What if the Loyalists trekked west after the American Revolution? And became white savages of the frontier?

[Strategos' Risk]

What if going to Canada and Britain, the Loyalists had headed west towards Louisiana territory and beyond after the U.S. won its independence? I'm inspired by the Boer Trekkers, the Wilderness Walk from For Want of a Nail. Alternatively, what if they went to where Tecumseh's Northwest Confederacy and take refuge with friendly Indian tribes. These renegade Tories become the white bogeymen of the frontier and a long-simmering source of tension between the Americans and the British despite the latter having formally denounced them as outlaws. (Though on occasion, British/Canadian local authorities will arm them to play off against the Americans.) They become roughly equivalent to the Boers to the Americans' British South Africans, a persecuted culture birthed in the wilds, though different in that by necessity and historical alliances, they are on rather better terms with the indigenous peoples.

Basically I'm looking for a situation similar to @galanx's New Albion where Loyalists, natives, and freedmen/escaped slaves make common cause against American settlers. And so the Loyalist/Tory identity lives on outside of Canada, as an adversary to the young United States and its settlers.

New Albion: A Different Division of North America

NEW ALBION- An alternative division of North America; POD: 1740 (A revision- hopefully improvement – of an ATL I posted a long time ago) [Foreword- one of my complaints with some of threads here is they often go deep into the woods. The author has done a lot of research in a particular time...

www.alternatehistory.com

As featured in that timeline, there were no shortage of interesting frontiersmen types, some of which fought for the British, many of whom with decent relations with native tribes. These frontiersmen almost seem like the British counterpart of the French-Canadian voyageurs, fathering Métis children and trading and fighting alongside natives instead of expelling them.

Robert Rogers (British Army officer) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Walter Butler (Loyalist) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Cherry Valley massacre - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Some of them were doing the Sam Houston living with Indians thing before Sam Houston. There's the incomparable William Augustus Bowles, who was basically the White Rajah of Florida.

William Augustus Bowles - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Captain John "Hellfire Jack" Rogers actually fathered the part-Cherokee wife of Houston.

John Rogers

There's also Loyalists who were considered outright Indian, but with prominent British ancestry, such as this leader of the Creek.

Alexander McGillivray - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Alternatively, I wonder how the British could've kept the Northwest Territory or parts of it somehow. Or as in New Albion and similar timelines, it requires the Patriots to hold Canada and prevent it from being a viable destination for Loyalists.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

Loyalists flee to the West instead of into Canada?

What if the Loyalists would have decided to move west during the American Revolutionary war? Lets mostly say they get routed into the areas of Michigan,Illinious, Indianna and Wisconsin. (Ohio of corse would tend towards the union) What do we see with this migration displacement?

www.alternatehistory.com

Found the earliest thread with "Loyalists" in the title on this forum from 2005 with this intriguing but probably completely geographically unworkable idea:

How about the Loyalists flee to Manhattan and Long Island after the war, and the Brits don't abandon them these islands in 1784 as they did in OTL? Could we see a kind of Loyalist Taiwan develop?

If not Long Island, then how about Grand Island / Isle de grande in Lake Eire (the one which was suggested as an alternative Zion)?

 

[unprincipled peter]

Well, you have the obvious question of why? North affords them a land with gov't backing. The vast majority of them may be robust, but they are used to living in civilization, not frontiersmen. The civilized tribes between the mississippi and the appalachians are plenty strong enough to resist encroachment by a gang lacking gov't backing, or will join with the newly minted USA to crush the interlopers. The English, for the most part, never looked to cohabitate with the natives, but rather looked to usurp the lands.

They could go into Spanish territory, where they likely find gov't backing as long as they pledged to the Spanish Crown. If they don't want that, this is their best bet to cut out their own territory, as the Spanish likely won't have the will to spend a lot of resources to remove them. the Spanish could back the natives to make life miserable for the interlopers. This leads to the next obvious question: if they don't want to settle under a crown (British to the North, Spanish to the West), why wouldn't they just join up with the Patriots? Unlike the Boers, they don't have a different culture. They just have a difference in opinion as to form of gov't.

