Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  61. Loyalist memorial to Powell, May 18, 1785, NA: CO 23/25, ff. 321–24.

  62. Sydney to Powell, July 18, 1785, NA: CO 23/25, f. 331.

  63. Powell to Loyalists, n.d., NA: CO 23/25, f. 325. Proceedings of May 13, 1785, Journal of the House of Assembly of the Bahamas, 12 May 1784 to 29 September 1794, NAB, pp. 50–60.

  64. Sydney to Maxwell, August 6, 1784, NA: CO 23/25, ff. 162–63.

  65. For a fuller exposition of the effects of personal trauma on Bahamian loyalists, see Michael J. 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. 221–29. On Brown: Edward J. Cashin, The King’s Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), p. 179.

  66. Schoepf, II, p. 271.

  67. J. Leitch Wright, “Dunmore’s Loyalist Asylum in the Floridas,” Florida Historical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (April 1971): 370–79.

  68. Sydney to Maxwell, June 1786, NA: CO 23/25, ff. 418–19.

  69. “Plan of the Town of Nassau and Environs on the Island of New Providence Surveyed by Order of the General Assembly of the Bahamas, by Captain Andrew Skinner, 1788,” NAB. The city was resurveyed in 1785 to incorporate all the new dwellings. Journal of the House of Assembly of the Bahamas, 12 May 1784 to 29 September 1794, p. 93.

  70. Schoepf, II, p. 263.

  71. The Book of Negroes names eighty blacks bound for Abaco on the ships William and Nautilus: http://www.blackloyalist.com/canadiandigitalcollection/documents/

  official/book_of_negroes.htm, accessed December 30, 2009. Riley, appendix D, pp. 266–69; Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, 2 vols. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), I, pp. 183–84. On Brother Amos, see Whittington B. Johnson, Race Relations in the Bahamas, 1784–1834: The Nonviolent Transformation from a Slave to a Free Society (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), pp. 56–58.

  72. Saunders, p. 20; Cashin, The King’s Ranger, pp. 174–79; Thelma Peters, “The American Loyalists and the Plantation Period in the Bahama Islands” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1960), pp. 69–70.

  73. See list of land grants, NAB: Registrar General, Land Grants, Book C1 (1789–90).

  74. Riley, pp. 180–85; [Wylly], p. 7.

  75. [Wylly], p. 3.

  76. G. Barry to Anthony Stokes, June 30, 1786, NA: CO 23/26, f. 225.

  77. Memorial of John Cruden, January 14, 1786, Journal of the House of Assembly of the Bahamas, 12 May 1784 to 29 September 1794, NAB, pp. 110–11.

  78. Siebert, p. 191. I derive this ratio from Wylly’s 1788 population estimate, counting four whites for each male head of family.

  79. “An Account of the present Situation of affairs in the Bahama Islands,” n.d., NA: CO 23/28, f. 150.

  80. Lord Dunmore to Sydney, November 28, 1787, NA: CO 23/27, f. 75.

  81. Quoted in Riley, p. 170.

  82. “An Account of the present Situation of affairs in the Bahama Islands,” n.d., NA: CO 23/28, f. 151.

  83. [Wylly], pp. 21–23, 40–41; Riley, pp. 169–70; Craton and Saunders, p. 187.

  84. Petitions reproduced in [Wylly], pp. 33–39; for originals see NA: CO 23/26, ff. 102–21, 153–54.

  85. For the documents and depositions in this affair, see NA: CO 23/28, ff. 105–6, 149–74.

  86. Dunmore to Sydney, February 29, 1788, NA: CO 23/26, ff. 103–4.

  87. Quoted in Riley, p. 172.

  88. [Wylly], p. 16.

  89. Craton, pp. 176–77; Craton and Saunders, p. 203.

  90. [Wylly], pp. 30–31.

  91. [Wylly], p. 24.

  92. On this—and a fresh interpretation of Lord Dunmore’s career in general—see James Corbett David, “Dunmore’s New World: Political Culture in the British Empire, 1745–1796” (Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2010). I am grateful to Jim David for sharing with me portions of this work while in progress.

  93. On Creek marriage customs and houses, see William Bartram, Travels (Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791), pp. 396–97, 514–15; Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), pp. 12–13, 15–17.

