The Benefits of Banishment: Loyalist Exiles and Opportunity during the American Revolution

The American Revolution created a refugee crisis. At least 60,000 loyalists were driven from their homes and scattered to the Caribbean, Canada, England, and the far reaches of the British Empire. These refugees gathered together, forming hubs and expanding their social and commercial connections. They used correspondence to maintain social and economic bonds over long distances. I propose to create a poster that employs a series of maps to examine the geographic movements, nascent communities, and correspondence networks of these loyalist refugees. This visualization will supplement a reinterpretation loyalists’ exile experiences. Many overcame the initial shock of expulsion and sought to productively pass the war. They used Atlantic mobility, socialization in loyalist enclaves, and newly minted correspondence connections to create opportunities and ultimately benefit from banishment.

After developing maps through the Palladio platform designed by the Stanford humanities design program, I will use this visualization to analyze dislocation, community formation, and networks of exiled loyalists. I will use four different maps: 1) traces the migration routes of a number of individuals in this study, which often involved multiple moves in a short period of time; 2) uses weighted points to show the relative size of communities (by number of exiles) at various points in time; 3) maps hundreds of letters onto a geographic map to show the trends in correspondence and formation of networks; 4) diagrams correspondence networks by individual, tracking the human center points in networks. The first and final two maps are based on the cataloguing of close to a thousand letters, centered on the correspondence collections of twelve New England families.

The families under study left their homes in 1775 and 1776 and experienced the war years very differently from those in other regions who were carried off in the large-scale British evacuations of 1782 and 1783. For these New England families, the outcome of the war was long uncertain; exile involved a precarious balancing act between hope to return home someday and loyalty to the British Empire. Because of that interim period of uncertainty, this research focuses on the war years and how individuals’ actions during the war contributed to their ultimate residence, occupation, and social circle in the aftermath of the Revolution.

The poster draws from research for my dissertation, “Among Strangers in a Distant Climate: Loyalist Exiles Define Empire and Nation, 1775-1815,” which investigates the long-term impact of loyalist exile. While Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles set the parameters of the loyalist diaspora, my project stresses connection: between communities and with the United States. After 1783, former refugees used these correspondence connections to form new trade networks and effect return to the United States, which involved maneuvering and manipulating the emerging state and national citizenship laws. Loyalists who retained their transatlantic connections also had an avenue for discourse about the development of the United States and the British Empire, as formerly physically close individuals remained socially close and shared their thoughts, fears, and plans in a rapidly changing Atlantic world.