Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  While the laws tightened, however, the Lord’s work went on. As Liele languished in jail, the Baptist movement took on a life beyond him. Another black preacher broke away to form a rival chapel that quickly developed a strong following of its own.85 By the time white British Baptist missionaries began arriving on the island in the 1810s, they found a thriving black evangelical community that had folded African traditions into its ecstatic Christian worship. Hostilities between planters and preachers continued well into the nineteenth century, outlasting the institution of slavery.86 But in a climate of such violence and terror, the preachers had an inbuilt advantage. The language of salvation, brought from America, offered an effective antidote to the imperial realities of slavery and death.

  MORE THAN a decade after it was commissioned, and after an extravagant £30,000 had been spent, the Rodney Memorial basked in the Spanish Town sunshine, complete. It spanned the main square between the governor’s residence on one side and the house of assembly on the other. But for all that Rodney’s marble hand pointed straight at the windows of her house, the governor’s wife Maria Nugent did not mention the structure at all when she described her surroundings in her diary. Perhaps that was because by the time she and her husband, newly appointed governor George Nugent, arrived in Spanish Town in July 1801, the Battle of the Saintes already seemed remarkably remote. The French Revolutionary wars had been raging for the last eight years (the length of the American Revolution), unprecedented in the annals of British warfare for their international extent and scale. The Nugents’ four years of married life had been totally overshadowed by conflict. The couple had previously been stationed in Ireland, where as a general in the British army, George Nugent helped suppress the French-backed nationalist rebellion of 1798. Their time in Ireland left them “heartily sick, tired, and disgusted,” said Maria, “having witnessed … all the horrors of a civil war.” Conflict-ridden Jamaica was the last place they wanted to be posted next. But duty called, and, “like good soldiers, we made up our minds to obey.” Not for nothing did she don “a full Lieutenant-General’s uniform” for formal dinners at sea, complete with gold epaulettes adorning her scarlet coat.87

  During a residence of four years in Jamaica, Nugent kept a diary that splendidly captures what it was like to live in such a magically beautiful yet dangerous place, a place where dances and sumptuous dinners continued against a backdrop of massive military mobilization, and where the “only three subjects of conversation” were “debt, disease, and death.”88 Her diary remains one of the most detailed and accessible sources on white Jamaica for this period. Nugent’s preoccupations strongly resembled those of her rough contemporary Elizabeth Johnston, despite their considerable differences in social rank. (The two women overlapped on Jamaica for three and a half years, though it is not clear they ever met.)89 They shared the same anxieties about raising children in such a dangerous climate. They shared a feeling of isolation as white women on an island dominated by “the blackies” (Nugent’s preferred term) and by creole planters whose dissolute habits both women deplored. In this alienating context, “religion” became for Nugent, like Johnston, “my greatest source of happiness.”90 And they shared another important if less obvious trait: Nugent, like Johnston, was an American loyalist refugee.

  Maria Nugent, née Skinner, had been raised to soldier on. She may not have remembered the night back in New Jersey in 1776 as clearly as her sister Catherine did, when the rebels came looking for her loyalist father General Cortlandt Skinner. She had been only four years old to Catherine’s five then, and the Skinner family had experienced many upheavals since. They spent the last years of the American Revolution in British-occupied New York, and evacuated to London in 1783. There, like their friend Colonel Beverley Robinson and his family, the Skinners lived in straitened but genteel circumstances, on property salvaged from America and compensation from the Loyalist Claims Commission. Though a civilian before the war, General Skinner—also like Robinson—positioned his children in the military, a good vehicle for social advancement. His sons got commissions in the army and navy, and his four youngest daughters married military men in turn. Maria’s sister Catherine formalized a family tie to the Robinsons when she married the colonel’s youngest son, William Henry Robinson, in 1794. The new war brought several family members back to the New World. Catherine joined her husband on his postings as a military commissary in the West Indies, while Catherine and Maria’s youngest brother worked briefly as a customs collector in Jamaica, before dying there of fever.

  Maria Nugent’s diary has made her a touchstone for historians of Jamaica, but positioning her within the context of American loyalist refugees illuminates a pattern evident across the diaspora, and repeated by generations of British imperial servants. Migrations, once set in motion, can be hard to stop. The conditions that brought Nugent and her relatives to the Caribbean echoed and reflected the circumstances that had carried the family to Britain in her girlhood. Dispossessed and displaced by one war, the family now strove to recuperate its fortunes as servants in another, children making up for what parents had lost. Set against the example of Elizabeth Johnston, Nugent’s passage through Jamaica also helps make sense of the island’s position on the loyalist refugees’ map. The colony might serve as a relatively attractive, lucrative—and temporary—posting in a longer imperial career, which was how Nugent and her relatives approached it. But loyalist refugees like Johnston, who intended to settle on Jamaica long-term, needed to do more than rebuild lost fortunes. They sought to rebuild some semblance of a home. In this respect, Jamaica proved an unreliable substitute at best.

