It is time to get over our fascination with biographies, and I say this as a scholar who specializes in a field, African American literature and history, in which one might wish for numerous biographies to emerge. For years, nineteenth-century African American history was, for many, just a small blank space. When asked to name as many nineteenth-century African American women as they can, my students generally struggle to come up with the predictable two that most people can manage: Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. They don’t fare much better, if even as well, when it comes to naming African American men. And even those in the field who can name a great number of people can’t usually tell you much about them. This is a field in which one comes to expect short biographical entries—when you can find one at all—that include the inevitable phrase “little is known.” Little is known about Kate Drumgoold beyond what she writes in her own autobiographical narrative. Until recently, little was known about Henry “Box” Brown after he successfully escaped from slavery and moved to England. Little is known about William Wells Brown’s approach to writing, since no original manuscripts exist. Little is known about nineteenth-century African American life and thought.

So why wouldn’t we want to know more—and what better way than by populating the literary landscape with biographies? Surely, this would be better than the biographical gestures we now encounter, brief sketches that are about as satisfying, and often about as accurate, as the many monuments and historical markers that James W. Loewen so painstakingly surveys in Lies Across America. And yet I think we should look beyond biographies if we want to do justice to the lives across America that have been so long assigned to obscurity.

Let me begin by reviewing the nature of the problem. There are three main reasons why that helpless little phrase—“little is known”—is so annoyingly pervasive for those who research nineteenth-century African American history and literature. The first and most frustrating is that not much information has been found because no one has bothered to look. We’ve had, though, a few test cases that demonstrate how much can be found when someone actually takes the time to explore the archives. Harriet Wilson was virtually unknown, and then a rare find and a bit of an anomaly, and then an important entrance into black life in New Hampshire, and eventually a study in the complexly overlapping histories of abolitionism, spiritualism, African American women’s entrepreneurialism, and cultural mobility. Each new stage of research revealed much more about Wilson’s life and world, and other historical subjects as obscure as Wilson once was would no doubt benefit from the same sustained efforts. The second reason why “little is known” is because so much of the historical record has not been carefully preserved or formally archived. There are no manuscripts available for almost all of the writers I study—and in some cases, there are very few original documents that feature their writing at all, at least that we know of. The possibility exists that important documents are sitting in some unopened box in some unexplored corner of a library, or perhaps in a local historical society, or even in someone’s attic—depending on who recognized this history as worthy of preservation and what means they had for preserving it. In too many cases, though, we simply don’t have a rich or even clear trail to follow. The third reason “little is known” is because the overwhelming message of the most readily available, comprehensively preserved, and carefully archived historical record is that white lives are the ones that matter, and accordingly black lives are to be discovered, if at all, mainly in their connection with prominent white men and women. We have seen this important-by-association dynamic in histories of the antislavery movement, the Underground Railroad, and even in many histories of slavery that have been devoted, in whole or in part, to the lives of the enslaved. So those who go looking will often find themselves redirected, or will have to learn to read the cultural codes well enough to follow trails that lead only windingly, indirectly, to the subjects we are looking to study.

It would be natural enough, then, to want to know more, and especially to long for good biographies, but I hope we can do better than that—and if we want to capture the truths behind the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” we will need to do better than to aim for more biographies. I am not complaining about biographical research, mind you. Rather, I am questioning how that research is framed, how it is presented, who gets biographical attention, and what constitutes a just representation of an individual life.

To be fair, I should note that, my research interests and ethical commitments aside, I’m simply not a fan of narrative biographies. Certainly, I use them in my research, but I almost never read one from beginning to end, and when I do read them thoroughly, I usually do so in piecemeal fashion, starting someplace at the middle and reading out in both directions. I was a subject editor for the National African American Biography, a resource I use often, but even there, I see the narrative format simply as a convenient convention for conveying information. I simply don’t find a more-or-less-linear narrative focused primarily on an individual’s life to be useful in understanding the process and contours of that person’s life, the cultural and ideological networks that are part of that life, or the performative dynamics negotiated in that life—in short, the many relations, the winding paths, and the changing narrative lines that characterize anyone’s life. Life might be one damn thing after another, but an individual’s identity—involving the delicate play between the private and the public, the complex frameworks that shape how we will understand and relate to one another, and the extended networks in which we live and work—cannot be reduced to a linear narrative, however artfully crafted it might be.

Think about the biographical challenges we face even in approaching some of the most famous and influential African Americans of the nineteenth century. Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Benjamin Banneker, and others were known largely through highly problematic narratives by white writers. When we turn to a figure like William Wells Brown, the biographical challenge is even more imposing. No one wrote about his life more frequently than Brown did in his various autobiographies, histories, and memoirs, but I’d challenge anyone to find a coherent self-presentation across those various autobiographical accounts—and a coherent biography drawn from his life misses the glimpse of Brown we get through his competing and contradictory autobiographical writings. Josiah Henson’s life was presented over a series of narratives, and in the later narratives, one can pretty much witness Henson disappearing into the legend that he was the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. Getting at the reality of his life requires something more than finding the reality behind the fictional character who came to dominate his life. Frederick Douglass had the advantage of representing his own life over different autobiographies, but his autobiographies don’t tell an increasingly full and authoritative story so much as provide a case study in the challenge of a black American’s search for a narrative framework by which his life might be understood. Harriet Wilson might be said to have addressed the same challenge, which is why we are still debating whether to identify Our Nig as an autobiographical act or as a novel that draws from the slave narrative tradition.

Rather than consider these various works as faulty biographical resources that can be corrected by a well-researched and authoritative biography, it might be better to ask why the African American writers who were most deeply invested in presenting their life story became instead examples of the limits of biography in understanding African American life. And as we answer that question, I believe we will discover why biography is problematic for approaching white lives as well. As Frederick Douglass realized when he published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), it was dangerous to go public with your story. Douglass soon had to leave the country for England, to avoid the very real possibility that, having been outed and located by the published story of his life, he could be captured and returned to slavery. William Wells Brown was in a similar situation, but perhaps worried as well about what might happen to his story when it became public and others could lay claim to it. Whatever his motivation, Brown both revealed and concealed his story regularly in a life-long autobiographical performance that always kept the public on the other side of the mask. Barack Obama might understand Douglass and Brown better than anyone. Certainly, he knows the danger that people will use your story to try to return you to the past, and he understands as well that the world is ready to manipulate the details of your story and fit you to a caricature, so you need to handle your self-presentation carefully and creatively. One nod to a black preacher or a thoughtful response to racial injustice could set the media off beyond your control.

Little is known? One might well say that far too much is known to hold black lives within the comforting confines of a narrative biography. It is a simple fact—or perhaps a complex set of facts—that African American lives in the nineteenth century were governed by different laws of time, space, mobility, and affiliation than were those of white Americans. Even if we focus only on nominally free African Americans, we encounter a complicated set of legal and social conditions shaping virtually every moment of every day. Being denied public transportation, entrance into a hotel, or service at a restaurant is not simply an insult or an inconvenience; such obstructions pose serious logistical problems, complicate one’s relationship with whatever white American with whom one might be traveling, and introduce one to a different social group (whether white or black) willing to accommodate one’s needs. One’s responses to such challenges constitute significant moments in one’s self-definition, influencing how those around will view the nature of the problem in addition to how they will view one’s own character. And the people one encounters during such moments—the community of support one turns to, or the community of prejudice one encounters—might play an important role in one’s life. One learns to think differently about the time it will take to travel, about the arrangements one must make for food and shelter, about the degree of comfort and convenience one can expect, about the people one will encounter along the way, and about the ways in which one’s response to every situation will be read and judged.

My point, again, is not that we should abandon biographical research, and I am definitely not going to suggest that we should follow William Wells Brown and Harriet Wilson in mixing fiction and biography. I can definitely do without a world that encourages the proliferation of works like William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, even if they were written by competent students of African American history, which Styron was not. Rather, I think there is value in looking at the kind of autobiographical tricksterism that we see in Brown, Wilson, and others, and I think we can learn from such examples of biographical violations as Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Styron shows the dangers not only of playing with the facts but also of biographies that fail to capture the complexities of the biographical subject’s world, the cultural contexts that any individual inhabits, the complex relation between background and foreground that we witness whenever we examine an individual life. At a time when we see inelegant Styronisms every time the news features what it takes to be the latest example either of black leadership or of black criminality, which for many amount to the same thing, it might pay to think about how we understand not only individual black lives but also the cultural frameworks by which black lives are positioned, obstructed, or realized. In doing so, we might come to appreciate why even today it is not unusual to encounter African Americans who find some measure of tricksterism a valuable approach in their self-presentation.

Even if we had biographies of the most prominent African Americans of the nineteenth century, we would be only moderately closer to understanding the realities of black life in their time. It’s striking, in fact, that biographies have been written thus far without the benefit of a robust recovery of so much of nineteenth-century African American history, and it’s striking as well that the biographies that have been pulled from the documentary remains of the past have not, with few exceptions, inspired a reinvigorated recovery effort of African American organizations, schools, presses, or social life. How is it possible to put together a book-length study of a black life without adding significantly to what we know of black lives generally?

Too often, African American biographies function as isolated, at times almost random, historical markers on an otherwise unmarked historical landscape. Instead of marking important sites of public memory, complex networks of only loosely associated or even contesting narratives of the past, and therefore forums for debate or for complex social and political negotiations, African American biographies tend to operate as isolated but all too familiar stories, tales of exceptional individuals. Biographies offer a kind of closure, a sense of resolution, of completeness. Arguably, a biography of Frederick Douglass should force one to realize how much about Douglass’s life and his world remains unknown, but it is all too possible for many readers to get through a biography of Douglass without even realizing that one has encountered very few African Americans along the way, that the biography’s index is populated primarily by white people, and that the documentary record favors the white American’s reading of history, even of black history, even of Douglass’s life.

I find myself thinking along these lines whenever I read a biography, thinking about how far removed it is from the lives I sense when reading autobiographies or local histories. We might encounter messy disputes with unresolved outcomes when we meditate on the role of genre in Wilson’s Our Nig, or on the accessibility of the autobiographical subject in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, or on the use of sources in Brown’s My Southern Home, or on the development of a lifelong project of self-representation in Douglass’s autobiographies—but when we read the biography, everything comes together nicely. We might wonder at the extensive efforts to create the kinds of organizations that can stand in for a well-governed community that we encounter when we read about African Americans in Philadelphia, Boston, or New York in the early nineteenth-century, and we might leave the experience thinking about the hundreds of people involved, and the dozens of leaders we’ve discovered connected to the most prominent African Americans, but when we read a biography of Frederick Douglass, we see leadership presented on a more manageable scale. It’s not at all surprising that scholars of black literary and cultural history—Sylvia Wynter, Alexander G. Weheliye, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Lloyd Pratt, and others—increasingly are arguing for an understanding of what it means to be human that focuses on the collective, the performative, the unknown and unknowable. Nineteenth-century African Americans didn’t spend their days trying to prove to white Americans that they were in fact human. Instead, they forged new versions of humanism, taking communities formed by racist force and transforming them into communities devoted to ongoing and collective self-determination.

