Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
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17. Deposition of Oliver De Lancey, May 20, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7727. See also depositions of John Fowler (no. 7728) and Robert Hunt (no. 7738).
18. Newspaper report, May 23, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7796.
19. “TO All Adherents to the British Government and Followers of the British Army Commonly called TORIES Who are present Within the City and County of New-York,” August 15, 1783, Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 44464.
20. “Extract of a Letter from Port Roseway, dated May 25,” Royal Gazette (New York), June 7, 1783.
21. “Extract of a Letter from Port Roseway … dated the 29th June 1783,” Royal Gazette (New York), July 19, 1783.
22. “Extract of a letter from a gentleman in St. John’s, Bay of Fundy.…,” Royal Gazette (New York), August 9, 1783.
23. “To those LOYAL REFUGEES who either have already left, or who hereafter may leave their respective Countries, in search of other Habitations,” Royal Gazette (New York), April 20, 1783.
24. Royal Gazette (New York), June 28, 1783, p. 3.
25. “Extract of a late Letter from New-York,” Providence Gazette, September 6, 1783.
26. “Account of sundry Stores sold at public auction, by order of the Commissary General, and pr. Particular account in his Office,” July 24, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 35, no. 8515.
27. See advertisement in Royal Gazette (New York), August 16, 1783.
28. “List of Sundry distressed Loyalists who have take[n] Refuge within the British Lines at New York to whom the following allowances are recommended for their support from 4th January to 31 March 1783 inclusive,” NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 31, no. 7258. In the second quarter of 1783, the commissioners paid £7,400 to 454 refugees: “List of Persons recommended by the Board appointed by His Excellency the Commander in Chief to consider the circumstances and claims of distressed Loyalists, for their support from 1st April to 30th June 1783 inclusive,” NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 34, no. 8252. Over the second half of 1782, British officers had paid £12,000 sterling in relief for New York refugees. See précis in NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 29, no. 6843.
29. Diary of Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson, n.d., RMC, pp. 10–11.
30. Beverley Robinson to Sir Henry Clinton, quoted in Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 157.
31. Cortlandt Skinner to Lord Sydney, March 7, 1783, NA: FO 4/1, f. 18; Skinner to Lord North, October 5, 1783, BL: North Papers, Add. Mss. 61864, f. 34.
32. Beverley Robinson to Carleton, June 6, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 33, no. 7911.
33. For these figures see the appendix; cf. Philip Ranlet, The New York Loyalists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), pp. 193–94.
34. Diary of Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson, n.d., RMC, p. 13.
35. Smith, pp. 615–16.
36. Elizabeth Johnston to William Johnston, January 3, 1783, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362.
37. Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist (New York: M. F. Mansfield and Company, 1901), pp. 74–75.
38. A total of 2,917 whites and 4,448 blacks arrived on the convoys from Georgia and South Carolina: “A Return of Refugees and their Slaves arrived in the Province of East Florida from the Provinces of Georgia and South Carolina taken upon Oath to the 23rd December 1782,” NA: CO 5/560, p. 507. “A Return of Refugees & their Slaves arrived in this Province from Charlestown, at the time of the Evacuation thereof & not included in the last return, the 31st Decembr 1783 [sic],” April 20, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 31, no. 7468. The estimate of twelve thousand was widely offered by contemporaries: see, for instance, Lord Hawke’s “Observations on East Florida,” in John Walton Caughey, ed., East Florida, 1783–85: A File of Documents Assembled, and Many of Them Translated by Joseph Byrne Lockey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), pp. 120–21.
39. Patrick Tonyn to Lord Shelburne, November 14, 1782, NA: CO 5/560, pp. 469–70.
40. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of British North America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 440. Charles Loch Mowat, East Florida as a British Province, 1763–1784 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1943), pp. 60–61.
41. Carole Watterson Troxler, “Refuge, Resistance, and Reward: The Southern Loyalists’ Claim on East Florida,” Journal of Southern History 55, no. 4 (November 1989): 586–87. William Johnston’s brothers Andrew and Lewis Johnston Jr. had as early as November 1776 signed a petition to Tonyn requesting tracts of land to settle on: Wilbur Henry Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785: The Most Important Documents Pertaining Thereto, Edited with an Accompanying Narrative, 2 vols. (Deland: Florida State Historical Society, 1929), I, p. 48.
