Transcript

Chapters

0:00:00 Introduction and partnership with Old North Illuminated
0:02:18 Pause to thank Patreon sponsors and reflect on podcast journey
0:05:01 Talk by Dr. Patrick O’Brien on loyalist exile and return
0:07:24 Main questions and importance of studying loyalist history
0:11:14 The reintegration of loyalists into American society
0:16:00 Understanding the sources on loyalists in colonial America
0:18:26 The diverse background of loyalists and skewed historical narratives
0:23:06 Soul’s Prominent Family and Mischievous Youth
0:27:17 Disease and Death Alter Jonathan Sewell’s Plans
0:28:03 The Experiences of Reverend Mathers Biles Junior in Boston
0:32:22 Loyalists in Nova Scotia: Refugees and Exiles
0:35:25 Thomas Hutchinson’s Unpopularity and Flight to Halifax
0:42:02 African American refugees join the loyalists in Halifax
0:49:19 Mary Brads Sheet Robby considers returning to Massachusetts
0:55:54 Learn about Dr. O’Brien and Loyalist exiles from Massachusetts

Introduction and partnership with Old North Illuminated

Music

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.
This is episode 2 85 this perilous hour of trial horror and distress, loyalist exile and return in revolutionary Massachusetts.
Hi, I’m Jake. This week, I’m turning the show over to our friends at Old North Illuminated.
You might remember that we’ve partnered with them before to air a couple of installments from their digital speaker series as podcast episodes, first, a talk on radical abolitionist David Walker in episode 2 40, then another one about two notable sea captains from Old North’s Congregation.
And episode 2 55.
This time, Professor Patrick o’brien of the University of Tampa will examine the loyalist experience of our revolutionary war mostly from the perspectives of women and enslaved African Americans.

[1:04] From our vantage point. 250 years later, it’s easy to view the war for independence as a simple story of good versus bad.
The good patriots battled the bad British from Lexington to Yorktown until we had a country to call our own look a little closer.
However, and the story isn’t so simple.
Many of the tens of thousands of loyalists who were eventually forced to flee, the New United States had roots that went back a century and a half in this country every bit as long as the patriots who drove them out.
And as Doctor o’brien points out many of those who left everything behind to start new lives in London or Halifax didn’t really have much say in the matter as enslaved people, indigenous groups and women were more or less forced to adopt the political positions of the white men in their lives.
Doctor o’brien will bring those stories to light by focusing on a few prominent Boston families, including Old North’s Rector Mather Biles, who was a featured character in Old North’s Play, Revolution’s Edge, which we discussed back in episode 2 76.

[2:12] Thanks to our good friends at Old North Illuminated for allowing us to share this talk with you.

Pause to thank Patreon sponsors and reflect on podcast journey

 

[2:18] But before we do, it’s time to pause and thank our Patreon sponsors for making hub history possible.
This month will mark seven years of the Hub History podcast when I celebrated the 1st 100 downloads of that first show about Pope’s Night in Boston.
I couldn’t imagine a time when over 5000 people would tune in every couple of weeks to hear me talk about Boston history.
If you would have told me, then that the show would win a preservation achievement award and a star award for innovation and communications and public history.
I just flat out wouldn’t have believed you.
I never thought we’d get this far. And at first, I didn’t think about what it would take to do.
So as our expenses for things like podcast, media, hosting, audio processing and transcription have grown over the years, the sponsors who support the show with $2.05 dollars or $10 every month have allowed us to keep pace.
So if you’re already a sponsor, thank you.
And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, just go to patreon dot com slash hub history or visit hub history dot com and click on the support us link and thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors, from the First Shots on Lexington Green in 17 75 until the last red coats left New York Harbor in late 17 83 about 75,000 Americans left the country.

[3:45] Some left by choice to be around people who share their political sentiments while others fled during the heat of battles taking place on their doorsteps, many more were forced to flee after combat was over either out of fear of brutal reprisals from patriot sympathizers on the Appalachian frontier or when they were declared persona non grata by retaliatory laws like the Massachusetts Banishment Act.

[4:11] They came from all over the country and they fled to all corners of the British Empire forging the term loyalist after the fact to tie their personal sacrifices to the greater triumphs of empire.
Most New England loyalists found their way to Nova Scotia which lies just across the Gulf of Maine in the Bay of Fundy.
Patrick o’brien will explore this diaspora through its lesser known participants.
Doctor o’brien is a historian of the American Revolution who studies British sympathizing women and families, their experiences exiles in Nova Scotia and their return to the United States in the late 18th century.
He’s an associate teaching professor of history at the University of Tampa And so now I turn the mic over to Doctor Patrick o’brien.

Talk by Dr. Patrick O’Brien on loyalist exile and return

Dr. Patrick O’Brien:
[5:01] I’ve titled uh today’s talk, this perilous hour of trial, horror and distress, loyalist exile and return in revolutionary Massachusetts.
And what we’re going to be looking at today are a couple of key questions.
First of all, we have to ask ourselves who, who were the loyalists.
I think a lot of us come into talk about the loyalist with a certain idea of their background, both educational social, but we have to be ready to reconsider who these people were and importantly how they experienced the American Revolution.
And that brings us to our second guiding question, which is how did diverse loyalists experience being removed from their New England homes and settled in what we’ll be looking at today mostly in Atlantic, Canada.
We’ll be zooming in on a couple of specific individuals, all from Boston and the Greater Boston, an area who are resettled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick.
And for brief periods in London, we want to dive into the diversity of this exile group and how they experienced exile to understand a little bit more about the networks that they created.

