The sheer demographic shock of Jamaica’s slave society must have struck black loyalist George Liele even before he disembarked. The very same ships that carried his family away from Savannah to a fresh start in freedom carried almost two thousand other blacks onward into continued slavery. The racial composition of the loyalist exodus to Jamaica shows what a central place slavery held in white loyalists’ calculations: the approximately three thousand white refugees who moved to Jamaica managed to export with them fully eight thousand slaves. Liele and his family belonged to a tiny number of free blacks amid the Jamaican immigrants. Even then, Liele’s own autonomy was hemmed in by his indenture to Moses Kirkland, the officer who had helped him purchase his family’s freedom—a reminder of how the boundaries between slavery and freedom could be blurred. Stepping off the Zebra convoy in August 1782, the Lieles joined about ten thousand mixed-race “free people of color” and free blacks living on Jamaica.15 As Liele made his way through Kingston’s streets, mud-clogged by the summer rains, he must have marveled to find himself, for the first time in his life, in a city where black faces outnumbered white. He was now in a society where he counted in the racial majority (divided though it was by ethnic cleavages), yet where that majority was brutally subordinated by law and violence. Liele knew, from his months in a Georgia jail, that being a free black in America was hard enough. What would freedom bring him here?
Landing on this alien island would have been equally striking for Liele’s fellow Savannah evacuee Elizabeth Johnston. In 1786, a year after William Johnston had left Scotland for Spanish Town, she steeled herself for another Atlantic passage and set off with their youngest children to join him in Jamaica. Though this had been the couple’s longest period apart, Johnston said little this time about her eagerness to see her husband; the farewells she had made in Scotland may have tainted her happiness. She had left behind her own father in Edinburgh, her close circle of in-laws, and her first real family home. Most wrenchingly, she left her firstborn son Andrew, who stayed with his grandfather Dr. Lewis Johnston to be educated in Edinburgh’s celebrated schools. Whether she felt transported by the gorgeous strangeness of the setting, Elizabeth Johnston never later told. All she recorded about her arrival on Jamaica was its date: December 15, 1786. It was the fifth place she had inhabited in as many years. Still just twenty-two years old, she had spent her entire adult life in transit, unsettled by the resonating aftereffects of the American Revolution. In something of the way Liele’s indenture made his emigration less than voluntary, Johnston’s movements fell into a shaded zone between free choice and force of circumstance. Her time on Jamaica would only enhance her tendency to understand all her migrations as trials.
Elizabeth Johnston remained mute about the island’s beauty, never mentioned sugar once, and rarely referred to the slaves who surrounded her. (As a white woman on Jamaica, Johnston belonged to an especially small minority in a society with twice as many white men than women.)16 But she was quickly schooled in another inescapable feature of Jamaican life: death. This island was a morgue. Tropical diseases such as yellow fever and malaria led to mortality rates among whites as high as one in eight, supporting one visitor’s casual observation that “once in seven Years there is a Revolution of Lives in this Island.… As many die in that Space of Time as perfectly inhabit it.”17 Of course that was why William Johnston had come to Jamaica in the first place. As a doctor, he filled the one profession guaranteed to thrive under any adverse circumstances. But the same mortal forces that supported the Johnston family financially also came to haunt them personally throughout their residence in Jamaica.
It was easy enough to understand why up to two-thirds of wealthy planters lived comfortably far away in Britain, leaving a small core of white overseers, bookkeepers, lawyers, and doctors to staff their estates. Arriving white loyalists notably resembled their Jamaican peers in a crucial respect: they were people pushed by circumstance to run high risks in hopes of high rewards. White Jamaicans saw themselves, too, as exiles of a sort, sojourners rather than settlers. “Europeans who come to this island have seldom an idea of settling here for life,” remarked the Jamaica planter and historian Bryan Edwards. “Their aim is generally to acquire a fortune to enable them to sit down comfortably in their native country.”18 Yet the island’s very advantages served as disadvantages for loyalist refugees, who in any case saw “their native country” as closed to them—underlining the degree to which their own choice to settle in this place was made under duress. Land was not just there for the taking, as in British North America or the Bahamas. In a well-supplied labor market, there were surprisingly few places for striving refugees to put their slaves to work. And though they represented a significant enough increase in the island’s white population—perhaps as much as a sixth—to earn special treatment from Jamaican authorities, they also invited competitive resentment from fellow whites.
