1 On the afternoon of 4 October 1783, 19-year-old Mary Robie and her younger sister Mehetable – or “Hetty” as her family and friends affectionately knew her – made the short walk from their home on Granville Street to Halifax’s Old Burying Ground. Although the sisters were travelling to a funeral, Mary thought more about the deteriorating weather conditions than about the somber event she was attending. “As it was a person we had no regard for nor had ever seen,” she explained, “we imagined that we should be unaffected.” As she watched the corpse being lowered into the grave, however, Robie acknowledged that the “gloomy awful scene” left her “exceedingly affected.” She and her sister spent that evening with their mother and aunt at the home of one of their neighbors. While such visits were not uncommon, Robie noted that after attending the funeral, time spent with her family and friends helped “dispel all the gloomy thoughts which the awful scene had given birth to.”¹ Like so many others, the Robie sisters found a reprieve from the hardships of daily life through the comfort of family.

2 The pages of Mary Robie’s diary, which she kept almost daily from May 1783 until June of the following year, provide an intimate glimpse into the rhythm of daily life in Halifax.² The daughter of a prosperous hardware merchant, who had fled Massachusetts and arrived in Halifax during the early days of the Revolution, Robie used her diary to record her daily routine. Perhaps hoping to echo her mother’s opinion that Halifax was “a dumb and stupid place, [which] furnishes no topick [sic] either for conversation or writing,” the teenage Robie often grumbled about the tedium of her usual day.³ In one entry, she sarcastically explained that mornings were typically spent entertaining friends with “the most interesting discourse on fashionable caps and gowns” and talking “scandal or fashions.” Afternoons were for little more than “tea, cards, supper, and to bed” only to “rise tomorrow and do just the same.” “What little variety there is in our lives,” she complained.⁴

3 Robie’s diary entries reveal that she lived a life of relative privilege, where social calls and leisurely activity filled her days. But equally unmistakable is her description of the emotional toll of exile and the constant struggle she faced as a refugee. On a personal level Robie lamented the disorder of Loyalist Halifax, especially the constant comings and goings of friends and family as transient revolutionary refugees continually moved across the British Atlantic in search of opportunity. “There is something so sad and so solemn in bidding one adieu, perhaps forever,” she wrote after saying goodbye to a young woman she had come to know during the girl’s two-year stay in Halifax. Describing how her and her sister felt after learning their close family friends would be leaving Halifax for London, Robie explained “Hetty squeezed my hand, we could neither of us speak.”⁵ But the distress of exile was not simply personal. Robie also used her diary to record the broader, inescapable anguish of Loyalist Halifax that plagued all members of society, even those whose status protected them from the worst poverty and physical suffering. “I have been a great deal engaged in some painful and melancholy scenes, which have almost effaced the pleasing ones,” she wrote of the overwhelming despair of Halifax in June 1784. “If I look round me, what thousands may I see more wretched than myself.”⁶

4 How did refugee women respond to the often-overwhelming sadness of revolutionary exile? While previous scholars have suggested that in the face of seemingly unrelenting sadness, women became “domestic creatures” of support whose “personal world did not extend beyond the front door,” this article uses the exile experience of the Robie family to demonstrate that women were not always “stoic, long-suffering, self-sacrificial, female[s] who bore [their] unhappiness bravely.”⁷ To the contrary, in settlements where grief abounded, compassionate and emotional women became central figures of support in the community and could also take on leading roles within the home. Aware of the collective Loyalist suffering, the Robie women employed traditional acts of familial support in public and helped build a sense of community among diverse refugees. Closer to home, Mary Bradstreet Robie – whom I distinguish from her eldest daughter, also named Mary, by using her maiden name – argued with her more stubborn husband that the family’s well-being, as well as her own happiness, necessitated a return to New England after the war. Rather than stoically face the misery of exile, the public and private roles of the Robies demonstrate that Loyalist women could use suffering to their advantage.

5 This article examines how Loyalist women responded to the hardships of exile and makes two claims. First, in Loyalist settlements where suffering abounded, women took on public roles of support that became the basis for an emotional community.⁸ As Keith Grant notes, “Early modern Nova Scotians did things with their emotions”; in Loyalist Halifax, women like the Robies recognized that their responses to widespread hardship carried tremendous emotional power.⁹ The “lived experience” of revolution and subsequent exile, especially the destruction of social networks and the widespread poverty of the refugee community, caused men and women of every class in Loyalist Halifax to feel a heightened sense of fellow feeling toward others.¹⁰ Although Bostonian Loyalist Mather Byles Jr. and the former Royal Governor of South Carolina Lord Charles Montagu shared little in common besides their fate as refugees, for example, when Byles learned of Montagu’s death in February 1784 he could not help but feel shaken by the former governor’s precipitous fall from power. He felt pity for Montagu and, as a fellow member of the Loyalist elite, he also worried that he too might die alone without fanfare “in a little hut in the woods of Nova Scotia.”¹¹

6 But Byles’s feelings were limited to his private writings. Publicly, he and other Loyalist men were determined to project the confidence of fervent British patriots. In contrast, women were expected to be more aware of, and sympathetic to, the suffering of others.¹² When the Robies visited newly arrived strangers, hosted a number of itinerant families at their home, and wept at the funerals of young men and women they had never met, they shared the suffering of others. Instead of an isolating feeling that pushed women into their homes, shared misery became the basis for a collective system of feeling.¹³ While previous scholars have explained women’s public practices as little more than an a reimaging of more exciting pre-revolutionary lives, studying the Robie women suggests that Loyalist wives and daughters used the common suffering to recreate bonds that had been lost in exile and establish a body of “elective-kin” among those who shared little else except the emotional toll of resettlement.¹⁴

