Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  DuBois helped the settlers draft yet another petition of protest. “Mr. Dawes seems to wish to rule us just as bad as if we were all Slaves,” it read, laying out familiar complaints about land and other abuses.83 Doubtless hoping to repeat Thomas Peters’s past political success, the black loyalists elected two representatives to carry the petition personally to Sierra Leone Company directors in London. They reached England in August 1793 and met with the chairman of the board. Though at first they found him “very kind” and “compassionate,” he strictly told them their “complaints were frivolous and ill grounded.”84 The newlywed Isaac and Anna Maria DuBois arrived in England a short time later, and once again DuBois helped them make their case. But the directors rejected the settlers’ demands, blocked them from meeting with Clarkson, and packed them off back to Sierra Leone as quickly as possible. For his pains, DuBois was dismissed too.85 When Anna Maria wrote up an account of her journeys to Sierra Leone, she was so put off by the company’s treatment of both her husbands that she actually came out against the abolition of the slave trade, the company’s founding principle.

  The black emissaries returned to Sierra Leone to find Freetown once again in ferment. This time tensions had been whipped up by a confrontation between black settlers and the white captain of a slave ship, a consequence of the uneasy proximity of Freetown to Bunce Island. Governor Macaulay managed to suppress a public riot by putting a cannon at his gate and offering free passage back to Halifax (on a former slave ship) for anybody who wanted to go.86 Nobody did—though a cluster of disappointed Methodists decided to move off company land altogether and start afresh, where “we may be no longer in bondage to this tyranious Crew.”87 The episode helped confirm Macaulay’s opinion that the Methodists were more troublesome than David George and his Baptists. For George by now stood out as one of Freetown’s most contented denizens, his loyalism strengthened by his experiences in Africa and Britain. All those white plots he had complained of in Nova Scotia seemed as distant as Birchtown itself. Authority had done well by him now: he had been kindly received during his visit to England, and enjoyed the support of British Baptists as he continued to grow his church. He also prospered in more earthly pursuits, holding a license to operate a tavern out of his house.88

  George did not protest, for instance, during the next major upset between settlers and government. It concerned quitrent, which Macaulay insisted that settlers pay on their freshly allocated grants. As early as 1783, Sir Guy Carleton had advised that no rents or fees be assessed on land grants for loyalists: he knew well that Americans viewed such charges as a form of taxation, and that “quit-rents will, in all cases, sooner or later become a source of popular disquiet.”89 Macaulay’s measure turned out to be every bit as provocative among black loyalists in Sierra Leone as Carleton had predicted. Many of them clearly remembered John Clarkson’s vow, made from Daddy Moses’s pulpit back in Birchtown, that there would be no fees on land in Sierra Leone. Here was yet another violation of British promises. Boston King wrote to Clarkson telling him that many families were “thinking of going when the R[a]in is over & it appire [appears] that their chief reason is because the Company require quit rent for their Lands.”90 A 1796 election of hundredors and tithingmen saw substantial gains made by candidates opposed to Macaulay.91

  As vocally as they resented this form of taxation, the Freetown settlers also continued to seek greater representation. When the hated Macaulay at last departed in 1799 (taking a number of Africans with him for a bracing dose of British civilization), black loyalists seized the chance to claim more autonomy. Resuming an old grievance, they demanded the right to appoint their own judges—a request that the company government, not surprisingly, rejected. But coming on the heels of years of dissatisfaction, this controversy pushed some Freetown residents to the brink. Unwilling to stand for continued infringements and restraints, some of the hundredors and tithingmen launched what amounted to a loyalist coup. In September 1800, they issued their own legal code, effectively setting themselves up as an independent government.92 They elected their own governor in the person of Isaac Anderson, one of the emissaries who had gone to London in 1793. And they gathered up their guns. The black loyalist rebels took up a position on a bridge just outside Freetown, with the tacit support of King Tom, the Temne subchief, ready to fight for their alternate government.

  For one steamy week, black settlers around Freetown had to choose once more between staying loyal or joining a rebellion. It was the largest armed challenge to imperial authority posed by any refugee loyalist community—and offered a rare insight into what purchase loyalty retained among these British subjects. David George balked at the spectacle before him. Even he had been moved to the brink of rebellion a few years earlier by a contentious marriage law, designed to clamp down on “loose” sexual morality among the blacks; but he had backed away at the prospect of violence.93 Fear of violence, if nothing else, prevented George from joining this rebellion too. The episode confirmed his loyalty to authority, in much the way revolution had done for his old friend George Liele in Jamaica. About half the settlers around him, however, took an opposite position. They had struggled for freedom on both sides of the Atlantic, and were unwilling to see their attempts at self-assertion end in the same old repression that had quashed them so many times before.

