Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  The American loyalists who approached the islands three centuries after Columbus belonged to a long line of colonists who hoped the Bahamas might bring heaven-sent rewards. They also reinforced a history of close ties between the Bahamas and continental North America. It was no coincidence that the settlement on Harbor Island, off Eleuthera, strikingly resembled the fishing villages of Massachusetts in architectural style.12 Culturally as well as ecologically, the islands shared more with places like Nantucket or the Outer Banks—or, of course, Bermuda—than with the British West Indian islands of Jamaica or Barbados, with their sugar plantations and giant slave labor forces. By the time of the American Revolution only about seventeen hundred whites and twenty-three hundred blacks (about half of these free) lived on New Providence, Eleuthera, and Harbor Island.13 Some scraped by on scavenging from the wrecks of ships dashed against the treacherous reefs. Others managed to eke out a living from fishing, whaling, catching turtles, and cutting timber. In the islands’ most lucrative business, seasonal workers raked salt from the glistening ponds that slicked and crusted the southernmost islands. These prewar residents would come to be called “conchs,” after the marine snails they ate, tough twists of flesh nestled in rose-lipped shells.14

  While the West Indies represented an economic powerhouse of the eighteenth-century British Empire, the Bahamas remained decidedly marginal to imperial calculations. The poorly defended islands were frequently attacked by Spain, and depended heavily on trade with nearby American ports for subsistence. So it was hardly surprising that Bahamians (like many Nova Scotians) saw the American Revolution primarily in pragmatic terms, as a threat to security and commerce, rather than in ideological ones. The revolution arrived in the Bahamas early one March morning in 1776, in the form of seven American warships off New Providence. When the governor called out the militia to defend Nassau, many of the men had no weapons, while others simply failed to show up. Two cannon fired as an alarm at Fort Nassau ended up falling off their mountings; in Fort Montagu, just east of town, “there was not a Barrel of Powder or length of Match Stuff” available for use.15 On hearing that three to four hundred American soldiers had landed on the beach, the fort’s outnumbered defenders promptly returned to their houses to protect their personal property. The patriots took Nassau without a single shot. Two weeks later they left again, many of them drunk to the point of senselessness on all the captured wine they had guzzled.16

  Despite such farcical scenes, and an apathetically loyal population, the Bahamas would be the site of a signal loyalist victory, in what turned out to be the very last action of the war. In 1782, Spain formally conquered the Bahamas. Loyalist refugees in nearby East Florida grew restive at the proximity of this Spanish occupying force. One impatient South Carolina loyalist called Andrew Deveaux decided to take matters into his own hands. Believing that “we have everything to fear, and nothing to expect from the British Empire, but what springs from our own … generous exertions,” Deveaux began “beating up for volunteers to go to take New Providence.”17 Approaching Nassau, Deveaux skillfully masked the paltry size of his “handful of ragged Militia”—perhaps seventy men in all—by sailing back and forth to his ships and appearing to land fresh boatloads of troops each time.18 The Spanish defenders felt sufficiently threatened that they abandoned Fort Montagu without a fight (as the Bahamians had done in 1776). On April 18, 1783, Deveaux raised the British flag over Nassau.19

  Deveaux’s capture of the Bahamas was a proud testament to loyalist entrepreneurship, and underscored the contrapuntal relationship between the islands and the mainland. The only problem was that he was too late.20 Not only had hostilities in North America formally ended four weeks earlier, but under the terms of the preliminary peace treaty signed in January 1783, Spain had already agreed to return the Bahamas to Britain. The loyalists were fighting for something that had already been won. The main effect of the adventure was to provide some positive distraction for refugees in East Florida reeling from the shocking news of the province’s cession.21