42. Bailyn, pp. 451–61; Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London: HarperPress, 2007), pp. 124–32.
43. Edward J. Cashin, The King’s Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), p. 159.
44. Troxler, pp. 587–90.
45. “A Memoir of the Life of William Charles Wells, Written by Himself,” in William Charles Wells, Two Essays: One on Single Vision with Two Eyes; the Other on Dew (London: Constable, 1818), pp. xx–xxii. The East Florida Gazette was published under John Wells’s name, but William Charles Wells’s memoir clarifies his own involvement. Three issues survive: see Facsimiles of the extant issues of the first Florida newspaper.…, intr. Douglas C. McMurtrie (Evanston, Ill.: privately printed, 1942).
46. John Cruden to C. Nisbet, March 25, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 30, no. 7213.
47. James Clitherall to John Cruden, May 25, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7766.
48. Clitherall to Cruden, May 31, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7834; Cruden to J. K. Rutledge, David Ramsay, Ralph Izard, and John Lewis Gervais, May 31, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7832; and Cruden to Major MacKenzie, June 5, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 33, no. 7891. Cruden also placed an advertisement in the East Florida Gazette of May 3, 1783, “ordering all persons holding negroes that were sequestrated, in Carolina to give in a list of their names and also the names of their owners.”
49. See Cruden to Lord North, August 22, 1783, NA: FO 4/1, ff. 63–66.
50. This was the spirit in which Cruden approached patriot Robert Morris, who had essentially bankrolled the American war effort, with a scheme to corner the Atlantic tobacco market. “I could lay before you a Variety of matters that would give you sattisfaction, & that might prove highly beneficial to you as an individual & to your family for Ever,” he hinted mysteriously. John Cruden to Robert Morris, August 15, 1782, LOC: Lovering-Taylor Family Papers. Morris responded favorably to Cruden’s scheme: Morris to Cruden, August 5 and 13, 1782, in John Catanzariti and E. James Ferguson, eds., The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781–84, vol. 6 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), pp. 137, 157.
51. Elizabeth Johnston to William Johnston, April 20, 1783, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362. Johnston misremembered the year as 1784 in her memoir (Johnston, p. 75).
52. John Cruden, “An Address to the Monarchical and Thinking Part of the British Empire,” BL: North Papers, Add. Mss. 61864, f. 141.
53. J. Mullryne Tattnall to John Street, May 30–August 28, 1783, NA: CO 5/560, ff. 483–86. This formula echoes, however unconsciously, George III’s valedictory words to Lord North.
54. David Fanning, The Adventures of David Fanning in the American Revolutionary War, ed. A. W. Savary (Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 1983), p. 64.
55. “Substance of Talks delivered at a conference by the Indians to His Excellency Governor Tonyn, Colonel McArthur, and the Superintendent,” May 15, 1783, NA: CO 5/560, pp. 617–19.
56. On the McGillivray family, see, among others, Edward J. Cashin,
Lachlan McGillivray, Indian Trader: The Shaping of the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992); John Walton Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938); and Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 67–89.
57. Alexander McGillivray to Thomas Brown, August 30, 1783, NA: CO 5/82, f. 405.
58. Brown to Carleton, April 26, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7556.
59. Brown to Carleton, May 15, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 32, no. 7688. Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 248.
60. Quoted in Calloway, pp. 26.
61. Cashin, The King’s Ranger, pp. 163–67; William S. Coker and Thomas D. Watson, Indian Traders of the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands: Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company, 1783–1847 (Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1986), pp. 49–55.
