Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Traveling on the same boat as George, Clarkson had heard his shipmates’ cheers and volleys on the sight of land. But it was “not in my power to describe my sensations at this moment, for I knew not what the next hours”—or weeks, months, years—“might produce.”47 Fortunately, the Temne did not attack them when they landed, as Clarkson had feared. Instead he discovered a different unwelcome piece of news: orders from the Sierra Leone Company appointing him superintendent of the new colony. The position was the last thing he wanted. “I had positively declared before I left England, that nothing should induce me to continue in Africa,” he moaned to the deaf pages of his diary, “or to undertake anything more than collecting the people in America and afterwards seeing them properly conducted to Sierra Leone.”48 He had been sick and stressed for months, and he longed to sail home to England to recover and rejoin his patiently waiting fiancée. “But what can I do?” When he considered the real “affection & regard” he felt for the loyalists, “and my ardent zeal for the civilization of the surrounding nations, and Africa … I have made up my mind to take the consequences … and to remain with the poor Nova Scotians till the Colony is established or lost.”49

  What unfolded on the African peninsula pitted great ambitions against ample difficulties. The work of making Freetown reprised the central features of loyalist settlement in British North America and the Bahamas. The colonists contended with an alien environment, with preexisting residents, and with one another. Their troubles revolved in part around the consistently contentious matter of land allocation, a source of strife in every loyalist settlement. But most of all, the newcomers wrangled with the government appointed to manage them. For Clarkson quickly learned, as so many governors had before him, that loyalist refugees were not unreflectingly “loyal” to dictates from above. These settlers, like their white peers in Nassau and Saint John, had ideas about rights and representation at odds with their rulers’ more authoritarian style.

  Through a near-constant tremble of fever, Clarkson labored to apportion land, organize working parties, and placate various constituencies. Freetown’s first lots took shape: David George and Thomas Peters received nine acres each, Daddy Moses seven; most of the other men gained six acres apiece, while women and children received two to four.50 As in other sites of exodus, shortages of food and supplies compounded the challenges of adapting to a strange physical environment. Here there were especially exotic dangers. One day a baboon seized a twelve-year-old girl from her tent. Leopards prowled out from the bush. Giant snakes slithered among the huts.51 Even before the rainy season, disease worked its deadly way through Freetown. “It is quite customary of a morning to ask, ‘how many died last night?’ ” noted Anna Maria Falconbridge.52 They had been on shore just three weeks when Violet King fell ill, “helpless as an infant,” and went out of her mind with delirium. Her husband and friends sat around her in prayer, when she “suddenly rose up” and said “I am well: I only wait for the coming of the Lord.” As their voices chorused up in the confident cadence of an old Wesleyan hymn she quivered and cried out with them, and “expired in a rapture of love”—embraced by the faith that had seized her soul at Daddy Moses’s meeting house in Birchtown.53

  Every evening as the noise of crickets and bullfrogs made “the town and woods ring,” Clarkson mustered his dwindling energies to record the trials of his day.54 “There are so many Circumstances which happen in the Course of the Day to plague and vex me that I am almost tired of my life,” he confessed.55 First he had to manage relations between the settlers and the Temne. Soon after landing he held a palaver with Naimbana to smooth the way for Freetown’s expansion, making the earnest promise that “I would never have come to Africa to take their land without paying for it.”56 He also tried to accommodate the remaining survivors from Granville Town, who felt marginalized and resentful of the new administration. Then there were the other Europeans. It was bad enough that the slave traders held court just a short distance away, to Clarkson’s continued horror. The Sierra Leone Company had dispatched a small governing council from London, a motley bunch of men divided by infighting, in some cases suspiciously racist, and in two instances hopeless alcoholics.57 In June 1792, Clarkson eagerly welcomed some new white arrivals, notably the loyalist Isaac DuBois. Hailing from Wilmington, North Carolina—the same town as Thomas Peters—DuBois, like the black loyalists, traveled to Sierra Leone as a multiple migrant, having initially settled in the Bahamas. He had abandoned his cotton-planting efforts there and now hoped for better luck in Freetown, a rare white settler in this free black colony. Clarkson appointed DuBois manager of the storehouse and town militia, and came to rely heavily on his competence.58

