Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary
World
By Maya
Jasanoff
(Knopf, 480 pages, $30)
Maya Jasanoff’s splendid new book, Liberty’s Exiles,
celebrates the idea of ordered liberty that American Loyalists took
with them in exile, first to Canada, and then throughout the
British Empire. They maintained their connection to Britain, and
acceded to self-government in gradual steps. Theirs was a model not
calculated to inflame the passions or result in television
miniseries, but it was followed by more than 60 countries with a
combined population of more than 2 billion people, and that is no
small thing.
It has often been said that Britain learned from its mistakes in
the 1770s, and that, after recognizing American independence in
1783, it wisely adopted a more prudent method of dealing with its
colonies in the “Second British Empire” that arose from the ashes
of the failed First Empire. But that is not Jasanoff’s story.
Instead, she proposes an ideological explanation for the
development of liberty in the former British colonies.
There was a Spirit of 1776 that animated the Founders, but for
the Loyalists there was also a “Spirit of 1783,” and for Jasanoff
these were really very similar. Both Patriots and Loyalists
subscribed to the same Whiggish, Lockean principles. Where they
differed was principally on the prudential question of whether they
should take on the British Empire. “Of course, government derives
its authority from the consent of the governed,” said the
Loyalists. “But do you really think that you can defeat the
greatest military power in the world? Or that your taxes will go
down when you build Tom Paine’s navy?”
When the Loyalists went into exile, then, they took with them
the same ideas about government that the Patriots held. These
ideas, in turn, informed the movement to self-government throughout
the Empire. The colonies would become independent, not through
violent revolution, but through the quiet accession to
self-government that Joseph Galloway had proposed to the
Continental Congress in 1774 (which failed by only one vote), and
which later was followed by Canada and throughout the Empire.
Jasanoff implicitly rejects the idea of American exceptionalism:
we are not exceptional, she thinks, in our adherence to the
libertarian ideals of the Founders. The Loyalists had the same
understanding of liberty, and brought it with them throughout the
Empire. The American Revolution, Patriots and Loyalists both,
remade the world, and not only America.
The story of the Loyalist emigration to Canada has been told
before, and indeed is central to the understanding the country has
of itself. What is novel in Liberty’s Exiles is the story
of the Loyalist emigration to other parts of the Empire: the
Caribbean, Africa, India, and Britain. As well, no one has
presented the Loyalists’ case with more sympathy, or better
explained why they remained attached to the Crown. Indeed, many of
the book’s readers might wonder which side they would have been on,
at the time.
AND YET THE BOOK is not without its weaknesses, chief of which
is its casual acceptance of the Whig interpretation of history. To
be on the side of liberty, she suggests, is to be a Whig and
subscribe to the Founders’ ideas on government. However, that works
only if Whiggism embraces a good many people usually thought of as
Tories: William Blackstone, Virginia’s Lord Dunmore, and Sir Guy
Carleton. These were people who, unlike many Patriots, sought to
emancipate slaves, and the story of how African Americans fared in
the Revolution will be uncomfortable reading for some. The same
might be said of the Native Americans, many of whom became Native
Canadians because of the Revolution.
The second difficulty is the book’s identification of Whiggism
with America. The Whig tradition in England antedates the
Revolution and indeed antedates America. And when Lord Durham
proposed responsible government on a not-entirely-willing Canada in
1839, he did so as an English, not a North American, Whig. (The
Durham Report is the source of that wonderful phrase, “benign
neglect,” used to describe how Westminster had governed
Canada.)
Finally, Jasanoff too easily identifies liberty with the Whig
tradition of the Patriots. She recognizes that the Loyalists were
less concerned with representative government than the Patriots,
preferring good government to self-government. Behind that,
however, was a different understanding of what liberty meant. For
the Patriots of 1776, liberty meant principally independence from
Great Britain and the right to elect members to a sovereign
deliberative assembly. For their part, the Loyalists were less
concerned about forms of government and more concerned about
freedom from state interference. To be sure, Jefferson shared their
views on personal freedom, but crucially this was the sense in
which the Loyalists thought themselves already free and not in need
of a revolution. Their understanding of liberty was labeled the
“liberty of the moderns” by Benjamin Constant, in contrast to the
Patriots’ Liberty of the Ancients.
Jasanoff’s book is well timed, for there is a growing sense that
the United States is in decline. The Heritage Foundation’s list of
“free” countries is dominated by former British colonies, while the
United States lags behind as “mostly free.” Freedom, as Jasanoff
notes, is not the property of America alone, but instead is enjoyed
by a host of countries, especially those in the Anglosphere. Her
explanation of why this is so might not be convincing, but she
nevertheless usefully directs our attention to a common heritage of
liberty.