  Less than six months after Nugent sailed into Kingston for the first time, Elizabeth Johnston landed in Jamaica again, drawn back from Edinburgh by news that her husband was ill. Her years in Scotland had been dominated by concerns about her two eldest children, Andrew and Catherine, whom she had left as innocent pre-adolescents but returned to find wayward teenagers, eighteenth-century style. Handsome, popular Andrew, at fifteen years old, had been cajoled into studying medicine, but—like his gambler father before him—easily found other diversions (such as a talent for ice skating) and became a perennial source of worry to his parents. Fourteen-year-old Catherine had developed a “wild and giddy” streak—encouraged, according to her mother, by unfettered access to a lending library and a taste for unsuitable novels. “When she heard I was coming to Edinburgh, she imagined me like a heroine in a romance,” said Johnston. But reality proved less rosy, and the mother and daughter, separated at a formative moment, never forged a successful adult bond.91

  Returning to the family house at Halfwaytree in 1802, the Johnstons’ Jamaican travails began anew, as illness and further partings haunted the family.92 For once, the Johnstons were together in December 1805, when the prodigal Andrew—now, like his father, a doctor in Jamaica—traveled from his practice to join them. The visit signaled a reconciliation between the parents and their feckless son, who seemed at last to be shaping up into a responsible adult. But on his way to Halfwaytree Andrew developed a terrible headache and stopped over in Kingston to recover. Instead he grew rapidly sicker, and soon he began vomiting up black: the fatal sign of advanced yellow fever. Though he lay dying just a short distance away from his parents, Andrew “could not, bear to see our grief, and begged that we would not come.” He died within a week. “To describe my anguish is impossible,” said Johnston. He had been a disappointment in life, yet his death carved a wound that could never heal.93 To make matters worse, Andrew’s death pushed Catherine into a serious “nervous illness.” Treated with heavy doses of laudanum, she began hallucinating—in keeping with Jamaica’s strange dangers—“that there was an insurrection of the slaves, that they had set fire to the house, and that the bed she lay on was in flames.”94

  The place killed Johnston’s infant daughters and her firstborn son; it drove her eldest daughter to the edge of insanity. She herself understood her Jamaican ordeals as divine trials, and prayed her
way forward. (Did anything other than health considerations ever inform her and William’s frequent decisions to separate? Johnston’s one-sided account makes it impossible to know.) From a modern psychological standpoint, it is more tempting to see the family’s continuing struggles as an illustration of how trauma gets played out across generations. Johnston, a child when the American Revolution began, had been a loyalist essentially because her father was. Now the consequences of the Johnstons’ loyalism, in the form of repeated separations and migrations, cast long shadows over their childrens’ lives in turn. Andrew and Catherine had done nothing more in the American Revolution than be born, in British-occupied Savannah and Charleston respectively. Yet the effects of displacement—raised by people other than their parents, struggling to form connections with their nuclear family, shunted around the Atlantic—seemed to mark them at least as deeply, and tragically, as their parents.

  The Johnstons immigrated to Jamaica because of professional opportunities—the same factor that moved the Nugents and the Robinsons around the British Empire. Yet the years in Jamaica infused Elizabeth Johnston with an almost emotional compulsion to leave, fueling a cycle of separations that seemed to take on a life of its own. So it was that one spring day in 1806 saw William Johnston pacing the Kingston docks, looking for a ship to carry his family, once more, away from this ill-starred island. With the trade restrictions of the 1780s largely lifted, the harbor was full of vessels bound for New York.95 Northern, healthy, and easy to reach (to say nothing of personally familiar to him), New York City seemed a suitable enough destination to William. He began scoping out available cabins, when he ran into a friend. “Why Doctor,” his friend exclaimed on hearing the plan, “I wonder you who are a loyal subject do not prefer sending your family to a British province.” Evidently this invocation of loyalism touched some chord in William, for he promptly booked a passage for the family to Halifax instead. “Send us to Nova Scotia!” Elizabeth cried when he came home with the news. “What, to be frozen to death? Why, better send us to Nova Zembla [in Baffin Bay], or Greenland.”96 Maybe she remembered the dismal accounts of the place that had circulated through St. Augustine back in 1784. But what she didn’t count on was that by now Nova Scotia had become home to so many fellow loyalists that it would be her last and most congenial destination of all.

  When the Johnstons set off on their next journey, most loyalist refugees in Jamaica had either moved on or faded from the record. A clutch of the old morass-subscribers (including one Lachlan McGillivray, cousin to Creek chief Alexander) had struck out into the forests of Central America to shape settlements in present-day Belize.97 Others shifted elsewhere in British America, and presumably some to the United States; and many, of course, died. The loyalists’ failure to find a berth in Jamaica had to do in part with intrinsic obstacles such as the lack of available land, and in part with their marginal position within a larger creole society that remained guarded toward them at best. The loyalists’ tale also mirrored a crucial shift in Jamaica’s position more generally. After the dual disruptions of the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution, the planters’ profits and political clout would never be the same. The ascendancy of metropolitan over creole interests became manifest in 1807 when, after thirty years of passionate campaigning by Wilberforce and others, Britain abolished the slave trade. The West India lobby wasn’t only trumped by metropolitan morality. It was also increasingly overshadowed by rival imperial locales. Before the American Revolution, Jamaica had been the economic powerhouse of the British Empire. By the end of the French wars a generation later, that position had been ceded to India.

