Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Largely landless and propertyless, black loyalists had to find other ways to support themselves in British North America. The blacks who rushed from their masters’ tables to be baptized by David George were among the many refugees who were employed as domestic servants. In Shelburne, the surveyor Benjamin Marston hired a number of blacks to construct the barracks and other public buildings. Others deployed their skills as coopers, smiths, and sawyers; they swept chimneys, cut hair, and made sails, ropes, and shoes. Boston King, one of the early Birchtown settlers, just about managed to eke out a living as a carpenter, crafting wooden chests and salmon-fishing boats on commission before securing steadier work as a house-builder, for £2 and a couple of barrels of preserved fish per month. King’s life was far from easy, but he felt good about his relative fortune “upon vieweing the wretched circumstances of many of my black brethren at that time, who were obliged to sell themselves to the merchants, some for two or three years; and others for five or six years.”4 For the sad truth of the free blacks’ plight was that many of these former slaves—who had rarely if ever before been paid for their work, or knew the luxury of commanding their own time—promptly ended up back in temporary bondage to white masters.

  Although there are crucial differences between indentured servitude and slavery—not least, indentures have a time limit—indentured black loyalists in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick worked alongside black slaves in a culture that easily conflated the two categories. It did not help that the polite language of British officialdom labeled the estimated twelve hundred slaves brought into the Maritimes by white loyalists as “servants.” (This term was also intended to ward off controversies with the United States over stolen slave property.)5 Abuses against free black laborers racked up fast. Employers routinely did not pay them as promised; in a few cases blacks were tricked into signing away their labor for much longer periods than they thought. Whites took black children into their households, “and when the Parents ask for the child they are told—‘have not I maintained your Child for this last year or years you must pay me a Dollar pr. Month for its bound or I shall keep him till he can pay me himself.’ ”6 Blacks also endured a perennial threat of reenslavement. In the worst violations of liberty, some black loyalists were simply seized and sold back into slavery in the United States or the Caribbean.7

  “The place is beyond description wretched,” said an aghast white visitor to Birchtown in 1788, “their huts miserable against the inclemency of a Nova Scotia winter.… I think I never saw such wretchedness and poverty so strongly perceptible in the garb and countenance of the human species as in these miserable outcasts.”8 And by now, five or six years into their postwar freedom, the black loyalists themselves must have felt beaten down by the sheer battle to get by. Even the energetic David George had almost been destroyed by the inhospitality of Nova Scotia. While he was returning from another preaching circuit around the province, his boat was blown off course in the same region where Benjamin Marston had been shipwrecked some years before. Adrift in the bitter sea, he felt the cold bite into his uncovered legs until they grew white, then purple, sharply painful, then numb. He wondered if he would ever have the use of them again. As he hobbled off the wooden sled and back into his Shelburne church in 1790, supported by his parishioners, he could only hope that things might somehow get better by spring.

  For all that British promises to the black loyalists had been made in good faith, by 1790 it was clear that the reality of their situation fell grievously short of their hopes—the starkest version yet of a cruel contrast that loyalist refugees had been encountering across the British Empire. Some found spiritual relief in David George’s emotional preaching, others in the words of blind “Daddy Moses” Wilkinson and itinerant Methodist exhorters including Boston King. But could black refugees in British North America win earthly consolations as well? Thomas Peters, the former sergeant, would try to find out.

  Peters, about fifty years old in 1790, was a Yoruba from present-day Nigeria, who had been brought to America as a slave in 1762. He had attempted to run away several times in his early years of enslavement, so when the British appeared off Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1776 with promises of freedom to patriot-owned slaves, he and his family were quick to respond to them. He served throughout the war in the Black Pioneers. After the war, he emerged as the most persistent spokesman of black loyalist complaint in British North America. Despite barely being able to sign his own name, Peters regularly delivered petitions in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick asking for black loyalists’ rights to be respected. By 1790, he too was growing desperate as colonial officials ignored his appeals. He began to consider going over their heads and lodging his complaints directly with higher authorities in Britain (as Joseph Brant, among others, had done to advantage). Then somebody passed on to him a snatch of overheard conversation.