Ultimately, then, I want to suggest that we should question the assumed parameters of our research, the narrative construction, and even the focus of the biographies we either write or wish for. A useful example might be Jean Fagan Yellin’s biography of Harriet Jacobs, which was soon complemented by The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, including a searchable CD, that connects readers to the documentary world behind the biography—or the more old-school model, Philip S. Foner’s five-volume The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, which takes readers through a world of documents as well as a biographical narrative. A very recent and productive model of a useful approach is Robert Levine’s The Lives of Frederick Douglass, which begins by taking seriously the possibility that Douglass lived, in fact, many lives. Exploring Douglass’s various autobiographical writings, Levine presents a complexly fluid life, one fed by many streams. Obviously, this approach is limited to those individuals who were engaged in sustained and still-preserved acts of self-representation, but when available, this approach takes us much further than does the standard biography.

I value such approaches, but I’d like to find ways to reimagine biography altogether, first by looking back at early African American biographical texts. It is revealing, I suggest, that the promise of African American achievement has been represented so often by way of the distinct genre known as collective biographies—basically, collections of biographical sketches unconnected by any overarching narrative but all serving a central point about the importance of the people (usually, both famous and relatively unknown) represented by the volume as a whole. From William Wells Brown’s The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863) to such relatively recent works as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African American Achievement (1997), collective biographies have been a staple of African American publishing. African American history was always deeply enveloped, complexly contextualized by other histories, other communities, and often the overall story presented has been the product of an activist determination, both individual and collective, to resist the pressures of the defining contexts and surrounding communities.

Today, that tradition is most strongly evident in the records painstakingly constructed by amateur historians and activists (both black and white) in the service of local or regional communities—for example, Mark J. Sammons and Valerie Cunningham’s Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage (2004), or H. H. Price and Gerald E. Talbot’s Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People (2006). Such local histories often lack an overarching or connecting narrative, beyond the overwhelming evidence of communities, lives, and events not accounted for elsewhere, and the guiding narrative of such histories almost always involves the painstaking attempt to gather together and preserve the fragmented records of isolated people and events so as to indicate a broader collective story not yet told and perhaps even unrecoverable as a single, coherent narrative. Like the Black Heritage Trails that are often associated with these texts, reading African American history can involve a more-or-less charted pilgrimage through a cultural landscape of important alliances across both space and time, sometimes a pilgrimage negotiated against the pressures and competing narratives of a nearly successful historical erasure. In these writings, the lives of apparently inconsequential people are placed next to biographies of the most prominent performers on the public stage, seemingly isolated incidents are placed next to grand historical battles, and what can be known is related to an imagined past and an envisioned future. This complex mix of historical focus, moreover, is usually framed by a social and political environment that is always provisional, shifting, and vulnerable—making it difficult to determine what might eventually emerge as central or marginal, as important or incidental.

Looking back at the collective biographies of the past makes it possible to look forward to what we might aim for today, when digital resources make a culturally rich approach to historical and biographical recovery more possible than it has ever been before. Rather than use the tools available to us to place newly imposing monuments on an otherwise scarcely populated historical landscape, we could use the lives we know best as entrance into the lives and the worlds that remain unknown to any but the most determined archival researchers among us. With the digital revolution, archives themselves are changing, and we accordingly have the opportunity to imagine a richer and more demanding history than ever before.

It is becoming increasingly possible to access the scattered documentary remains of the African American past wherever they are, and perhaps even to connect with the nontraditional archives—the bookstores, the churches, the fraternal organizations, the community organizations, the attics and basements—in which so much of what has been preserved of African American lives is held. This is a history that involves gathering together various historical sites and individual stories that replicate broad patterns of racial control and resistance, representing both an imposed and collectively determined communal identity, the feedback loops of U.S. racial history. This is also a history that involves attending to the local variations in that pattern, the unpredictable effects of the convergence of chaotic laws and incoherent social practices restricting or otherwise channeling community interactions and the possibilities of agency. In the feedback loops connecting history and memory, shaping both broad collective frameworks and specific communities, is a process—stable in its general contours, but unpredictable in its local manifestations, a combination of scripted identity and improvisational performance—central to any just understanding of African American history.

The biographies we most need now are those that actually represent complexly contextualized and interconnected lives—and we have the tools we need now for such biographical work. With the help of digital ego-networks, we can graph the system of relations connected with any biographical subject we wish to study. We can locate African American lives in black communities, and we can come to a better understanding of the relations among black and white Americans generally. Whether we enter by way of specific locales (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, New Orleans), initiatives (the Colored Convention movement, the abolitionist movement, the women’s movement), or organizations (the A.M.E. Church, mutual benefit societies, the Prince Hall Freemasons), we can get a better sense of how black lives functioned, and how people worked together to ensure that their lives would matter. There are a couple of features of this approach that make it particularly attractive, and perhaps primary among them is that it would not be conceptualized primarily as an attempt to recover any one person’s biography, nor as an attempt to look at any single person’s life in isolation. At base, the purpose of such an approach would be not simply to recover and reprint but also to read and attend to the documents related to black lives in daily performance, and always with a piercing awareness of what we do not yet know, and at times even what we cannot hope to know.

In other words, such an approach would help us piece together the networks and patterns that emerge when we study people’s lives not as abstract and coherent individual stories, or independent tales, but as they were lived, in concert with others, often involved in various and even competing narratives, contributing to and benefitting from collective efforts. It is a matter of accounting for various historical and cultural attractors, various dynamics by which the turbulent forces that shape African American life acquired identifiable stability, the process by which cultural forces merged into cultural formations and by which black identity was claimed from within and not simply imposed from without.

In short, the approach that I’m looking for might lead us to focus more on recovering communities than on recovering individual narratives. This approach might help us get beyond the biographies that announce that one well-documented black life matters and enter more substantially into a recognition that Black Lives Matter, beyond the exceptional, representative, or putatively archetypal life stories, accounting for even those not fully represented in the documentary record. Not incidentally, such an approach might also help us highlight the networks of affiliation fundamental to whiteness—the networks of opportunities, standards of achievement, and environmental support for white Americans, which would in turn also highlight the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Even for those who are not interested in studying African American history and literature, I think it would be good to get over the illusion that biographies provide a useful entrance into lives lived in the context of American history and culture. Even after many years engaged in African American Studies, having grown to expect the ongoing marginalization of my field, I’m still surprised to read a biography of a white American from the nineteenth century and discover that this story of a life richly lived has almost nothing to say about race or slavery. Certainly, it’s encouraging to encounter such books as Henry Wiencek’s An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America or David Waldstreicher’s Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution, but one can only reflect on how many biographies of these two “founding fathers” one can read without encountering slavery or race as not just a side note, and not even just as a prominent concern, but as a central, defining presence in these lives, and in the early life of the developing republic. And one can read any number of biographies of white American writers with almost no mention of race. They were white, after all, so why talk about race? What role could U.S. racial history possibly have when telling the story of a white person’s journey from obscurity to prominence—the early education, the eventual connections, the wonderful coincidences, the fortunate encounters, the ultimate self-discovery and determination to succeed, against all odds? What possible role would race play in such a story when the subject is white?

Autobiographies, biographies, and collective biographies have become such dominant genres in African American literary history because the challenge of relating the dynamics of black lives has always been and is still so daunting. As we look back and attempt to recover the many black lives that have emerged in research on African American history and print culture, even when we can gather reliable facts from the scattered documents available, we are faced with the task of accounting for the often absurd contexts, as shaped by white supremacist ideologies, within which those “facts” operated. Not incidentally, we are faced with the same task when approaching white lives, though that challenge remains largely invisible to the great majority of Americans, biographers included. But by finding more innovative and complex ways to approach black lives as actually lived, as collectively performed, as improvisationally imagined, we will find ourselves not only appreciating African American history but also reevaluating white American history—and thereby coming just a bit closer to a productive understanding of American history generally, one distinguished not by biographies along the road but by maps that show where the roads connect, and how they might be navigated. We all might then be able to follow those maps to discover where those who came before us lived, where we live now, and why it matters to get it right.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

John Ernest is the Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor of English and chair of the Department of English at the University of Delaware. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (2009) and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (2014).

Students document antebellum African American civic engagement

The high-school students in the extracurricular Project Apprentice to History (PATH) in Beverly, Massachusetts, are not your typical honors students, yet their achievements are extraordinary. From their work on a project on African Americans in antebellum Boston, these students obtained a sense of connection to real people in history whose lives seemed at times ordinary and at other times heroic. The PATH students’ willingness to engage in hard work with primary sources gave meaning to the contributions of people who have either been forgotten or never before appreciated. (Click here to learn more about PATH.)

The research project focused on African Americans’ civic engagement through membership in voluntary associations. Many of these, such as the Boston Vigilance Committee and the Boston Anti-Man Hunting League, were abolitionist groups actively involved in the Underground Railroad, while other voluntary associations focused on temperance, prison reform, and other reform movements in the first half of the nineteenth century. The project began as a result of a fieldtrip W. Dean Eastman’s U.S. history classes took to the African American Meeting House on Boston’s Beacon Hill. The visit triggered questions about the role of Bostonians in both the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement. “I was wondering if there was a way to find out who the fugitive slaves were,” one student said, “and who, if anyone, helped them.” Another student was “interested in social divisions at that time period in Boston. Who were the ‘upper-class’ African-Americans? Who was in the ‘lower-class’?”

By ultimately combining all we could find on each African American citizen and group, we focused on the point where public and private history meet, where local history intersects with broader historical trends and events. The students compiled a database of cross-referenced demographic data from the U.S. Census, Boston city directories, and Boston tax records. They also digitized and indexed hundreds of articles from William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.  Eventually, they published the results of their original research on the Web. And the testimony of the students themselves is indicative of just how meaningful the project was for them.

Central to the success of our project was close collaboration with libraries, museums, and archives, including the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Boston African American Historic Site. In addition to providing essential records of various voluntary associations, these institutions allowed our students to see where and how much of the most important research into the American past is undertaken.

At early, before-school sessions at the Beverly Public Library, students continued the research they had started on the previous Saturday in Boston. Students printed copies of the original enumeration sheets from an 1850 U.S. census CD-ROM. Using blank census forms, they then began the process of transcribing and entering into a spreadsheet all of the individual demographic data from the African Americans that was listed. This painstaking process involved deciphering the handwriting of the census enumerators. “I definitely got a lot better at reading primary documents,” said Alison Woitunski, class of 2004. “You would be surprised at how difficult it is to read someone’s handwriting on paper that’s over 100 years old.”

This process also helped students develop research skills. “The most important skill I learned was how to conduct primary research,” Ryan Morse, class of 2004, said . “Beyond that I learned how to organize a really well-written paper, and to organize my thoughts to come out in the best way possible.”

From the 1850 census, our database expanded to include categories such as age, sex, race, occupation, literacy, value of real estate, and place of birth. The 1848-53 Boston city directories listed names, occupations, and addresses of adult residents of Boston. Prior to the 1848 directory, the list was segregated, making it easier to develop an initial database that included street addresses. Starting with the 1849-50 directory, it was difficult to tell the race of the residents. And, although the 1850 census expanded the categories of our database, it omitted the important category of street address.

We found an answer in the 1850 tax records at the Boston city archives. In these manuscripts all adult names were listed by address, occupation, and race. We photocopied and digitized the records for Beacon Hill and then transcribed the data into a table. Now we were able to link African Americans from the 1850 census with their respective residences. By combining city directories, the census, and tax records, we could trace the lives of nearly two thousand African Americans through 1848-53 using our database.

