Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  She had lost two children already—one in Edinburgh, another in Jamaica—but this bereavement touched Elizabeth Johnston more deeply than any other. Perhaps it had something to do with the sense that she could have stopped it, that she had actually approved (and probably watched) when the fatal germs were applied to her child’s soft, satin limbs. But to be there in that strange, suffocating place, with nothing familiar around her, “having no female relation to be with me, only black servants, and having to think about and direct everything for so many little ones”—it seemed too much to bear. “Much exhausted in mind and body,” she fell into a serious depression. Not long after the baby’s death, the Wildmans offered to adopt the Johnstons’ daughter Eliza and take her with them to Britain as their own. “We could not for some weeks make up our minds to part with her,” Johnston confessed, as they wrestled with a dilemma that faced generations of parents in inhospitable imperial outposts. Was it better to keep the children close at home, exposed to tropical dangers—or to send them thousands of miles “home” to distant Britain? Deciding it “best for the child,” the Johnstons dispatched Eliza to England with the Wildmans. For much the same reasons, they sent their eldest daughter Catherine back to Edinburgh at her grandfather Dr. Johnston’s request.65

  As the inexorable pressures of mortality closed in around them, the Johnstons discovered Jamaica to be a false refuge for them too. Though William Johnston succeeded where many southern refugee planters did not, by quickly carving out a professional career, the hostility of the alien environment broke down his family both physically and psychologically. In 1796, a “debilitated” Elizabeth Johnston admitted defeat. She decided to return to Edinburgh with the children, as “a duty both to their health and their morals,” while William, who “could not possibly leave his practice,” stayed on in Jamaica alone. Fully forty years later, the grief still welled up inside her when she remembered “the morning of that sad day when I heard that the boat was come to take us on board,” for another separation, another Atlantic crossing. “I hardly think I was in my senses. I uttered screams that distressed my poor husband to such a degree that he would then … have been glad if I had given up going. He begged me … to let him go on board and bring our things back, but all I could say was, ‘It is too late!’ ”66

  But as the figures on the docks dwindled into blurs and dots, and the ruins of Port Royal shimmered away beneath the ship, and the green Blue Mountains receded into gray outlines, she drew strength from a fresh source. In her darkest hours of mourning and isolation, Johnston had been saved. She saw the arms of an unfamiliar God stretched out to embrace her: a loving, accessible presence, the God of the Baptists. The old Anglican pieties she had been trying to console herself with since Florida seemed merely “cold morality” to her now. She found solace in “the preaching of the Dissenters, which has been the means of awakening many a poor soul.”67 Like millions of others in the later-eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Johnston had been caught up in the evangelical tide known as the Second Great Awakening. Her own path to conversion, through personal upheaval and distress, seemed to crystallize the larger process of recovery across an Anglo-American world torn by war. She had lost so much in Jamaica; but this discovery she could carry with her always.

  FOR THIS island of death was also increasingly an island of Christian faith. The spiritual comfort Elizabeth Johnston discovered in her personal trials would be repeated thousands of times over in 1780s Jamaica as evangelical Protestant missionaries began to convert the brutalized slave population in large numbers. What was more, those missionaries were black themselves—and black loyalists from America at that. While white refugees had imported thousands of slaves but themselves blended anonymously into Jamaican society, died, or left, a handful of free black loyalists, importing their religious sensibilities, made an indelible mark on the island. Their activities tied Jamaica into a growing Atlantic-wide network of black evangelicalism, a vibrant and enduring consequence of the loyalist dispersal. At the forefront of these missionary activities was George Liele, who brought to Jamaica a version of the same Baptist teaching that his protégé David George was spreading in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.68

  Like William Johnston, Liele had the good fortune to arrive in Jamaica with a personal recommendation to the governor—but in his case, it was to be an indentured servant. Indebted to loyalist Moses Kirkland for the purchase price of his family members, Liele had effectively been obliged to follow Kirkland to Jamaica in 1782. “Promising to be my friend in this country,” Kirkland arranged for Liele to work in the comparatively congenial employ of Governor Archibald Campbell. After two years, Liele managed to pay off his indenture, and Campbell provided him with “a written certificate from under his own hand of my good behaviour.” Knowing the power of paper in British colonial society, Liele also made sure to procure “a certificate of my freedom from the vestry and the governor … both for myself and my family.” Fully seven years after his manumission in wartime Georgia, he could declare himself beholden to no man, and prove it legally to anyone who asked.69

