Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  It also highlighted the divisions embedded within Bahamian loyalist society, around competing ideas about what the British Empire ought to do for its subjects. Hepburn, Brown, Wylly, and others articulated an oppositional rhetoric of rights and representation very similar to that of American patriots. At the same time, they imported their slaves in large enough numbers to transform the Bahamas’ racial composition, just as they imported American racial attitudes which they aimed to put into law. Dunmore and Bowles, though (and Cruden at his sanest), espoused a competing image of what the British Empire stood for. In line with the “spirit of 1783,” they envisioned a multiethnic community united in loyalty under a tolerant, protective crown—a conception of empire historically more congenial to metropolitan authorities than to provincial white settlers. Dunmore, the man who freed slaves in Virginia, acted as a lightning rod for conflicts over race in the Bahamas thanks to his comparative tolerance of black claims to freedom. The collision of opinions during his governorship set a precedent for conflicts over race and slavery between white Bahamians and British authorities that would long outlast him.

  It also formed a backdrop of controversy against which William Augustus Bowles posed a vivid contrast. Here was a white American loyalist hoping to lead his adoptive Indian brethren to territorial independence, with British aid. This head-spinning combination attested to the cosmopolitan possibilities of the British Empire as a place in which a man like Bowles—or like Joseph Brant or Alexander McGillivray—could successfully portray himself as at once a loyal imperial subject and as the leader of a sovereign Indian nation. All these men hoped that the same empire that offered paternalistic protection to blacks would provide support for North America’s indigenous peoples, in the face of U.S. encroachment. But in the intensely divided political environment of the Bahamas, Bowles’s plans proved especially provocative, by deepening battle lines already dug around slavery and representation. Such interlocking tensions make the Bahamas a striking case in point of why the stories of loyal whites, blacks, and Indians have to be explored together to be understood in full.

  Territorial ambitions like Bowles’s can sometimes seem hard to take seriously, especially considering the small forces involved and the very large areas they hoped to control, often at great distances from metropolitan centers. Yet the American Revolution fueled precisely such expansionist thinking among British subjects. After all, the British Empire had always built itself up by capitalizing on the weaknesses of its imperial rivals, of which the United States, with its shaky frontiers, was now one. Besides, when loyalists had built cities in the Canadian wilderness, when the Iroquois established a new domain in the Great Lakes, when free blacks pioneered a settlement in Sierra Leone, and when British subjects colonized Australia and governed Bengal, then why wasn’t Muskogee also a plausible prospect? However outraged Bahamian loyalists might have been by Bowles as a character, they could not write off his enterprise as such. That was just the problem. Bowles emerged from the same turbulent late-eighteenth-century climate that fostered numerous other imperial visionaries, from John Cruden to Francisco de Miranda, and acted as a forerunner in turn to nineteenth-century U.S. filibusters who sought to carve their own chunks out of Spanish America. (Just a decade after Bowles’s capture, U.S. vice president Aaron Burr plotted the conquest of the lower Mississippi Valley and Mexico along rather similar lines.) All these projects revealed visible points of convergence between apparent opposites, Anglo-American loyalists and rebels, between the British Empire and the expansionist American republic.

  When some loyalists demonstrated against imperial authority to the point of breaking with it altogether, and others championed schemes designed to expand and entrench it, it was clear that loyalism itself could connote a wide range of things. By the time of Bowles’s arrest, war with republican France would make loyalty and the containment of dissent more urgent than ever to British imperial authorities. With the threat of a French attack on the Bahamas, and anxious that popular agitation might take a dangerously republican turn, Dunmore could no longer resist a fresh election. In 1794, for the first time in a decade, Bahamian voters chose a new house of assembly. The results at last confirmed the refugee planter ascendancy in the islands, by eliminating Dunmore’s old supporters and electing a number of his long-standing rivals; William Wylly was appointed chief justice. Renewed fears of slave uprisings, triggered by the 1791 revolution on Saint Domingue, inspired a series of tougher racial laws, designed to keep blacks and whites safely apart, and trumping Dunmore’s paternalistic policies. Provoked at last by the continuing protests against Dunmore, his massive expenditures, and his unavoidably irregular (not to say corrupt) behavior, Whitehall recalled the hated governor in 1796. Dunmore returned to Britain under a cloud, his own loyalty ironically tainted by a personal scandal, when one of his daughters had married—without royal permission—one of King George III’s sons.118

