Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
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On his father’s instructions, William Johnston traveled to Britain (probably with an evacuation fleet from New York) to resume his medical studies in Edinburgh. His departure left Elizabeth emotionally overwrought, brooding alone in her room, spinning anxious fantasies of what might become of him, of them. She scrawled plaintive screeds begging, “May this bitter separation be our last.” William’s half-pay as a loyalist captain would not be enough to support them all in Britain, so Elizabeth and the children continued to depend on his father’s protection. Yet month after month Lewis Johnston remained “still in suspence where his next route will be,” while he tried to sell his slaves in a suddenly glutted market. “Probably if your Father disposes of his Negroes,” Elizabeth wrote to William in early 1784, “he may go to Scotland tho’ I have my fears on that head, as he seems to have an Idea of Jamaica, from the Flattering accounts the Loyalists there give of their large crops of Indigo.” To add to her worries, she was pregnant again—“I have grown lusty in every sense of the word”—and “the uncertain state we are in at present makes me unhappy in the dread of my near Lying in when your Father leaves . . . and I will remain here, rather than go to sea so near my time, in short, we are all distracted not knowing how to resolve.”67
A full ten months after learning about the cession of East Florida, Lewis Johnston at last managed to sell his slaves and made up his mind to move to Scotland. Elizabeth and her children would travel with him. He also sold William’s slaves to Thomas Brown, for £450, with the exception of one, Hagar, whom Elizabeth “kept as a nurse, for the expected stranger who I hope will shortly make its appearance.”68 Her departure for Britain came not a moment too soon. William’s most recent letter had upset her on numerous fronts, beginning with his accusation that she did not write to him often enough. (“Believe me,” she insisted, “I have had you constantly in my mind, and suffered so much anxiety on account of our distressing separation, that tis impossible I could omit a single opp[ortunit]y of writing.”) Nor was his letter sensitive on other points: “I am hurt at your not mentioning the then little invisible, nor your wishing for my safe delivery, as you must have known my situation before you left me.” Worse, far away from his family’s supervision, William had not yet moved on to Edinburgh, but remained unaccountably in “that seducing City” of London, “full of temptations”—specifically the gaming table—“which Americans of your disposition cannot always resist.”69
Boarding the worm-eaten boat at St. Mary’s a few days before her twenty-first birthday, the Elizabeth Johnston who sailed from Florida in May 1784 had matured from the woman who had arrived there fifteen months earlier. This had been a cruel introduction to her career as a refugee: learning to appreciate her new surroundings just in time to discover she must leave them, and then experiencing months of haunting worry and doubt. She carried a different newborn in her arms now—Lewis, born in March—and she had coped as a single parent when her “volatile” eldest son Andrew broke his leg and when Catherine, “the greatest vixen in Florida,” fell dangerously ill. Her own father was as distant as her husband, also in Britain; she had to make do on little money and her in-laws’ support. And she had come to feel separation from her husband as an intolerable strain. Increasingly she worked to “fortify my mind with that strengthener religion (which is the only resource in cases of real distress)”—just as she increasingly dreaded the prospect of moving and being away from William. As she embarked at Florida for her first Atlantic crossing, she little knew how many more voyages and separations there would be to come.70
THE JOHNSTONS were relatively privileged, as refugees went: notably, they were among only a handful of Floridians (about 2 percent) who opted to travel to expensive, far-off Britain, supported by the proceeds of their slave sales.71 The majority of Florida loyalists, including Thomas Brown with his newly purchased slaves, chose to immigrate to the Bahamas despite the negative reports, since at least it was nearby and had available land. “British promises” had “been violated in every instance,” declared one loyalist officer. “Stripped of our property, drove from our homes . . . robbed of the blessing of a free and mild government, betrayed and deserted by our friends,” now they were “thrown on the wide world friendless and unsupported.” One thing he knew: “whenever Great Britain sees it her interest to withdraw her force and protection from us,” then it would. No more promises for him. A few days later the disaffected officer and seven other loyalist families pushed off into the coastal waterways in flatboats, to find new fortunes at Natchez on the Mississippi, altogether beyond British reach.
The deep sense of injustice felt by so many East Florida loyalists is worth listening to not just as an expression of personal distress. It triggered political aftershocks as well. These would later become especially evident in the Bahamas, where doubly displaced refugees arrived harboring a deep sense of betrayal. In East Florida itself, it was enough to push some loyal British subjects to the brink of radical action. “Should England be engaged in another War (as she shortly must be),” warned a Georgia loyalist, “let her not expect that, out of thousands of us Refugees, there will be one who will draw a sword in her Cause.... The People are so exasperated they cannot now endure the Name of an Englishman.” Anger moved him to contemplate nothing short of a coup against the Spanish. “Perhaps the Dons may find themselves deceived in their Expectations of taking Possession of this Country. We have a fine Body of Provincial troops here, equal to any in the World,” he said, and together they could resist. Rumors told of a plot among the loyalist troops to mutiny, arm the slaves, and “put every white Man to Death that opposed them keeping the Country to themselves as they will rather die than be Carried to Hallifax.”72
These particular schemes did not materialize. But in the hands of loyalist visionary John Cruden, similar ideas took on an extraordinary life of their own. As loyalists were leaving Florida in the spring of 1784, Cruden crossed the ocean in reverse, returning from a sojourn in Britain to the land that he loved. The cession of East Florida foiled all of Cruden’s business plans for trade in St. Augustine. He had always been dedicated to the idea of fairness, hence his actions concerning black loyalists and slaves. But what wrongs had now been committed against the white refugees, and “the poor Indians, whom we have cherished . . . and who have been shamelessly deserted.” (Some of whom, “singular as it may appear,” he believed to be “descended from the ancient Britons” and “speak the Welsh language.”)73 He acknowledged that it would no longer be possible to overturn the treaty and keep the Floridas entirely. Yet redress, rewards even, might still be seized. Arriving at the mouth of the St. Mary’s River, Cruden dreamed of a community reborn. A scrap of paper survives to tell of his ambitions. “At a meeting of the Delegates of the Loyalists on the St. Mary’s River,” the fragment reads, “It was unanimously Resolved that in the present State of the Loyalists Mr. Cruden should be Vested with Dictatorial powers, and untill such time as another Mutiny could be held with propriety, that the Loyalists should consider Every act of His as their President binding upon them.” It was signed, “John Cruden, President, United Loyalists.” If Britain wouldn’t give East Florida to loyalists, well then, loyalists could take some of it for themselves. By establishing an independent state for loyalist refugees, Cruden, the newly appointed dictator of St. Mary’s, would strike a blow for justice for his own kind, just as he had always strived to achieve for others.74
East Florida governor Tonyn knew something of what was afoot. Cruden and his friends, Tonyn informed his superiors in Whitehall, had been concocting “plans suggested by their inflamed imaginations, and finally they foolishly hit upon the diabolical design of seizing this government by force and setting themselves in opposition to the Spanish.” To break up the conspiracy, Tonyn hoped to exploit potential rifts between Cruden and the other denizens of the region, the infamous bandits who had been resisting authority for years. By granting Cruden permission to raise a “posse” against the banditti, Tonyn prided himself