Revolutionary Loyalism: Enslavement and Liberation

A hybrid fellow’s forum with Liam Riordan, the Adelaide and Alan Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine from March 23, 2023. Recording available.

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About the Presentation

Those who opposed the American Revolution have generally been vilified or ignored in American public memory and even by most US-based historians. Yet, loyalists often had compelling and valid reasons for distrusting the rebellion. Rather than simply celebrate loyalists, as in the inset to the portrait by Benjamin West (himself a loyal Briton) of Loyalist Claims Commissioner John Wilmot, this presentation uses comparative biography to examine Revolutionary loyalism as a force for both enslavement and liberation. 

Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston was an enslaver from Georgia, whose postwar years in East Florida and Jamaica relied on continuing and intensifying the enslavement of others. Thomas Peters, by contrast, was enslaved in North Carolina, but fought with the British for the duration of the war, and then strove for greater rights as a free Afro-Briton in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, London, and Sierra Leone. The political breadth of loyalists was akin to that of patriots, neither was predominantly anti-slavery—but loyalism did contribute to greater direct liberation of enslaved people during the war, and it may even have had the greater radical potential.

 

 

About Liam Riordan

Liam Riordan is the Adelaide and Alan Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine. The religious, racial, and ethnic diversity of the Philadelphia region in the Revolutionary period was the subject of his first book, Identities in the New Nation. His current research examines loyalists, those who opposed the rebellion that created the United States. Another area of expertise is the Maine statehood era, its bicentennial commemoration, and Public History. In 2020 he received the Maine Historical Society’s Neal W. Allen History Award as well as the Outstanding Faculty Member Award for Public Engagement from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UMaine. He currently chairs the City of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission. He was the Director of the University of Maine Humanities Center (2014-2016), a Board Member of the Maine Humanities Council (2010-2017), the state affiliate of the NEH, and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Glasgow (2012).