Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
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55. Prokopow, pp. 87–88. On Frogg, see “A List of Loyalists in Jamaica,” NLJ: MS 1841, p. 12. He managed to receive at least some official succor, with a 1787 commission to make the uniforms for the Kingston town guard (Kingston Vestry Minutes, June 28, 1787, NAJ: 2/6/6).
56. “Return of Persons who Emigrated from East Florida to different parts of the British Dominions,” signed by William Brown, May 2, 1786, NA: CO 5/561, f. 407. At least fifty whites and two hundred blacks from Florida transited through Jamaica to the Mosquito Coast in the summer of 1784: Alured Clarke to Sydney, August 15, 1784, NA: CO 137/84, f. 157.
57. “Extract of a Letter from Governor Orde, to the Right Honble Lord Sydney, dated Dominica Novr. 25th 1784,” NA: T1/610, f. 192.
58. Boyd Alexander, England’s Wealthiest Son: A Study of William Beckford (London: Centaur Press, 1962), pp. 210–15. Beckford later sued the Wildmans to recover the plantation, Quebec, near Port Maria. Alexander notes that James Wildman’s “letters and handwriting indicate an almost illiterate man unable to express himself on paper.” On returning to England in 1794, Wildman used his fortune to buy Chilham Castle in Kent.
59. Allan Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740–1800 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 55–56.
60. Brown, pp. 181–90; Sheridan, chapters 7–8, passim. For ameliorative efforts in Jamaica see Christa Breault Dierksheide, “The Amelioration of Slavery in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1770–1840” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2009), chapters 5–6.
61. Sheridan, p. 46–47, 83–95, 192, 295–312. See also Craton and Walvin, pp. 125–34.
62. Sheridan, pp. 9–11; Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist (New York: M. F. Mansfield and Company, 1901), pp. 82–83. Dr. Johnston’s former teacher Benjamin Rush famously applied both treatment methods to yellow fever victims in Philadelphia that same year, though to little avail.
63. Sheridan, pp. 250–63. When Maria Nugent’s daughter was vaccinated from the arm of “a nice little mulatto child” in Spanish Town a decade later, it was using the safer Jenner method of vaccination with cowpox virus (p. 177).
64. Johnston, pp. 84–85.
65. Johnston, pp. 85, 89, 105. The details of Catherine’s departure are not explained in Johnston’s narrative. Catherine accompanied her mother to Jamaica in 1786 (p. 80), but Elizabeth later lamented that Lewis Johnston had “taken her from me, thinking to benefit her by the advantages she would gain in Edinburgh,” when Catherine was ten, i.e. in 1792–93 (p. 105).
66. Johnston, p. 90.
67. Johnston, pp. 85–86.
68. On the postwar revival in Jamaica, see Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), chapter 5; Brown, chapter 6; Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), chapter 1.
69. “An Account of several Baptist Churches, consisting chiefly of Negro Slaves: particularly of one at Kingston, in Jamaica; and another at Savannah in Georgia,” in “Letters Showing the Rise and Progress of the Early Negro Churches of Georgia and the West Indies,” Journal of Negro History 1, no. 1 (1916): 71. This and Liele’s other letters first appeared in the Baptist Annual Register of 1790–93.
70. Quotations from “An Account of several Baptist Churches,” and George Liele to John Rippon, May 18, 1792, in “Letters Showing the Rise,” pp. 71–73, 81. See also Cox, II, p. 13. John W. Pulis, “Bridging Troubled Waters: Moses Baker, George Liele, and the African American Diaspora to Jamaica,” in John W. Pulis, ed., Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World (New York: Garland Publishing, 2002), pp. 183–222.
71. “An Account of several Baptist Churches,” in “Letters Showing the Rise,” pp. 73–74. On Liele as a leader and institution-builder, see Frey and Wood, pp. 115–17.
72. “An Account of several Baptist Churches,” in “Letters Showing the Rise,” p. 71.
73. Stephen Cooke to Rippon, November 26, 1791, in “Letters Showing the Rise,” pp. 75–76.
74. Julius Sherrard Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1986), pp. 209–12.
75. Scott, pp. 213–14.
76. Scott, pp. 51–58.
77. Scott, pp. 182–83.
78. R. C. Dallas, The History of the Maroons, 2 vols. (London, 1803); John N. Grant, The Maroons in Nova Scotia (Halifax, N.S.: Formac, 2002); Brathwaite, pp. 248–51.