During the course of the project, students began narrowing their research to topics that could be answered through the database. What was the racial and gender composition of the members of the various abolitionist groups? To what extent had both slavery and the slave trade flourished in Massachusetts? How did segregation impact Massachusetts’s schools, marriage laws, and passenger train accommodations? We were particularly curious about the years 1850-53 because of the ramifications of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Who were the fugitive slaves living in Boston in 1850? Did the neighborhood population change in the ensuing years?

We found an invaluable source of information on voluntary associations in The Liberator. Students digitized nearly five hundred articles dealing with these groups between the years 1831 and 1855, discovering many names from our database appearing in these articles. 

At the Massachusetts State House Special Collections, one of our students, Alison Woitunski, discovered an account book of the Boston Vigilance Committee listing fugitive slaves. From this account book she created a chart identifying both the fugitives and their benefactors. Again, many of these names could also be linked to our database. 

At the athenaeum we discovered an 1852 map depicting every structure in the city. We began considering economical ways of accessing the database using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology. Having only a rudimentary concept of the capabilities of GIS, we enlisted the help of Roland Adams, GIS Manager for the City of Beverly, and the possibilities became clear. GIS integrates maps with data, so that points on a map are designated to correspond to a database. Under Adams’s direction students arranged the information from the database into GIS format. Through careful research comparing a modern GIS map to the 1852 map, students were able to match parcel ID’s from the Boston Tax Assessors Office to the Beacon Hill addresses in our database. Now by clicking on a particular building on the modern-day map, one could see who was living there in 1850.

The culmination of the project arrived when students presented the results of their research at the Downtown Boston Harvard Club on February 9, 2004, before historians, archivists, and their parents and peers. Of the project, Alison Woitunski said, “[L]ooking back, I am not quite sure how I managed to be at PATH meetings at 6:30 A.M. or spend so many Saturday afternoons doing research in Boston, but I’m glad that I did.” Molly Conway added, “[O]ne thing I learned from this experience is that history is about finding the truth in what happened; when we used the Latin word for truth, veritas, we meant it also as a virtue.”

Online visitors may now access the resources developed by the students in PATH by visiting our Website.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.3 (April, 2005).

W. Dean Eastman teaches history at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, and has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Disney American Teacher Award (1991), Harvard University’s Derek Bok Prize for Public Service (2000), and the Preserve America Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year Award (2004).

Kevin McGrath is a library teacher at Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts.

If pop culture is to be believed, 2017 was a good year for black science, science fiction and fictions of science. Hidden Figures introduced film-goers to the work of black female scientists like Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson; science fiction fans anticipated Jordan Peele’s upcoming adaptation of Lovecraft Country; the universe of Black Panther rapidly expanded through comics and film; and Octavia Butler’s dystopian Parable of the Talents (1998) was resuscitated due to its prescient portrayal of the fictive Senator Andrew Steele Jarret and his (in 1998, still un-trademarked) slogan: Make America Great Again. But, of course, the reasons for Butler’s sudden popularity reveal a bleaker state of affairs. If, this time around, Oscars were not quite so white, very few people would mistake 2017 as a good year for racial justice.

The hate-filled currents of Donald Trump’s presidency, freshly invigorated by Charlottesville, and the residual racism of scientific inquiry, converged in a September editorial in Nature, the most influential publisher in the sciences. In it, the anonymous author(s) defends the Central Park statue of J. Marion Sims, the nineteenth-century scientist who performed gynecological experiments on enslaved women’s bodies without anesthesia; as well as Parran Hall at the University of Pittsburgh, named after Thomas Parran Jr., director of the infamous Tuskegee experiment. To remove these figures from the public eye, the author(s) claim, would be to “whitewash history.”

As though history were some stable and pure truth to be apprehended by the intrepid man of science; as though history had not already been whitewashed by centuries of archives, monuments, museums, and curricula; as though we could not distinguish the descriptive question of “what happened” from the normative question of “what merits commemoration.” To make this kind of claim, in other words, requires a certain amount of confirmation bias—we selectively see what we want to see (for example, a statue of J. Marion Sims as the embodiment of scientific history) and fail to see the great and messy rest (the patients, plantation owners, investors, competing scientists, activists, etc.) To be fair, in their conflation of “history” with processes of history making, the editors propose alternatives—for example, contextual information or “equally sized” commemorative statutes to the victims—but these are inadequate and perhaps disingenuous suggestions. In moral life, commensurability is not measured by mass or circumference, and racist histories of science—histories that persist in the present-day medical community—cannot be countered with a contrite footnote. Instead of proposing true historical redress, the editorialists confirm the right to public space that these statues and buildings have always enjoyed.

In contrast, Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science imagines what comes after the statues have fallen. Suffice it to say, she goes much further than an apologetic plaque, and her results are fascinating. Fugitive Science insists on the role of African American scientific actors not as objects or specimens, but rather as active participants working within and against a dynamic set of scientific discourses and practices. Deploying Foucault’s concept of counter-science, Rusert intervenes in narratives of racist pseudo-science, establishing not only a more inclusive history of early American science, but in doing so, arguing for a revision of the concept of the human. Rusert’s work, both masterful and suggestive, should not only be of interest to scholars of African American literature and antebellum science, but it also contributes to a number of critical turns, including the post-human, the environmental humanities, and archive theory.

Rusert’s first chapter begins with a figure hostile to the notion of black “radical empiricisms” (20)—or, indeed, hostile to blackness itself: Thomas Jefferson, whose infamous claims of African deficiency in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) sparked a tradition of antebellum black critique, beginning with Benjamin Banneker, and comprising David Walker, James W.C. Pennington, and James McCune Smith, among others. In tracing this tradition, Rusert intervenes in the centrality of Jefferson to antebellum racial theory. De-monumentalizing, as it were, the Founding Father, Rusert situates Banneker as the progenitor of African American science and even—in the chapter’s most suggestive sections—science fiction. Chapter two builds on the first chapter’s exploration of African American ethnologies through its consideration of black portraiture and ekphrastic writing as opaque “modes of resistance” to the racist scopic regime of antebellum science. Turning from iconicity to embodied practices of visuality, Rusert’s third chapter traces the cross currents between popular scientific lecture circuits and black performance in the United States and Britain. Here, Fugitive Science is at its most international, chronicling the transatlantic movements of figures like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry Box Brown.

From the transatlantic, Rusert turns to the cosmic in her fourth chapter’s consideration of Martin Delany’s scientific inquiry. Reading Delany’s Blake alongside his writings on statistics, ethnology, astronomy, and electricity, Rusert highlights the linkage between planetary revolution and slave revolution in order to “imagine new worlds of freedom” (179). These expansive new worlds condense, in chapter five, into the feminized “tight spaces of the parlor and the classroom” (27). Here, Rusert considers the scientific work (capaciously defined to include friendship albums, natural history cabinets, and pedagogical lectures) of African American educator Sarah Mapps Douglass. Just as Rusert begins the book with a specter of racist pseudoscience—Thomas Jefferson—so too does she close the book with meditations on an equally looming figure: Sarah Baartman and the pathologizing of black women’s bodies. In doing so, Rusert moves from speculative fiction to speculative archival theory, working with and against her archives to conjecture on—although, as she admits, not fully recover—black women’s challenges to racial science. Through attention to the “gaping silences and gaps” (184) of the archive surrounding Baartman and Douglass, Rusert challenges the “Hottentot paradigm” with a “speculated, fragmented history of black women engaging with natural science” (217).

I left Fugitive Science with two questions. The first concerns the scope of the project: while Rusert declares that nineteenth-century racial science “spanned the globe,” (11), her objects of inquiry are nearly all Anglo-American. What she calls a “deeply Atlantic science” (13) remains, in the end, largely a story of Anglophone U.S. culture and, occasionally, its dealings with Britain. There is plenty of rich terrain here alone and Rusert treats that terrain both thoughtfully and thoroughly. I would, however, be keen to see scholars take up Rusert’s promise of a “global and diverse network of experiments, theories, and practitioners” (13) by engaging with other sub- and supra-national units, especially across Native American, African, Caribbean, and Latin American cultures. When we shift Rusert’s axis from the Anglophone to the multilingual, from the transatlantic to the hemispheric, global, or diasporic, I suspect new histories will become legible, expanding and deepening Rusert’s suggestive claim that natural science “meditates(s) on the category of the human itself” (6).

This spatial and linguistic shift brings me to my second question: how do we demarcate scientific doctrines and practices from pseudoscience in a way that is both inclusive and reparative? Many of the discourses and practices Rusert describe look like science, sound like science, smell like science, but are not necessarily science. This is not a criticism: what we consider “science” has been formed through a historical process of normative evaluation. But can we draw the boundaries of “science” broadly enough to include diasporic traditions of folk knowledge production but narrowly enough to exclude racist theories, now deemed pseudoscientific, that have been used to oppress and dehumanize people of African descent? At times, it seems that Rusert’s counter-narrative to racist pseudo-science does not have the conceptual space to address folk beliefs and spiritual practices that are epistemically warranted but not necessarily systematized. Although Rusert gestures toward these traditions (what she calls a vernacular “underbelly of fugitive science” [29] and, at times, “mysticism” [6]), diasporic spiritual traditions, including Conjure, Vodou, and Obeah, are largely subordinated to those knowledge disciplines that a twenty-first-century reader would recognize as scientific: for example, astronomy, physiology, geology, botany and (more controversially) ethnology. Scholars seeking to build on Rusert’s work may want to consider the interplay between institutional and folk knowledge in order to expand, revise, and internationalize our criteria for demarcating pre-twentieth-century scientific inquiry.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Mary Grace Albanese is an assistant professor of English at Binghamton University (SUNY). Her work has appeared in American Literature, ESQ, and The Henry James Review, among other venues.

The American Revolution as civil war

In the opening number of The Crisis Thomas Paine saves some choice words for the loyalists: “And what is a Tory? Good God! what is he? I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.” Paine doesn’t so much define loyalism here, as he does the character of loyalists. His strategy is typical of patriot accounts of loyalists, which dissolve the category of loyalism by emphasizing the individual loyalist over the shared vision of loyalism. Characterizations such as this make it virtually impossible to understand loyalist motivations or thinking. Framing the question in terms of individual loyalists and using the term as an ad hominem empties loyalism of any ideological, political, or conceptual meaning. This strategy has proven remarkably effective. For most of the past two hundred-odd years the answer to the question of what made someone a loyalist at the time of the American Revolution has been more or less irrelevant. Although subsequent political and cultural historians may not partake of Paine’s vicious rhetoric, loyalism and loyalists remain among the most poorly understood aspects of the Revolution.

