United Empire Loyalists

The people who came to what would be Ontario later came to be known as United Empire Loyalists.  Their descendants proudly work to remember their history.  They are most often depicted as hard-working farmers and small business people bravely opening up a new land to what they understood as civilization.  It all comes across as a wonderful adventure.

To really understand those people who came in the later 18th century, it is necessary to revisit just what the American Revolution really was for the people engaged in it.  We remember it as a proud birth of a great nation.  And it was.  It is hailed in the United States as a time of victory and celebration against overseas oppression.  The historiography of the events are universally happy.  It brought about great men still idolized in America - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and many others.  

Flag of the United Empire Loyalists - Wikipedia

This is not how it would have been experienced at the time.  This was a civil war.  And civil wars are the nastiest and ugliest of all conflicts.  They pit brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour and community against community.  For every happy American who came to be citizen of a new country, there was a refugee who was forced to flee their homes with little or nothing.  For every Thomas Jefferson defining a new nation, there was a John Johnson leading his fellow loyalists to the wilderness to start all over again.  For every John and Sam Adams, there was a Molly and Joseph Brant, siblings who had to find a new way for their communities.  

We know the plight of war refugees today - from Syria, from Ukraine, from Afghanistan.  For those who make it to Canada, they arrive in a country which is fully formed and able to help.  (Not to imply that it is easy or totally a happy experience!). But for those arriving in the 18th century, there was just wilderness, and the tools they had to carve out a new life from it.