Edit: who is going to smuggle them all their goods/guns? Spanish/USA can lock up Mississippi River and Ohio river access. British are going to abandon them in favor of good relations with USA and Spain.

 

[Chris Nation]

The British Empire is quite a large place. I have a feeling they'd end up scattered rather than trekking West - the Caribbean, Britain, South Africa, Australia, and even India (IOTL, the British East India Company Army was littered with Americans) come to mind.

 

[Belisarius II]

That doesn't seem at all likely, or realistic. The Loyalists came from settled areas of the Colonies, they were looking for a safe place to live with their families. Living with the Indians would be a dangerous, wild life, not suited for most Europeans. Besides the land the Indians were living on had been seeded by Britain to the U.S., and so it would eventually be settled by the same people they were running away from. Louisiana was an underdeveloped Semitropical Spanish possession, that was developing a commercial cash crop economy. Canada was a far more attractive place to go.

 

[Belisarius II]

Loyalists flee to the West instead of into Canada?

What if the Loyalists would have decided to move west during the American Revolutionary war? Lets mostly say they get routed into the areas of Michigan,Illinious, Indianna and Wisconsin. (Ohio of corse would tend towards the union) What do we see with this migration displacement?

www.alternatehistory.com

Found the earliest thread with "Loyalists" in the title on this forum from 2005 with this intriguing but probably completely geographically unworkable idea:

Manhattan, and Long Island were never going to be a Loyalist Taiwan. First off the Americans would never have agreed to let the British keep it, and second it wasn't defensible. A third reason was most of the population of Long Island supported the Patriots, so the British would have to maintain an endless military occupation, which they had no interest in doing. Leaving the Colonies means leaving the Colonies, not fighting on endlessly to hold onto an enclave.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

If Canada was not an option, the urbanized Loyalists would have to get off the mainland if they couldn’t go west. Maybe they could go north and try to secede from the U.S. later on along with the pro-British Quebecois.

 

[Sarthak]

the british government themselves would not allow it. They wanted to keep Canada, and purposefully fed it with loyalists to prevent uprisings and aid for the Americans in case of an attack. They would divert the loyalists to the north, and let's be honest, the Loyalists went north because it was far more economically viable. The only other option would be Spanish Louisiana in the New Orleans area. And that would be too far away for the loyalists of the Appalachians and Northeast

 

[Paradoxer]

What if going to Canada and Britain, the Loyalists had headed west towards Louisiana territory and beyond after the U.S. won its independence? I'm inspired by the Boer Trekkers, the Wilderness Walk from For Want of a Nail. Alternatively, what if they went to where Tecumseh's Northwest Confederacy and take refuge with friendly Indian tribes. These renegade Tories become the white bogeymen of the frontier and a long-simmering source of tension between the Americans and the British despite the latter having formally denounced them as outlaws. (Though on occasion, British/Canadian local authorities will arm them to play off against the Americans.) They become roughly equivalent to the Boers to the Americans' British South Africans, a persecuted culture birthed in the wilds, though different in that by necessity and historical alliances, they are on rather better terms with the indigenous peoples.

Basically I'm looking for a situation similar to @galanx's New Albion where Loyalists, natives, and freedmen/escaped slaves make common cause against American settlers. And so the Loyalist/Tory identity lives on outside of Canada, as an adversary to the young United States and its settlers.

New Albion: A Different Division of North America

NEW ALBION- An alternative division of North America; POD: 1740 (A revision- hopefully improvement – of an ATL I posted a long time ago) [Foreword- one of my complaints with some of threads here is they often go deep into the woods. The author has done a lot of research in a particular time...

www.alternatehistory.com

As featured in that timeline, there were no shortage of interesting frontiersmen types, some of which fought for the British, many of whom with decent relations with native tribes. These frontiersmen almost seem like the British counterpart of the French-Canadian voyageurs, fathering Métis children and trading and fighting alongside natives instead of expelling them.

