EXPATRIATES AND EXILES
Thomas Danforth, a Massachusetts lawyer who was exiled because of his loyalty to the British Empire during the American Revolution, complained in 1783 from his new home in London that he was "near his fortieth year, banished under pain of death, to a distant country, where he has not the most remote family connection." He was "cut off from his profession ... and in a great degree from social enjoyments." Loyalists such as Danforth represented the earliest and one of the largest groups of Americans to live outside their homeland as expatriates or exiles. Many other groups would follow.
Several hundred thousand Americans have likely been exiles or expatriates. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but expatriates are individuals who have chosen to live in a foreign country, and exiles are individuals who have been forced to leave their homeland. True exiles have been few in the American experience; most Americans who have left the nation did so as expatriates. Some have left for purely personal or family reasons, others because they objected to certain social or political conditions in the United States.
Between sixty thousand and eighty thousand Loyalists, out of a population of 2.5 million, fled the country during and after the American Revolution. They were true exiles, many having endured the confiscation of their property, humiliation at the hands of former friends, and relocation to distant, often unwelcoming places. Thousands went to England, the Maritime Provinces of British North America, and the West Indies. More than half came from New York, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, but every state contributed a share.
Some Loyalists were British officials, like Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts, or backcountry residents who relied on British authority as a counterweight to the political power of the coastal elite. Others believed the rebellion would be crushed by the British military or considered it an illegal attack upon legitimate authority.
Most went to the Canadian provinces, but between seven thousand and eight thousand went to England. There they spent much time and energy seeking positions within the British government, often without success, and lobbying for continuation of the war against the rebellion. Loyalists wanted, above all, to justify their decision. They wrote histories of the Revolution, arguing that it lacked legitimacy and widespread support and that its leaders were cruel and dishonest. But, in this first American lost cause, they remained outsiders in their land of birth and in England as well.
The most famous lost cause in American history led to a second group of expatriates when leaders of the failed Confederacy, fearful of postwar political conditions, emigrated. Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of war and secretary of state, moved to England and became a successful lawyer. Gen. Jubal Early and a few others went to Canada and still others to Japan, Australia, and Egypt.
The largest number, however, moved to Central and South America. Mexico appointed Confederate admiral Matthew Fontaine Maury as commissioner of immigration, and he helped attract some two thousand ex-Confederates who established the colonies of Carlota and Cordova between Mexico City and Vera Cruz. Honduras, Jamaica, and Cuba also drew southern whites in the aftermath of war. Between twenty-five hundred and four thousand southerners set up agricultural colonies in Brazil where slavery was still legal. The Brazilian government encouraged this movement by offering cheap land and appointing immigration agents to aid the migrants. Most of the Brazilian expatriates returned to the South in the 1870s, but several hundred remained. Americana, Brazil, is still home to four hundred or so descendants of these expatriates; Jimmy Carter visited the community during his presidency in the late 1970s.
The first large-scale black American emigration also grew out of the slavery issue and focused on Africa and Canada. The American Colonization Society, formed in 1816, wanted to relocate American blacks in Africa as a way of dealing with the problem of slavery. The society founded Liberia specifically as a black American colony, and a few thousand ex-slaves moved there. This, however, was a white-sponsored movement and was widely criticized by blacks themselves. Black leader Frederick Douglass opposed black emigration altogether, although other leaders, such as Martin R. Delany, promoted black-sponsored African emigration.
Canada was also a destination for blacks before the war. It was the terminus of the Underground Railroad; escaped slaves followed the North Star, which thereby gained mythic meaning. About forty thousand went to Canada, settling in the new agricultural communities of Wilberforce, Dawn, the Refuge Home Society, and Elgin. Over half went as a result of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), which required northerners to cooperate in capturing runaway slaves, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857), which denied citizenship to blacks.
