1750s, the Germans had been discussing a possible mutual defense treaty with the Haudenosaunee because neither group felt themselves to be particularly British or French, the French were still in play at the time, and found themselves somewhat stuck between worlds.
[00:08:25] TC: Yeah, it’s very true. Travelers into the backcountry of Pennsylvania and the backcountry of New York were often kind of surprised when they would encounter indigenous people who didn’t speak English, but they spoke their native language and then they spoke German, which was that, we often forget just how many German people settled in the colonies. The loyalists like to present this when – I think it was Thomas Hutchinson, the former governor of Massachusetts, when he met King George the third, he played up, “Well, we have a lot of loyalists in the ranks, the Germans, they’re hardworking just like the House of Hanover and they seek your protection.”
[00:08:59] AH: Going back to your earlier point about not being able to lump any group into any one category, even the Haudenosaunee where we’re quite dramatically fractured by having to choose sides in the revolution.
[00:09:11] TC: That’s right. The [inaudible 00:09:13] sided with the rebels, or the patriots, or the revolutionaries. The Mohawk, and the Seneca, they were with the British. You go across the 13 colonies and really what you see is, in many different communities across the whole territory is all these little civil wars that breakout, where all disputes over land, over religion, all bubbled to the surface. Again, it’s not necessarily that these groups are super into the idea of the Declaration of Independence or they’re super into the idea of the crown as a supporter of rights, it’s that these are the sides they find themselves on. They’re fighting for their kin, and they’re fighting against their traditional enemies and all that kind of stuff. These ideas all get glommed on to the political arguments of the day. In memory, it all becomes patriots and loyalists.
[00:10:05] AH: It all becomes political, yes. There are some very interesting and sometimes ugly stories about some personal grievances that were resettled amidst the fog of war. Another case that I’ve heard of in upstate New York had to do with a man who objected to how his daughter had been treated. When things went awry, he settled that in a pretty ugly. What leads someone like John Brown to make the decision as [inaudible 00:10:28] claims as declare in favor of the British government from the first? We know that he participated in the Schoharie uprising, but ultimately, it must have been a very personal decision for him. In his case, it’s a little more obvious. His father died when he was 17. The most significant man in his life was his cousin, Adam Kreisler, who worked in the Indian Department under Joseph Brant and who also became the stepfather to John’s two half-brothers. I suspect that was a driving factor, those personal reasons for many, many loyalists or patriots.
[00:11:02] TC: Yeah. Follow the family lines and follow the money is often going to be the answer to a lot of these things. Ideology certainly plays a role, absolutely, and we do see on occasion families break up and have terrible disputes. The most famous being Benjamin Franklin and his son, William. That’s the famous family breakup that everyone points to. There are other examples. But what I find more often than not is that families that appear to be broken up by the ideology, the revolution, are actually hedging their bets. One of the loyalists I’m studying, working on his biography for the next project, one son is with Patriot Militia and the other son goes across the Long Island Sound to join the British in New York. They stayed in contact the whole time. When the loyalist is captured by the Americans, the Patriot Militiaman comes and helps them get out of jail. The family really tends to be where your first loyalty lies.
[00:11:59] AH: When we think of it, we often think of it in terms of black and white, you’re a loyalist or you’re a patriot. It’s one or the other. What we have to weigh when we talk about the concept of choice is that it was simply the idea that neutrality was impossible.
[00:12:12] TC: Yeah, and it was actually against the law. There was a New York law passed, I think it was in ’78 or ’79 that actually says, “Neutrality is just a cover for Toryism.” Therefore, it’s just these rich, wealthy landholders that are pretending to be neutral so they don’t lose their land. But the first opportunity they get, they’re going to side with the British.
[00:12:33] AH: It’s very, very important, very interesting what you say about some of the harsher penalties that we think about were uncommonly handed out. But the most common penalty ultimately was the forfeiture of property, is that right?