  Of all the challenges facing the new settlement, though, the greatest came from the settlers themselves. Wilberforce had warned Clarkson to beware of Thomas Peters, recognizing that the impulses that had led Peters to London made it unlikely he would remain a passive subject in Freetown. Sure enough, within a fortnight of landing, Peters came to Clarkson “and made many complaints; he was extremely violent and indiscreet in his conversation and seemed as if he were desirous of alarming and disheartening the people.”59 Peters started attending Methodist meetings, and “invariably after the Meeting is over addresses the People and complains that the promises made to him in London have not been complied with.”60 The delays in getting their land allocated made the black loyalists all the more receptive to Peters’s rhetoric, for, “ill treated through life,” they “began to think they should be served the same as in Nova Scotia.”61 “You know Governor, the state you found us in in Nova Scotia & New Brunswick,” they reminded Clarkson. “King George was good to us, God bless him and gave us many Articles to comfort us and gave us promises of land … but yet after being there for many years we never received them.”62

  Clarkson soon found that the settlers, “having imbibed strange notions from Thomas Peters as to their civil rights,” became fractious and reluctant to work.63 “The trouble the Blacks give me in coming for orders, in bringing complaints &c. daily increases,” Clarkson said. “I am often so harrassed that in my weak state I am ready to faint.… I have scarcely put a stop to one evil when others arise.”64 On Easter Sunday 1792, Clarkson learned of a plot by Peters to take over the government. He immediately called a meeting “under a Great Tree”—perhaps a spreading cotton tree, like the one that defines central Freetown today. With the settlers assembled before him on the red ground—as six months earlier they had gathered in the Birchtown pews—he turned to Peters and “said, it was probably either one or other of us would be hanged upon that Tree, before the Palaver was settled.” In sharp terms, Clarkson persuaded the settlers that “the Demon of Discord” would bring “misery and guilt,” and “blast … every prospect of bettering the condition of the Black population throughout the world.”65 A few days later the settlers agreed to a declaration “purporting that whilst they reside in this Colony, they will live obedient to its Laws which will be made conformable to those of England as far as local circumstances will permit.”66

  And then suddenly, in June, Thomas Peters died: a quick victim of the pernicious fevers of the place. His death removed the most strident political presence among the loyalists, and Clarkson’s single greatest source of trouble. But the legacy of this community leader did not so rapidly vanish. A month later, reports circulated of Peters’s ghost strolling the streets of Freetown.67 His political vision lingered, too, of a colony in which blacks would hold the reins of their own government rather than remain the misled subordinates of a white imperial administration.

  Clarkson continued to exert all his diplomatic skills in managing concerns about rights and about land. He had unwittingly paved the way for the most serious conflict between settlers and the Sierra Leone Company by promising, in Birchtown, that the black loyalists would not be charged quitrents on their land grants. It later turned out that the company had quite different ideas. Meanwhile, Clarkson agreed to a request that blacks be allowed t
o serve on juries alongside whites. He responded positively to a complaint from David George and other leading citizens about the decision to site public buildings on the waterfront, remembering how in Nova Scotia “they were all excluded from ye Water by the white gentlemen occupying all the Water Lots.”68 The biggest problem stemmed from delays in clearing and granting the promised twenty-acre farm lots. The settlers never ceased to tell Clarkson how they had never received their grants in North America. But Clarkson knew that even if they put all their muscle-power to work (which they did not), a thousand machetes could not possibly cut back enough jungle by summer’s end. Instead, Clarkson hammered out a compromise by which the settlers took smaller lots as a temporary measure, until more ground could be cleared.

