Samuel Curwen was a judge of admiralty and merchant in Salem, Massachusetts, fifty-nine years old when the war began. He left in April 1775 not because he wanted to fight for Britain but because he feared what would happen if he stayed. He spent nine years in England writing daily in his journal about the people he met, the news from America, and his steady hope that the war would end and he could go home. The journal is at the Library of Congress, item 13022190, public domain.
Curwen left Salem on April 26, 1775, eleven days after Lexington and Concord. He wrote in his journal that the times rendered it necessary for him to remove from the reach of popular fury. He sailed for London and did not see Massachusetts again for nine years.
To support and countenance the measures now pursuing here to the utmost of my ability is what I have constantly done, and to desert their cause at a time when it most needs support would be an act of base ingratitude; on the other hand, to continue in a place where I am considered an enemy would be neither safe nor comfortable.
Curwen settled first in London, then moved between London, Bristol, and Exeter. His journal records daily life in detail: visits to coffeehouses where American news arrived weeks late, encounters with other Loyalists in similar circumstances, the financial strain of exile, and his sustained attention to the progress of the war. He was not bitter or propagandistic. He was a man watching events he could not influence. He met Thomas Hutchinson in London. The two documents read together give a layered picture of the Loyalist exile community.
America, hapless country! Would to God the contest had never been begun, or that it had ended more honorably for both countries.
Curwen returned to Salem in September 1784. He was sixty-eight years old. His property had been partially seized and was only partially restored. He found Salem changed. He spent the last eighteen years of his life there quietly. His journal ends with his return. He died in 1802 at the age of eighty-six. The list included in the journal of Bostonians who departed with the British evacuation in March 1776 is one of the most specific primary source records of who left and when among the ordinary Loyalist population of New England.
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