Eleven Exiles: Accounts of Loyalists of the American Revolution

Ian K. Steele was Professor in the Department of History, University of Western Ontario, London.

This collection of biographies opens with a brief, balanced survey of the coming of the American Revolution and the dispersal of the loyalists. Co-editor John Grant follows this with a full-length portrait of John Howe, printer’s apprentice who left Boston with the British evacuation and became a prominent publisher and postmaster in Halifax. Francis Green, Boston soldier and merchant who fled in the same flotilla, is carefully described by Phyllis Blakeley, Nova Scotia’s provincial archivist and co-editor of this volume. She also contributes the fascinating story of Boston King, a South Carolina negro carpenter who settled in Birchtown, N.S., became a Methodist preacher, and migrated again to Sierra Leone.

When nine authors write eleven biographies of loyalists, the authors’ perspectives are more disparate than those of their subjects. The editors should not, however, have tolerated fictitious description, nor is it necessary to have those “shots heard around the world” three times. Most of the loyalists met here are presented to fit English Canada’s founding myth. Their loyalty, determination, and suffering are reverenced, even if some had no choice, received special treatment, or prospered more than they could have otherwise. Robert Allen’s description of William Jarvis is exceptional, offering sensible reservations about this Connecticut loyalist who became the arrogant “Mr. Secretary” of Upper Canada.

Scholarly study of loyalists will be transformed by Volume V of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Eleven Exiles is for a different audience — general readers anxious to meet a few interesting loyalists.