Jamaican creoles did not let this anomaly pass without comment. The tax relief measure had dragged Kingston parish revenues down, even as the loyalist influx brought its population noticeably up. Soon the parish was struggling to make ends meet. In the fall of 1784, the exasperated members of the vestry encouraged the church warden to ship, at parish expense, “such persons off the island, who are desirous of going and are like to become burdensome”; it was cheaper to pay for them to leave than to pay for them to stay.38 The vestry followed up with an impassioned petition to the house of assembly. They commended the tax relief law for its “honourable motives.” But seventy “apparently wealthy” refugees, they noted, living in “elegant” houses “in some of the best situations in town,” had been exempted from taxes—while the indebted parish had spent more than £2,000 on relief, and its poor house was filled to bursting.39 A year later, the vestry repeated its plea in still stronger terms. The law had been intended “for the consolation of the Poor, or such as were bereft of all property,” they noted; but the successful petitioners for tax relief “have been employed in very lucrative departments.” “Vague Itinerants and volatile fugitives, ought not to be discharged from [taxes] by virtue of national munificence, or the specious appreciation of Loyal and Distressed refugees.”40
The house of assembly did not ultimately meet the Kingston vestry’s demands—quite possibly because it had a host of other petitions to deal with, all grappling with postwar economic vicissitudes.41 With the thirteen colonies lost, Jamaica mattered more than ever to the British imperial economy. At the same time, American independence had unfortunate consequences for Jamaica when the British government sharply restricted trade with the United States. Supply of basic provisions fell, prices rose. The opposite phenomenon overtook the sugar market: exports increased while prices trended downward, and high wartime duties remained frustratingly in place. In retrospect, many people would point to the American Revolution as the beginning of the end for the West Indies as the epicenter of the British Empire.42 Soon enough the Jamaica house of assembly addressed petitions of its own directly to the king, seeking tax reductions and freer trade. It was hard enough to cope with commercial regulations, war debts, supply shortages, and hurricanes. The American refugees added yet another financial burden. Was it really “advisable at this time,” they asked, “to give Berth to a New Spirit of Emigration and Adventure” by encouraging loyalists to settle in Jamaica?43 Though not numerous enough in Jamaica to permeate political life as they did in British North America and the Bahamas, loyalist refugees nevertheless made a mark on Jamaican politics too. As focal points of Jamaica’s postwar distress, they came to embody the predicament of a society coming to terms with its own altered position in a changing imperial world.
All the while, the refugees quested for opportunities for themselves and their slaves. Some Americans had trouble adjusting to tropical conditions. One South Carolinian had brought fourteen slaves and intended to start a plantation, but at sixty-two years old, “being very corpulent (upwards of 280 weight) is very unwieldy and inactive” and “unable to work.”44 In keeping with provisions made for refugees elsewhere, Whitehall had instructed Governor Campbell to make ungranted lands available for the loyalists.45 The trouble was, there was virtually no land to be had. When the three months of food rations supplied for the Charleston refugees ran out in April 1783, even the slave-rich loyalists were not yet in a position to provide for themselves. The weather that season had been “excessive and uncommon dry,” they complained, their slaves had fallen sick, and anyway they had “no land of their own here to employ them on.” Though they tried to hire out their slaves for money, either on private plantations or public works projects, they found this difficult since “the return of peace has greatly lessened the demand for Negro labour.”46
Nathaniel Hall, with more than four hundred slaves to place, was initially fortunate in this respect. He had connections to the influential planter Simon Taylor, who was fast becoming the richest man in Jamaica, if not indeed the whole British Empire.47 On the “very strong” recommendations of Hall by mutual friends, Taylor reported that “I have distributed his negroes among my Friends where they can be maintained.”48 But Taylor was disappointed at the results. The American slaves, he decided, were simply not up to the kind of labor expected on a Jamaican plantation. “In respect to the American Negroes,” he counseled a friend,
I advise you to have nothing to do with them on any acct. I have never seen a single Gang of all that have been brought out to this Island that has turned out well. They are a set of soft Angola and Mundigo Negroes who are too lazy ever to provide provisions for themselves and who have always been used to be handfed & if not give themselves up & take to dirt-eating which is inevitable Death.49
Sugarcane required tougher, hardier men, he thought; slaves “seasoned” to the particular physical challenges of the Jamaican work environment, slaves not from Angola or Sierra Leone but (here acknowledging the ethnic differences within the black Jamaican population) from the Gold Coast and the Bight of Biafra, primary depots for Jamaica-bound slaves.50 Hall, in turn, soon complained to one of the slaves’ owners, William Knox, that he could no longer locate sufficient employment for them in Jamaica. Finding his carefully exported human property an increasingly “burthensome possession,” Knox arranged through Hall to send the majority back to the United States to be sold.51 It is hard enough to follow the fortunes of loyalist refugees in Jamaica, and reconstructing the trajectories of loyalist-owned slaves proves even more difficult. But this example reveals that some endured a fate at least as bad as staying on Jamaica: they were shipped out again, with all the physical and psychological brutalization that the process entailed, on another stage in an ongoing cycle of migrations. Even for loyalist-imported slaves, Jamaica proved a deceptive place of residence.