  It drifted up from a Nova Scotia dinner table, perhaps belonging to one of those slick, prosperous loyalists who had managed to snap up the best lots of land and build a fancy house fast, one of the white refugees who could afford to hire black refugees to wait on him. Around the edges of this particular table hovered a black attendant, quietly serving and clearing, when somebody mentioned a familiar name: that of the abolitionist Granville Sharp. His ears perked up. Sharp was known across the Afro-British world thanks to his role in the 1772 legal case that had effectively ended slavery in England. What the waiter heard next enticed him even more. Sharp, the dinner guests said, was sponsoring a scheme to settle free blacks in Africa, on the coast of Sierra Leone. The blacks were to have land and liberty under a free government, and prove to the world that an African colony without slaves could be as valuable a commercial partner for Britain as the African slave-trading posts that Sharp so abhorred. Some black settlers had already set off for Sierra Leone, funded by the British government.9

  Strange as it might have sounded, it was of course true. Granville Sharp was now in charge of the scheme launched in London by the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor to establish a free black settlement in Sierra Leone. Hearing about the project now, in North America, only enhanced Peters’s determination to deliver his next petition personally to top British administrators. A hundred black families in New Brunswick and another hundred people in Nova Scotia deputed him (he said) to travel to London and “represent their unhappy situation … in the hope that he should be able to procure for himself & his fellow sufferers, some establishment, where they may attain a competent settlement.” Some of them wanted their land grants honored in North America; the rest were “ready and willing to go wherever the wisdom of Government may think proper to provide for them as free subjects of the British Empire.”10 They might not have received their promised land in Nova Scotia, but this promised land of freedom in Africa sounded like too good a chance to miss. In the autumn of 1790, Thomas Peters sailed from Nova Scotia to London with his petitions, to find out whether black loyalists in British North America might join the Sierra Leone settlement.11

  Peters’s activities would culminate in the final and farthest-ranging major branch of the loyalist exodus: a second collective migration by black loyalists in British North America to West Africa. From start to finish, the Sierra Leone project replayed scenarios that had been acted out across previous loyalist settlements—showing that even this apparently extraordinary enterprise in colonization had important antecedents and parallels. Nevertheless, there were key contextual differences which made what unfolded in Sierra Leone an especially vivid case study in the possibilities available to—and the limits placed on—loyalist refugees in the British Empire. Not only did the Sierra Leone colonists seek to assert free black sovereignty in the shadow of a major British slave-trading station; they also represented an advance guard of British colonization in a region dominated by indigenous powers. Most significantly, the black loyalists set off for Africa not in the 1780s, in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution, but in the 1790s, in the era of the French Revolution. Their
settlement took shape against the backdrop of a fiercely ideological war between Britain and France. The wars pitted Britain’s “spirit of 1783” against the more radical, egalitarian—and, in British eyes, destabilizing—promises of republican France. This had important repercussions for the black loyalists in Sierra Leone. It meant that when they feuded with their governors over issues of rights and taxation—just as refugees in British North America and the Bahamas had done before them—their protest held explosive potential. It turned the Sierra Leone loyalists into the most potentially revolutionary challengers to imperial authority of all.

  OF COURSE, Thomas Peters had no way of anticipating any of that in 1790. Nor did he yet know, when he traveled to London that fall, what had happened to the black refugees who had already gone to Sierra Leone: the three hundred or so destitute blacks in Britain who signed up in 1786 to travel to Africa under the aegis of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor.

