On Election Day 2020, I opened a new book and started reading.

It was an ironic choice for that day, an account of when Americans felt bitterly towards their neighbors, angry enough burn them out of house and home.

No, it wasn’t about Election Day 2016.

Nope, not the Civil War, either.

It was the Revolutionary War. In Liberty’s Exiles, author Maya Jasanoff gives us a fascinating and readable account of British citizens who fought against America’s founding.

Once the treaties were signed and the muskets laid to rest, the Patriots looked at the Tories and pretty much said, Thanks for nothin’. Now get lost.

And a few thousand people, loyal to King George, were now refugees. Where could they go?

If you’re going to be loyal to the country your neighbors fought against, you can’t do better than pledge yourself to the Britain of the late 1700s. These were the days when “the sun never set on the British Empire.” The king and his ministers could easily offer land elsewhere (lots of places to choose from), ships in which to get there, food and money until you could build a house, get some crops, and maybe compensation for property you lost in the conflict.

From these pages tumble forth the vanished goods of American households: rum puncheons, damask bedspreads, carpenter’s tools, old brass coffee pots, slick new saddles, favorite garnet earrings.

And so people packed up whatever they had left and spread out — to Nova Scotia, to the Bahamas, to Sierra Leone. Some even sailed “home” to Britain, though it most certainly did not feel like home. What is this damp and foggy island?

You might see them in your mind’s eye, a lot of rosy-cheeked Anglos. But they were also blacks (free and enslaved), and Indians (Creeks and Mohawks) who served as soldiers in the war. Their nation owed them some gratitude.

Promising people acres of land is different than delivering on that promise. Let’s just say that places like Nova Scotia and the others were a little raw at the time, a little unknown, a little full of blasting winters or tropical diseases, or big snakes and zoo animals on the loose.

One upside was getting off the boat and finding the new village full of folks you knew back in Savannah or Boston. But the biggest downside was up-ended lives which, for not a few, became their ever-after.

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Photo credit: Ron Cogswell on Visualhunt.com / CC BY