  94. The definitive biography of Bowles is by J. Leitch Wright, William Augustus Bowles: Director General of the Creek Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967). See also Elisha P. Douglass, “The Adventurer Bowles,” William & Mary Quarterly 6, no. 1 (January 1949): 3–23; and the hagiographic contemporary biography by Benjamin Baynton, Authentic Memoirs of William Augustus Bowles (London, 1791).

  95. Wright, p. 13; Cashin, p. 184; 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), p. 114.

  96. Philip Waldeck Diary, transcribed and translated by Bruce E. Burgoyne, LOC, f. 217A.

  97. Journal of Zachary Macaulay, May 28, 1798, Zachary Macaulay Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library [Harvard College Library: Microfilm A 471, Reel 3]; Baynton, pp. 12–13.

  98. Among the most prominent were George Galphin, David George’s onetime master and a patriot; and Alexander McGillivray’s loyalist father, Lachlan. On the place of white and mixed-ethnicity individuals in Creek culture, see Andrew Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), esp. pp. 26–45, 77–95; 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), esp. pp. 2–3, 46–89.

  99. Baynton, p. 29.

  100. Deposition of William Augustus Bowles, April 9, 1788, NA: CO 23/27, ff. 158–59. However suspect Bowles’s testimony may be, the paraphrase he provided of Cruden’s letters does bear notable echoes with Cruden’s surviving letters. That said, no documents appear to suggest that Cruden proposed an outright overthrow of the Bahamas government. He seems, rather, to have spent late 1786 and early 1787 trying to persude the Duke of York to make some of the islands crown colonies and settle them with “the most industrious inhabitants of the Northern States.” See James Cruden to General R. Grenville, August 8, 1786, BL: Add. Mss. 70959, f. 89.

  101. Henceforth Cruden’s younger brother James, once charged with promoting John’s ambitious plans across the courts of Europe, pursued the family’s claim for a lost fortune of £40,000 from the Loyalist Claims Commission. Claim of James Cruden, NYPL: Loyalist Transcripts, vol. 48, pp. 528–55.

  102. Saunt, pp. 38–63.

  103. Saunt, pp. 70–75, 83–88; Coker and Watson, pp. 115–16. McGillivray’s brother-in-law Louis LeClerc de Milfort remarked on how, in London, “Bowles dressed like the Indians to give a semblance of reality to his story.” Louis LeClerc de Milfort, Memoir, or a Cursory Glance at My Different Travels & My Sojourn in the Creek Nation (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1956). The portrait was painted by Thomas Hardy on Bowles’s 1791 visit to London; another member of his party sat for William Hodges, the painter who had first made his name as artist on Captain Cook’s second voyage, and subsequently traveled to India.

  104. When not enough men volunteered for the expedition Dunmore released a handful of criminals from the Nassau jail to join it. Petition from “Subscribers late of the Party under the Command of Col. Bowles from Nassau,” November 24, 1788, LOC: East Florida Papers, reel 82, bundle 195M15.

  105. Wright, pp. 30–35; Coker and Watson, pp. 117–20. Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes to Alexander McGillivray, St. Augustine, October 8, 1788, quoted in Caughey, McGillivray, pp. 202–3.

  106. McGillivray to John Leslie, November 20, 1788, quoted in Caughey, McGillivray, p. 207; McGillivray to William Panton, February 1, 1789, quoted in Caughey, McGillivray, p. 217; Milfort, pp. xxxi–xxxiv, 82–83.

>   107. Baynton, p. 67; Wright, pp. 37–38.

  108. Parr subvented Bowles’s travel and lodging. See Parr to Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, Halifax, May 10, 1791, PANS: RG1, vol. 221 (reel 15328), no. 164.

  109. Douglas Brymner, ed., Report on Canadian Archives (Ottawa: Brown Chamberlin, 1891), pp. 255–56.

  110. Petition of William Bowles, January 3, 1791, reprinted in Frederick Jackson Turner, “English Policy toward America,” American Historical Review 7, no. 4 (July 1902): 726–28.

