Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
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It could not have encouraged them to see the handbill posted around New York City on April 15, 1783, reproducing the text of Article VII together with Carleton’s orders that “no Person is permitted to embark as a Refugee, who has not resided Twelve Months within the British Lines, without a special Passport from the Commandant.”10 Three officers were to examine every departing ship for property—that is, people—illicitly removed. Some of the black loyalists had certificates attesting to their military service; but many of them did not. Was this how their runaway journeys would end: with abduction on the streets, or reenslavement at the docks?
But Carleton had insisted during the evacuation of Charleston that slaves promised freedom should have it—and his word held just as firmly now in New York City. He implemented his own version of the commission General Leslie had established in Charleston, to assess the cases of blacks claiming freedom. Every Wednesday from ten till two, members of this committee (made up of four British and three American representatives) sat in Fraunces’s Tavern on Pearl Street to hear out disputes over former slaves. Those cleared by the board received a printed certificate of freedom signed by the commandant of New York, General Samuel Birch. Then at the docks, inspectors entered the names of all departing blacks into a sprawling register, together with their ages, former owners’ names, brief physical descriptions, and notes—ironically enough, much the same information recorded for slave sales. The register, known as the “Book of Negroes,” forms a genuinely exceptional document of exodus; nothing like it exists for the thousands of white loyalist refugees. The reason for such careful bookkeeping was that these migrants were also exceptional compared to whites. They could be considered property as well as people. The volume that recorded the black loyalists’ freedom thus reinscribed their former status as slaves.11
British assurances of freedom held good. But Americans were none too pleased. On a Tuesday morning in early May 1783, Carleton sailed up the Hudson on the aptly named Perseverance toward the broad waters of the Tappan Zee, to hold a conference with George Washington. The commanders had exchanged chilly letters for a full year, but this was their first meeting in the flesh. Sizing each other up on the shore, each man may have been disconcerted to detect a hint of himself in the other: standing roughly eye to eye at about six feet tall, big-nosed and thin-lipped, exuding authority as much by their braided uniform coats and tall boots as by their innate gravitas. The commanders had pressing items of business to discuss, including the ongoing depredations of partisan raiders in the countryside, the exchange of prisoners of war, and the timetable for evacuation. But Washington started off the conference by lecturing Carleton on what, to him, was the most urgent matter of all: the removal of human property from New York. Carleton calmly explained that a fleet had already embarked for Nova Scotia with registered black loyalists on board. “Already imbarked!” exclaimed a startled Washington. (He might have been yet more surprised to know that one of the blacks embarked, Harry Washington, had once belonged to him.) Carleton replied that he could not abide by anything in the treaty “inconsistent with prior Engagements binding the National Honor, which must be kept with all Colours.”12
That evening, from his quarters in Orange, Washington wrote Carleton a letter bristling with rebuke:
I was surprized to hear you mention that an Embarkation had already taken place in which a large Number of Negroes had been carried away. Whether this conduct is consonant or not to, or how far it may be deemed an Infraction of the Treaty, is not for me to decide. I cannot however conceal from your Excellency, that my private opinion is that the measure is totally different from the Letter & Spirit of the Treaty.
He demanded to hear from Carleton exactly what procedures had been put in place to prevent such miscarriages in future. But Carleton could match his counterpart’s accusations point for point, meeting outrage with moral superiority. It was odd that Washington should be “surprized” by the news, Carleton dryly observed, when everything had been conducted in the most open manner. All the ships for Nova Scotia had been inspected, and the only disputes “arose over negroes who had been declared free previous to my arrival. As I had no right to deprive them of that liberty …, an accurate register was taken of every circumstance respecting them.” Besides, he concluded, “Had these negroes been denied permission to embark, they wou’d, in spite of every means to prevent it, have found various methods of quitting this place, so that the former owner wou’d no longer have been able to trace them, and of course wou’d have lost, in every way, all chance of compensation.” In short, he had acted entirely in keeping with the spirit and letter of British law. “The negroes in question … I found free when I arrived in New York, I had therefore no right … to prevent their going to any part of the world they thought proper.”13
Back on Pearl Street, the commission continued its weekly work under the hospitable roof of Samuel Fraunces—reputedly part black himself. They handed out certificates of freedom by the hundreds, and at the waterfront the register of names grew apace, with the particulars of “stout” and sometimes “sickly wenches,” “likely girls,” “fellows” both “feeble” and “fine.” By the time the commissioners finished, more than two thousand names had been entered into the Book of Negroes. Boston King sailed for Port Roseway with his certificate in hand and his new wife, Violet, twelve years his senior, by his side, among the 132 free blacks (Harry Washington included) looking for a new life beginning on L’Abondance. Members of the Black Pioneers, including Murphy Stiele, who had been haunted by voices about a great black army winning the war, and Thomas Peters, a future leader of black loyalist refugees, took their tickets to freedom on the Joseph bound for Annapolis Royal.