[6:14] And then we’ll also ask ourselves what brought some of these exiles back to New England after the war.
I think this is a really understudied moment in loyalist history.
The loyalists in exile build new networks and create new communities and have visions for what their society is going to be like.
But some of them feel incredibly underwhelmed with what they are able to build and yearn for return to New England.
So we ask ourselves, how did this happen? And there will zoom in on how women played a really important role in bringing loyalist families back to the United States.
And I’ll wrap things up with kind of a final point about why does this all matter today?
I’ll only use this word once during the talk. But as we approach the semi sesa centennial, uh so the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, I think the loyalists have really valuable lessons for all of us to learn from.
And I think for the next generation, there’s a lot of avenues for research and we should be teaching the loyalist experience as much as we teach the patriot one.
And these are kind of the main questions that we will be looking at.

Main questions and importance of studying loyalist history

 

[7:24] So I’ll start with a quick little vignette.

[7:27] On the evening of September 15th, 17 79 having closed the store, she ran in Halifax, Nova Scotia for the evening, Elizabeth Cummings took a moment to write a reply to a letter she received from her good friends in Boston, Mary and Catherine Biles, quote, my heart throbbed with eager expectation. She wrote of learning.
She had a letter from home and as I ran through its pleasing contents, a glow of grateful adoration warmed my soul and raised a grateful adoration to the almighty giver of all things for having thus dealt in bounty and goodness with my dear friends, affording them many blessings in this perilous hour of trial, horror and distress.
When the fearful judgment of heaven above and our land and nation involved in the misery of war, I find myself so kindly remembered.

[8:20] The Cummings sisters had fled Boston in March 17 76 and although their business had flourished in the years since arriving in Nova Scotia, Cummings words reveal that her removal from her friends and home still weighed very heavy on her heart.
She concluded her letter noting a bit about the cloud she called it uh that hung over her and it reveals to us the way that lives continued to be affected by the war and its aftermath.
And she assured her friends quote, nothing can give so much pleasure at this time.
As the indulgence of writing to them, I start with this quote from Elizabeth Cummings letter.
Not because it’s only the title of My Talk, but because I think it reveals something very important about the loyalist experience and that is the prominent place of hardship of grief and of suffering.

Jake:
[9:16] Hi, this is Future Jake. Just cutting in for a moment. The picture that Doctor o’brien’s about to reference will be included in the show notes this week at hub history dot com slash 285.
There are a few more times in the talk when he references slides, but most of those are just scans of documents and I think we can get by without seeing those.

Dr. Patrick O’Brien:
[9:39] The image you see in the background here is a very famous one.
It’s actually not a portrait itself. It’s a detail from a portrait of John Ley Wilmont that is painted in 18 12.
It probably never existed on its own. But it’s titled The Reception of The Loyalists by Great Britain.
And if you look at this image, there’s a lot of really valuable content to it.
I think when we think of the loyalists, we tend to imagine the people standing on the right side of the image.
These are the well connected elite of colonial American society.
They come from well educated backgrounds. They tended to have a tremendous amount of wealth by colonial standards.
They were envisioned to be largely conservative. Although we can talk about whether that’s accurate or not.
And importantly, they had important positions in British North America’s colonial government and in British North America’s clergy.

[10:37] But as I think is more important about this image if you look to the left of those individuals, you see that in 19th century America and Britain, it was well known that the loyalists were incredibly diverse.
It’s not simply the upper class elite who sided with the British during the war. You also have an indigenous man.
You have three formerly enslaved African Americans to the left who are reaching out to Britannia.
You have a woman who’s standing in mourning, veiled in uh black.

[11:11] To represent what she had lost during the war.

The reintegration of loyalists into American society

 

[11:14] And this is what I really want to emphasize about who the loyalists were.
We know that roughly 20% of the American population sided with Great Britain to some extent during the war, that makes about 300,000 to 400,000 colonists loyalists in name.
Although some scholars actually make the number slightly larger as many as 500,000 or perhaps even higher sided with Great Britain or held British sympathies at some point during the war.
It’s also critical to note that of those people, only 60 to 100,000 flee the United States at the war’s conclusion, meaning that the vast majority of loyalists remained in the New American United States and actually reintegrated to American society rather seamlessly.
Rebecca Brandon has a fantastic book about the reintegration of the South Carolina loyalists.
And we’re looking at the exiles today, but it’s critical to note that we’re actually looking at the minority of the loyalist population.

[12:19] It’s also important to recognize that enslaved people used the tumult of war to their advantage mostly to secure their own freedom throughout the war.
Promises of freedom. Lured African Americans to both the patriot and loyalist side on the patriots.
You can think of the first Rhode Island regimen and to the loyalist, especially after Lord Dunmore proclamation in November of 17 75.
You have a significant number of enslaved individuals fleeing the rebellious masters seeking their freedom amongst the British line and as um Bell notes in a recent book about the escaped um or I should say the fleeing African Americans who formerly been enslaved, one third of them are women, which is a significantly larger number than runaways from previous eras demonstrating to us that women took specific advantage of the tumult of war to secure, not only their freedom but the freedom of their Children and, and spouses as well, which I think is very important for us to note.

[13:22] And then of these uh formerly enslaved African Americans who escaped.
We know that somewhere between 1,502,000 and perhaps even more.
Harvey Amani Whitfield’s research into the resettlement of African Nova Scotia is incredibly enlightening, settled in Atlanta to Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick after the war.
And we’re going to look at one of these individuals in order to kind of better understand the challenges that quote unquote servants.
Uh and we’ll talk about what that term means faced in Atlantic, Canada.

