"Those Whom by Nature You Are Most Nearly Allied": A Loyalist Family Navigates Exile and Return

In early February 1799, Mary Sewall wrote urgently from her Marblehead, Massachusetts home to her sister, Hetty Sterns, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Sterns’ husband had died in May of the previous year, leaving his pregnant wife and their eight young children dependent on Hetty’s brother, the family’s sole relation in Nova Scotia. The tone of Sterns’ recent letters was concerning, but the solution to her sister’s grief was, at least in Sewall’s mind, clear: she committed to, as she explained, “Doing everything possible to facilitate your return to your native land.” But she also recognized persuading her sister would not be easy. “Undoubtedly,” she noted, “your long residence at Halifax must have created a strong attachment to it, [and] you must have many friends there and feel a partiality to the customs and manners you have been so long accustomed to.” Sewall admitted that a return would not cure all her sister’s ills, but it would rectify the hardship of being separated from her family. “It appears to me that place is of very little consequence,” Sewall acknowledged, “except as it brings you near to those whom by nature you are most nearly allied.”

The paper contributes to the panel’s focus on complex loyalties during the Revolutionary Era by exploring how members of the extended Robie family navigated often-conflicting loyalties during their return to the United States in years following 1783. Doing so demonstrates that while their enemies may have labeled the family “Tories” during the war, ultimately, they saw the loyalty they owed each other as their most important allegiance. My paper adds to the growing body of literature that investigates the myriad allegiances eighteenth-century men and women held and the ways they balanced and reconciled these interests amid the tumult of the Revolution.