Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  A full ten months after learning about the cession of East Florida, Lewis Johnston at last managed to sell his slaves and made up his mind to move to Scotland. Elizabeth and her children would travel with him. He also sold William’s slaves to Thomas Brown, for £450, with the exception of one, Hagar, whom Elizabeth “kept as a nurse, for the expected stranger who I hope will shortly make its appearance.”68 Her departure for Britain came not a moment too soon. William’s most recent letter had upset her on numerous fronts, beginning with his accusation that she did not write to him often enough. (“Believe me,” she insisted, “I have had you constantly in my mind, and suffered so much anxiety on account of our distressing separation, that tis impossible I could omit a single opp[ortunit]y of writing.”) Nor was his letter sensitive on other points: “I am hurt at your not mentioning the then little invisible, nor your wishing for my safe delivery, as you must have known my situation before you left me.” Worse, far away from his family’s supervision, William had not yet moved on to Edinburgh, but remained unaccountably in “that seducing City” of London, “full of temptations”—specifically the gaming table—“which Americans of your disposition cannot always resist.”69

  Boarding the worm-eaten boat at St. Mary’s a few days before her twenty-first birthday, the Elizabeth Johnston who sailed from Florida in May 1784 had matured from the woman who had arrived there fifteen months earlier. This had been a cruel introduction to her career as a refugee: learning to appreciate her new surroundings just in time to discover she must leave them, and then experiencing months of haunting worry and doubt. She carried a different newborn in her arms now—Lewis, born in March—and she had coped as a single parent when her “volatile” eldest son Andrew broke his leg and when Catherine, “the greatest vixen in Florida,” fell dangerously ill. Her own father was as distant as her husband, also in Britain; she had to make do on little money and her in-laws’ support. And she had come to feel separation from her husband as an intolerable strain. Increasingly she worked to “fortify my mind with that strengthener religion (which is the only resource in cases of real distress)”—just as she increasingly dreaded the prospect of moving and being away from William. As she embarked at Florida for her first Atlantic crossing, she little knew how many more voyages and separations there would be to come.70

  THE JOHNSTONS were relatively privileged, as refugees went: notably, they were among only a handful of Floridians (about 2 percent) who opted to travel to expensive, far-off Britain, supported by the proceeds of their slave sales.71 The majority of Florida loyalists, including Thomas Brown with his newly purchased slaves, chose to immigrate to the Bahamas despite the negative reports, since at least it was nearby and had available land. “British promises” had “been violated in every instance,” declared one loyalist officer. “Stripped of our property, drove from our homes … robbed of the blessing of a free and mild government, betrayed and deserted by our friends,” now they were “thrown on the wide world friendless and unsupported.” One thing he knew: “whenever Great Britain sees it her interest to withdraw her force and protection from us,” then it would. No more promises for him. A few days later the disaffected officer and seven other loyalist families pushed off into the coastal waterways in flatboats, to find new fortunes at Natchez on the Mississippi, altogether beyond British reach.

  The deep sense of injustice felt by so many East Florida loyalists is worth listening to not just as an expression of personal distress. It triggered political aftershocks as well. These would later become especially evident in the Bahamas, where doubly displaced refugees arrived harboring a deep sense of betrayal. In East Florida itself, it was enough to push some loyal British subjects to the brink of radical action. “Should England be engaged in another War (as she shortly must be),” warned a Georgia loyalist, “let her not expect that, out of thousands of us Refugees, there will be one who will draw a sword in her Cause.… The People are so exasperated they cannot now endure the Name of an Englishman.” Anger moved him to contemplate nothing short of a coup against the Spanish. “Perhaps the Dons may find themselves deceived in their Expectations of taking Possession of this Country. We have a fine Body of Provincial troops here, equal to any in the World,” he said, and together they could resist. Rumors told of a plot among the loyalist troops to mutiny, arm the slaves, and “put every white Man to Death that opposed them keeping the Country to themselves as they will rather die than be Carried to Hallifax.”72

