From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: The DePeyster Family of New York by Valerie H. McKito

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Reviewed by: From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: The DePeyster Family of New York by Valerie H. McKito Heather Schwartz From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: The DePeyster Family of New York. By Valerie H. McKito. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015, 248 pages, $24.95 Paper. In the abundance of scholarship on the American Revolution, Loyalist studies form a niche in the field that has received increasing attention of late. Recent books by historians such as Maya Jasanoff, Ruma Chopra, and Judith Van Buskirk have focused mainly on Loyalist motivations, both political and practical, or the diaspora of Loyalists who evacuated by force or choice to other parts of the British Empire. Yet, Loyalists who eventually returned to the United States and reintegrated into society remain understudied. In From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: The DePeyster Family of New York, Valerie H. McKito confronts this crucial question: how and why did Loyalists return to their former homes and successfully assume the mantle of Republican citizenship? While historians have long understood that Loyalists played an important role in the founding of Canada, McKito argues that they were also "inexorably intertwined" with the formative period of the United States (2). McKito examines the logistical processes of exile and reintegration via the compelling case study of Frederick DePeyster (1758–1834), fourth son of a prominent Dutch family in New York City. Like his three brothers, James, Jr., Abraham, and Joseph Reade, Frederick fought for Britain during the Revolution. He served first in the Nassau Blues, then as an officer in the King's American Regiment. When the British evacuated New York following the Treaty of Paris, Frederick and his brothers—banished due to their military service—sailed with the last fleet to Canada in November 1783. While in exile, Frederick cultivated wealth and influence as a merchant [End Page 469] and landowner in New Brunswick, guided by expectations of elite status and aided by his family name as well as his military land grant and pension. In 1793, shortly after New York lifted legal restrictions against Loyalists, Frederick, then thirty-five, returned to reinstate his family's standing among New York City's upper echelon. This move coincided with improved trade prospects in New York as well as his auspicious marriage to Helen Hake. McKito infers that Frederick made a calculated, primarily economic decision to return at a propitious moment. Readers hoping for a study of Loyalist ideology will be disappointed, as McKito argues that self-interest rather than political conviction motivated the DePeysters' choices during and after the American Revolution. She reconstructs the story of a family that chose sides based on what seemed to offer the surest means of securing the wealth, reputation, and influence they had steadfastly built. Frederick and his father, James, like other residents of the port city of New York, believed the sound decision was to side with an empire that facilitated the expansion of their ever-growing fortune as merchants in an Atlantic economy. This focus on interest rather than politics may derive, in part, from the limitations of McKito's primary sources, principally the DePeyster Family Papers at the New York Historical Society. During the War of 1812, with the British Army marching through the capital, Frederick DePeyster burned papers related to the family's former Loyalist leanings. Given New York City's vulnerability during the war, these papers could have compromised the family's credibility, but whether they contained any indication of political or personal fealty cannot be surmised. This book is ambitious in scope, as McKito traces multiple generations of DePeysters from the arrival of Johannes to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1647 through Frederick's term as patriarch until his retirement in 1820 and Frederick, Jr.'s subsequent leadership. With such an extensive chronology, McKito's appendices of DePeyster genealogy prove invaluable. She draws heavily from a wide range of secondary sources in her engrossing account of change in New York and the broader Atlantic World from an early modern economy through the dynamic period of the market revolution. Throughout this odyssey, she touches on a multitude of topics, including Dutch culture, trade, slavery, and European war. The strength of...