Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Southern loyalists saw the reconquest of Georgia as a happy omen of wider victory to come. Indeed, for a time it seemed as if the setbacks of the previous years had been put into reverse. In 1780, the British captured Charleston, South Carolina, turning that city, too, into a safe haven for loyalists.70 Where patriots had attainted prominent South Carolina loyalists, forcing them into exile as enemies of the state, some now returned to retrieve their confiscated property.71 Where patriots had imposed oaths of allegiance to the new state legislature, the British now made sure that hundreds of Charleston residents (including much of the city’s Jewish community) signed certificates pledging to be “true and faithful Subject[s] to His Majesty, the King of Great Britain.”72 Where the patriots had earlier confiscated loyalist property, now patriot plantations and slaves were “sequestered,” or requisitioned, for British use. A North Carolina merchant called John Cruden was appointed commissioner of these sequestered estates, and energetically set about managing them for maximum economic benefit to the British.73

  The newly wed Johnstons especially enjoyed a period of upturn. William had been suffering from a “nervous complaint” triggered by a dangerous ride to Augusta to deliver military intelligence. He traveled to New York, in hopes that a more temperate climate would help him recover, and in a fit of “romantic folly” he insisted on bringing his bride across the war-torn country with him. The couple spent the summer of 1780 relaxing in the calm, British-held countryside of Long Island.74

  But as the Johnstons’ belated honeymoon reached its end, so did Britain’s relative good fortune in the south. The strategy had called for the capture of Charleston in part to secure Savannah. Now, to maintain control over South Carolina, the general commanding the southern army, Charles, Lord Cornwallis, felt he had to conquer North Carolina, and to do that, Cornwallis believed he had to move north again into Virginia. Behind him, the Georgia and Carolina backcountry broke down into bitter conflict between patriot and loyalist militias. Thomas Brown felt the brunt of it. He had made Augusta into a loyalist base and cultivated Creek and Cherokee support in a new office as superintendent of Indian affairs for the south. In the autumn of 1780, patriots attacked Augusta, besieging Brown’s forces in horrid conditions. By the time reinforcements came to the rescue, Brown had been lamed again by a bullet through both thighs, while Andrew Johnston, one of his most trusted lieutenants, lay among the dead. Patriots responded to the loyalists’ pyrrhic victory by accusing Brown and his men of scalping the sick and wounded, summarily hanging prisoners of war, and kicking the decapitated corpses of their victims through the streets.75

  Such appalling reports contributed to an increase in patriot insurgency across the interior of Georgia and the Carolinas and left the British struggling to contain what amounted to a guerrilla war. A few weeks after Augusta, a partisan battle at King’s Mountain in North Carolina left the British hopelessly weakened in the rear. Meanwhile, Cornwallis’s army staggered onward, low on supplies, manpower dwindling, harassed by patriot attacks.76 And Virginia still lay ahead.

  THE OLDEST and by far the largest of the thirteen colonies, in both area and population, Virginia sat at the geographic center of revolutionary America. Together with Massachusetts, Virginia formed one of the revolution’s two ideological poles. It was the home of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among other founding fathers, and the heartland of America’s slaveowning plantocracy. Just a day after the first shots of the war were fired in Massachusetts, conflict erupted independently in Virginia’s capital, Williamsburg. Yet despite Virginia’s prominence, few military actions took place there until Cornwallis invaded in 1781. Rather, the colony stood out as the epicenter of another revolution, whose shock waves were felt hundreds of miles away. David George was one of that revolution’s twenty thousand black participants.77

  Born a slave on a plantation in the Tidewater region of eastern Virginia around 1740, David went into the fields almost as early as he could remember, carrying water, carding cotton, picking tobacco with his callused fingers. His was a brutal boyhood: he watched his sister flogged until her bare back looked “as though it would rot.” He saw his runaway brother hunted down with dogs, hung by the hands from a cherry tree, and whipped so violently that he might not have felt the stinging salt water poured into the open wounds. He heard his own mother struck by the lash, “begging for mercy.” In his twentieth year, David decided to get away from all this. He walked through the night and all the next day and just kept on going, out of Essex County, out of Virginia, over the Roanoke River, over the Pee Dee, and on toward the Georgia border. There he worked peacefully for two years, until his master tracked him down again and David fled once more, as far as Augusta. Even there, five hundred miles away from his Virginia owner, David was not safe. After six months his master’s son turned up to seize him, and David ran yet again. This time, he landed in the custody of a powerful Indian trader called George Galphin, at Silver Bluff, on the opposite bank of the Savannah River from Augusta.