  But if the black loyalists were not prepared to submit, neither was the white government. Intervening before King Tom could become openly involved, the governor launched a forceful strike against the rebels. In a battle at the bridge, British troops swiftly routed the rebels, killing two and capturing thirty more. The rest were mostly hunted down from the bush. Isaac Anderson, the would-be first black ruler of a self-governed Freetown, met justice at the end of a rope. Among the two dozen rebel leaders banished from the colony for involvement in the uprising was Harry Washington, who had run away from George Washington’s Mount Vernon some twenty years before. Also banished was the self-named former slave British Freedom.94 The African-American revolution in Freetown was over—and the quest for expanded liberty, however American or British, cut short.

  THE 1800 rebellion was the culmination of a series of conflicts around subjects’ rights that had erupted in Freetown since its founding. It highlighted how Freetown itself, established a decade after the surrender at Yorktown, entrenched patterns made manifest across the loyalist diaspora. Like the troublesome East Florida refugees in the Bahamas, Freetown’s black loyalist settlers had experienced a double displacement, and internalized a mistrust of British authorities in North America that proved extremely difficult to overcome. Their attempts to achieve greater political representation (and reduced taxes) resembled analogous efforts by white loyalists in British North America and the Bahamas. They used the same tools to demand their rights—petitions, delegations, elections—deployed by their white peers. Faced with intransigence from their white rulers, some of these frustrated settlers even made the ultimate break with imperial authority that American patriots had done before them, and instigated armed rebellion.

  But this wasn’t 1776, or even the mid-1780s; it was 1800. William Wilberforce, who had been one of the guiding spirits behind the colony, snidely commented that the black loyalists in Sierra Leone were “as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.”95 (He might as well have said Port-au-Prince, since what the rebels sought resembled what the Haitian revolutionaries were fighting for: a government by and for free blacks.) Likening American loyalists to French revolutionaries, Wilberforce revealed the anti-democratic attitudes that accompanied his paternalistic antislavery crusade. His jibe also called attention to the French Revolution’s role in sharpening the edges of the “spirit of 1783.” The wars enhanced the exercise of top-down authority in the British world, hemmed in individual liberties, and provided a pretext for territorial expansion. Around the empire, as loyalist refugees from William Wylly to George Liele discovered, the French wars tested British subjects’ loyalty afresh.

/>   So it was not surprising that the Freetown colonists, founding their settlement in the turbulent 1790s, ran up against the “spirit of 1783” with unusual force, for better and worse. This was especially evident in their encounters with imperial authority. Not only were the lines between rulers and ruled etched in white and black; as war continued, metropolitan government tightened its grip. In 1799, the Sierra Leone Company petitioned Parliament for a royal charter to solidify its rule. Parliament had rejected the company’s request for a charter in the 1780s, largely under the influence of the proslavery lobby. By 1799, though, the influence of that lobby had declined, while the prospect of French republicanism destabilizing regimes in and beyond Europe made Parliament look more kindly on any request to enhance centralized authority. In 1800, the Sierra Leone Company received a charter granting it direct rule over Freetown. States routinely underwrite the power of arms with the power of law. As if on cue, the charter arrived in Freetown just weeks after the September rebellion. It eliminated hundredors and tithingmen outright, marking the end of even the illusion of representative government for the black loyalists. Following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the Sierra Leone Company itself was dissolved and Freetown turned into a crown colony, administered directly by Whitehall.

  The imposition of crown rule pointed in turn to a second aspect of the “spirit of 1783” carried to new lengths (literally) by the black loyalists: expansionist initiatives. Their transatlantic exodus extended British rule into a hitherto largely uncolonized part of the African continent. As a colony of settlement, Freetown came into being in contrast with the utilitarian British slaving stations on the West African coast, and acted as a bridgehead for further imperial incursion. (Freetown also served as a model for the neighboring colony of Liberia, founded by American abolitionists in the 1820s.) The black loyalists’ migration established a template for subsequent black arrivals. In 1800, a second group of free blacks joined the loyalists in Freetown: Jamaican Maroons. The Maroons had already followed in the footsteps of the black loyalists once, as exiles in Nova Scotia, where they settled in one of the villages largely vacated by the black loyalists in 1791. But Nova Scotia was a far, cold cry from Cockpit Country, and the unhappy Maroons petitioned every official they could, asking to move to a warmer climate. The Sierra Leone Company welcomed their request, seeing the Maroons as a good group with which to augment—and dilute—Freetown’s population of obstreperous loyalists. The Maroons arrived in Freetown, with exquisite coincidence, just as the rebellion of 1800 was in full swing. On government orders, they disembarked in time to help suppress the rebels—part of a classic imperial strategy of divide and rule. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, a third group of blacks came to Freetown in the form of “recaptives” liberated by the Royal Navy from intercepted slave ships. Within twenty years of the black loyalists’ arrival, they had become a minority in a city of their own making, and would be known as the “Nova Scotians” to distinguish them within an increasingly diverse population.96 The label obscures their connection to the United States and a history of revolution, which may be one reason it stuck.