7 The Robie women also used the ever-present despair of Loyalist Halifax to achieve their own objectives within the home. Despite the previous assertions that women “held out little hope of returning to America,” matriarch Mary Bradstreet Robie was eager to bring her family back to New England following the peace of 1783 and used her unhappiness to make it happen.¹⁵ Returning briefly to her native Massachusetts in the summer of 1784 to escape disease-ridden Halifax and care for her sickly newborn daughter, Robie became only further convinced that the family would never be as happy in Nova Scotia as they could be in Massachusetts. During the next five years, she began a sustained appeal to her husband that they should repatriate. In her plea, Robie emphasized both her duty to protect her children and her emotional longing for home. Despite her efforts, her family’s connections to Nova Scotia grew only stronger after her return to Halifax in 1784. Sensing the need for more concrete connections, Robie facilitated a marriage between her eldest daughter and the promising young Boston merchant Joseph Sewall during another trip back to Marblehead in 1788. In the spring of 1789, with her family’s New England connection secure, she demonstrated the power of her influence in a letter she sent back to her husband in Halifax. “If you expect ever to see me again,” she asserted, “you must come here.” Her husband landed in back in New England the following year, forever separating branches of the family between two nations.¹⁶

8 In tracing the role of the Robie women in Loyalist Halifax, this article also contributes to many interconnected historiographies. As the Robie sisters’ service at the stranger’s funeral exhibits, women were an integral part of burial practices and refugees adapted mourning rituals to fit their situation.¹⁷ The Robie women’s attention to other refugees’ hardship and grief suggests new ways historians of the Loyalist diaspora and American Revolution could consider women’s agency in regards to the war, allegiances, and exile. The family’s return to Massachusetts not only suggests further study is needed into the return of the American Loyalists, but it also demonstrates how wives and daughters acted as facilitators of repatriation and sheds light on how marriage could be used to promote reconciliation after the Revolution.¹⁸

9 The Robie family’s last few years in Massachusetts were tumultuous. A vendor of imported British goods in the affluent North Shore town of Marblehead, Thomas Robie’s business struggled in the early days of the Massachusetts boycott. Throughout 1769, Samuel Hall used his weekly newspaper, the Essex Gazette, to identify and publicly condemn merchants who failed to comply with the non-importation agreements. In December of that year, Hall named Robie, alongside three others of Marblehead, as purveyors who continued to import and store British-made products. He urged the town’s patriots to recognize that these men did “sordidly prefer their private interest to the public Good.” Robie published a reply weeks later; however, few of Hall’s subscribers were sympathetic to his defense.²⁰ Robie again enflamed the patriot majority of Marblehead in 1773 when he had himself and his family inoculated against smallpox, a decision many radicals believed was a part of a Tory conspiracy to spread the disease among the town’s inhabitants.²¹ The final straw came in May 1774 when Robie signed his name, alongside other prominent merchants and politicians of the Boston area, in a letter expressing support for the despised governor Thomas Hutchinson.²² Following his public endorsement of Hutchinson, Robie joined the ranks of other prominent Tories and hostilities against him and his family intensified.

10 Attacks against ardent and perceived British sympathizers in Massachusetts became increasingly violent in the late summer months of 1774. On 1 September 1774, Thomas’s cousin and Massachusetts Attorney General Jonathan Sewall returned from court in Boston to his family’s Cambridge residence and found a patriot mob had smashed the windows and terrified his wife and children. Sewall removed to Boston for his family’s safety, and he advised his cousin to do the same.²³ Facing increasing pressure from his creditors, Robie mortgaged the family’s home for £800 in late 1774.²⁴ He drew up his last will and testament on 22 March 1775.²⁵ A month later, the people of Marblehead ransacked Robie’s business much like they had Sewall’s home. Robie took his family first to his sister Mehitable Higginson’s home in neighbouring Salem, but fearful of continuing retribution the Robies – including Thomas, his wife Mary Bradstreet Robie, daughters Mary (age 11) and Hetty (age 9), and sons Simon Bradstreet (age 5) and Thomas (barely 1 year) as well as Higginson and her ten-year-old daughter – fled north to Nova Scotia on 2 May 1775.²⁶

11 The family was among the earliest Loyalist arrivals to Halifax and, as such, enjoyed unique advantages over refugees who arrived in the later war years.²⁷ Most importantly, as an early arrival, Thomas Robie was able to establish himself as a hardware merchant and profit from the tremendous increase of capital that followed the Royal Navy to Halifax during the American Revolution.²⁸ He also profited from supplying later refugees. By the early 1780s, Thomas’ financial success allowed him to join at least the outer ranks of Halifax’s mercantile bourgeoisie. As a sign of his family’s growing wealth and importance, on 22 April 1780 or almost five years after the family’s arrival, Thomas purchased a lot near the waterfront on the bustling Granville Street from Peter McNabb for £345, and from his new home Robie continued to run his hardware business.²⁹

12 The Robie family also acted as an advance guard of New England refugees in Nova Scotia. Both Thomas and his wife maintained frequent correspondence with friends and family held up in Boston with General Gage and his army through March 1776. In a series of letters exchanged with Sewall, Robie kept his cousin informed of life in Halifax and Sewall gave Robie an account of Boston under siege. Circumstances were dire in both cities. “For a month past you met as many dead folks as live ones,” Sewall recounted of the hunger, inflation, and disease that plagued Boston during Washington’s land blockade.³⁰ Robie’s news from Halifax was little better. He described a series of illnesses that afflicted the earliest arrivals to Halifax. Sewall had planned to take up his position as judge of the Vice Admiralty Court in Halifax, but news of a smallpox epidemic in Halifax gave him second thoughts. He ultimately decided to sail for England in the late summer of 1775, where he believed he could use his political connections to secure a better government position in Nova Scotia. He encouraged his cousin to join him, and Robie left Halifax, and his family, sometime in the early fall of 1775.³¹ Knowing the two would be reunited in London, Sewall’s outlook on the war improved dramatically. Sewall wrote assuredly to Halifax, “Cheer up Robie, I think I see Daylight tho’ it has been a long dark stormy night – I begin to hope the storm has almost spent itself.”³²