  And so Dunmore’s vision of empire may have been defeated in the local context of the Bahamas. But the white loyalist settlers’ dreams of a cotton-rich plantation society proved equally elusive. The sandy Bahamian soil Dr. Lewis Johnston had disdained never became more fertile. The chenille bug continued to burrow into the cotton bolls. Hurricanes regularly wrecked houses and crops, while sustaining rainfall too rarely came. By 1800 most planters had abandoned their struggles with cotton and turned to a more diverse, if less lucrative, assortment of corn, peas, and other grains.119 (In a remarkable illustration of the Bahamas’ contrapuntal relationship with the mainland, sea island cotton would be reintroduced from the Bahamas into the American south, where its fortunes became the stuff of legend.) Some of them cashed in and moved on. In 1805, Thomas Brown developed a third 6,000-acre estate, a counterpart to those he had owned in Georgia and the Bahamas, on the island of St. Vincent, on land recently seized from the indigenous Caribs.120 In stark contrast to British North America, the Bahamas never took off as an agricultural economy. The islands flourished best in their position as maritime center, way station, and offshore hub—a role they continue to play more than two centuries later.

  For all that Dunmore had prepared for war with his extensive bulwarks and barricades, Fort Charlotte—the jewel in his crown of fortresses—would never fire its guns in battle.121 Manning the bastions facing the blank ocean, bored soldiers carved their initials into the sun-baked walls, waiting for attacks that never came. Like the folly in Airth, it still stands there, a relic of dated ambitions. In the end, despite loyalist efforts to make it otherwise, the Bahamas remained marginal to imperial interests. For the important challenges for the British Empire, like the real profits and possibilities, lay in a different quarter of that aquamarine sea. It was on the Caribbean island of Jamaica, Britain’s richest colony, that loyalist refugees would experience most acutely the disjuncture between hopes and realities, and the pressures of living in an empire once more consumed by revolutionary war.

  Thomas Jefferys, Jamaica, from the Latest Surveys, 1775. (illustration credit 1.10)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  False Refuge

  ITS BEAUTY could take your breath away. From the sparkling surface of the water your gaze swept sharply up to the craggy Blue Mountains, climbing into the clouds. Over the rippled slopes fell a living green blanket, textured in the weird vegetable forms of the tropics: giant ferns and tufted bromeliads, flap-eared plantains, muscular trees draped in epiphytes, careening stands of bamboo, and sinewy palms. When you turned past the outer lip of the harbor you floated over the broken stones of the old capital of Port Royal, mostly destroyed in a 1692 earthquake. The gleaming sand swept around the shoreline to Kingston, Port Royal’s replacement, the greatest British metropolis in the Caribbean. Gulls sliced circles around the masts, the sun cut the water into liquid diamonds. No wonder loyalists were captivated by it. “Such hills, such mountains, and such verdure; everything so bright and gay, it is delightful!” gushed one new arrival on cruising toward this spectacular landscape.1 An eighteenth-century a
esthete effusively compared the bay of Kingston to the bay of Naples, with the Blue Mountains standing in for Vesuvius and the submerged ruins of Port Royal like a phantom Pompeii under the transparent sea.2 Others let the “grandeur and sublimity” simply overcome them, knocking language from their lips.3 Whatever else loyalist refugees knew of this lush island, they could see it wasn’t the thirteen colonies anymore.