What, meanwhile, were the landless white refugees to do? Here they were in the most profitable colony in the British Empire. Yet the richest failed to break into an already congested planter society, and the poorest still relied on charity handouts from the parish. It was then that they began to hear of a tempting possibility. In the western parish of St. Elizabeth, along the Black River, rumor told of unclaimed crown lands stretching across twenty thousand acres or more. The soil would be perfect for sugarcane, it was said, or maybe the indigo that many loyalists had grown in South Carolina before the war. The only problem was, it was currently a waterlogged morass. “Could it be drained,” the planter Edward Long had optimistically suggested in 1774, the St. Elizabeth morass “might form many capital plantations. No attempt of this sort has yet been made … but it promises to yield a very great return for any of the proprietors, who shall have spirit, ability, and patience, sufficient for prosecuting such an experiment.”52 For Jamaica’s dispossessed refugees, the experiment seemed well worth running. With Governor Campbell’s support, a project came together to drain the St. Elizabeth morass and divide it into land grants for Jamaica-based loyalists.
Mangrove thickets choke the Black River and its tributaries into an impenetrable maze of roots, a network of water and wood. If you pause for just a moment, the insects swarm into a tornado above your head, whine past your ears, and prick your fingers and wrists. Crocodiles lurk among these opaque channels. Lazy, brown, bump-backed things, they seem as benign as floating branches, until in an instant they can thrash up from the water with enough force to snap a small child in two. This was the weird wetland world that engineer Patrick Grant cruised into late in 1783, with a team of slaves and his surveyors’ tools, and a mandate from the governor to chart the morass into lots for loyalist refugees. For nine months, the surveyor pursued his task, trudging and sloshing through the swamps, laying out his lines and ignoring as best possible the complaints of nearby landowners, who used the dry patches now and then to graze their cattle. In the autumn of 1784, Grant staggered back to Spanish Town exhausted but satisfied. He lay before the assembly his hard-won map of 28,040 acres divided
into 183 lots, and a bill of £3,660 for his pains.53
Loyalist refugees signed up to claim the St. Elizabeth lots and eagerly waited for the house of assembly to issue their patents to the land—a pro forma process, they assumed. But the assembly hit a snag: Grant, they thought, was charging too much for his work. They decided to launch an inquiry into his actions—and by extension into the legitimacy of this settlement scheme, initiated by the now departed governor Campbell. Interrogating the assemblyman for St. Elizabeth, a house committee asked whether he thought there was enough “dry land interspersed among the waters … to make 183 comfortable settlements?” He did not. “Are you of the opinion,” they continued, “that any living creatures besides fish, frogs, Dutchmen, and amphibious animals, can exist in the district?” He was not. “Are you of the opinion that this spot … can be drained, so as to make it useful for the habitation of man?” He was not. Even if he were given the land for free, he said, he would not take it.54