[00:12:44] TC: That’s right. Yeah, it mean, the American Revolution was not like the French Revolution. I mean, we didn’t see loads of wealthy loyalists being executed. It wasn’t like the Russian Revolution where they put them up against the wall and shot them. It was very different. A part of that was because of the family personal nature of the society I just mentioned. But also, it was a society that took ideas of honor very seriously. This was one of the reasons why I find studying the loyalists so fascinating, is that we have an opportunity to see in the loyalist treatment really the values of society that they lived in.
My research is really on those wealthy, landowning loyalists that became the stereotype in myth and legend. I try to get into the real story of their lives and experiences. The trick is when you’re studying society 250 years in the past is to try and get into their headspace, try and get into their mentality. That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s why I find studying the loyalists so interesting, is that in the negative, in the way that they’re treated, we get to understand something really deep about 18th Century society and mentality and culture.
[00:13:50] AH: That’s the trick, is to get out of our own headspace, because when we think of things like forfeiture of property, we just look at it as an economic penalty. Whereas, it was vastly more than that. In the case of a farmer like John Brown, we may say, “Well, land was more tangibly essential to his survival,” and yet, there was very much social context there that was equally dire. Yes?
[00:14:13] TC: Yeah. That’s right. Because to be a landowner, to own anything, it is the source of honor for a lot of these. When you think about someone who comes from Germany where there’s peasant farmers, tenant farmers, serfdom is still a fact of life in many parts of the German states. To be independent, to have your own land, that was something to cherish. That was something that gave you a – this is why I like to think about honor and how the anthropologist, Frank Henderson Stewart describes it, it gives you a right to respect. It’s a right to have a place in society and is a very specific kind of right, because it is a right to have a say in public affairs, but it’s a right that is deeply gendered. It means that you are a man. If you lose that land, if you have that stripped from you, if you lose your honor, it takes away part of your manhood. It takes away part of your identity as an elite male.
[00:15:13] AH: I love the phrase you use that sums that up. You refer to it as the loyalist facing a political death.
[00:15:19] TC: Yeah, that’s right. Political death, this is an actual term that you come across occasionally in Connecticut court records. When they confiscate a loyalist land – I don’t know if it’s an official term, but it’s a term they use and they say, “Okay. Now, this person is politically deceased. They are a non-entity in the state. They cannot vote obviously. They cannot own land and they’re essentially banished.” It comes from an old English legal concept of attainder, which is, if you commit treason, you lose all your land, but you also can’t pass it along to your kids. Political death isn’t always, it’s not like a natural death in the sense that confiscated estates don’t just get handed to the kids. The kids are going with you. If you have one, your wife has to go with you.
That all sort of encompasses – is encompassed with this idea of political death, that it’s a legal consequence, but it’s also a sort of social, and a cultural excision of them from their society. It was really effective, because if you are a gentleman, or a landowner or something like that, and you see your neighbor losing everything, losing his respect in town, being pelted, seeing his wife and kids go hungry and have to go off somewhere, you’re going to think twice about declaring your support for the British crown. It’s a very effective way to neutralize loyalist support. It’s also a way for colonists who support the revolution to sort of signal that, “Yes. I am part of this revolution. I’m with you. No matter what happens, no matter where I am on the social ladder, I could be a penniless landless farmer, but at least I’m not a tory.”
[00:17:01] AH: These hierarchies really speak to the nature of the society in a very interesting way. The racial one is a very intriguing one. In the case of the Butler’s Rangers, part of why they were so reviled was because in many ways they adopted the six-nation style of war and that didn’t go over very well.
[00:17:18] TC: No, it didn’t. They were very effective fighters. If you go through the list of engagements that the Butler’s Rangers fought, they usually came out on top. I mean, loyalist soldiers do not have a good reputation, either with the British authorities or with the Americans, but Butler’s Rangers were feared.
[00:17:33] AH: Ultimately, the war was lost. The loyalists crossed the Niagara River and began settling Upper Canada. Then we switch from political death to political rebirth and it was something of a mirror image of what had happened in the rebuilding of the new British colony.
