Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Chapter Two: An Unsettling Peace

  1. Nathaniel William Wraxall, Historical Memoirs of My Own Time (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1904), p. 398.

  2. William Smith, Historical Memoirs of William Smith, 1778–1783, ed. W. H. W. Sabine (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1971), p. 461.

  3. Smith, pp. 461–63.

  4. Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (London: BBC Books, 2005), pp. 124–25. John Cruden to Lord Dunmore, January 5, 1782, NA: CO 5/175. (I am grateful to Jim David for a copy of this document.) In April 1782, William Smith heard Dunmore still talking about raising “several Corps of Blacks upon the Promise of Freedom.” Smith, p. 497.

  5. Robert M. Calhoon, “ ‘The Constitution Ought to Bend’: William Smith Jr.’s Alternative to the American Revolution,” in Robert M. Calhoon et al., The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 14–27.

  6. For an important reappraisal of these peace initiatives, see Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Lord North and Conciliation with America,” unpublished manuscript.

  7. King George III to Lord North, January 21, 1782, The Correspondence of King George the Third with Lord North from 1768 to 1783, ed. W. Bodham Donne, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1867), II, pp. 403–4.

  8. On these events see Ian R. Christie, The End of Lord North’s Ministry, 1780–82 (London: Macmillan, 1958); John Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782–84 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

  9. Debate of February 22, 1782, Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols. (London: R. Bagshaw, 1806–20), XXII, columns 1028–29.

  10. Debate of February 27, 1782, Parliamentary History, XXII, columns 1071, 1085.

  11. Debate of March 15, 1782, Parliamentary History, XXII, column 1199.

  12. Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third from the Year 1771 to 1783, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), II, p. 521.

  13. Walpole, p. 500.

  14. For Carleton’s early career, see Paul David Nelson, General Sir Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester: Soldier-Statesman of Early British Canada (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 17–27.

  15. Quoted in Nelson, pp. 45–46.

  16. Quoted in Nelson, p. 55.

  17. Philip Lawson, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1989). See also Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760–1791 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), chapter 9.

  18. Nelson, pp. 58–60.

  19. Neatby, chapter 10.

  20. Nelson, p. 136; Neatby, pp. 151–52.

  21. Quoted in Nelson, p. 102.

  22. Christie, pp. 291–94.

  23. Nelson, pp. 142–43.

  24. I have drawn biographical information on William and Benjamin Franklin from Sheila L. Skemp, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Sheila L. Skemp, Benjamin and William Franklin: Father and Son, Patriot and Loyalist (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).

  25. For minutes and other documents relating to the Board of Associated Loyalists see NA: CO 5/82, ff. 23–88, 178–203.

  26. Skemp, William Franklin, pp. 256–63; Smith, pp. 499–521 passim; Schama, pp. 141–44; Nelson, pp. 152–55.

  27. Smith, p. 545; Skemp, William Franklin, pp. 263–66.

  28. Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, August 30, 1779, BL: Add. Mss. 21774, f. 58.

  29. For these later campaigns, see Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972), pp. 192–258.

  30. “Return of Prisoners & Killed, by the Different Partys under the Direction of Captain Brant, In Augt. 1780—of Col. Johnsons Departmt,” BL: Add. Mss. 21769, f. 70.

  31. Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), pp. 268–74. Few whites who learned about the Indian reprisal, in turn, would easily forget it. Delawares seized an American colonel and painstakingly tortured him to death: gouging him with burning sticks, forcing him to walk over hot coals, firing “squibs of powder” at him until “he begged of … a white renegade who was standing by, to shoot him, when the fellow said, ‘Don’t you see I have no gun.’ ” Soon enough he would be scalped, his body tossed into the embers and coals shoveled over him till he was finally dead. Maj. William Croghan to Col. William Davies, Fort Pitt, July 6, 1782, LAC: William A. Smy Collection, MG31 G36.

  32. Edward J. Cashin, The King’s Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), pp. 143–44; Hugh McCall, The History of Georgia (Atlanta: A. B. Caldwell, 1909 [1784]), pp. 532–33; Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist (New York: M. F. Mansfield and Company, 1901), pp. 69–73.