13 But left alone in Halifax for at least a year, Mary Bradstreet Robie’s letters contain little of Sewall’s optimism. “So much for Halifax,” she wrote in no unclear terms in January 1776. “I wish I had never seen it.”³³ Although it was on the cusp of major growth during the Revolution, when the Robies arrived in May 1775 Halifax remained a small outpost in the nascent British colony that bore little resemblance to the thriving town of Marblehead they had left behind.³⁴ Robie complained to her husband about being unable to find adequate care for a terrible toothache, half-jokingly writing “If you ever see me again I am afraid it will be without teeth.” She decried the “dark and rainy Halifax weather,” and prayed her husband would return from England and bring the family out of their captivity. Reminding her husband to send her best wishes to Sewall and his wife while they were together in London, Mary Bradstreet Robie quipped: “Make my best respects to the judge and Lady . . . and tell e’m [sic] I wish they will never see Halifax.”³⁵ From London, Robie attempted to reassure his wife by encouraging her to not live any differently in Halifax than she had in New England. “Tho I would by no means discourage frugality and economy,” he advised her, “do not debar yourself the Necessities and Conveniences of Life on account of the unhappy situation of affairs.”³⁶

14 Most refugees who landed in Nova Scotia between Gage’s evacuation of Boston in March 1776 and the final withdrawals from the last British strongholds of the eastern seaboard in late 1783 expressed feelings of unhappiness in ways similar to Mary Bradstreet Robie. Mary Driskill spoke of her “very Disconsolate position” when she arrived in Nova Scotia. Hannah Watson explained that her arrival left her with the “deepest Distress, Misery, and Indigence.”³⁷ Sarah Winslow believed the British government had abandoned its faithful subjects, who would spend their “last days in wretchedness.”³⁸ Although women appear more likely to express their discontent, Loyalist men also felt the despair. One refugee noted how even “strong proud men wept like babies.”³⁹ The gloom of exile was inescapable in Loyalist Nova Scotia.

15 The refugees were constantly aware of the sadness imbued within their society, and this feeling permeated even the more joyous occasions. Shortly before Christmas 1783, Mary Robie declined an invitation to attend a ball at the governor’s mansion. In a letter years later, Robie explained to her sister that she detested the “stiffness and ceremony, which generally prevails in public places.”⁴⁰ While she did not attend, she used her experience at similar festivities to speculate in her diary about what the event would be like. “It gives me pleasure,” Robie imagined, “in a large company to look around and see the appearance of happiness on every face and every eye sparkle with delight.” But Robie recognized that beneath the joyful surface lay a more bleak reality. “I never dare to draw back the curtain to look what is behind all this apparent happiness,” she explained, “les’t I should find some times only gilded misery.”⁴¹ Robie, like so many other refugees, recognized the inescapable sadness that defined Loyalist society in Halifax even if it was not always apparent.

16 In an attempt to escape the signs of the widespread poverty of exile and to recreate the grandeur of their lives before the war, Loyalists held many large gatherings like the one Robie described. Robie found at least a modicum of comfort in the façade these gatherings provided. But she also knew that the merriment around her was superficial. She called the apparent happiness “only gilded misery” because she recognized the ball was merely a distraction that provided a thin veil to cover the harsh realities of exile.⁴²

17 But Robie’s comment should not simply be dismissed as another example of Loyalist hardship. After all, she and the other ball attendees were members of the elite and therefore insulated against much of the physical suffering that less affluent refugees endured. Instead, Robie’s thoughts suggest she recognized a common thread of emotion that connected all Loyalists. While she did not share the physical suffering, she wanted to imagine herself as part of the broader emotional community.⁴³ As historian Joanne Burke argues, emotions, like suffering, have the power to “align individuals with communities.”⁴⁴ Although only a brief note, Robie’s emphasis on the pervasive sadness suggests that she understood the feeling of despair to be a critical component of the broader Loyalist experience. The “gilded misery” of exile provided a common bond between diverse refugees who shared little in common other than their sadness.⁴⁵

18 This idea of “emotion shared” – or what 18th-century people called “compassion,” “sympathy,” or “fellow feeling” – was a vital character trait. As Adam Smith noted in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), “Nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary.” British society emphasized the importance of fellow feeling and perceived those who did not demonstrate what one scholar has dubbed “irresistible compassion” as lacking a key component of humanity. Both men and women were expected to be conscious of the feelings of others. But unlike men, 18th-century women needed to protect themselves from being seen as overly sentimental, which Sarah Knott notes could cause them to be perceived as “the sign of sensibility gone wrong: ineffectual, excessive, and affected.”⁴⁶ Women in Loyalist Halifax, therefore, had to toe a fine line between compassion and composure. Ultimately, Loyalist women like the Robies found they could demonstrate both these qualities in an important public role: the compassionate neighbor. Through this position, women established important personal connections and set the precedent for a new emotional community in exile.

19 One duty Loyalist women assumed as compassionate neighbors was to visit newly arrived refugees, even if they were strangers. As refugees flocked to Halifax during late 1783, women’s visits to homes of strangers became increasingly common. This custom became so routine that, in writing back to his aunts in Massachusetts, Mather Byles III noted his sister Rebecca, in contrast to her peers, “never goes to see a stranger that arrives because she supposes they are like all the rest.”⁴⁷ Although this comment highlights some of the class divisions in Loyalist Halifax, Byles’s note also emphasizes how other elite women (such as the Robies) made it a habit to visit newly arrived refugees regardless of social status. His remark also demonstrates how women’s visiting practices, especially to homes of “strangers,” were highly visible and important public functions.