[13:54] And also the title I’ve been using Loyalists is somewhat misleading after all that moniker is created by the upper echelon of the loyalist society.
As they’re petitioning for compensation from the British government, they’re emphasizing their loyalty so that they’ll be repaid for the things that they think they are owed and some of them will greatly exaggerate how much they are owed and, and actually get it, uh which is really very interesting about this while others get nothing.
Even if they were honest about what they have lost, they’ll use this term loyalist to be compensated by the British and, and the American government.
But I think that that title is very misleading because it suggests a unified body.
It suggests a monolith whose defining characteristic was their devotion to the British Empire.
But really, it erases just as much as it highlights because what we lose and what’s not necessarily visible in Benjamin’s West painting that I have in the background here is the ideological diversity of the loyalist diaspora that was equally as important as its physical diversity.

[15:02] So I also think that we should talk quickly about the source base that we, as historians used to figure out who the loyalists were because it’ll help illuminate some of the problems with studying the loyalists.
Perhaps one of the most important source bases is the Loyalist claims commission.
There’s more than 3000 claims created by loyalist families after the war for compensation, the British government will eventually give over £3 million.
Uh This is about 37% of everything that was requested.
And much of what we know about the loyalists comes from studying these claims.
We can figure out who the loyalists were, what they owed, how they viewed their own allegiance.
Because many of these claims come with statements of their loyalty that are endorsed by fellow loyalists or in some cases, uh American uh patriots as well.
And much of what we get from the loyalists is built from these.
And I’ll talk a bit about the problems in just a second with that.

Understanding the sources on loyalists in colonial America

 

[16:00] We also know a lot about the loyalists from colonial newspapers.
Uh I have one of them clipped to the bottom left from Massachusetts talking about how our tories are the worst in the province, uh which is already giving you a sense of how colonial newspapers covered. Uh the loyalists.
We also know a bit about them from the pamphlets that are published in the 18th century.
I love giving the students in my American history class. One of them called the Deceiver Unmasked or Loyalty and Interest United, which is the Reverend Charles Inglis of New York’s rebuttal to Thomas Payne’s common sense.
Now, all of my students have heard of common sense.
They know a bit about it, but when they learn that there is a rebuttal to it, they’re often left kind of shocked and they really like working through um the arguments that are made there.
But these pamphlets are really useful for us as well.
We use a number of personal writings which I’ll be leaning into very heavily for this talk.
There’s legislation that is created mostly banning the loyalists from returning, although a lot of it is taken back after the war and then to understand African Nova Scotia’s, perhaps the most important source we have is the quote book of Negroes.
Um that was created by the British government for the resettling of free people of color in the maritimes.

[17:16] But as I’m sure you’re kind of understanding already, there’s significant issues with this source base to start with the Loyalist Claims Commission.
It’s not representative of the loyalists as a whole. For example, in Massachusetts, 81% of all of the claims filed by Massachusetts loyalists come from the coastal counties which were home to only about 51% of the new of the Massachusetts population.
So we know that these loyalist claims skew towards the more coastal loyalists.
We also know that only 468 claims are filed by women.
And Mary Beth Norton has done a really good job in writing an article showing what we can figure out from these claims by women, but that’s a fraction of the overall loyalist claims.
So getting into the mindset of loyalist women has proved challenging for uh a number of historians.
As you saw from the pamphlets, a lot of them that are circulated are created by the elite, uh Charles Inglis, an Anglican minister.
Uh They tend to skew towards the uh specific anglican view of loyalism, which is an important one, but again, not representative of the loyalists as a whole.

The diverse background of loyalists and skewed historical narratives

 

[18:26] We know that loyalists came from all walks of life.
They represent a really good socioeconomic cross section, uh an ideological cross section of colonial American society.

[18:37] And I think actually most importantly, something that really skews our understanding of the loyalists are the things that are written in the early 19th century by early 19th century American historians, when the first historians are writing about the American revolution, they’re trying to frame it in a way that pits the, you know, plucky underdog against this big bad empire in order to kind of tell a moral lesson about the American revolution and to do so, they need a bad guy.

[19:09] And the bad guy quickly becomes not necessarily just Britain, but also colonists who sided with Britain or were perceived to have sided with Britain.
Uh The example I’ve got here is someone that people in Massachusetts probably know very well.
Uh That’s Thomas Hutchinson, uh the last colonial governor.
For those of you who’ve read a bit about Thomas Hutchinson. He’s probably like a lot of us uh academics very interested in the history of New England.
I mean, born and bred in New England or whose family goes back generations.
But in mercy, Otis Warren’s hands, as you can see from this quote in her 18 05 publication, he’s dark, intriguing, insinuating, haughty and ambitious.
While the extreme ari marked each figure of his character, his abilities were a little elevated above the line of mediocrity uh which is pretty damning language to use and what mercy Otis warden does.
And, and kind of throughout that uh publication is extrapolate out from Hutchinson to cover all the loyalists.
Uh they all become self serving, which is the opposite of the patriots in this case, who were um self denying, right, who were disinterested as John Adams would call them.
And so you get this dichotomy that’s not necessarily accurate.
And I think one of the major takeaways from today is that loyalties in the 18th century were on a scale.

[20:32] They were fluid. One of my colleagues here at the University of Tampa Casey Tillman has written really well about loyalist women and the way in which their fluidity of allegiance is important to understand.
There are devout defenders of empire. Don’t get me wrong. We’re actually gonna start with one in just a minute.
But there are also people who simply believed that the devil they knew which would be the British Empire is better than the devil that they didn’t, which would be emerging uh sorry, emerging American Republicanism.
And so you have also people who are willing to change their allegiances depending on who has sway at the time.

