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The Loyalists' Image of England. Ideal and Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Mary Beth Norton
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Extract

Historians of Anglo-America have long been fascinated by the cultural relationship between the colonies and the mother country during the eighteenth century. Recently, this interest has been intensified by studies suggesting that the Americans drew heavily on English sources for their revolutionary ideology. Scholars have thus recognized the importance of defining the exact nature of the interplay between England and America, and one of the most frequently-chosen means of accomplishing this clarification has been to examine the accounts of English travelers in the colonies and the impressions of provincial visitors to the British Isles. Such personal narratives provide an excellent basis for comparing the two cultures and for delineating the extent of their shared heritage. Yet strangely enough, despite this continuing interest in colonial reactions to England and vice versa, few works have discussed in detail the experience of the loyalist refugees who fled to Great Britain during the revolutionary war. In part this seems to be a consequence of the long-term neglect of the loyalists in serious studies of the American rebellion, but even with the recent upsurge of interest in them, their time in exile has received scant attention from historians. Generally the loyalists' experience in England has been treated as something of a side show to the main event, which was acted out upon the American stage. This lack of scholarly concern is at the same time curious and lamentable, for the refugees' letters and diaries provide a wealth of information about the ways in which eighteenth-century Americans perceived Great Britain, and thus about the nature of the relationship between the two closely-connected English-speaking cultures.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Summer 1971 , pp. 62 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1971

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References

NOTES

1 See, for example, Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar and Colbourn, Trevor, The Lamp of Experience (Chapel Hill, 1965).Google Scholar

2 The treatment of the exiles in Nelson, William, The American Tory (New York, 1961)Google Scholar and Brown, Wallace, The Good Americans (New York, 1969)Google ScholarPubMed is limited to one chapter each. The one partial exception to this observation is Einstein, Lewis, Divided Loyalties (Boston, 1933)Google Scholar, which concentrates heavily on Americans who engaged in espionage activities on behalf of the British.

3 Boucher, Jonathan, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (New York, 1967), 592Google Scholar. See also Seabury, Samuel, Letters of a West Chester Farmer, ed. Vance, Clarence (White Plains, 1930), 128.Google Scholar

4 Allen, William, The American Crisis … (London, 1774), 6–7Google Scholar; Adams, John and Leonard, Daniel, Novanglus and Massachusettensis (New York, 1968), 145, 147, 217Google Scholar; Seabury, , Letters, 138.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 121-22; Adams, and Leonard, , Novanglus and Massachusettensis, 170.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 150; Seabury, , Letters, 140.Google Scholar

7 Aikman, Louisa Wells, The Journal of a Voyage from Charleston, S. C. to London (New York, 1906), 61–2Google Scholar; Sargent, Winthrop, ed., The Loyalist Poetry of the Revolution (Philadelphia, 1857), 89.Google Scholar

8 Harrison Gray, Jr. to Harrison Gray, Sept. 22, 1775, Gray Collection, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; Samuel Quincy to his wife, Sept. 5, 1775, Samuel Quincy Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (hereafter MHS); Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776 (Collections of the MHS, LXXI, 1914), 225Google Scholar; Codman, Martha, ed., The Journal of Mrs. John Amory (Boston, 1923), 4.Google Scholar

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10 John S. Copley to his wife Susannah, July 11, 1774, Copley Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division; Raymond, W. O., ed., Winslow Papers, 1776-1826 (St. John, N. B., 1901), 13.Google Scholar

11 Van Schaack, Henry C., The Life of Peter Van Schaack (New York, 1842), 135Google Scholar; Peter Van Schaack, Notes on Arrival in England, 1779, Van Schaack Papers, Columbia University Library.

12 For a detailed description of the loyalists' London activities, see Norton, Mary Beth, “The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789” (unpub. Ph.D. diss., Harvard, 1969), 59–72.Google Scholar

13 Ward, George A., ed., The Journal and Letters of Judge Samuel Curwen, 3rd ed. (New York, 1845), 213Google Scholar; Isaac Low to Peter Van Schaack, June 5, 1787, Van Schaack MSS.

