Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
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us in blood.”75 He assured his Spanish counterpart, Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes, that “the Government of Spain, have nothing to fear from Mr. Cruden”; all his talk was just the British habit of free speech at work. But it must have given Tonyn some secret pleasure to know that the Spanish would inherit a domain shot through by the continuing consequences of loyalist discontent, turmoil on the borders, and an Indian population inclined toward the British. And even he had not adequately gauged the extent of Cruden’s schemes.
On July 12, 1784, the Spanish flag rose over the Castillo de San Marcos to volleys of musket fire and cannon salutes; the Minorcan community’s priest held a mass and a full Te Deum was sung, “all of which was experienced with complete happiness by ourselves,” reported Zéspedes, “and with applause by the new Catholic subjects.” (Approximately five hundred of East Florida’s pre-revolutionary population of Mediterranean-born colonists decided to remain under Spanish rule.) The transfer of power was formally complete. But “in the swamps and thickets” around the rivers in the north, Cruden and his “desperadoes” worked to build an independent loyalist state.76 “There are twelve hundred men embodied between the St. Mary & St. John’s Rivers in Florida,” Cruden’s younger brother James reported to the British ambassador in Vienna, and another twelve hundred in Nassau and Natchez, “all of whom are in perfect readiness to cooperate in the prosecution of his purpose.” “Agents are dispatched into the Indian Country,” he explained. “Commissioners are appointed to associate the Loyalists, who have resorted to Nova Scotia... proper persons are sent to Charles-Town, and Philadelphia, to sound the disposition of the Continental Officers; from these arrangements, added to the anarchy that prevails universally throughout the Continent, the most sanguine hopes of success are entertained.77 “America shall yet be ours,” swore John Cruden, “but the House of Brunswick do not deserve the sovereignty of it.”78 It was time to turn to Spain.
In all the thousands of petitions produced by loyalist refugees, perhaps none conveys more clearly the sheer desperation loyalists felt after defeat and perceived betrayal by Britain as the appeal that John Cruden addressed to King Carlos III of Spain in October 1784:
Abandoned by that Sovereign for whose cause we have sacrificed Every thing that is dear in life and deserted by that Country for which We fought and many of us freely bled . . . We. . . are Reduced to the dreadful alternative of returning to our Homes, to receive insult worse than Death to Men of Spirit, or to run the hazzard of being Murdered in Cold blood, to Go to the inhospitable Regions of Nova Scotia or take refuge on the Barren Rocks of the Bahamas where poverty and wretchedness stares us in the face Or do what our Spirit can not brook (pardon Sire the freedom) renounce our Country, Drug [sic] the Religion of our Fathers and become your Subjects.
Cruden went on to entreat the Spanish king to grant loyalists “the Jurisdiction and the sole discretion of the internal Government” for the area between the St. John’s and the St. Mary’s rivers, in exchange “for which we will gladly pay a reasonable Tribute to Your Majesty and Acknowledge You as Lord of the Soil,” defending the province “against Every power but our Mother Country.”79
For Cruden’s greatest quarrel was not with Spain, or even with Britain, but with the United States and the republican patriots who had wrecked his world. He barraged Spanish authorities with letters assuring them of his benign intentions; he had styled himself dictator merely “to prevent Your Government from having any apprehension at frequent Meetings, Customary as you know to us, but not so in the Dominions of Spain.”80 At the helm of his proposed loyalist state, Cruden promised to resist an enemy common to Britain, Spain, and American loyalists alike: republicanism. The reason his brother James was in Vienna was to woo the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II to this imperial coalition. (“He hates Republicans,” Cruden noted.) “However much you might be disposed to consider my plan Visionary and too Extensive,” Cruden told the Spanish, “it is not impossible that such a grand wish may be laid as may pave the way for a happy, cordial, and lasting Union between Britain and Spain.” Together, American loyalists and the empires of Europe could vanquish the upstart republican United States and restore the power of crowns.81
Zéspedes had no fewer illusions than Tonyn about Cruden’s “abounding fanaticism”: “I regard him as a mere visionary,” he said, and his only worry was that Cruden’s ideas “will perhaps have a great influence on the large number of impoverished and desperate exiles from the United States, who find no means of subsistence in the Bahama Islands.” When Cruden wanted to go to Nova Scotia in 1785 to muster further support, Zéspedes was only too happy to give him a passport just “to be forever rid of him.”82 The Spaniard must have been irked when he continued to receive letters from “this restless soul” not from far-off Canada but from the Bahamas, just a few dozen miles offshore. From his new perch Cruden continued to transmit his schemes to correspondents west and east, informing Lord North, for instance, that “with but a very little help, I will D. V. not only bring Hence the lost sheep, but open the Gates of Mexico to my Country.”83
John Cruden would never return to Florida, and fewer and fewer people credited his talk. Yet for two reasons it would be unfair to write off his plans as meaningless ravings. First, Cruden’s far-out ideas emerged from a set of destabilizing experiences shared by thousands of other loyalists, and suggested how the revolution had the ability, however paradoxically, to radicalize loyalist politics. The British evacuations really had inverted loyalists’ worlds: cast out from their homes, then cast out again from their haven, it was little wonder that some grasped for extreme alternatives. Personal trauma intensified a sense of political grievance. The second reason to take Cruden’s plans seriously was that his contemporaries did too. High-ranking British officials read his letters, while Zéspedes came to believe that Governor Tonyn personally had some hand in the plot.84 This attested to a deep skepticism among European powers about the territorial integrity of the United States. If the United States fell apart, as many people expected it would, Britain, France, and Spain all wanted to scoop up the fragments. What Cruden essayed in Florida was just the first in a series of British projects to assert control in this region. Soon Cruden’s shoes would be filled by a Maryland loyalist called William Augustus Bowles, who solicited British support for another loyal independent state, to be peopled primarily by the Creeks. And within less than a decade, Cruden’s suggestion of an imperial coalition against republicanism would become real when the French Revolutionary wars brought Britain and Spain together as allies against the French republic.
Throughout 1784 loyalists and slaves migrated out of East Florida on flatboats, in ships, and through back ways in the wilderness. An official estimate counted 3,398 whites and 6,540 blacks leaving East Florida for other British domains. A further five thousand were “imagined to have gone over the Mountains to the States &c.,” where most of them disappear from historical view.85 Governor Tonyn’s own drawn-out departure played out in miniature the strains and reluctance with which the evacuations had taken place. The eighteen months allotted for withdrawal by the treaty expired in March 1785, at which time Tonyn expected that “this arduous and vexatious business, will be fully and completely accomplished in the course of a few weeks.” But he required (and received) a four-month extension actually to finish the work, and it was only in August 1785 that he could report, from on board the Cyrus at the port of St. Mary’s, that “I have discharged my mind of a heavy burden, by the dismission of the last division of Evacuists.” Tonyn continued impatiently to wait to “emerge, out of this most disagreeable situation” and sail for England. And then, it was as if Florida itself held him back. On September 11, 1785, the wind picked up enough to carry the Cyrus over the first sandbar, then shifted direction suddenly, dashing