The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration [1920 Ed.]

For over a century, American history treated them as traitors. Canadian history barely remembered them at all. W. Stewart Wallace's 1914 chronicle recovers the voices of the United Empire Loyalists, the tens of thousands who refused to abandon the Crown during the American Revolution and subsequently fled north to build a new British North America. Wallace painstakingly documents how American historians distorted and marginalized these refugees, painting them as villains while erasing their contributions to the nation forming across the border. The narrative traces their exodus from confiscated homes, their reception in the wilderness of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec, and the demographic revolution they triggered in British North America. Wallace demonstrates how these exiled Americans fundamentally transformed Canadian identity, politics, and society. Written with scholarly rigor but unmistakable sympathy, this work remains a foundational text for understanding how a displaced people helped forge a nation. Essential reading for anyone curious about the hidden foundations of Canada or the complicated legacies of loyalty and loss in revolutionary America.