  The exploit also helped direct attention to the Bahamas as a location for loyalist resettlement.22 The Bahamas had not initially appealed to Florida-based refugees. The only loyalist settlement thus far had been pioneered by a group of about fifteen hundred New Yorkers who moved to Abaco, one of the northern islands, in the summer of 1783.23 To most refugees, the Bahamas seemed little more than “barren Rock[s].”24 Dr. Lewis Johnston confirmed this negative impression when he made his investigative mission from St. Augustine in the summer of 1783. He quickly saw why Bahamians had not bothered to develop agriculture on the out-islands, “and never visit them with any other View than wrecking Turtling and cutting Timber.”25 The soil quality was far too poor to establish sugar plantations as in the West Indies, or to cultivate rice and tobacco as in the American south. Yet many of the Florida refugees, Johnston included, had one overriding objective. They needed to find a place where they could put their slaves to work. For all that the Bahamas may have seemed unpromising for settlement, Nova Scotia made even less sense, with a “climate … not being calculated for Southern Constitutions, or for the employment of the Slaves.” Jamaica and Barbados were already crowded, with very little land available. The Bahamas had the advantage of being “nearly in the same Latitude” as Georgia and South Carolina, “very thinly Inhabitated, and but little Cultivated.”26 Caught between a “barren rock” and the hard place of Nova Scotia, the majority of Florida refugees chose the rock.

  In late 1783, the British government decided to buy out the islands’ hereditary proprietors, and—as in British North America—offer loyalists “Tracts of Land … (gratis) proportioned to their former situation, and ability to cultivate them.”27 This was the first of several parallels between the experience of the Bahamas refugees and that of their peers in the Maritimes. Next came the arrivals. Bahamas governor John Maxwell, like Governor Parr in Nova Scotia, suddenly found himself coping with the makings of a refugee crisis.28 By the middle of 1784, transports from Florida were disgorging refugees and slaves onto New Providence by the hundreds. “They are sitting themselves down, where they can; and without order,” reported Maxwell, “as I unfortunately do not know, whether the Purchase of the Soil has been made by Government.”29 Many stayed in more or less rudimentary conditions around Nassau; others migrated to the dry, empty out-islands, to tear back the scrub and try their luck at planting. All told, more than six thousand loyalists and their slaves arrived in the Bahamas, doubling the prewar population and raising the ratio of black to white inhabitants from a little more than one to one to two to one.30

  For all that the Bahamian climate was more forgiving than that of Nova Scotia, the undeveloped islands had little to offer destitute arrivals. By the spring of 1785 there was such a shortage of food that officials urged East Florida governor Patrick Tonyn to stop sending any more refugees.31 (When John Cruden, plotting his coup against the Spanish takeover of Florida, had asked the Bahamas governor for provisions, he was put off with a sharp reminder that “the Provisions remaining are for those Loyalists, who are expected here.”)32 The islands remained so dependent on imports that the wreck of a single British supply ship off Nassau was enough to push the hungry refugees to the brink of famine.33 Nor was there sufficient housing available to accommodate them. Despite being the largest town in the islands, Nassau had “but one tolerably regular street,” lined with simple wood houses. A visiting German naturalist discovered all the buildings “filled with refugees excaped from North America.” He could only locate lodgings for himself in a “quite barn-like” dwelling outside of town; many refugees still lived in tents.34

  On Abaco, where the New York loyalists settled, the situation was not much better. They laid out a town—named Carleton after their benefactor Sir Guy—and entertained high hopes for a place praised in the New York press for its potential to be the next big plantation economy. But they soon discovered the country to be “not … so fertile as had been expected,” and that it wou
ld be “impossible for them to clear the Land, Plant it, and Reap the Fruits of their Labour Sooner than Twelve or Fourteen months.”35 As in the other Carleton, on the Saint John River, dearth fueled dispute. They “had been but few days on shore,” reported one official, “when dissention got among them, which by degrees rose to such a height, they were on the point of taking arms against each other.” Hopelessly divided by a fight over food distribution, some of the Carleton settlers split off to found a rival town at Marsh’s Harbour.36

  “It will be a difficult Task, I imagine, to please so dissatisfied a People,” Governor Maxwell anticipated.37 That was an understatement. The troubles on Abaco foreshadowed what turned out to be the most significant resemblance between loyalist societies in the Bahamas and British North America: conflict between disgruntled refugees and the officials responsible for helping them. Echoing their peers in the north, the newly arrived Florida refugees promptly began complaining about provisions, land allocation, and political representation. And like Governors Parr and Thomas Carleton before him, Maxwell became a focal point of loyalist rage.

