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. This groundbreaking book offers the first global
history of the loyalist exodus to Canada, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone,
India, and beyond. Following 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, Liberty’s Exiles challenges conventional
understandings about the founding of the United States and the shaping
of the postrevolutionary world. Based on original research on four
continents, this book is at once an intimate narrative history and a
provocative new analysis—a story about the past that helps us think
about migration, tolerance, and liberty in the world today.