After the Civil War, worsening race relations, southern agricultural depressions, and northern ghetto life caused some African-Americans to entertain hopes of drastic change through immigration to Africa. Several hundred South Carolina blacks went to Liberia in 1878, and disciples of Henry McNeal Turner, a black spokesman for African-American nationalism, carried emigrants to different areas of Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century. Alfred C. Sam, a Ghanaian, launched a movement in Oklahoma that led thousands of blacks to Houston in 1914, after which many of them journeyed on to Liberia on his ship the S.S. Liberia.
In the late nineteenth century, another group joined the ranks of expatriates: American painters. James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Theodore Robinson, John Singer Sargent, Frank Duveneck, and William Merritt Chase were among the most important members of this group. These artists were often repelled by the opulent materialism and vulgarity of the Gilded Age and fled to Paris, the international art center of this era. Whistler and Sargent eventually moved to London, and other artists became a part of the Munich, Germany, art colony. Some painters stayed in Europe permanently, but others eventually returned.
Henry James, perhaps the most famous American literary expatriate, shared much with these artists. He divided his time between Europe and the United States in the 1860s and early 1870s, before settling permanently in London in 1876. He left his native land for the cosmopolitanism of Europe and the opportunities it afforded to write of the domestic affairs and fashionable lives of the leisure class. His writings explore the experience of expatriation and the differences between cultures, often portraying provincial Americans facing a complex world. He became a British citizen in 1915.
Although artistic and literary expatriates of the post-Civil War era were small in number, they tied American culture more closely to European currents. The same was true of the "Lost Generation" writers of the 1920s, who may be the best known of all American expatriates. Among the reasons for their departure was what their chronicler Malcolm Cowley called their rootlessness. Children of the well-off bourgeoisie, they had gone off to college, where they learned of a wider world and broke their ties with home.
But World War I was the main reason these expatriates left America. Many had served as ambulance drivers attached to the French forces before the United States entered the war. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Julian Green, William Seabrook, E. E. Cummings, Harry Crosby, Sidney Howard, Louis Bromfield, Robert Hillyer, and Dashiell Hammett—a who's who of literary figures of the era and all of them future expatriates. Disillusionment after the war added to their distrust of idealism and tradition.
They had returned to the United States at war's end, but in the early 1920s their discontent led many back to Europe. They disliked postwar American culture, seeing its social mores as moralistic, standardized, and vulgarized. They saw themselves as creative artists living in a business civilization devoted to the worship of materialism. Europe represented ancient wisdom, a place of history and of refinement. They went there hoping to discover new creative energy, to become a part of an emerging modernist culture.
The lives of the Lost Generation expatriates offer appealing images: the cafés of Paris, the coffeehouses of Vienna, the cabarets of Berlin, the bullfights of Pamplona. But theirs was a religion of living for art, and after a few years abroad most decided they could practice their new religion at home as well as in Europe: Europe, too, they claimed, had been conquered by the business civilization. Exposure to Europe had made them feel less culturally inferior, and they became homesick, as Cowley wrote, longing for "a Kentucky hill cabin, a farmhouse in Iowa or Wisconsin, the Michigan woods."
Europe also nurtured African-American expatriates. It offered the same attractions that drew other Americans, but for blacks it represented something more: a cultural environment free of the racial obsessions of American society. After World War I, France, in particular, had the reputation of welcoming black Americans, and writers, artists, entertainers, and intellectuals found a refuge there. Writer Richard Wright, entertainer Josephine Baker, and jazz musicians Arthur Briggs, Benny Carter, and Dexter Gordon were only a few of the prominent African-Americans who found a home in France.
In the 1920s, too, a Jamaica-born, charismatic black man, Marcus Garvey, was reviving the back-to-Africa idea but now as a mass movement among blacks. Garvey had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914 in the British West Indies, with the goal of promoting black equality through independence from white society. He formed a Harlem chapter soon after coming to the United States in 1916. Garvey's steamship company, the Black Star Line, sent the migrants to Africa, but Liberia refused to cooperate, fearing Garvey wanted to take control of that nation. He soon was in trouble with the American government for misuse of funds from his investors and was deported to Jamaica in 1927.