  The Irish-born Galphin, with his Creek Indian wife and mixed-race children, stood out as a sort of southern counterpart to Sir William Johnson. Silver Bluff was a veritable multiethnic kingdom in the backcountry, where the runaway David joined a diverse community with more than a hundred slaves who mixed relatively freely with both whites and Indians. He worked comfortably for a master who “was very kind to me,” and met and married a part-black, part-Creek woman named Phillis. But David’s years at Silver Bluff imprinted him most forcefully for another reason. In the early 1770s, a black preacher arrived in the woods to spread Baptist teachings to the slaves. David found himself alternately captivated and disturbed by the preacher’s message. “I saw myself a mass of sin,” he confessed, and realized that he “must be saved by prayer.” After an exuberant meeting in a mill on Galphin’s plantation, David and Phillis were baptized together in the millstream. David could hardly contain his ecstatic faith. Listening to another charismatic black Baptist, George Liele, preach in a cornfield, David felt an overwhelming urge to lead prayers himself. Liele encouraged the new convert to follow his passion. With Galphin’s permission (notable in an era when many planters were wary of their slaves being exposed to Christian teachings), David began to preach to the slaves at Silver Bluff—adopting his mentor Liele’s first name George as his own surname. Soon he presided there over America’s first black Baptist congregation.78

  By the time war broke out in 1775, Virginia seemed comfortably distant to David George. But the repercussions of conflict disrupted his enclave in time, for reasons originating in the very place from which he had fled. British military fortunes did not get off to a good start in Virginia. The governor, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, bore part of the blame. Despite being born into considerable privilege as a member of the Scottish aristocracy, Lord Dunmore came of age acutely aware of the precariousness of fortune. In 1745, his father had supported the bid of Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”), the Jacobite pretender, to reclaim the British throne from the Hanoverian king George II. The choice to stay loyal to the Stuarts cost many prominent Jacobites their titles and more. Though Dunmore’s family managed to avoid serious sanctions, the near miss must have informed his subsequent hard-nosed pursuit of power and personal gain. Appointed governor of New York in 1770 and governor of Virginia a year later, he was perhaps best known for his aggressive approach to land acquisition—achieved through war against the Indians—and he quickly acquired a reputation for autocracy, arrogance, and self-interest. These qualities were displayed the day after Lexington and Concord, when Dunmore ordered his men to remove the gunpowder from the Williamsburg magazine, to protect it from possible rebels. His unilateral move alienated moderates and patriots alike.79 Armed volunteers demanded the return of the gunpowder; Dunmore responded by booby-trapping the magazine with a spring-loaded gun, wounding three men who tried to break in. The Virginia capital bayed for the governor’s blood. Under cover of night, Dunmore and his family fled to the sa
fety of a British frigate in the James River.

  Dunmore did not mean this as an admission of defeat. He promptly turned HMS Fowey into the headquarters of an extraordinary government in exile, using the fleet to launch operations against patriots in Hampton, Norfolk, and other coastal towns. Hundreds of loyalists rowed out to join this waterborne outpost of British Virginia—as did runaway slaves, who were also given sanctuary. Soon Dunmore governed a “floating town” inhabited by three thousand people on board nearly two hundred ships.80 Patriots denounced Dunmore for “throwing the affairs of this colony in extreme confusion, by withdrawing himself unnecessarily from the administration of government.” But that was not the worst of it. For Dunmore also appeared to be “exciting an insurrection of our slaves” by putting guns in the runaways’ hands.81

