in North America. It was fighting its two biggest imperial rivals in a war around the world. The entry of foreign powers also had critical effects in deepening the sense of division between patriots and loyalists, Americans and Britons. It was no coincidence that persecution of loyalists measurably increased after Saratoga, manifested in a series of anti-loyalist laws. Within six months of the battle, six states had stiffened and expanded their test laws, enforcing loyalty oaths. In 1778 New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina all passed punitive laws allowing loyalists to be arrested or banished. Pennsylvania passed an act of attainder against “divers traitors.” New Jersey established a committee of safety. Delaware prohibited trade with the enemy. Georgia implemented a vague but sinister law against “the dangerous consequences that may arise from the practices of disaffected...persons within this state.”61 And when the British strategically abandoned Philadelphia in June 1778, just nine months after they had captured it, thousands more loyalists became refugees—including Joseph Galloway and his daughter Betsy, bound for Britain.
It was not only whites who took flight. Saratoga very nearly sounded the death knell for Iroquois support of the British. “Upon the News of General Burgoynes Disaster,” Molly Brant “found the five Nations very wavering & unstable.” Still, she rallied her allies, reminding a Seneca chief “of the former great Friendship & Attachment which subsisted between him and the late Sr Wm Johnson, whose Memory she never mentions but with Tears in her Eyes” and of his promise “to live and die a firm Friend & Ally to the King of England and his Friends.” So persuasive were her arguments on the chief “and the rest of the 5 Nations present, that they promised her faithfully to stick up strictly to the Engagements to her late worthy Friend, and for his & her sake espouse the Kings Cause vigorously and steadily avenge her wrongs & Injuries.”62 Mohawk loyalism prevailed. But Molly Brant and most of the Mohawks had by now become refugees themselves by fleeing west to the Canadian frontier for safety, sharing in a common loyalist fate.
EVER SINCE 1775, British officials had hoped for—if not expected and counted on—a large popular turnout among loyalists to bring the war swiftly to an end. About nineteen thousand loyalists joined provincial regiments, which compared reasonably well with the Continental Army’s maximum force of twenty-five thousand, but fell considerably short of the combined American strength including patriot militias, to say nothing of the hordes of men required by the consistently troop-starved British.63 After Saratoga, mustering loyalist manpower became more urgent than ever. Joseph Galloway and other prominent refugees in England persuaded British ministers, notably the colonial secretary Lord George Germain, that loyalists would still flock to the British flag if given the right support. The best prospects for this lay in the southern colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. Demographically, economically, and culturally, these colonies resembled the neighboring colonies of East and West Florida and the British West Indies—all of which remained loyal—about as much as they did those of New England, the hotbed of revolution. They had the highest ratio of slaves to whites in the colonies (hovering at about one to one), which tended to encourage a commitment to social stability among whites fearful of slave uprisings. Georgia, in particular, established in 1733, had a white population of only about thirty-five thousand, many of whom had close ties to Britain and the British Caribbean.64 So it made good sense for Britain to turn its strategic attention south after the disaster of Saratoga.
John Lichtenstein (or Lightenstone, as he often Anglicized it) was exactly the kind of southern loyalist the British hoped would help. In 1762 Lichtenstein had immigrated to Georgia from the eastern fringe of Europe: he had been born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a German Protestant minister. In Georgia he married Catherine Delegal, the daughter of one of the colony’s first settlers, a Huguenot. Lichtenstein acquired a modest indigo plantation on Skidaway Island, south of Savannah, and a dozen slaves; he also earned a commission as captain of a government scout boat, patrolling coastal waterways. The Lichtensteins’ only child, Elizabeth, born in 1764, remembered her Skid-away home as a veritable eden of “figs, peaches, pomegranates, quinces, plums, mulberries, nectarines, and oranges.” But the idyll did not last. When Elizabeth was ten her mother died; and two years later, the outbreak of war upset her world again. Lichtenstein continued to command the scout boat until patriots demanded that he turn it over to them. He refused, staying loyal to the government to which he owed his livelihood. But the patriots confiscated the boat anyway, and Lichtenstein retreated to Skidaway.65
One morning in 1776, while he was shaving, Lichtenstein looked out the window to see a group of armed men approaching. Fortunately for him, one of his slaves valiantly distracted the party, giving him time to dress hurriedly and slip away in a small boat along with three slaves. The fugitives made their way to a British man-of-war anchored off Savannah. Lichtenstein sailed with the ship (which was also carrying Georgia’s now deposed colonial governor, Sir James Wright) to the safe haven of Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax, he joined the 1776 expedition against New York City, and there was formally commissioned in the quartermaster’s office of the British army.
It was in this capacity that Lichtenstein became one of three thousand British and loyalist soldiers who, in the last days of 1778, landed in the swamps outside Savannah to commence Britain’s southern offensive. For him and many of the men squelching through the rice fields, this was a homecoming. Lichtenstein knew the area so well that he helped the commanding officer, Highlander colonel Archibald Campbell, choose the spot to disembark. The British swiftly captured Savannah and established it as a bridgehead for further operations. Campbell marched toward Augusta to secure the backcountry, with the help of Thomas Brown’s Rangers and other loyalist reinforcements. Sir James Wright returned to his post as governor, making Georgia the only revolting colony formally restored to crown control.
Through all this time, Elizabeth Lichtenstein had been tucked away from conflict on an aunt’s plantation in the country. Now back in Savannah, Lichtenstein immediately sent a passport for his long-lost daughter to join him. She entered a city still marked by battle: the streets were strewn with papers torn from books and ledgers; feathers ripped from bedding skimmed across the dirt. So much seemed new to her—her father, for a start, whom she had not seen in three years, and whom she regarded with reverence and awe. City life, too, presented unfamiliar scenes to an “unsophisticated girl, quite new to the world, its customs and usages,” who had spent the last few years effectively in hiding. Still, Elizabeth was no longer a child of twelve. At fifteen, she mixed with her father’s new loyalist friends as a young adult. Indeed, much to her father’s alarm, she promptly fell in love.66
Elizabeth stayed in Savannah with the family of Dr. Lewis Johnston, a Scot who had immigrated to Georgia in the early 1750s via a short sojourn on St. Kitts, where he had married the niece of a planter. Johnston managed an impressively varied career as a medical doctor, a wealthy planter, and a public servant, as a member of the governor’s council and speaker of the assembly. When war broke out, the doctor and his family refused to break their allegiance and emerged among Savannah’s most prominent loyalists. One of Johnston’s younger brothers was Savannah’s leading printer and refused to print patriot declarations in his newspaper. To protect himself and his precious typefaces, he shut down the press and took his materials into the back-country for safety.67 Dr. Johnston’s sons carried the family politics onto the battlefield. One son, Andrew, joined Brown’s Rangers and saw tough service on the Florida frontier. Another son, William Martin Johnston, escaped from Savannah on the same ship as John Lichtenstein—with whom he became good friends—and joined a loyalist regiment in New York. Before the war, “Billy” had been a popular if feckless medical student (studying under Philadelphia’s celebrated doctor and patriot Benjamin Rush), more given to gaming than books. Stationed in occupied New York, the captain quickly became one of the city’s “dashing fashionables,” a charmer, flirt, and gambler. So it was no wonder that when Lichtenstein’s twenty-five-year-old friend began paying court to young Elizabeth, ten years his junior—and