  This hapless band of emigrants got an unpleasant foretaste of trouble before they even left England. Though the expedition had been organized impressively quickly, its departure was held up for four months by one delay after another: administrative delays, embarkation delays, bad weather, and bad luck. Cooped up inside the cramped ships, the emigrants endured conditions little better than those of a prison hulk. They subsisted on awful rations of salted food, and lacked warm clothes to cover themselves with as winter fell. About fifty people died of fever before they got under way. A public feud broke out between the expedition’s commissary, the enterprising former slave Olaudah Equiano—the first black to receive any such appointment from the king—and another agent whom Equiano accused of skimming off Treasury funds. Ominous columns against the project appeared in London newspapers, alleging that the blacks were being transported against their will—whether to a penal colony, or back into slavery, nobody quite could say, but “they had better swim to shore, if they can, to preserve their lives and liberties in Britain, than to hazard themselves at sea with such enemies to their welfare.”12 It did not make Granville Sharp’s charitable mission any easier when the first fleet of prisoners bound for Botany Bay simultaneously began preparing to sail. In some minds, there was little difference between the convicts on board one fleet and the charity cases on board the other.13

  So when at last, after the four months of waiting and two months at sea, they made out the tall, dark silhouette of the West African coast in the spring of 1787, it was a particularly gratifying spectacle. They turned into the mouth of a giant bay, shaped like a flexed arm, and cruised into one of the largest natural harbors in the world. On their left, white beaches skirted the low-lying forests of the Bulom Shore. On their right, where they intended to establish their “Province of Freedom,” high mountains rippled into thick folds. When Portuguese explorers had first seen these peaks in the fifteenth century, they thought the humpbacked crests resembled the shape of a reclining lion. They named it Serra Lyoa (Lion Mountains), and continued on their course, charting out the future routes of the Atlantic slave trade. The free black settlers who approached Sierra Leone in 1787 became the first people of African origin systematically to reverse that human traffic, in the first “back to Africa” project in modern history.

  The colonists disembarked at a cove called Frenchman’s Bay—promptly renamed the more patriotic St. George’s Bay—cut a track into the bush, and planted a British flag. The next day a local Temne subchief, known to the Europeans as King Tom, came down to have a “palaver” (a term for meeting used in Africa) and soon agreed to a treaty granting the new settlers a huge tract of land. Quite aside from the fact that the treaty revolved around woefully mismatched European and African understandings about land ownership, Tom was only a subordinate ruler, and lacked authority to make this agreement in the first place. A year later, the settlers finalized the grant of the land with King Tom’s superior, King Naimbana. In this 1788 treaty, Naimbana agreed to cede land to “the free community of Settlers … lately arrived from England,” promised to protect them “against the Insurrections and Attacks of all Nations or people whatever,” and made over to them a portion of the valuable customs duties paid by ships anchoring in the harbor. In return, he received several suits of embroidered clothes, a telescope and a “mock Diamond ring,” two hefty wheels of cheese, and the usual tributes of tobacco, guns, and rum.14

  By the time Naimbana fixed his mark to this paper, though, more than a quarter of the settlers were dead. The much-delayed fleet had arrived squarely in time for the annual rains that batter crops, slick the mountainsides into sheets of clay, and produce stagnant pools breeding bacteria and bugs. The unlucky arrivals camped under torrential rains in a tent settlement they called Granville Town. Sharp had provided them with a Short Sketch of Temporary Regulations (“short” being nearly two hundred pages long) detailing how the colony should be managed, right down to the prayers to be said on each day and the specific wording of indenture certificates. Based around an idealized form of Anglo-Saxon communal government he called “frankpledge,” Sharp envisioned a state divided into “tithings” made up of ten families each, and “hundreds,” composed of ten tithings; elected representatives from these blocks (called tithingmen and hundredors) would meet in a common council, not unlike a New England town meeting, to organize labor and defense. A black loyalist from Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, was duly elected the first leader of this “land of freedom, like England, where no man can be a slave.”15