  George Liele, though, stayed put in Jamaica, despite the persecution he faced as a free black and a Baptist. If indeed he ever wished to leave, he may have found the cost of a passage to Britain or North America prohibitive. In Jamaica, the work of evangelizing was hard but it was ample and necessary; besides, his brethren had already established missions elsewhere in the western Atlantic. And maybe, reading between the lines of their optimistic reports about congregation-building, Liele knew that the furrow of a black loyalist would be just as hard to plow wherever else he might go. Liele’s namesake in Nova Scotia, David George, could have told him tales of hardship aplenty. Indeed, for David George and his followers—unlike for Liele—the pressure of living as free blacks in British North America had become intolerable by the 1790s. So when the promise of another land appeared before them, they were ready for a fresh exodus.

  William Dawes, Plan of the River Sierra Leone, 1803. (illustration credit 1.11)

  CHAPTER NINE

  Promised Land

  DAVID GEORGE returned to Shelburne in 1790 on a wooden sled, built for him and pulled across the slush by his “brethren,” since his legs were so badly frostbitten he could hardly feel them anymore. It had been six years now since George had been driven out of town in the great riot of 1784. After five months lying low in Birchtown, he had ventured back into Shelburne, cutting his way with a whipsaw across the ice-blocked river between the settlements. He discovered his residence destroyed and the Shelburne meeting house “occupied by a sort of tavern-keeper, who said, ‘The old Negro wanted to make a heaven of this place, but I’ll make a hell of it.’ ” But with dedication and divine goodwill, George managed to reclaim his church from its sinful tenant and preside over “a considerable revival of religion” in Shelburne.1

  As word of this inspiring black preacher spread, George decided to transmit the Lord’s word farther in turn. He traveled to Saint John, New Brunswick, where he baptized black loyalists before a fascinated throng of white and black onlookers. But some city residents, uncomfortable at the spectacle, insisted that he get a license to preach from Governor Thomas Carleton. George proceeded to Fredericton to do so. With help from a white loyalist he had known in Charleston, he secured a certificate granting “permission from his Excellency the Lieutenant-Governor to instruct the Black people in the knowledge, and exhort them to the practice of, the Christian religion.” The governor himself sent regrets for being too busy to come and watch George baptize in Fredericton. The next time George preached in Saint John, “our going down to the water seemed to be a pleasing sight to the whole town.” Some of his new converts “were so full of joy” at his return that “they ran out from waiting at table on their masters, with the knives and forks in their hands, to meet me at the water side.” Up and down New Brunswick, and on the coasts of Nova Scotia, George preached and baptized, planting the seeds of new congregations.2

  George’s message must have shone a rare flash of hope for his converts during difficult years of dearth and readjustment. His success at congregation-building among the refugees, who were still coping with the unsettling consequences of war, resembled George Liele’s experiences in Jamaica. So, though, did various attempts to restrict and harass him—a sign of the anxiety white loyalists felt even here, far from the West Indies, about vocal blacks and their potentially disruptive teachings. To be sure, the climate for blacks in British North America was substantially better than it was for the enslaved black masses in Jamaica. The majority of George’s parishioners were black loyalists, officially free, and they lived in a province where slaveowning was legal but nowhere near as widespread as in the West Indies. That said, the conditions of life for black loyalists in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick stood in bleak contrast to those of their white refugee neighbors. Their promised land delayed and their independence hemmed in, many blacks grew dissatisfied enough to contemplate a new move altogether, in which David George would play an important role.

  Among the thousands of loyalists grumbling about the drawn-out process of getting land grants in the Maritimes, the three thousand or so black loyalists had greatest cause for complaint. Although they had been told they would receive land on the same terms as white refugees, their grants were invariably smaller, worse located, and slower in coming. Blacks did not hesitate to use that favorite British device, the petition, to call attention to their situat
ion. Shortly after arriving in Nova Scotia, two former sergeants in the Black Pioneers addressed a petition to Governor Parr asking him to honor General Clinton’s promise that the blacks should earn “land & provitions the same as the rest of the Disbanded Soldiers.” One of those sergeants was named Thomas Peters, and this was the first in a remarkable series of measures he would undertake to better the situation of his peers. By the time Parr instructed the surveyors to improve the location of the Black Pioneers’ grants, another winter’s snows were piling up, making it impossible to lay out the twenty-acre farm lots Parr decreed they should have. The surveyors hastily drew up one-acre town lots for the blacks and left it at that. This was a relatively typical allotment; in the best cases, blacks received parcels of fifty acres in regions where whites drew between a hundred and four hundred each. Compared to their former conditions of slavery, black loyalists could see their position as a glass half full. Compared even to the struggling white refugees around them, though, they may have seen their glass half empty. Peters, for his part, abandoned his quest for a good grant in Nova Scotia and crossed the Bay of Fundy hoping to do better for himself in New Brunswick.3