Not only have loyalists been generally dismissed as self-interested, cowardly, antidemocratic, elitist collaborators, their numbers have often been distorted and minimized. Determining who was a loyalist and under what conditions can be very difficult. Given the intimidation and violence to which they were subjected by crowd action, committees of safety, and patriot agitators like Paine, most loyalists carefully avoided public scrutiny. Many signed oaths of allegiance to the patriot cause when threatened with public action; some successfully maintained a pretense of neutrality; and still others kept their secret safe. This may explain why calculations of the percentage of loyalists in the colonies and early states have varied from one-fifth to one-third of the total population. The most famous estimate of the percentage of loyalists at the time of the Revolution comes from an 1815 letter John Adams wrote to James Lloyd in which he calculates that one-third of the population were “averse to the revolution.” In the same letter Adams also suggests that another third wavered in their allegiances. Even at the more conservative (probably too conservative) 20 percent figure favored by some historians, the idea that such a significant proportion of the population may have opposed the independence movement is a staggering fact—a fact that remains virtually unaccounted for in our reckoning of the Revolution. Moreover, if we add the significant numbers of blacks and Native Americans who, for various reasons, sided with the British, the percentage of loyalists swells to an even greater proportion of the population. In this discussion I have focused solely on the white settlers because they form the core of the typical narrative of the Revolution.

My aim here is less to suggest how a consideration of loyalists and loyalism might change our view of the Revolution and more to begin to develop a working definition of loyalism that does not reinscribe their marginality. Only in so doing can we truly begin to understand their significance. In what follows, I want to begin to sketch out a definition of loyalism that is not inherently prejudicial by drawing on two writers, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and James Fenimore Cooper. These two authors have often figured as paragons of the exceptionalist thesis, or the idea that there is something very, very different about American identity, and that something is often equated with patriotism. Crèvecoeur and Cooper, however, had strong ties to loyalism and produced early works in which loyalist characters play major roles. These characters suggest that in many cases loyalists opposed the Revolution not only because they cherished their historical, commercial, and affective links to the British Empire but also because they objected to the cost it exacted on their communities. Just as significantly, Crèvecoeur and Cooper respectively imply that loyalism, despite its apparent alienation from the mainstream, has played a vital role in the development of American culture and society.

Farmer James and the Dilemma of the Revolution

In the influential third chapter of Letters from an American Farmer—which bears the title “What is an American?”—Crèvecoeur’s narrator Farmer James describes the process whereby European (primarily British) immigrants to Pennsylvania were transformed into Americans. Critics have typically read this chapter as evidence of the emergence of a new and distinct American national identity in the late eighteenth century. In other words, “What is an American?” has served as a cornerstone of the American exceptionalist account of the Revolution. In the exceptionalist view, which dominated so much of literary and historical analysis of American culture and politics during the last century, the forces shaping colonial America and the early United States are fundamentally different from those shaping Europe and the rest of the world. The United States and its people are seen to represent a special instance in the history of the world. Farmer James’s description of the process whereby European immigrants are transformed into Americans has often been understood to reinforce the proposition that the Revolution was the inevitable consequence of America’s radical difference with Europe. Crèvecoeur, however, was a loyalist who fled the colonies to return to his native France. Farmer James, the hero and narrator of the Letters, is also a loyalist, albeit one who in the end opts out of the war altogether. Crèvecoeur’s case illustrates the difficulties a more complicated and nuanced version of loyalism poses for the patriot narrative of the Revolution.

The exceptionalist reading of “What is an American?” emphasizes those moments in the chapter when Farmer James celebrates the differences between European and American identities: “The American is a new man,” he asserts, “who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions.” If we look more closely at the chapter, however, we can see that Crèvecoeur sets up the narrative of transformation with a scene that affirms the ties between the Old World and the New. The chapter opens with an account of what he imagines a newcomer might see and feel upon landing in Philadelphia.

I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts which must agitate the heart and present themselves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman when he first lands on this continent. He must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair country discovered and settled; he must necessarily feel a share of national pride when he views the chain of settlements which embellish these extended shores. When he says to himself, “This is the work of my countrymen, who, when convulsed by factions, afflicted by a variety of miseries and wants, restless and impatient, took refuge here. They brought along with them their national genius, to which they principally owe what liberty they enjoy and what substance they possess.” Here he sees the industry of his native country displayed in a new manner and traces in their works the embryos of all the arts, sciences, and ingenuity which flourish in Europe.

The trajectory of the narrative here emphasizes continuity with an English and European past rather than a radical break with a hopelessly antiquated and hierarchical world. This imagined English traveler recognizes the new world he encounters in British North America to be an extension of English aesthetic and social ideals. The American colonies, rather than rejecting or ignoring European culture and society, have evolved by developing their English and European inheritance. Crèvecoeur strategically uses the term “national” to describe the character of these people and their work, and thereby privileges the deeper connections between Americans and Britons. He uses “country” and “countrymen” to refer to the place that is British North America, but he never identifies the people of the thirteen colonies as a nation. This is true throughout the Letters.

Crèvecoeur thus sets up his account of the development of an American identity by calling attention to continuities between Europeans and British North Americans before turning to the differences between them. This sense of a dual identity, in turn, explains Farmer James’s reaction to the Revolution in the last chapter of the Letters, a chapter that has long puzzled scholars, who have often argued that it is inconsistent with the rest of the text. I want to focus on one moment in particular from that closing chapter, because I think it offers an insight into a completely different understanding of the Revolution. Struggling to come to grips with the onset of the Revolution, Farmer James is so distraught that he suffers a nervous breakdown. Recovering his wits but still unable to choose a side, he seeks divine guidance.

Great Source of wisdom! Inspire me with light sufficient to guide my benighted steps out of this intricate maze! Shall I discard all my ancient principles, shall I renounce that name, that nation which I held once so respectable? I feel the powerful attraction; the sentiments they inspired grew with my earliest knowledge and were grafted upon the first rudiments of my education. On the other hand, shall I arm myself against that country where I first drew breath, against the playmates of my youth, my bosom friends, my acquaintance? The idea makes me shudder! Must I be called a parricide, a traitor, a villain, lose the esteem of all those whom I love to preserve my own, be shunned like a rattlesnake, or be pointed at like a bear? I have neither heroism nor magnanimity enough to make so great a sacrifice.

Borrowing not from the language of republicanism or liberalism but from the vocabulary of sentimentalism, Farmer James presents the Revolution as a choice between killing his father and killing his brothers. The politics and ideals of the Revolution are irrelevant to Farmer James who, elsewhere in the chapter, dismisses the political debates of the Revolution as an elite game that callously ignores the sufferings of ordinary people. Rather than feeling implicated in the political stakes of the Revolution, Farmer James experiences the conflict as a local matter that potentially pits him against his family, friends, and neighbors.

Framed as a prayer, Farmer James’s plea for wisdom revolves around feelings and affective relations rather than social, political, ideological, or economic concerns. By the end of the passage, his feelings of disorientation merge what appear to be two choices into one inevitable outcome; the apparent binary of patriot and loyalist dissolves. Neither side offers a substantially different outcome because regardless of which side he chooses, Farmer James will be seen by many as a traitor and a villain. From the point of view of social relations, the political choices of the Revolution are inherently unsatisfactory because they divide and fracture a once peaceful community. Crèvecoeur’s poignant account of the dilemma of the Revolution is a far cry from Paine’s characterization in The Crisis. Instead of cowering in fear, Farmer James presents the reader with a profound ethical conundrum. The enormous psychological and emotional weight of this decision drives him to temporary insanity and ultimately he opts to avoid the question altogether by removing his family to the western backcountry. Like Crèvecoeur and his semi-autobiographical hero Farmer James, most loyalists were deeply ambivalent about the Revolution. They were torn between their local attachments and their allegiance to the British Empire. The latter had supplied not only an affective and historical connection but also a link to European commercial, political, and cultural centers of exchange. This is a version of loyalists and loyalism to which popular historians and scholars of the Revolution alike have for the most part failed to attend.

Crèvecoeur’s characterization of Farmer James demonstrates why loyalists challenge the powerful narratives of unity and consensus that were so important to the patriot rhetoric of democratic Revolution. For patriots, alienating and disenfranchising the loyalists was crucial to ensuring the Revolution’s success, but all too often subsequent generations of historians have, albeit tacitly, accepted patriot characterizations of loyalism as the truth. Put simply, loyalists have been omitted from the history of the Revolution because there is no convenient place for them in the stories of triumphal democracy and freedom that inform most histories of the Revolution. Erasing the loyalists, dismissing them as self-interested cowards, radicalizing them as a band of fanatical hard-liners, or as is more typically the case, alienating them by lumping them in with the English invader makes it possible to imagine that there was no meaningful domestic opposition to the “patriot” plan of separating from Great Britain and adopting a radical new democratic form of government. This narrative tells the story of American independence as a conflict between the newly emergent United States and the powerful and established British Empire. By its logic loyalists had to be Britons: they could not be Americans when “American” had become a synonym for patriot. Not being Americans, in turn, loyalists would not be considered relevant to the story of the early United States. This was, of course, Paine’s strategy in those sections of Common Sense and The Crisis where he attacks loyalists. Ironically, the viciousness of Paine’s antiloyalist rhetoric suggests that he understood them to pose a significant threat to the success of the patriot movement. Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James, the sympathetic, sentimental, ambivalent loyalist, presents the greatest challenge because he is virtually impossible to demonize. Perhaps this explains why scholars have so often ascribed a patriot point of view to Crèvecoeur and his hero.

Cooper’s British Americans

Early in his career, James Fenimore Cooper published two novels about the Revolution and early republic in which loyalists figure prominently, The Spy (1821) and The Pioneers (1823). In these novels loyalists are often sympathetic figures whose experience of the Revolution, much like Farmer James’s, is no less traumatic and difficult than that faced by patriots. I want to focus on The Spy in particular because it is the only novel in which Cooper directly treats the War of Independence. In his introduction to the 1831 edition,Cooper comments explicitly on his view of the Revolution.

The dispute between England and the United States of America, though not strictly a family quarrel, had many of the features of a civil war. Though the people of the latter were never properly and constitutionally subject to the people of the former, the inhabitants of both countries owed allegiance to a common king. As the Americans, as a nation, disavowed this allegiance, and as the English chose to support their sovereign in the attempt to regain his power, most of the feelings of an internal struggle were involved in the conflict. A large proportion of the emigrants from Europe, then established in the colonies, took part with the crown; and there were many districts in which their influence, united to that of the Americans who refused to throw away their allegiance, gave a decided preponderance to the royal cause. America was then too young, and too much in need of every heart and hand, to regard these partial divisions, small as they were in actual amount, with indifference.

Cooper ties himself in knots in this passage. Throughout the paragraph he qualifies each statement to the point where what might otherwise seem to be crucial distinctions are blurred, even to the point of being emptied of meaning. Phrases such as “not strictly,” “never properly,” “most of the feelings,” and “partial divisions” obscure as much as they reveal. The language of this paragraph suggests that Cooper finds himself torn between a desire to recognize the internal divisions between Americans at the time of the Revolution and a wish to produce a narrative of American nationhood.

Cooper struggles to reconcile those two impulses because so often the national argument has depended upon the alienation of the loyalists and the dichotomization of American and British identities, values, and cultures. In spite of such manifest fears about acknowledging the potential legitimacy of loyalism, Cooper invites his readers, albeit tentatively, to understand the Revolution as a civil war. By equating it with a family quarrel or an internal struggle, Cooper represents the war as a conflict pitting Americans against one another rather than an international conflict between two wholly separate peoples. Like Crèvecoeur, then, Cooper has chosen to explore the way the Revolution splinters the American family. He does so in The Spy by focusing on a family that is divided in its loyalties and by situating the action in New York, perhaps the most divided of the former colonies. The major conflicts in the novel, both on the battlefield and off, take place between family members, friends, and neighbors who often appear to agree on everything but the question of American independence.