  These particular schemes did not materialize. But in the hands of loyalist visionary John Cruden, similar ideas took on an extraordinary life of their own. As loyalists were leaving Florida in the spring of 1784, Cruden crossed the ocean in reverse, returning from a sojourn in Britain to the land that he loved. The cession of East Florida foiled all of Cruden’s business plans for trade in St. Augustine. He had always been dedicated to the idea of fairness, hence his actions concerning black loyalists and slaves. But what wrongs had now been committed against the white refugees, and “the poor Indians, whom we have cherished … and who have been shamelessly deserted.” (Some of whom, “singular as it may appear,” he believed to be “descended from the ancient Britons” and “speak the Welsh language.”)73 He acknowledged that it would no longer be possible to overturn the treaty and keep the Floridas entirely. Yet redress, rewards even, might still be seized. Arriving at the mouth of the St. Mary’s River, Cruden dreamed of a community reborn. A scrap of paper survives to tell of his ambitions. “At a meeting of the Delegates of the Loyalists on the St. Mary’s River,” the fragment reads, “It was unanimously Resolved that in the present State of the Loyalists Mr. Cruden should be Vested with Dictatorial powers, and untill such time as another Mutiny could be held with propriety, that the Loyalists should consider Every act of His as their President binding upon them.” It was signed, “John Cruden, President, United Loyalists.” If Britain wouldn’t give East Florida to loyalists, well then, loyalists could take some of it for themselves. By establishing an independent state for loyalist refugees, Cruden, the newly appointed dictator of St. Mary’s, would strike a blow for justice for his own kind, just as he had always strived to achieve for others.74

  East Florida governor Tonyn knew something of what was afoot. Cruden and his friends, Tonyn informed his superiors in Whitehall, had been concocting “plans suggested by their inflamed imaginations, and finally they foolishly hit upon the diabolical design of seizing this government by force and setting themselves in opposition to the Spanish.” To break up the conspiracy, Tonyn hoped to exploit potential rifts between Cruden and the other denizens of the region, the infamous bandits who had been resisting authority for years. By granting Cruden permission to raise a “posse” against the banditti, Tonyn prided himself on “having been able to avert the catastrophe … without resorting to the calamitous and dangerous necessity of using force, which might have bathed us in blood.”75 He assured his Spanish counterpart, Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes, that “the Government of Spain, have nothing to fear from Mr. Cruden”; all his talk was just the British habit of free speech at work. But it must have given Tonyn some secret pleasure to know that the Spanish would inherit a domain shot through by the continuing consequences of loyalist discontent, turmoil on the borders, and an Indian population inclined toward the British. And even he had not adequately gauged the extent of Cruden’s schemes.

  On July 12, 1784, the Spanish flag rose over the Castillo de San Marcos to volleys of musket fire and cannon salutes; the Minorcan community’s priest held a mass and a full Te Deum was sung, “all of which was experienced with complete happiness by ourselves,” reported Zéspedes, “and with applause by the new Catholic subjects.” (Approximately five hundred of East Florida’s pre-revolutionary population of Mediterranean-born colonists decided to remain under Spanish rule.) The transfer of power was formally complete. But “in the swamps and thickets” around the rivers in the north, Cruden and his “desperadoes” worked to build an independent loyalist state.76 “There are twe
lve hundred men embodied between the St. Mary & St. John’s Rivers in Florida,” Cruden’s younger brother James reported to the British ambassador in Vienna, and another twelve hundred in Nassau and Natchez, “all of whom are in perfect readiness to cooperate in the prosecution of his purpose.” “Agents are dispatched into the Indian Country,” he explained. “Commissioners are appointed to associate the Loyalists, who have resorted to Nova Scotia … proper persons are sent to Charles Town, and Philadelphia, to sound the disposition of the Continental Officers; from these arrangements, added to the anarchy that prevails universally throughout the Continent, the most sanguine hopes of success are entertained.77 “America shall yet be ours,” swore John Cruden, “but the House of Brunswick do not deserve the sovereignty of it.”78 It was time to turn to Spain.