  Truly free at last, Liele set himself up as a “farmer,” bought a team of horses and wagons, and worked as a carter with the help of his three growing boys. But the real measure of success, as far as George Liele was concerned, lay in another domain. Around September 1784, Liele began to preach once more. He preached on the Kingston racetrack and in the open air in Spanish Town, while black loyalist colleagues such as the New York barber Moses Baker carried the good word deeper into the interior. Just as the charismatic Liele had done a decade earlier in the moss-draped glades of the Carolina backcountry, he quickly drew followers around him in Jamaica. His “words took very good effect with the poorer sort, especially the slaves,” who had rarely if ever been exposed to such preaching—though many retained a culture of African spirituality. The ghastly conditions of slaves’ lives, steeped in violence and permeated by death, surely enhanced their receptiveness to Liele’s message. He baptized converts in the river at Spanish Town, in the salt waters of Kingston harbor, in the streams and creeks that braided through the countryside. In Kingston he started a nascent church in a small private house, with just “four brethren from America besides myself.” Soon he counted 350 supporters in his congregation, a few of them white, and his followers around the country numbered at least fifteen hundred, “some living on sugar estates, some on mountains, pens, and other settlements,” mostly enslaved, largely illiterate.70

  “There is no Baptist church in this country but ours,” Liele announced proudly in 1791, and he could now point to the rising walls of an actual chapel to prove it. The project was a testament to Liele’s capacities not just as a preacher but as an institution-builder. His tight community of faith in the American south had been scattered when many of its members followed evacuating British forces. Yet from an evangelizing point of view, dispersal was the best thing that could have happened to them. Through letters from around the Atlantic, Liele proudly kept track of David George’s activities in British North America; of the successes that another black loyalist, Brother Amos, enjoyed in the Bahamas; and of how Andrew Bryan, whom he had baptized himself, continued to win black converts in Savannah. His own church in Kingston provided a vital base in this expanding international black organization.

  To build the chapel proper, Liele knew that asking for contributions from the destitute slaves “would soon bring a scandal upon religion,” and his free black congregants hardly had money to spare. Though his parishioners devotedly pulled together their pennies and bits, Liele reached beyond the black community—as he had done before in America—to solicit contributions from Jamaican whites. “Several gentlemen, members of the house of assembly, and other gentlemen,” contributed a quarter of the funds that Liele used to purchase three acres in eastern Kingston and start building. His church walls were eight feet high when he reached out again, this time to Baptists in Britain. His congregation was growing fast and strong, he told them. All he need
ed was a little more money to put on a roof, and “this building,” he assured his sponsors, “will be the greatest undertaking ever was in this country for the bringing of souls from darkness into the light of the Gospel.”71 Completed in 1793, a good two decades before white Baptists established a permanent mission, Liele’s chapel was the first Baptist church in Jamaica.

  Liele pitched his appeals to British dissenters perfectly, since many were coming to see missionary activity as the best way to cleanse the British Empire of the stain of slavery. His activities did not go over so well, however, in a colony run by white supporters of slavery. As one of Liele’s white patrons explained, “the idea that too much prevails here amongst the masters of slaves is, that if their minds are considerably enlightened by religion or otherwise, that it would be attended with the most dangerous consequences.” All that talk of equality in the eyes of the Lord, all that talk of freedom in salvation—it sounded suspiciously like revolutionary language to slaveowners, who worried that missionaries might incite their slaves to revolt. And how much more they must have worried when those missionaries were black, and former slaves to boot. Liele understood the opposition he faced. He knew how David George had been hounded out of Shelburne, how Andrew Bryan in Savannah had been arrested and savagely whipped; he remembered how Jamaicans “at first persecuted us both at baptisms and meetings.”72 Ever the diplomat, Liele took pains to assure white audiences that he posed no challenge to slavery as such. He admitted no slaves “into the church without a few lines from their owners of their good behaviour toward them and religion.”73 Converting slaves, he stressed, was about enlightenment, not revolution. He was a loyalist, after all: he had no stated desire to overturn the order of empire itself.