[21:10] So I think figuring out a bit about this sliding scale of allegiance is important.
One thing I also write about is that when we think about allegiance, we often think, OK, it’s either to the British Empire or to the emerging United States or maybe the state in which people live.
But there’s also dimensions of uh allegiance, people had allegiance to more than just politics.
There are family allegiances which are incredibly important.
There are religious allegiances which are also important and often intertwined with politics and there are a number of other allegiances like to class and to place that people have to negotiate as they’re also weighing their ideas of the British Empire and the emerging American Republic.
So I think thinking about this sliding scale of loyalty along with the dimensions, demonstrates to us just how complicated it was to determine your allegiance in the 18th century and how difficult it is for us today to figure out whether it’s fair to call someone a loyalist as the term implies or to kind of pay attention to their other allegiances as well.

[22:16] So having kind of set a little bit of a background about loyalism and the complications with studying it.
Let’s look at some, let’s look at some loyalists. I’ll start with uh one of my favorites.
This is Jonathan Sewell and I think if we’re thinking about loyalists, like who is the, you know, most devout of the people, we are going to look at Jonathan Sewell is my answer for today.
He is an unwavering supporter of the British Empire so much so that at the end of the war, when his family members are returning to the United States and, and very much urging him to come along with them, he says get lost.
He says the world is big enough for all of us, meaning that I’m gonna go somewhere else and I will never see my friends uh again.
So this is someone who really has a gripe against the American revolution and I couldn’t find a portrait of him.
But there he is portrayed in HBO S fantastic John Adams series.

Soul’s Prominent Family and Mischievous Youth

 

[23:06] Soul is interesting because he comes from a very prominent family.
You can tell by his last name. If you’re familiar with Samuel Sewell uh of the 17th century.
But his father dies at a young age. The only reason he is able to attend Harvard is because his uncles, the Reverend Samuel Cooper of Brattle Street Church and his other uncle, the chief justice Stephen Sewell are able to raise the funds for him and he graduates after some mischief to uh Jonathan Sewell’s letters.
By the way, if you get a chance, the Massachusetts historical are fantastic because he is incredibly witty.
So he’s quite funny. And during his youth, he was um rather mischievous.
So he gets into some trouble at Harvard. This follows him for a bit, but he’ll graduate in 17 48.
He’ll teach for a bit in Salem before he goes on to open a law practice.
Very successful one in Charlestown.
He’ll also marry Esther Quincy only a few months before his very good friend, John Adams marries her cousin Abigail Smith.

[24:04] He is an avid supporter of Thomas Hutchinson, which pays off.
He’s appointed Massachusetts Attorney General in 17 67.
And later, he’s appointed to the Vice Admiralty Court in Nova Scotia, which is stationed at Halifax and Sewell visits briefly uh and is very underwhelmed with what’s largely still a military garrison.
It bears no resemblance to Boston.
And so he will not take up residence ever in Halifax. Um Instead he’ll pay a deputy before the revolution to uh work his position for him.

[24:34] But after the famous powder alarm in September of 17 74.
When his windows are broken by an angry mob. He’s actually away in Boston on court.
Uh His wife is home with her two young sons and two law students.
The windows are broken after there’s some kind of um commotion and there are, the mob is only placated when Esther Sewell, empty the cabinets of her, of her liquor cellar uh to the mob to send them home.
This will convince uh Jonathan Sewell that his family’s best interests are not outside the city of Boston, but he moves closer to where the regiments are in Boston, which is important for our story because Jonathan Sewell is a firsthand witness of what occurs after, after the battles of Lexington and conquered the siege of Boston.
He’ll remain not until March of 17 76. He’ll remain in Boston until September of 17 75.
But all the while he’s writing to his cousin, someone will look at a little bit later, Thomas Roby who has already left for Halifax.
And he’s describing the hardship that plagues the loyalists, those who are remaining sympathetic to Britain in Boston.
And I think that this is important because what Seul describes is disease, hunger hardship.

[25:54] That from a very early stage is beginning to define the experience of the loyalists, those who are sympathetic to Britain.
And I’ve got some quotes kind of plucked here from his letters North to Halifax.
He explains that he’s situated in Tom Boylston’s house in School Street.
He talks a bit about the kind of nice accommodations that he has.
And this is in comparison to others who are forced into really kind of um sad lodgings you’ll see here that he also blames the American patriots for the wickedness that they’ve brought and his own suffering.

[26:30] He notes that he hears so many stories from without that.
He doesn’t really know what is true and what is not. And this is another defining aspect of early loyalism is that the loyalists imagine that the siege of Boston will be broken up and that the American Revolution will be short lived, but they’re getting conflicting reports from all over.
And so from a very early stage, the loyalists are never clear on who has the upper hand and how long this conflict will continue and they very much want it to end.
They blame the American patriots for disturbing the peace.
A lot of loyalists will write about the quote, unnatural rebellion that has been created by uh the American patriots, which is a really interesting perspective to have.
He also writes about the disease that is plaguing the people held up in Boston.

Disease and Death Alter Jonathan Sewell’s Plans

 

[27:17] He writes for a month past, you meet as dead, many dead folks as live ones, which is again, really kind of graphic, but tells us about this hardship that once again in exile is going to plague the loyalist community.

[27:30] And ultimately, it’s disease and death that change his plans rather than traveling north to Halifax.
Well, remember he has a seat on the Vice Admiralty Court. He already has an appointed position there.
This is the logical move for him to make, he boards his wife, his Children, including uh two enslaved people as well as you see there, he boards them on a ship bound for London because news of a smallpox outbreak in Halifax has frightened him to the idea of moving north.

