By Richard Yeomans
In recent months there has been a growing debate about New Brunswick’s loyalist past, and especially how it fits into the present with the question of whether to rename the University of New Brunswick’s law school building, Ludlow Hall. This is a debate worth having, even if it involves uncomfortable truths about our history.
To many, the loyalists of the American Revolution are understood as the founding mothers and fathers of this province. Through the 19th century, this thinking evolved into a kind of myth that later Canadian historians used to imagine the foundation of modern-day Canada.[1] But in doing so, the 19th-century “tory myth” skewed our view of the loyalists as contrary-minded Americans that rejected revolution.[2] In other words, the loyalists were remembered historically as a deferential group of refugees who wholehearted accepted the authority of Britain.
Ludlow Hall, [after 1984]. PR; Series 2; Sub-series 3; File 541; Item 2. Photo credit: Joe Stone & Son Ltd.
It would be impossible to drive along the Interstate 95 from Maine to Florida and not encounter countless Washington and Jefferson eponyms. Likewise, walking the streets of any New Brunswick town reveals similar Chipmans, Odells and Ludlows immortalized on the landscape as town names, city parks and one law school – now a subject of controversy.
However, the loyalists’ legacy is a far more complicated and these icons of loyalism were, in fact, only a small minority of a larger refugee population. In many instances, they were not even the policymakers of New Brunswick. The story, at this point, is only about 10 per cent told.[4]
Let’s remember that before the establishment of New Brunswick, loyalists poured into cities like New York to escape the violence of civil war. To maintain order, the British kept New York under a state of martial law: closing assemblies and refusing to reopen any form of municipal governance. Middling loyalists believed that the restoration of civil government in the city could be the catalyst to a larger restoration of peace in the colonies – suggesting that the success of government under the umbrella of a British Constitution would “quicken others by Our Example.”[5]
The British command, meanwhile, thought colonists enjoyed too many liberties, having sparked revolution in the first place. What is important is that middling loyalists challenged the unilateral power of the British, and sought a constitutional solution to armed conflict. When peace no longer looked possible, a small group of elite loyalists capitalized on the anxieties of the British, seeking to carve out positions of power in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
A group of 55 petitioners lobbied the British for tracts of land to the tune of 5,000 acres each, so in New Brunswick they might create “the most Gentleman-like Government on Earth.”
When news of the scheme reached refugees who had arrived in Saint John and Halifax, more than 600 loyalist refugees petitioned the crown to denounce “Persons ungenerous enough to attempt ingrossing [sic] to themselves so disproportionate a Share of what Government had allotted for their common benefit.”[6] In short, it was not well-received by other loyalist refugees who were not part of this elite.
That’s because middling refugees, especially those that landed in New Brunswick, had a keen sense of what was in the common interest, and that it was the duty of government to serve the many over the interests of the few. In previous generations of scholarship on the loyalists, this characteristic of the refugees of the American Revolution was lost in a tide of biographical analyses of specific elite loyalists: confined within the concept of an age of revolutions. These accounts of the loyalists have begun to wane in the last decade, and more transnational methodologies and approaches have shown loyalists as something more than just an isolated group within a larger British World.[7] Much remains to be done to fully pull back the curtain of the tory myth, but historians who examine the loyalists as more than counter-revolutionary have made great strides toward better understanding a loyalist mentality, particularly when we discuss the loyalists within a frame of an age of constitutions.[8]
This unique mentality materialized countless times in New Brunswick through the 1790s, and well into the early 19th century. Legislators such as Elias Hardy, Amos Botsford, and James Glenie – all of whom challenged the elite minority of New Brunswick – pushed for greater representative control in the colony and for a progressive legal establishment. They understood the unique problems refugees faced in post-revolution New Brunswick, where an old stock executive continuously attempted to bulwark its own power, clashing with more democratic middling groups. These loyalists and legislators have received comparatively little scholarly attention, and have in turn figured less prominently in public commemorations of the loyalists, such as the naming of buildings.
