Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday March 20, 2011
|
LIBERTY'S EXILES: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
Maya Jasanoff
Knopf
ISBN 978-1400041688
460 pages
$30
Reviewed by Pauline Maier
What happens to people who take the losing side in a revolution or a civil war?
In this ambitious, empathetic and sometimes lyrical book, Maya Jasanoff tells the story of the Loyalist exiles of the American Revolution -- the 60,000 people who fled the 13 colonies of North America after their countrymen had declared their independence, had founded a republic and had successfully defended their revolution in a war that set friends, neighbors and family members against one another. Those stalwart, loyal defenders of British rule eventually dispersed into far-flung parts of the world.
Although other historians have studied the Loyalists and parts of their widespread migration, "Liberty's Exiles" justly claims to be "the first global history of the Loyalist diaspora."
Historians estimate the total number of Loyalists at about 20 percent of the population of the United States at the time of the Revolution, or roughly a half-million men, women and children. Most of them managed to remain in the new nation. The exiles were the outer fringes of the category, people so committed to the Crown or so alienated from the "patriots" that they had to leave. Why?
Jasanoff says the exiles acted from "a range of reasons, ideological and otherwise," although, as the Cornell historian Mary Beth Norton argued in a classic essay almost 40 years ago, most Loyalists shared the same basic 17th-century English "Whig" ideas that moved the revolutionaries. Unlike other colonists, however, they refused to embrace the republic. Royal office-holders instinctively sided with the king; slaves fled to the British in search of freedom; recent English immigrants like Georgia's Thomas Brown could not "take up arms against the Country which gave him being."
In describing prewar conditions, Jasanoff sometimes accepts questionable Loyalist views uncritically. The "Sons of Liberty," in fact, were not "street gangs" that "smashed property and assaulted individuals," but an organized resistance movement that worked to contain violence while opposing the Stamp Act. Nor was the plan of union proposed by Loyalist Joseph Galloway in 1774, which would have made an American Congress a subordinate part of the British Parliament, either a "compelling" solution to the Anglo-American conflict or "the last concerted American attempt to preserve ties with the British Empire." Galloway's plan was incompatible with both Britain's unwillingness to compromise Parliamentary sovereignty and the colonists' emergent conviction that Parliament had no right to govern them.
It was "wartime violence" -- between cadres of "patriots" and Loyalists in the countryside, and between contending armies -- that "pushed thousands of Loyalists into British lines" for what they thought would be a temporary stay. At the war's end, they were clustered in New York, Charleston and Savannah, where they "heard terrifying reports ... of loyalists hunted down and murdered by vindictive patriots." They also learned that some state legislatures had confiscated Loyalist property and banished hundreds of prominent Loyalists on pain of death for "treasonable Practices." When the British offered land and free passage to other parts of the empire, the decision to accept was, for many, painful but obvious.
The result was a massive evacuation of both soldiers and civilians that Jasanoff describes in emotionally wrenching detail.
Over half the emigres went to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick (founded in 1784) or Quebec, where British settlers quickly outnumbered the French population. Eight thousand whites and 5,000 free blacks went to Britain; about 6,000 white Southern Loyalists, slaves in tow, went to the Bahamas or Jamaica. In time, many moved again -- to found Sierra Leone, a black British colony in Africa; to serve with the British Army in India (where two of Benedict Arnold's sons ended up). In 1787, the first shipment of prisoners to the new British penal colony in Australia included seven black Loyalists.
These migrations contributed to what Jasanoff calls "the spirit of 1783," as Britain recovered from its losses in America and extended its power, with Loyalist support, across the globe, building a new empire that would last deep into the 20th century. In the "spirit of 1783," Britain also decided that the 13 colonies "had been given too much liberty, not too little," and tightened the reins of imperial authority. That provoked opposition from Loyalists, who carried an American language of rights, above all on the familiar issue of representation, into Canada, the Bahamas and Sierra Leone.
