This book is the first collection of Loyalist scholarship to span the 13 independent states and the Florida and Canadian provinces that remained loyal to the Crown in the American Revolution. The Loyalists disrupted the colonial communities in which they lived in ways that helped define the Revolution. Loyalist garrison towns became a pathological environment of violence and suspicion, which brought out the worst in patriot, British, and Loyalist behavior. In Canada, Loyalist exiles tried to create model Anglo-American communities, but in the end had to jettison Loyalist ideology to claim a new British North American identity.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER This groundbreaking book offers the first global history of the loyalist exodus to Canada, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, India, and beyond. At the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand Americans loyal to the British cause fled the United States and became refugees throughout the British Empire. Liberty’s Exiles tells their story. This surprising new account of the founding of the United States and the shaping of the post-revolutionary world traces extraordinary journeys like the one of Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who led her growing family to Britain, Jamaica, and Canada, questing for a home; black loyalists such as David George, who escaped from slavery in Virginia and went on to found Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone; and Mohawk Indian leader Joseph Brant, who tried to find autonomy for his people in Ontario. Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, this book is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative analysis that changes how we see the revolution’s “losers” and their legacies.

This book is the first collection of Loyalist scholarship to span the 13 independent states and the Florida and Canadian provinces that remained loyal to the Crown in the American Revolution. The Loyalists disrupted the colonial communities in which they lived in ways that helped define the Revolution. Loyalist garrison towns became a pathological environment of violence and suspicion, which brought out the worst in patriot, British, and Loyalist behavior. In Canada, Loyalist exiles tried to create model Anglo-American communities, but in the end had to jettison Loyalist ideology to claim a new British North American identity.

“Engaging and steeped in years of research . . . a must read for all who care about the intersection of Canadian, American, British, and African history.” —Lawrence Hill, award-winning author of Someone Knows My Name In an attempt to ruin the American economy during the Revolutionary War, the British government offered freedom to slaves who would desert their rebel masters. Many Black men and women escaped to the British fleet patrolling the East Coast, or to the British armies invading the colonies from Maine to Georgia. After the final surrender of the British to the Americans, New York City was evacuated by the British Army throughout the summer and fall of 1783. Carried away with them were a vast number of White Loyalists and their families, and over 3,000 Black Loyalists: free, indentured, apprenticed, or still enslaved. More than 2,700 Black people came to Nova Scotia with the fleet from New York City. Black Loyalists strives to present hard data about the lives of Nova Scotia Black Loyalists before they escaped slavery in early South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and after they settled in Nova Scotia—to tell the little-known story of some very brave and enterprising men and women who survived the chaos of the American Revolution, people who found a way to pass through the heart, ironically, of a War for Liberty, to find their own liberty and human dignity. Includes historical images and documents

In this thought-provoking history, Gilbert illuminates how the fight for abolition and equality - not just for the independence of the few but for the freedom and self-government of the many - has been central to the American story from its inception."--Pub. desc.