20 In early October 1783, Mary Robie described the busy day her mother had visiting newly arrived Loyalist families throughout Halifax. She noted that although these families were “strangers,” they were also “people of character” and “Mama visited them from a motive of compassion as they knew nobody here.”⁴⁸ Although Robie’s emphasis on these refugees’ “character” might suggest these refugees were fellow elites, evidence from colonial newspapers demonstrates that by the 1780s, British sympathizers used this term to mean colonists who had remained loyal. For example, in a 1780 address to the departing military commandant, New York’s mayor, David Matthews, reminded Major General James Pattison to remember the colonists of New York to British officials in London by “our characters, as loyal and affectionate subjects to the best of kings.”⁴⁹ In a letter to the Earl of Shelburne reprinted in the South-Carolina Weekly Gazette, a sympathetic Briton praised the “brave and loyal men in America,” who through their sacrifices demonstrated the “character particular to Britons.”⁵⁰ Given that Robie noted the arrivals had no connections in Halifax, it is likely that her emphasis on the refugees’ character referred to their status as colonial Loyalists rather than an elite class standing.

21 Visiting newly arrived strangers was a marked change from the Robies’ normal social calls. Prior to the influx of refugees in 1783, the family mostly kept company with fellow New England refugees, many of who were close friends, and who had also come from Marblehead and the surrounding area during the late 1770s.⁵¹ But the “strangers” they visited in October 1783 were refugees from New York, which had been evacuated over the summer months.⁵² Visiting newly arrived refugees, Mary Bradstreet Robie practiced “extra-domestic sociability” and blurred the lines between private and public practice. During these visits, she both judged the character of the new arrivals and increased her own intimate circle while also providing a larger public service of acclimating new arrivals to Loyalist Halifax.⁵³ Through her visiting practices, Robie was not simply imagining a more exciting lifestyle or attempting to relive the glory of her pre-revolutionary station; instead, her visits provided a valuable first point of contact for new arrivals, provided the Robie family with an extended network, and served as an important symbol of public empathy to the broader Loyalist population of Halifax.⁵⁴

22 Mary Bradstreet Robie used her visits to build “an environment of mutual benevolence, fictive kinship, and friendship” between the earlier refugees and those of 1783.⁵⁵ For the newly landed refugees, Robie’s visits provided an important link to their new home. As a well-connected earlier arrival, Robie would have been a valuable source for information. In her parlour on Granville Street she hosted some of the most prominent figures in the colony, including Lt. Governor Edmund Fanning, the surveyor of the Port Roseway (Shelburne) settlement Benjamin Marston, the chaplain to the army at Halifax Mather Byles Jr., the minister of St. Paul’s Anglican Church Dr. John Breynton, and Rev. Peter De la Roche of Lunenburg and Rev. John Wiswall of Cornwallis. When she visited new families, she could have provided them with some of the insights she gained from conversing with these elite figures in her own home. Certainly Robie benefited from these new settlers as well. Through her visits she was able to both learn about life in the other Loyalist strongholds and assess the new arrivals’ potential benefit to her own inner circle.

23 But these visits also served an important emotional function. Having lived through the hardships of settling in Halifax herself, Robie represented an empathetic figure to new arrivals. She helped the refugees make sense of their new home and provided essential functions of support for these new strangers. Perhaps most demonstrative of her public position of support, Robie volunteered her daughters to mourn alongside families coping with the loss of a loved one. While visiting new families, Robie learned of a young woman who, having been separated from her parents during the war, died shortly after arriving in Halifax. Survived only by her siblings, whom she had cared for, the woman had no one else to mourn her death. Although many 18th-century colonists eschewed grandeur and spectacle in funerals, popular custom still dictated that respected and loved individuals command large turnouts for their burials as a sign of respect.⁵⁶ Funerals in Halifax, and throughout the Loyalist settlements of Nova Scotia, however, were often sparsely attended, which contributed to the feeling of a “lonely death” in exile.⁵⁷

24 The connection forged by Mary Bradstreet Robie during her visit meant that the newly arrived family now had potential mourners to attend the young woman’s funeral, and on the evening of 3 October 1783, Mary Robie and her sister received a request “to serve as pallholders to a Miss Wood.” “We had never any connection, or even knew there was such a person here,” Robie explained, but after learning of the family’s plight the Robie sisters consented to visit the family. Being asked to serve at the funerals of young men and women they had never met was not entirely uncommon for young Loyalist women of Halifax. Both Mather Byles Jr. and his 20-year-old daughter Rebecca attended the funeral of another recent arrival on 4 February 1784. Rebecca, who was serving as “bearer for a girl of her acquaintance” was given special clothing – “white gloves and white ribbands [sic]” – which he noted was “the usual custom of such funerals in this place.”⁵⁸ Mary Robie also noted the particular mourning rituals of Halifax while attending another funeral: “The pall was held by six young Women dressed in white with Hoods that covered their faces and the corps [sic] was lowered only by males,” Robie explained. “Everything was conducted with decency as [the deceased] had left directions.”⁵⁹ The description of Loyalists’ grieving practices, especially the unique clothing mourners wore, suggests the refugees developed their own customs for mourning in exile. Funerals in Loyalist Halifax were marked by more than distinctive dress, as the participation of unknown strangers from the Loyalist community demonstrated the power of collective loss and shared suffering to create community.