[00:17:52] TC: That’s right. Everything that was taken from them, they need to rebuild, they need to restore. That includes rebuilding physical structures, their houses. That means rebuilding their family life. That means rebuilding, for the men, for their role as these patriarchs, as these father figures for their families and for public leaders in their communities. In the Maritimes, we often don’t think about this, but for a lot of loyalist, that meant restoring slavery, ensuring that that part of their understanding of what honor meant is to be a slave owner. About 1,200, at least 1,200 enslaved people were brought to Nova Scotia in the Maritimes.
They couldn’t do this on their own, the loyalist men, these soldiers, and officials that were kicked out of the United States essentially and had to plant down the new routes in New New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Upper Canada relied on the British government for assistance. They relied on their families to do a lot of the work. They relied on their extended family networks that were often cross-border. Again, we see that allegiance and loyalty is not always political, but we have a movement after the American Revolution and after the initial settlement of late loyalists.
These late loyalists are not just coming up on their own. They’re following lines of communication, following lines of family networks and treating those loyalists that came before them as patrons to write them letters of reference, and come into town and set up. Yeah, it’s a process and it takes generations really, to rebuild their sense of honor, their sense of place in the world, their public identity. That’s where it comes and the mythmaking starts with their grandkids, sort of really building up men who might have just been very modest farmers into these gentlemen who are the cream of American society who resettled.
[00:19:45] AH: So really it was that same social system that drove the rebirth and you referenced the patriarchs, and something interesting happened in Upper Canada, because that patriarch system created a fairly exclusive club as you alluded to. It wasn’t enough to be just a loyalist. You had to be a certain type of loyalist to be part of that group.
[00:20:04] TC: That’s right. That eventually leads us to the family compact, that’s the term that William Lyon McKenzie uses to describe the small clique of people. It wasn’t just loyalists. It was also newer British arrivals that came over. To be an influential loyalist, you really had to toe a line. You had to embrace loyalism and that is, dissent is wrong, you’ve got to support the imperial connection. If you don’t support the imperial connection, then you’re probably democrat – lower case d, democrat. You’re republican and basically, you are going to cause all these new societies that they’ve developed, these perfect loyal societies to be swallowed up by American democracy. It leads to what Alan Taylor calls a Civil War of 1812 in Upper Canada and it leads to the rebellions in 1838, this very rigid society where dissent, petitions are not welcome.
[00:21:00] AH: Absolutely, because that ultimately failed. There was the growing reform movement, which was postponed a little bit by the war of 1812. But ultimately, it was a reaction to that patriarchy that led to the rebellion in 1837.
[00:21:15] TC: And after the war of 1812 too. The British were conscious of this, the British government and the family compact. After the war of 1812, when the Upper Canadian Militia was not reliable, mass desertions, there was of course the bloody [inaudible 0:21:29], where the British authorities executed traitors. There was even a unit in the American army, the Canadian volunteers that were fighting for the Americans. In their ranks, there were kids of loyalists. This was a big problem. In the aftermath, the British government actually brought in what they call the ultra-loyalists, and these were Wexford Irish Protestants that settled in St. Lawrence Valley, who are more loyal than the loyalists, and loyalists were more imperial than the empire. They’re trying to build a counterrevolutionary society in Upper Canada.
[00:22:03] AH: There was the rebuilding of society, but if we step back to the earlier premise, there was also the personal rebuilding. In a number of cases, personal, political rebirth could lead to a little bit of social climbing.
[00:22:15] TC: Oh yes, yeah. Like John Brown, he’s a private in Butler’s Rangers, but that house, the Brown Homestead, is pretty nice for a private in a Ranger unit. It’s the same with the loyalists I study in the St. Lawrence Valley, where you have shopkeepers and really not very influential people in Connecticut, but then they relocate to the frontier society, which again is something that frontier society – it’s an opportunity that frontier societies offer across the board, whether they’re loyalist or whatever. But in this case, if you say the right things, if you toe the right line and you embrace that idea of loyalism, which part of that is telling everyone how much you lost and how hard you suffered and everything else, then you do get government preferment. You get the best land. You get the part of the river with the rapids so you can build your mill. You get the most productive agricultural land. Then before you know it, you could be the Justice of the Peace, and you can also be the coroner, you can also be the Militia colonel or you can be the customs collector, roads commissioner. All these things start adding up and you become basically a little autocrat in your corner of society.
