O’Brien on Loyalists via Old North, 21 Sept.

On Thursday, 21 September, Old North Illuminated will host a virtual talk by G. Patrick O’Brien on “‘This Perilous Hour of Trial, Horror & Distress’: Loyalist Exile and Return.”

The event description says:

Between April 1775 and the early months of 1783, more than 75,000 colonists fled the upheaval of the Revolution for the protection of the British Empire. Nearly half of these refugees, including many New Englanders, landed on the rocky shores of Nova Scotia.

The most prominent of these exiles called themselves “loyalists,” a label they fashioned to accentuate their own unwavering fidelity, and the broader collective’s shared dedication to maintaining Britain’s empire in North America. . . .

Concentrating on a few loyalist families from the greater Boston area, including that of Rev. Mather Byles Jr., the rector of Old North Church until 1775, Dr. G. Patrick O’Brien of the University of Tampa will explore what it meant to be a loyalist during the American Revolution.

The talk will pay special attention to how marginalized loyalists, including women and enslaved people, grappled with the hardships of wartime exile and the role these figures had in bringing families back to their American homes after the war.

It’s notable that although the Rev. Mather Byles, Jr. (shown above), left with the British troops, his father, the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Sr., remained in Boston, as did his two half-sisters. The Boston Byles family continued to profess loyalty to the king, even in the new republic. While some Loyalists came back to the U.S. of A., or tried, these Byleses never left.

G. Patrick O’Brien is professor at the University of Tampa. He is working on a book about the experiences of loyalist women and families during the Revolution, their exile in Nova Scotia, and the social networks repatriating loyalists created between British Canada and the United States.

This online event will run from 7:00 to 8:30 P.M. Register for the link through this Eventbrite page; make a donation of of any amount to Old North Illuminated to support the preservation and interpretation efforts at Old North Church in the North End.

Mary and Catherine Byles: Boston's last Loyalists

From the wonderful online history magazine Common-place, I recommend Edward M. Griffin’s profile of two of the most intriguing characters from Revolutionary Boston: Mary and Catherine Byles, unmarried daughters and heirs of the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Sr. They remained in Boston through the war and for many years afterward, but remained Loyalists to the end.

Griffin quotes a description of a visit to the ladies in 1833 by author Eliza Leslie (shown here, courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia):

Then Mary turned to Catherine and asked, “Have you no curiosities to show the ladies?”

“Nothing, I fear, that the ladies would care to look at.”

“To the contrary,” said Mary, “my sister has a box of extraordinary things such as are not to be seen every day.”

Thereupon, Miss Leslie’s companion begged the sisters to permit their Philadelphia visitor a glimpse of Miss Catherine’s collection of curiosities. After a little coaxing, Catherine produced a square bandbox. She took from it the envelope of a letter to their father addressed by Alexander Pope himself. There were four commissions, each bearing the signature of a different British sovereign at the top of the document. . . . The last was an artificial mulberry that looked surprisingly real.

“And now,” said Catherine, “I will show you the greatest curiosity of all.” She removed an inner pasteboard box that fit within the larger one, set it on the floor, and took from a round hole in the lid an artificial snake. With some mysterious twist, she set it in motion, and it ran about in the neighborhood of Miss Leslie’s feet. After all had remarked on its ingenuity, Catherine told the snake that it was time to go home. As she returned it to its box, it seemed to wiggle away.

“What!” said Catherine, giving the snake two or three smart taps, “Won’t you go in? Are you a rebel too?” Immediately, the serpent straightened and scurried back into its box.

The Byles sisters got their habit of showing off their curiosities from their learned and fun-loving father. Here’s what people recalled about him from Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, this entry written by Clifford K. Shipton:

Byles made a large and fantastic collection of curiosities. Besides mathematical and scientific toys (his interest in science was not very deep) it included worthless accumulations such as five or six dozen pairs of spectacles, about twenty walking sticks, a bushel of whetstones, a dozen jestbooks (worn), and several packs of cards (new and clean). When the grandchildren came to the house, the parson would take them on his knee and ask, “What is the Chief End of Man?” If they rattled off the answer properly, he would play with them among his curiosities for hours. . . .

[Once the minister’s wife Rebecca] had been at housework when guests arrived, and she had hid in a closet to avoid being seen. They asked to see Byles’s curiosities, and he obliged by exhibiting them, at last throwing open the closet and showing his wife as his “greatest curiosity.”

Prof. Griffin’s article about the Byles sisters continues, “In an upper room, they displayed portraits of themselves at ages seventeen and eighteen, painted by the famed English portraitist Henry Pelham.” Since they were born in the early 1750s, those portraits would have been painted around 1770. The artist wasn’t an Englishman, therefore, but John S. Copley’s little (half-)brother Henry, a fellow Bostonian. (Henry’s father, Peter Pelham, had engraved a portrait of the Byles sisters’ father during his brief Boston career, and Copley had painted the man and his son, both ministers.)

Griffin refers to the women living in “the old family house” in the old South End. They refused to pay taxes on that property, in part because they would not acknowledge the authority of any government but Britain’s. I also recall reading that because the house had been the parsonage of their father’s meeting-house, it had never been taxed then. In any event, the sisters seem to have had very little money to pay their taxes anyway.