25 Mary Robie’s empathic thoughts while visiting the grieving family and at the graveside of the stranger demonstrate the importance of “gilded misery” to the community of Loyalists in Halifax. “As strangers we pitied them,” she explained after meeting the deceased’s surviving siblings, “and [we] looked upon ourselves obliged to be of all the service in our power.”⁶⁰ Summarizing her thoughts on the burial, Mary further commented, “This was a young woman of six and twenty, who after a short illness was cropped, as it were, in the flower of her age in a strange place unknown and unlamented.”⁶¹ While she had never met the departed, as a fellow refugee in Nova Scotia Robie intimately understood the young woman’s struggles and worried she too would share a similar lonely death in exile. Robie’s tears at the stranger’s graveside were a sign of her compassion and served to reinforce Loyalist community.⁶² Robie’s presence and compassion at the young woman’s funeral demonstrate the importance of fellow feeling to the Loyalist community of Halifax and reveal the highly visible role of women within this emotional community.

26 During the spring of 1784, Halifax saw the arrival of thousands of Loyalist exiles, and the Robies welcomed a new baby to their own household. Mary Bradstreet Robie gave birth to her final child, a daughter named Hannah, on 12 March 1784.⁶³ While the family celebrated the child’s birth as a blessing, her mother closely watched the deteriorating conditions around Halifax with apprehension. An ominous and unsettling mood seemed to settle over the city during the early months of 1784, and Hannah’s birth reinvigorated her mother’s desire to return to Massachusetts. Although her husband remained committed to staying in Nova Scotia, Mary Bradstreet Robie became insistent that a return to their American home was in the family’s best interest.⁶⁴ The role Robie played in bringing her family out of exile demonstrates that not all Loyalist women accepted their fate as permanent exiles.⁶⁵ More importantly, Robie was able use the omnipresent gloom of Loyalist exile to sway her husband’s opinion on repatriation.

27 Many Loyalists were unhappy with the disadvantageous terms reached between Great Britain and the United States at the Revolution’s end, especially the ambiguous language about the restoration of Loyalist property.⁶⁶ The final British defeat, and what was essentially the capitulation of Loyalist property, only cemented despair in collective consciousness of Loyalist Halifax. Such sadness manifested itself in a number of ways. The younger Mary, for instance, began her diary entry for 29 February in the following way: “Thank heaven this [day] is past . . . for we have had two dreadful predictions, one public the other private.” Since the British colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, leap years were known to excite superstitions among many colonists.⁶⁷ For the Loyalists of Halifax, the leap year of 1784 coincided with the disastrous end of the war and the haphazard resettlement of refugees. Within this calamitous atmosphere, a dire rumour gained considerable traction. “It was predicted that the day was to be as dark as night,” Robie explained, “[and] that there was a most violent storm, and that the greatest part of the city was to be overflowed by inundation.” Her younger brother Thomas also confided in his sisters that he had “dreamt he was going to die on the twenty ninth of February,” which his sister described as “extraordinary” because “it was a leap year and he knew it not.” Robie felt considerable distress as she “had heard several stories of people who had foretold the time of their own death,” but, she explained, she had decided to “keep it carefully from my mother” who was expecting the birth of her child any day.⁶⁸ More than children’s gossip, the worrying rumours Robie recorded in her diary speak to the ever-present gloom that shrouded Loyalist Nova Scotia when Hannah Robie was born.⁶⁹

28 Intensifying feelings of unease around the period of Hannah’s birth, the delivery had been difficult for the aging mother. Although the baby was born healthy, the long and laborious birth left the family feeling “poignant uncertainty.”⁷⁰ Mary Bradstreet Robie’s recovery from Hannah’s birth was slow, but this was not necessarily unusual for upper class women of the period.⁷¹ By early May Mary Bradstreet Robie was dining with family, and her daughter noted that her health and spirits were both “remarkably well.”⁷² By the month’s end, however, the health of both mother and child took a serious turn for the worse. In Mary Bradstreet Robie’s eyes, their ill health was symptomatic of widespread diseases, especially smallpox, that had come to Halifax with the influx of refugees.⁷³

29 Lacking proper medical attention and fearing the worst for both her own health and that of her newborn, Mary Bradstreet Robie became increasingly vocal about her desire to exchange disease-ridden Halifax for Massachusetts. Perhaps fearing his former neighbours would take revenge on his wife and children, or maybe worried the sickly woman and child would not survive the notoriously rough crossing between Nova Scotia and New England, Thomas Robie resisted his wife’s pleas for return.⁷⁴ Instead of the oversea journey, he arranged to bring the family out of Halifax and into the country. On 25 June 1784 the family took a carriage from Halifax to the home of one of Robie’s business associates in Sackville, roughly 12 miles north. For the younger Mary, the family’s journey into the country was an adventure. Unhappy that she had only “been 4 miles out of town” since she arrived 9 years earlier, she welcomed the opportunity of seeing other regions of Nova Scotia.⁷⁵ The excursion was little help, and Robie’s diary indicates her mother’s health continued to decline rapidly upon their return to Halifax in early July. After the failure of his country excursion, Thomas yielded to his wife’s wishes and prepared arrangements for her passage back to New England.

30 In early July 1784, Mary Bradstreet Robie, her eldest daughter Mary, and the newborn Hannah boarded a ship destined for New England. This was the family’s first excursion home since their exile almost a decade before. The 10-to-12 day sail between Halifax and Massachusetts was a treacherous and tiresome voyage for seasoned seamen, but for a sick mother, her 3-monthold child, and a 20-year-old tasked with watching over the ailing family the crossing was excruciating. Upon arriving in Massachusetts, the younger Mary explained how all aboard the New England bound ship had “tremble[d] at the idea of the long passage” with the wind against them. The journey was arduous, and although the younger Mary had escaped the “sea sickness” that plagued nearly all aboard, her mother and young sister had suffered tremendously. They fared little better after landing in Massachusetts, where they stayed in Salem with her father’s sister, Mehitable Higginson, who had herself returned from Halifax sometime in early 1783.⁷⁶ Mary spent days tending to them. “The first moment of leisure I had after being a little recovered from the fatigue of the voyage in my heart I dedicated to writing you,” Mary explained in a letter to her sister in Halifax, “but Mama and the baby having both been rather indisposed necessarily engaged all of my attention.”⁷⁷

