Jasanoff’s notable achievement is to engage the reader’s interest, and sympathies, in the travails of the Revolution’s losers. It will be thoroughly rewarding, even for the reader already familiar with the fates of the winners.
To some extent, it is a story of “what-ifs.’’ As Jasanoff, a professor of history at Harvard University, puts it from the perspective of Loyalists in Canada, “How might the thirteen colonies have looked without independence?’’ Both Canada and the United States “shared a commitment’’ to life, liberty, and property. “What really distinguished them,’’ she writes, “was not the pursuit of liberty, but the persistence of loyalty.’’
That loyalty inevitably brought the Loyalists into armed conflict against the Revolution. That side of the story received a stirring account in Thomas B. Allen’s “Tories,’’ published last year.
While there were hardships in creating exile settlements in Nova Scotia and upper Canada, the one that seemed the easiest to accomplish became an emblem of dislocation.
After the 1783 peace treaty, Loyalists in Georgia found a congenial refuge in British-held east Florida where they, with their slaves, could re-create their plantation economy and lifestyle. But just two years later, another peace treaty handed east Florida over to an uncongenial Spain, which wanted them to stay if they converted to Catholicism.
As much as the war divided and separated families, so too did the war’s end.
It split the once powerful Iroquois Confederacy, with the Mohawk leaders Joseph Brant and his sister Molly Brant, wife of a colonial grandee, leading their followers into Canada, while the Oneida tribe remained in New York.
Writing with authority, and an engaging style, Jasanoff puts a human face on the events through the stories of several families swept up and out by the conflict.
One such story, an account of fortitude, is that of Elizabeth Johnston.