By the time we get to the war of 1812, there are way too many colonels in the Upper Canadian Militia because every social climber that came up by this point has got themselves a nice fancy rank in the upper Canada Militia.
[00:23:43] AH: John Brown didn’t quite rise to that level, but when you look at the fact that 20 years from being forced out of his little home on his 200-acre farm, he had an estate of 1,200 acres and a fine Georgian stone home. It’s a pretty significant alteration.
[00:24:01] TC: When we talk about how the loyalists suffered and how they lost everything, for a lot of these guys that ended up in situations like John Brown, the revolution was their path to, like you say, a social ascendancy.
[00:24:14] AH: One of the things you reference is the fact that the loyalists could be pretty assertive with the British about what they felt was owed to them by right. But even so, the compensation they received doesn’t really explain the full prosperity of someone like John Brown. Something we talked about earlier, that idea of families being torn apart, and that being less common than we perceive. I suspect that had something to do with the fortunes of a lot of these people because the Browns had cousins back in New York who are doing quite well and who we know the family was still in contact with.
[00:24:48] TC: That’s right. The border was not – it was not a great wall. It was very fluid, very porous. Family networks were not cut off. They were expanded. When we think about a family farm and extended families, these are really little businesses that are running and you see this number of cases. In the case that I’m studying for the next book, there’s no schools of any quality in Upper Canada. If you want to raise your son up to be a gentleman, then you need to send him away. Where do you send him? Well, they’re not in a position to send them to Oxford or Cambridge or anything like that, but they can send them to grammar schools in New England. That’s where a lot of the elite loyalist kids end up, back in Massachusetts, back in Connecticut or in Albany or something like.
They learn how to be a gentleman there and then they come back with all their contacts they made in their schools. Right? Some of these, for example, in the present book, I look at the family network of Amos Botsford. His son, William Botsford, became speaker of the house in New Brunswick in the early 1780s, into the early 1790s. His son is at Yale. These connections are there, and these are important connections, and lucrative connections that give you all sorts of business contacts. Loyalist or not, tory or patriot, gentleman stick to their own kind if you will, and share business tips and leads, and work with each other and build their wealth together essentially.
These loyalists, even though they’re resettling in Upper Canada and they are given their land by the British, they get some of their lost estate back, but it’s not very much. It’s usually about 30% of like the cash value that they can prove of whatever they lost. But they still do all right and they do all right because of these networks that are not ideological at all.
[00:26:35] AH: Right. It was all part of rebuilding a society around the same sort of structure that had preexisted. In a sense, a large part of that was about redefining the loyalists, tying them to the structure of that new order in order to make it successful. Ultimately, that failed as we know, we went through the reform period and that system was rejected. For a while, the loyalist then got lumped into the bad guy camp with the family compact and others.
[00:27:05] TC: That’s right, but when we get on the other side of that, by the 1850s or so, there’s quite an influx of immigration, migration into Upper Canada. You can see at this point, this is where the loyalist myth starts to take root in Upper Canada, and I’m sure in New Brunswick and other places as well. Because the ruling powers, ruling elite begin to become quite concerned that their position is being undermined. They look to loyalists and they say, “We need to start publishing books. We need to start publishing histories. Put up monuments that celebrate the importance of the loyalists.” “The loyalists,” they argued, “gave us our values that are different from the Americans. They gave us our values that are about order and peace, and tranquility and prosperity in our own way and it was all the loyalist.”
We’ve got guys like William Canniff, his book published in 1969 about the History of Settlement of Upper Canada. Egerton Ryerson writes his book in 1880, The Loyalists of America. This is about really arguing that the loyalists, they weren’t feet gentlemen, they were these Victorian gentlemen that rolled up their sleeves, got to work. They knew about frugality. They knew about hard work. They weren’t like the gentleman that the Americans say they were and all that kind of stuff. There’s a great moment actually in one of these attempts to create this usable past.
