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 a copy of the author's finding aid for Audit Office 12. The original documents that constitute Audit Office 12 are stored in the National Archives in London, England. Audit Office 12 contains documents of nine commissions. Essentially all of Audit Office 12 concerns monetary claims by American Loyalists for relief, compensation, or other payments, as a consequence of the American Revolution. The body of material, thus collected, contains considerable information about the politics of the revolution, the conduct of the war, and the experiences of individual Loyalists. All of Audit Office 12 was microfilmed by the Public Archives of Canada (now part of the Library and Archives of Canada) on microfilm reels B-1155 to B-1183. This book is based on that microfilm copy.

"A fast-paced, often riveting account of the military and political events leading up to the Declaration of Independence and those that followed during the war ... Brands does his readers a service by reminding them that division, as much as unity, is central to the founding of our nation."—The Washington Post From best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands comes a gripping, page-turning narrative of the American Revolution that shows it to be more than a fight against the British: it was also a violent battle among neighbors forced to choose sides, Loyalist or Patriot. What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels? That is the question H. W. Brands answers in his powerful new history of the American Revolution. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were the unlikeliest of rebels. Washington in the 1770s stood at the apex of Virginia society. Franklin was more successful still, having risen from humble origins to world fame. John Adams might have seemed a more obvious candidate for rebellion, being of cantankerous temperament. Even so, he revered the law. Yet all three men became rebels against the British Empire that fostered their success. Others in the same circle of family and friends chose differently. William Franklin might have been expected to join his father, Benjamin, in rebellion but remained loyal to the British. So did Thomas Hutchinson, a royal governor and friend of the Franklins, and Joseph Galloway, an early challenger to the Crown. They soon heard themselves denounced as traitors--for not having betrayed the country where they grew up. Native Americans and the enslaved were also forced to choose sides as civil war broke out around them. After the Revolution, the Patriots were cast as heroes and founding fathers while the Loyalists were relegated to bit parts best forgotten. Our First Civil War reminds us that before America could win its revolution against Britain, the Patriots had to win a bitter civil war against family, neighbors, and friends.

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.

When, at the beginning of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it became increasingly evident that the thirteen American Colonies would revolt from Great Britain and attempt to establish their independence, and when it became necessary for all men to take sides on the great question, a large number of Americans of wealth and abilities remained loyal to their King. The motives which actuated these men were, of course, various; some were honorable, others selfish. But to the ardent patriot, blinded by zeal for liberty, nothing could justify, or even palliate, such conduct. As a consequence, the Tories of the American Revolution suffered not less-in reputation than in estate, and names which would otherwise be found on the roll of honor in the history of Colonial America. are now but synonyms of reproach. One of the most active and influential of these Tories, and, consequently, one of the most despised, was Joseph Galloway, a Pennsylvania lawyer, politician, and pungent pamphleteer; but hardly more effectually has the soil of an English graveyard buried from sight his mortal remains than has the mass of opprobrium heaped up by partisan hatred hidden the memory of his deeds in the land of his birth. This pamphlet, which is the most well-known of all his pamphlets, contains a very clear exposition of the nature and necessity of the supreme authority of Parliament over the Colonies. It criticizes the acts of the Congress, and makes it very evident that its author would not have anything further to do with such assemblages. An attack upon this pamphlet, entitled “An Address to the Author of the 'Candid Examination' was soon issued, for which Dickinson was in part responsible. This was in turn answered by Mr. Galloway in a 'Reply.'

Given in memory of Betty Gelber by the Texas Research Ramblers.