Loyalist refugees in Jamaica thus arrived in an island of opposites and extremes. Jamaica had survived the dangers of war, its sugar output kept increasing, and its economy diversifying; it seemed on the surface a perfect place for the refugees to rebuild. But restrictions on trade with the United States left Jamaicans reeling and resentful. Provision shortages, combined with severe drought, led to a famine that reputedly killed at least fifteen thousand slaves.19 You might be forgiven for thinking that nature itself was out to get Jamaica. Almost every year in the 1780s screaming hurricanes swept away crops and houses like chesspieces off a game board, and left the lushest landscapes “visibly stricken blank with desolation,” brutally exposing how fragile even the largest fortunes might be.20 However hard you tried to focus on the opulence, you could not get away from the violence. It charged relations between white and black. It infected bodies from within. It burst out of the very heavens. And less than a decade after the British evacuations from the United States, it threw Jamaica—and the loyalist refugees—into the cockpit of another revolutionary war. Struggling to carve out a niche on Jamaica, loyalists hit up against the disjunction between aspirations and realities in such intractable form that some of them would end up moving on again. If by the 1790s the American Revolution looked like the first chapter in what historians have called an age of democratic revolutions—continuing in France and Saint Domingue—loyalist refugees in Jamaica gained hard-won insight into how the revolution had also set off an age of imperial migrations.21
DOMINATING THE main square of Spanish Town stands a remarkable monument to imperial confidence. It consists of a heroic statue, sheltered under an elaborate cupola and flanked by sweeping colonnades. The figure’s giant toes alone, splayed wide apart in sandals, convey an aura of command. Every part of his Roman costume, from skirt to tunic to luxuriously billowing cape, emphasizes his powerful physique. His left hand rests on a sword and shield, and his right fist points determinedly ahead, clenching a baton. Not many passersby could understand the somewhat inelegant Latin inscribed on its pedestal—to Admiral Lord George Rodney, who restored well-being to Jamaica and peace to Britain—but the gist of the thing was clear enough.22 The Rodney Memorial, as this glorious ensemble is called, represents an anomaly in the historical vestiges of the American Revolution. It is the greatest British victory monument of the war. Nothing better demonstrates how differently the American Revolution looked from the British West Indies than it did from the thirteen colonies—and by extension, how different the outlook of loyalist refugees would be from that of their Jamaican hosts.
While thirteen British colonies in North America rebelled in 1775, the other thirteen colonies that Britain possessed in the Americas, north and south of the future United States, did not. None remained more staunchly loyal than the West Indian islands, of which Jamaica was the largest.23 Although Jamaica traded with the thirteen colonies for food and timber, these commercial ties were overshadowed by the island’s dependence on the protectionist British sugar market. (Jamaicans particularly resented American smugglers who circumvented British tariffs by impo
rting cheaper molasses from the French West Indies.) Economically, it had nothing to gain from joining the American Revolution. Strategically, it had much to lose. Unlike American colonists, who resented the stationing of British troops on their soil, Jamaicans positively welcomed British garrisons to protect them from their own slaves. The memory of Tacky’s Rebellion was still fresh when a slave conspiracy in the fateful month of July 1776 underscored how much Jamaicans depended on British forces. Though rumored to have been encouraged by American patriots, this plot in western Jamaica owed much to the fact that half the islands’ soldiers were in the process of shipping out for North America.24 Martial law and the usual savage executions successfully suppressed the would-be rebellion; but the incident still haunted Jamaicans when a massive slave revolt broke out on nearby Saint Domingue in 1791. To a small white population heavily reliant on Britain, anti-imperial revolution—especially when it was a revolution by slaves—felt like a nightmare come to life.