  It can be easy—especially in light of the region’s more recent history—to relate the story of Freetown as a chronicle of broken promises and thwarted hopes. Yet in spite of the limits placed on their autonomy, in spite of the diminution of their influence, “Freetown” actually meant something to its free black founders. These black migrants demonstrated more clearly than any other loyalist refugees the continued purchase of the third element in the “spirit of 1783”: a commitment to liberty and humanitarian initiatives. Freetown marked the last stage of these refugees’ transcontinental journey out of bondage. In the thirteen colonies, most of them had been chattel slaves. In Nova Scotia they were nominally free, but constrained in various ways: many had become indentured to whites, never received adequate land grants, and been excluded from civic participation. In Sierra Leone, they remained free and did one step better again: they got their land, as well as various civil rights such as the ability to choose representatives and sit on juries.

  And for all the difficulties in founding this place, the colonists could point to one unmistakable achievement: Freetown actually survived and grew. For contrast they had only to look at the wreckage of Granville Town, or at another colony essayed at exactly the same time by a breakaway faction of the Sierra Leone Company, on the nearby coast of Guinea. That project, misbegotten from the outset, ended in disaster within a year, with all its colonists either dead or evacuated. One of the first victims was the colony’s surveyor—none other than Benjamin Marston, the man who had laid out Birchtown nearly a decade before. He died on the West African coast, a world away from North America, yet just three hundred miles from many of the Birchtown blacks he had once helped to settle.97 It was a poignant if accidental reminder of the fragility and the interconnectedness of refugee lives.

  If Marston had had the chance to see Freetown, he might have recognized there a range of loyalist opinion similar to that he had once observed in Shelburne. British promises of liberty did not reach as far as Thomas Peters or the 1800 rebels wanted. But while conditions in Freetown pushed some to revolt, they strengthened the loyalty of others.98 David George, for one, had been as outspoken as anyone about the abuse of his rights back in Birchtown. In Sierra Leone, however, he rarely protested. With freedom and property secured, systematic persecution at an end, and a promising arena for preaching before him, George had little reason to wish his government otherwise. Boston King appeared to share his positive outlook. King, like George, had also had the chance to visit England, and spent two memorable years there sponsored by British Methodists. In the meeting houses of London and Bristol, King “found a more cordial love to the White People than I had ever experienced before,” for “in the former part of my life I had suffered greatly from the cruelty and injustice of the Whites.” He decided that “many of the White People, instead of being enemies and oppressors of us poor Blacks, are our friends, and deliverers from slavery.”99 To be sure, this was exactly what King’s white audience wanted to hear, and he must have known it. Still, living in a free black society gave King a security and confidence he had never enjoyed before. Never again would he be flogged and tortured as he had been in South Carolina, or regularly haunted by nightmares of his master coming back to snatch him, as he had been in New York. Never again would he be “pinched with hunger and cold” in snowbound Birchtown.100 Political aspirations imported from North America may not have taken root in Africa, but that did not make the colony a failure, or even necessarily a disappointment to its inhabitants. Indeed, the evangelical Christianity imported by loyalists including George and King proved to be quite compatible with the Sierra Leone Company’s civilizing mission.

  At least one other loyalist who came to Freetown must have heard resonance in the city’s hopeful name. One spring evening in 1798, Governor Zachary Macaulay had stepped onto his piazza to discover “a very singular & interesting personage” standing in the twilight. “He was meanly clothed, but his air & manner had somewhat very commanding and prepossessing in them.… [H]is eye was strongly expressive of firmness and intrepidity, and of a Spirit capable of daring enterprize.” Macaulay “was at some loss even to conjecture from what part of the World he could have come,” when the stranger introduced himself: “ ‘My name Sir,’ ” he said, “ ‘is William Augustus Bowles, I am a Chief of the nation of Creek Indians.’ ” Freetown meant something to Bowles because it marked his own release from captivity. Bowles had last flashed across British imperial authorities’ consciousness in 1792, when he was taken prisoner by the Spanish and shipped to the Philippines. In 1798, his Spanish captors decided to transfer him to their French allies and put him on a ship bound for Europe. As the vessel cruised up the West African coast, Bowles watched and waited for any chance to escape. When a rival craft drew up alongside his own, he saw the near miracle he needed. Collecting his wits and a small bundle of clothes, he s
lipped away onto the adjacent boat—and when that ship in turn sailed to Freetown, Bowles stepped back into the British Empire, a free man.101

  Bowles enjoyed Macaulay’s hospitality and sketched a pleasing picture of Freetown, with tidy white houses nestled comfortably against the mountains.102 The city brought the “spirit of 1783” to life, a pioneering colony in a new imperial domain. And as he looked out toward the Atlantic from the edge of another continent, Bowles felt his own expansive dreams revive. He and the black residents of the town around him had been among sixty thousand loyalists dispersed by the American Revolution. Together, they had challenged, benefited from, and helped shape a renewed British Empire. Now that another revolutionary war was redefining regimes around the world, what role would any of them continue to play in the British Empire going forward?