For a whole year the investigation remained suspended while the assembly was out of session. By the time it resumed the inquiry in late 1785, loyalists had grown tense with impatience. Not surprisingly, some of the largest refugee slaveowners in Jamaica had subscribed to the scheme—people like Moses Kirkland, Nathaniel Hall, and his wife—imagining in the dark morass the ideal solution to their labor problems. Every month without land, to them, was another month at a loss. A humbler South Carolina tailor called Robert Frogg was one of several loyalists who preemptively moved to St. Elizabeth with his slaves anyway. Poor Frogg’s efforts to start draining the swamps prompted one local resident to jest that “the land thereabouts were so unhealthy, that even a frog could not live there.” Such reports only confirmed the assembly’s dismal view of the scheme. At the end of 1785, two years after Grant began his survey, the house judged that “the morass land … laid out for the refugees from America, cannot be drained for cultivation, but at such a considerable expense as to make it highly improbable that they will ever be drained.” It refused to grant patents to the land, and closed the book on Jamaica’s one and only officially sponsored land scheme for loyalists.55
“Frog” puns notwithstanding, nobody seems to have joked about the double meaning of “morass.” The metaphoric resonance may have been just too painful for the loyalists involved. No episode more succinctly captures the contrast between the refugees’ reception in Jamaica and that in other parts of British America. Land grants sat at the center of British provisions for loyalists in the Bahamas and British North America. In Jamaica, the one effort to provide land began in farce and ended in tragedy. Combined with the complaints from the Kingston parish vestry, the house of assembly’s refusal to follow through with the land grants confirmed Jamaicans’ cool response toward the plight of the American refugees.
It was especially ironic that this land of opulence, rooted in slavery, should prove so unsatisfying for the largest slaveowners among the refugees—people who must have been attracted to this island precisely because of its storied wealth. Unable to procure land, unable to hire out their slaves profitably, American planters found it far more difficult to adjust to Jamaica than professional men like Alexander Aikman and William Johnston, who could at least get jobs for themselves. (Again, though a breakdown of refugees by occupation and status remains elusive, the absence of other conspicuous successes like these suggests they remained a rarity.) News of the disappointing conditions on Jamaica circled quickly back to the mainland, as returns of the East Florida evacuation make clear. In contrast to the thousands who poured in from Savannah and Charleston, a mere 196 whites set off for Jamaica from St. Augustine—many of them intending only to use the island as a way station, en route to the “Spanish Main.” For them, the largely unknown possibilities of Central America appeared preferable to the known lack of opportunities on Jamaica.56 Ultimately, more Florida refugees decided to migrate to the tiny island of Dominica than to Britain’s Caribbean gem, attracted by promises of land grants from the governor. Though the lands were “very bad, being in general Tops of Mountains, and so situated as not to allow of cultivation,” at least they were on offer—and a mountaintop was surely better than a morass.57
AT DUSK, the tropics grew deafening as nature transitioned from day to night: cawing birds, scuttling animals, the rhythmic crescendo of rattling insects. Bats dipped and ducked in the twilight; sticky-toed geckos scuttled over walls; vultures swooped into the trees and hunched up their ruffled shoulders to sleep. In the humid air mosquitoes condensed like a rising mist. They homed in on warm bodies as if some deep intelligence guided their needle-noses to blood. If you weren’t careful, you’d step back indoors to find every patch of bare skin inflamed with bites.