I have to actually cite this. This from Norman Knowles’ Inventing the Loyalist, a great book on exactly what we’re talking about. Jedediah Merritt who was, I think, the son or grandson of Thomas Hamilton Merritt, was sort of a young guy and they hired them on to do the research to tell us about how great the loyalists were. He came back and he said, “Well, they were farmers,” and they farmed. That’s what they did. They were not impressed. They kind of asked for the money back. That tension is always kind of there between what this ruling elite in the Victorian period wanted the loyalists to be, this kind of fairytale, and what they actually were. That loyalist myth has sort of been a kind of millstone around the – around the loyalist, the actual loyalist history ever since where we’re constantly trying to poke through that myth and get out the real loyalist.
There’s been some great work done in the past 20 or 30 years that really, really demonstrates this very well. In Canada, I’m not even sure that if you asked someone on the street, like, “Who are the loyalists?'', I’m not entirely sure you would get any kind of answer. I think they’re in the textbooks in elementary school, but they tend to be, across Canada, regionally important. Right? I think if you grew up in Niagara or you grew up in New Brunswick, you would know who the loyalists were and they’re part of your local culture. But across Canada, I don’t believe that they have a resonance that they once did or if they ever did.
If you go to Ottawa, all the monuments that are there, to all those different stuff, there’s no monument to the loyalists. The only monuments to the loyalists are one to John Butler and the other one to Joseph Brant, Thayendanegea in the Walk of the Valiants by Parliament Hill. But there’s a War of 1812 monument, but there’s no loyalist monument. It seems that the loyalists have kind of become just one of a number of waves of settlers or migrants that contributed to Canada.
[00:30:23] AH: To that end, what are the most prevalent misconceptions you feel that remain about the loyalists today?
[00:30:32] TC: Broadly, I think if we talk – if you go more broad North American, we still have misconceptions that they were British, that they were rich, that they were out of touch, old-fashioned. There’s a great line from The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson by Bernard Bailyn from 1974-75. He sort of wonders, it’s like, I think the line is something like, “How could any sensible, well-informed American stand against the American Revolution?” The idea that it’s inevitable and it’s good and what’s wrong with these people? Then the last misconception, I think, is that they all left the United States.
In fact, a very small percentage left. I think there might have been 30,000-ish went to the Maritimes, 7,500 to 10,000 maybe to Upper Canada or Québec largely, Upper and Lower Canada and another 10 or 20 or something like that that might go to Britain and the Caribbean. That leaves about 420,000 people that were associated with the loyalist camp that melted back into American society. There’s been some really good work done by historians like Rebecca Brannon and Aaron Coleman who look at this process of transitional justice, of reintegration, of how do you bring these people back into your society. How do you overcome the trauma of Civil War? How do you douse these vendettas and harsh feelings?
Prior to, sort of, this generation of historians, it’s not something that people really looked at very much. It’s an incredible opportunity to look at and learn from how the Americans actually did this and be able to apply some of these lessons to war-torn countries today.
[00:32:13] AH: When you talk about the assumption in the states about, well of course, there were patriots. I think we have our own version of that. If we’re here in Canada, we’re proud Canadians. It seems like a no-brainer. Well of course there were loyalists. Maybe that’s part of why we haven’t been as introspective as we ought to have been. That and the fact that there were so many purpose driven reinterpretations of the loyalists. But it’s not entirely a failure of scholarship. There still even today are some pretty strong feelings in some corners that are remnants of that conflict.
