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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 8, 2012
American Loyalists
There is more to Canadian history than United Empire Loyalists, as any Wild Rose of Alberta might tell you, or any Blue Flag Iris of Quebec. Canada herself, even "the white man's Canada," is much older than Confederation; much older than the American Revolution from which our Loyalists fled. She has a history to which the migration of those Loyalist refugees was an accretion.An extremely important one, however, and one which has everything to do with the nation that was subsequently shaped. True, I have Loyalist ancestry myself, and am therefore an interested party. But it grieves me more broadly that young Canadians today are squeezed through our dysfunctional public school systems with no under-standing whatever of our side in the American Revolution; no finer appreciation of the Loyalist cause than that it is "irrelevant today." For Christmas, a Texas friend put into my hands a book which should have received more notice up here, when it appeared last year. It is Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, by Maya Jasanoff. It is readable popular history of the best kind, documented and solid, and it is part of a larger American effort to understand their own roots more broadly. Several other books have appeared over the past few years in something amounting to a mildly revisionist historical genre. Alan Taylor's focused account of the "western front," in the book he en-titled The Civil War of 1812, is an-other example of this intellectual effort to represent the British-American clash, in a way that is free of the old jingo mythologizing: to downplay British Empire versus American Republic, and in-stead emphasize the civil (or rather, uncivil) dispute between two fairly similar conceptions of human liberty, held by one and the same people. As those who dipped into The Clockmaker series, by the great (and still funny) yarn-spinner, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, once knew, the inhabitants of Nova Scotia were always as much "Yankees" as their cousins in New England. And as the readers of Maya Jasanoff will discover, from her admirable pillage of archives around the world, so were tens of thou-sands of other Loyalists who, deprived of their property and livelihoods in the Thirteen Colonies, scattered elsewhere through the Empire - to Britain, the West In-dies, Africa, India, and beyond. Her book is primarily about this diaspora, and for the Canadian reader already acquainted with our national history, it is wonderfully eye-opening. It places the Canadian Loyalist experience on the cosmopolitan stage, and by showing the struggles of individual refugees, whose life stories she traces, it shines light in-to attitudes unmistakably "American" that travelled with them. These influenced the Empire as a whole, contributed to its triumph-ant recovery from the American debacle, and to its flavour as an agent for constitutional liberty in so many remote places where human enslavement and arbitrary rule had been "normal" since time out of mind. This is a very proud story, but it is lost today on students who are taught their mite of history backwards: who become steeped in anachronism, from the bigoted habit of sitting in judgement on the past, and applying to it only the latest, politically correct standards. One will never understand what an extraordinary achievement it was, to end slavery for instance, if the whole struggle is cast mindlessly in purely racial terms, as "white versus black." And to use just that example, one will never appreciate such delicious ironies, as the role of black Loyalists in the American Revolution. Jasanoff has a gift for opening obturated windows, with little passing shimmies of fact. Did you know, for instance, that George Washing-ton lost a handful of his own personal slaves, who ran off to freedom behind British lines? That a more sizable contingent of Thomas Jefferson's escaped slaves managed likewise to join up with our Loyalist forces? A cheap shot, but a good one against the "Champions of Liberty." Of course, many Loyalists also owned slaves, and the evacuation of this "property" was a large part of the logistical nightmare of British disengagement. On the other hand, the contradictions it exposed - some blacks free and equal, others in legal bondage - contributed powerfully to the acceleration of the British campaign against slavery everywhere. (In all the world, it was first outright banned right here in Upper Canada: this fine province of Ontario.) In the background of Jasanoff's book, and several others that have appeared lately, we get a better idea of a struggle that was more like a civil war than a revolution. And that is part of the reason America turned out differently than France, or Russia, which had real Revolutions. To understand this is to grasp that for two years after the famous surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown (defeated as much by typhus as by Washington's Patriots and the French Navy), Loyalists continued fighting in the bush, completely abandoned by their supposed British "masters." One hears something of their frustration echoed, in desperate Vietnamese appeals for American help, after they were abandoned in the 1970s. The message of: "Hey, we're still fighting, send us some frigging ammunition." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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