Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
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John Cruden recalled the emotional reaction when the assembled refugees drank to the king’s health: “How he [the king] must have felt had he seen the Company; two of the Gentlemen were so much agitated that they covert their faces with their handkerchiefs, but they could not conceal the Tears that trickled down their Loyal Cheeks.”52 For another young Georgia loyalist, news of the peace was
the severest shock our Feelings have ever had to struggle with. Deserted as we are by our King, banished by our Country, what Recourse is left us in this Combination of Calamities. . . . Heavens! What distress! That men who not only possessed the Necessaries, but all the Luxuries of Life . . . should become Vagrant, & be plunged in the Torrent of Misery & Despair by the Parliament of Britain, who having no further Occasion for their Services, treat them with Contempt and mock their sorrows.
“We are all cast off,” he opined. “I shall ever tho’ remember with satisfaction that it was not I deserted my King, but my King that deserted me.”53
This plaint captured the essence of loyalist anguish. The doors of “our Country,” America, were bolted to them. And now, far worse, their own king had shunned them. After so “many scenes and passages through and during the late war,” one loyalist “could not put any faith” in the news until he “saw the King’s speech” in print: it was only on reading his sovereign’s words, endorsing the peace, that he accepted the reality of this outrageous betrayal.54 The deeply emotional, almost histrionic character of East Florida loyalist outpourings suggests what a profound attachment imperial subjects felt to the figure of the king. They also gave voice to the psychological power of a blow by which thousands of individuals already traumatized by many years of war and migration were forced to move once more. This further displacement carved mental wounds that flared up in years and destinations to come.
White loyalists were not the only Floridians who felt traduced by their sovereign. Talk of East Florida’s cession swirled into Indian country, where Creeks long allied with the British could not believe what they were hearing. Aghast at the news, they held a conference with Governor Tonyn and Thomas Brown, the superintendent of Indian affairs. “We took up the Hatchett for the English at a time we could scarce distinguish our friends from our Foes,” remembered one Creek chief:
The King and his Warriors have told us they would never forsake us. Is the Great King conquered? Or does he mean to abandon Us? Or does he intend to sell his friends as Slaves, or only to give our Lands to his and our Enemies? Do you think we can turn our faces to our Enemies, and ask a favour from them? No. If he has any Land to receive us (We will not turn to our Enemies) but go [to] it with our friends in such ships as he may send for us.
Another chief recalled how he had learned at his father’s knee about his people’s bonds with the British, a connection so deep the two groups intermarried “and became one flesh.” For him, too, a life in exile seemed better than one overshadowed by the United States or Spain: “If the English mean to abandon the Land, we will accompany them. We cannot take a Virginian or Spaniard by the hand. We cannot look them in the face.”55 These protests were reinforced by the new leader of the Creeks, Alexander McGillivray. As his unlikely name suggested, McGillivray was part Scottish: his father was a prominent loyalist Indian trader in Augusta; his mother was half French, half Creek. McGillivray held a position among the Creeks analogous to Joseph Brant among the Mohawks, an Indian leader with strong links to white society, committed to guarding his nation’s interests in the face of white empires.56 “I conceive we have a right to protection & support from the Nation whose cause has drawn the vengeance of an enraged multitude upon us,” he wrote to Brown. The Creeks had fought “from principles of Gratitude & Friendship to the British Nation,” and it was both “cruel & unjust” after eight years of loyal service “to find ourselves & country betrayed to our Enemies & divided between the Spaniards & Americans.”57
Brown, for his part, found it difficult to look his Indian friends in the face: “The situation of our poor unfortunate allies most sensibly affects me. They were ever faithful to me. I never deceived them.” They had fought side by side since the very beginning of the war, and he felt his own personal honor undercut by the decision to abandon them to Spanish rule.58 Brown understood that some chiefs had sworn to resist, and worried that “through rage and disappointment they will wreak their vengeance on the unfortunate unhappy residents in their land.” “However chimerical” it might seem that the Creek “very seriously proposed to abandon their country and accompany us,” there were in fact some precedents for such movements. When the Spanish left Florida in 1763, the Yamassee Indians followed them to Cuba; and now in Canada a Mohawk loyalist settlement was taking shape under British sponsorship. Brown suggested to Carleton that the Creeks “might be conveyed to the Bahamas,” where they could start afresh under British protection.59
But the Creeks were not black loyalists: Carleton did not feel that British promises had been breached with “those deceived Indians as you are all so fond to stile them.” If they wanted to go to the Bahamas, then he would provide the ships to take them, but it would be much better to “dissuade them from a measure destructive of their happiness.”60 Instead, Brown and his colleagues tried to soften relations between the Indians and the Spanish, and preserve Indian goodwill toward Britain as a bulwark against the Americans. On Brown’s urging, Alexander McGillivray accepted a commission in Spanish service, and became a silent partner with the Scottish merchant firm that retained the valuable monopoly on the Florida Indian trade.61 Governor Tonyn prided himself on the thought that “in the Breasts of these unenlightened Savages, there remains deeply rooted, an unextinguishable spark of ardent Love, and faithfull attachment, to the British name; which may rise into a Flame, and be improved to advantage, on some future occasion.”62 How valuable such enduring loyalty might prove remained for later British officials to discover.
For all that East Florida loyalists hoped against hope that something in the treaty might yet be reversed, the eighteen months allotted for their departure were fast vanishing, along with any semblance of civic order. The northern frontier between Florida and Georgia had become a bandit-ridden no-man’s-land, raided by Americans coming south and ravaged by lawless quasi-loyalist gangs. Loyalists lived in fear of attack by disgruntled Indians. “The whole of the People in the Province are in the utmost Confusion, nothing going on but robbing and plundering,” reported one refugee.63 And where on earth were they to go? Tonyn remained “perfectly in the dark” until the spring of 1784 about what the arrangements for evacuation would actually be.64 Tonyn described the loyalists as
quite at a loss how to dispose themselves. The West India Islands are stocked, and it requires a greater capital than in general they are possessed of to form settlements in them....[T]he Bahama Islands are mere rocks, fit only for fishermen, and the Inhabitants live chiefly by wrecking. Nova Scotia is too cold a climate for those who have lived in the southern Colonies, and intirely unfit for an outlet, and comfortable habitation for owners of slaves.65
Dr. Lewis Johnston set off on an exploratory mission to the Bahamas to size up the possibilities for settlement there. Johnston had lived briefly in St. Kitts before his immigration to Georgia, so he had some experience of the West Indies. But the Atlantic archipelago of the Bahamas was quite different. What “they reckon here their best lands,” he reported, were merely “poor sandy soil,” holding little promise for long-term rewards. “My Expectations tho’ by no means sanguine being so cruelly disappointed,”