[00:32:45] TC: Yeah. I would say so. But in some quarters, yeah, this is still very much an emotional, there’s a very much emotional connection to this history, to these families that came up from the states. The United Empire Loyalists’ Association is a descendent society, genealogical society that keeps these stories alive. For example, in the Loyalist Map, we have about 1,830 loyalist families mapped. Of those, I think about 1,500 or so are from genealogies of the United Empire of Loyalists’ Association that they provided. They are an incredible resource of people who really want to share the stories and share the real stories of people like John Brown, from regular people. Not the big loyalist leaders or politicians, regular people that came up and resettled Upper Canada. You find a lot of amazing tales like John Brown and just regular people trying to survive in extraordinary times.
[00:33:49] AH: There’s some really compelling and relevant stories amongst those groups for sure. What do you say when a young historian comes to you and asks you, “Why should I study the loyalists?” What do you say?
[00:34:00] TC: Well, I mean, on one hand, I just find the loyalist story, the drama of it just totally captivating, right? It’s Civil War, it’s upheaval. How can you not find it interesting? The competing ideologies, it’s trying to decide how to best order your society. But I think there’s also some lessons in this. We see just how far political divisions can go and how they can – when we moralize our political positions and vilify those who disagree with us, where this can lead and it can lead to a very, very dark place.
In Canada, the interest in loyalists has waned but it kind of has its own life that’s separate from historical interest or interest among historians in the United States. You see, I think, interest in the loyalists pop-up when there are divisions in American Society. Lorenzo Sabine and there’s a few other writers who look at the loyalists and become fascinated by the loyalists between the 1840s and 1860s. That’s the period that we’re leading up to the Civil War. Trying to understand their political divisions at that point, “Well, let’s look at the loyalists.” In the 1960s and 1970s, we see the loyalists become a real point of interest again. Part of that was the centennial or bicentennial, but also part of that too was the upheavals of the 1960s. Then in the past 10, 15 years, there’s been all kinds of fantastic work done on the loyalists by American scholars. I think that’s part of all history is but the present, right? I think that’s part of our political moment.
[00:35:34] AH: To be fair, I think we’ve been to a degree distracted, not in a bad way, by the bicentennial of the War of 1812. It’s taken up a lot of attention up here in the last decade or two.
[00:35:48] TC: Yeah. The War of 1812 really swallows up the loyalist story, but the two have a lot in common from sort of a public or social memory kind of perspective. We see in both some ideas of what Canada is or what Canada became from this point in social discourse and popular culture. Again, it all usually comes back to the idea that we’re not American. The idea that, this goes back to the 1890s with a historian FP Coin and he was talking about, “Look at the United States, they have lynchings, and they have rapacious capitalism, and they have all these terrible things going on in the Gilded Age, and all these murders. Ten thousand murders a year, all this kind of stuff. Canada is not like that. Why isn’t like that? It’s because of the loyalists.”
That’s a bit of a stretch, but people, that was an argument and there are still arguments that come up that connect the modern, sort of, political culture in Canada that prefers moderation and a moderate political discourse to the sort of the more polarized type of discourse we see in the States. There may be some merit to that, but I think what we see in the War of 1812 and what I noticed following the War of 1812 commemorations was, again, this idea of embracing the differences and living into those differences between the United States and Canada and to show whichever way the Americans go, Canada is going to be different, try and be consciously different.
[00:37:15] AH: Yeah. It becomes a little bit convenient sometimes. I think we’re perhaps not responsive enough to our own flaws because we’ll often use that excuse to point fingers and find fault somewhere else.
[00:37:27] TC: Yeah, it is a kind of moral superiority and it can kind of come off as smug, for sure. It does cause us to not reflect on the fact that we do have very troubling histories when it comes to race and everything else in our society. Canadians are shocked when they discover it. With the recent revelations, residential schools, with learning about Canada’s history of slavery, Canadians are shocked because the myths we told ourselves that we weren’t like the Americans and it’s not true.
[00:37:59] AH: Which is one of the big reasons to get beyond the mythology and get to the actual history for sure.
[00:38:04] TC: That’s right.
[00:38:07] AH: You’ve touched on one of your other areas of interest here, which is the digital history, augmented reality and so on. One of your students referred to as, “Your refined palette for video games.” Talking about the Loyalist Migration Project. Fantastic project. We’ll post the link to that on our website. I’m curious as to with all the data you’re collecting, what have you learned from that so far. What are your key takeaways from that project so far?