Jamaica also needed Britain to guard it from the external dangers posed by war. These came perilously close to the island in the winter of 1781–82, when the French fleet, fresh from its triumph at Yorktown, cruised out of the Chesapeake and into the Caribbean. The seemingly unstoppable force seized the British colonies of St. Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat in quick succession, and had Jamaica next in its sights. Jamaica’s resourceful governor, Archibald Campbell (who assumed that position after his successful command in Savannah), busily worked up a strategy for island defense, calling on all whites, free blacks, and selected “confidential slaves” to support British troops.25 Jamaican creoles shuddered at the prospect of an imminent invasion; it was rumored that the French carried “50,000 pairs of handcuffs, and fetters” to capture their slaves. Fortunately for them, the Royal Navy under Admiral Rodney was in pursuit. Early on an April morning, a superior British force caught up with the French in a channel between Dominica and Guadeloupe called “the Saintes.” Boldly breaking through the line of French ships, Rodney scored a decisive victory, capturing the French admiral de Grasse himself. In a stroke, Rodney saved the richest colony in the empire and handed Britain a valuable bargaining chip in the peace negotiations.26
Recognizing the historical significance of the Battle of the Saintes (as it became known), the Jamaica house of assembly voted to spend £1,000 commissioning a statue from one of London’s finest sculptors.27 But like all such monuments, the Rodney Memorial is a splendid half-truth. For one thing, the beginning of the war had found the admiral rather ingloriously hiding out from his creditors in France, ruined by gambling losses. When he conquered the Dutch island of St. Eustatius in 1781, he plundered it so rapaciously that he provoked transatlantic outcry as well as costly lawsuits. More seriously, Rodney was so busy ransacking St. Eustatius that he failed to intercept the French fleet on its way to Yorktown.28 The Battle of the Saintes allowed him to salvage a reputation badly shaken by his earlier errors. Instead of being the rogue who helped lose America, Rodney became the hero who saved Jamaica. And since Jamaica was Britain’s most profitable colony, and the Caribbean its most valuable imperial region, this battle mattered more from the perspective of the British Empire as a whole.
So when the evacuation fleet from Savannah landed in Port Royal, four months after the Battle of the Saintes, it brought the haggard faces of defeat to an island basking in victory. (At least one Jamaican newspaper concealed from its readers the fact that this actually was an evacuation fleet, and the beginning of the end of British rule in the thirteen colonies.) Over the next six months, ships from Savannah and Charleston unloaded thousands of disoriented refugees and slaves into the streets of Kingston and the nearby capital, Spanish Town, in varying states of need. With approximately twenty thousand residents, Kingston was the largest city in the British Caribbean, and the third largest city in English-speaking America, after New York and Philadelphia.29 It outclassed Savannah and Charleston, to say nothing of Nassau or Halifax, with its extensive city plan and the proud buildings of a colonial cosmopolis: well-appointed barracks and spacious parade, an imposing church complete with pipe organ and clocktower, a free school, and—like Spanish Town—a handsome synagogue. The city’s broad streets were lined with two- and three-story brick houses, designed for the climate with covered galleries and patios. “The most luxurious epicure” would find everything available in Kingston’s overflowing markets. At a concert or ball in the city’s two finest taverns, Ranelagh and Vauxhall, you could almost imagine yourself in the London pleasure gardens for which they were named. Even the county jail merited distinction: it formerly belonged to a mathematician who installed an observatory there, “little suspecting … that it would be converted into a receptacle for unfortunate persons, who are here precluded from almost every other amusement than that of star-gazing.”30
The refugees made a startling impression against this prospering scene. “Affecting and unusual spectacles of Misfortune and Misery were exhibited in all parts of the town,” locals opined. It is impossible to tell from the scant surviving record what percentage of newcomers arrived in poverty, but given the migration patterns from Savannah and Charleston, whereby wealthier loyalists opted to move to East Florida, it seems fair to speculate that disproportionately many of the whites arriving in Jamaica were relatively poor. With the vast majority of the three thousand white refugees remaining in Kingston, parish authorities formed the front line of relief. Dozens of loyalists were admitted into the poor house, and many others received ad hoc pensions. Kingston residents, moved by the sight of such sufferings, took up a subscription that raised just over £1,000 on behalf of the refugees.31 Another observer, Prince William Henry, passing through Jamaica on naval duty, was so shocked by the sight of the destitute masses spilling off the evacuation fleets that he offered “a handsome sum” from his own funds “for the relief of those refugees from South Carolina.”32 His royal example inspired a legislative sequel. In February 1783 (the same week that it commissioned the Rodney Memorial), the house of assembly passed a bill “to exempt from Taxes for a limited time such of his Majesty’s subjects of North America as from motives of Loyalty have been or shall be obliged to relinquish or abandon their possessions in that country, and take refuge in this Island with Intent to settle.”33 That last qualification—“with Intent to settle”—stands out. British officials had long fretted over how to maintain Jamaica’s white population, ravaged as it was by disease and absenteeism. Deficiency laws, mandating that planters maintain a minimum number of whites on their property, had proved hapless at best. Loyalist refugees thus appeared as attractive candidates for long-term residence. The question was how actually to integrate them.