Robert Rogers (British Army officer) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Walter Butler (Loyalist) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Cherry Valley massacre - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Some of them were doing the Sam Houston living with Indians thing before Sam Houston. There's the incomparable William Augustus Bowles, who was basically the White Rajah of Florida.

William Augustus Bowles - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Captain John "Hellfire Jack" Rogers actually fathered the part-Cherokee wife of Houston.

John Rogers

There's also Loyalists who were considered outright Indian, but with prominent British ancestry, such as this leader of the Creek.

Alexander McGillivray - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Alternatively, I wonder how the British could've kept the Northwest Territory or parts of it somehow. Or as in New Albion and similar timelines, it requires the Patriots to hold Canada and prevent it from being a viable destination for Loyalists.

To be honest loyalist are not type to become “white savages”. Look at Canada who identify and nation is practically centered around being loyalist to British monarch. Many especially then are just overseas English, Scots, or Protestant Irish subjects. Even ones who went to South Africa were not as frontiersmen or trekking like Boer counterparts.

The colonist are honestly much more likely to do this if they lose and many basically did do exactly that before Revolution while moving into Appalachia backwoods/backcountry against British agreements with natives. Loyalist want British guidance and leadership. The ones fleeing to Appalachia or wilderness don’t want it or real any overlordship of any type. One reason many went out there basically to be left alone or do as they please.

The American middle and upper class that came to US were largely your artisans, sailors, traders, merchants, clerks, and officers but lower class from largely peasant or exile backgrounds(Celts kicked out of isles, religious dissenters, criminals, and groups not welcome in isles anymore like highlanders who duel or get into clan wars. Which is basically what some would do in Appalachia or rural south). British even commented how these regions “retained” “medieval” character long dead in isles mixed /acculturated with native elements. The “white savage” has been thing in US especially in south for centuries. Some Americans back then would kick Englishman teeth in for pointing that those. It’s something they often did not like being highlighted

 

[galanx]

The British Empire is quite a large place. I have a feeling they'd end up scattered rather than trekking West - the Caribbean, Britain, South Africa, Australia, and even India (IOTL, the British East India Company Army was littered with Americans) come to mind.

1) Caribbean- not particularly hospitable for white men; some of the wealthier Loyalists could end up there, if they were okay with slavery.
2) Britain- not a land of opportunity for most Loyalists. That was where their ancestors came from.
3) South Africa - Britain didn't occupy it until 1795; then gave it back to the Netherlands in 1803, then reoccupied it in 1806 and didn't formally claim it until 1815. settlers first arrived in 1820.
4) Australia- first settled in 1788, by convicts who weren't exactly volunteers. But, yeah, possible- I avoided this in my timeline by killing off Cook on the B.C. coast and replacing him with Foulweather Jack Byron, delaying the discovery by twenty years.
5) India- the Americans in the Company were, like the Britons, merchant-adventurers, not settlers.
In my tl the Americans took not only Quebec but also Nova Scotia, and they didn't want Loyalists because (naturally) they doubted their allegiance and, to the Loyalists, it was basically the same government-why move? I had most of the Loyalists reluctantly stay; some go to New Albion- basically fur (sea-otter) forts established in the Pacific north-west from northern California up to Alaska.
The ones that moved west comprised three categories-
a) Natives, mostly Mohawks who had fought for the British- the Americans didn't trust them, plus they wanted their land.
b) Loyalists who had fought alongside the Indians and were accused of taking part in massacres, and faced hanging because of it
c) Slaves who had taken advantage of the British offer of freedom for those who fought for the Crown, and who faced being returned to slavery by the Americans.
Basically, they couldn't go north, and they couldn't stay put.

 

[Chris Nation]

along with the pro-British Quebecois.

I think that is the only time I have ever read those words in this order.