[00:38:33] TC: Well, I think there’s a number of things. I still kind of think of it as we’re in the first phase. We approach the project a little differently than other mapping projects for history I’ve done. We didn’t start with a big corpus of primary sources. We’re going to go to that next. We’re going to look at loyalist claims and the old loyalist list and whatever we can find. But this was a project to work with genealogists, to work with people, family historians who have researched their own family trees. We might see a loyalist name on a ship manifest and it just disappears. Okay. That’s one name. But what a family historian will do this is look for that name, and then connect it with a name on a land registry in New York and then connect that with a name, the land registry in Norfolk County, and build a story and build a beautiful little micro history that no historian working on this alone could ever reconstruct all these different stories.
The first thing we’ve learned is just how incredible the work of family historians, people who do their family genealogies, the incredible work they do. The potential of working with these groups and putting it all together and seeing what happens. When you look at that map, those are genealogies that you’re seeing. Those are people’s families that are alive today, that trace their roots to those people that moved across the border and across the oceans all the time back then. That’s the first thing that we learned. This is an untapped resource that we professional historians need to take seriously.
There were no real surprises yet. I was saying to you the other day that one of things that did strike me is when you do visualize things, you do get a different sense of the story. For me, I’d always known the Germans were a big part of the story and then you see, like look at all those migrants that came from Germany, all throughout Germany, where it’s the Palatine or Hanover or Brunswick, and they came over into New York State mostly and then migrated into Upper Canada. There was an old idea that colonial America was a three-mile an hour world, that people didn’t move much. That’s not true. People were moving all over the place. This was a society that was on the move. Even if the loyalist migrations hadn’t happened, it still would be a fascinating map just to watch the transatlantic voyagers of people and the intercolonial movement of people.
We hope though, in the coming years to start building on this more, to start drawing on digitized archival sources and adding more and more to this map. We have 1,830 families mapped. Some of those are individuals, some of those are families. We think 60,000 people left so there’s a lot of work to do. Hopefully, in a few years, we can do some real quantitative work, and crunch some numbers and see what we come up with.
[00:41:32] AH: That’s our first big takeaway for today, is to say to all the family genealogists out there with some loyalist histories, get over to the Loyalist Migrations Project website and offer up your information. It’s obviously going to make a big difference in the scholarship moving forward.
[00:41:50] TC: That’s right. There is a form that you can fill out and you can send it to us. We do have a backlog. It’s coming to the beginning of the school year, so unfortunately, it will take a while to get to it. But next summer, we’ll hit the ground running and get back to work with our student researchers.
[00:42:05] AH: Well, there’s already a lot of great information there and we’ll be patient as we wait for it to come together. Speaking of being patient, when can we expect to see your book?
[00:42:15] TC: Well, it’s under review right now, so academic publishing requires patience. Hopefully before too long. I’m anxious to get it out.
[00:42:25] AH: I’m sure. As we’re waiting patiently for that day, what three books would you recommend to anybody who wants to start to learn more about this foundational piece of our history?
[00:42:35] TC: Yeah. That’s a great question. There’s lots of older stuff from the ’60s, and ’70s and ’80s that I love, but I will focus on more recent books for your listeners. So anyone who wants to get started and learn about the loyalists, the first stop is Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles. This is a fantastic book that really looks at the migrations of the loyalists and really shows the diversity of the loyalist ranks. It looks at everybody from black loyalists, escaped and enslaves people who flee the plantations to go and fight for the British for their own freedom. It looks at Joseph Brant. It looks at all sorts of people that then spread out and create a new kind of British Empire after the war. That’s where I’d start.
