This volume offers for the first time a comprehensive account of the relationships and interests of that vast number of colonial Americns whose loyalty to the Crown during the Revolution earned them exile and confiscation of their property. It offers maximum usefulness to readers, including the key, by names of testators, to many wills, will abstracts, and administrations-- some of which may be the only copies extant. C0045HB - $22.50
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER This groundbreaking book offers the first global history of the loyalist exodus to Canada, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, India, and beyond. At the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand Americans loyal to the British cause fled the United States and became refugees throughout the British Empire. Liberty’s Exiles tells their story. This surprising new account of the founding of the United States and the shaping of the post-revolutionary world traces extraordinary journeys like the one of Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who led her growing family to Britain, Jamaica, and Canada, questing for a home; black loyalists such as David George, who escaped from slavery in Virginia and went on to found Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone; and Mohawk Indian leader Joseph Brant, who tried to find autonomy for his people in Ontario. Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, this book is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative analysis that changes how we see the revolution’s “losers” and their legacies.
This book is a copy of the author's finding aid for Audit Office 12. The original documents that constitute Audit Office 12 are stored in the National Archives in London, England. Audit Office 12 contains documents of nine commissions. Essentially all of Audit Office 12 concerns monetary claims by American Loyalists for relief, compensation, or other payments, as a consequence of the American Revolution. The body of material, thus collected, contains considerable information about the politics of the revolution, the conduct of the war, and the experiences of individual Loyalists. All of Audit Office 12 was microfilmed by the Public Archives of Canada (now part of the Library and Archives of Canada) on microfilm reels B-1155 to B-1183. This book is based on that microfilm copy.
This study seeks to primarily answer two questions: who were the Loyalists and why were they loyal? Some light may also be shown on the suffering of the Loyalists, their political philosophy, and the reasons for their failure. The author journeys through time investigating the "intrigues" in each state chiefly by examining the remaining records of the claims commission set up by the British government to indemnify American Loyalists for losses caused by the Revolution. -- Pref.