  Shattered by illness and strain, Clarkson received permission to sail to England on leave at the end of 1792. As he looked over his time in Africa, he could take pride in the fact that Freetown had survived its first year: a vital achievement, especially in the wake of Granville Town’s failure. The colony would remain. But he was also leaving unresolved problems in the hands of a cadre of white officers who proved unsympathetic, inept, or both. Clarkson’s immediate successor, William Dawes, was an austere evangelical who had just completed a stint as an officer in the penal colony of Botany Bay. It wasn’t the most promising qualification for governing a group of people trying to escape the memory of enslavement and injustice. Equally unpropitious was the background of Dawes’s replacement, Zachary Macaulay, who had spent five formative years working on a Jamaican sugar plantation. Though still in his twenties, the fiercely religious Macaulay struck even his supporters as “inflexible” and “illiberal,” sometimes “chilling.”69 The rest of the colony’s councilors descended into strife and dissipation. Alexander Falconbridge, the only one of them with long experience in the region, steadily drowned himself in alcohol. After a drinking binge one day in December 1792, he died. “I will not be so guilty as to tell a falsehood on this occasion, by saying I regret his death, no! I really do not,” wrote his widow Anna Maria, soured by years of his abuse.70

  Through all the disputes that divided them, the black loyalists—Peters excepted—had looked on Clarkson as an honest broker, and more: their Moses. His departure attracted outpourings of sorrow and goodwill. Naimbana sent an ox and an Arabic prayer for a safe passage. Black settlers came by the dozens to present their beloved superintendent with humble offerings for his journey: yams, eggs, onions. Phillis George brought a handsome donation of three chickens and four eggs, while her husband David was the leading signatory of another petition.71 Addressed to the Sierra Leone Company directors, the text described (in the broken writing its authors had learned as adults) how Clarkson “ever did behave to us as a gentilmon in everey rescpt [respect]…. Our ardent desier is that the Same John Clarkeson Shold returen Back to bee our goverener.” Until that time, “we pray that his Excelency John Clarkson might Be preserved safe over the sea to his frinds and return to us again.”72

  David George also made preparations to leave. From their first meeting when Clarkson stepped off the boat in Shelburne and through their voyage together to Sierra Leone, the two men had become good friends. Clarkson often came to hear George preach, and sometimes joined his prayer meetings; George named his youngest child after Clarkson. Maybe they had been discussing homecomings on board the Lucretia one day, en route to Africa, when it struck George to ask his friend “if I might not hereafter go to England?” George “wished to see the Baptist brethren who live in his country.” Clarkson agreed to take him if the chance ever arose. Now George packed his trunks too, “preached a farewel sermon to the church” and appointed deputies to carry on in his absence.73 A few days after the black loyalists’ first Christmas in Africa, Clarkson and George cruised out of Freetown together, on another journey charted, as they would have been inclined to see it, by God and the British Empire.

  ON A SEPTEMBER morning in 1794, seven ships entered Freetown harbor with British flags flying. They were a welcome sight in the settlement, where supplies were short and ships (if not part of the inevitable slave traffic heading upriver) might bring much-needed provisions. “Multitudes” gathered on the waterfront to watch the unexpected fleet draw near, while from his balcony the new governor Zachary Macaulay made out the details of the boats through his telescope. They were rigged and built in the British style, he saw, they bristled with guns, and the sailors on one frigate were training a cannon—straight up at him! He darted inside as shots zinged past. Within moments the ships had run down what turned out to be decoy British flags and put up their real colors instead: the French Revolutionary tricolor. They fired off a broadside straight into Freetown. David George, who had been to Britain and back unscathed, was in the crowd of people screaming, pushing, scrambling away from the hail of shells. Though Macaulay ordered a white cloth hung over his balcony as a flag of truce, the bombardment continued for an hour and a half. Storehouses, offices, dwellings, and the Anglican church all exploded into ripping flames and eye-watering smoke. Then came the plundering. French sailors grabbed rum, money, food, anything valuable they could carry. They smashed the printing press and the apothecary’s shop, trampled Bibles into the dirt, seized and slaughtered hogs and chickens by the hundreds. The sans culottes even snatched clothes off residents’ backs—leaving George shirtless and his family “almost naked.” At the end of the day a young child was dead; two settlers had their legs blown off. By the time the French forces left two weeks later, Freetown—barely two years old—lay in ruins.74