Garvey's expulsion from the United States ended that particular movement, but Africa throughout the twentieth century continued to attract prominent American black intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois, who spent his last years in the newly independent nation of Ghana. Pan-Africanism was a theme in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and in the black freedom movement of the late 1960s, leading some American blacks, including Stokely Carmichael, to emigrate there.
In the 1930s another group of Americans were attracted by a European society, but this time it was not the artistic world of Western Europe but the brave new communist world of the Soviet Union. The Great Depression impelled American socialists to seek a radical alternative to capitalism, one that the Soviet Union seemed to represent. By the early 1930s the Soviet economy was expanding, and its culture offered innovations that appealed to intellectuals. Social scientists were attracted to the possibilities of a planned society, and political scientists predicted an appealing fusion of democracy and socialism. Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union saw that nation as fundamentally different from other societies. As historian Richard Pells has written, to radical American writers of the 1930s "the Soviet Union was ultimately not a country but a state of mind."
John Reed, who traveled to the Soviet Union in 1917 to observe the revolution, was the first of a long line of American journalists, social scientists, novelists, and poets to go there. The Soviet government assiduously courted American visitors and showed off their model factories and collective farms. Among those who emigrated were Marxist ideologues who saw the Soviet Union as the testing ground for the theory of working-class revolution, noncommunist socialists who admired the Soviet experiment in social and economic planning, engineers and workers targeted by Soviet recruiters, and writers who believed that the new society valued their work. After serving a prison sentence for anticonscription activities in World War I, the anarchist Emma Goldman was deported to Russia in 1919. She remained there for three years before leaving over differences with the Bolshevik government. The number of those living in Russia was no more than a few thousand at its height in the early 1930s.
By the late 1930s, though, disillusionment had set in, as Joseph Stalin increasingly appeared to be a new version of the czar. In 1934 he had begun the show trials and executions in his bloody purge of thousands of high-level officials and bureaucrats. Many socialists condemned the terrorist campaign, as well as his foreign policy that accommodated European fascists. Well before 1940 the flow of American sympathizers to the Soviet Union had virtually ended, and many had returned home. Later, during the cold war, those who had spent time in the country were subject to harassment and worse for their expatriation.
The most recent group of American expatriates dates from the Vietnam War era. Some twenty-five hundred to three thousand draft resisters sought asylum in Canada (mainly in Toronto) and Scandinavia. Deserters from the military, mostly in Europe, established a community in Sweden in 1967, when that country granted asylum to four disaffected servicemen off the aircraft carrier Intrepid.
Expatriation during the 1960s sometimes involved a broad questioning of American institutions and materialistic values, particularly on the part of middle-class youth. But the draft was the major reason many who opposed the war chose expatriation. The high point of the movement came in the late 1960s, as the number of American troops in Vietnam steadily increased. When the draft ended in the early seventies and American forces were gradually withdrawn, both protest against the war and expatriation because of it declined. In contrast to draft resisters, who tended to be middle class, the military deserters in exile typically came from poor or working-class families, volunteers who joined the military for financial reasons and then left the ranks as transfer to Vietnam loomed.
Jimmy Carter's first act as president, in January 1977, was to pardon those individuals convicted of criminal law violations because of peaceful opposition to the Vietnam War. Those who had fled the United States rather than face charges were free to return without fear of prosecution, and many did so, although some had made permanent lives abroad. Military deserters were not pardoned.
American expatriates and exiles, then, have sought sanctuary in other lands for many reasons—economic, political, intellectual, cultural, personal, and ethnic. Many struggled with their estrangement, some choosing permanent expatriation, others eventually returning. "I am not now, and never will become—at least, not by my own desire—an expatriate," said African-American writer James Baldwin while living in France in the 1960s. "For better or for worse, my ties with my country are too deep, and my concern is too great." Baldwin was typical of Americans who fled their homeland. Alienated from it, they continued to ponder its meaning for clues to their identity.
David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973); Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1934); Ernest Dunbar, The Black Expatriates: A Study of American Negroes in Exile (1968); Eugene C. Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (1985); Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789 (1972).
Charles Reagan Wilson
See also American Colonization Society; Underground Railroad; and entries for individual expatriates.