  111. Cruden to North, May 16, 1785, BL: North Papers, Add. Mss. 61864, ff. 133–34.

  112. Bowles to Lord Grenville, January 19, 1791, reprinted in Turner, pp. 728–33.

  113. Grenville to Dunmore, April 1, 1791, NA: CO 23/31, f. 7.

  114. Bowles to Dunmore, February 6, 1792, NA: CO 23/31, f. 153.

  115. Panton to Indian chiefs, February 19, 1792, in Caughey, p. 309.

  116. Wright, pp. 56–70; Coker and Watson, pp. 148–56.

  117. Wright, pp. 71–92.

  118. Votes of the Honourable House of Assembly (Nassau: John Wells, 1796); Craton and Saunders, pp. 203–11; David, chapter 5.

  119. The travails of a middle-class loyalist planter are well described in Charles Farquharson, “A Relic of Slavery: Farquharson’s Journal for 1831–32,” typescript, NAB. See also Peters, pp. 148–54.

  120. Cashin, The King’s Ranger, p. 197.

  121. Craton, pp. 176–78.

  Chapter Eight: False Refuge

  1. Maria Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, ed. Philip Wright (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1966), p. 10.

  2. William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, 2 vols. (London, 1790), I, pp. 21–22, 80; II, p. 401. This William Beckford (1744–1799) is not to be confused with William Thomas Beckford (1760–1844), son of Alderman William Beckford (1709–1770), one of Jamaica’s largest absentee landowners, builder of Fonthill Abbey, and the author of the Gothic novel Vathek. Beckford the historian was Alderman Beckford’s nephew. He wrote his Descriptive Account while imprisoned for debt in the Fleet prison.

  3. Bryan Edwards explained, “The whole of the scenery is … superlatively fine, nor can words alone (at least any that I can select) convey a just idea of it.” Bryan Edwards, The History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 2 vols. (London, 1793), I, pp. 180–83.

  4. Louisa Susannah Wells, The Journal of a Voyage from Charlestown to London (New York: Arno Press, 1968 [1906]), pp. 48, 111–12.

  5. See especially Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).

  6. On Aikman’s career, see Frank Cundall, “The Early Press and Printers in Jamaica,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 26 (April–October 1916): 290–354.

  7. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 149–87. Edward Ward, A Trip to Jamaica with a True Character of the People of the Island (London, 1700), pp. 13, 16.

  8. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 39, 67.

  9. Beckford, I, pp. 50–51.

  10. Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 13–16.

  11. Mintz, pp. 46–52.

  12. J. R. Ward, “The British West Indies, 1748–1815,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 433. Barbados, however, had a larger and more settled white population, with a slave to white ratio of about four to one.

  13. Burnard, p. 156; Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (London: MacMillan, 1989), p. 72.

  14. Burnard, pp. 150–51; Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 140–41.

  15. Edwards, I, p. 230.

  16. Burnard, pp. 16–18.

  17. Quoted in Brown, p. 13. Burnard, p. 16.

  18. Edwards, I, p. 227.

  19. Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 86; Lowell Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833: A Study in Social and Economic History (New York: Octagon Books, 1963 [1928]), pp. 180–82, 189–90. Brown notes that the high estimate of slave deaths offered a convenient way for planters to explain falling numbers in the slave population (p. 184).

  20. Beckford, I, pp. 103–4.

  21. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959–64).

  22. I am grateful to Josiah Osgood for his analysis of this inscription.

  23. For a comprehensive discussion of this topic see Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

  24. O’Shaughnessy, pp. 151–54.

  25. “Memoir Relative to the Island of Jamaica by Major General Archibald Campbell,” 1782, NLJ: MS 16.

  26. O’Shaughnessy, pp. 232–37.

  27. Frank Cundall, “Sculpture in Jamaica,” Art Journal (March 1907): 65–70. On commemorative efforts in Britain, see Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profile Books, 2010), pp. 67–71.

