Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
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and the colorful presence of Minorcans and other Mediterranean islanders who had been recruited a decade earlier as laborers for the settlement of New Smyrna, farther south. Now and then she glimpsed the exotic wife of Andrew Turnbull, the entrepreneur behind that scheme, a “lady of Smyrna, who always retained the costume of her country, a majestic, noble-looking woman.” Johnston enjoyed promenades along the broad, pointed ramparts ringing the city, the breeze slapping against her skirts. And what a pleasure it was, after the supply shortages of wartime Savannah and Charleston, to feast on fish caught fresh from the sea! “I never was in better health and indeed never was so fleshy as during my . . . residence there,” she later remembered. Best of all, William got leave for a brief visit from New York, and they could plan their future face-to-face.37
By the start of 1783, twelve thousand loyalists and slaves had settled in East Florida.38 Although the governor, Patrick Tonyn, struggled to support so many refugees “without provisions, money, cloathing, or implements of agriculture, and in the most deplorable circumstances,” he welcomed their arrival as the commencement of “a happy Era to this province.”39 Tonyn glowingly forecasted the expansion of his realm to the south and north, augmenting the growing communities on the St. John’s and St. Mary’s rivers. Britain had acquired the territory from Spain at the end of the Seven Years’ War, and it had been rapidly carved up in a speculative frenzy with a few hundred British landlords, many of them aristocrats and grandees, claiming more than 2.8 million acres among them. The peace commissioner, Richard Oswald, secured a grant for twenty thousand acres. Governor Tonyn’s “dear friend” Henry Strachey, the deputy British peace commissioner, owned ten thousand acres, while Tonyn himself bagged another twenty thousand.40 But few landlords had actually settled their lands (Strachey and Tonyn were exceptions), leaving the province’s potential largely untapped.
The vast claims already staked on East Florida’s most attractive land was surely one reason wealthy new colonists like Dr. Lewis Johnston, Elizabeth Johnston’s father-in-law, were “much dissatisfied” on first arriving in the province; other fertile prospects lay still less accessibly in Indian country.41 Another cause for dissatisfaction may have been the knowledge that so few British plantations had met with any success. New Smyrna presented a frightful spectacle of how things could go wrong. This palmetto-fringed eden became a latter-day heart of darkness. Malaria and malnutrition killed off colonists by the hundreds, while its founder, Andrew Turnbull, turned slave driver, enforcing a deadly labor regime by whips and chains.
Yet even as New Smyrna failed—its survivors had all withdrawn to St. Augustine by 1777—the rewards of colonization in East Florida seemed closer than ever.42 Governor Tonyn knew that the influx of loyalist and slave workers might be just what the province needed to tip over into prosperity. To cater to loyalists’ demands for land he devised a scheme to escheat smaller plots from within large grants. Thomas Brown, a member (with Dr. Johnston) of Tonyn’s governing council, settled many of his old soldiers around the St. John’s River—and earned ten tracts in the region for himself amounting to 100,000 acres, dwarfing the fifty-six hundred acres he had lost in Augusta.43 While rich loyalists hired out their slaves for money, poorer settlers built themselves thatched huts and log cabins and got to work girdling trees and clearing ground for corn and rice.44 St. Augustine took on cosmopolitan trappings such as Tonyn had not enjoyed in a decade of living there, thanks to refugees like the entrepreneurial South Carolina printer William Charles Wells. Wells had dismantled his family’s printing press in Charleston (used to print Charleston’s leading prewar newspaper) and brought it with him to St. Augustine. There he successfully reassembled it—thanks to invaluable diagrams in a book called The Printer’s Grammar and “the assistance of a common negro carpenter”—to publish Florida’s first newspaper in early 1783. In his spare time, Wells managed and acted in a troupe of theatrically minded army officers, who staged amateur productions “for the benefit of the distressed Refugees.”45
Could it be that loyalists would achieve in East Florida what two decades of imaginative British colonization efforts had not: making profitable plantations out of subtropical swamps, flourishing towns from struggling outposts? Tonyn certainly hoped so, as one of many officials who embraced this refugee crisis as an opportunity for colonial expansion. John Cruden, the onetime commissioner for sequestered estates in Charleston, was another. Now a displaced refugee in Florida, Cruden enthusiastically shared Tonyn’s visions for East Florida’s future. The difference was that Cruden’s enthusiasm had begun to border on mania. Still committed to his mandate as commissioner, he made a point of tracking down slaves whom loyalists had illegally removed from South Carolina. March 1783 found him on the Caribbean island of Tortola, well known as a clearinghouse for slaves, where he discovered that “many Negroes the property of the inhabitants of the Southern Provinces, have been offered for sale, and by people who have no right to dispose of them.”46 From Tortola he returned to St. Augustine but found his efforts to retrieve sequestered slaves thwarted by obstructions from the governor and council.47 Governor Tonyn did not understand Cruden’s passion to restore property to patriots who, in Tonyn’s view, had done loyalists such wrong. Equally important, the land speculator in Tonyn, “whose chief study is to inrich himself at the Expence of many,” had no desire to compromise his province’s invaluable labor force.48 By May, Cruden was in New York seeking Carleton’s support instead. In June he proceeded on to London to solicit the endorsement of government ministers.49
This cause might seem an odd preoccupation for an ardent loyalist—and, judging from his writings, a quasi-abolitionist too—but it was in keeping with both Cruden’s sense of justice and his personal ambitions. His transatlantic peregrinations undoubtedly involved genuine outrage at the capture of so many slaves by loyalists who had never legally owned them. They also reflected an aggressive desire for self-advancement and official recognition. Cruden stands out as an example of how adverse circumstances encouraged some refugees to think up creative alternatives, even when those involved unusual alliances and causes.50 However peace turned out, Cruden could see some way for himself and his fellow loyalists to profit from it. His ideas would only grow more grandiose with time.
In the event, in April 1783 the news of the peace treaty hit East Florida loyalists like a hurricane. Article V of the peace with the United States, which neutered the possibility of receiving compensation from the states, paled for them next to Article V of Britain’s peace treaty with Spain and France, by which Britain agreed to cede East and West Florida to Spain, with no strings attached. It had seemed like a reasonable arrangement to British diplomats, who were more committed to keeping the strategically valuable Gibraltar than the economically disappointing Floridas. But the treaty yanked the ground from beneath the refugees’ feet. They had already undergone the ordeal of leaving their homes under duress, often more than once, and accepted the challenge of starting over in an underdeveloped land. Now even this hard-won asylum was denied them—and by their own government at that. Unless loyalists were prepared to swear allegiance to the king of Spain and practice Catholicism, they had eighteen months to gather up their possessions and go.
“The war never occasioned half the distress, which this peace has done to the unfortunate Loyalists,” Elizabeth Johnston wrote, “no other provision made than just recommending them to the clemency of Congress, which is in fact casting them off altogether.” Her father-in-law Lewis became “unwell both in body and mind as he lets this news of a peace prey too much on his spirits but how can it be avoided, with such a Family, and such prospects enough to distract him.”