  If the prospect of Indian attacks struck terror into frontier colonists, slave rebellions formed the stuff of nightmares for whites in every British colonial slave society. Since 1774 anxious patriots had rumored that the British might arm the slaves, inciting revolt from within the very bosom of American homes.82 Now Dunmore did just that. On November 7, 1775, he issued a proclamation that declared “all indented Servants, Negroes, or Others (appertaining to Rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops, as soon as may be.”83 Within two weeks of the proclamation, Dunmore reported that two to three hundred slaves had joined him on his ships. He formed the runaways “into a Corps as fast as they come.” Called the “Ethiopian Regiment,” these black soldiers went into battle wearing uniform badges that boasted “Liberty to Slaves,” a slogan chilling to the white patriot champions of liberty.

  Dunmore’s proclamation may have stemmed more from pragmatism than principle. The offer of freedom, limited as it was to patriot-owned slaves, brought valuable recruits into British service and dealt a huge blow to rebel morale, without openly undercutting the support of loyalist slaveowners. Motives aside, however, the proclamation’s social impact is hard to underestimate. From one mouth to the next, talk of freedom spread across the plantations of the south—and the slaves began to run. Single mothers led their children to the British; old and young traveled side by side; entire communities sometimes ran away together, dozens of slaves escaping from single plantations. Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment quickly numbered more than eight hundred men, and might have attained twice that strength were it not for a smallpox epidemic that killed hundreds on board Dunmore’s fleet. In pointed irony, some of the most prominent patriots lost their own slaves to the British. Several of George Washington’s slaves ran from Mount Vernon to the floating town. So did several belonging to Virginia burgess Patrick Henry—known for his patriotic rallying cry “Give me liberty, or give me death!”—who cited Dunmore’s proclamation as a reason that Americans should declare independence.84

  By July 4, 1776, though, Dunmore’s floating town was decimated by disease, and there was no improvement in sight. Dunmore was forced to retreat to New York with his Ethiopians. Despite the governor’s die-hard instincts, his effort to preserve royal authority in Virginia had become a farce, another lost cause for the onetime Jacobite. But Dunmore’s proclamation took on a life of its own. By inviting African Americans to join, it dramatically changed the character—and the material strength—of loyalist support for the British. British military commanders promptly repeated the promise of freedom to slaves who would fight. When the British bombarded Wilmington, North Carolina, in the spring of 1776, so many slaves ran to join them that General Sir Henry Clinton formed them into another black regiment, the Black Pioneers. (One of those Wilmington runaways, Thomas Peters, would later emerge as a significant leader of black loyalists in exile.) All told, approximately twenty thousand black slaves joined the British during the revolution—roughly the same number as the whites who joined loyalist regiments. Though hopes of a great white loyalist surge would prove elusive to British commanders, Dunmore and others harbored enduring fantasies of blacks helping to save the colonies for Britain.

  News of black liberation wound into the southern backcountry, as far as Silver Bluff and the ears of David George and his friends. George’s master Galphin had come out as a patriot—or in George’s more muted phrase, an “antiloyalist.” Galphin was appointed Indian commissioner by the patriots, a position in which he vied with his loyalist counterpart Thomas Brown for Creek support. Because of Galphin’s efforts, Creek backing for the British remained uncertain as the redcoats advanced into the backcountry. But when the British army encamped opposite Silver Bluff, the choice for Galphin’s black slaves was clear. On January 30, 1779, David George and his family—among ninety of Galphin’s slaves—crossed the Savannah River to the British camp, to earn their freedom as black loyalists.85 The Georges made their way to British-occupied Savannah, where David found work as a provisioner and butcher and Phillis did laundry for the British soldiers. Better yet, from George’s point of view, he was reunited in Savannah with his spiritual mentor George Liele. Together they continued to preach, knitting together a community of faith among other runaway blacks. Such ties among black loyalists, as among white loyalists, would provide an important sense of togetherness in years to come and destinations unknown.86