 

[Chris Nation]

I think that is the only time I have ever read those words in this order.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

The Quebec were against the revolting Americans because the British had bent over backwards for them and the Church was against the revolution. You haven’t read it in those ways because Québécois didn’t exist at that time- everything was called Canada in that period.

 

[Ramontxo]

Not to say being Catholic may mean being afraid of the Yankees (in the pure original New England meaning)

 

[Canuck Wingnut]

Not quite sure that this falls under the OP, but:
Before the negotiations leading up to the Treaty of Paris, the French were trying to ensure that Britain would hold on to the trans-Appalachian territory. (Despite being allies of the Americans, the French were still worried that they would go after Louisiana.) It was, oddly, the British who realized that they completely lacked the ability to actually enforce a claim to that region, and agreed to let the Americans claim all the territory they wanted. (This also includes Vermont, which at this point did not acknowledge the Continental Congress.) Let's suppose that instead, a different British negotiating team decides to take temporary face saving even at the cost of future humiliation and collaborates with France to officially limit the American's territorial claims to the smallest possible space.

Loyalists, not aware that the claims made by the British government are known in London to be infeasible, would have no particular reason to believe these territories are worse prospects for settlement than Canada. I propose, therefore, that you could get reasonable numbers of loyalist settlers heading West rather than North: the loyalists in Canada were also heading to an unimproved frontier: I don't see any reason trans-Appalachia would look worse. Of course, wait a few years and the fact that they've been essentially abandoned by Britain and the Americans are coming is going to be very obvious, but I believe that is more or less what the OP was going for and I've simply arrived there by a roundabout route...

As for the consequences, unfortunately in the longer term the Loyalists are probably screwed. Without good trade routes to England they're really no better off than the natives they're living among, and the Americans, as already mentioned, will be coming on fast and willing to come up with whatever justification is necessary to claim the land.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

Having the French subtly subsidize the Loyalists as a check against the Americans is a nice idea. I was actually thinking of the fate of the Acadians earlier today, about how they are an example of a settler people who were expelled en masse only thirty years or so earlier, and many ended up settling the frontier anyway- the Spanish wanted them to shore up Louisiana, as fellow Catholics, against the English.

Loyalists, not aware that the claims made by the British government are known in London to be infeasible, would have no particular reason to believe these territories are worse prospects for settlement than Canada. I propose, therefore, that you could get reasonable numbers of loyalist settlers heading West rather than North: the loyalists in Canada were also heading to an unimproved frontier: I don't see any reason trans-Appalachia would look worse. Of course, wait a few years and the fact that they've been essentially abandoned by Britain and the Americans are coming is going to be very obvious, but I believe that is more or less what the OP was going for and I've simply arrived there by a roundabout route...

Trans-Appalachia, like the Ohio River Valley / Northwest Territory, is frontier but it hardly seems inhospitable. I think counter to some of the posts made in this thread, not all Loyalists were urbanized and would be against becoming pioneers - I've posted noteworthy examples of rangers and other frontier types who supported the Crown. Maybe these individuals would only represent a small minority of the Loyalists, but even if you have several hundreds to low thousands of white Loyalists, allied native tribes, and former slaves who were promised freedom by the British moving west, that would still be a noteworthy presence. Even if they get absorbed in a few decades through extermination or simply dying out, that might've been at least left a formative memory in the psyche of the early United States.

As for the consequences, unfortunately in the longer term the Loyalists are probably screwed. Without good trade routes to England they're really no better off than the natives they're living among, and the Americans, as already mentioned, will be coming on fast and willing to come up with whatever justification is necessary to claim the land.

They would be inevitably, but even if they only exist for a couple decades, it would still be a very interesting culture of loyalty to Britain, hatred of the Patriots, and cooperation with natives for survival.

I was also wondering if the Spanish might use them in Florida as a counter to American expansion and freebooters. They could make them convert to Catholicism, and like in the settlement of Texas, many of the Loyalists simply feign conversion, and become a patron-less, cut-off people that Spain could use as a countervailing force against the U.S.