  33. William Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution: So Far as It Related to the States of North and South Carolina and Georgia, 2 vols. (New York: David Longworth, 1802), II, p. 336.

  34. David Fanning, The Adventures of David Fanning in the American Revolutionary War, ed. A. W. Savary (Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 1983).

  35. Moultrie, II, p. 355. For a detailed description of these post-Yorktown engagements, see Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), pp.272–327.

  36. Cashin, pp. 150–53.

  37. Sir Guy Carleton to Alexander Leslie, July 15, 1782, quoted in Report on American Manuscripts in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 4 vols. (London: HMSO, 1904), III, p. 19.

  38. Carleton to Leslie, May 23, 1782, NYPL: Alexander Leslie Letterbook.

  39. Leslie to Alured Clarke, June 4, 1782, and Leslie to Sir James Wright, June 4, 1782, NYPL: Alexander Leslie Letterbook.

  40. Wright to Lord Shelburne, September 1782, quoted in Charles Colcock Jones, The History of Georgia, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1883), II, p. 526.

  41. Wright to Carleton, July 6, 1782, quoted in Report on American Manuscripts, III, p. 11.

  42. “To the Citizens of Charles-Town, South-Carolina,” August 9, 1782, LOC: “American Papers Respecting the Evacuation of Charlestown 1782,” George Chalmers Collection.

  43. Piecuch, pp. 292–98.

  44. For South Carolina’s act: Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: A. S. Johnston, 1838), IV, pp. 516–23. The names were published in the Royal Gazette (Charleston), March 20, 1782. For Georgia (text quoted here): Allen D. Candler, ed., The Revolutionary Records of the State of Georgia (Augusta, Ga.: Franklin-Turner Company, 1908), I, pp. 373–97; Robert S. Lambert, “The Confiscation of Loyalist Property in Georgia, 1782–1786,” William & Mary Quarterly 20, no. 1 (January 1963): 80–94.

  45. Jones, II, pp. 516–17.

  46. “Proceedings of the Merchants & Citizens of Charlestown upon a Report that the Garrison was shortly to be evacuated; with the Letters and other Papers which passed between them Genls. Leslie, Govr Mathews &c,” LOC: “American Papers Respecting the Evacuation of Charlestown 1782,” George Chalmers Collection.

  47. Moultrie, II, p. 279; Lambert, p. 230. For lists of refugees receiving handouts, see Murtie June Clark, Loyalists in the Southern Campaign of the Revolutionary War, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1981), I, pp. 512–29.

  48. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 120. Fanning, p. 60.

  49. Patrick Tonyn to Lord George Germain, May 1, 1782, NA: CO 5/560, p. 421.

  50. “Address of the Upper and Commons Houses of Assembly to Lieut. Gen. Alexander Leslie,” June 16, 1782, quoted in Report on American Manuscripts, II, p. 527; Tonyn to Carleton, June 20 and 21, 1782 (R
eport on American Manuscripts, II, p. 529, p. 531). See also address from General Assembly to Tonyn, June 19, 1782, NA: CO 5/560, p. 752.

  51. Leslie to Carleton, June 28, 1782, NYPL: Alexander Leslie Letterbook.

  52. Henry Nase Diary, July 11, 1782, NBM, p. 13.

  53. “An Account of Several Baptist Churches, consisting chiefly of Negro Slaves: particularly of one at Kingston, in Jamaica; and another at Savannah, in Georgia,” reprinted in Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), pp. 326–27.

  54. I have drawn sailing dates from the diary of Henry Nase, July 20–27, 1782, NBM, pp. 13–14.

  55. Michael John Prokopow, “ ‘To the Torrid Zones’: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of American Loyalists in the Anglo-Caribbean Basin, 1774–1801,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1996), pp. 17–20. Leslie had asked Carleton for enough shipping to carry fifty whites and nineteen hundred blacks to Jamaica. Leslie to Carleton, July 6, 1782, NYPL: Alexander Leslie Letterbook.