Carleton’s principled defense of the black loyalists stands out for its clarity of conviction, and highlights an emerging contrast between certain American and British attitudes toward slavery. Carleton’s hand-picked personal secretary, Maurice Morgann, was an articulate abolitionist, who in 1772 published Britain’s first proposal for a gradual emancipation of slaves in the West Indies.14 Carleton himself was not an abolitionist as such; he had not explicitly set out to free the slaves. His actions spoke in part to a sense of personal honor. Promises had been made, promises must be kept. But they also reflected his commitment to a concept of national honor—and the paternalistic government’s responsibility to uphold it—that would rapidly gain momentum among the rulers of the postwar British Empire. His time as governor of Quebec had honed his belief, in common with a number of his fellow administrators, that an empire of diverse subjects was best ruled by a strong executive. After all, he might well have thought, what was imperial power for, if not to be exercised by the rulers who had it on behalf of those subjects who did not?
FEW OF THE thirty-five thousand or so loyalist civilians in New York City could have expected their lives would ever come down to a choice between emigration and endangerment. Through the spring and summer of 1783, they sifted through a competing series of promises and threats, deciding if, when, and where to go. In the words of “The Tory’s Soliloquy,” a satirical patriot verse published in various American newspapers: “To go or not to go—is that the question? / Whether ’tis best to trust the inclement sky / That scowls indignant o’er the dreary Bay / of Fundy … or stay among the Rebels! / And, by our stay rouse up their keenest rage, / That, bursting o’er our now defenceless heads, / Will crush us.”15
News of the peace brought patriots back into New York City to reclaim their property, but loyalists making the reverse journey found conciliatory feelings in notably short supply. “Almost all those who have attempted to return to their homes have been exceedingly ill treated, many beaten, robbed of their money and clothing, and sent back,” Carleton told the British ministry.16 In Westchester County, an elderly member of the prominent loyalist DeLancey family had been beaten “in a most violent manner” and told to “run to Halifax, or to his damned King, for that neither he nor one of his breed should be suffered to remain in the
Country.”17 Another town announced that loyalists “shall not be permitted to continue longer than seven days, after being duly warned to retire, on pain of experiencing the just punishment due to such infamous parricides.” Citizens of Poughkeepsie declared that loyalists deserved nothing “from this country but detestation and chastizement. The spirit of 75 still beats high, and must beat high, or American freedom is no more.”18 An author calling himself “Brutus” issued a sinister warning, widely reproduced in regional newspapers, “TO All Adherents to the British Government and Followers of the British Army Commonly called TORIES.” “Flee then while it is in your power,” he ordered, “for the day is at hand, when, to your confusion and dismay; such of you as reject this seasonable admonition, will have nothing to deliver them from the just vengeance of the collected citizens.”19
Offsetting such worrying reports, positive propaganda appeared in the New York press under the signature of loyal emigrants, boasting about their new climes. A settler at Port Roseway described quantities of fish veritably leaping from the water: trout, salmon, cod, “hollaboat (a most delicate fish indeed),” and herring so numerous that “I am told that a single person with a scoop net, may take twenty barrels in one day.”20 “Often I thank God I came to this place,” said another, “and I sincerely think Port Roseway, in a little time, will be one of the most flourishing capital places in North America.”21 From Saint John, on the Bay of Fundy, an emigrant boasted of the bracing climate, fertile soil, and a toothsome menagerie of “Moose, (which I think excels any beef) Hares, Rabbits, Partridges, Pidgeons.”22 Loyalists on St. John’s Island (today called Prince Edward Island) declared, “We were told, as perhaps you may be, the worst Things possible of the Country; such as, that the People were Starving; We should get nothing to eat, and should ourselves be eaten up by Insects.… We have found the Reverse too true.… Come and see, and depend on the Evidence of your own senses.”23 And if none of these northern locales appealed, there were also the turquoise-bordered islands of the Bahamas, an archipelago that “wants only inhabitants, and a small degree of cultivation, to render it as flourishing as any of the West-India Islands.”24
By late summer 1783, New York City witnessed a continuous parade of loyalist departures, and some patriot returns. It must have been an eerie thing to watch one of the largest cities in America turning inside out. “No News here but that of Evacuation,” one bemused (undoubtedly patriot) commentator wrote, “This … occasions a Variety of physiognomic, laughable Appearances.—Some look smiling, others melancholy, a third Class mad. To hear their Conversation would make you feel merry: Some … represent the cold Regions of Nova-Scotia as a new-created Paradise, others as a Country unfit for any human Being to inhabit. Tories are vexed with Tories; they curse the Powers to whom they owe Allegiance, and thus render themselves rebellious.”25 Advertisements crowded the columns of the Royal Gazette announcing sales and business closures, and informing loyalists when and at which wharf to board their ships. British regulars and Hessians packed their gear and began to leave by the regiment-load. Cannon came down from the ramparts, munitions were crated up. The commissary’s office sold off its surplus stock: 63,596 pairs of shoes and 68,093 pairs of worsted stockings, 10,100 shoe buckles, 21,000 needles.26 On summer Wednesdays and Saturdays, the Wagon Office auctioned its draught and saddle horses, carts, and equipage.27
Colonel Beverley Robinson had an especially close look at the loyalist plight during these last hectic months of British occupation. As one of three inspectors of refugees, he and his colleagues visited and assessed the needs of hundreds of “distressed Loyalists” who had poured into the city from as far away as Florida. The inspectors distributed nearly £9,000 (New York currency) to 529 refugees for the first quarter of 1783 alone.28 He surely knew personally some of the 212 New Yorkers on that list, reduced to destitution from positions of perfect comfort. Now he, like them, had to decide where to locate his family in future.