  Such pledges could hardly have come at a more critical time. The same year Liele began constructing his church, Jamaica was rocked by news of a giant slave rebellion on Saint Domingue. Citing the right to equality promised by the French revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, slaves swept across the north of the French colony, burning canefields and killing two thousand whites in their wake. The rebellion became the opening act of the Haitian Revolution, which ultimately led to the establishment of the second republic in the Americas. (Some of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution had fought alongside the French and Americans in Savannah in 1779, perhaps gaining an early taste of republican principles there.) These events seared themselves into the consciousness of blacks and whites throughout Atlantic slaveowning societies. On Jamaica, a mere hundred miles away from Saint Domingue, the neighboring revolution had an especially pronounced effect. Blacks in Jamaica followed these events with keen interest, while white Jamaicans tried to suppress the news—which frightened them as much for being a slave revolt, tapping into a deep well of white Caribbean terror, as for being a republican one.74 Proximity to Saint Domingue made Jamaica an asylum again, this time to black runaways and white refugees fleeing Saint Domingue with their slaves.75 Following the outbreak of Anglo-French war in 1793, Jamaica also came to serve as the staging post for a series of British interventions on Saint Domingue. Through all the bloodshed, tangled alliances, and regime changes that followed in Saint Domingue, one lesson at least was clear to white Jamaicans. This was dangerous, it was close at hand, and nothing like it could be allowed to happen here.

  Liele made sure to stress his congregation’s loyal participation in island defense efforts. “The whole island under arms,” he observed in late 1791, “several of our members and a deacon were obliged to be on duty; and I being trumpeter to the troop of horse in Kingston, am frequently called upon.” But the rapidly changing circumstances of war seriously compromised his position for two reasons. First, simply being a free black in Jamaica became much harder under the tightened discipline of a government more than ever concerned to police runaways, itinerants, and deserters—figures often presumed to be vectors of revolution.76 “It is scarcely safe for a man of colour to appear in public,” a Kingston newspaper warned, as early as 1791.77 One particular segment of Jamaica’s free black population, the Maroons, became a special source of anxiety for British officials.

  In the western interior of Jamaica stretches Cockpit Country, an eerie landscape of scooped valleys and egg-shaped mountains. On the hilltops of this hidden world lived communities descended from runaway slaves, called the Maroons, who had successfully won quasi-independence from British rule in the 1730s. They were allowed to remain unmolested in five reserved towns, as long as they agreed not to harbor fugitive slaves but rather helped to catch them. The revolt on Saint Domingue made the imperial state especially concerned to manage interactions between the Maroons and other blacks. Much to the Maroons’ anger, authorities imposed fresh restrictions on them to try to keep them apart from slaves. In 1795 (a year in which British authorities also confronted slave uprisings on St. Vincent and Grenada), Maroon resentment exploded when the Maroons of Trelawny Town struck back at the British. Hiding out among the dips and rises of the cockpits, they waged a successful guerrilla war against a British force five times their size. Only when the British shifted to unconventional tactics, by importing a hundred snarling bloodhounds from Cuba, did they manage to hunt down their elusive enemy. In defeat, the Maroons were promised the right to remain on the island if they agreed to beg on their knees for forgiveness, and to move to wherever else on Jamaica the government decided to send them. But citing a breach of the treaty, the governor reneged on his word: he decided to send the troublesome Maroons away from Jamaica once and for all. In a bleak counterpoint to the expulsion of the Acadians, British authorities rounded up 568 Trelawny Maroons and shipped them off under military escort to the opposite end of British America: Nova Scotia.78 The defeat and deportation of the Maroons vividly demonstrated the lengths to which the imperial government would go in enforcing racial hierarchy, underlining the difficulties facing any free black on Jamaica during these years of war and revolution.