  56. “Nathaniel Hall,” q.v., “A List of Loyalists in Jamaica,” NLJ: MS 1841, p. 14. Claim of Sir James Wright in Report of Bureau of Archives, II, p. 1306.

  57. “A Return of Refugees, with their Negroes, who came to the Province of East Florida in consequence of the evacuation of the Province of Georgia,” n.d., NA: CO 5/560, pp. 806–8.

  58. John Graham to Carleton, July 20, 1782, quoted in Report on American Manuscripts, III, p. 30. A contemporary newspaper report claimed that Brown, his twelve hundred men, and three hundred Indians traveled with three thousand blacks. New England Chronicle, September 19, 1782, p. 3.

  59. Elizabeth Johnston to William Johnston, May 25, 1781, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362.

  60. William Johnston to John Lichtenstein, May 20, 1781, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362.

  61. Elizabeth Johnston to William Johnston, September 3 and September 2, 1781, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362.

  62. Leslie to Sir Henry Clinton, March 27, 1782, quoted in Report on American Manuscripts, II, p. 434. See also Leslie to Clinton, April 17, 1782, quoted in Report on American Manuscripts, II, p. 457.

  63. Leslie to Carleton, September 8, 1782, NYPL: Alexander Leslie Letterbook.

  64. Autobiography of Stephen Jarvis, NYHS, p. 78.

  65. Henry Nase Diary, November 20, 1782, NBM, p. 15.

  66. Clark, ed., I, pp. 545–50.

  67. Lambert, p. 254. “Return of the Loyal Inhabitants within the British Lines at Charles Town South Carolina who have given in their names as intending to leave that Province.…,” August 29, 1782, Report on American Manuscripts, III, p. 97. Schama, p. 134.

  68. Leslie to Carleton, June 27, 1782, quoted in Report on American Manuscripts, II, p. 544; Leslie to Carleton, August 16, 1782, NYPL: Leslie Letterbook.

  69. Carleton to Leslie, July 15, 1782, quoted in Report on American Manuscripts, III, p. 20.

  70. Leslie to Carleton, August 10, 1782, NYPL: Alexander Leslie Letterbook.

  71. Samuel Rogers to Joseph Taylor, May 1, 1782, LOC: Lovering-Taylor Family Papers. Cruden’s father, William, was minister of the Scottish Presbyterian Church in Crown Court, Covent Garden. “William Cruden,” q.v., DNB; Alexander Chesney, The Journal of Alexander Chesney, ed. E. Alfred Jones (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1921), p. 91.

  72. John Cruden, Report on the Management of the Estates Sequestered in South Carolina, by Order of Lord Cornwallis, in 1780–82,” ed. Paul Leicester Ford (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Historical Printing Club, 1890), pp. 13–14. Jeffrey J. Crow, “What Price Loyalism? The Case of John Cruden, Commissioner of Sequestered Estates,” North Carolina Historical Review 58, no. 3 (July 1981): 215–33.

  73. John Cruden to Robert Morris, August 15, 1782, LOC: Lovering-Taylor Family Papers.

  74. “Articles of a Treaty, Respecting Slaves within the British Lines, British Debts, Property secured by Family Settlements, &c.,” LOC: “American Papers Respecting the Evacuation of Charlestown 1782,” George Chalmers Collection.

  75. Leslie to Carleton, October 18 and November 18, 1782, NYPL: Alexander Leslie Letterbook. Leslie to Carleton, “Secret,” October 18, 1782, quoted in Report on American Manuscripts, III, pp. 175–76. Moultrie, II, pp. 343–52.

  76. “Commission for the examination of Negroes,” n.d., NYPL: Alexander Leslie Letterbook.

  77. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), p. 60. Moultrie and others insisted that twenty-five thousand blacks had been taken away from Charleston, many of them illegally.

  78. Pybus, p. 59; “An Account of the Life of Mr. David George …,” in Carretta, ed., p. 336. Carretta’s note that George left for Nova Scotia with Major General James Patterson cannot be supported: Patterson was in Halifax throughout this period, and could not have been the “Major P.” George names as a patron in Charleston. Both Pybus and Carretta state that George left on November 19, but the only recorded Halifax convoy appears to have sailed in October—with almost exactly the number of loyalists George estimated.