Jasanoff skillfully threads the stories of individual Loyalists through her narrative, as she beautifully describes, one by one, the often inhospitable places they went. She follows the life of David George, an escaped Virginia slave, as he traveled from Savannah to Nova Scotia, where he became a Baptist preacher who eventually led his black congregation to Sierra Leone; of Joseph Brant, a Mohawk Indian who tried to establish a new homeland for the Iroquois between Lakes Erie and Ontario; of William Augustus Bowles, a peripatetic Marylander who "went native" and attempted to found a Creek state in Spanish Florida.
Above all, however, Jasanoff follows Elizabeth Lichtenstein, the daughter of a Georgia Loyalist, from her marriage at age 17 to William Martin Johnston, a Loyalist officer and medical student, through their evacuation from Savannah to Charleston (when she was seven months pregnant with a second child) and, for Elizabeth, to East Florida, which she sadly left after Britain ceded Florida back to Spain. Over the next two decades the Johnstons were frequently separated from each other and their many children as they shuttled between Edinburgh and disease-ridden Jamaica, unable to find a livelihood or a lasting refuge in either place. Elizabeth could never reestablish a bond with her difficult oldest daughter. She buried a young son in Scotland and in Jamaica lost another three children -- two little girls, a toddler and an infant, to scarlet fever and the after-effects of smallpox inoculation, then her oldest son to yellow fever -- and, finally, her husband. It's no wonder that she struggled with melancholy.
Elizabeth and several of her children eventually found a home in Nova Scotia, but until her death in 1848 she bore the scars of a political decision made by her father almost three-quarters of a century earlier. That she had helped extend the British empire in her own small way was, I suspect, not much comfort.
Pauline Maier is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at MIT and the author of "Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
FALLING SIDEWAYS
Thomas E. Kennedy
Bloomsbury
ISBN 978-1608190812
290 pages
$26
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
A year ago Thomas E. Kennedy emerged from undeserved obscurity with the English-language publication of "In the Company of Angels," the first novel in what he calls his "Copenhagen Quartet." An American now in his mid-60s and a longtime resident of Copenhagen, he has been widely published in Europe and has been awarded a number of prestigious literary prizes, yet until last year he had gone almost entirely unpublished in his native country. The favorable reception accorded "In the Company of Angels" seems to have put him on track at last, a process that may continue with the publication here of the somewhat less successful "Falling Sideways," the second of his four Copenhagen novels.
Apart from being set in that Danish city, the two novels could hardly be more dissimilar. "In the Company of Angels" is at heart a love story, the principals being a Chilean who has come to a Danish center for the rehabilitation of torture victims and the local woman who becomes deeply involved in his case. By contrast "Falling Sideways" is that rarest of commodities in American literary fiction, a novel about men and women at work; it is part-satire and part-drama, and it is very smart.
The workplace is called the Tank. Kennedy never makes explicitly clear what it does -- I have no idea why -- but it appears to be a blend of think tank, foundation and university, though its main function seems to be to spin wheels. The son of one of its ranking employees, Frederick Breathwaite, a young man named Jes, had a student job there for a while:
"Jes had been amazed at how little anyone seemed to do. They wrote e-mails or sometimes letters, photocopied and filed them, sent them, and received responses, which needed new letters, new photocopies, new files. They went to meetings. Sometimes some of the big shots went to meetings in other cities or other countries where they apparently had their e-mails translated into other languages so they could talk about them with foreigners. Meanwhile, there were a million truly important things that needed doing in the world, things that were a matter of life and death for people who lived in poverty and misery. Jes wanted a foot into that door."
Now, though, the door through which Jes' father passes every day is not so wide as it used to be. At the regular meeting of what's known to insiders as "the Mumble Club" -- "Six chiefs and the CEO, Martin Kampman, who chaired. Four men, two women" -- Kampman gives them the bad news: "It hasn't hit us yet, but there will be a substantial deficit in the last quarter of this year. It might be as high as one hundred and fifty million. So I have to ask every one of you to draft a plan for cutting costs, to absorb the loss." When the others express astonishment and bewilderment, the CEO says, "You all know -- or should know -- what has been happening these past many months with foreign investments as well as that both the state and the county have decided to cut our subsidies." When Breathwaite objects -- "We discussed that nearly two years ago. And again last year.
