minister and read about his mission. The most “immediate object to which all other considerations must give way” sounded deceptively simple: Carleton was to withdraw “the garrison, artillery, provisions, stores of all kinds, every species of public property” from New York, Charleston, and Savannah, as well as St. Augustine in East Florida if he saw fit. Meanwhile, in his role as a peace commissioner, he was to placate the Americans as much as possible in order “to revive old affections and extinguish late jealousies”—part of a hearts-and-minds offensive designed to separate the Americans from the French. There was one group of people who were to command his closest attention. Carleton must extend his “tenderest and most honourable care” to the loyalists, by helping them move to “whatever other parts of America in His Majesty’s possession they choose to settle.”23
The mission was defined clearly in outline, but executing it would be daunting indeed. He had up to 100,000 soldiers and civilians in British-held cities to evacuate. Yet he possessed scant resources with which to provision them, no clear instructions on where actually to send them, and fewer than fifty ships at his disposal. And for all that hostilities had officially ceased, Carleton discovered a different reality on the ground. From New York to the swamps and forests of the lower south, the civil war continued, clouding over the impending evacuations with violence.
TO RECOVER the conflicts that continued in America during the months after Yorktown is to understand the passion with which some loyalists clung to, and fought for, their version of British America. Equally important, it helps explain why so many loyalists chose to follow the departing British. Wartime violence had pushed thousands of loyalists into British lines, for what they hoped would be a temporary stay. But as internecine conflict continued into peacetime, present danger and the threat of future reprisals made loyalists fear for their long-term welfare in the United States. It transformed their displacement into an international diaspora.
Carleton landed in New York on May 5, 1782, to find himself immediately swept up in a controversy that revealed the depth of factional animosity still raging in the colonies. It centered in part around one of New York’s leading loyalists, William Franklin, the last royal governor of New Jersey, and the only son of patriot statesman Benjamin Franklin. How long ago it seemed that father and son had flown a kite together, the wet string twirling and pulling in William’s hands as the square of stretched silk bobbed, fluttered, and caught the currents up toward the storm clouds. For thirty years the Franklins had been close partners in life and work, moving together to London and back and sharing in the early upbringing of William’s son, Temple. But the coming of war opened an unbridgeable rift between them. Benjamin Franklin broke with British authority, signed the Declaration of Independence, and moved to Paris, where he now served as a peace commissioner and one of the United States’ most revered public figures. William Franklin, though no friend to arbitrary power, and a champion of imperial reform, could not bring himself to renounce his loyalty to the king—and endured two years as a patriot prisoner for his refusal. During his time in jail, his beloved wife Elizabeth fell dangerously ill, but Washington denied Franklin permission to visit her. She “died of a broken heart” before her husband could see her. Equally painful for William, Benjamin had essentially adopted Temple Franklin as his own and taken the lad to Paris, where Temple acted as secretary to the American peace commission. The relationship between Benjamin and William Franklin would never be restored, and stands out as the highest-profile example of how this civil war tore families apart.24
William Franklin arrived in New York City after his release from jail, battered, disappointed, and ready to fight back. His efforts to organize loyalists were formalized in 1780 with the creation of a so-called Board of Associated Loyalists, which sponsored paramilitary “companies of safety”—a counterpart to patriot committees of safety—to protect loyalists in the hinterland.25 Under the board’s patronage, partisan fighting ravaged the greater New York area well after Yorktown. On an early spring day in 1782, a patriot captain named Joshua Huddy, notorious for his rampages through central New Jersey, was found swinging from a tree at Sandy Hook. A paper pinned to his chest declared, “We, the Refugees, have with grief long beheld the cruel murders of our brethren, and . . . determine to hang man for man, as long as a refugee is left existing. . . . UP GOES HUDDY FOR PHILIP WHITE.” A loyalist captain had ordered the execution—apparently on William Franklin’s instructions—in retaliation for the summary killing of another loyalist, Philip White, some days earlier. Outraged by the incident, George Washington demanded that the perpetrator be handed over for punishment or else he would order a British prisoner of war executed in his stead. To make matters worse, the officer selected for American retribution—a Yorktown prisoner—turned out to be the poignantly young and impressively well-connected Charles Asgill, heir to a baronetcy. Before long the New York spat had become an international incident, with Prime Minister Shelburne asking Benjamin Franklin to intercede personally on Asgill’s behalf.26
When the new commander in chief arrived in New York City, patriots were screaming for justice, loyalists were up in arms to protect their own, and British regulars were incensed at the idea of an innocent officer falling victim to Washington’s lex talionis. On his very first day on shore, Carleton spent two hours closeted with William Franklin and William Smith discussing the case. Asgill was ultimately relieved thanks to a direct appeal from his mother to a different American ally, Queen Marie Antoinette. Washington did not come out well from the affair: his unforgiving stance verged on downright cruelty. But William Franklin came out looking worse. As the sordid details of the case emerged before boards of inquiry and a court-martial, Franklin appeared vengeful and injudicious, denting his reputation as a sage leader. It was a thoroughly souring experience for the former governor. The news, which reached America in midsummer 1782, that Britain had agreed to recognize American independence—that Franklin’s father had won—only compounded his despair. In August 1782, William Franklin sailed to England for a life in exile, carrying with him—“for a Pretext,” thought William Smith—“a Petition to the King from the Loyalists, deprecating the Separation of the Empire and imploring Protection,” a list of grievances against the government whose asylum he sought.27
The Asgill affair was just the first instance of the violence still haunting America that Carleton had to contend with. On the western edges of New York and Pennsylvania, Britain’s Indian allies had been caught up in another ongoing partisan struggle. After Saratoga, Molly Brant had moved to Niagara with the other Mohawks from her village. Like many a refugee, she found herself “not at all reconciled to this place & Country,” for it “at first seemed very hard for her to leave her old Mother . . . & friends behind and live in a Country she was an entire Stranger in.”28 Still, she continued to muster support for the British, and was rewarded in turn with a house built for her on Carleton Island, at the far eastern tip of Lake Ontario. Joseph Brant fought in an intensifying series of offensives and counteroffensives: patriots led a scorched-earth campaign across the Finger Lakes region; Indian war parties and loyalist militias swooped down on patriot outposts ranging all the way from the Mohawk to the Ohio rivers.29 Brant’s raids in one month alone resulted in ninety people captured and killed, more than a hundred houses destroyed, and five hundred cattle and horses seized.30 Such vicious frontier war attested to an animosity between white colonists and Indians too entrenched for a formal Anglo-American cease-fire to eliminate. These hatreds boiled over in what was probably the largest massacre of civilians during the entire American Revolution, five months after Yorktown. In far western Pennsylvania, patriots captured a village of pacifist Moravian Delaware Indians and methodically murdered every one, striking each male victim first with a blow to the head, as livestock were stunned before slaughter, then tearing off their scalps.31 Carleton’s ability to neutralize frontier violence would have special bearing on the future of the refugee Mohawks.
Of all