France and Spain both got sick and tired of the American revolutionary allies pretty soon after the war so it seems like loyalties shift quickly in the colonies.

Before Calhoon's work, estimates of the Loyalist share of the population were somewhat higher, at about one-third, but these estimates are now rejected as too high by most scholars.[22] In 1968 historian Paul H. Smith estimated there were about 400,000 Loyalists, or 16% of the white population of 2.25 million in 1780.[23][24]

Historian Robert Middlekauff summarized scholarly research on the nature of Loyalist support as follows:

The largest number of loyalists were found in the middle colonies: many tenant farmers of New York supported the king, for example, as did many of the Dutch in the colony and in New Jersey. The Germans in Pennsylvania tried to stay out of the Revolution, just as many Quakers did, and when that failed, clung to the familiar connection rather than embrace the new. Highland Scots in the Carolinas, a fair number of Anglican clergy and their parishioners in Connecticut and New York, a few Presbyterians in the southern colonies, and a large number of the Iroquois stayed loyal to the king.[25]

Farmers, eh? Couldn't some of them been willing to settle the frontier? Weren't some of them, particularly in places like Nova Scotia and Canada proper, essentially already frontiersmen?

 

[Canuck Wingnut]

Trans-Appalachia, like the Ohio River Valley / Northwest Territory, is frontier but it hardly seems inhospitable. I think counter to some of the posts made in this thread, not all Loyalists were urbanized and would be against becoming pioneers

In case it wasn't clear, I agree with you. In particular, most estimates for the number of loyalists who settled in Upper Canada center around roughly 10,000 people- hardly a small group.

That's important since Upper Canada was, at the time, defined as the area up the St. Lawrence River from Montreal, and had been selected by the British as a place to put all these refugees specifically because it was unsettled (by whites) at the time and the government therefore didn't have to figure out how to purchase land they could support themselves on. In retrospect, Upper Canada with its riverine transport links firmly under British control is an obvious place to send Loyalists, but at the time between the problem of the Ottawa Rapids and Niagara Falls making the St. Lawrence less than attractive as a transport route below Montreal (the reason why no one had settled there before this) it was not obvious that Upper Canada was a good bet.

Which leads me to my next thought: what are the effects on Canada's history, if we reduce the number of Loyalists arriving in modern day Ontario significantly? Presumably, if British North America continues to exist some loyalist refugees will head north by sea. But if their numbers are much lower, the chances that they remain in the Nova Scotia/ New Brunswick area are much higher. Britain's focus on holding on to the northern half of the continent centered around keeping Quebec loyal; with fewer English-speaking settlers about presumably in the short term that gets a boost in importance. In the long term, however, its hard to see Quebec not becoming unhappy with British rule, so Britain will want to find enough Anglo settlers to prime the pump and get an English-speaking Upper Canada off the ground (not impossible: most estimates suggest more American settlers for Upper Canada arrived after the initial Loyalist settlement was over, interested in cheap land, than the initial batch of ideologically-motivated refugees) but they have no guarantee they'll get them. With or without more Anglo settlers, I'd expect that Britain would be less inclined to install and support an elected legislature in Upper Canada without the pressure from the Loyalists. That alone will have a major effect on subsequent Canadian history.

Jumping back to our hypothetical West Loyalists, I wonder if they'd be able to pull some of the same kind of "Late Loyalists" as Upper Canada did: that is to say men looking for cheap or free land with low taxes who like the relatively ungoverned nature of frontier colonies and don't hold a particular ideological affiliation to either Congress or the Crown. Men like that might become a significant presence in a Loyalist West with relatively low numbers of initial Loyalist settlers, but they might not be particularly welcomed, especially if the Loyalists are smart enough to court Native alliances and understand the damage that seizing more land for new settlers is doing to those alliances. That might require the Loyalists to be smarter than they were historically, at least in Upper Canada: the early elected and especially appointed leadership there pushed hard to keep slavery legal over the practical opposition of Governor Simcoe, who wanted loyal Black settlers who could be relied upon to resist an American invasion. Whether "Late Loyalists" are welcomed or not, I suspect they could easily become a source of political tension amongst the Loyalists, between those who don't trust anyone who didn't arrive on the first wagon and those who want to grow their population even if they risk becoming American by doing it.