It was not seen as a threat" -- Kampman icily replies, "The possibility was clear."
The people chiefly affected by this news are Breathwaite and Harald Jaeger. The former, a 60ish American, is "chief of international affairs, the Tank's token foreigner, a large, bulky man who walked slowly through the headquarter hallways, speaking Danish like a broken arm." The latter is a "senior manager," recently promoted, the divorced father of two girls whom he claims to love but at heart a compulsive womanizer who sees a potential conquest in every woman who crosses his field of vision and is surprisingly successful at getting what he wants.
Kampman, the CEO who follows up his announcement by instilling fear in his employees, is a "professional downsizer," known behind his back as "Martin the Mortician," a machine in human flesh whose "aim was one day to so perfectly incorporate time into his bloodstream and nervous system that he could live without a clock." He's only 39 years old and hard to the core: "Neither tall nor physically imposing in any way nor, for that matter, brutal or harsh of manner, Kampman had a way of keeping Jaeger unsure, even fearful to an extent."
Kampman and Breathwaite have one thing in common: Each has a son who is in, or beginning to be in, a state of rebellion. Jes Breathwaite, 21 years old, is further along than 17-year-old Adam Kampman, who is just now discovering the pleasures of life that his demanding father tries to deny him. With Kampman the issue is control; he wants his son to be himself cloned and will do whatever he has to make that happen. With Breathwaite, on the other hand, it's a matter of love. He is bored by Jes' two older brothers, leading conventional middle-class Danish lives, but hopes that Jes will be something more interesting and better. Yet Jes spurns every effort his father makes to start him on that path toward success.
Instead he drifts: "He'd dabbled in post-modernism, and he'd dabbled in post-traditionalism and in post-colonialism, and he'd dabbled in post-ethnicity and in behaviorist post-ethicism and no doubt in post-postism, too, leading up to pre-ism, retro-ism, which could end only in now-ism, and then on to neo-nowism ad infinitum, until time stops its survey of all the world." Not merely is he "a very bright kid with an understanding of everything and a grasp of nothing," but he's rejected all his father's efforts to get his foot in the door at the Tank and works, instead, "in a bloody key-and-heel bar run by a Pakistani." Breathwaite hates to see "his youngest son wearing a blue workman's smock and grinding a key on some kind of lathe," and:
"(His wife) would call him a snob if she could hear his thoughts, but it was not snobbishness; it was respect for the boy's intelligence and fear of how he was branding himself in this country, where a person who played at being an unskilled laborer ran a very real risk of ending with that as his only option. In the United States, you could reinvent yourself repeatedly.
You could probably do it here, too, but only with great effort. Here you were expected to have your papers in order. It was a small country. Every failure was noticed, registered. There were people everywhere who remembered you, and opinions were seldom revised for the better."
The problem is that Jes is every bit as hard a case as Kampman is. Kennedy may admire and sympathize with Jes' professed idealism, but Jes is a selfish, self-centered young man whose real interest is only in his own pleasure and who has an especially unpleasant cruel streak. When immature, virginal Adam brings a girl to Jes' apartment, Jes has her in bed in no time. Jalal, his boss at the lock-and-key shop, is uncommonly kind and generous to him; Jes rewards this by mocking Jalal behind his back, scoring easy points with other local idlers. In his way, he's even more of a horror than Kampman is, which is to say he's just about impossible to like.
While Jes fritters his youth away, his father is left to ponder what is to become of the autumn of his own life. His working life is shattered, his marriage is uncertain, the son he most loves has repudiated him as "a dead man who had never lived."
He's a good man who deserves better.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
| Recent Stories |
 AN IMPROVISED LIFE: A Memoir
HISTORY OF A SUICIDE: My Sister's Unfinished Life
MR. CHARTWELL
GHOST LIGHT
CHARLES JESSOLD, CONSIDERED AS A MURDERER |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
