Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
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That left only one British territory as an attractive possibility for southern slaveowners: the neighboring loyal province of East Florida. More or less similar to Georgia in climate and ecology, and unfolding in mile upon mile of uncultivated land, East Florida appeared to loyalist planters like the last best hope for reproducing their existing lifestyles. The ambitious governor of East Florida, Patrick Tonyn, enthusiastically encouraged loyalist immigration. “Upon the unfortunate defeat of Earl Cornwallis” he issued a proclamation inviting “the distressed and persecuted Loyalists in the neighbouring Colonies” to “become settlers in this Province.”49 Hundreds had already arrived. The only trouble was that in Carleton’s initial orders, St. Augustine had also been slated for evacuation. Dismayed loyalists and sympathetic officials chorused in protest against the measure, as did Governors Wright and Tonyn.50 Under loyalist pressure, Carleton canceled the evacuation on the grounds that Florida would give loyalists “a convenient refuge, whither the most valuable of their property may without much difficulty be transported, and in a Country where their Negroes may continue to be useful to them.”51 East Florida henceforth became the destination of choice for southern loyalists—underscoring the importance of property concerns, and slavery in particular, in determining the course of the loyalist exodus.
Loyalists in Savannah were the first to confront a situation that would be replayed on successively larger stages in the months ahead. Seven thousand white civilians and slaves prepared to depart in less than four weeks’ time. How or if loyalists readied themselves psychologically for leaving can never be really known, but there were concrete chores aplenty. The city’s neat grid of angles and squares turned into a moving mosaic. Days became busy with selling and packing, transactions and farewells. Soldiers piled up military stores and ordnance below the fort walls to be rowed out to the coast. Slaves hauled furniture and baggage and gathered by the hundreds to ship out with their masters. Ultimately almost all of the five thousand enslaved blacks in Savannah would leave, transported from the city as loyalist property. On July 11, 1782, the garrison trooped into flatboats and rowed around the grassy curves of the river mouth to the sea. “Nothing can surpass the sorrow which many of the inhabitants expressed at our departure,” a New York soldier noted in his diary, “especially those ladies whose sweethearts were under necessity of quiting the town at our evacuation; some of those ladies were converted and brought over to the faith, so as to quit as well and follow us.”52
If it is hard to know just what went through the minds of departing loyalists, it is especially difficult to gain insight into the attitudes of the majority of people who left, those five thousand or so enslaved blacks, who outnumbered the white migrants by more than two to one. George Liele, though, part of the tiny minority of free blacks to evacuate, did provide some account of what made him go. Liele may have found a higher solace in his journey, for he followed two masters to the seafront—if you counted the one in heaven as well as the one on earth. For about three years, Liele had been living in Savannah as a free man, ever since his former owner, a loyalist who had manumitted him before the war, had been killed, his hand blown off by a patriot bullet. Liele may well have worked in Savannah as a carter, like many other free blacks, helping to provision the British as his friend David George was doing from his butcher’s stall. But the labor that really consumed Liele (and George) was the Lord’s: preaching among the blacks in town, as he had done in the cornfields, clearings, and barns around Silver Bluff. Though David George moved his family to Charleston in anticipation of disruptions in Savannah, Liele stayed on and preached till the very end of the British occupation.
