Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Provocative handbills and news reports in Wells’s Gazette once more circulated around the islands. Agitated loyalists convened an emergency meeting in Nassau to give vent to “the intolerable grievances under which they and their constituents groan.” The departed Governor Maxwell, they contended, had used “the utmost Art & influence … to prevent His Majesty’s loyal subjects lately settled in these Islands from obtaining any share in the Representation.” The elections had been conducted in “a direct flagrant & intolerable breach of the Constitution and Laws.” The assembly did not represent them, and they in turn were “not bound by any Laws the Assembly might pass.” They called on Powell to dissolve “the present Assembly as illegal and unconstitutional” and appoint a committee (from a group of loyalist protestors) “to transact business” in its stead.61

  Refusing to abide by the law, calling for the suspension of regular government: these were revolutionary challenges. And they called themselves loyalists? The escalating conflict left ministers in Whitehall scratching their heads. “It is not a little extraordinary,” marveled Lord Sydney, “that Men who profess to have suffered for their Loyalty to the Crown, and adherence to the British Constitution, should so far forget themselves, and the Duty they owe to His Majesty, as to be guilty of the most daring attempts against His Royal authority, and that Constitution.”62 Governor Maxwell, with appropriate resources, might have suppressed the protests with a crackdown like Carleton’s in New Brunswick. But Powell, himself a loyalist and more diplomatic than his predecessor, refused to lose his cool. He thanked the loyalist petitioners for their “Attachment and firm Adherence to the British Constitution” and prorogued the assembly for the summer, enjoining the members to “use your utmost endeavours to heal the divisions that hath and continue in some degree still to subsist.”63 His moderation yielded only moderate rewards. After a four-month break, the assembly successfully ejected seven of its most obstreperous members. But disputes over selection of representatives outlasted the aging Powell himself, who died in the winter of 1786, passing on the tense legacy to yet another governor.

  None of this protest was unique to the Bahamas in substance. Bahamas refugees appealed to the British constitution in defense of their rights, spoke out against its abuse, and deployed the printing press, the petition, and the law in their cause. All of these were characteristic forms of protest in pre-revolutionary America and around the British world. Yet there was something distinctive in the style of this Bahamian protest, with its explosive public outbursts, riots and assaults, and proto-revolutionary councils. Why was it all so hysterical? Reflecting on the dispatches from Nassau, Lord Sydney volunteered an explanation. Given “the disagreeable state in which many of the Loyalists upon the Bahama Islands are represented to be,” he suggested, it was hardly surprising that the once affluent refugees should keenly “feel the difference between their former and present situation and that their Temper and Disposition should be sowered from the unpleasant change.”64 Of course, all loyalist refugees dealt with deprivation, dislocation, and dispossession. But it was no coincidence that the most refractory Bahamian loyalists had come from East Florida in particular. Not only did they carry the physical and psychological legacies of war. (Thomas Brown, for instance, arrived in the Bahamas so plagued by migraines as a result of the 1775 attack that in an extreme attempt at relief he underwent trepanning, a procedure in which a hole was cut into his skull.)65 These doubly displaced refugees came bearing enormous resentment against their own government for abandoning Florida. And perniciously reminding them of the gulf between where they came from and where they now were, loyalists in the Bahamas lived under the shadow of the United States, so close and yet so far. Proximity to the United States was a source of such consternation to some refugees that they attacked American flags, yet it was a source of ambition to others, like Cruden, who imagined using the Bahamas as a base for imperial expansion.

  All these circumstances help explain how it was that these American loyalists came as close as any refugees yet to emulating American patriots in a final, vital respect: they seemed prepared to take up clubs and pistols if necessary, to make a decisive break from their governor. Indeed for a time it even seemed that the loyalist agitators might prevail over imperial authority. Until, that is, authority arrived in the form of a ruler few would forget. Lord Dunmore, the former governor of Virginia, was coming back across the Atlantic.

  PERHAPS THE Earl of Dunmore had been in an especially good mood in 1761 when he commissioned a new folly for his estate at Airth. He had recently been married, and chosen to represent Scotland in the House of Lords—a particular honor given that his father had been disgraced for supporting the Young Pretender in 1745. Certainly this was a folly if ever there was one. Up close, it looks like a stone carver’s masterpiece, an elaborate confection of exquisitely crafted tongues and curls of stone. From a distance, it looks like a joke. The intricately sculpted structure represents a gigantic pineapple, four stories high, a favorite eighteenth-century decorative motif blown out of proportion, and a strange evocation of the tropics against the glowering lowlands sky. What Dunmore could not possibly have known was that twenty-five years later he would be governing a land of pineapples—one of the few tropical species successfully cultivated in the Bahamas.66

  Lord Dunmore loved to do things big. As governor briefly of New York, and from 1771 of Virginia, he embraced his chance to make a mark, prosecuting expansionist campaigns against the Shawnees in the Ohio Country and—by no means incidentally—acquiring a phenomenal four million acres of American land for himself. His efforts to quash revolution in Virginia had been equally assiduous, from his extraordinary floating government on the Chesapeake to that controversial 1775 proclamation offering freedom to slaves. Though Dunmore had been forced to abandon the floating town in 1776, he was unceasing in his efforts to win the war. On both sides of the Atlantic, he became a leading advocate for loyalist causes and for continued British offensives. Among the projects he supported was one, advanced after Yorktown, to seize the lower Mississippi Valley and turn it into a loyalist asylum.67 Another was Cruden’s 1782 plan to raise a large black army. Dunmore was Cruden’s most prominent patron for a reason, for he, like Cruden, refused to see 1783 as an end to British prospects in the United States or its southern borderlands. Their world was simply too dynamic to acknowledge any defeat as final.

  When Powell’s death created a vacancy in Nassau’s Government House, Dunmore seemed to many an ideal candidate to replace him. (Maxwell, who was officially on leave in Dublin, was politely informed that the ministry had decided to replace him with “some Person entirely unconnected with the present Inhabitants of those Islands.”)68 The earl was experienced in North American administration, he enjoyed considerable loyalist support, and he had been actively questing for another governorship. Dunmore greedily accepted the appointment and crossed the Atlantic in 1787. A priori, Bahamian loyalists welcomed him: here was a man whom they felt they could rely on to promote loyalist over conch interests, a primary source of tension under Maxwell. But they soon discovered that the new governor had competing interests of his own. To begin with, there were his authoritarian tendencies, stronger even than Maxwell’s, and his relentless search for personal gain. More provocatively, there was the issue for which Dunmore had become notorious in Virginia—freeing black slaves—a somewhat dubious credential in the eyes of white Bahamian slaveowners. Finally, there were Dunmore’s ongoing dreams of restoring imperial control on the North American continent, an ambition that as governor of the Bahamas he was especially well placed to pursue. For all that Dunmore had made a name as a friend to loyalists, none of these objectives squared neatly with the desires of his agitated new subjects.

  By the time Dunmore reached Nassau, the influx of refugees had caused the city to burst its seams. A 1788 map commissioned by the assembly gives a nice overview of Nassau at this time.69 The city center, anchored by Fort Nassau, contained public buildings including the church and
assembly; Vendue House, built in 1787 for slave sales; and an open-sided structure gloriously labeled the Bourse, which served as a public marketplace and meeting place.70 Eight or ten busy wharves lined the waterfront, and new streets ran inland as far as Government House, poised on a hill just south of the city center. The enlarged city was divided neatly into 214 lots, many of them owned by loyalist refugees. Nearly a quarter of Nassau real estate belonged to forty-eight different women, both white and black. Twenty-seven lots belonged to “free negroes” and people “of colour”—an important reminder that up to half of the Bahamas’ prewar black and mixed-race population was free. A small number of black loyalists now joined them, including an associate of David George and George Liele’s called Brother Amos, who established the first Baptist church in the islands.71 Although overwhelmingly black shantytowns skirted the city limits, Nassau itself, on paper at least, looked strikingly racially integrated. From his corner lot on Princes Street, a white loyalist called Isaac DuBois could see the façade of Government House from his front windows. If he looked out the back of his house, he could see that of his black neighbor Thomas Maloney; if he looked to the right, he saw the property of Henry Evans, another black; and diagonally opposite he glimpsed the land of Rebecca Darling, a woman “of colour.” (A few years later, DuBois would be almost entirely surrounded by black neighbors when he moved to Freetown, Sierra Leone.)

  The out-islands at the time of Dunmore’s arrival had changed even more dramatically. By terms announced in 1785, loyalist men and women could claim rent-free grants of forty acres each, plus a further twenty for every additional person in a household—slaves included. Because land came in proportion to slave ownership, the biggest planters from America had some chance of reproducing their positions in the Bahamas. Thomas Brown was among these fortunate few. In 1775 he had been master of almost six thousand acres in the Georgia backcountry, with 150 indentured servants in his employ. In 1785 Brown claimed sixty-four hundred acres in the Bahamas, mostly on the salt-rich Grand Caicos, and had 170 slaves to work them (including those he had bought from William Johnston in Florida).72 Brown’s ability to match his prewar circumstances was of course relatively unusual; his land grants were among the largest made to any loyalist. The majority of refugees made do with more modest tracts, usually of less than two hundred acres each.73 In contrast to Brown’s workforce of 170, the mean number of slaves on Bahamaian plantations was fewer than thirteen. Cumulatively, however, the refugee immigration completely altered the landscape of the islands. Loyalists—or more precisely, their slaves—brought thirteen thousand acres of land under cultivation in just a few years, nearly quadruple the prewar total.74

  They did not grow sugar as in the West Indies, or rice as in the Low Country, or tobacco as in the Chesapeake. Instead they turned to a crop new to many of them: sea island cotton. Cotton would be the great white hope of Bahamian planters. First sown on the islands in 1785, the cotton crops of 1786 and 1787 yielded 150 and 250 tons respectively. William Wylly, a Georgia loyalist and author of the best general description of the islands for this period, supplemented his position as the Bahamas’ solicitor-general by turning cotton planter on Abaco. He boasted of an annual output that “has infinitely exceeded their [the planters’] most sanguine expectations.” He enthused about the fortunes of one planter, who with “no more than thirty-two slaves” had managed to produce fully nineteen tons of the crop, “worth on the spot 2660l., which is nearly double the whole value of the negroes by whose labour it was made.”75 But chances were good that when Wylly walked among his waist-high cotton plants that season or the next, he would have noticed a worrying thing nestled among the triangular leaves: striped, squiggling chenille bugs. These ravenous little caterpillars first blighted Bahamian cotton crops in 1788, and proved a relentless scourge in years to come.

  Some loyalists may have seen a cruel irony in the coincidence of the chenille bug infestation with Lord Dunmore’s arrival, for within weeks the governor had started to look like something of a plague himself. In charge of land grants, Dunmore promptly established himself within the ranks of the Bahamian landed elite by issuing himself a handsome 5,355 acres and granting another seventeen hundred acres to one of his sons. But the governor shared less with loyalist planters when it came to his attitudes about slave labor. As the man who first promised freedom to slaves during the American Revolution, Dunmore was not pleased to discover that in the Bahamas “the Negroes, who came here from America, with the British General’s Free Passes, [are] treated with unheard of cruelty, by men who call themselves Loyalists. Those unhappy People after being drawn from their Masters by Promises of Freedom, and the Kings Protection, are every day stolen away from these Islands, shipped, and disposed of, to the French at Hispaniola.”76 John Cruden had already resumed the “disagreeable and distressing” task of hunting down blacks seized by loyalists “in Violation of the most positive Orders of Government.”77 To help stamp out such practices altogether, Dunmore issued a proclamation—his very first act on shore—promising to establish a tribunal to investigate black claims to freedom.

  It was not quite the incendiary blast of his 1775 proclamation in Virginia, but Dunmore’s order immediately had loyalists up in arms. The importation of slaves by loyalists had more or less doubled the ratio of slaves to whites in the islands.78 As early as 1784, the assembly had responded to the sharp increase in the black population by passing a harsh new legal code against slaves and free blacks, resembling that of the American southern states. Suddenly here was a new governor spontaneously granting concessions to blacks instead. “The New Inhabitants considered Lord Dunmore as a Friend to the Negroes,” one contemporary observed.79 Dunmore noted dryly that “this enquiry has given umbrage to some persons here who had detained several of those poor unhappy people under various pretences in a state of slavery.”80 “Umbrage” was putting it mildly. In Nassau, a group of white loyalists burst into the house of a free mulatto and savagely attacked her. A loyalist arrested for his part in the incident swore “he would burn every house belonging to the free negroes in that quarter of town.”81 On Abaco, Thomas Brown was arrested as one of the ringleaders of a race “Riot” and was henceforth seen as “an open Opposer of Lord Dunmores Administration.”82 The racial violence prompted Dunmore to sail to Abaco himself with his “Negro Court” in tow, to assess the merits of black loyalist claims. (Though as it turned out, the governor’s promises achieved little: of the thirty claimants who came to court, only one was judged to be free.)83

  The controversy over the management of slaves—with Dunmore upholding, in principle, the right of black loyalist over white—proved just the opening salvo in an escalating war between the governor and white loyalists, between the forces of authority and the appeal to rights. Dunmore’s knack for alienating his subjects flared up next over the perennially vexed issue of political representation. In early 1788, loyalists across the islands petitioned Dunmore to dissolve the assembly—a natural move, they argued, following the appointment of a new governor. New Providence loyalists made the case that they “consider themselves unrepresented in the present Assembly; and that the Planting and Commercial interests of the Colony are in the same Predicament.” Loyalists from Exuma pleaded that they were “deprived of the Right of legislative representation.” The cotton planters on Long Island stated “that many of the present members of the House of Assembly were illegally chosen”; on Cat Island, loyalists felt “excluded from a representation in the Legislative Councils” and thus shut out from the “blessings of Liberty” promised by the British constitution. In the most detailed petition, Abaco loyalists called attention to the fact that they had come to the islands “convinced that in the most obscure and remote part of His Majesty’s Dominions, they would enjoy those inestimable Rights and Privileges of the British constitution.” Yet, they lamented, “there is scarce a Planter, a Merchant, or an American loyalist in the Lower House of Assembly.” To all these wordy requests, Dunmore delivered more or less
the same terse reply: “Gentlemen, I do not think it expedient for His Majesty’s service to dissolve the House of Assembly at this period.”84

  Dunmore’s petitioners did not accept his rejection lightly. Solicitor-General William Wylly, for one, would stand for none of it. Wylly had only arrived in the Bahamas a little before Dunmore, but the Georgia native and erstwhile Florida refugee was closely connected to many of his new neighbors. (Both William and his brother Alexander had fought in Thomas Brown’s Rangers, in which capacity Wylly had rescued William Johnston from patriot attack outside Savannah in 1781.) Wylly was quickly schooled in local politics when the chief justice (a Dunmore partisan) approached him with the dark warning that he should “take a party.” Standing his ground as an independent, or at any rate refusing to align himself with Dunmore, Wylly found himself swept into jail on an accusation that he had called the justice “a damned liar.” Thomas Brown, part of the anti-Dunmore faction, offered an affidavit in Wylly’s defense; and Wylly’s lawyer, another leading anti-government loyalist, managed to get Wylly off in a trial that exposed the farce of his arrest in the first place.85 Lord Dunmore responded by effectively closing down the courts.

  Standoff turned into stalemate. To Dunmore, the loyalist “party” that so plagued him, like Maxwell before him, appeared a selfish bunch of hucksters, horse thieves, smugglers, and troublemakers primarily concerned with keeping stolen slaves.86 The only way to ensure such people’s obedience, he determined, was to nip their demands in the bud. In a grand demonstration of authority, Dunmore launched the construction of batteries and fortifications across the out-islands, as well as a massive new fort to the west of Nassau, called Fort Charlotte. The fort’s mighty, cannon-studded bastions may have been intended to inspire as much awe among New Providence’s residents as among its putative assailants. For “had we a war with America tomorrow,” Dunmore worried, “the Loyalists … would be those I should have the greatest reason to fear.”87