The central drama of the novel concerns the fate of Henry Wharton, an accused spy, who is captured by the Americans while visiting his family in Westchester. In order to make his way safely from New York City—the center of British military operations for much of the war—to his family’s Westchester home, Henry is forced to cross the American “picquets” in White Plains. Fearful of being identified as a loyalist, Henry disguises himself for the journey. Although he sought to do nothing more treacherous than visit his family, the use of a disguise technically makes him a spy. During Henry’s trial, the accusation, although it is never explicitly stated as such, seems to be that Henry avails himself of the pretext of visiting his family in order to survey the positions of the American troops.

The matter is complicated because the ranking officer of the troop that detains Henry is his sister Frances’s fiancé, Major Peyton Dunwoodie. Frances, an ardent patriot who had promised to marry Dunwoodie at the conclusion of the war, vows that she can never consent to the proposed union should her brother be hanged as a spy. Dunwoodie, who believes Henry is innocent and does everything in his legal power to help him, finds himself torn between his duty as an officer and his love for Frances. Henry and Dunwoodie are close friends too. Unlike Frances, Henry understands Dunwoodie’s predicament and urges Frances to marry Dunwoodie in spite of the American officer’s role in his capture and detention. The novel makes it clear that, political differences notwithstanding, Henry and Dunwoodie share a commitment to the same male sense of duty and honor, one that absolves Dunwoodie of any personal responsibility for Henry’s death. They both insist on separating their duty from their feelings, their role as soldiers from their personal relationship—a theme that is repeated throughout the novel. Frances, who in many respects emerges as the true hero of the novel, refuses to give credence to such distinctions, especially when Henry is innocent of the charges.

Cooper has thus structured these relationships so that Frances is torn between her feelings of loyalty towards her brother and her love for Dunwoodie. In so doing, Cooper suggests a profound affinity between Henry and Dunwoodie, although one is a loyalist and the other a patriot. Both are presented as honorable figures, each equally sincere in his motives for adopting his respective causes and each equally committed to the rules of conduct governing his professional position. The novel never suggests any fundamental ethical or character flaw in Henry. If anything, Henry narrowly avoids becoming the victim of a great American injustice. The patriot Dunwoodie and the loyalist Henry are much more alike than they are different. The problem the novel addresses, therefore, is not related to Henry’s character or the reasons for his decision to espouse the loyalist position—the narrative’s silence on the question implies that such questions are irrelevant. Instead, the novel explores how the divisions created by this “family quarrel” lead to artificial distinctions that distort human relations and destroy communal values. Frances is thus left to negotiate the same problem that had paralyzed Farmer James in Crèvecoeur’s text.

Ultimately, the novel suggests that Henry and Dunwoodie are wrong to choose the political over the personal. They are wrong, that is, to privilege duty over feelings. That message is delivered most effectively in the novel’s denouement when Henry’s escape to safety is ensured by Dunwoodie’s acknowledgement of the wisdom of Frances’s priorities. When Dunwoodie meets Frances after learning of Henry’s escape he complains, “I can almost persuade myself that you delight in creating points of difference in our feelings and duties.” Frances replies, “In our duties there may very possibly be a difference . . . but not in our feelings, Peyton—You must certainly rejoice in the escape of Henry!” Frances, who has been urged to keep Dunwoodie busy for two hours to insure Henry’s escape, dramatizes the union of feelings and duty when she decides that the best way to delay Dunwoodie’s pursuit of Henry is to accept his proposal of marriage on the condition that the wedding take place immediately. She feels so guilty about deceiving Dunwoodie that she reveals her reasoning to him: “Stop, Peyton; I cannot enter into such a solemn engagement with a fraud upon my conscience. I have seen Henry since his escape, and time is all important to him. Here is my hand; if, with this knowledge of the consequences of delay, you will not reject it, it is freely yours.” By accepting her terms openly, Dunwoodie appears to accept Frances’s view of the proper relationship between feelings and duties. Cooper stages this scene so that Dunwoodie’s consent to Frances’s terms establishes that he has finally learned this important lesson and can now collect his reward.

By combining the discussion of duty and feelings with an insistence on the fundamental similarities between loyalists and patriots, Cooper has constructed a novel in which the affective relations between family members, friends, and neighbors supersede the political debates of the Revolution. Hence, the aim of the novel is not simply to foster reconciliation between patriots and loyalists but to challenge the notion that the distinction between them was ever particularly meaningful. Cooper’s aim is not to dismiss the dispute over rights and sovereignty that motivated the Revolution but instead to remind his readers of the contingent and fluid meaning of those debates. Once the war had concluded, Americans needed to find ways to reconcile with one another and rediscover their fundamental commonalities. To this end, Cooper and Crèvecoeur challenge the easy dichotomies of loyalist and patriot, Briton and American, instead underscoring the fundamental continuities between both. Those continuities can be difficult to perceive if we privilege the political. In  Letters and The Spy the political is relegated to the background in favor of an emphasis on local or personal relationships.

In light of Crèvecouer’s and Cooper’s respective representations of loyalists at the time of the American Revolution, I’d like to conclude with a definition. Let me emphasize the provisional nature of this description of loyalism. I see my work on loyalism and loyalists as one entry point into a subject that requires much more study and analysis. In that spirit, I propose the following definition: A loyalist was an American who favored reconciliation with Great Britain during conflicts that began with the Stamp Act and concluded with the War of 1812. Loyalists, who constituted up to one-third of the population at the time of independence, opposed the Revolution for a variety of reasons, including affective, sentimental, economic, political, religious, and philosophical ones. Most loyalists were proud to be American colonials and identified strongly with their local communities and governments. In many cases, they resented the British government’s efforts to tax them and shared the view, held by most mainland British-Americans, that those measures violated their rights as British subjects. In spite of such concerns, they were proud of their British heritage, which in fact had taught them (and their patriot counterparts) to cherish their rights, and they wished to remain a part of the powerful British Empire. Understanding themselves as imperial subjects, loyalists saw no necessary contradiction between their local identity as Americans and their national identity as Britons. Although large numbers of them migrated to British Canada during the War for Independence, many also stayed in the new United States and many of this latter group became important figures in the politics and culture of the early American republic. To recognize loyalism as a legitimate response to the late eighteenth-century colonial controversies in British North America thus requires us not only to recast the Revolutionary conflict as a civil war but also to revise our understanding of the dynamics of consent, coercion, resistance, nation formation, and peoplehood during the Revolution.

Further Reading:

The classic treatment of loyalists is Mary Beth Norton’s The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789 (Boston, 1972). More recently, Judith Van Buskirk’s Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in New York (Philadelphia, 2002) explores relationships across the political divide in the British “occupied” New York City. A spate of pieces published in a variety of venues in the last year suggests a resurgence of interest in loyalists. To name a few, Alan Taylor published an article on loyalist exiles to Canada, in the Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2007), Maya Jasanoff contributed a provocative piece on loyalists in the New York Times Magazine (July 1, 2007), and, of course, readers of this publication will recall that Ed Griffin wrote about his current work on the loyalist Mather Byles for the July 2007 edition of Common-place.

A fuller account of Crèvecoeur’s instrumentality to the exceptionalist paradigm and his text’s critique of the Revolution can be found in my forthcoming essay, “The Cosmopolitan Revolution,” which will appear shortly in a special double issue of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction dedicated to the early American novel. For an excellent account of the challenges critics have faced when attempting to reconcile “Distresses” with the rest of the Letters, see Grantland S. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America(Chicago, 1997).

The body of scholarship on Cooper is long and deep. Two works in particular that attend to concerns I address in this essay are Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York, 1996)–which explores Cooper’s habitual treatment of political and ideological themes in domestic terms—and Wayne Franklin’s recent biography of Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (New Haven, 2007), in which he discusses Cooper’s relationship with the Delancey family.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Edward Larkin, an assistant professor of English at the University of Delaware, is the author of Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (2005). His current book project bears the working title Tory America: Loyalism and the Logic of Empire in the Early United States.

Over the past few decades, the American Revolution, traditionally the purview of early American historiography, has become an important focus for American literary and cultural studies. Yet much contemporary scholarship continues to characterize “Revolutionary America” as essentially Patriot writing and printed media, with little attention paid to the thousands of Americans who were not as interested in declaring their independence from Britain. When Loyalists of the American Revolution are considered at all, much of the focus is on men, with figures such as Benedict Arnold, John Andre, Jonathan Odell, and Joseph Stansbury standing in the spotlight.

But consider Mrs. Nathaniel Adams, a Loyalist who testified in the court martial of a Continental soldier accused of destroying her home during the Battle of White Plains. Consider Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson of Philadelphia, deemed a Loyalist against her will when she delivered George Johnstone’s attempted bribe to Joseph Reed. Consider, as well, Sarah Cass McGinn, a Loyalist well-versed in Iroquoian languages who served the British as an interpreter during the war. Many Loyalist women—self-identified and otherwise—participated in or were affected by the war, and I have named only a few. Dorothea Gramsby, Catherine and Mary Byles, Peggy Hutchinson, Anna Rawles, Margaret Morris, Janet Shaw, Anne Hulton, and Phila Delancey also either identified as Loyalists or had that identity thrust upon them. Those who stayed behind as their husbands, brothers, and sons left home to fight can tell us what life was like running businesses, raising children, and tending property, all while living among neighbors and relatives who shunned them for their politics. Those who fled in exile write about slipping away in the dark of night, babies in tow, possessions left behind, lurching toward cold and unfamiliar destinations far from home—narratives that provide another, often unrepresented perspective on the American Revolution (fig. 1).

Discussing eighteenth-century Loyalists has been difficult, in part, because their political perspectives do not fit neatly into the American origin story. In his 2007 Common-Place article “What is a Loyalist?” Edward Larkin raises this very point. To the Loyalists, the founding fathers were tyrants, not leaders. The “Sons of Liberty” were vigilantes, not victors, and the war meant the collapse of order and civilization, not the defeat of longstanding injustice. Further complicating the Loyalist/Patriot divide is the harsh truth that people did not always get to decide their political affiliation for themselves. While some had the luxury of pledging loyalty to the crown, others had loyalism thrust upon them. Self-appointed Committees of Safety branded as Loyalists merchants who refused to sign nonimportation agreements, even though their reasons for protest may have been monetary rather than political. Anglican priests were automatically Loyalists due to their affiliation with the Church of England. Unless they made a public display of disavowing their family members, people with prominent Loyalist relatives were assumed to be Loyalists-by-association. The Loyalist Claims Commissioners defined Loyalists very broadly, granting money or land to those who fought for the British or pledged allegiance to Great Britain (even after fighting for or pledging allegiance to the Rebels).