The Robinsons had fought a good war. Colonel Robinson himself played a role in one of the revolution’s most notorious incidents, the 1780 defection of Continental Army general Benedict Arnold to the British. As patriot commander of West Point, Arnold had taken up residence in Robinson’s confiscated house, just across the Hudson River from the fort, and there plotted to surrender West Point to the British. Robinson was the perfect British decoy to establish contact with Arnold. Sailing up to West Point on the British warship Vulture, he solicited a meeting with Arnold on the pretext of personal business related to the house, and Arnold made his infamous escape to the British on the Vulture a short time later. Soon enough, Robinson’s eldest son Beverley Jr. was campaigning behind the turncoat general in Virginia. Meanwhile his sons Morris and Phil Robinson had become patriot prisoners of war. The colonel spent eighteen months trying to get the boys released and succeeded at last “in consequence of the embers of friendship that still remained unextinguished” between himself and George Washington.29
American independence, Robinson could see, would force “the Loyalists of America to depend on the mercy of their enemies for the restoration of their possessions, which we are well assured they will never grant.” The terms of the peace treaty only confirmed his view that a future in the United States would be untenable. Robinson’s Loyal American Regiment had been promised land grants in Nova Scotia. His men, like the majority of loyalist veterans, traveled north together to settle tracts assigned by regiment, trading in their comradeship in arms for neighboring farms. The colonel himself preferred to go to Britain, “with the hopes that the government … will not suffer us to starve but allow us a small pittance.”30 (His New Jersey counterpart Cortlandt Skinner made the same choice, moving his large family to England while his former regiment settled in the Saint John River valley.)31 But as Robinson confessed in an embarrassed memorial to Carleton, “my circumstances are so very distressing that I cannot leave this place, without some assistance from Government.” He required a six-month advance on his pay to actually make the move.32 In the late summer of 1783, Robinson set off for England with his wife, daughters, and some of his sons. Beverley Jr. went to Nova Scotia with the Loyal Americans, while Phil remained garrisoned in New York City with his British infantry unit. This parting of the ways scored a painful line in the Robinson family, one among many clans dispersed by emigration. In years to come, the scattered relatives remained connected through affectionate, newsy letters—but several would never meet again.
Of course, in New York as in other British-held cities, not all loyalists left. Some families chose to split the challenges of staying and going, with female family members remaining in situ to pursue property claims (in some states, dower property had been excluded from confiscation) and men going on ahead to scout out new places of residence. Yet considering how much stronger the pull of stasis can be over change, the striking thing is just how many people did choose to go. Ultimately the total recorded exodus of New York loyalists to Nova Scotia alone amounted to nearly thirty thousand. A further twenty-five hundred or so traveled to Quebec and to Abaco, in the Bahamas.33 All told, the evacuation of New York City may represent the largest (proportionate to population) civilian transfer in American history.
Not many loyalist civilians were left in New York by November 1783, when Carleton fixed the date for his own departure. The fleet waiting off Staten Island on Evacuation Day was Britain-bound, carrying government personnel, along with the remaining troops and refugees. Nineteen-year-old Phil Robinson was among the last British troops to march out of the city on Evacuation Day, “the only one of the family that witnessed that most humiliating scene.”34 Carleton’s confidant William Smith also lingered till the bitter end. He wrote up a power of attorney for his wife, Janet, who was staying on to manage family affairs, drafted his last will and testament, packed his trunks, and rowed out with Carleton to the Ceres—the same ship that had carried the commander in chief to America eighteen months before. Crammed into a cabin “where five pens are scribbling around o
ne Table,” Smith wrote fondly back to Janet on shore. “Give yourself not a moment’s uneasiness,” he reassured her. “Every Comfort is to be found here.” Still, Smith could not hide his impatience to set off, especially when they remained inexplicably at anchor a week later and he watched the celebratory fireworks exploding over Bowling Green. Writing yet “another Farewell” to his wife, he hoped that “no Accident happens by the Fireworks which I see.… Adieu to you all. Imbrace Harriet, and tell her I shall never forget to love her, if she loves you and obeys all your commands. Yours ever ever WS.” Two days later the Ceres rounded Sandy Hook and headed into the open sea.35