79. Scott, p. 231. Anna Maria Falconbridge, whose abolitionist husband was involved in the Sierra Leone settlement scheme, arrived in Kingston not long afterwards and remarked on how much “it would have hurt me” to see Wilberforce “coupled with such an incendiary.” A. M. Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone during the Years 1791–1792–1793, 2nd ed. (London: L. I. Higham, 1802), pp. 234–35.
80. Francis Augustus Cox, History of the Baptist Missionary Society, from 1792 to 1842, 2 vols. (London: T. Ward and Co., and G. J. Dyer, 1842), II, pp. 13–15; Brathwaite, p. 253.
81. Brathwaite, p. 255.
82. Clement Gayle, George Liele: Pioneer Missionary to Jamaica (Kingston: Jamaica Baptist Union, 1982), p. 19.
83. On paternalism as exercised on Jamaican plantations, see Byrd, pp. 78–85.
84. Thomas Coke, A History of the West Indies, 3 vols. (Liverpool: Nutter, Fishall, and Dixon, 1808), I, p. 445; Frey and Wood, p. 136.
85. Thomas Nicholas Swigle to [John Rippon], May 1, 1802, “Letters Showing the Rise,” pp. 88–89.
86. On the nineteenth-century history of Baptism in Jamaica, see especially Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
87. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, pp. 1, 10–11, 253.
88. Nugent, p. 184.
89. In October, 1803, Nugent noted that “Mrs. and the Misses Johnstone were the ladies at dinner to-day,” but gave no first names. (Nugent, p. 179.)
90. Nugent, p. 23.
91. Johnston, pp. 91–95, 105–7.
92. Johnston, p. 107.
93. Johnston, pp. 96–97.
94. Johnston, p. 108.
95. On U.S. commerce with the Caribbean in this period, see Michelle Craig MacDonald, “From Cultivation to Cup: Caribbean Coffee and the North American Economy, 1765–1805” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2005), chapter 5.
96. Johnston, pp. 110–11.
97. On loyalists in Belize, see especially the work of St. John Robinson, “Southern Loyalists in the Caribbean and Central America,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 93, no. 3–4 (July–October 1992): 205–20; and Prokopow, section III.
Chapter Nine: Promised Land
1. “An Account of the Life of Mr. David George …,” 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. 338–40.
2. “An Account of the Life of David George,” in Carretta, ed., pp. 340, 348 n. 48.
3. James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (London: Longman, 1976), pp. 23–32; Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: Capricorn, 1976), pp. 100–102, 108–11 (Peters quote p. 109); Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), p. 36.
4. “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” in Carretta, ed., p. 360.
5. Walker, pp. 40–41; Winks, pp. 37–38. The terminological slippage makes it hard to know how many of the 396 “servants” listed in 1784 musters of Shelburne and Birchtown were actually enslaved.
6. John Clarkson’s Memorandum Boo
k, BL: Add. Mss. 41626B, ff. 15–16. This volume contains notes on a number of abuses cited by black loyalists in Nova Scotia.
7. Walker, pp. 50–51. On slavery in loyalist Nova Scotia, see Barry Cahill, “Habeas Corpus and Slavery in Nova Scotia: R. v. Hecht, ex parte Rachel, 1798,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 44 (1995): pp. 179–209.
8. Wilson, pp. 95–96.
9. The dinner party anecdote was reported by Thomas Clarkson, and is quoted in Wilson, pp. 177–78.
10. “Memorial of Thos. Peters and Others to the Rt. Honl. W. W. Grenville one of His Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State,” NA: FO 4/1, ff. 421–23.
11. He must have left Nova Scotia at more or less the same time that William Augustus Bowles also sailed from Nova Scotia, in search of British support for Muskogee. This leads Wilson to suggest fancifully that they may have traveled on the same ship. Wilson, pp. 179–80.
12. Wilson, pp. 149–50.
13. The fullest account of the Black Poor project is provided in Stephen J. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786–91 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1994), pp. 129–60. But see also Wilson, pp. 144–53; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (London: BBC Books, 2005), pp. 190–97; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), pp. 111–19; Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), pp. 139–53. Equiano discussed the scheme in his autobiography: Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 226–31.
14. “Treaty for 1788,” NASL.
15. Granville Sharp, A Short Sketch of Temporary Regulations (Until Better Shall be Proposed) for the Intended Settlement on the Grain Coast of Africa, Near Sierra Leona, 2nd ed. (London: H. Baldwin, 1786), p. 34.
16. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–2.
17. A. M. Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone during the Years 1791–1792–1793, 2nd ed. (London: L. I. Higham, 1802), pp. 32–33.
18. Falconbridge, p. 64.
19. “Manuscript Orders from the Directors of the Sierra Leone Company,” ca. 1791, NASL, p. 5.
20. Sir Henry Clinton to Evan Nepean, December 26, 1790, NA: FO 4/1, f. 416.
21. Memorial of Thomas Peters to Lord Grenville, ca. December 24, 1790, NA: FO 4/1, ff. 419–20.
22. Henry Dundas to Thomas Carleton, August 6, 1791, NA: CO 188/4, f. 215.
23. Quoted in Wilson, p. 186.
24. William Wilberforce to John Clarkson, August 8, 1791, BL: Add. Mss. 41262A, f. 5; Thomas Clarkson to John Clarkson, August 28, 1791, f. 11; Henry Thornton to John Clarkson, December 30, 1791, f. 44; Thomas Clarkson to John Clarkson [January 1792], ff. 64–74.
25. Carleton to Dundas, December 13, 1791, NA: CO 188/4, ff. 239–40.
26. Clarkson Diary, October 8, 1791, NASL, p. 16. The originals of Clarkson’s diary have been dispersed and some portions lost. I have drawn citations from Clarkson’s diary for March–December 1791 from the manuscript original in the National Archives of Sierra Leone. Citations from December 1791–March 1792 are drawn from a microfilm in the New-York Historical Society of Charles Bruce Fergusson, ed., Clarkson’s Mission to America, 1791–1792 (Halifax: Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1971); and citations for March–August 1792 are from a microfilm, also in the New-York Historical Society, of the original. Clarkson’s diary for August–November 1792 has been published in Sierra Leone Studies 8 (1927): 1–114.
27. A copy of this handbill can be found in PANS: RG 1, vol. 419 (reel 15460), item 1.
28. “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” in Carretta, ed., pp. 363–64.
29. Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1864), II, pp. 307–8.
30. Stephen Skinner to Colonel William Shirriff, November 2, 1791, NYHS: Stephen Skinner Letterbook.
31. John Clarkson Memorandum Book, BL: Add. Mss. 41262B, f. 15.
32. “An Account of the Life of David George,” in Carretta, ed., p. 340.
33. Clarkson Diary, October 25, 1791, NASL, p. 32.
34. Clarkson Diary, October 26, 1791, NASL, pp. 33–34.
35. Clarkson Diary, October 26, 1791, NASL, p. 37.
36. Clarkson Diary, November 2, 1791, NASL, p. 41.
37. Clarkson Diary, October 28, 1791, NASL, p. 38.
38. Byrd, pp. 177–99.
39. “Bill of fare—for Victualling the free Blacks to Sierra leone,” PANS: RG 1, vol. 419 (reel 15460), item 18.
40. Thomas Peters and David Edmons to Clarkson, December 23, 1791, BL: Add. Mss. 41262A, f. 24.
41. Clarkson Diary, December 23 and 26, 1791, NYHS, pp. 115, 118.
42. Wilson, p. 225.
43. Clarkson Diary, December 13, 1791, NYHS, p. 104.
44. “An Account of the Life of David George,” in Carretta, ed., p. 340; “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” in Carretta, ed., p. 364; Clarkson Diary, January 15 to March 6, 1792, NYHS, pp. 161–68.
45. “An Account of the Life of David George,” in Carretta, ed., p. 340.
46. Clarkson Diary, March 11, 1792, NYHS, p. 171; “An Account of the Life of David George,” in Carretta, ed., p. 340.
47. Clarkson Diary, March 6, 1792, NYHS, p. 168.
48. Clarkson Diary, March 7, 1792, NYHS, p. 169.
49. Clarkson Diary, March 18, 1792, NYHS, pp. 180–81.
50. Lots are itemized in a list of “Names of Settlers Located on the 1st Nova Scotian Allotment,” NASL.
51. Clarkson Diary, March 20 and 27, 1792, NYHS, pp. 8, 37. Anonymous Journal, March 15, 1792, BL: Add. Mss. 41264, f. 13. Falconbridge, p. 162.
52. Falconbridge, p. 148.
53. “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” in Carretta, ed., p. 364.