  28. O’Shaughnessy, pp. 217–32; Ragatz, pp. 160–63.

  29. Beckford estimated the population in 1790 at eight thousand whites, fifteen hundred free people of color, and fourteen thousand slaves (Beckford, I, p. xxii). A report commissioned by the Kingston parish vestry gave the population of Kingston as 6,539 whites, 2,690 free people of color (listed as “brown”), 590 free blacks; and 16,659 slaves. Kingston Vestry Minutes, February 28, 1788, NAJ: 2/6/6. (These numbers are also quoted by Edwards, I, p. 213.) Both sets of figures of course date from after the loyalist influx. Edward Long estimated Kingston’s population at five thousand whites, twelve hundred free blacks and people of color, and five thousand slaves (see Edward Long, The History of Jamaica. Or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island …, 3 vols. [London: T. Lowndes, 1774], II, p. 103).

  30. Long, II, pp. 102–18.

  31. Kingston Vestry Minutes, November 5, 1784, NAJ: 2/6/6, f. 118.

  32. Quoted in 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), p. 29.

  33. House of Assembly Journals, February 11–14, 1783, NAJ: 1B/5/1/31.

  34. House of Assembly Journals, December 2, 1783, NAJ: 1B/5/1/32.

  35. See “A List of Loyalists in Jamaica,” NLJ: MS 1841. Prokopow gives a breakdown by place of origin, pp. 32–33.

  36. “A List of Loyalists in Jamaica,” NLJ: MS 1841, pp. 9, 16, 24–25, 27, 31–32, 34.

  37. “A List of Loyalists in Jamaica,” NLJ: MS 1841, pp. 9–10, 14, 17, 25, 35, 40–41.

  38. Kingston Vestry Minutes, March 11, 1783, NAJ: 2/6/6, f. 65; Kingston Vestry Minutes, October 11, 1784, NAJ: 2/6/6, f. 116.

  39. Kingston Vestry Minutes, November 5, 1784, NAJ: 2/6/6, f. 118.

  40. Kingston Vestry Minutes, November 28, 1785, NAJ: 2/6/6, ff. 156–57.

  41. Ragatz, pp. 190–91.

  42. This thesis was most famously advanced by Lowell Ragatz and by Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). A recent modification of Williams places equal emphasis on the Haitian Revolution as a cause of planter decline: David Beck Ryden, West Indian Slavery and Brit
ish Abolition, 1783–1807 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. chapter 9. For a demonstration of how the war affected one major planter family, see Michael Craton and James Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670–1970 (London: W. H. Allen, 1970), pp. 154–79.

  43. The 1783 petition is quoted in Prokopow, p. 36. See also To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty in Council, the Humble Memorial and Petition of the Council and Assembly of Jamaica (Kingston, 1784).

  44. Quoted in Prokopow, p. 61.

  45. Prokopow, p. 69.

  46. Petition of loyalists in Jamaica to Carleton, April 8, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 31, no. 7357.

  47. Brown, pp. 21–22. Simon Taylor’s house Prospect Park was later purchased by Alexander Aikman, and is now the residence of the Jamaican prime minister (Cundall, “Early Press,” p. 310).

  48. Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, September 9, 1782, Cambridge University Library: Vanneck Papers, 3A/1782/36. I am indebted to Vince Brown for references from the Taylor letters.

  49. Taylor to Arcedeckne, September 3, 1787, Cambridge University Library: Vanneck Papers, 3A/1787/14. “Dirt-eating” was a poorly understood if widespread practice among West Indian slaves. Eighteenth-century observers like Taylor often saw it as a degenerate, voluntary practice; recent medical opinion (though still not unanimous) suggests it may be symptomatic of mineral deficiencies. Sheridan, pp. 216–19.

  50. A searchable database of Atlantic slave trade data is available at http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces, accessed December 26, 2009.

  51. Prokopow, pp. 62–63. Of the 102 transported out of Savannah, thirty children had been born, but only seventy-six survived in 1786 to be sold, of which only twenty-five, in turn, were deemed sellable in Charleston. Leland J. Bellot, William Knox: The Life and Thought of an Eighteenth-Century Imperialist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), pp. 198–99.

  52. Long, II, p. 189.

  53. Proceedings for November 13, 1784, Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica (Kingston: Alexander Aikman, 1804), VIII, p. 22.

  54. Proceedings for December 21, 1784, Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, VIII, pp. 82–83. The fullest treatment of this scheme is in Prokopow, pp. 65–100. “Frog” had long been used as a slang term for the Dutch, as well as for Jesuits and the French.