  By 1781, with northern offensives abandoned and the southern advance under General Cornwallis running into trouble, the British army’s mass liberation of slaves had come, in some minds, to look more strategically necessary than ever. In August 1781, a sergeant in the Black Pioneers named Murphy Stiele had a brush with the supernatural. He was sitting in the regimental barracks on Water Street in New York City when he heard a piercing yet disembodied voice. It instructed Stiele to tell General Clinton (now commander in chief) to “send word to Genl. Washington That he must Surrender himself and his Troops to the King’s Army, and that if he did not the wrath of God would fall upon them.” If Washington refused, Clinton “was then to tell him, that he would raise all the Blacks in America to fight against him.”87 For two weeks the voice pestered Stiele, until he relayed his message to the commander in chief. Stiele’s vision of blacks thronging to the British standard—a very particular version of those recurring hopes of loyalist support—must have given Clinton pause, since he had always promoted British recruitment of slaves. Such an influx might be just the thing to rescue Cornwallis’s campaign.

  During Cornwallis’s march, black slaves had continued to join the British—including almost two dozen belonging to the author of the Declaration of Independence himself, Thomas Jefferson. Yet despite these arrivals, Cornwallis did not have enough manpower to bring the “wrath of God” down on anyone. He commanded about six thousand soldiers, and his resources were fast running out. Cornwallis decided to set up camp on an exposed peninsula near Williamsburg and wait for reinforcements.88 The men labored through the heat to dig fortifications around the new post, called Yorktown. Smallpox and typhus ravaged the camps, afflicting the blacks—most of whom had not been inoculated for smallpox—in especially large numbers. Provisions were so short that almost everyone, including hundreds of loyalist civilians in the British lines, suffered from anemia.89 By late summer, little more than half Cornwallis’s men were fit for duty. Then, on the last day of August 1781, scouts caught sight of a fleet approaching—only to discover that it was not the hoped-for British reinforcements, but the French. The enemy navy closed in on the British by sea. Meanwhile, Washington was racing overland from Pennsylvania to pin the British in by land. Two weeks later, a combined force of sixteen thousand French and American soldiers camped outside Yorktown. The outnumbered British army, and the loyalists in their care, were trapped. “This Place is in no state of defence,” reported a desperate Cornwallis to General Clinton. “If you cannot relieve me very soon you must be prepared to hear the worst.”90

  Plan of York Town and Gloucester in Virginia, Showing the Works Constructed … by the Rt. Honble: Lieut. General Earl Cornwallis, with the Attacks of the Combined Army of French and Rebels, 1781. (illustration credit 1.2)


  The bombing started in the night of October 9, blowing up the carefully constructed earthworks in cascades of dirt, as the French and Americans advanced methodically toward the British positions. Inside the lines, Yorktown became a lurid scene of fire and blood. Deserters straggled out from the besieged camp reporting that the soldiers within were worn out “with excessive hard duty & that they are very sickly.” Loyalists, black and white, suffered through an ordeal of hunger and sickness as the dead and wounded mounted around them. To spare resources, Cornwallis ordered the slaughter of the horses, expelled smallpox patients from the hospital, and drove away many of the blacks who had run to the British.91 But the food was gone. The ammunition was gone. The reinforcements had not come. It was time to seek terms. On the anniversary of Saratoga—a coincidence not lost on the Continental Army—Cornwallis sent a messenger with a flag of truce to negotiate his surrender.92

  At two o’clock in the afternoon on October 19, 1781, Cornwallis and his army marched out of Yorktown to surrender to George Washington and his French allies. They emerged from their blasted hell in neat ranks, with “arms shouldered, colors cased and drums beating a British or German march.”93 Legend holds that the band played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” In retrospect, it seems almost too good to be true, since from some perspectives, the world order really had been inverted. The underdog had triumphed, the mighty empire had faltered. The song would have held special resonance for contemporaries. The ballad had originally appeared in the English Civil War, more than a century earlier, when conflict had divided Britons on the question of royal and parliamentary power.94 The tune could have reminded its listeners of what so many of those who lived through the American Revolution had already experienced. Civil wars often overturn their participants’ worlds—and sometimes those can never be uprighted again.