62. Tonyn to Sydney, December 6, 1784, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, pp. 324–25.
63. Quoted in Thomas Nixon to Evan Nepean, October 22, 1783, NA: CO 5/560, p. 848.
64. Tonyn to North, September 11, 1783, NA: CO 5/560, p. 685.
65. Tonyn to Sydney, May 15, 1783, NA: CO 5/560, pp. 585–86.
66. Lewis Johnston to unknown recipient, July 14, 1783, NA: CO 5/560, pp. 927–33. On Johnston in St. Kitts, see Alexander A. Lawrence, James Johnston: Georgia’s First Printer (Savannah: Pigeonhole Press, 1956), p. 3.
67. Elizabeth Johnston to William Johnston, October 11, 1783, November 10, 1783, January 2, 1784, January 15, 1784, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362.
68. Elizabeth Johnston to William Johnston, February 12, 1784, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362.
69. Elizabeth Johnston to William Johnston, April 6, 1784, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362.
70. Elizabeth Johnston to William Johnston, November 10, 1783, and February 3, 1784, PANS: Almon Family Papers, reel 10362.
71. “Return of Persons who Emigrated from East Florida to different parts of the British Dominions,” William Brown, May 2, 1786, NA: CO 5/561, f. 407.
72. Tattnall to Street, May 30–August 28, 1783, NA: CO 5/560, ff. 483–86.
73. Cruden was referring here to the legend of Madoc, the Welsh prince believed to have discovered America in the twelfth century. For a contemporary discussion of Welsh Indians, see John Williams, L.L.D., An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 (London: J. Brown, 1791).
74. Fragment dated June 30, 1784, LOC: East Florida Papers, Reel 82, Bundle 195M15.
75. Tonyn to Cruden, St. Augustine, May 26, 1784, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, pp. 195–96.
76. Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes to Bernardo de Gálvez, July 16, 1784, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, p. 231.
77. James Cruden to Sir Robert Keith, November 24, 1784, BL: Add. Mss. 35533, f. 141.
78. Quoted in Siebert, I, p. 169.
79. “Petition of the Loyalists to the Spanish King,” October 28, 1784, LOC: East Florida Papers, Reel 82, Bundle 195M15. A copy of this text appears in Caughey, ed., East Florida, pp. 301–2.
80. Cruden to Carlos Howard, December 8, 1784, LOC: East Florida Papers, Reel 82, Bundle 195M15. A copy of this text appears in Caughey, ed., East Florida, pp. 431–32.
81. Cruden to Howard, March 10, 1785, and Cruden to Zéspedes, March 10, 1785, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, pp. 485–87.
82. Zéspedes to Gálvez, March 23, 1785, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, p. 484.
83. Cruden to North, May 16, 1785, BL: North Papers, Add. Mss. 61864, ff. 133–34.
84. Zéspedes imputed as much when he wrote to Tonyn that “I cannot but think it strange that Senr Cruden in a Manifesto dated in the month of November last appears to be informed of part of the contents of my letter to your Excellency” (Zéspedes to Tonyn, April 11, 1785, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, pp. 587–88). He found the ex-governor “hypercritical and suspicious,” and discovered “a number of intrigues” plotted by Tonyn’s friends and presumably “entered into with his approval.” (Zéspedes to Gálvez, June 6, 1785, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, pp. 552–53).
85. “Return of Persons who Emigrated from East Florida to different parts of the British Dominions,” William Brown, May 2, 1786, NA: CO 5/561, f. 407.
86. Tonyn to Sydney, April 4, 1785, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, p. 500; Tonyn to Sydney, August 29, 1785, NA: CO 5/561, f. 353; Tonyn to Sydney, August 10, 1785, NA: CO 5/561, f. 235; Tonyn to Sydney, September 15, 1785, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, p. 721; Tonyn to Sydney, November 10, 1785, quoted in Caughey, ed., East Florida, pp. 738–39.
87. Tonyn to Lord Hawke, April 4, 1785, quoted in Caughey, East Florida, ed., p. 536.
88. Siebert, I, p. 177.
Chapter Four: The Heart of Empire
1. Louisa Susannah Wells, The Journal of a Voyage from Charlestown to London (New York: Arno Press, 1968; repr. New-York Historical Society, 1906), pp. 61–62, 78.