In a recent article published in by Brunswick News, reporter John Chilibeck wrote that among the American refugees, Ludlow is “acknowledged by historians as one of the most prominent loyalists who came to New Brunswick in its infancy, whose influence helped shape the province in its first 25 years.”[9] And this is true. Past historians have focused overwhelmingly on Ludlow and others like him – in short, on the few and not the many. Today, those who contend that only a small minority represented a larger loyalist refugee experience and tradition use that past focus as a flimsy shield.
Today’s controversy surrounding Ludlow is certainly justifiable. He was more than likely the owner of enslaved black people, and more evidence supports rather than disputes this accusation. Ludlow was also one of the last judges in the British Empire to uphold, legally, the institution of owning human beings.[10] Historical attention on Ludlow is also illustrative of a larger problem within loyalist studies, but one that is eroding as historians shift focus away from a revolutionary and counter-revolutionary dichotomy.
By the standards of even his own time, Ludlow was an inert conservative who did not represent the larger population of loyalist New Brunswick. And like his peers who signed the Petition of 55, Ludlow’s entire career was about his own prestige, not the common interest of New Brunswickers.
For that reason, we must not take the work of past historians as the defence of a man who was antiquated even in his own time. Instead, we must look to those New Brunswickers that sought to build a progressive place. When we replace Ludlow – and should it be with another loyalist – let it be a Hardy, Botsford or Glenie.
But if the goal is to commemorate a New Brunswicker, let us look more broadly, and remember the important contributions of the Acadians and Indigenous/Peoples of Colour that make up the fabric of this province. After all, history is always being rewritten.
Richard Yeomans is a PhD student in the Department of History at UNB.
Notes:
[1]At the national level, loyalist refugees have been positioned as founders numerous times. See, for example, A. R. M. Lower, Colony to Nation: A History of Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977). For a New Brunswick specific example, see, W. Stewart MacNutt, New Brunswick, A History: 1784-1867 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1963).
[2] See Murray Barkley, “The Loyalist Tradition in New Brunswick: the Growth and Evolution of an Historical Myth, 1825-1914,” Acadiensis, 4, 2 (1975): 3-45; Norman James Knowles, “‘Object lessons’: Loyalist Monuments and the Creation of Usable Pasts,” in Inventing the Loyalists (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
[3] Ann G. Condon, The Loyalist Dream for New Brunswick: The Envy of the American States (Fredericton: New Ireland Press, 1984).
[4] To this point, I juxtapose the ‘Petition of 55’ and the response of over 600 loyalists who counter petitioned as a representation of loyalist refugees in the Maritimes. Thought of this way, the Fifty-five Petitioners and their peers represent 10 per cent of a larger loyalist body, but appear disproportionately in loyalist scholarship and commemorations.
[5] Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City During the Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011): 65-66.
[6] Quoted in Esther Clark Wright, The Loyalists of New Brunswick (Moncton: Moncton Publishing Company Limited, Second Edition, 1972): 176.
[7] Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011);
[8] In a forthcoming article in the CHR, Elizabeth Mancke approaches the loyalists as part of larger constitutional dialogue within the British World. As she writes, “to label it an ‘Age of Constitutionalism’ includes revolution as one response to a constitutional crisis, but it does not marginalize non-violent movements for constitutional change and reform.” In other words, the loyalists cease to be a marginal component of larger political changes during the long eighteenth century. Elizabeth Mancke, “The Age of Constitutionalism and the New Political History,” Canadian Historical Review, 100, 4 (December, 2019): 625.
[9] John Chilibeck, “Students want Ludlow name off hall, citing his advocacy of slavery,” The Telegraph Journal, Saint John, NB, Friday, October 11, 2019, A2.
[10] For further investigation into Ludlow’s career in New Brunswick, see Judith Fingard, “The New England Company and the New Brunswick Indians, 1786-1826: A Comment on the Colonial Perversion of British Benevolence,” Acadiensis, 1, 2 (Spring, 1972): 29-42; C. M. Wallace, “LUDLOW, GEORGE DUNCAN,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 5, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed October 30, 2019, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ludlow_george_duncan_5E.html; Joseph Wilson Lawrence, and Acadiensis, The Judges of New Brunswick and Their Times. Sources in the History of Atlantic Canada, No. 4 (Fredericton, N.B.: Acadiensis Press, 1985); Harvey Amani Whitfield, North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016).
Acadiensis 