31 Back in Halifax, Thomas Robie wrote his wife a few letters suggesting he was still not entirely comfortable with her return to New England. “I must repeat my desire,” he wrote to his wife in late July, “that you find a [wet] Nurse for Miss Hannah . . . as you are now in a Land flowing with Milk if not with Honey.”⁷⁸ While he wished his wife a speedy recovery, he reiterated that her travel was a temporary fix. Despite his fears, Robie was certain that once his wife returned to New England she would recognize how much better life in Halifax was than Massachusetts and would “come back in good spirits.”⁷⁹

32 By 8 August, Mary Bradstreet Robie was well enough to write her husband a short letter, but her words did little to reassure her worrying spouse. Contrary to what her husband believed, Robie wrote that she found life in New England was far superior to her experience in Halifax. “I wish you was here,” she wrote, and assured him that if he returned to Massachusetts “you would never wish yourself in H[alifa]x again.” Being back in New England confirmed what Mary Bradstreet Robie had imagined all along, and having tasted happiness again for the first time in years she had no desire to return north. “In short you must come here or I shall elope again,” she threatened her husband, “for I shall never be content to live in the way I have done there.”⁸⁰ Robie’s threat was not entirely clear; she implied, however, that if her husband would not consider returning to New England she would continue to make trips back herself. She may have even been alluding to the idea that she would leave him for a permanent return. Although Robie and her daughters had played an important public role in Loyalist Halifax, she yearned for a return to a more stable lifestyle in Massachusetts.

33 Her daughter, however, was less keen on the idea of repatriation. The younger Mary felt a sense of relief and joy similar to her mother’s when she landed back in New England. “I cannot pretend to tell you how we felt when we first saw land, or of my emotion of coming ashore,” she wrote to her sister Hetty in Halifax, “I am certain your heart will give you a much better idea than my pen.” But while she rejoiced in her family’s return, her outlook on the future was starkly different from her mother’s. She had built a group of good friends in Halifax and still felt a strong connection to the Loyalist community in exile. Contemplating the contrast between the happiness she felt on arriving in New England and the sadness that remained from leaving friends in Halifax, Robie wrote: “I could be contented here as formerly; however, I by no means wish it. My Halifax friends still have too much hold on my heart.”⁸¹ The younger Robie’s connections to Nova Scotia were much stronger than her mother’s.

34 Perhaps recognizing that she stood alone in her desire to return, Mary Bradstreet Robie knew that, despite her threats, she had no leverage. In the same letter where she expressed her desire to repatriate, she also assured her husband of her fidelity. “You know I shall (not withstanding what I have said above) prefer being with you, wherever you think it will be best.”⁸² Family remained paramount in her mind, and while a return to New England confirmed what she had believed she also recognized she would not be fully content in Massachusetts without those she loved. As she wrote to Thomas: “My love to the children. I hope you are attentive . . . tho [I am not] superstitious [I am] anxious, and should anything happen, I should be more unhappy than if I had not left home.”⁸³ Three of her children and her husband remained in Halifax, and she knew she belonged with them. She and her daughters set sail back to Nova Scotia in late October 1784.

35 Unfortunately for Mary Bradstreet Robie’s ambitions, the family’s connections to Nova Scotia only grew stronger after she returned to Halifax. Sometime in late 1784 or early 1785, Hetty Robie agreed to marry Jonathan Sterns. Sterns, a close family friend and fellow New England refugee, was 15 years Hetty’s elder but had been a frequent visitor to the Robie household, and Hetty’s father looked favorably on the marriage between his daughter and an established lawyer and political representative of the Loyalist faction in Halifax. The couple gave birth to their first child sometime in 1786. After the marriage, Simon Bradstreet, the eldest Robie boy, began studying law with his new brother-in-law.⁸⁴

36 At the same time, Thomas Robie purchased property through his connection with fellow Marblehead Loyalist Benjamin Marston in the growing settlement of St. John. Marston encouraged Robie to bring his hardware business to New Brunswick, explaining that not only did Robie’s land sit on the “only Passage through which all the waters of that mighty [St. John] River flow into the Ocean” but also that the new settlement had both “Good Soil & Good Government” that “certainly exceed you in Nova Scotia beyond all degrees of comparison.” Furthermore, Marston assured Robie “the best People among you are all looking toward this New Province.”⁸⁵ With favorable prospects, Robie considered moving with other discontented Nova Scotian Loyalists to New Brunswick.⁸⁶

37 With their ties to the region increasing, Mary Bradstreet Robie recognized she needed to develop a new strategy to convince her husband to bring the family, at least those not bound to Nova Scotia, back to New England. Knowing her husband’s business had slowed since the conclusion of the war, she hoped to entice him with economic arguments.⁸⁷ During her first trip to New England, Robie had recorded that the Massachusetts market was growing. “The town is upon the rise,” she explained in 1784, “[and] all the men say on the wharf, ‘Oh if we had but Mr. Robie’s shop to go to’.”⁸⁸ She reiterated these sentiments in 1787, and her husband, looking to expand his business by at least testing the markets in New England, agreed to let his wife return to sell some products he was having trouble moving in Halifax. Mary Bradstreet Robie, her daughters Mary and Hannah, and a young black servant boy named Prince, sailed for Marblehead in October 1787.⁸⁹

38 Mary Bradstreet Robie quickly established herself as a hardware vendor out of the same home her family rented in Marblehead. By early November, she was writing back to Halifax about business. Although they sold “not a farthing” the whole first week, by the second week she was making around five dollars a day.⁹⁰ While business was not as profitable as she hoped, she continually emphasized the positives of the return and encouraged her daughter to do the same. “Every body in this Town would be glad to have you return,” the younger Mary obligingly told her father, “former animosities were all forgot.”⁹¹ “Mr. Martin says you would do much better here than where you are,” Mary Bradstreet Robie wrote in reference to one competitor, “and so many others, they all say . . . your things are better than what they get of others and you was honest.”⁹² Robie’s letters to her husband were repeatedly positive, even if business was not what she had hoped.