Mosquitoes were pests, but nobody yet knew they were killers too: carriers of deadly yellow fever and malaria. The sinister little Aedes aegypti mosquito alone, dispensing the yellow fever virus into the human bloodstream, helped kill more white people in the eighteenth-century Caribbean than any single other cause. Smallpox, dengue fever, yaws, hookworm, dysentery, tetanus: all the plagues that made Jamaica such a death trap also made it a beacon of opportunity for the newly trained Dr. William Johnston. He came to Jamaica with justifiably high hopes for his career. He enjoyed the influential patronage of the governor; he held credentials from Edinburgh, the best medical school in the British world; and while his compatriots discovered that Jamaica had little room for more planters, Lord knew it always needed doctors. The governor generously “attached him nominally to some regiment”—a sinecure from which Johnston reaped a salary of 20 shillings per week plus handsome supplements for his family. Soon he accepted an invitation from James Wildman, a member of Jamaica’s governing council, to serve as physician on Wildman’s estate at Liguana. (Wildman was a powerful if slightly dubious patron: as attorney to one of Jamaica’s richest absentee owners, William Beckford, he and his brother had rapidly amassed—or rapaciously swindled, it was alleged—a fortune off commissions, and persuaded Beckford to give them a substantial plantation outright.)58 Johnston’s quick ascent may have helped inform a veteran Jamaican doctor’s gripe that “this country owing to the vast number of Medical people who were either refugees, or deprived of employment by the place, is so perfectly overrun with them that almost every small plantation has got its Doctor.”59
Diseases affected blacks and whites differentially (notably, blacks had greater immunity to yellow fever and malaria than whites), but black or white, free or slave, nobody could escape the pervasiveness of death in Jamaica, least of all the doctors who tried to cheat it. By the 1780s, terrible mortality rates among West Indian slaves had become an incriminating piece of evidence for British abolitionists, who latched onto the fact that slave deaths consistently outpaced births to argue that slavery needed to be ameliorated, if not eliminated outright. Planters, in response, became increasingly concerned to reduce slave mortality.60 Existing records suggest that at any given time, half the slaves on a sugar plantation might be afflicted with some injury or illness. Johnston’s tasks likely involved regular visits to an estate hospital, staffed by black attendants, where he would treat and diagnose slaves on the sick list. He may also have administered smallpox inoculations, an increasingly widespread practice on Jamaican plantations. Another of his duties would have been to fill out an annual report on the causes of death of slaves, required by Jamaica’s consolidated slave law of 1788—a grim record of how man and nature conspired to keep slaves dying young.61
Johnston continued to treat white patients as well. A pan-American yellow fever epidemic in 1793 proved a bonanza to his practice, when his merchant clients in Kingston called on him to attend the sick sailors on their incoming ships. Yellow fever produces internal bleeding and jaundice; it starts with a headache, then fever, nausea, and vomiting. When the vomit turns black and gritty with blood, it is almost over: the victim is usually dead within days. Dr. Johnston eschewed the technique of bloodletting that other doctors prescribed for the disease; though as he
dosed one heaving patient after another with calomel, a mercury solution given as a purgative, his treatment may have harmed as much as it helped.62 “Sometimes there were seventeen or more funerals a day,” Elizabeth Johnston remembered with distress. At their family house in Halfwaytree, just outside Kingston, she had a large Jamaica-born brood of young children to worry about: Eliza, born in 1787, a year to the day after Elizabeth Johnston’s arrival on Jamaica; Laleah Peyton in 1789; then John (1790), Jane Farley (1791), and James Wildman (1792). Johnston congratulated herself that none of her family contracted yellow fever. But their resistance to the island’s diseases would not last much longer. By the end of 1793 the Johnstons’ youngest daughter, Jane, was dead of scarlet fever, aged two.
You could not avoid death, but you could try to come to terms with it. As if to replace the lost child, the Johnstons named their newest infant, born in 1794, Jane Farley as well. With her, the Johnstons weren’t taking any chances: because of William’s constant exposure to smallpox, he arranged to have the baby girl inoculated. Although the procedure had become widespread in Jamaica by then (as in Britain), there was always some risk that, rather than developing antibodies to fight off the controlled infection, the patient might contract a fatal case of smallpox instead.63 Parents anxiously monitored the incisions where the virus had been applied to make sure infection did not spread. The second Jane Farley Johnston, just three months old, was not so lucky. “After lying on my lap for some time on a pillow, a very sad spectacle, one sore being quite black, she died in my arms,” her “angelic blue eyes” never to open again. William carried the small body from Elizabeth’s lap and she collapsed on the floor, convulsed in grief and prayers.64
Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World Page 33