  Of all the British colonies to which loyalists migrated during and after the revolution, Jamaica presented the most immediately attractive destination. The very fact that refugees did not regularly complain about going there, as they did about Nova Scotia and the Bahamas, said much about its appeal. It was the most populous, developed, and richest British island in the Caribbean, and its slave-based plantation system made it an obvious choice for slaveowning southern loyalists in particular. South Carolina refugee Louisa Wells, for one, who had escaped from Charleston to join her parents in Britain, openly fantasized about traveling “to the scorching Torrid Zone.” That was partly because she found her British “Isle of Liberty and Peace” cold and dank, and promptly fell ill. It was also because Britain lay on the wrong side of the Atlantic: Wells’s fiancé, Alexander Aikman, had moved to Jamaica, and she longed to join him there. In 1781, Wells braved the dangers of another wartime Atlantic crossing to do so—only to get captured by the French and imprisoned for three months. Undaunted, she took passage for Jamaica again, this time as a passenger on board a slave ship.4

  She arrived with nostrils clogged by the stench of packed bodies, of vomit, waste, and sweat, barely concealed by pungent vinegar-swabbed decks, and with an all too vivid sense of the desperate conditions under which the vast majority of immigrants to Jamaica—captive Africans—journeyed to an isle of slavery and violence. The patterns of black migration in the British Atlantic have been well mapped by historians, to reveal the contours of a community transformed by dislocation.5 Wells’s voyage pointed up the irony in the fact that this colony, based on forced migration, now served as a haven for American refugees. Displaced by war, she belonged to a group whose movement—though not coerced in anything like the manner of slaves—also fell short of fully voluntary. It was a telling portent of the many unsettling contradictions loyalists would soon encounter in Jamaica.

  To Wells, fortunately, Jamaica offered a happy asylum: she found Aikman thriving, and they married in early 1782. Aikman had started a newspaper when he reached Kingston—the Jamaica Mercury, soon renamed the Royal Gazette and emblazoned with the royal arms—and from 1780 gloried in the position of official printer to the crown. His paper joined the diaspora of publications that fanned out from the loyalist Wells family’s single Charleston printshop, to East Florida, the Bahamas, and now Jamaica. While his brother-in-law John Wells printed assaults on imperial rule in Nassau, Aikman became a pillar of the Jamaican establishment, acquiring plantations and fine houses, and serving as a member of the house of assembly from 1805 to 1825.6

  Yet the Aikmans’ successful transition from South Carolina to Jamaica was fairly exceptional among the three thousand loyalist refugees who came to the island. For all Jamaica’s evident advantages as a site of loyalist settlement, it posed adverse contrasts with British North America and the Bahamas. Refugees in the former, after all, remained in North America, and comprised the majority of the population in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; loyalists also formed a majority in the Bahamas, which remained environmentally and culturally more similar to (and connected with) the former southern colonies than Jamaica. In terms of ecology and population structure alone, going to Jamaica was like going to a tropical moon. The refugees were doubly a minority, enveloped within Jamaica’s creole white society, which was itself numerically overwhelmed by slaves, in a ratio of black to white dwarfing that of pre-revolutionary South Carolina and Georgia. American refugees had trouble finding land, employing their slaves, and preserving their health in a notoriously disease-ridden environment (which may help account for the relative absence of records documenting loyalist lives in Jamaica). In place of an ideal haven, loyalists quickly ran up against the harsh realities of Jamaican life: the elusiveness of its legendary wealth, the violence of its slave-based society, the decimating forces of disease, and a permeating sense of vulnerability from within and without. Contradictions between expectations and realities formed a defining theme of the refugee experience across sites of loyalist exodus, but nowhere would these contrasts appear more starkly than in Jamaica. They were practically built into the society itself.

  Jamaica signaled many things to an eighteenth-century Anglo-American. First and foremost was opulence. A thousand miles away from Britain’s other West Indian colonies of Barbados and the Lesser Antilles, Jamaica formed the third corner of a compact triangle of imperial wealth based on sugar. Cuba and Saint Domingue, each about a hundred miles from Jamaica, yielded profits just as dramatic for Spain and France as Jamaica did for Britain. It was the wealth of these rivals, in fact, that first lured Britons to the western Caribbean. They came not as planters, but as pirates. In 1655, Britain seized Jamaica as part of a smash-and-grab expedition against the Spanish, and for decades to come the island functioned primarily as a buccaneering base. “The Dunghill of the Universe, the Refuse of the whole Creation … the Place where Pandora fill’d her Box,” snarled one satirist of this rowdy, lawless society. It was no wonder that people interpreted the 1692 earthquake that destroyed Port Royal as divine retribution against the “very Sodom of the Universe”—especially given how much they preferred what replaced the buccaneer-dominated society, namely the plantation economy of imperial dreams.7 But Jamaica’s proximity to French and Spanish colonies kept it at the center of one of the eighteenth-century’s biggest imperial war zones. Vulnerability to outside attack was one reason that Jamaica, like other British West Indian colonies, remained emphatically loyal in the face of the American Revolution.