  It all started with the food. The distribution of rations, like the distribution of land, was a perennial source of tension between refugees and government across the diaspora. But in the Bahamas, the issue took on a special twist, due to the islands’ proximity to the United States. Responding to a petition from refugees complaining about food supply problems, Maxwell suspended an order in council against trade with the United States, thus allowing American ships to bring desperately needed provisions into Nassau.38 Little did he anticipate the loyalist response. “This, in their Opinion, is a monstrous offence,” Maxwell discovered. Some refugees were so angered by the sight of U.S. ships in the harbor that they tried to tear the stars and stripes down from the masts.39 Maxwell condemned such behavior as “contrary to the peace of our Lord the King and in open violation of all public Order and decorum,” and issued a proclamation “strictly commanding and enjoyning all His Majesty’s Leige Subjects, to refrain from such dishonourable and illegal practices.”40 “I have often been called upon, when I commanded a Regiment, to prevent Riots when Bread was scarce, but that was before I had to do with Loyalists,” he mused. “Who would have thought, that giving them Bread cheap would, at the same Time, give them offence?”41

  Within a day or two of these incidents, somebody strolling down Nassau’s Bay Street would have spotted curious handbills pasted up. They had almost certainly been printed on the press belonging to the Wells family from Charleston, which John Wells had recently brought with him from St. Augustine and now used to publish the Bahamas’ first newspaper, the Royal Bahama Gazette.42 The handbill made a “proclamation” of its own, satirizing Maxwell’s, and pretending to be in his voice:

  Whereas I have in Violation and direct Opposition to the Order of His Majesty in Council permitted sundry Vessels the property of Rebels to enter and dispose of their Cargoes in this Island. And Whereas some of those people called Refugees or a name equally hatefull to me Loyalists have … showen [sic] their dislike to this part of my Conduct … I do hereby declare, that … I shall … mark such loyal and dutifull Conduct to His Majesty (while it is so opposite to my Interest) with my highest displeasure.43

  Maxwell’s loyalist enemies were convinced that the governor favored the prewar “conch” inhabitants over the needy newcomers. They accused him of opening the port to American ships not so as to help them, but to benefit himself and his conch friends financially. For how could it possibly help them to admit the very Americans who, in their eyes, had chased them into exile?

  Maxwell lost no time branding his enemies in turn. His ideal society, not unlike that espoused by his fellow Anglo-Irishmen the Carletons, rested on authority, hierarchy, and an agrarian economy. “When I mention the Word, Loyalists, in General Terms,” he took care to note, “I always mean to except out of their general bad Behaviour many among them, who are quiet & orderly.”44 He especially admired the refugee planters “who have set themselves down on the out-Islands with large Families and ten, twenty or one Hundred Slaves.” It was the urban professionals—merchants, printers, lawyers—who caused all the trouble, and the East Florida refugees especially. (He thought they received tacit backing from Governor Tonyn, who coveted the Bahamas governorship for himself.)45 “They are the most tormenting, dissatisfied People on Earth,” Maxwell despaired.46 “If I am to judge from what I have at present (a very few excepted) they are the Scum & Refuse of our unfortunate Army,” and “if the Remainder, that intend coming here, are of the same Sort, Civil Government is in Danger.”47 The only way to deal with such people, Maxwell concluded, was to suppress them with a show of military force. The trouble was, he had no force to show: British troops assigned to garrison the islands were still in Florida and would not arrive for several months yet.