Freedom, Liele had learned, could be a precarious condition. Once, he had been jailed by whites who did not believe his old master had really freed him. Only by presenting his manumission papers did he get released, with the support of a white benefactor, a backcountry planter and loyalist officer called Moses Kirkland. (It was Kirkland who had taken in Thomas Brown after the latter’s torture in 1775.) Liele owed Kirkland something more. Liele’s wife and four small children had all been born slaves, and Kirkland apparently helped him purchase their freedom. In return, Liele agreed to renounce a portion of his own liberty by indenturing himself to Kirkland for a period of a few years. Now the British were leaving Savannah, Kirkland was banished, and George Liele was “partly obliged” to follow, no longer a slave, and yet neither entirely free. Like everyone else, he had important preparations to make before his departure. Standing in the shallows of the Savannah River in the shadow of the city walls, Liele baptized Andrew, Hannah, and little Hagar Bryan, three slaves belonging to a loyal Baptist, bringing three new members into the church. As the Lord willed that Brother George would carry the word beyond American shores, now it was for Brother Andrew to continue his work among Georgia blacks.53
On July 20, 1782, Liele and his family sailed on the first convoy out of Savannah, bound for Port Royal, Jamaica.54 His reason for evacuating with the British might seem clear—to protect some limited freedom for himself and his family. But the moment Liele stepped on board he would have seen overwhelming evidence of why so many whites left: to protect their enslaved property. The sloop Zebra (a suggestive name given the racial breakdown of its passengers) and its twelve flanking ships carried a mere fifty white loyalists on board. The vast majority of its passengers were nineteen hundred blacks, almost all of them slaves.55 Whole slave communities sailed out together: more than two hundred belonged to governor Sir James Wright alone, the remnant of an enslaved labor force numbering more than five hundred souls that Wright had once put to work across eleven plantations. They had survived the war only to be transported to Jamaica in the custody of one of Wright’s associates, Nathaniel Hall, there to be hired or sold into the notoriously punishing conditions of Caribbean slavery.56
The next day, a second evacuation fleet left for St. Augustine. This convoy would also be numerically dominated by slaves; Georgia’s lieutenant governor John Graham took charge of no fewer than 465 black men, women, and children belonging to himself and others.57 Thomas Brown, meanwhile, escorted another, more unusual nonwhite contingent. About two hundred of the Creek and Choctaw warriors who had fought with him against the patriots were returning to their villages, after spending a year at war.58 Their presence on board represented a rare British concession to southern Indian allies, and a unique counter-flow within the exodus: for them, and them alone, this voyage out was a voyage home. The St. Augustine convoy also carried most of William Johnston’s extended family: his father Lewis Johnston Sr., his brother Lewis Jr., and his sisters with their husbands and children. The Johnstons had a strong reason to favor Florida. With seventy-one enslaved men, women, and children in his household, Lewis Johnston Sr. figured as one of the largest slaveowners among the Georgia refugees.
Elizabeth and William Johnston, though, joined the fleet bound for Charleston with William’s regiment. It was an unusual choice for Elizabeth to go to Charleston with William, rather than to St. Augustine with her in-laws—not least because she was then seven months pregnant, and passed up the offer from a patriot friend of William’s to stay in Savannah under his protection until she was “fitter for moving.” But the Johnstons had already been apart for much of their short married life, and Elizabeth wanted no more of it. She had suffered the loneliness of raising their firstborn son, Andrew—a “handsome sweet fellow” with a “large proportion” of his father’s “passionate temper”—while William was away at war. And she had acquired another reason to wish William close at hand. For beyond her watch, William had fallen into his old habit of gambling, “a vice so destructive and ruinous in its nature” that it threatened to wreck their growing family.59 He did not reveal the alarming extent of his losses to his wife, but wrote to her father with hangdog contrition, imploring Lichtenstein to support the family in their need.60 What was worse, William’s behavior opened a rift with his own father and sisters. “You know not how wretched you have made me,”
Elizabeth opined, “and tis cruel to distress a Father whose sole wish & care, is to see his children happy.”61 Dr. Lewis Johnston, with his wealth and influential connections, was not a man to be alienated lightly. A rift with him would cut off the young couple from their best source of support and patronage.
So when British power collapsed around her in Savannah, Elizabeth Johnston followed her impulse and her spouse: “My husband would not like the separation, and I positively refused to remain.” Not once did she mention the issues of principle involved in leaving her home. Nor, more strikingly, did she note the obvious impetus for her extended family’s departure. Every single one of Johnston’s close male relations had been proscribed under the Georgia Confiscation and Banishment Act, including William Johnston, his father Lewis, and her father John Lichtenstein. In her own telling, Johnston did not leave for reasons of political sentiment but for emotional ones, the bond of conjugal love.