2. Mary Beth Norton and Eliga Gould, among others, cite this quote as typical of loyalist attitudes about Britain; but my own research suggests that it is quite exceptional. Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 205; Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (London: Constable, 1974), p. 42. My analysis in this chapter owes much to Norton’s definitive study.
3. Americans visiting Britain before the revolution often expressed a similar feeling that “home” reinforced their provincial identities: Susan Lindsey Liveley, “Going Home: Americans in Britain, 1740–1776” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1996). For the loyalist response, see Norton, esp. pp. 41–61.
4. Quoted in Lively, pp. 277–78.
5. Diary of Edward Oxnard, October 5, 1775, March 21, 1776, UNB: MIC-Loyalist FC LFR.09E3J6.
6. Oxnard, November 29, 1775, UNB: MIC-Loyalist FC LFR.09E3J6.
7. Oxnard, March 27, 1776, UNB: MIC-Loyalist FC LFR.09E3J6.
8. Samuel Curwen, The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist, ed. Andrew Oliver, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), I, p. 37.
9. Oxnard, November 13, 1775, UNB: MIC-Loyalist FC LFR.09E3J6.
10. Oxnard, October 18, 1776, UNB: MIC-Loyalist FC LFR.09E3J6.
11. Curwen, I, p. 162.
12. Oxnard, February 8, 1776, UNB: MIC-Loyalist FC LFR.09E3J6; Norton, pp. 73–76. He also attended a meeting of the Robin Hood Society, a debating society, at which the question was posed “whether it is equitable & Right that the Congress should confiscate the Estates of the Refugees in England.” The measure was “determined to be unjust by a great majority” (September 14, 1775).
13. See, among others, Oxnard’s lament on his thirtieth birthday: “May Heaven grant me a happy sight of my native land before the return of another Birth day. Driven by the unhappy situation of my once happy Country, to see that peace in a foreign Clime, which was denied me in my own, my anxiety since I left it is not to be expressed by words.” Oxnard, July 30, 1777, UNB: MIC-Loyalist FC LFR.09E3J6; John Watts to Robert Watts, April 19, 1779, NYHS: Robert Watts Papers, Box 2; Curwen, II, p. 607.
14. John Watts to Robert Watts, March 31, 1784, NYHS: Robert Watts Papers, Box 2.
15. Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 54. For an excellent summary of the effects of the war on Britain, see John Cannon, “The Loss of America,” in H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the American Revolution (Harlow, U.K.: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998), pp. 233–57.
16. Diary of Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson, n.d., RMC, p. 14. Oxnard, September 13, Oc
tober 26, 1775, UNB: MIC-Loyalist FC LFR.09E3J6.
17. Diary of Samuel Shoemaker, October 10, 1784, NYHS, pp. 248–50.
18. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), chapter 5.
19. There were of course pre-revolutionary precedents: see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). On the cultivation of imperial royalism after 1783, see C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 165–209; Miles Taylor, “Queen Victoria and India, 1837–61,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 264–74.
20. Debate of February 17, 1783, Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, vol. 23 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1814), columns 452–53 (North), 460 (Mulgrave), 468 (Burke), 524 (Bootle), 481 (Sheridan), 492 (Lee).
21. Debate of February 17, 1783, Parliamentary History, vol. 23, columns 503, 571. The original motion of censure came in two parts, the first challenging the territorial concessions, and the second stating that “this House do feel the regard due from this nation to every description of men, who, with the risk of their lives, and the sacrifice of their property, have distinguished their loyalty.” Once the first motion passed, the second was withdrawn.
22. Debate of February 17, 1783, Parliamentary History, vol. 23, column 438.
23. Debate of February 17, 1783, Parliamentary History, vol. 23, columns 564–70. Wilmot is sometimes confused with his father, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas—see, e.g., Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (London: BBC Books, 2005), p. 177. In 1812 Wilmot added “Eardley” to his surname by royal license to become John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot, under which name he published his memoir of service on the Loyalist Claims Commission. His son, Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot, pursued the family career trajectory as a lawyer, member of Parliament, and colonial governor. See “Sir John Eardley Wilmot,” “John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot,” “Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot,” q.v., DNB.