The Experiences of Reverend Mathers Biles Junior in Boston

 

[28:03] There’s someone else held up in Boston that I know people at Old North are intimately familiar with.
And this is the Reverend Mathers uh Biles Junior who is, of course the second rector of Christ’s Church.
He’ll famously hand over the keys on the eve of the American revolution to the church.
Mathers Biles Junior is there in Boston as well, but he experiences the death and hardship of early loyalism firsthand.
His first wife, Rebecca dies in the summer of 17 75.
And it’s unclear exactly if she dies of disease brought about um by the overcrowding of Boston.
But his mother also dies as well. So he’s experienced death kind of twice during this period.
And he will in March of 17 76 board along with about 1000 others with the British troops bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia.
He’ll also take with him his 13 year old daughter, Rebecca, his son Mathers files the third, his daughter, Elizabeth Anna and Sarah with him as well.

[29:05] And it’s important here to talk a little bit about Halifax and about Nova Scotia.
The loyalists are very much persuaded early on in their settlements that Nova Scotia does not have opportunity.
What’s interesting about Halifax is that it’s only about 415 nautical miles northeast of Boston.
That’s about a four day sail at the time.
And this sale was actually rather tumultuous. Um, most of the lawyers who make the crossing talk about how rough it was and how hard it was on them.
A lot of seasickness and if anyone’s ever been to Halifax or the south shore of Nova Scotia, you’ll know that the geography and the climate is really not all that different from Boston or from other parts of New England.
But for the loyalists, these two places couldn’t have been more different.
I’ll read you some of the quotes. Um, Mary Bradstreet, Robbi, a fellow exile will write in January of 17 76.
So much for Halifax. I wish I had never seen it.
Now, if I knew what to say more, I would write on by way of amusement for myself. For, I have no other.
And if I thought it would be any amusement to you and had my New England head.

[30:17] I believe I should. But as that is not the case and this dumb and stupid place furnishes no topic either for conversation or writing, I shall conclude.

[30:26] And I think that that quote is really powerful. Not only is it pretty damning of Halifax, but also she talks about losing her New England head.
And I think what she means by that is that by removing to Halifax, she has lost a bit of her intrinsic character.
This is an individual whose family’s line traces back to the earliest days of the settlement of New England.
Her great, great grandfather was a um former governor of Massachusetts.
This is someone who believed themselves distinctly American and removing to Halifax changed that for her.
It caused her to lose her sensibilities, her New England head, Jacob Bailey of Maine, was very much looking forward to resettling in New E uh in Nova Scotia because he was excited to quote, live in the place of a lawful prince once again.
But seeing the coast for the first time, he noted only quote, its dark and dejecting gloom and described the quote shrubby spruce fur and hemlock which by their starving and misshapen appearance sufficiently indicate the severity of the climate and the barrenness of the soil.
So once again, a really kind of negative description of uh Nova Scotia.
Another refugee wrote later in 17 83 quote, we were taught to believe this place was not as barren and foggy as had been represented.
But we find it 10 times worse. It is the most inhospitable climate that ever mortals have set foot on.

[31:54] So the loyalists are overwhelmingly writing about the despair of Nova Scotia, about the gloom of Nova Scotia and their patriot counterparts are more than willing to pick up on this and revive an old nickname that had become popular during the Acadian deportation of the 17 fifties and sixties.
The nickname of Nova Scarcity to really rub it in the loyalist face that they made the wrong decision here in supporting the British Empire.

Loyalists in Nova Scotia: Refugees and Exiles

 

[32:22] And I bring that up not because it’s an interesting tidbit, but because it is really central to the loyalist exile experience in Nova Scotia.
And in Halifax, they saw themselves not as staunch defenders of the British Empire, but as refugees as exiles.
And they often wrote about themselves as such.
Most of them, at least until the 17 eighties, late eighties and early nineties, they referred themselves not as loyalists but as refugees.
Elizabeth Biles, um she writes a letter back to her aunts in Boston from Halifax.
And the last page of it, she’s, I believe around 11 years old at the time of this letter.
Um The last page of it, she includes a poem that her father had written and that she had stitched into a sampler and I’ll just read it to you because I think it’s incredibly powerful, a young exile from my native shore.
Stare at the flash of arms and dread. The roar.
My softer soul not formed for scenes like these flies to the arts of innocence and peace.
My heart exults while to the attentive eye, the curious needle spreads the enameled die while varying shades the pleasing task beguile.
My friends approve, me and my parents smile.

[33:36] It’s a really interesting poem for a lot of reasons and we had more time.
We could talk about, you know, being a young loyalist, a second generation loyalist uh about being a young girl in particular in Halifax.
But that first line I a young exile from my native shore really drives home.
How deeply ingrained the refugee experience was for the loyalists in Nova Scotia.
Their defining characteristic arguably is their removal from home. Is their exile.

[34:07] And I think that this is important for a lot of reasons, but it allows us specifically to study loyalist women in a really interesting way.
I’ll shift gears from the Biles family and bring up. Now the Robe family of Marblehead, Massachusetts, Thomas Robe and the Robby family is the subject of my ongoing book project.
Um Thomas Roby is a prosperous merchant in Marblehead. He’s also the cousin of Jonathan Sewell like Sewell.
He’s left fatherless at a young age. He has an apprenticeship and becomes a vendor of British made goods.
He moves to Marblehead, which is on the up and up in the 17 fifties and marries the daughter of Reverend.
Um Simon Bradstreet, a very wealthy member of town from the second congregationalist church in 17 72.
He purchases a a lot on the main street in town which is modern Washington Street.
If some of you are familiar with Marblehead and build a large brick home on it.
Uh It still stands today as he was becoming more affluent and more influential in town.
He was also being increasingly depicted as someone with British sympathies.
He was accused of continuing to import British goods in violation of the non importation agreement, something he vehemently denied but was hurled at him in newspapers and in other publications.