39 Although she could paint a rosy picture of sales, the younger Mary was also less inclined to deceive her father and included in her letters more sobering news. While her mother had requested that her husband send more items from Halifax, Mary believed it “more advisable” for him to try and sell most hardware items in Halifax as “everything of that kind is much lower here [in Marblehead] than at Halifax.” Mary also contradicted her mother’s description of their competitors. She described the business of Mr. Hale and Mr. Scooby, which “undersells every body.” Making matters worse, she believed, “every thing here sells under the sterling cost,” and she warned her father “I find nothing that will bear so great a profit here as at Halifax.”⁹³ While Mary Bradstreet Robie was careful only to relay all the well wishes and positive news, her daughter more accurately described the low cost of goods and competitive market in New England.⁹⁴

40 Despite her pessimistic outlook, the younger Mary continued in the trade and began a close study of the market. Throughout the early months of 1788 she continued to correspond with her father about the price of goods and requested he send specific items she believed would easily sell in Marblehead. Soon, her store was selling a good deal of hardware items imported from Halifax. Noting the tendency of other vendors, especially that of her close friend Joseph Sewall, to sell items “so cheap [that] others are forced to sell cheaper or not sell at all,” she only requested hardware she knew could not be found in other stores.⁹⁵ Having sold all of the small and large pins Thomas sent from Halifax, she requested he send more, along with “White Chapel Needles” that she believed “would sell quite well here.” She also advised her father to secure “knives and forks,” “Horn combs,” and “Knitting Kneedles.”⁹⁶ She monitored other vendors closely, learning what prices she could charge to entice customers away from the competition while still charging prices close to those her father requested.

41 Even with her growing expertise in the hardware business, the younger Mary longed for Halifax. By the early spring months of 1788 she had been away from Nova Scotia longer than she had ever been before, and her letters north began to reflect her desire to return. “I hope that you continue to take your evening Walk whenever the weather will admit of it,” Mary wrote to her father. She asked him to remember her to the many families he would visit while out walking. She concluded that she wished to be back with her friends and family soon.⁹⁷ And in a letter addressed to her sister Hetty, she explained “Absent from my Friends so dear, the most delightful scenes lose half their charms.”⁹⁸ As the months pressed on, the younger Mary looked back to Halifax for her happiness.

42 Aware of her daughter’s growing desire to return to Nova Scotia, Mary Bradstreet Robie became increasingly anxious about their time in New England. Robie had become less involved in the business as her daughter’s interest in the market increased, and if the younger Mary wrote north that it would best to close shop and return to Halifax there would be little her mother would be able to do to stop it. She could, however, find a suitor for her unmarried daughter. The younger Mary had developed a friendly contest with local competitor Joseph Sewall. Robie often joked to her father that Sewall’s expertise as a merchant threatened to drive her business under. Sewall probably felt similarly. He had arrived in Marblehead from Boston in November 1785 with “a small assortment of goods” which did not exceed £300. By 1788, Sewall estimated his annual profits to be a modest “£800 to £900” and his total property to be another £900. Although he only turned a small profit each year, Sewall recognized that combining his venture with Robie’s would help corner the market in the region and give him access to better quality goods coming in from Halifax. He no doubt cared for Mary, but also recognized their merger would benefit both families’ business operations. Sewall proposed marriage to Mary Robie in early July 1788.⁹⁹

43 Mary Bradstreet Robie appears to have played a significant role in encouraging Sewall to propose. Although Sewall had wanted to ask Robie to be his wife, he was aware his intended’s continued connection to friends and family in Halifax made a New England marriage undesirable. When Sewall wrote to Thomas Robie in Nova Scotia, he explained his hesitations, but also noted that Robie’s wife had encouraged him to ask for her daughter’s hand. “I should not have presum’d Sir, to make this application,” he wrote, “if I had not had some degree of encouragement from Mrs. Robie, for whom I shall ever entertain the most grateful regard.”¹⁰⁰ Mary Bradstreet Robie also wrote to Halifax explaining she had already given her consent and she warned her husband “You will not object.” While she recognized “it will be a hard blow to me and all her friends at H[alifax] to part with her,” she also stressed “we should all give up self when she is to be the gainer.” She implored her husband to remember the “endearments of a tender father” and consent to his daughter’s lasting happiness.¹⁰¹ While the New England business had been less than successful, it had produced a marriage. Mary Bradstreet Robie again emphasized the good of the family and played to her husband’s role as father in order to cement a connection back to New England.

44 Thomas Robie seemed to understand that his distance from Massachusetts necessitated that his wife and daughter act without his express consent. He also agreed the marriage was in his daughter’s best interest. But as a dutiful father, he was sure to write his daughter with “one or two hints” regarding “that new relation you now sustain.” Perhaps reflecting some of the quarrels he had with his own wife, Robie instructed his daughter to “never affect to have your own way or persist with your husband by any other method than a decent and mild endeavor to persuade him . . . by all means give way rather than appear to contest.”¹⁰² While not out of line with 18th-century marriage ideals, Robie’s comments to his daughter were born out of some of his own frustrations with his own marriage. Perhaps he also recognized his wife had finally gained the upper hand through the new union.