A Historian’s Take on AMC’s Turn

In telling the story of the American Revolution, academic historians and Hollywood filmmakers have a troubled history. Both parties have attempted to bring the founding of the American republic to life for a contemporary audience, but rarely have they agreed on how best to accomplish this. There has been no shortage of directors who have ignored the advice of their historical consultants or of historians who have criticized a film’s most trivial anachronisms. A clever work of satire, the 1986 film Sweet Liberty captured the dynamics of this dysfunctional relationship. The film’s protagonist, Michael Burgess (ably played by Alan Alda), is a college history professor who sells the movie rights to his prize-winning study of the American Revolution to the director Bo Hodges (Saul Rubinek). Thrilled that his life’s work will be captured on the silver screen, Professor Burgess eagerly welcomes the production crew to his sleepy Southern college town only to learn that Hodges intends to adapt the book as a bawdy comedy targeted at a teenage audience. Horrified, Burgess confronts Hodges to demand an explanation. Clearly amused at the historian’s discomfort, Hodges proclaims the three principles of a successful Hollywood blockbuster: “defy authority, destroy property, and take people’s clothes off.” Nonplussed, Burgess retorts, “What does that have to do with American history?” Blinded by the demands of their respective disciplines, Burgess and Hodges fail to see their common mission. Both the historian and the filmmaker must to do more than merely relate an accurate narrative of the period’s events. They must make the past relevant to the present. Done well, both academic history and historical cinema have the potential to breathe new life into familiar stories. Each can rejuvenate the Revolution.

Making the American Revolution meaningful to a twenty-first-century audience is exactly what the cast, crew, and producers of AMC’s new television series Turn have set out to accomplish. Promising to tell “the story of America’s first spy ring,” Turn speaks to a post-9/11 audience intrigued by the workings of global espionage and raised on a diet of political violence served up by CNN. Turn is a product of its time. Though historians often disparage historical interpretations driven by a presentist agenda, few would deny that the questions we ask of the past are shaped by the world we live in today. The producers of Turn and academic historians have this in common: neither can escape viewing the past from the perspective of the present.

Errors in chronology and costuming are easily overlooked because the show succeeds at capturing the spirit of America’s tortuous path to nationhood, but it fails epically in its responsibility to the very real people who walked that road over 200 years ago.

Turn‘s implicit argument, that the American Revolution was far more violent, more terrifying, more contested, and more uncertain than we usually imagine when we picture George Washington crossing the Delaware or Thomas Jefferson drafting the Declaration of Independence, falls in line with a recent trend in the historical literature that depicts the birth of our nation as a brutal and divisive struggle. Turn portrays an embryonic America torn apart by political discord. The conflict raging in the small Long Island town of Setauket, where much of the series is set, is presented as a microcosm of the larger conflict. Like all American colonists, Setauket’s denizens must confront the fraught questions of political and family allegiance in a time of turmoil. One cannot help but think of the stark divisions between blue and red states in contemporary America. To drive this point home, as well as to increase the dramatic tension, the protagonist Abraham Woodhull (Jamie Bell) lives in a house divided. Abe’s father, Richard (Kevin R. McNally), a socially prominent judge, and his wife, Mary (Meegan Warner), are firm supporters of the crown. Abe’s own loyalties, which he strives to conceal from his family, end up reluctantly, though resolutely, with the Revolutionaries. As the series unfolds, Abe struggles to maintain his principles in a morally ambiguous world. His allies on the Patriot side, Benjamin Tallmadge (Seth Numrich) and Caleb Brewster (Daniel Henshall), are not above committing atrocities in the name of the “glorious cause,” and his British opponents, most obviously Major Hewlett (Burn Gorman) and Ensign Baker (Thomas Keegan), are capable of integrity and humanity. This is not the traditional story of America’s nobility and virtue in the face of Britain’s barbaric brutality most recently showcased by the 2000 film The Patriot. What’s not for a historian to love?

As is often the case, the devil is in the details. Errors in chronology and costuming are easily overlooked because the show succeeds at capturing the spirit of America’s tortuous path to nationhood, but it fails epically in its responsibility to the very real people who walked that road over 200 years ago. Like many historical dramas, Turn uses a combination of actual historical individuals and fictional characters in its cast. In a recorded discussion with faculty from the College of William & Mary in February 2015, the producers of Turn lauded their efforts to portray the experiences of little-known revolutionaries like Woodhull and Tallmadge rather than the usual parade of Founding Fathers. They are pleased to be doing “history from the bottom up.” While household names like George Washington and Benedict Arnold are present, the show’s principal players are men and women long obscured by the cobwebs of history. Perhaps it is because of this obscurity that the producers felt entitled to take such great liberties with the lives of these individuals: liberties that would undoubtedly expose the producers to a defamation of character suit were the people portrayed in the series still alive.

Some of these liberties are harmless, perhaps even necessary. The real Hewlett, for instance, was an American, born and bred on Long Island, not the posh Englishman Burn Gorman personifies. In fact, a regiment of American Loyalists, not British regulars, garrisoned Setauket throughout the war. Green-coated Americans fighting blue-coated Americans might easily confuse the lay viewer, however. The producers’ decision to anglicize Hewlett and his troops is justifiable on the grounds of narrative clarity and does little to misrepresent Hewlett, a man who was historically dedicated to the British Empire. Depicting an adulterous relationship between Abe Woodhull and Anna Strong (Heather Lind) is more questionable. Woodhull, who was a single man during the war, was ten years Anna’s junior. There is no evidence that the married mother of six had a romantic relationship with Woodhull. Yet, the demands of drama are paramount. The romance between Abe and Anna is a crucial component of the show’s narrative arc. In a work of historical fiction, creative liberties will be taken. Turn does not purport to be a work of documentary history after all.

Artistic license, however, is no excuse for the series’ portrayal of British Captain John Graves Simcoe (Samuel Roukin). In the show’s pilot episode, viewers are introduced to a tall, foppish, effeminate, but unmistakably sinister Englishman destined to be a thorn in the side of the would-be hero Abe. It is no surprise that the producers of Turn, aiming primarily at an American audience, wanted a British antagonist. Simcoe is that and more. He is for Turn what William Tavington was for the Patriot: a British officer of unspeakable cruelty and devilish cunning. Roukin has described the character he portrays as “basically a sociopath,” and not without reason. Turn‘s Simcoe is a predator. He sexually menaces Anna, brutally beats Abe, stabs an American spy in the throat at a dinner party, hangs an innocent man, and murders a Loyalist soldier in order to bolster his reputation among his men. These are but a few of his more egregious acts. But Simcoe is no mere brute. His is a calculating and clever embodiment of evil, born of hatred. According to AMC’s website, “John Graves Simcoe is a born attack dog who harbors an intense dislike for most colonists.” That dislike—or better yet, loathing—manifests itself in his scheme to assassinate Abe’s father and frame the Patriot-leaning Reverend Nathanial Tallmadge (Boris McGiver) for the shooting. When Abe foils his plan, Simcoe is livid. During a prisoner-exchange negotiation with Patriot forces, Simcoe defies Major Hewlett’s direct orders and callously executes Caleb Brewster’s uncle in front of his nephew. Although Hewlett has him arrested, Simcoe escapes court martial, languishing for a time as a clerk in the quartermaster’s department, before being promoted to command of the Loyalist Queen’s Rangers regiment. The British high command appears largely unconcerned by Simcoe’s brutality.

The real John Graves Simcoe did none of these things. The son of a decorated naval officer who died during the British campaign to capture Canada in 1759, Simcoe was a twenty-three-year-old Eton- and Oxford-educated lieutenant when war erupted in Massachusetts in 1775. Though he lamented “the dreadful scene of civil war” that had engulfed the colonies, the young officer was eager to prove an effective soldier. Like many of his fellow British officers, Simcoe believed that the colonists had been led astray by Whig demagogues and that force alone could bring about an “effectual reconciliation” between the king and his colonists. There is no doubt that Simcoe was what historian Stephen Conway has dubbed “a hard-liner:” an officer who thought rebellion deserved to be punished. In a letter to his mother, he referred to the rebellious colonists as “infatuated wretches” and hoped for their “inevitable destruction.” Yet his zeal to suppress the American rebellion did not translate into unrestrained brutality toward American soldiers or civilians. He approved of his commanding general Sir William Howe’s orders to protect the property of the people of Boston and to spare the town from flames upon the army’s departure in 1776. A man as deeply committed to his God as his King, Simcoe strongly disapproved of harming the helpless. When he discovered that some of his soldiers were disinclined to take prisoners in battle because Simcoe had forbidden them to confiscate their captives’ watches, Simcoe reversed his policy. Human life was more important than private property. This is hardly the portrait of a sociopath.

Paradoxically, the likely culprit behind this case of cinematic slander is the historian behind the series: Alexander Rose, the author of the popular history Washington’s Spies, upon which Turn is based. To Rose, a Cambridge University-trained historian of twentieth-century Britain, “Simcoe exemplified the worst aspects of the British army.” The evidence supporting this claim is tenuous, to say the least. Rose points to the Queen’s Rangers’ occupation of Oyster Bay during the winter of 1778-79 as proof of Simcoe’s “wanton brutality.” In Rose’s words, Simcoe “stripped Oyster Bay bare of wood” and “sacrilegiously converted” the Quaker meetinghouse into a storeroom. Simcoe’s troops did occupy Oyster Bay that winter, and no doubt they seized buildings and other supplies for purposes of defense and firewood, but this was common practice among eighteenth-century armies. The Continental Army would have behaved no differently, except perhaps promising the buildings owners’ reimbursement in worthless Continental currency.

Most erroneously, Rose claims that “Simcoe made his presence felt” in Oyster Bay by apparently overseeing—or at least condoning—the whipping of a townsperson. Following Rose’s footnote leads to an obscure local history that relies on a nineteenth-century source as evidence of this incident. The source, Henry Onderdonk’s Documents and Letters Intended to Illustrate the Revolutionary Incidents of Queens County (1846), records excerpts from a number of eighteenth-century documents but omits documentation for this particular incident, in which the author narrates the arrest of “a respectable young man, John Weeks,” for failing to give the correct countersign when challenged by a sentry. Weeks was “seized, tried, and sentenced to be whipped.” His punishment was interrupted only by the “frantic appeals of his mother and sister.” The problem is that even according to this undocumented nineteenth-century account, Weeks’s arrest occurred before Simcoe and his Rangers reached Oyster Bay. The contingent occupying the town was the Loyalist regiment Fanning’s Corps, a “rude and ill-behaved” unit, in the estimation of the nineteenth-century historian. It is hard to imagine how Simcoe could have made his presence felt in the town when he was not even there. It is equally difficult to fathom why Rose would cite a twentieth-century local history to ascribe culpability to Simcoe for this alleged incident when he cites Onderdonk’s work elsewhere in his book. An ungenerous reviewer might assume bad faith.

Though the event is not depicted in the show, the real John Graves Simcoe did have an altercation with the Woodhull family. In late April 1779, Loyalist John Wolsey, who had been released recently from a Patriot prison, informed Simcoe of Woodhull’s career as a rebel informant. Intent on apprehending the suspected spy, Simcoe and a party of his Rangers descended on the residence of Abraham’s father, Judge Richard Woodhull. The judge, who historically was a Patriot rather than a Loyalist sympathizer, became the hapless victim of his son’s clandestine activities when Simcoe’s men failed to discover Abe. According to a letter that Abe later wrote Tallmadge, Simcoe, eager “to make some compensation for his Voige [voyage] … fell upon” the Judge “and Plundered him in a most Shocking Manner.” Rose’s interpretation of this event was that Simcoe personally “beat up Abraham Woodhull’s father.” An alternate reading of the source suggests that Simcoe sought financial compensation for the expedition and permitted his men to seize items of the judge’s private property. British troops plundering inoffensive American civilians was in and of itself a “Shocking” act of cruelty discouraged by the prevailing European rules of war, but it was a far from uncommon practice during the conflict.