Thomas Hutchinson’s Unpopularity and Flight to Halifax

 

[35:25] He also signed a letter of support later on for Thomas Hutchinson after he’s been recalled to Britain, which is published in all the newspapers in New England making him even more unpopular.
He also has his family inoculated against smallpox, which is interesting and actually brought him a lot of heat in Marblehead along with some other loyalists.
So there’s an interesting kind of dynamic here.

[35:45] And after the battles that Lexington and conquered, he decides that his family’s best interests are not in New England that for their safety, they should flee not to Boston, but to Nova Scotia, to Halifax.
And he boards his four young Children. You can see their names there inscribed on um the common book of prayer that they took with them to Halifax, along with their birth dates, his four young Children, his sister, whose widowed sister and her daughter, his wife, and also a young enslaved girl who unfortunately, name is not recorded in any of the family’s writings, which I think speaks a bit about the violence of the archive. But we will look at her in a minute.

[36:25] And they arrive in Halifax very early on. There’s some of the earliest loyalists to come to Nova Scotia.
And this benefits Robby as you can see in the bottom right there.
Uh He reopens his store, his importing business and he does quite well benefiting after the influx of 1000 refugees in March of 17 76.
And then again, later on, uh thereafter when more refugees come, you’ll also see up at the top.
Roby tries to walk back his loyalism in Mar in February of 17 75.
He has this published in the Essex gazette.
What you’ll notice is an apology for his perceived loyalism where he notes I never had any wish to injure the town and country to which I belong.
And if he had any other effect, I am really sorry for it.
So you can see here that some of the loyalists or people who are perceived as loyalists try to walk back.
Uh Some of the animosity that has been building against them often at this case for uh for at least a decade.

[37:22] So why look at the robes? It’s not actually Thomas Robe who I think is all that interesting, but it’s interesting to look at the robes because of the Robbie daughters and because of the role that suffering played in their lives.
This right, what you see on the screen now is, uh Mary Roby’s diary that she keeps as a 19 and 20 year old young woman in Halifax for about a year in 17 83 and 17 84.
And it’s one of the best insights we have into what daily life was like in Halifax for well to do loyalists like herself.
I’m gonna read you an excerpt from Friday, October 3rd and Saturday October 4th when Mary Roby is attending the funeral of a young woman.

[38:09] Well, Hetty and I were sent to be Paul holders to a Miss Wood Hetty is her younger sister, sister or he as she was known.
And though we never had any connection or even knew that there was such a person here, yet we were informed, she had a brother and sister here and that they had recently arrived here finding they were decent people and as strangers, we pitied them and looked upon ourselves, obliged to be in all powers of our service.
And then in Saturday, October 4th, Miss Lyde called to see us in the morning.
Mama was out, she went to see some ladies who live opposite, they are strangers, but people of character, mama visited them from a motive of compassion as they knew nobody here in the afternoon we went to the funeral.
We imagined that as it was a person we had no regard for nor had ever seen that would be unaffected.
But there is something so awful in death that we could not look at it unmoved.
This was a young woman of six and 20 who after a short illness was cropped as it were in the flower of her age in a strange place, unknown and unlamented.
And I think what you see there is something really powerful.

[39:21] Roby imagined that she had no connection with this young woman she had never met was serving from an obligation that she had as a fellow loyalist.
But upon attending the funeral, she expresses what was something that was very important to 18th century young women.
And that is the idea of fellow feeling what 19th century individuals would call empathy.
This fellow feeling arose from nothing more than their shared hardship.

[39:47] Roby saw in this Miss Wood, a vision of herself and very much feared some of what Miss Wood was experiencing, being buried in exile, being buried as a refugee, unknown and unlamented.
But you also see not just fear but community building.

[40:06] The loyalist women more so than the men were expected to express this fellow feeling.
It’s built into late 18th century ideology about how young women should act.
They’re supposed to feel what later people would call empathy with their fellow exiles but not so the men, right, the stiff upper lip of the British Empire, men were supposed to remain optimistic about the king and about the government of Nova Scotia, not to kind of dwell in the hardship.
And so it’s women who began building the intangible bonds of community with fellow refugees based only on their shared suffering and to drive that home even further.
There’s another funeral in January of 17 84 for a fellow refugee from Massachusetts that is attended both by Mathers Biles Junior and by Mary Roby and they both write about it.
Biles writes simply, I attended the funeral of a son of the Reverend Mr Rogers of Littleton who has left a widow and eight Children.
Mary Roby writes, Mr Rogers is dead.
Such is the lot of all mankind be still my heart and cease to flow my tears yet not the bare knowledge of his death could affect me like viewing the indescribable distress of his wife. How hard is her lot?
So you notice here that they both reference the widow that is left, but Mary Roby empathizes with the widow in a way that Biles may have done, but certainly doesn’t write about.

[41:35] And I think that those empathetic bonds are very important in understanding loyalist communities in exile.
A week later, Robbie was still reflecting on this lingering feeling.
I’m still reflecting on the dissolution of Mr Rogers image before me, I cannot attend to visitors or anything else. Everything seems trifling.
So this shared suffering is incredibly important to the loyalist communities and the intangible bonds that are created amongst them. But it had limits.

African American refugees join the loyalists in Halifax

 

[42:02] There are another group of refugees amongst the loyalist of Halifax.
These are formerly enslaved African Americans who flee largely New York in 17 83 and 17 84 with the retreating British army, like I said, between 1,502,000, perhaps even more black settlers came to Nova Scotia alongside the loyalists.
And this is not kind of well known in the United States, but slavery existed in Nova Scotia, much like slavery existed in New England.
It was different than in the colonial plantations of the South or of the Caribbean.
It’s what historians call, quote family slavery.
And it was imagined by 18th century New Englanders and Nova Scots to be less brutal than the form that existed in the colonial plantations of the South, but was no less. So as we’re about to see in a minute.
And the settlers including loyalists of Halifax actually regularly practice the capture and resale of free black individuals in Halifax, some of them to the West Indies so much so that in the 17 eighties, the Nova Scotia legislator debates, passing a law that would forbid the sale of formerly enslaved people to the Caribbean.

