Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
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provisions for thousands to be located and sent. And this was only half Carleton’s job. Also in New York there were some thirty-five thousand loyalist civilians, almost all of whom, if Savannah and Charleston offered any example, would probably seek to leave. Where would he find the ships to carry them, or rations to feed them? Where would they go and what equipment did they need to get settled? In his New York headquarters Carleton found himself pulled in as many directions as the refugees would travel. He managed a constant stream of entreaties from the disabled and dispossessed. He monitored Indian diplomacy and persisting hinterland violence. He processed requests for aid from Florida, from Jamaica, from Quebec and Nova Scotia. He corresponded with British officials, urging them to adopt generous policies toward the migrants. Yet under these extraordinarily pressured conditions, Carleton and his staff improvised a series of measures that laid the foundations for an Atlantic-wide program of refugee relief.
When the southern evacuations commenced, Carleton had proposed that the British government grant tracts of land to loyalist refugees, free of charges and quitrents, in Nova Scotia, Florida, and other relatively sparsely settled provinces. Some precedent for this could be found in mid-eighteenth-century Nova Scotia, when land confiscated from French Acadians had been redistributed to Anglophone settlers; similar offers of land had also been extended to veterans after the Seven Years’ War, as a good way simultaneously to encourage colonization and provide gainful employment for demobilized soldiers, who were seen as a potential source of social instability. But Carleton’s land-for-loyalists scheme fitted into a larger plan for imperial reconstruction. The loss in America, he felt, had made it “indispensably necessary to establish the most close & cordial connection with the provinces which have preserved their allegiance.” Giving land to loyalists in British North America and elsewhere would ensure that “every man will readily take arms for its defence, & by these means only they can be preserved. Not only quit rents and fees of office of every sort shou’d be dispensed with, but no taxes shou’d be imposed in future by Great Britain.”4 The policy thus had a twofold purpose: it rewarded a population whose loyalty had already been confirmed, while reinforcing loyalty and security elsewhere in the British Empire.
In January 1783, an association of New York loyalists dispatched agents to Nova Scotia to scout out a settlement at a place called Port Roseway, an undeveloped harbor about a hundred miles south of Halifax. Although Nova Scotia governor John Parr had not yet received instructions from London about land grants, he offered to provide the refugees with 400,000 wooden boards to build new houses. The planks would be the beginnings of a veritable loyalist metropolis. Initially about six hundred loyalists had joined the Port Roseway Association intending to emigrate. When their fleet prepared to sail at the end of April 1783, “upwards of seven thousand” people had signed on to go.5 Carleton’s commissary-general, the able London merchant Brook Watson, processed an imposing list of goods for the pioneers: adzes and saws, water buckets and grease buckets, calipers and pincers, cartridges, powder, shot and shell, lanterns, locks, and ladles.6 Ships from Britain set out to meet the settlers, heavy with hatchets and hoes, and all the shingles, “gimblets,” and “wimble bits” they might need.7 As the first New York evacuation fleet sat well-stocked and ready to sail in the harbor before him, Carleton wrote to Governor Parr expressing his pleasure that “we are able to give these deserving people, some refuge, which I trust they will amply repay by that increase of wealth, and commerce and power, which they may give in future to a greatly diminished Empire.”8 A few months later, Carleton learned that British ministers had approved his recommendations about land grants. The key elements of loyalist resettlement—free passage, provisions and supplies, and access to land—were all in place.
Carleton did not mention another, equally significant dimension of the loyalist exodus to Nova Scotia that he worked hard to facilitate: the emigration of black loyalists. While white loyalists had been devastated by Article V of the preliminary peace treaty, it was Article VII—Henry Laurens’s stipulation forbidding Britain from “carrying away any Negroes, or other Property”—that terrified the blacks. News of the peace, remembered Boston King, a former slave from South Carolina, “diffused universal joy among all parties, except us, who had escaped from slavery and taken refuge in the English army; for a report prevailed at New-York, that all the slaves . . . were to be delivered up to their masters.” King had already endured much to “feel the happiness of liberty, of which I knew nothing before.” He had run away to Charleston from a cruel master, and survived the physical ravages of smallpox and the discomforts of military service. Toward the end of 1781 King had made his way to New York, where, unable to find the tools to resume his trade as a carpenter, he moved from master to master in domestic service, struggling just to keep clothes on his back. At least he had his freedom. But King and his peers spent the spring of 1783 haunted by the spectacle of “our old masters coming from Virginia, North-Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” Consumed by “inexpressible anguish and terror,” some black loyalists in New York were too frightened to eat, and “sleep departed from our eyes.”9
It could not have encouraged them to see the handbill posted around New York City on April 15, 1783, reproducing the text of Article VII together with Carleton’s orders that “no Person is permitted to embark as a Refugee, who has not resided Twelve Months within the British Lines, without a special Passport from the Commandant.”10 Three officers were to examine every departing ship for property—that is, people—illicitly removed. Some of the black loyalists had certificates attesting to their military service; but many of them did not. Was this how their runaway journeys would end: with abduction on the streets, or reenslavement at the docks?
But Carleton had insisted during the evacuation of Charleston that slaves promised freedom should have it—and his word held just as firmly now in New York City. He implemented his own version of the commission General Leslie had established in Charleston, to assess the cases of blacks claiming freedom. Every Wednesday from ten till two, members of this committee (made up of four British and three American representatives) sat in Fraunces’s Tavern on Pearl Street to hear out disputes over former slaves. Those cleared by the board received a printed certificate of freedom signed by the commandant of New York, General Samuel Birch. Then at the docks, inspectors entered the names of all departing blacks into a sprawling register, together with their ages, former owners’ names, brief physical descriptions, and notes—ironically enough, much the same information recorded for slave sales. The register, known as the “Book of Negroes,” forms a genuinely exceptional document of exodus; nothing like it exists for the thousands of white loyalist refugees. The reason for such careful bookkeeping was that these migrants were also exceptional compared to whites. They could be considered property as well as people. The volume that recorded the black loyalists’ freedom thus reinscribed their former status as slaves.11
British assurances of freedom held good. But Americans were none too pleased. On a Tuesday morning in early May 1783, Carleton sailed up the Hudson on the aptly named Perseverance toward the broad waters of the Tappan Zee, to hold a conference with George Washington. The commanders had exchanged chilly letters for a full year, but this was their first meeting in the flesh. Sizing each other up on the shore, each man may have been disconcerted to detect a hint of himself in the other: standing roughly eye to eye at about six feet tall, big-nosed and thin-lipped, exuding authority as much by their braided uniform coats and tall boots as by their innate gravitas. The commanders had pressing items of business to discuss, including the ongoing depredations of partisan raiders in the countryside, the exchange of prisoners of war, and the timetable for evacuation. But Washington started off the conference by lecturing Carleton on what, to him, was the most urgent matter of all: the removal of human property from New York. Carleton calmly explained that a fleet had already embarked for Nova Scotia with registered black loyalists on board. “Already imbarked!” exclaimed a