14 The comment was made by Thomas Danforth, a Massachusetts attorney; see Curwen, , Journal and Letters, 71Google Scholar. The fluctuations of loyalist opinion are traced in Norton, , “The British-Americans,” 323–63.Google Scholar

15 Thomas Hutchinson to his daughter Sarah Oliver, Nov. 1, 1774, Egerton Manuscripts 2661, f. 71, British Museum, London (hereafter Eg. MSS); Hutchinson to Charles Paxton, Feb. 16. 1776, Ibid., f. 172. For a discussion of the governor's increasing disillusionment, see Norton, , “The British-Americans,” 306–8.Google Scholar

16 Hutchinson, Peter O., ed., The Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson (Boston, 1884), II, 408–9Google Scholar; Daniel Batwell to George Panton, Nov. 1, 1780, Knollenberg Collection, Yale University Library, New Haven. See also Curwen, , Journal and Letters, 212.Google Scholar

17 “Journal of Rev. Joshua Wingate Weeks, Loyalist Rector of St. Michael's Church, Marblehead, 1778-1779,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, III (1916), 205Google Scholar; Jonathan Sewall to Thomas Robie, Jan. 29, 1779, Sewall Papers, MHS; Mrs. Esther Sewall to her father. March 4, 1778, Miscellaneous Manuscripts, MHS.

18 Thomas Hutchinson to Governor Grant, June 2, 1775, Eg. MSS 2661, f. 155; to his son Thomas Jr., July 28, 1774, ibid., f. 39; to [Jonathan] Sewall, December 30, 1774, ibid., f. 97. See also Hutchinson, , Diary and Letters, I, 215, 281, 356Google Scholar; II, 95.

19 William Vassall to Joshua Richardson, Jan. 18, 1780, Vassall Letterbook, I, 149, Harvard University Library (microfilm); Hutchinson, , Diary and Letters, I, 281Google Scholar; Elisha Hutchinson to his wife Polly, July 15, 1775, Eg. MSS 2668, f. 85.

20 Archibald Kennedy to Robert Watts, March 18, 1786, Watts Papers, New York Historical Society, New York City. On loyalists and American food, see Norton, , “The British-Americans,” 124–6.Google Scholar

21 Sir William Pepperrell to Isaac Winslow, July 17, 1778, Winslow Papers, MHS.

22 Jonathan Sewall to David Sewall, April 14, 1777, Misc. MSS, MHS. See Thomas Hutchinson to ………., Aug. 8, 1779, Eg. MSS 2661, f. 187; and Oliver, Peter, Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion, ed. Adair, Douglass and Schutz, John A. (San Marino. Calif., 1961), 162.Google Scholar

23 William Vassall to Dr. James Lloyd, Dec. 20, 1775, Vassall Letterbook, I, 105; Elisha Hutchinson to his wife Polly, Sept. 6, 1775, Eg. MSS 2668, f. 93.

24 Edward Oxnard, Diary, Jan. 9, 1776, Maine Historical Society, Portland. On the other topics, see Oxnard diary, Jan. 1, 1776; Curwen, , Journal and Letters, 45Google Scholar; Hannah Winslow to Isaac Winslow, May 5, [1782], Winslow MSS; Hutchinson, , Diary and Letters, I, 278.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., I, 379; Van Schaack, , Life, 136Google Scholar. See also Hutchinson, , Diary and Letters, II, 36.Google Scholar

26 Peter Van Schaack to William Laight, Aug. 16, 1784, Van Schaack MSS; Curwen, , Journal and Letters, 396Google Scholar. See also William Vassall to Joseph Dowse, March 10, 1785, Vassall Letterbook, I, 236; and Samuel Quincy to his wife, April 18, 1778, S. Quincy MSS.

27 Henry Caner to Mrs. Wentworth, July 10, 1776, Caner Letterbook, Bristol University Library, Bristol, England; Curwen, , Journal and Letters, 375Google Scholar; Van Schaack, , Lıfe, 263.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 244; Curwen, , Journal and Letters, 231Google Scholar; [Galloway, Joseph], Letters from Cicero to Cataline the Second (London, 1781), 65Google Scholar; William Browne to F. B. Winthrop, Oct. 11, 1779. Browne Letterbook, I, 34.

29 Hutchinson, , Diary and Letters, I, 200.Google Scholar

30 Van Schaack, , Life, 304, 318.Google Scholar