  Soon, the planters’ source of wealth outstripped even the greatest of pirates’ hoards. It came packed in an unassuming green stalk, about as thick as a child’s wrist. Sugarcane fed an increasingly insatiable British sweet tooth. (Average Britons in the 1780s consumed twelve pounds of sugar per person per year, three times as much as their grandparents.)8 “A field of canes, when … it is in arrows (or full blossom), is one of the most beautiful productions that the pen or pencil can possibly describe,” enthused the planter and writer William Beckford.9 He might as well have said the most lucrative, for to its owner a field of ripe sugarcane was tantamount to a field of profits. Sugar was gold in the eighteenth century. Jamaica’s trade in sugar and rum helped make the island the wealthiest colony in the late-eighteenth-century British Empire. On the eve of the American Revolution, when per capita wealth for a white person in England averaged about £42, and about £60 for whites in the thirteen colonies, white Jamaicans enjoyed a per capita net worth of £2,201.10 The only other British imperial domain that could rival Jamaica in terms of profitability was India, and even there, opportunities for adventurous Britons to come back loaded with diamonds and gold (like the great nabob Robert Clive) were tapering off by the end of the century. At only forty-four hundred square miles—about the size of Connecticut, and significantly smaller than Cuba or Hispaniola—Jamaica could lay claim to being, after French Saint Domingue, the second richest colony on earth.

  And yet Jamaica’s opulence rested on the inherently abusive system that enabled such fortunes in the first place. All that wealth depended on a slave labor regime of remarkable proportions. If you lop off a section of sugar cane and gnaw at it, you can just about suck out some of its sweet juice. But processing these fibrous stalks into bulk sugar requires an enormously labor-intensive process of harvesting, grinding, boiling, molding, and crystallizing—every stage of which was performed by slaves.11 As consumption of sugar increased, so did the labor force required to produce it. By the end of the American Revolution, about 210,000 slaves outnumbered the island’s eighteen thousand whites by a ratio of nearly twelve to one. This r
atio of black to white was fairly typical of British Caribbean colonies, but stood in startling contrast to the former thirteen colonies, where no state had even a black majority in 1790.12

  Greatly outnumbered by its own slaves, the white minority went to appalling extremes to secure its authority. White Jamaica survived on a reign of terror. To be sure, slave discipline in the American colonies—to say nothing of the penalties regularly dispensed by the British criminal justice system—seems horrifying enough in retrospect. But even by contemporary standards, Caribbean violence was of another order. A dispassionate record of Jamaica’s everyday sadism survives in the diaries of plantation overseer Thomas Thistlewood, whose thirty-seven-year-long career on the island ended with his death in 1786. By then, Thistlewood had scored tens of thousands of lashes across slaves’ bare skin, practically flaying some of his victims alive. He had had sex with 138 women (by his own tally), almost all of them slaves. He had stuck the heads of executed runaways on poles; he had seen cheeks slit and ears cut off. He routinely meted out punishments such as the following, for a slave caught for eating sugarcane: “had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector shit in his mouth.”13 Such incredible barbarity symptomized the panic that pervaded Jamaican white society: the fear that the black majority might rise up and slaughter them in their beds. Thistlewood would not have blinked at the sentences imposed on slaves convicted of participating in Tacky’s Rebellion of 1760, the largest slave uprising in the eighteenth-century British Empire: some gibbeted in iron cages, others slowly roasted over open flames.14