The book that inspired my own work is Judith L. Van Buskirk’s Generous Enemies. I love this book. This came out about 2002 and it deals with the very fluid nature of allegiance that we talked about quite a bit in this podcast. It focuses on the territory around New York, the Long Island Sound, the behavior, and the attitudes of gentlemen at war, and just the revolution was not as clear-cut as people like to think. It was not just loyalists and patriots. Those polls existed, but there was a lot of fluidity between. Oftentimes, family and friendship trumps political ideology and political allegiance. People would help the others who are supposedly their enemies and they would do it without even thinking, “I’m going to get in trouble. No, I have to help. He’s my cousin.”
Then finally, a more recent book from 2016, Harvey Amani Whitfield’s North to Bondage from the University of British Columbia Press. That provides a real corrective to the loyalist narrative that demonstrates and shows that while we do have thousands of black loyalist, of freed African-Americans who come to Nova Scotia, that the loyalist were involved in slavery. Many of the people, many of the elites that I study are slavers. This is part of their culture, this is part of their self-identity. Even while some loyalists are trying to differentiate themselves with the Americans and show that they have the moral high ground and end slavery. There are loyalist who tenaciously hold on to slavery and even re-enslaved African-Americans who escaped and found their freedom. It’s really sad story but it’s a really important one that Canadians understand that slavery is part of the history of our country in a way that we have not acknowledged previously.
I will give a fourth one.
[00:45:17] AH: Fair warning too, that’s something we’re going to have to reconcile ourselves within and come to terms with. That’s a very important point. The fourth book, your bonus book.
[00:45:27] TC: Absolutely. My bonus book, it’s a new one from 2019. It’s an edited collection by Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore. It’s called The Consequences of Loyalism and it’s to honor a historian, really important American historian of the loyalist, Robert Calhoon. It’s a fantastic collection of both Canadian and American historians. It sort of shows you what’s going on with nice little short concise chapters that your readers can enjoy.
[00:45:55] AH: Excellent. Well, there’s couple there that I know of and a couple I haven’t read. Thank you very much for those. Just for fun, we’ll close with a lighter question. If you could have a drink with any participant in the American Revolution, who would it be and why?
00:46:08] TC: Well, that’s a good question. I’ve given this some thought. I would actually be leery about sitting down and drinking with a lot of these guys from the American Revolution because they drank heavily. It was some prestige to be what they call the three-bottle man. If you could put back three bottles of red wine at dinner and not vomit, you were considered a good drinking buddy. But that being said, I would love to sit down with the subject of my next book project who is a Connecticut exiled loyalist named Joel Stone. He’s credited as the founder of Gananoque, Ontario, which is where I grew up. Again, sort of one of these characters who really contributed to that loyalist myth.
Why I’d want to sit down with him is that there’s an incredible amount that he left behind of his own writings, letters, account books, that kind of stuff. But these guys who had been collections of archives, of letters and things that are left behind, they consciously curated these. They want to leave behind an image of a man. They want to create a face for themselves that’s quite different from the real man. When you’re poking around in court records, you start to see a different character kind of come out. I have all kinds of questions for him that I would love to sit down and get some answers to, but I don’t believe he would really tell me. The loyalists, like their patriot adversaries, were real masters of spin. I don’t think you would really fess up.
[00:47:38] AH: Well, if you could get through three bottles with him, you might get him there.
[00:47:42] TC: Yeah, he might.
[00:47:42] AH: That’s a great choice. Thank you very much for your time and your insight today. I feel like I’m a little bit wiser.
[00:47:51] TC: Well, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.
[00:47:53] AH: I think we’ll be back and do this again. We got a lot more we could talk about for sure. I think we’ve made a great case for learning more about your own loyalist ancestors. I can say from experience that it’s been a remarkable and surprising journey for me. If you aren’t sure where to start, or you would be interested in working with our research team at the Brown Homestead, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us any time, our door is open.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:48:20] ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening. Episode 3 is coming soon. Join us as we catch up with the museum anarchist himself, Franklin Vagnone. Subscribe today so you won’t miss it. To learn more or to share your thoughts and show ideas, visit us at the brownhomestead.ca. You can also connect via our social media or if you still like to do things the old-fashioned way, you can even email us at opendoor@thebrownhomestead.ca.
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