  For all the similarities between the founding of Freetown and other loyalist settlements, the French attack on Freetown underscored a central difference. This was the 1790s, not the 1780s: the French Revolution had plunged Britain into a bitter global war, and reframed debates over liberty and authority. For black loyalists, the French attack was an awful addition to the challenges they faced in developing this colony. For their white rulers, the episode confirmed how important it was to maintain discipline, order, and loyalty among imperial subjects at a time when another revolution threatened to unseat British power altogether. The early years of Freetown showed how the coming of the French Revolution hardened the lessons British rulers had drawn from the American Revolution. It also polarized imperial subjects afresh around loyalty to the existing order versus resistance in the name of greater liberty.

  Governor Macaulay had asked the French commander to spare Freetown from plunder on the grounds that it was a neutral colony, and that the black settlers were “not Englishmen.” Black loyalists begged the French to restore some of their possessions, “telling them we was Americans from North America” and thus (they claimed) French allies. All’s fair in war. But once the French left, such assertions appeared more suspicious than not. Macaulay not only demanded that the blacks assume some of the cost of the destroyed Sierra Leone Company property; he imposed a new loyalty oath before he would grant them medical assistance or employment. “We was British subjects eighteen & twenty years before we came here,” the indignant settlers retorted, and since “after our arrival hear we all took the Oath of Allegiance to our King and Country, we therefore refused to comply.”75 As loyal British subjects, they should get British rights with no questions asked. To them, Macaulay’s maneuvers worryingly resembled those familiar white efforts to deny them land and rights in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Daddy Moses and his congregants summed up their distress in a plaintive letter to John Clarkson: “In Your Being here we wance did call it Free Town but since your Absence We have a Reason to call it A Town of Slavery.”76

  If only Clarkson were still with them! During his year as governor he had been able to use his close relationship with the loyalists, one founded in genuine mutual respect, to defuse tensions about land allocation and rights. For years to come, Freetown’s black residents sent him emotional letters describing their disappointments and begging for his return. “Times is not as it was when you left us,” they said sadly.77 “We Believe tha
t it was the handy work of Almighty God—that you should be our leader as Mosis and Joshua was bringing the Children of Esaral [Israel] to the promise land,” wrote another correspondent—“but Oh that God would Once more Give you A Desire to come & visit us here.”78 What they did not know was that Clarkson himself had fallen out of favor with the Sierra Leone Company directors, who objected to what they saw as his preference for settlers’ interests over company profits. Not long after his return to Britain, the directors dismissed him as governor. “Thunderstruck” by the move, Clarkson nevertheless kept his grievances to himself lest he enhance public disapproval of the entire Sierra Leone Company project. He wrote back to his black friends in Freetown and told them that his recent marriage prevented him from returning.79

  Clarkson had sworn that the settlers’ coveted farmlands would be distributed within a few weeks of his departure. Unfortunately his successors did not comply. He had been gone less than two months when the black loyalists rose up again to protest the delays. “Mr. Clarkson promised in Nova Scotia that no distinction should be made here between us and white men”; they reminded Clarkson’s replacement, Governor Dawes, “we now claim this promise, we are free British subjects, and expect to be treated as such.”80 In Clarkson’s absence, Isaac DuBois became their strongest white ally. A fellow American refugee, he must have presented a sympathetic contrast with the stern British evangelical officers. Though DuBois had fared little better as a cotton planter in Sierra Leone than in the Bahamas, his managerial competence quickly earned him respect and stature in the colony. He also discovered surprising personal fulfillment. In early 1793, DuBois declared himself “happyly joined in the bonds of wedlock”—to the freshly widowed Anna Maria Falconbridge. They married less than three weeks after her first husband’s death. She “made no apology for my hastiness … for deviating from the usual custom of twelve months widowhood.”81 He, for his part, didn’t mind that the minister failed to keep the news discreetly to himself (as he had been instructed to do), but “carried it piping hot to the ears of every one he met.” “I am happy,” DuBois said, experiencing an improbable flash of fortune compared with the ample disappointment he had known as a loyalist refugee.82