  79. Report of numbers of loyalists leaving Charleston for Halifax, October 20, 1782, in Report on American Manuscripts, III, p. 179.

  80. Henry Nase Diary, November 27 and 30, 1782, p. 15, NBM.

  81. William Johnston is named in the “Commission for the examination of Negroes,” n.d., NYPL: Alexander Leslie Letterbook. Johnston, p. 74.

  82. Major P. Traille to Brigadier General Martin, January 29, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 29, no. 6835. Carleton ordered that the bells be returned, as unlawfully confiscated American property.

  83. A return of evacuated civilians is reprinted in Joseph W. Barnwell, “The Evacuation of Charleston by the British,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 11, no. 1 (January 1910): 26. For the order of evacuation, see Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries, vol. 8 (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1882), pp. 826–30.

  84. Cruden to Morris, August 15, 1782, LOC: Lovering-Taylor Family Papers.

  85. Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). Oswald’s career is explored in detail by David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–85 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  86. John Jay, “The Peace Negotiations of 1782–1783,” in Justin Winsor, ed., Narrative and Critical History of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), p. 137.

  87. See Shelburne to Henry Strachey, October 20, 1782, LOC: Papers of Henry Strachey, ff. 93–94.

  88. Adams, quoted in Isaacson, p. 414.

  89. Benjamin Franklin to Richard Oswald, November 6 and 26, 1782, in Benjamin Franklin et al., Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: McCarty & Davis, 1834), I, pp. 460–64.

  90. “The Last Will and Testament of Benjamin Franklin,” http://sln.fi.edu/franklin/family/lastwill.html, accessed December 27, 2009.

  91. Isaacson, p. 415.

  92. Henry Laurens, “Journal of Voyage, Capture, and Confinement,” NYPL. Laurens’s treatment was not improved by the friendly overtures made by his fellow inmate Lord George Gordon—an anti-Catholic demagogue who had incited the greatest riots in London history—who invited Laurens to take a walk with him around the Tower. The prison governor “swore like a Trooper” on the news and forbade Laurens from walking anywhere beyond his cell door. Laurens got into further trouble when Gordon sent him a piece of cake.

  93. Morris, pp. 381–82.

  Chapter Three: A New World Disorder

  1. Thomas Townshend to Sir Guy Carleton, February 16, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 30, no. 6917.

  2. William Smith, Historical Memoirs of William Smith, 1778–1783, ed. W. H. W. Sabine (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1971), p. 574.

  3. Townshend to Carleton, February 16,
1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 30, no. 6917.

  4. Carleton to Lord Sydney, March 15, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 30, no. 7139.

  5. John Parr to Sydney, Halifax, June 6, 1783, NA: CO 217/56, f. 89.

  6. “Return of Ordinance proposed for Roseway,” March 2, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 30, no. 7049.

  7. “List of items sent out to Nova Scotia,” NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7631.

  8. Carleton to Parr, April 26, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7557.

  9. “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher,” reproduced in Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), pp. 352–56.

  10. Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 44375.

  11. For a published edition of the Book of Negroes, see Graham Russell Hodges, ed., The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution (New York: Garland Publications, 1995). The April fleet carried 660 black men, women, and children to Nova Scotia. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), p. 66.

  12. Smith, pp. 585–87.

  13. George Washington to Carleton, May 6, 1783, and Carleton to George Washington, May 12, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, nos. 7637 and 7666.

  14. Christopher Leslie Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (April 1999): 276–81. Carleton had personally recruited Morgann from the Earl of Shelburne’s office, recognizing Morgann’s remarkable talents. The Welsh polymath had also ventured into Shakespeare criticism, penning an influential treatise on the character of Sir John Falstaff.

  15. Quoted in Catherine S. Crary, ed., The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings from the Revolutionary Era (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), pp. 391–92.

  16. Carleton to Townshend, May 27, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7783.