  In all the thousands of petitions produced by loyalist refugees, perhaps none conveys more clearly the sheer desperation loyalists felt after defeat and perceived betrayal by Britain as the appeal that John Cruden addressed to King Carlos III of Spain in October 1784:

  Abandoned by that Sovereign for whose cause we have sacrificed Every thing that is dear in life and deserted by that Country for which We fought and many of us freely bled … We … are Reduced to the dreadful alternative of returning to our Homes, to receive insult worse than Death to Men of Spirit, or to run the hazzard of being Murdered in Cold blood, to Go to the inhospitable Regions of Nova Scotia or take refuge on the Barren Rocks of the Bahamas where poverty and wretchedness stares us in the face Or do what our Spirit can not brook (pardon Sire the freedom) renounce our Country, Drug [sic] the Religion of our Fathers and become your Subjects.

  Cruden went on to entreat the Spanish king to grant loyalists “the Jurisdiction and the sole discretion of the internal Government” for the area between the St. John’s and the St. Mary’s rivers, in exchange “for which we will gladly pay a reasonable Tribute to Your Majesty and Acknowledge You as Lord of the Soil,” defending the province “against Every power but our Mother Country.”79

  For Cruden’s greatest quarrel was not with Spain, or even with Britain, but with the United States and the republican patriots who had wrecked his world. He barraged Spanish authorities with letters assuring them of his benign intentions; he had styled himself dictator merely “to prevent Your Government from having any apprehension at frequent Meetings, Customary as you know to us, but not so in the Dominions of Spain.”80 At the helm of his proposed loyalist state, Cruden promised to resist an enemy common to Britain, Spain, and American loyalists alike: republicanism. The reason his brother James was in Vienna was to woo the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II to this imperial coalition. (“He hates Republicans,” Cruden noted.) “However much you might be disposed to consider my plan Visionary and too Extensive,” Cruden told the Spanish, “it is not impossible that such a grand wish may be laid as may pave the way for a happy, cordial, and lasting Union between Britain and Spain.” Together, American loyalists and the empires of Europe could vanquish the upstart republican United States and restore the power of crowns.81

  Zéspedes had no fewer illusions than Tonyn about Cruden’s “abounding fanaticism”: “I regard him as a mere visionary,” he said, and his only worry was that Cruden’s ideas “will perhaps have a great influence on the large number of impoverished and desperate exiles from the United States, who find no means of subsistence in the Bahama Islands.” When Cruden wanted to go to Nova Scotia in 1785 to muster further support, Zéspedes was only too happy to give him a passport just “to be forever rid of him.”82 The Spaniard must have been irked when he continued to receive letters from “this restless soul” not from far-off Canada but from the Bahamas, just a few dozen miles offshore. From his new perch Cruden continued to transmit his schemes to correspondents west and east, informing Lord North, for instance, that “with but a very little help, I will D. V. not only bring Hence the lost sheep, but open the Gates of Mexico to my Country.”83

  John Cruden would never return to Florida, and fewer and fewer people credited his talk. Yet for two reasons it would be unfair to write off his plans as meaningless ravings. First, Cruden’s far-out ideas emerged from a set of destabilizing experiences shared by thousands of other loyalists, and suggested how the revolution had the ability, however paradoxically, to radicalize loyalist politics. The British evacuations really had inverted loyalists’ worlds: cast out from their homes, then cast out again from their haven, it was little wonder that some grasped for extreme alternatives. Personal trauma intensified a sense of political grievance. The second reason to take Cruden’s plans seriously was that his contemporaries did too. High-ranking British officials read his letters, while Zéspedes came to believe that Governor Tonyn personally had some hand in the plot.84 This attested to a deep skepticism among European powers about the territorial integrity of the United States. If the United States fell apart, as many people expected it would, Britain, France, and Spain all wanted to scoop up the fragments. What Cruden essayed in Florida was just the first in a series of British projects to assert control in this region. Soon Cruden’s shoes would be filled by a Maryland loyalist called William Augustus Bowles, who solicited British support for another loyal independent state, to be peopled primarily by the Creeks. And within less than a decade, Cruden’s suggestion of an imperial coalition against republicanism would become real when the French Revolutionary wars brought Britain and Spain together as allies against the French republic.

