Loyalist Resettlement

Following the American Revolution, tens of thousands of Loyalists fled the young United States and resettled in various parts of the British Empire. In total, these emigres numbered around seventy-five thousand, including fifteen thousand enslaved people, and they comprised roughly one in forty inhabitants of the thirteen newly-independent states.¹ This resettlement brought Loyalists to Florida, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, and England, but most relocated to Britain’s remaining North American colonies.² The influx of Loyalists into these colonies prompted administrative reorganization and cultural change, shaping the development of what would become Canada.³

The vast majority of Loyalist emigres evacuated from British-held cities—namely Savannah, Charleston, and New York City—alongside British troops in the last two years of the Revolutionary War (1775–1783). New York City, home to thirty-five thousand Loyalists and the final city to be evacuated, was the largest point of departure. Most fleeing New York—around thirty thousand people—headed north to Nova Scotia, while those leaving from Southern ports, especially enslavers, tended to resettle in Florida or the Caribbean.⁴ While Loyalists varied in socioeconomic status, precise motivations, and specific political visions, those that left the United States generally feared for their lives and/or property—including enslaved people—should they remain. They were also enticed to relocate by British promises of land and provisions in Nova Scotia and elsewhere.⁵

The British captured the province of Nova Scotia, which encompassed today’s Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, from France in 1710. In the 1750s, British authorities expelled most of the region’s French-speaking population in a coordinated campaign which some historians have called an ethnic cleansing.⁶ In the ensuing years, New England colonists attracted to the forcibly emptied land reshaped the province. Despite its connections to the southern thirteen rebellious colonies, Nova Scotia remained loyal to the British Crown during the American Revolution.⁷ By the mid-1780s, upwards of thirty-thousand Loyalists had migrated to Nova Scotia, making up a majority of the population.⁸ British administrators—their resources already stretched thin—often found themselves at odds with many Loyalist emigres.⁹

Some Loyalist elites, Edward Winslow of Massachusetts chief among them, began to promote the partition of Nova Scotia and the establishment of its western half as a province run by and for American Loyalists. This was to be “the envy of the American states” and a vindication of Loyalism.¹⁰ Nova Scotia’s governor opposed the proposed partition, but Winslow’s appeals to officials in London won the desired creation of the province of New Brunswick in 1784.¹¹ New arrivals were promised provisions of food, resources, and land grants. An example of these allotments can be seen in a 1792 Map Showing Land Grants to the East of St. John. The allotments depicted on the map are unequal in size, visualizing the conflict over the proportion of land grants, which, coupled with limited political representation, led to discontent among many non-elite Loyalists. The grand plans for New Brunswick remained largely unfulfilled.¹²

Many relocated Loyalists in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick settled in towns created specifically to accommodate them. Planned by colonial authorities, the towns were laid out on grids. A typical example, seen in A Plan of the Town of St Andrews (1785), notes that Nova Scotia governor John Parr ordered it “for the Accommodation of Loyal Emigrants & disbanded Corps.”¹³ Most towns remained fairly small, but the largest Loyalist settlement, Shelburne, emerged as a boomtown.¹⁴ A 1785 Plan of the Town of Shelburne illustrates the rectangular grid on which the city was planned. Although it grew faster than anticipated, Shelburne quickly declined as disputes over land allocation, political conflicts, and insufficient resources led to emigration and further discontent with colonial government.¹⁵ Faced with continued hardship, new arrivals grew disillusioned with colonial government and Loyalist elites.

Among those who fled to Nova Scotia were roughly three thousand free Black Loyalists, many of whom had escaped slavery and fought alongside the British during the Revolution before evacuating New York City.¹⁶ A smaller number of enslaved individuals were forcibly moved to Nova Scotia by their Loyalist enslavers.¹⁷ The largest free Black Loyalist settlement was Birchtown, near Shelburne.¹⁸ Though they had won their freedom, Birchtown inhabitants faced racism and hostility from Shelburne’s white residents. Many lived in poverty, and Nova Scotia’s white Loyalists relegated them to manual labor under conditions of indentured servitude.¹⁹ In the early 1790s, when British abolitionists offered the opportunity to resettle in the African colony of Sierra Leone, many Black inhabitants chose to depart.²⁰ The exodus of this labor contributed to Shelburne’s decline after the 1780s.²¹ Still, some Black Loyalists remained in Nova Scotia, forming the basis of a community that remains to this day.

Elsewhere in British North America, about six thousand Loyalists moving north fled to Quebec, then encompassing the present-day provinces of Quebec and Ontario.²² This number included several hundred Mohawks, who, under Joseph Brant’s leadership, had served as Britain’s most important Indigenous allies.²³ By 1791, British authorities decided to accommodate English-speaking Loyalist migrants in a largely Catholic, Francophone colony by partitioning Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada.²⁴ An early plan for this partition is outlined in a map of the Proposed Division Line for Upper and Lower Canada. Upper Canada, with an Anglophone Loyalist majority, was organized largely as a challenge to the United States, from which British administrators, especially Governor John Graves Simcoe, sought to attract settlers by offering abundant land and little taxation.²⁵ To many Americans, the prospect of cheap land, low taxes, and political stability was an attractive offer. Tens of thousands “Late Loyalists” migrated to Upper Canada in the 1790s and 1800s.²⁶

Anti-Loyalist sentiment began to subside in the United States by the mid-1780s, but the northern British provinces continued to loom large in Americans’ minds as a rival around the War of 1812.²⁷ In Upper Canada (now Ontario), Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, the Loyalists were central to an emerging national identity, and their legacy continued to shape national identity and political values into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²⁸

Banner image credit: Benjamin West’s Reception of the American Loyalists by Great Britain in the Year 1783

Bibliography

Barkley, Murray. “The Loyalist Tradition in New Brunswick: The Growth and Evolution of an Historical Myth, 1825–1914.” Acadiensis 4, no. 2 (1975): 3–45.

Harris, Cole. The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada before Confederation. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008.

Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Knopf, 2011.

Lennox, Jeffers. North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.

Marquis, Greg. “Commemorating the Loyalists in the Loyalist City: Saint John, New Brunswick, 1883–1934.” Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire urbaine 33, no. 1 (2004): 24–33.

Taylor, Alan. “The Late Loyalists: Northern Reflections of the Early American Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 1 (2007): 1–34.

Whitfield, Harvey Amani. “The African Diaspora in Atlantic Canada: History, Historians, and Historiography.” Acadiensis 46, no. 1 (2017): 213–32.