Alexander Aikman printed 460 copies of the act, which quickly made its way around the refugee community.34 In a sort of miniature version of the Loyalist Claims Commission, refugees filed cases to prove their loyalty, losses, and intention to settle. Successful claimants received certificates confirming their tax-exempt status. These documents open a rare window onto the composition of the Jamaica loyalist refugees. (At least 169 certificates survive, though fifty-one of these belong to a different group of claimants included in the act: settlers displaced from British outposts in the Bay of Honduras and the Mosquito Shore.)35 At one level, they expose the refugees’ geographical and social diversity. There were migrants who had initially evacuated from Boston in 1776, like William Parker, “an inhabitant of that place from his infancy as a loyal subject to his Britannick Majesty.” There were New Yorkers like Robert Stuart, a loyalist veteran who found he “cou’d not remain in New York after the evacuation of that place”; and Israel Mendes, with his family of eight, who joined a Jewish community in Kingston at least as thriving as the one he had left in colonial New York. Benjamin Davis of Philadelphia, “one of the people called Quakers,” had escaped prosecution in Pennsylvania, fled to Charleston, and sailed to Jamaica from there. Two claimants from West Florida had been imprisoned in Havana after the capture of Pensacola.36
Two-thirds of the certificates, however, belonged to loyalist refugees from Georgia and South Carolina, and together form an important record of the larger if still more obscure component of the influx into Jamaica: loyalist-owned slaves. George Liele’s patron Moses Kirkland landed in Jamaica with forty-one slaves, whom he hoped to employ in indigo planting, as he had back in America. The widow of an attainted Georgia loyalist, Helen McKinnon, also managed to extract forty-one slaves from her husband’s confiscated property, while Susannah Wylly (William’s mother) arrived with thirty-seven, “a part of her slaves and that of her children (being all British subjects), … which have been employed in Kingston and in the county in jobbing.” Several claimants brought not only their own slaves but those consigned to them by associates. In addition to the eighty-nine slaves of his own that Samuel Douglas of Augusta brought from Georgia, he carried 113 belonging to a pair of London merchants, “all of which slaves to the number of 202 have for some time past been employed on the Public Works.” William Telfair, also from Augusta, brought sixty-six of his and his wife’s slaves, as well as 112 owned by South Carolinian William Bull, whose family already owned land in Jamaica. Then there was Nathaniel Hall, the largest slave trafficker in the list. He came with fifty-six of his own slaves, 102 belonging to the imperial official William Knox, 217 of Georgia governor Sir James Wright’s, and thirty-seven more besides—“all of which said negroes amount[in]g in the whole to 412 have since their arrival been employed in St. Thos. in the East.”37 Altogether, the eighty-one claimants from South Carolina and Georgia brought 1,359 slaves to Jamaica—a ratio of one to sixteen whites to blacks, higher even than the Jamaican average.
Skewed so strongly toward wealthy southern slaveowners, the certificates make for a curious record of distress. On the one hand, all of these testimonials document real losses and the real problems and deprivations of being a refugee, whether one had left behind thousands of acres or the humblest of houses. On the other hand, those who had lost the largest amount of property had also often preserved the most, in the movable form of their slaves. Owning dozens of slaves made them well-off by any eighteenth-century standards. Their successful bids for tax exemption (like many of the cases rewarded most fully by the Loyalist Claims Commission) seemed to prove the maxim that to those who have, more shall be given. Were these really the starving refugees so in need of government relief?
Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World Page 32