[43:15] And The famous book of Negroes identifies a lot of arrivals as quote servants.
But Harvey and Manny Whitfield’s research really demonstrates that this term was probably used in order that if a law ever was passed in Nova Scotia banning slavery, that people identified as servants would not be emancipated.
They operated in this ambiguous realm of freedom but still enslaved by families because they needed to maintain a close connection to them or else risk being captured and sold into a worse fate.
And it allows me to shed light on a really interesting woman named Flora Lee who also comes from Marblehead Massachusetts.
She’s born into slavery in Manchester in the late 17 thirties and she has enslaved her entire life um by the Lee family eventually falling into the hands of Hannah Lee who will live in Marblehead and is the grandmother of um Mary Bradstreet robe.
And around the same time that Mary the robes built their home on marble heads, Washington Street, 17 72.

[44:21] Hannah Lee gifts a young child, a daughter who had belonged, who was Flora’s daughter and had belonged to Hannah Lee.
She gifts this daughter to the robes.
And when the robes flee Marblehead in 17 75 they take this child with them who I mentioned before.
I wish I could use her name to give her um some agency. But unfortunately, it’s never listed in any of the records.
And there’s this really powerful letter that Hannah Lee from Marblehead sends north to Halifax in July of 17 79.
And I’m only gonna read you the brief postscript on it because it’s the only place in the archive where Flora’s Voice ever lives.
The last line of the letter is Flora sends her duty to you and her love to her child.
And this is a really powerful line and talks a bit about how the breakup of loyalist families resulted in the breakup of black families as well, but not because of their allegiance because of their status as enslaved peoples.
What’s remarkable about Flora Lee is that that note was probably a reminder to the robes about her continued allegiance to the family and a note to her daughter not to despair because her mother has a plan.

[45:38] Henley dies in 17 81 and essentially manu meets Flora.
She leaves her a couple of possessions from her home and Flora does something rather remarkable and I’m not quite sure exactly how this is done, but she sails north for Halifax and think about doing so being incredibly revolutionary.
She is giving up essentially her freedom, what she had achieved in Massachusetts.
After the death of her owner to return to slavery in the Robe home, she’s not enslaved and the Robby won’t write of her as a slave anymore.
They’ll right of her as a servant.
But in Halifax where free people of color ran the risk of being sold into slavery in the Caribbean, she had to maintain a close connection to the Robe home where she was virtually enslaved.
Again. Of course, this was a trade she was willing to make to be reunited with that daughter who had been taken away from her.
And I think that this is a really kind of powerful moment of uh enslaved people or formerly enslaved people’s agency.

[46:33] Sadly, that daughter dies in June of 17 83.
A measles epidemic rocks Halifax that same year and some of the earliest casualties occur in the Robe family home, including Flora’s daughter.
And I’ll read Mary Robe’s description of this moment and I think you should juxtapose it in your mind to the description of Miss Wood’s funeral because this is a girl who lived in her home, who had been spirited away with her from Marblehead.
And this is how she describes the funeral. You’ll notice none of the fellow feeling.
You’ll see the limits of the community of suffering came home.
Heard the little negro was dead. Felt glad that a period put to its misery.
Is it not natural to suppose that I wished her sufferings to end?
And as there was no other way, but by her disillusion I earnestly desired, I may almost say prayed for it when it arrived.
I felt a burden removed from my mind.

[47:23] So I think that juxtaposition is incredibly noticeable here.
We see the limits of the community of suffering Black loyalists suffered worse than their white loyalist counterparts.
But there’s no gilded misery as Robbie calls it here, this is a release from hardship.
So you can see the real limits of the community of suffering.
But Flora doesn’t disappear from the Robe’s writings. In fact, she actually increases about a year later, she will bring a young boy named Prince into the Robbie family home.

[47:53] And this young boy named Prince is incredibly interesting because he does not appear to be Flora’s biological son.
Instead, it seems to be a young boy that Flora has adopted, taken into uh her protection and will care for as her own through.
As we’re about to see the Robbie and her repatriation to Massachusetts in the 17 eighties and nineties Prince comes into the Robe family home on the eve of their first return to Massachusetts, in March of 17 84 Mary Bradstreet, Robby had given birth to her final child, a daughter named Hannah after that grandmother who had passed away uh Flora’s owner in Marblehead, and the birth of this young daughter convinces Mary Bradstreet Robe that the family’s interests are no longer in Halifax.
The disease that has permeated her own home very much frightens her and she begins pleading with her husband to let her return to Massachusetts by 17 84.
Even though Thomas Robe is named in the Banishment Act of 17 88 the 17 84 legislator had walked back a lot of this banishment language.
And so there was an opportunity to return. Thomas Roby is very much against the idea, but eventually relents.
And as you can see from some of the quotes that I pulled from uh the eldest daughter, Mary Roby and her mother, Mary Bradstreet.
Robby, they return to Massachusetts.
Although brief, they’ll return in July and come back to Halifax in September.
They celebrate this moment.