54. Clarkson Diary, April 5, 1792, NYHS, p. 74.
55. Clarkson Diary, May 4, 1792, NYHS, p. 169.
56. Clarkson Diary, March 27, 1792, NYHS, p. 43.
57. Wilson, pp. 240–44. The alcoholics were Dr. Bell, the surgeon, and Alexander Falconbridge, commercial agent.
58. Clarkson Diary, June 23, 1783, NYHS, p. 312.
59. Clarkson Diary, March 22, 1792, NYHS, pp. 20–21.
60. Clarkson Diary, June 15, 1792, NYHS, p. 293.
61. Clarkson Diary, April 8, 1792, NYHS, p. 86.
62. Clarkson Diary, June 26, 1792, NYHS, p. 324.
63. Clarkson Diary, May 19, 1792, NYHS, pp. 221–22.
64. Clarkson Diary, May 29, 1792, NYHS, p. 248.
65. Clarkson Diary, April 8, 1792, NYHS, pp. 81–84.
66. Anonymous Journal, April 11, 1792, BL: Add. Mss. 41264, f. 27.
67. Clarkson Diary, July 25, 1792, NYHS, pp. 388–89.
68. Clarkson Diary, July 30, 1792, NYHS, p. 400.
69. Walker, p. 181; Wilson, p. 293.
70. Falconbridge, p. 169.
71. Prayer and List of Gifts, BL: Add. Mss. 41262A, ff. 210–20; Journal of Isaac DuBois, BL: Add. Mss. 41263, f. 1.
72. “Farewell Petition,” November 28, 1792, in Christopher Fyfe, ed., “Our Children Free and Happy”: Letters from Black Settlers in Africa in the 1790s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 30–31.
73. “An Account of the Life of David George,” in Carretta, ed., p. 341.
74. Journal of Zachary Macaulay, September 28, 1794, Zachary Macaulay Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library [Harvard College Library: Microfilm A 471, reel 3]; Schama, pp. 368–71; Wilson, pp. 317–20; David George to John Rippon, November 12, 1794, in Carretta, ed., pp. 343–44.
75. Wilson, pp. 318, 21.
77. Luke Jordan and Isaac Anderson to Clarkson, June 28, 1794, in Fyfe, ed., p. 42.
78. James Liaster to Clarkson, March 30, 1796, in Fyfe, ed., pp. 49–50.
79. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 49–50; Walker, p. 176; Wilson, p. 288.
80. Falconbridge, p. 205.
81. Falconbridge, p. 210.
82. Journal of Isaac DuBois, January 7, 1793, BL: Add. Mss. 41263, f. 3. The couple had a son, Francis Blake DuBois, one of whose sons in turn was named John Clarkson DuBois. The African-American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois, who was partly descended from white Bahamians, surmised that his forebears were loyalists, and wondered if he was perhaps related to Isaac DuBois, whom he knew held a land grant in the Bahamas. The connection is all the more intriguing given that DuBois spent his last years in West Africa, attracted there by his black ancestry—little knowing that, in Isaac DuBois, he may have had a white ancestor who lived on the continent too. W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984), p. 105.
83. “Settlers’ Petition,” in Fyfe, ed., p. 38.
84. Falconbridge, p. 255.
85. Wilson, pp. 295–97.
86. Walker, pp. 178–80; Pybus, pp. 178–80.
87. Nathaniel Snowball and James Hutcherson to Clarkson, May 24, 1796, in Fyfe, ed., p. 52.
88. Walker, p. 205.
89. Sir Guy Carleton to Sydney, March 15, 1783, NYPL: Carleton Papers, Box 30, no. 7139. Walker, p. 219.
90. Boston King to Clarkson, June 1, 1797, BL: Add. Mss. 41263, f. 147.
91. Pybus, pp. 189–90.
92. This document is reproduced in Fyfe, ed., pp. 63–64.
93. Walker, pp. 208–9.
94. Pybus, pp. 198–202; Walker, pp. 228–35; Wilson, pp. 393–95.
95. Quoted in Fyfe, p. 87.
96. By 1811 there were already 807 Maroons to 982 Nova Scotians. “Houses and Population within the Walls of Sierra Leone taken by Order of Governor Columbine, April 1811,” in Liverpool to Maxwell, November 20, 1811, NASL: Secretary of State Despatches, 1809-[1811], pp. 155–56; Fyfe, pp. 114–15.