Plundering was one thing; physical assault was entirely another. Had Simcoe personally beaten a fellow gentleman—and an elderly one at that—he would have faced official censure, if not court martial and dishonor. Moreover, Abe would certainly have been more explicit in his letter had that been the case. When New York Loyalist Edmund Palmer “fell upon” a Mr. Willis, who was an “old Gentleman,” American Major General Israel Putnam informed Washington that Palmer “abused, beat, & left him, to appearance dead.” Abe’s letter is silent on his father’s status after the raid. It is highly unlikely that Judge Woodhull experienced such treatment at the hands of Simcoe. During a similar raid in 1778, Simcoe had personally protected the improbably named American Colonel Thomas Thomas, “a very active partizan of the enemy,” from his “irritated soldiers” who wanted to revenge the death of one of their comrades. If Simcoe or his troopers had brutalized Judge Woodhull, rather than merely plundered him, the Patriot press would have had a field day. Instead, the raid failed to make the news.

This is not to suggest that the real Simcoe was a softy. During his raids in New Jersey, Simcoe and his Rangers regularly burned barns and even private dwellings belonging to suspected Patriots. A Frenchman visiting Canada after the war was struck by Simcoe’s persistent “hatred … against the United States” and his “boasting of the numerous houses he had fired during the unfortunate conflict.” In 1779, the Pennsylvania Evening Post claimed that Simcoe’s “exploits have generally been marked with acts of the most inhuman barbarity.” To the governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, Simcoe was “a consummate savage.” Seeking to exploit Simcoe’s raids for propagandistic purposes, both the author of the piece in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and Livingston—who was a skilled propagandist often writing under the pseudonym Adolphus—painted Simcoe as a barbarian: someone beyond the pale of the civilized world. Rose, and by extension the producers of Turn, have accepted uncritically the Patriot propagandists’ interpretation of Simcoe.

The historical Simcoe, despite his firm belief that the stick was a better inducement for loyalty than the carrot, was no murderer. The Duke of Northumberland, who knew him well, claimed that Simcoe was “brave, humane, sensible, and honest.” Even Simcoe’s arch rival, American cavalry commander Colonel Henry Lee, described Simcoe as “one of the best officers in the British army” who “was a man of letters, and like the Romans and Grecians, cultivated science amid the turmoil of camp.” To Lee, Simcoe was “enterprising, resolute, and persevering.” It is hard to imagine an American officer endorsing someone who regularly murdered Patriot soldiers and brutalized civilians. Turn‘s portrayal sullies the memory of an officer who, though inveterately opposed to American independence, served his king and cause with honor and vigor.

Turn‘s depiction of Simcoe is not only unjust to a man who would go on to be one of the founders of modern Canada, it is regrettable in its predictability. Roukin gives us the classic cliché of a sexually aggressive and cruelly sadistic aristocratic English villain. The viewer instantly recalls the English lord who rapes newly married women under the guise of the law of Primae Noctis in Braveheart (1995) and Tim Roth’s repulsive interpretation of rapist and murder Archibald Cunningham in Rob Roy (1995). The Patriot‘s William Tavington, while not a rapist, does delight in burning innocent men, women, and children alive. All three characters accomplish their evil deeds with a smirk and a hint of an aristocratic lisp. But these characters are works of fiction. Though potentially inspired by historic characters, they bear fictional names. Their nefarious deeds require no documentation. Simcoe, on the other hand, was real. He and his Queen’s Rangers operated on Long Island and raided Setauket. Abe Woodhull considered Simcoe an especially dangerous foe, even wishing him dead. The opportunity to create a sophisticated, complex, zealous, and contemporarily relevant antagonist was thrown away on Roukin’s Simcoe. In the end, Turnfails most spectacularly by failing to live up to its potential for originality, squandering its chance to rejuvenate the Revolution by resorting to a tired trope. This unfortunate decision tarnishes an otherwise plausible and entertaining historical drama.

Further Reading:

For the relationship between historians and Hollywood, see Robert A. Rosenstone, “Inventing Historical Truth on the Silver Screen,” Cinéaste 29:2 (Spring 2004): 29-33 and Melvyn Stokes, American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (London, 2013), especially chapter 1: “The American Revolution.”

The February 3, 2015, discussion among the producers, cast, and advisors of Turn and faculty members from the College of William & Mary, entitled “Television, History, & Revolution,” can be viewed in full here.

For a brief biography of the real Major Hewlett, see Todd Braisted, “Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hewlett: The Loyal-est Loyalist,” Turn to a Historian, April 27, 2015.

For information on the relationship, or lack thereof, between Abraham Woodhull and Anna Strong, see Rachel Smith, “Abraham Woodhull and Anna Strong Revisited,” Turn to a Historian, April 6, 2015.

The interview in which Samuel Roukin characterizes Simcoe as “basically a sociopath” can be found here.

Find AMC’s official biography of the character John Graves Simcoe here.

For historical biographies of John Graves Simcoe see William R. Riddell, The Life of John Graves Simcoe, First Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Upper Canada, 1792-96 (Toronto, 1926), Mary Beacock Fryer and Christopher Dracott, John Graves Simcoe, 1752-1806: A Biography (Toronto, 1999), and Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York, 2010), chapter 2.

For Simcoe’s letter to his mother in which he mentions “the dreadful scene of civil war,” “an effectual reconciliation,” “infatuated wretches,” and “inevitable destruction,” see John Graves Simcoe to Katherine Simcoe, Boston, June 22, 1775. Transcribed in Riddell, The Life of John Graves Simcoe.

For Stephen Conway’s description of some British officers as “hard-liners,” see Stephen Conway, “To Subdue America: British Army Officer and the Conduct of the Revolutionary War,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43 (1986): 381-407.

For Simcoe’s approval of Howe’s policy of protecting civilian property and refusing to burn Boston upon the army’s evacuation, see John Graves Simcoe to Katherine Simcoe, Boston, March 13, 1776. Transcribed in Riddell, The Life of John Graves Simcoe.

For expressions of Simcoe’s religious faith, see John Graves Simcoe to Katherine Simcoe, Boston, June 22, 1775. Transcribed in Riddell, The Life of John Graves Simcoe, and John Graves Simcoe to Katherine Simcoe, Boston, March 13, 1776. Transcribed in Riddell, The Life of John Graves Simcoe.

Simcoe’s decision to reverse his policy on plundering enemy prisoners can be found in Simcoe’s Military Journal: A History of the Operations of a Partisan Corps, Called the Queen’s Rangers … (New York, 1844).

For Alexander Rose’s claims that “Simcoe exemplified the worst aspects of the British army,” engaged in “wanton brutality,” “stripped Oyster Bay bare of wood,” and “sacrilegiously converted” the Quaker meetinghouse into a storeroom see Alexander Rose, Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (New York, 2006).

For an example of Continental troops seizing private property, and General Washington’s opposition to it, see George Washington to the Board of War, Valley Forge, January 2-3, 1778. Founders Online, National Archives (last update: 2015-03-20). Source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 13, 26 December 1777-28 February 1778, ed. Edward G. Lengel (Charlottesville, Va., 2003).

See also George Washington to Colonel Armand-Charles Tuffin, marquis de La Rouërie, Wilmington, September 2, 1777. Founders Online, National Archives (last update: 2015-03-20). Source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 11, 19 August 1777-25 October 1777, eds. Philander D. Chase and Edward G. Lengel (Charlottesville, Va., 2001).

In his narration of the whipping of John Weeks, Rose chose to cite Frances Irwin, Oyster Bay in history; a sketch by Frances Irvin. With notes by Clara Irvin (Oyster Bay, New York [?]: 1963 [?]). Henry Onderdonk’s recounting of the alleged incident is very clear that Simcoe and his Queen’s Rangers were not present at the time. Henry Onderdonk, Documents and Letters Intended to Illustrate the Revolutionary Incidents of Queens County … (New York, 1846).

Abraham Woodhull’s account of Simcoe’s raid on his father’s house appeared in Samuel Culper to John Bolton, June 5, 1779. George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799: Series 4. General correspondence, 1697-1799, which can be accessed via a keyword search here.

For Rose’s interpretation of the raid see Rose, Washington’s Spies, 129, 163.

General Israel Putnam’s description of Edmund Palmer’s alleged plundering and beating of a “Mr. Willis” in July 1777 can be found in Major General Israel Putnam to George Washington, Peekskill, NY, July 19, 1777, Founders Online, National Archives (last update: 2015-03-20). Source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 10, 11 June 1777-18 August 1777, ed. Frank E. Grizzard Jr. (Charlottesville, Va., 2000).

For Simcoe’s protection of Colonel Thomas from his “irritated soldiers” see Simcoe’s Military Journal.

The Frenchman who visited Simcoe in Canada was François-Alexandre-Frédéric La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. His account of Simcoe’s hatred for the Americans can be found in Travels through the United States of North America, the Country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada … (London, 1800).

For the Pennsylvania Evening Post‘s claim that Simcoe’s “exploits have generally been marked with acts of the most inhuman barbarity” see Pennsylvania Evening Post, November 6, 1779.

For Livingston’s description of Simcoe as “a consummate savage” see Taylor, The Civil War of 1812.

For more on Livingston’s career as a Patriot propagandist see The Papers of William Livingston Carl E. Prince, Dennis P. Ryan, Pamela B. Schafler, and Donald W. White, eds., 5 vols., 2:3-6 (Trenton, N.J., 1979).

In a letter to Captain Joseph Brant, the Duke of Northumberland described Simcoe as “a most intimate friend of mine.” Northumberland thought Simcoe was “possessed of every good quality which can recommend him to [Brant’s] friendship. He is brave, humane, sensible, and honest.” Northumberland to Captain Joseph Brant. September 3, 1791. Simcoe’s Military Journal.

For Colonel Henry Lee’s recollections of Simcoe see Henry Lee, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States 2 vols., 2:8 (Philadelphia, 1812).

Abraham Woodhull confessed to Benjamin Tallmadge that had he not “fear of Law or Gospel, [he] would certainly [kill Col. Simcoe], for his usage to me.” Samuel Culper to John Bolton, December 12, 1779. George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799: Series 4. General correspondence, 1697-1799.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3.5 (July, 2015).

T. Cole Jones holds a PhD in early American history from the Johns Hopkins University. He is the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and will be joining the faculty of Purdue University as an assistant professor of history in the fall. His current book manuscript is entitled Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Radicalization of the American Revolution.

As the siege of Boston ended in March 1776, about 1,100 Loyalists and their families sailed from the town with the British military forces. Abigail Adams watched from Penn’s Hill as the ships passed by—the “largest Fleet ever seen in America,” she wrote. “They look like a forest.” Since then, only those Boston Loyalists who relocated elsewhere, chiefly in Nova Scotia or England, seem to have attracted much interest among American historians. Otherwise, the Boston Loyalists, their properties confiscated, their contributions to colonial Massachusetts denigrated, simply evaporate from Boston’s history.

