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Even if Britain stopped fighting, loyalists believed that British rule in the colonies could still be saved. Britain could refuse to grant the colonies independence and instead offer them some kind of self-rule, rather like Joseph Galloway’s plan of union, or an analogous proposal by William Smith to create an American parliament.5 This had been the thrust of British peace initiatives during the war, which had granted virtually everything the colonists had requested up to 1775, and even floated the possibility of admitting American representatives into the House of Commons. Though Congress had dismissed the most significant British overture, the Carlisle peace commission of 1778, insisting on independence as a prerequisite for further talks, Smith, Galloway, and others still held out for an imperial federal union.6 Loyalists could perhaps take some comfort in knowing that King George III himself was so strongly opposed to independence that he threatened to abdicate if it were granted. “A separation from America would anihilate the rank in which the British empire stands among European States,” he declared, “and would render my situation in this country below continuing an object to me.”7
Partly because of the range of possibilities still in play after Yorktown, it took a year for British and American negotiators to work out a preliminary peace treaty, and another year until a definitive peace was signed and British troops evacuated. Historians tend to fast-forward through these two years as if their outcome were inevitable. But for loyalists in America, especially those who had already fled to British-occupied cities, these years of peacemaking proved just as stressful as the years of war. Loyalists saw their hopes for a continued British relationship with the colonies dashed, one after another. They wanted renewed military offensives; but Britain declared a cessation of hostilities. They wanted the colonies to remain part of a confederated empire; Britain acknowledged U.S. independence. They wanted protection from reprisals and security of property; the Anglo-American treaty left many feeling just as “abandoned” by the British as the Yorktown loyalists had been. They wanted to preserve the British Empire, and instead they watched the British start to leave. By the middle of 1782, loyalists in British-occupied New York, Charleston, and Savannah confronted urgent choices about where to vest their own futures: in the United States or in other quarters of the British Empire. In a climate of persistent violence and uncertainty, the majority chose to evacuate with the British. Yet the wrenching results of the peace also left them feeling deeply frustrated with the British authorities who brokered it. Loyalists thus often went into exile harboring grievances against the very same government they relied on for support. Their disheartening final months in America laid the groundwork for a recurring pattern of discontent elsewhere in the British Empire, with repercussions as far afield as Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone.
It was to be as much in European political and diplomatic councils as on a Virginia battlefield that loyalist dreams came crashing down. Back in Westminster, support crumbled for the war effort and the wavering government of Lord North. After all, many Britons had never wanted to go to war in the colonies in the first place. The “friends of America” included some of the greatest politicians of the age, such as the eminent political philosopher Edmund Burke. They also included future leaders William Pitt the Younger, elected to Parliament in 1781 at the tender age of twenty-one, and Charles James Fox, a radical aristocrat, who ostentatiously dressed in buff and blue, the colors of Washington’s army. Though North’s political adversaries had long been stymied by their own internal rifts, the opposition regrouped after Yorktown and emerged determined to bring the war in America to an end.8
Late one February night in 1782, a venerable general rose from the narrow wooden benches of the House of Commons to speak out against a war “marked in the best blood of the empire,” “traced...by the ravaging of towns and the murder of families; by outrages in every corner of America, and by ruin at home.”9 He went on to propose a motion to end “the farther prosecution of the offensive war on the continent of North America, for the purpose of reducing the revolted colonies to obedience by force.” At half past one in the morning, Parliament voted in favor of the motion by a slim margin of nineteen votes.10 Two weeks later, North failed a vote of “no further confidence” (the first use of such a measure in British history) and submitted his resignation.11 In North’s leavetaking meeting with King George III the next day, the king, resistant to the bitter end to the idea of American independence, dismissed his prime minister coldly, saying, “Remember, my Lord, that it is you who desert me, not I you.”12
In June 1782, the new prime minister, William Petty, Earl of Shelburne—another friend of America—took the critical decision to acknowledge American independence. This concession made sense from a metropolitan British perspective, because the future of the thirteen colonies was only part of a larger strategic picture involving France and Spain. It mattered less to Britain whether the United States was independent than whether it remained in a British, as opposed to French, sphere of influence. For loyalists, though, this was the worst news yet, ending any prospect of continued imperial ties. It also raised the next major challenge for administrators. How would the colonial relationship actually be dismantled? This question had two distinct parts. One was addressed in Paris, where British and American peace negotiators began to hash out the details of U.S. independence. There were borders to be drawn. There were economic relationships to be untangled, from trade privileges to the resolution of transatlantic debts. Then there was the issue that most gripped the loyalists’ attention. What provisions would be made to protect them from legal and social reprisals, and compensate them for their confiscated property?
Meanwhile in North America, British officials had to figure out how to phase out Britain’s physical presence on the ground. There were about thirty-five thousand British and Hessian troops to be withdrawn, and substantial British garrisons in three cities—New York, Charleston, and Savannah—to be dismantled. These cities also held at least sixty thousand loyalists and slaves living under British protection, whose welfare had to be taken into account. A further difficulty was that Sir Henry Clinton had resigned his position as commander in chief immediately after Yorktown, leaving nobody actually in charge of superintending this huge task. The job description for his successor was as awe-inspiring as it was unenviable: it required nothing short of deconstructing the apparatus of an empire from the bottom up. Who could be entrusted with it? Fortunately the king and his ministers, despite their many differences, readily agreed on whom to appoint. Sir Guy Carleton, veteran military officer and colonial administrator, was their man.
OF ALL the British officials who influenced the fate of refugee loyalists, Sir Guy Carleton was far and away the most significant, and also the most trusted and well liked. (Lord Dunmore, for instance, who continued to be involved in loyalist affairs, rarely commanded either trust or affection.) As the primary manager of Britain’s evacuation from the United States, Carleton bore the brunt of responsibility for the refugees and slaves under British protection. His actions determined their futures to an extent unrivalled by any other policymaker, and his ideas defined the shape of the loyalist migration in crucial ways. So what sort of a person was the new commander in chief ? Horace Walpole, one of Georgian Britain’s sharpest commentators, estimated Carle ton to be “a grave man, and good officer, and reckoned sensible”—a sight better than any of the ineffectual commanders who had preceded him.13 Many of those who met the general agreed with Walpole’s assessment. Stiff and closed in demeanor, Carleton may well have chilled less commanding souls when he looked down his long, severe nose at them from an imposing height (for the era) of six feet. But if anybody could have glimpsed behind the general’s ungiving façade as he traveled down to Portsmouth on April 1, 1782, and waited for the Ceres to sail to New York, they would surely have detected confidence and at least a whiff of self-congratulation. For Carleton had been to North America before, three memorable times—and this appointment, coming