  But it wasn’t so easy to create a “Province of Freedom” when, just a few miles up the Sierra Leone River, sat one of the largest British slaving stations in West Africa, on Bunce Island. As many as fifty thousand slaves passed through Bunce Island’s holding pens before sailing across the Atlantic in chains—many of them, in the 1780s, bound for Jamaica. (Richard Oswald, the British negotiator behind the Peace of Paris, was one of the Bunce factory’s principal proprietors, and his American counterpart Henry Laurens acted for many years as Charleston agent for Bunce Island slaves.) The slave traders lived in a grand multistory stone house and amused themselves with rum, mistresses, and playing rounds on the island’s two-hole golf course.16 It was a rather stylish existence until you looked out the factory windows and saw hundreds of captives in the yard below, chained in circles, feeding themselves from troughs of rice.17 As the free blacks of Granville Town got hungrier, sicker, and wetter, it was not so surprising that many of them ran off to join the European slavers and enjoy such luxuries as regular meals. The slavers, in turn, were busily influencing King Tom’s successor, King Jimmy—who profited from the slave trade—to turn against the abolitionist-sponsored settlement. In late 1789, provoked by a conflict with the crew of a British ship, King Jimmy ordered the remaining residents of Granville Town to evacuate and burned their huts to ashes.

  From Province of Freedom to proverbial fiasco: “God grant I never may again, witness so much misery as I was forced to be spectator of here,” lamented an English visitor named Anna Maria Falconbridge on seeing the Granville Town survivors a short time later.18 Granville Sharp despaired when he heard about the colony’s destruction. But he was not one to brood for long. He had already started to form a joint-stock company that would take over the Granville Town land and manage the settlement henceforth as an explicit experiment in moral mercantilism. By giving land to free black colonists and conducting an “honorable trade” in their produce, Sharp’s company would demonstrate that free African labor was a profitable enterprise, undercutting the social and economic basis for the slave trade. What was more, they would spread “civilization” on the back of commerce, using their model society (and evangelical faith) to introduce “light and knowledge in a Continent which has been kept in misery by the slave trade.”19 Though the strong pro–slave trade lobby in Britain prevented it from winning a royal charter, the Sierra Leone Company was officially incorporated in July 1791. Its directors included all the abolitionist luminaries of the time—among them Sharp, William Wilberforce,
and the indefatigable publicist of the antislavery movement Thomas Clarkson—while scores of merchant investors underlined its profit motive. The company dispatched Alexander Falconbridge (Anna Maria’s husband), a former slave-ship surgeon turned abolitionist, to renegotiate the land deals and revive the settlement. All they needed now were new colonists to populate it.

  Enter Thomas Peters, who arrived in England toward the end of 1790. London was by far the biggest city he had ever seen, a chaos of faces and noises, bustle and jostle. Yet even this cosmopolis was not so big that a new black man in town talking about rights would not soon become known to Granville Sharp. Peters quickly tracked down both his old company commander and General Sir Henry Clinton, who referred him in turn to Wilberforce and Sharp. On Boxing Day 1790, Peters submitted two petitions to the secretary of state William Grenville, with an endorsement from Clinton urging Lord Grenville to “suffer the poor Black to tell his own melancholy Tale.”20 One petition denounced government failures to provide decent land grants. The other, framed with Sharp’s help, delivered a broad denunciation of Nova Scotia’s “public and avowed Toleration of Slavery … as if the happy Influence of his Majesty’s free Government was incapable of being extended so far as America to ‘maintain Justice and Right’ in affording the Protection of the Laws & Constitution of England.” Black loyalists had been “refused the common Rights and Privileges of the other Inhabitants,” Peters protested, invoking the language of British rights so often used by dissatisfied loyalists. They had “no more Protection by the Laws of the Colony … than the mere Cattel or brute Beasts,” he concluded, and “the oppressive cruelty and Brutality of their Bondage is … particularly shocking irritating and obnocious to … free People of Colour who cannot conceive that it is really the Intention of the British Government … to tolerate Slavery in Nova Scotia.”21