The Johnstons arrived in Charleston to find that city, too, in the throes of pre-evacuation mayhem. Day in, day out, British officials coped with shortages of food, rum, ships, and cash; rising disorder and falling morale; and more than ten thousand civilians clamoring for relief and reassurance. “The perplexity of civil matters here is so much beyond my abilities to arrange, that I declare myself unequal to the task, nor have I the constitution to stand it, from morning till night I have memorials and petitions full of distress, &c. &c. before me,” moaned Charleston commander General Leslie.62 Patriot advances had cut off the city’s food supply, forcing Leslie to send forage parties out to raid the countryside for grain.63 Soldiers grew restless and undisciplined, falling “into all kinds of dissipation,” and, increasingly, running away.64 An attempted deserter was hanged before a crowd of two thousand; two other men were flogged with “500 lashes each at the most public parts of the town and then drummed out of the garrison, for harboring two deserters.”65 Conditions among the impoverished refugees were not much kinder. From November 1781 to November 1782, a neighborhood coffin maker crafted 213 wooden boxes for the loyal dead: a poignant list of spouses, grandparents, and, especially, children; for a teenager named “America,” and for individuals of whom no more was recorded than their heights.66
Within a week of the publication of evacuation orders in August, 1782, 4,230 white loyalists announced their intention to depart with the British, along with 7,163 blacks, chiefly slaves.67 Following the Savannah precedent, East Florida was the destination of choice. But in Charleston, a far larger and more economically developed city than Savannah, the evacuation of so many slaves posed special complications.
During the British occupation, about a hundred patriot-owned estates with five thousand slaves had been “sequestered” and run for the benefit of the British military by the loyalist commissioner of sequestered estates, John Cruden. Now, with evacuation imminent, many loyalists whose own slaves had been seized by the patriots wanted to take sequestered slaves as compensation. Logical though the swap might appear, it was also illegal, since loyalists had no title to these patriot-owned slaves. To make matters more difficult, hundreds of black loyalists lived and worked in Charleston—David George and his family now among them—who had legitimate claims to leave with the British as free people. Patriots balked at the prospect of any of their valuable slaves, sequestered or freed, sailing off into the empire. How could Britain evacuate blacks so as to prevent wrongful seizure of patriot-owned slaves, on the one hand, while upholding promises of freedom to black loyalists on the other? Leslie wrote to Carleton for instructions. “In whatever manner we may dispose of such of them who were taken on the sequestered estates,” he felt, “those who have voluntarily come in, under the faith of our protection, cannot in justice be abandoned to the merciless resentment of their former masters.”68 Carleton emphatically agreed: “Such as have been promised their freedom, must have it.”69
With loyalists and patriots clamoring for fair allocation of property, and blacks both free and enslaved facing him with their plight, Commissioner John Cruden had his hands full and his capacities stretched. Not least, Cruden was terribly in debt: numerous people had failed to pay him for hired labor and produce from the sequestered estates, and his public accounts were £10,000 in arrears.70 (He and his younger brother had meanwhile racked up such personal expenses that their poor father, a Presbyterian minister in London, had asked his brokers to stop extending the boys credit.)71 But John Cruden had always been one to see the bright side of things—witness the proposal he had sent to his patron Lord Dunmore, after Yorktown, to raise an army of free blacks and continue the war. When provisions were running low in Charleston in the summer of 1782, Cruden equipped a flotilla of galleys and dispatched them into Low Country waterways to seize patriot grain supplies.72 In the months ahead Cruden would do whatever he could to ease loyalists’ distress—even when his ideas and methods became unconventional indeed.
Cruden prided himself on his management of the sequestered estates, many of which he averred were “in higher Cultivation than when I took them into my Charge, [and] would have been torn to pieces by needy Creditors” without his care. Surely, he thought, it would be simple enough to resolve disputes over slaves. Putting forward his own version of the golden rule, he endeavored to return all sequestered slaves to their patriot owners “in the hope & firm belief that it will produce a similar effect on them by Exerting them to restore the property of the British Subjects.”73 Cruden thus vigilantly policed loyalists from taking away patriot-owned slaves that did not belong to them. He trusted patriots to be equally respectful, in turn, of loyalist property and the freedom of black loyalists. To him there was no contradiction between upholding the rights of slaveowners in one domain and supporting the liberty of free blacks in another: that was what honor was all about.