 

[Revachah]

They did it.

Loyalists are the reason why some of my early African ancestors were brought to Spanish West Florida

They were the basis western goods being brought to Georgia, Florida, Alabama and St Tammany Parish Louisiana.

They introduced the slaving of African peoples to both the mixed race elite of tribal communities and more traditionalist “pure bloods”.

They facilitied the Chickamauga War/Cherokee-American war in Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennesee.

The Northwest Indian War/Little Turtle War of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin

Lower Town Cherokee were given special invitation by Governor Arturo Oreilly of Spanish Florida to make treaty and get weapons to fight Americans up north.

But most notably were critical influencers in War of 1812 providing the guns and political maneuvering of the Red Sticks in the south.

TL;DR: those that could did and they assimilated into the elite of tribal nations.

Post war those that weren't killed quietly assimilated into American society and their children later migrated to Oklahoma if they had not assimilated into white society.

 

[galanx]

After the Revolution, the Loyalists would have to organise meetings, plan expeditions, decide where they're going- it's not like they'd be going to an already claimed territory with the permission of the sovereign power.
Would the Americans allow that? They've just fought with these people- would they allow them to peacefully head off to occupy the lands further west?
The Loyalists can't just drift out of the new country in ones and twos- what about their relations with the tribes already in possession?

 

[durante]

What if going to Canada and Britain, the Loyalists had headed west towards Louisiana territory and beyond after the U.S. won its independence? I'm inspired by the Boer Trekkers, the Wilderness Walk from For Want of a Nail. Alternatively, what if they went to where Tecumseh's Northwest Confederacy and take refuge with friendly Indian tribes. These renegade Tories become the white bogeymen of the frontier and a long-simmering source of tension between the Americans and the British despite the latter having formally denounced them as outlaws. (Though on occasion, British/Canadian local authorities will arm them to play off against the Americans.) They become roughly equivalent to the Boers to the Americans' British South Africans, a persecuted culture birthed in the wilds, though different in that by necessity and historical alliances, they are on rather better terms with the indigenous peoples.

Basically I'm looking for a situation similar to @galanx's New Albion where Loyalists, natives, and freedmen/escaped slaves make common cause against American settlers. And so the Loyalist/Tory identity lives on outside of Canada, as an adversary to the young United States and its settlers.

New Albion: A Different Division of North America

NEW ALBION- An alternative division of North America; POD: 1740 (A revision- hopefully improvement – of an ATL I posted a long time ago) [Foreword- one of my complaints with some of threads here is they often go deep into the woods. The author has done a lot of research in a particular time...

www.alternatehistory.com

As featured in that timeline, there were no shortage of interesting frontiersmen types, some of which fought for the British, many of whom with decent relations with native tribes. These frontiersmen almost seem like the British counterpart of the French-Canadian voyageurs, fathering Métis children and trading and fighting alongside natives instead of expelling them.

Robert Rogers (British Army officer) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Walter Butler (Loyalist) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Cherry Valley massacre - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Some of them were doing the Sam Houston living with Indians thing before Sam Houston. There's the incomparable William Augustus Bowles, who was basically the White Rajah of Florida.

William Augustus Bowles - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Captain John "Hellfire Jack" Rogers actually fathered the part-Cherokee wife of Houston.

John Rogers

There's also Loyalists who were considered outright Indian, but with prominent British ancestry, such as this leader of the Creek.

Alexander McGillivray - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Alternatively, I wonder how the British could've kept the Northwest Territory or parts of it somehow. Or as in New Albion and similar timelines, it requires the Patriots to hold Canada and prevent it from being a viable destination for Loyalists.

Britain decides to create a Loyalist colony in the Pacific Northwest, and then settlers begin streaming west in an early Oregon trail situation?