But not every Loyalist left Boston, and although we know little about those remaining, we do know what happened to the most prominent among them, the Reverend Doctor Mather Byles the elder. When fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Byles was sixty-eight and a Congregationalist minister at the Eighth Congregational Church (called the Hollis Street Church) in Boston. By July 1777 he had been expelled from his ministry, convicted by the revolutionary Committee of Safety as a dangerous person, and placed under house arrest and the guard of an armed sentry. His crime: making disdainful jokes about the rebels and their cause.

The case of Mather Byles actually involves two clergymen named Mather Byles, father and son, and it redirects our attention to the local history of the Revolution as civil war—tearing families apart, setting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, and reconstructing the social order for generations to come. It even separated Loyalist families. For example, Mather Byles père stayed with his daughters in their Boston home during and after the blockade. But his Loyalist son, Mather Byles Jr., fled with his five children to the British garrison at Halifax.

If we think of the War of Independence as a civil war fought between British subjects, we also get a sharper look at revolutionary politics during and after 1775-1776. This story recalls the famous question Carl Becker asked a century ago: If the colonies were to get “home rule,” then “who should rule at home”? In 1776-1777, old man Byles learned to his cost that in his Boston home, the revolutionaries would rule. In this account, I focus on the siege and its aftermath in two events in 1776 and 1777 that disciplined him, punished him, and dramatically silenced him after he had spent seven decades as a British citizen in his hometown but suddenly found himself in a Boston he could no longer recognize.

There is a subplot.

In recent years we have seen a surge of interest in American loyalists. Highlights of this renewed attention to loyalists include: journal essays by prominent scholars such as Philip Gould, Alan Taylor, and Jasanoff; several recent books, most notably Cassandra Pybus’ Epic Journeys of Freedom, which generated a significant response; a conference at the University of Maine in 2009; and the 2011 AAS Seminar in the History of the Book dedicated to the topic. With Liberty’s Exiles Maya Jasanoff has added a remarkable book to this list, one that establishes the ground for all future studies of American loyalists. Jasanoff’s meticulous and ambitious study deftly captures the experience of a wide range of loyalist actors, including black slaves, Native American allies of the British, Southern planters, and powerful mid-Atlantic and New England political figures. The demographic diversity of her history is impressive, as is the fluidity with which her narrative moves across gendered, racial, social, and regional variations. For these reasons, it would be an injustice to reduce Liberty’s Exiles to the category of a study of loyalism. Loyalists may be the key players of the study, but the central theme of the book is the resituating of the American Revolution in a much broader global imperial history. As such, Liberty’s Exiles makes an indispensable contribution to a growing body of work on empire and the globalization of eighteenth-century studies.

Jasanoff provides a vivid sense of the impact that key events and decisions of the Revolution had on the people who were most affected by them.

Another way to describe Jasanoff’s study would be to say that this is a book about how the American loyalists who left the United States reshaped the British Empire in the decades following the American Revolution. The Revolution here becomes a crucial event in the history of the British Empire, which, of course, it was. But this dimension of the conflict has often been elided in nationalist histories focused on how the Revolution changed (or didn’t change) the politics and culture of thirteen colonies turned states. Either way, as the emphasis on exile in the title implies, Jasanoff’s study is principally focused on the loyalist migration out of the United States during and after the Revolution. The early chapters of the book explore the nature of American loyalists’ sentiments and their views of the Revolution. The trajectory of the narrative, however, is always directed toward their eventual departure for England, Canada, and other parts of the British Empire.

Liberty’s Exiles unfolds chronologically, but the focus of the study is biographical. Jasanoff builds her metanarrative around the stories of individual loyalists. This strategy of emphasizing individual experiences and tying them to the major political, military, and administrative events that unfolded has the advantage of giving a real human face to the conflict. In many ways it’s a brilliant decision by Jasanoff, especially when we consider how intensively the traditional story of the American Revolution has dehumanized loyalists. Through the stories of loyalists such as Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, David George, and William Augustus Bowles, Jasanoff provides a vivid sense of the impact that key events and decisions of the Revolution had on the people who were most affected by them. Policy decisions and military actions are not just currents in the broad flows of history; they have specific effects on individuals who then make decisions accordingly. In addition to providing a more concrete sense of how individuals experienced the events of the Revolution, this approach highlights the kind of agency afforded to these loyalists.

Foregrounding the biographical also calls attention to the different and similar questions faced by loyalists from across the demographic spectrum. We can see, for example, how the departure of British loyalist forces in Savannah affects both the elite white Johnston family and the free black George Liele. Jasanoff constantly organizes her narrative around these comparisons and contrasts. The other key device that moves the narrative forward is the comparison between regions. So with an event like the aftermath of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, she moves through a series of characters in Savannah and Charleston to show us how a diverse range of actors responded to the British departure from those cities. Later, in Part III of the book, she dedicates a series of chapters to the fates of loyalists in different outposts: the Bahamas, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and England. This way we get both local variations and regional comparisons. In both cases, Jasanoff’s remarkable archival work has enabled her to tell the stories of a diverse set of peoples. And Jasanoff has gone to great lengths to track down exiled American loyalists around the world and to tell their stories. Through them she traces the global effects of the American Revolution and its impact, particularly, on the British Empire as it rearticulated itself around the world. In this respect, Liberty’s Exilescontinues the work of Jasanoff’s first book, Edge of Empire, which explored the origins of the British Empire. Closer to home, the early chapters of Jasanoff’s book integrate the loyalists more fully into the story of the American Revolution and provide insights into what a less nationalistic reading of the Revolution might look like.

In its metanarrative, though, Liberty’s Exiles is only peripherally interested in the Revolution itself and in the United States more generally. The loyalists in this book are always on the path to departing their homes in the thirteen colonies. The narrative trajectory of Jasanoff’s history points away from the United States so that it sometimes can feel as if these characters, while clearly shaped by their American experiences, are mostly passing through the Revolution on their way to the more important work that will take place when they go on to challenge and reshape the British Empire. Ironically, then, the loyalists whose voices are absent from this study are those who remained in the United States after the war. Of course, those loyalists are not the subject of Liberty’s Exiles. They were not exiled.

Jasanoff’s study thus underscores a gaping hole in the historiography of the Revolution. For every loyalist who departed the colonies, at least seven stayed behind, and the number is more likely closer to ten or eleven. To do the math in shorthand: by Jasanoff’s count, which can be found in the detailed appendix to the book, about 60,000 loyalists emigrated from the United States in the 1780s and 1790s, but by most estimates there were between 500,000 and 750,000 loyalists at the time of the Revolution. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the United States in 1780 was about 2.8 million, and the general view among historians is that in 1775, 2.5 million people resided in the colonies. Using the 1775 figure as a baseline, if 30 percent of Americans were loyalists, there should have been a total of around 750,000 loyalists. Even if we take the most conservative estimate of 20 percent of the population, the total number of loyalists would be 500,000. By any count then, the vast majority of loyalists remained in the U.S. after the war. We sorely need a parallel study to Jasanoff’s to recover their experiences, their voices, and, most importantly, their role in the creation of the new American state. To take only one example, Tench Coxe, one of Alexander Hamilton’s most important confidants and advisors, was a loyalist who had left during the war but would return and come to play a key role in the new United States.

Virtually every study of American loyalists has focused primarily on the stories of those who left, from Mary Beth Norton’s study of loyalists who relocated to England and Bernard Bailyn’s biography of Thomas Hutchinson in the 1970s, to more recent work by Judith van Buskirk, Ruma Chopra, and Liam Riordan. No doubt the archive has made it much easier to tell the stories of those who left. For obvious reasons, loyalists who stayed tended not to publish narratives of their experiences of the war and not to advertise their feelings about the war and its effect on their families. We can find glimpses of those experiences, however, in the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, who married the loyalist Susan DeLancy, and in the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, whose loyalist father was banished from Pennsylvania when the author was a mere child. One suspects, however, that with the longstanding emphasis on the Revolution as a narrative of triumphant nationalism, scholars have also not looked terribly hard to uncover the stories of loyalists who stayed.

To tell the story of the loyalists who left, Jasanoff draws on the language of diaspora. Surprisingly, however, Jasanoff never comments on or tracks the larger implications of this concept. What does it mean to call the experience of largely white American loyalists who felt they had to leave the United States a diaspora? The term diaspora has both a long history and, perhaps more importantly for the purposes of Jasanoff’s study, a contentious recent history. Without going into that history here, suffice it to say that the study of diasporic peoples and their experiences has become so important in the social sciences and the humanities that it has an influential journal dedicated entirely to the topic. A quick perusal of any issue of Diaspora will show how vibrant and exciting, but also how contested, scholarship on the topic has been. Scholars of diaspora fiercely debate the applicability of the term to peoples other than the original Jewish and Armenian populations whose experiences have shaped its meaning. In recent decades, scholars such as George Shepperson and Brent Hayes Edwards have profitably argued for its applicability to the case of Africans relocated to the Americas. But they did so through a direct and careful engagement with the conceptual frame and theoretical meanings that diaspora has obtained.

Recently, in The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse has argued for diaspora as a useful framework for thinking about the British migration to the United States. Once again, though, Tennenhouse situates his use of the term in dialogue with its past uses and connotations. So, what does it mean to think of the loyalist exiles in terms of a diaspora? How do their experiences resemble the experiences of other diasporic peoples such as the Jews, the Armenians, and African-Americans? How might the insights of scholars who have worked on those other diasporic populations help us understand the ways these American loyalists experienced their dislocation and reconstructed their identities? By attending to these questions, Jasanoff might have helped us think about how a particular notion of what it meant to be British (or Anglo-American?), borne of a diasporic mentality, shaped these exiles’ approach to the work of reconceiving and refurbishing the British Empire. Diaspora theory, in other words, has long been engaged with precisely the questions that Jasanoff takes up in her book: How do global flows of population shape cultural practices and identities? How does the notion of a home, or a cultural memory of home, inform cultural agents’ or actors’ approach to fashioning themselves and their world abroad? Diaspora refers to a way of thinking about these questions related to globalization and to the movement of people and ideas across space and time, a topic that is at the heart of Liberty’s Exiles.

Liberty’s Exiles is required reading for any scholar interested in the early phases of globalization, the impact of the American Revolution on the reshaping of the British Empire, and the exportation of what we might identify as an American way of thinking about the relations between periphery and center in an imperial context. Thus far I have emphasized the “exiles” in Jasanoff’s title, but I would be remiss not to conclude by underscoring the metanarrative of “liberty” in her story of the American loyalist exiles. Again and again, Jasanoff traces how the ideas of liberty that the loyalists had developed during their time in the thirteen colonies would resurface and challenge the shape of British imperial authority in the other outposts of the empire to which they moved after the war. To some this might be the most surprising insight of Jasanoff’s book: the long-demonized loyalists who had been written out of American national history as opponents of liberty and democracy would become among the most vocal advocates of their rights and liberties in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, the Bahamas and elsewhere. As Jasanoff shows, the American loyalists were never opposed to liberty or notions of representation in government. They were simply opposed to a separation from the British Empire, which they, and for that matter their patriot countrymen, saw as the source of liberty in the modern world. Liberty’s Exiles tells how the loyalists’ commitments to those ideas would transform the British Empire, if not the world.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.1.5 (November, 2011).

Edward Larkin is associate professor of English at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (2005) and edited the Broadview edition of Paine’s Common Sense (2004). He is currently working on a study of the way notions of empire shaped the politics and culture of the early United States.