45 Mary Bradstreet Robie arrived back in Halifax in November 1788 with a tangible connection back to New England through her daughter’s marriage and an “exceedingly anxious” desire to hear all the news coming from Massachusetts.¹⁰³ Her stay in Halifax was short. She left Halifax for Marblehead again in early May of the following year to help her daughter with her first pregnancy. This time she brought her youngest son, Thomas Jr., with her to help care for the growing Hannah and, although it is unclear what arrangements she had worked out with her husband, with most of her family back in New England she appears to have had little intention of returning to Nova Scotia. Her husband was also beginning to see his new connection with Sewall provided more stability than his business in Halifax or possible opportunities in St. John.¹⁰⁴

46 Mary Bradstreet Robie’s voyage in 1789 marked her last trip between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. The same day she arrived in Marblehead she wrote back to Thomas: “If you ever expect to see me again, you must come here. It will be greatly for your interest to come and the sooner the better.”¹⁰⁵ With his daughter married in Massachusetts, his business opportunities expanding in New England, and his wife and youngest son removed to Marblehead as well, almost all of Thomas Robie’s interests now lay back in the United States. He landed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the early weeks of June 1790. Long opposed to repatriation, upon arriving he echoed his wife’s sentiments on the superiority of New England. “I can’t be but took with the surprising contrast between New England and New Scotland,” he said of initial impressions, and continued “For although the necessities of life were vastly lower [in Halifax], the difference is yet astonishingly great.” For Robie, it was only after his return to New England that he recognized the folly of his past stubbornness. While he admitted he once held “a partiality” for Halifax, upon returning to New England he mocked the foolishness of the “hard inhabitants” of Nova Scotia and their insistence on building lives within the British Empire.¹⁰⁶

47 When news of Mary’s engagement to Sewall reached her sister Hetty in Halifax, she shared none of her mother’s excitement; instead, she lamented her own nuptial ties that bound her to Nova Scotia. “Those who did not extend their connections were the happiest,” she wrote dejectedly to her mother. Describing the sadness she felt upon contemplating her sister’s marriage, she explained “My tears flow as I write. I must take my leave. It is wrong to allow myself to dwell upon the subject.” She also rhetorically asked “What shall I say upon the subject of losing my dearest sister?”¹⁰⁷ When she learned her father would be leaving Halifax, too, Hetty was distraught. She noted that her family’s removal back to New England was “a loss which I shall ever deprecate as one of the greatest in my life.”¹⁰⁸

48 In Massachusetts, both Mary Bradstreet Robie and her daughter took on more private lives than they had in Loyalist Halifax. Mary Bradstreet Robie replaced visiting strangers with long walks in her garden where she could observe “the beautiful presence of the trees in full bloom,” and she noted a return to New England left her with “a grateful heart.”¹⁰⁹ Mary Sewall traded serving at the funerals of unknown refugees for a more domestic role caring for growing family. She grew increasingly focused on the household, especially organizing the hired staff, whom she described as “careless, dirty, and lazy” without her supervision. Having removed herself from the hardware trade and immersed herself in the home, Mary took pride in her new role as mother.¹¹⁰ Her marriage to Sewall proved especially lucrative. Joseph went on to become a successful merchant and, later, treasurer for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The couple’s second son, Samuel Edmund Sewall, had an even more distinguished career. He served in the Massachusetts Senate, helped found the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1831, and was one of the first supporters of a small newspaper, The Liberator, which was run by friend and fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.¹¹¹

49 The family’s fortunes in Halifax were more mixed. After his studies with Sterns, Simon Bradstreet Robie established himself as a lawyer and became one of the leading politicians of the Loyalist faction in Nova Scotia.¹¹² Hetty, on the other hand, only saw her hardships increase. A political rival savagely beat her husband to death in the streets of Halifax after a disagreement in 1798.¹¹³ To worsen matters, shortly after Sterns’ death, Mary received word from Halifax that Hetty was both severely ill and advanced in pregnancy. Mary wrote to her grieving sister hoping she would join the family in New England. But ultimately she knew her sister would not join them as her “long residence at Halifax” created “a strong attachment” between her sister and their adoptive home. Hetty died in Halifax removed from her family.¹¹⁴

50 Only the youngest Robie continued to maintain relationships between New England and Nova Scotia into the 19nth century. Having never married, Hannah spent her life travelling between her brother’s residences in Nova Scotia and her favorite nephew’s home in Boston.¹¹⁵ Shortly before her death in 1832, Mary Sewall scribbled a few words on the back of the diary she had kept nearly 50 years earlier in Halifax. She addressed the note to Hannah. Believing her time was short, Mary advised Hannah that while she could “show it to my children or Mr. Sewall,” she would be better off burning the diary “as there is little worth preserving.”¹¹⁶ As an itinerant living between both Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, however, Hannah found the account of the family’s exile fascinating. As she read about her sister’s life as a young adult in Halifax, she could not have helped but feel moved by the struggles the family faced.

51 As refugees in Halifax, the Robie women served important public roles. Not content to simply observe the suffering of other refugees, they embodied fellow feeling towards others as a sign of their refinement and for the greater public good. These were not simply imagined responsibilities; instead, acts and expressions of fellow feeling created a recognizable community of shared hardship in Loyalist Halifax. The Robie women also played an integral role in directing the fate of the family after the Revolution. Although they had followed the family patriarch into exile in 1775, beginning in 1784 Mary Bradstreet Robie and her eldest daughter built their family’s connections back to New England and eventually brought the majority of the Robie family home to Massachusetts.

52 The Robie women’s compassionate actions while living as exiles in Halifax demonstrate the importance of Loyalist women to their communities and the centrality of shared suffering to refugee experience. But as Mary Bradstreet Robie’s determination to bring her family back to New England reveals, the despair of Loyalist exile could also push some women to seek a return to their American homes. When her appeal to her husband’s sensibilities failed, Robie established a more tangible connection back to Massachusetts through her daughter’s marriage. Collectively, Mary Bradstreet Robie and her daughters’ actions during their time as refugees suggest Loyalist women were not simply complicit followers. To the contrary, women had influence over their husband’s decisions concerning the family and were also important public figures in the creation of Loyalist communities.