Joel Stone and his family are fixed in their place in the past, but the past is not the same as history. The past, as we know it, is gone, and all that remains are the written and physical fragments that we study and interpret as history. Historians need to place their work in the body of history written by other historians. This allows us to see how the interpretations and methodologies have changed over time, and will provide future historians with a map so that they can follow the same trail and come to new insights, interpretations and discoveries. This is called Historiography.
Biography is sometimes the best way to approach history. It is an individual, unique human story as opposed to a general political or social narrative. It is not intended to reveal the average or typical person from the past as there is no such thing, and Joel Stone could never be viewed as such. He is as peculiar and unique as any person, and the sheer volume of written material left by him makes him an exceptional case study. As Dr. Nancy Rhoden writes in her introduction to The Human Tradition in the American Revolution “biography allows a reciprocal evaluation of the impact of one person on public events and the significance of those same public events to individual lives.” Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Rhoden states that biographies “also allow modern readers to take an intellectual journey to another time and place, to put themselves in the place of these historical actors, and to get a glimpse of the world in which they lived.”[1]
Biography can also be problematic. It is tempting to read into the remnants of a life, and try and discern motivations beyond what is written. While there are ways to do this, most often this approach can lead to a dead-end or an endless circle of speculation and possibilities which can be argued but never proven. Thus, it is often important to let our subjects speak for themselves.
For a century or more after their arrival in Canada, the loyalists were venerated as the true embodiments of all that was good in the British Constitution. In local lore they were regarded as Christ-like martyrs who stood up against anarchy and upheaval, and as such, the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century writers produced a fair amount of hagiographic retellings of their stories.[2]
Joel Stone is credited as the founder of Gananoque in Leeds County, Ontario. Streets, parks, and beaches all bear his name. The town hall is the former home of his business partner John McDonald, who began a dynasty that dominated the politics of the little town for years after Stone’s death. This circumstance caused Stone’s memory to be celebrated in the town and his papers to be preserved by his grandchildren.
Several historians have worked on Stone and each writer in the past has had their own interpretation of who Stone was as a man. Joel Stone found his first chronicler in Agnes Maule Machar who wrote a brief biography for the United Empire Loyalist Association in 1899. It’s the sort of Loyalist Myth that was in vogue at the time, and Joel Stone fit the stereotype of that Loyalist – a respectable member of the community who refused to turn against the King and lost everything as a result. Standing firm in the face of anarchy, Stone, the suffering hero, is finally victorious in defeat.[3]
The next person to write about Stone was one of his own descendents, Judge Herbert Stone McDonald, in 1917. His retelling is not much different from Machar’s, and there is almost a religious tone to the writing. Both tales are little more than attempts at myth making, omitting any fact that might cast a grey tinge to their glowing hero. Judge Herbert Stone McDonald, who published his paper through the Ontario Historical Society, described his work as a “tribute” to Stone and other loyalists whom he praises as “the forefathers of the great Province of Ontario.”[4]
In 1966 H. William Hawke, a resident of Gananoque wrote a fairly good examination of some of the surviving correspondence of Stone and although never published, it is a good source for transcribed letters and documents. He presents Stone in a more human light, but the sympathy for the town founder still reads through as he remarks that “he was a remarkably great and good man.”[5]
The bi-centennial celebrations of the American Revolution in the 1970s and 80s fostered a renewed interest in the Revolution, and as a result a number of authors took on Stone in varying degrees. In 1980, Elizabeth Morgan, a Queen’s history MA student, wrote a 200 page thesis on Stone from an angle that leaves it with a very problematic interpretation and takes the story out of its context. Rather than viewing Stone’s correspondence through the conventions and formulae of the times, she infers personality traits and motivations to create an anachronistic interpretation that simply cannot be defended. She presents Stone as a self-serving opportunist, who used his family and friends and sees a “crisis of credibility surrounding Joel’s character,” arguing that Joel’s loyalism was from purely personal motivation.[6]
In 1984, Dr. Donald H. Akenson of Queen’s University looked at Stone in some of the opening chapters of his classic The Irish in Ontario. He has a very different take on Stone. Purely economic in focus, Akenson presents an interesting description of Stone’s work in Upper Canada. For Akenson, Stone is a consummate business man and risk taker, out for profit to be sure, but genuinely concerned in his public offices writing that “he was not vicious; he was notably loyal in personal matters, [and] protective of the weak.” Finally, in the same year Kenneth Donovan published an article in the Dalhousie Review which synthesized a number of overlooked sources to create a helpful, if brief, biography. [7] He sees Stone has genuinely dedicated to loyalism, but not above looking out for himself when necessary. Neither work, however, looks closely at the family relations that persisted in the Stone family.
The treatment of Loyalists in the historiography and social memory of the American Revolution has always been problematic. While they were venerated in Canada, the popular memory of the Tories in the United States was rarely balanced. In Connecticut, stories continued to be told as late as the 1860s of bands of Tories attacking children and the public humiliations that were justly meted out to these depraved criminals.[8] At the centennial anniversary of Litchfield in 1851, it was celebrated that “this county never furnished the enemy with any Tories.” [9] This is a surprising statement coming out of Stone’s hometown. The Loyalists were losers in the civil war and later generations would hardly want to celebrate their Tory ancestors while their fellow citizens extolled the fact that “no county ever was more efficient in the contest for liberty.”[10] Another factor that dictated this historical amnesia was the reality that most Tories remained silent as long as they could, or else acted in secrecy as Stone did. Even years after the Revolution, Joel Stone was careful to warn his friends in Litchfield to keep “a silent tongue and a listening ear,” in regards to his involvement in Tory activities in the area.[11]
The historiography of the American Revolution has tended to examine loyalists in isolation, often setting loyalists apart from the accepted narrative.[12] Books and articles by such historians as Judith Van Buskirk and Joseph Tiedemann have come along way in challenging that work in isolation. Overall, the historiography of the loyalists is lacking in an examination of their family dynamics, not within the refugee communities that formed in Canada, but of the links that remained intact between them and their former homes. Van Buskirk’s book hints at this possibility. Her focus is on the city of New York, and the porous nature of the lines separating British and American controlled areas. While the authorities in New York looked across the Long Island Sound and saw their enemies in Connecticut (and vice versa), the people, in general, did not always see the situation in such stark terms. Most attempted to get by as best they could, relying on old connections from trade and commerce, class, and especially family. Regardless of political belief or affiliation, be they Patriot or Whig, people “leaned on family members” in order to survive.[13] This is what Joel Stone was forced to do during the Revolution and for decades after the war.