  Throughout 1784 loyalists and slaves migrated out of East Florida on flatboats, in ships, and through back ways in the wilderness. An official estimate counted 3,398 whites and 6,540 blacks leaving East Florida for other British domains. A further five thousand were “imagined to have gone over the Mountains to the States &c.,” where most of them disappear from historical view.85 Governor Tonyn’s own drawn-out departure played out in miniature the strains and reluctance with which the evacuations had taken place. The eighteen months allotted for withdrawal by the treaty expired in March 1785, at which time Tonyn expected that “this arduous and vexatious business, will be fully and completely accomplished in the course of a few weeks.” But he required (and received) a four-month extension actually to finish the work, and it was only in August 1785 that he could report, from on board the Cyrus at the port of St. Mary’s, that “I have discharged my mind of a heavy burden, by the dismission of the last division of Evacuists.” Tonyn continued impatiently to wait to “emerge, out of this most disagreeable situation” and sail for England. And then, it was as if Florida itself held him back. On September 11, 1785, the wind picked up enough to carry the Cyrus over the first sandbar, then shifted direction suddenly, dashing the ship against the bar. Taking in water at a rate of six inches per hour, the frigate crawled back to shore for repairs. Tonyn spent an uncomfortable two months at St. Mary’s until new vessels arrived from the Bahamas to fetch him.86

  On November 13, 1785—two years after Evacuation Day in New York, four years after Yorktown—Tonyn and the last of the Florida refugees finally put out to sea. “It is shocking and lamentable,” Tonyn had written on leaving St. Augustine, “to behold a Country once in a flourishing state now in desolation—a once beautiful City lying in ruins; these … may be compared to my own misfortunes, and those of a deserving, considerable Loyal People, who from a condition of happiness and affluence … are by a cruel reverse in human affairs reduced to indigence and affliction.”87 If he and his fellow passengers looked back to shore, they might have seen heaps of cast-off planks scattered over the sand. Unable to sell their houses to incoming Spaniards, loyalists had dismantled the frames, hoping to take them away for reassembly in the Bahamas or elsewhere—but there was not enough room for them on the ships.88 Rebuilding a house would be hard enough. Rebuilding lives and communities posed an altogether more daunting task. But when the last Florida refugees faced the Atlantic before them, at least they were heading in a promising direction. They were bound for Britain, where the blueprints for reconstructing loyalist fortunes—a
nd imperial ones—were being drawn up.

  PART II

  Settlers

  Thomas Kitchin, A Compleat Map of the British Isles, 1788. (illustration credit 1.5)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Heart of Empire

  “HOW SHALL I describe what I felt, when I first set my foot on British ground?” soliloquized Louisa Wells, a young loyalist refugee from Charleston, when she disembarked on the shores of Kent in 1778. “I could have kissed the gravel on the salt Beach! It was my home: the Country which I had so long and so earnestly wished to see. The Isle of Liberty and Peace.” After what she had endured, Wells had good reason to feel relieved. The daughter of Charleston’s leading printer, a loyalist, she had stayed in the war-torn city to protect the family property against confiscation “as long as one stone stood upon another,” while her relatives fanned out in a loyalist diaspora in miniature.1 Her parents went to England; her brothers William and James to East Florida, bringing the family press with them; and her fiancé, a former apprentice of her father’s, to Jamaica. Wells painstakingly liquidated family assets in Charleston and invested the proceeds in easily transportable indigo, only to have her cargo seized by patriots as she prepared to sail for England. Then her ship itself was captured as a suspected privateer. She finally made it across the Atlantic, five months after leaving Charleston, plagued by bad weather and fear of French attack.