  On a late July day in 1784, another handbill appeared in Nassau. “The peculiar Situation of the LOYAL REFUGEES, now in the Bahama Islands,” it read, required “their steady and united Exertions to preserve and maintain those Rights and Liberties, for which they left their Homes and their Possessions.” The document announced a “General Meeting of the Loyalists from the Continent of North-America” to discuss loyalist concerns. The list of fifteen signatures at the bottom instantly confirmed Maxwell’s prejudices. They included three lawyers, a doctor, several merchants, and a few wealthy planters, and they had all come via St. Augustine. The president of the group, James Hepburn, had been attorney general of East Florida and an anti-Maxwell agitator from the moment he arrived. The printer John Wells was another signatory, here appearing to act out his newspaper’s motto, “not bound by any masters.”48 The meeting was to be hosted by none other than Lewis Johnston Jr., Dr. Lewis Johnston’s son and William Johnston’s brother, who may have been primed for dissatisfaction with the Bahamas by his father’s negative reports.49

  Through the summer of 1785, loyalist grievances snapped like water drops on a hot skillet. Hepburn and two other lawyers, believing that they were unjustly excluded from practicing law, stormed into the courthouse and assailed the chief justice with such “a Torrent of Billingsgate Language” that proceedings had to be adjourned. The court remained suspended for several months while tempers cooled.50 On another occasion, Hepburn showed up at Governor Maxwell’s house and accused the governor of so betraying his duty that his authority had become meaningless. Maxwell, equally quick with extremist language, retorted that “if this Conduct is not a very high Misdemeanor, not to say, Treason, I don’t know what is.”51 Meanwhile, Maxwell juggled complaints about land allocation, on the one hand trying to honor the prior claims of prewar settlers, on the other placating loyalists who, “Where they see a vacant Spot, say, they must have it, and will have it: it is ‘promised to them’ that is their Language.”52

  And then there were the riots. One Sunday morning, loyalist agitators stood outside the church with “Drums beating the Rogue’s March, so as to drive the people out of the Church.” Occupying the premises, they “amused themselves” in the dead of night “with Ringing the Bell, as if the Town had been on Fire.”53 Such disruptions continued for weeks, invariably originating “from the Houses and Tents of the Loyalists.”54 In a scene that could have unfolded in revolutionary America, a mob of “both White and Black Men armed” appeared one night at the gates of the chief justice’s house, shouting “Fire” and threatening to shoot the inhabitants.55 Yet with the courts suspended and no troops at his disposal, Maxwell was effectively powerless to retaliate—an authoritarian lacking the necessary instruments of authority.56

  The protestors won a victory of sorts: Maxwell was recalled from his position and sailed home with evident relief in the spring of 1785. His successor as acting governor was James Edward Powell, a genial man “far advanced in his dotage,” and himself a loyalist refugee from Georgia.57 Powell hoped that now “tranquility and mutual confidence would take place of Rancour and resentment.”58 But Maxwell had already, before leaving, set
in motion the greatest controversy yet between loyalists and government. In late 1784 he dissolved the house of assembly and called an election for a reconstituted house, with eleven new representatives for the recently settled out-islands. Among the freshly elected members taking their seats in February 1785 were the notorious James Hepburn and a number of his discontented loyalist friends.

  In his first speech to the assembly, Governor Powell promised to “have no retrospect to whats past, But hope that Harmony and mutual confidence may be restored in future.” No sooner had he finished his remarks than Hepburn leapt up to present a clutch of petitions from his associates. Each petitioner claimed he had been elected to the assembly by a handsome majority, only for the provost marshall “falsely, wickedly, and illegally” to install a rival candidate (representing the conchs) in his stead. Hepburn and six other members stomped out of the chamber in protest, “without leave of the Speaker, in a very abrupt manner.”59 Summoned to appear before the house and give their reasons for withdrawing, Hepburn and his friends refused, saying they “did not chuse to attend the House while there were persons in it illegally chosen.” In retaliation, the sitting members ordered that the loyalist protests be “burned by the hands of the Common hangman as a most wicked false and scandalous reflection upon the authority and dignity of this House.” The next day, in a graphic performance of the power of the state, the public executioner ignited the offending documents in front of the courthouse.60