<P> Nor were Carleton's evacuees from New York City the only black Loyalists to escape from the United States . Thousands of other blacks escaped to Canada by other means, many on ships leaving Charleston or Savannah . Others escaped to British Florida . A total of between ninety - one hundred and ten thousand four hundred black Loyalists eventually found refuge in Canada . </P> <P> Most of the Loyalists remained in the United States after the British left . Others left and later returned to the U.S. Still others made new homes elsewhere, and never returned to the United States . Of this last group, the largest number became the foundation of the English - speaking Canadian community, and their story is told below . </P> <P> According to some estimates, about 62,000 Loyalists at a minimum left the United States by 1784: 46,000 to Canada, 8000 - 10,000 to Great Britain and the rest to the Caribbean, including several thousand who went to Florida, but who moved on after it was returned to Spain in 1784 . There were at least two waves of American immigration shortly after the Revolution to what is now Ontario, then Upper Canada . The first wave were the wartime Loyalists, who in the early 1780's, went to the southern and eastern parts of the Niagara Peninsula . In the second wave, 30,000 Americans, attracted by promises of land and low taxes in exchange for swearing allegiance to the King, went in the 1790's to the western Niagara Peninsula . Canadian historian Fred Landon concludes that, "Western Ontario received far more land - seekers than Loyalists ." As to the Loyalists who went to England, their story was sometimes not as happy as they had no doubt dreamed . "Transplanted Americans were treated as Americans, not former or new Britons," and, "Some wealthy Loyalists chose exile in England, though they knew Loyalists were not welcome there," (Thomas B. Allen, Tories, Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War, 2010, p. 328). </P> <P> As to the Loyalists who remained within the United States, Loyalists were a minority in every state and in most communities . This differentiated them from the assertive, vocal white pro-Confederate majorities in the South after the Civil War . After the Revolution, Loyalists and their descendants rarely drew attention to themselves . An example of some who did is the Tiffany family, originally of Connecticut, who donated the diary of a Loyalist ancestor to the LIbrary of Congress in 2000 . The diary indicated that in fact the Patriot hero Nathan Hale was captured by Robert Rogers and his Loyalists, a narrative not known before . </P>

Who fought on the side of the colonists