  And George Liele was suspicious not only because he was free and black. His activities as a preacher set a second mark against him. The close connection between abolitionists and evangelicalism had made certain forms of Christian teaching seem, in the eyes of many Jamaican planters, almost as subversive as republicanism. One Kingston mob even burned the radical Thomas Paine in effigy next to a figure of the evangelical abolitionist William Wilberforce.79 Persecution against Liele (as against other preachers) intensified in the revolutionary climate. Though Liele got permission from Spanish Town authorities “to make mention of their names in any congregation where we are interrupted,” this did not prevent a range of outrages. Once during a service, a man rode his horse straight into Liele’s chapel and up to the altar, issuing the mocking challenge, “Come, old Liele, give my horse the sacrament?” while the animal whinnied and snorted before the cross. Another time, three men strode over to the communion table, seized the sacramental bread, and distributed it while cursing and swearing. In 1794, a new sedition law put an end to Liele’s preaching altogether. After a sermon on some text at best peripherally suggestive of abolitionist sentiments, Liele was charged with “uttering dangerous and seditious words” from his pulpit. He was hauled off to prison, loaded down with heavy iron chains, and his feet locked in stocks.80 His colleague Moses Baker was arrested for quoting the words of a Baptist hymn: “We will be slaves no more, / Since Christ has made us free, / Has nailed our tyrants to the cross, / And bought our liberty.”81

  So after all that loyal volunteering to defend the British Empire both in America and in Jamaica, after all those certificates and testimonials to his freedom, here was George Liele back in jail again—a slave no more, but a prisoner nonetheless. (Perhaps he and Baker indulged in stargazing from the Kingston jail.) At his trial, despite concerted efforts to prove that he was trying to incite a slave rebellion, Liele was acquitted of the charge of sedition. But his opponents found another way to take him out of action: he was imprisoned for debts incurred while building the church, and confin
ed for more than three years.82

  In the space of just a decade, George Liele thus confronted as directly as any one individual could the twinned objectives of the post-revolutionary British Empire, toward moral righteousness and top-down rule—the two faces of paternalism.83 Liele had come to Jamaica as an embodiment of a particular humanitarian promise: by affiliating himself to the British during the war he had secured his freedom and been transported in (nominal) liberty with his family to another British territory, at British expense. His work as a Baptist preacher tied him into a larger community committed to a program of individual and collective moral uplift. Liele seemed a perfect illustration of the self-image, championed by abolitionists among others, of a British Empire that would give all its free subjects, regardless of ethnicity, British liberties, the rule of law, and the chance to partake in cultural enlightenment. And in his repeated assertions of loyalty during the heat of the Haitian Revolution, Liele appeared to be living proof (with how much sincerity it is hard to say) of how such policies could tighten diverse subjects’ bonds to king and empire, not strain them.

  But when the Caribbean blew up in a new revolution, Liele found himself staring into the authoritarian face of the British Empire. An empire of law and of liberty some might claim it to be, but this was still an empire that practiced mass enslavement, and Britain was the world’s preeminent slave-trading nation. As the activities of governors like Lord Dunmore or even Lord Dorchester had suggested, humanitarian sentiment and restrictive rule were by no means mutually exclusive. Loyalist refugees in New Brunswick and the Bahamas had felt the fist of authority close around issues of political representation in the 1780s. In Jamaica in the 1790s, with republicanism and slave revolt rattling the gates, the suppression of dissent became an imperial imperative. Through sedition laws, the deportation of the Maroons, and other repressive measures, the Jamaican government clamped down (as the Pitt ministry was doing in Britain) on the circulation of potentially subversive individuals, information, and rhetoric. Liele’s prosecution in 1794 was just part of a larger campaign against suspected dissidents. In 1802 the house of assembly passed a law banning “the preaching of ill-disposed, illiterate, or ignorant enthusiasts, to meetings of negroes and persons of colour, chiefly slaves”—another effort to limit the spread of evangelical language.84 Partly because of such legislation, Liele himself never returned to regular public preaching after the 1790s.