Mary Brads Sheet Robby considers returning to Massachusetts

 

[49:19] Mary Brads Sheet Robby writes to her husband, quote, you would never suspect that when here you had an enemy in the place.
In short, you must come here or I shall elope again for I shall never be content to live in the way I have done there.
This is a very clear line that Mary Brads Sheet Robby believes the family’s interests are, are back in Massachusetts and threatens although she walks this back later and says she’s joking but threatens to continue to remove to Massachusetts until the family does so more permanently.
She also talks a little bit about the townspeople.
The town is upon the rise. All men say so on the wharf, oh, if we had, but Mr Roby’s shop to go to.
So she begins to put in his mind that the shop that he runs, which is struggling by this point in Halifax would be better off if they returned to Massachusetts.

[50:07] But again, she has to go back to Halifax in September of 17 84.
And from the moment she arrives back, she is already planning the next return to Marblehead that won’t come until September of, I’m sorry, October of 17 87.
But Mary Bradstreet returns once again to Marblehead with her daughters, Mary and Hannah and the young boy named Prince and she’s returned this time because the economy of Halifax has totally fallen out.
And Roby has a very hard time making any sales in Halifax.
So his eldest daughter takes objects with her to sell in Marblehead and is quite good at it.
She knows the prices she can fetch. She requests more items from her father to be sent from Halifax.
But Mary Brad Street, Robby, her mother is intent on finding a more permanent connection to Massachusetts.
She is intent on finding her eldest daughter, a husband and an American husband and she does in one of her husband’s distant relatives, Joseph Sewell, who’s a competing merchant in Marblehead.
And Sewell writes back to Halifax to Thomas Roby.
I should not have presumed to make the application as it if it had not been for some encouragement from Mrs Roby and I shall be ever entertained the most gratefulness towards her paraphrasing there a little bit.
But he writes in his letters back to Halifax that it was Mrs Roby, Mary Brad Street. Robby who had convinced him to ask for her daughter’s hand in marriage.

[51:32] And they went in September of 17 88 Mary Brassie Robbie writes in no uncertain terms back to Halifax that her husband will consent to the marriage because they all have to give up if she is to be the gainer.

[51:44] And while most people are happy about this marriage, there is someone who is very unhappy.
This is Mary’s younger sister, the girl who accompanied her on that trip uh to the funeral in 17 83 her sister Hetty who had married previously at the age of only 19 to a man, nearly twice her age in Halifax, a loyalist.
Hetty writes my tears flow as I write and she goes on to describe how she must take her leave.
What can I say upon losing my dearest sister?
She comes to think that those who did not extend their connections were the happiest, meaning those who didn’t marry uh were happier than those who did because she had married a refugee.
She had bound herself to exile and she read the writing on the wall.
Her family was bound for New England.
And by 17 89 the family had made their last Crossing and had returned to Massachusetts leaving.
Not just Hetty. Um, at this point, she’s Hetty Stearns.
She’d married Jonathan Stearns who is a member of the, um, loyalist, uh, political group but comes to a very sad early fate.
Uh, he may have been murdered. Something I can talk about in question and answer again.
It’s, it’s a little bit unclear but it leaves Hetty widowed in Nova Scotia when she comes to Massachusetts.
Mary Roby’s husband writes that she looks 10 years older than her older sister despite being, uh, a few years younger.
So she has a very, uh, sad life and, and dies quite young, uh, in, in Halifax.

[53:10] Uh I can talk a bit about the Sewell family too. Um One of their Children, Joseph Sewell and Mary Robby’s Children is um Samuel Edmon Sewell, who is one of the leading abolitionists in Massachusetts, uh who was raised also by the woman Flora who makes a return to Massachusetts as well.
So there’s a really interesting story to be told there about the way in which abolitionism is shaped by continuing legacies of slavery uh in the late 18th century.

[53:35] So let me conclude. I’ve told a lot of stories I, I’ve looked into some loyalists, I’ve looked into their experience as exiles.
I’ve tried to highlight the diversity, both ideological and physical of the loyalist diaspora.
And I just want to make a quick note about why I think it matters.
The loyalists play a very big role in the history of Canada.
And as we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, perhaps it’s time that the loyalists play an important role in American history as we’ve seen here.
These aren’t simply the losers of the American revolution.
As one historian once called them, to me, they occupy a really complex place in colonial American society and the decisions they made have important ramifications on generations of their family going into the future.
I’ve worked with uh people at the Massachusetts Historical Society to create a fantastic set of primary source documents.
Uh If any one is an educator, I would highly recommend checking out history source offered by the Massachusetts Historical Society which can bring primary sources into the classroom along with curated exercises that have been uh incredibly fruitful in my own classroom.

[54:49] I think also as we move towards revolution 2 50 it’s time, American historians have deeper dialogues uh with their Canadian counterparts about these questions of allegiance and what they mean.
And it’s also a place for future graduate students.
Uh I think a really fruitful place for future graduate students to look into these stories of loyalist, women, of enslaved loyalists of free black loyalists, the communities that they built.
What can we say about free black communities in Nova Scotia and the connections to loyalism, about hardship, about rising above that hardship.
And how can we tell a more complex story about allegiance at a time where people’s loyalties are once again, becoming prominent aspects of their character or at least perceived to be?
So, thank you all so much uh for being here.
I hope this has been both entertaining and informational.
Thanks to everyone from all over for coming. I I really appreciate it.
Thank you everyone at Old North for the opportunity I really look forward to this all summer.

Learn about Dr. O’Brien and Loyalist exiles from Massachusetts

Jake:
[55:54] To learn more about Dr o’brien and loyalist exiles from Massachusetts.
Check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 285.
I’ll have the portrait of John Wilmet that shows diverse loyalists in the background.
And I’ll also include links to some of Doctor o’brien’s articles about loyalist women as well as primary sources and other background reading material about the loyalist exiles.
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Music

Jake:
[57:03] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners.