Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  To agitated loyalists, Wylly foremost, Dunmore represented the worst of a bad aristocracy, (Scottish) tyranny personified: “obstinate and violent by nature; of a capacity below mediocrity … ignorant of the Constitution of England, and of the Rights of British subjects; his principles of Government are such as might naturally be expected from the lordly despot of a petty Clan.” Wylly’s charges against the governor resembled those made by American patriots against reviled governors in the thirteen colonies. Dunmore’s suspension of the courts and refusal to call an election betrayed the most fundamental rights—such as habeas corpus—that British subjects held dear. To make matters worse, “his private life” was no “less reprehensible than his publick character.”88 The governor’s nepotism knew no bounds: he got one son elected to the assembly in a by-election, and would later unilaterally appoint another son to be lieutenant governor. Dunmore’s pineapple in Airth was nothing compared to the folly of his island fortifications, whose costs spiraled to a staggering £32,000, eight times the original estimate, draining public funds.89

  What could a loyal Bahamian do? Wylly directed his appeals to British ministers, hoping “that Justice might be obtained” in London “for injuries offered to British Subjects, in the most distant parts of the Empire.”90 But in Nassau, Dunmore continued his near-absolutist regime—and Wylly feared that worse was to come. He rounded off his catalogue of complaints against Dunmore “with a charge that may perhaps appear incredible.” For, Wylly declared, registering his shock in italics, “His Lordship has endeavoured to alarm the minds of the people by circulating strange reports of conspiracies entered into by the Loyalists (those Loyalists who have bled so freely in the cause of their King and Country) to throw off their allegiance to Great Britain,… in order to put themselves under the protection of a Rebel Congress.”91 How could Dunmore accuse the loyalists—the loyalists—of being in secret collusion with the United States? And who knew what outrages he might commit next?

  The awful truth for Wylly was that not only did Dunmore claim to possess evidence of a loyalist plot against the state—and by extension a justification for imposing martial law, which Dunmore longed to do.92 The governor himself was also becoming rapidly embroiled in an intrigue that transposed Bahamian rivalries into North America. Dunmore had long supported some of the most radical ideas for reasserting British sovereignty on the continent. In the Bahamas he was especially well positioned to facilitate such projects. And now, in place of mad John Cruden, Dunmore had found a perfect new collaborator to advance them, in the form of a dynamic young loyalist called William Augustus Bowles.

  HE MUST HAVE demonstrated himself to be a reliable provider by bringing meat and deerskins for his prospective bride, perhaps also a blanket and some clothes. He might have built a house for them to live in, too, a neat foursquare dwelling with white- or red-plastered walls and a roof of cypress bark.93 With his broad shoulders and strong features, he certainly looked like a good enough warrior, yet at about sixteen years old, the groom was only just a man, not even fully grown. And for all that his skin had darkened under the Florida sun, no amount of weathering could obscure a revealing mark of his ancestry: his deep-set eyes twinkled blue.94

  Many teenage boys in colonial America might have fantasized about such a life, inverting all those bloodcurdling tales they had been reared on: running away to live with the Indians, dressing in buckskins, wielding tomahawk and scalping knife, savoring imagined woodland freedoms of sex, violence, and drink. The precocious Maryland-born William Augustus Bowles had done all this in his teens and more. (Even this marriage to the daughter of a Creek chief was his second; he had fathered at least one child already by a Cherokee first wife.)95 Bowles had begun his adventures at the age of fourteen, in 1777, when he earned a commission as ensign in a regiment of Maryland loyalists. But he adapted poorly to a military career that combined immense boredom with exceptional discomfort. In late 1778, his regiment traveled to Pensacola to reinforce the city against an anticipated Spanish attack. He hated this steaming, stinking, sickness-filled port, judged by a fellow officer to be a hell on earth: “Satan and all his angels should be banished to this place.”96 Stir-crazy and insubordinate, Bowles quarreled with his commanding officer and got struck from the rolls. When a delegation of Creek Indians who had come to Pensacola to collect presents from the British returned to their villages, Bowles “threw my red Coat with indignation into the Sea” and traveled with them.97

  Bowles became one of hundreds of white men to dwell among the Creeks in the later eighteenth century.98 (The Creek leader Alexander McGillivray was the son of one of the most prominent, Scottish trader Lachlan McGillivray.) Bowles “went native” to the extent of forming a Creek family, and when he led a Creek war party to the defense of Mobile, a contemporary described him “grown out of recollection, and in every respect like a savage warrior.”99 But he never renounced his allegiance as a British subject. In 1780, Bowles even ended up rejoining his loyalist regiment, which meant that at the end of the war he was entitled to a land grant for his service. He chose to move to the Bahamas, close to his adoptive southeast. Circulating restlessly in the postwar years between the Bahamas and the North American mainland, Bowles became another of those loyalist refugees—like John Cruden—whose wartime wanderings anticipated a peripatetic postwar life.

  In April 1788, Bowles appeared in Nassau with an alarming tale. On a recent visit to Georgia, he had met a fellow veteran who owned land in the Bahamas. The officer “urged him [Bowles] very strongly to call upon Messrs. Johnston, Hepburn, Cruden and some others” once he returned to the islands. “These and some others were principal leaders of a strong Party in the Bahamas,” his acquaintance told him, and they were about to put into motion a daring plan. The officer pulled out a sheaf of letters to explain. These described a soaring scheme “of rendering the said Islands independent of Great Britain.” Seceding from the British Empire, the new loyalist rulers of the Bahamas would “open their Ports to all the world; have an extensive Commerce, and moreover derive great profit and advantage from the Salt Ponds with which the said Islands abound.” Everything was in place for the project; all the plotters had to do was set a date “to rise and possess themselves of the Government.” At the bottom of the documents, Bowles read the confident signature of the man who had penned them: John Cruden.100

  The encounter left Bowles convinced that “there has been, and is now, a design to wrest this Colony from the Dominion of Great Britain.” Indeed he was quite certain that the ongoing conflict over seats in the house of assembly “was not with any real design of obtaining a representation of the People, but to discover by this means the strength and number of their Party.” Not democracy, but a coup d’état: here was Dunmore’s evidence of a loyalist conspiracy against his regime. And it was especially convenient that Bowles swore to all this in a deposition just days after William Wylly’s trial. A charge of treason (even if it hinged on the words of crazy Cruden) would surely shut down the loyalist antigovernment agitators once and for all. In the event, Bowles’s sensational accusations advanced no further. Not least, by the time he testified, John Cruden was gone for good; in September 1787, Cruden died in the islands for which he harbored such great hopes, just thirty-three years old.101 But the symbiotic relationship Dunmore and Bowles forged over the case soon evolved in ways that would have made Cruden proud.

  Though Bowles and Cruden probably never met, they shared more than a moment of virtual connection through the pages of Cruden’s treasonous letters. For like Cruden, Bowles believed that Spanish authority could be overturned in Florida, and saw the Bahamas primarily as a jumping-off point from which to do so. The difference was that Bowles wanted to achieve this conquest in the name of, and with the support of, the Creek Indians. The American Revolution had thrown Creek society into flux, transitioning from traditional ways of life toward an economy more oriented around plantation agriculture and slave ownership.102 Creek chief Alexander McGillivray personified this s
hift. Like Joseph Brant, McGillivray invariably impressed whites with his fine Charleston-educated manners, fair complexion, and European dress. He forewent the winter hunting pursued by most Creek men in favor of managing an estate on the Gulf of Mexico, and spent summers on his sprawling plantation at Little Tallassie, complete with apple orchards, large herds of livestock, and a labor force of sixty slaves. Meeting McGillivray in 1790, Abigail Adams (whose husband John was then vice president) was impressed that he “speaks English like a Native”; but he spoke to his fellow Creeks through an interpreter. Bowles presented a self-conscious contrast to this, portraying himself—to white audiences at least—as every inch the Indian hunter and warrior. The only surviving portrait of him depicts a decidedly Byronic figure in a ruffled shirt, silver armbands cinching its billowing sleeves, thick coils of beads looped around his neck, and an elaborate ostrich-plumed turban. Though some fellow whites found his Indian dress “ridiculous” and “slovenly,” the showy guise also helped him attract white support. He hoped his British ties, in turn, would help him garner a following among the Creeks.103

  Bowles’s ambitions in Florida dovetailed beautifully with Lord Dunmore’s. Since the peace of 1783, the Indian trade in Spanish Florida had been controlled by a firm called Panton, Leslie and Company. Headquartered in Nassau, the company was strongly affiliated with Dunmore’s Bahamas enemies—including Thomas Brown, who had helped secure its monopoly when he was superintendent of Indian affairs. Dunmore wished to unseat the company for reasons largely to do with Bahamian politics and personal profit. Bowles, meanwhile, had his own reasons to topple Panton, Leslie. The firm’s silent partner in Indian country was none other than McGillivray, Bowles’s greatest rival in his bid to gain ascendancy among the Creeks. With Dunmore’s backing, Bowles led an expedition into Florida a few months after the Wylly affair, designed to oust Panton, Leslie from the region.104 Unfortunately for him the foray quickly became a fiasco. On warnings from Thomas Brown, Spanish authorities turned McGillivray against “that villain Bowles,” who was “no more than the foolish instrument of veritable scoundrels.”105 McGillivray gave Bowles some “wholesome advice” designed to “dismiss him from this Country forever,” and threatened to “cut off his ears” if he did not oblige.106

  But neither Bowles nor his patron Dunmore were daunted by failure. Rather, they found further common ground in Bowles’s bigger plans for the future of Florida. Offering a compelling variation on projects that Dunmore had long endorsed, Bowles envisioned a whole new state rising from the swamps under his personal leadership. He called it Muskogee. Muskogee, as he sketched it out to the governor, was to be an independent Indian state, free of Spanish rule, secure against American incursions, and a haven for anyone loyal to British ideals. It would achieve this comfortable position thanks to an alliance with the British Empire, making it a sort of southern counterpart to Joseph Brant’s confederacy. And Britain would benefit from the relationship in turn by gaining access to the Mississippi. Dunmore liked what he heard. With the governor’s blessing, Bowles returned to Creek country in 1789 to start bringing Muskogee to life. So it was that what started as a local conflict among Bahamian politicians spilled over into commercial rivalries, Indian affairs, and a test of the meanings of loyalty itself.

  At Coweta, on the Chattahoochee River (now the border between Alabama and Georgia), Bowles convened a council of Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee representatives. He began to style himself “Estajoca,” or “Director General of the Creek Nation.” “The unanimous voice of twenty thousand warriors” (or so he flattered himself) acclaimed him as their leader and commissioned him to go on an embassy to London.107 Bowles set off on an Atlantic circuit to win British aid, retracing the journeys of many loyalist refugees before him. From the Bahamas, he headed to Nova Scotia to attract imperial administrators to the idea of a loyal western alliance between Muskogee and the Iroquois. He successfully recruited Governor Parr to his plan in Halifax, helped by the fact that he presented it at the height of an Anglo-Spanish war scare, and proceeded to Quebec to meet with Lord Dorchester.108 Though Dorchester had always been wary of Indian alliances, and tried to dissuade Bowles from going to London, even he acknowledged that Creek aid would be invaluable in the event of war with Spain.109 With Dorchester’s reluctant blessing (and at his expense), Bowles and his small entourage crossed the Atlantic and arrived in London at the end of 1790.

  There, despite adverse diplomatic developments, Bowles confidently proposed what was surely the grandest pro-British scheme for seizing North American territory since the American Revolution. In a petition to King George III, Bowles stressed his dual role as both “leader of an independent and populous Nation” and a British subject of proven loyalty. “I have always preserved my Allegiance to your Majesty and my affection to this Country,” Bowles assured his sovereign, and now he was in a rare position to demonstrate it by bringing a vast region of North America into the imperial embrace.110 Bowles volunteered more specific propositions to the foreign secretary. With appropriate British backing, he calculated it would take just two months to drive “the Spaniards from the whole country of the Floridas and that of New Orleans.” From there, he “would proceed without delay to Mexico, and in conjunction with the Natives declare it independent of the Spaniards” (a promise that uncannily echoed John Cruden’s onetime boast that he would “open the Gates of Mexico to my Country”).111 As to the loyalty of Muskogee to the British crown, officials could rest easy. Just look at the rest of the empire, Bowles observed: look at India. He pointed to the example of Robert Clive, the East India Company general who had brought Bengal under British hegemony. Clive had sworn that the only way to secure the Indian subcontinent was to use local troops, and Bowles thought “the Maxim … as good in America as in Indostan.” In the same way Britain maintained control in India with an army of native sepoys, it could sustain its enlarged American empire with Creek and other indigenous manpower. “The Americans are now waiting their opportunity to seise the remainder of the British Colonies,” Bowles concluded. The time was right for a preemptive British strike.112

  Whether it was the strength of his passion or (more likely) the smallness of his budget, Bowles managed to secure limited British permission to move forward with his plans.113 (Whatever else, Muskogee must have seemed more plausible than the scheme for a British-sponsored rising across South America advanced by the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda a few months earlier.) Bowles returned to Nassau and from there set sail for Florida, with the red-and-blue Muskogee banner he had designed himself rippling from the mast. This time fortune was kinder to Bowles’s expedition. He successfully rallied further Indian support, and boasted to Dunmore that he was vested “with full power to transact all business of the nation and direct their future councils.”114 His deputies scored a critical strategic victory by seizing a Panton, Leslie warehouse. While Dunmore delivered confident reports to London that “one of the finest Countrys in the world” was about to be opened to Britain, McGillivray and his associates scrambled to preserve their influence, urging the Indians to back away from Bowles: “He calls himself an Englishman, but be assured he is none; he tells you that he Came from the King of England, but when did you See an officer of that King Come to you in poverty & rags.”115 But soon McGillivray had to retreat to Pensacola in the face of what was fast becoming a dangerous challenge to his authority. Confronted with such upheaval in their domains, Florida’s Spanish governors decided to negotiate with Bowles.116

  In early 1792, Bowles cruised into New Orleans on a Spanish vessel to speak with his opponents. As he stepped out into this cosmopolitan city between the river and the gulf, he must have felt his life’s ambition about to come true: Muskogee to be recognized, the Mississippi gained for the British Empire. Bowles insisted to the Spanish governor of New Orleans that he, rather than McGillivray, should be recognized as the leader in Creek country. He would make Muskogee a bulwark against the United States, he promised, and a committed friend t
o the empires of both Spain and Britain—invoking, like Cruden before him, the common interests of European empires in the face of a republican rival. The governor appeared receptive and told Bowles to meet with superior authorities in Cuba to finalize an agreement.

  But when Bowles disembarked in Havana, under the imposing fortress of Morro Castle, he realized with a thud that he had been tricked. The Spanish had no incentive to support Bowles’s grand pro-British plans when they already enjoyed good relations with the Creeks through McGillivray. Luring him to Cuba was a way of pulling him into captivity. Just weeks before, Bowles had looked set to lead the Floridas to loyal independence in a greater British world. Now he was a Spanish prisoner, soon to be transferred from Cuba to Cádiz, and then to the Philippines, as far from Muskogee as the Spanish Empire could take him. Instead of becoming lord of Muskogee, Bowles became surely the only American loyalist to be exiled in southeastern Asia. Stranded in that Pacific archipelago, on the other side of the world from the Bahamas, Bowles must have gained a visceral appreciation for the power of global empires. Only a near miracle could bring him back to Muskogee.117

  HE WOULD OFTEN be described as the “adventurer” Bowles, and at one level the dismissive epithet was appropriate. Bowles’s failed attempts to establish the state of Muskogee rendered him something of a shooting star across the Bahamas scene, blazing brightly and fast flaming out. For all its exceptional qualities, however, Bowles’s career brilliantly illuminated the persistence with which refugee loyalists—like the British Empire to which they adhered—sought to translate losses into gains.