As the first ships prepared to sail from Charleston in October 1782, Leslie and the patriot governor of South Carolina agreed on terms respecting the exchange of prisoners and the transfer of sequestered property. “All the Slaves, the Property of American Subjects in South Carolina, now in my Power, shall be left here, and restored to their former Owners,” ordered Leslie, “except such Slaves as may have rendered themselves particularly obnoxious by their Attachment and Services to the British Troops, and such as have had specifick Promises of Freedom.” To placate the patriots and “in order to prevent the great Loss of Property, and probably the Ruin of many Families,” he volunteered to pay a fair price for black loyalists whose former owners contested their cases.74 But the enormous numbers of blacks claiming freedom as loyalists made Leslie blanch at the “monstrous expense” that would be involved.75 Instead, Leslie appointed a board of inspectors to interrogate blacks who had “come in under the faith of various Proclamations and promises, in hope of obtaining their freedom,” and judge their veracity.76 American inspectors were given the right to search outbound ships for illicitly removed slaves. Leslie’s handling of this issue provided an important model for the still larger evacuation of blacks that Sir Guy Carleton would soon superintend in New York.
David George and his family were among those whose freedom was confirmed by the board, and numbered among an estimated fifteen hundred free blacks evacuated from Charleston.77 George was impressed to discover that his family, just like the white refugees, was entitled to free passage to other British domains. They sailed on one of the first convoys out of Charleston, at about the beginning of November 1782.78 Though the majority of ships were bound for New York or St. Augustine, the Georges had a more unusual destination. They and their five hundred or so fellow passengers were headed for Nova Scotia, where they would be among the first of thousands of loyalist refugees who flooded into the British North American province in the year ahead.79
Coincidentally, William Johnston may have been one of the officers who cleared George for departure. As one of eleven men appointed to Leslie’s board of inspectors, William spent some of his last days in Charleston hearing out the stories of black women and men who had fled f
rom slavery. Elizabeth Johnston gave birth to the couple’s first daughter, Catherine, in the comfort of a stately sequestered house. Around her in the emptying city, “everything is in motion, and turned topsy-turvy.” “It is impossible to describe what confusion, people of all denominations, seem to be in,” one soldier noted. “The one is buying everything he can to complete his stock of goods, the second is searching for a passage to some other garrison of His Majesty’s troops; the third is going from house to house to collect his debts.”80 Though the Johnstons had no property to handle in Charleston, they also faced fresh choices. William’s regiment was due to ship out to New York City, along with most of the Charleston garrison. Far away and likely facing imminent evacuation itself, New York made little sense as a destination for Elizabeth and the children. This time they decided that she would head for St. Augustine separately and stay with William’s relatives until he could join them there, to establish their first real family home.81
In early December 1782, Elizabeth Johnston stepped into a small boat with her toddler son, infant daughter, and a black nurse, and rowed out into the harbor to board a Florida-bound schooner. It was like cruising into a jigsaw puzzle. Above her loomed the curved wooden walls of a city afloat, dark with slime and tar, the outlines of figures scurrying along decks and rigging, canvas sails stretched on a lattice of masts. Skiffs and rowboats traced ripples across the water, ferrying loyalists and slaves, barrels of food and supplies, furniture and livestock—even the valuable bells of St. Michael’s Church—to the waiting ships.82 More than twelve hundred white loyalists and twenty-six hundred blacks plashed out to join a convoy bound for Jamaica. Another group of two hundred black loyalist soldiers gathered to sail for Saint Lucia. A few hundred individuals, including various government officials, joined a convoy for Britain. Finally, on the afternoon of December 12, the soldiers began assembling on the city wharfs to board the transports for New York. Two days later, the Americans formally reoccupied Charleston, while the Johnstons swayed out to sea in opposite directions: he with the garrison to New York City, she to join the rapidly growing loyalist community in East Florida.83