Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

During and after the Revolutionary War, Jamaica was Britain’s most profitable colony, the center of British sugar production. It was also fervently loyalist, narrowly saved from French attack in the 1782 naval conflict called the Battle of the Saintes. Jamaica offered American loyalist refugees tax relief but, except the failed St. Elizabeth morass project along the Black River, canceled when experts deemed the swamp impossible to drain, did not offer loyalists land.

American loyalist enslavers, thinking Jamaica a place of refuge due to the portable nature of the enslaved as property, found the labor market saturated. Loyalist refugees with scarcer skills fared better. Former South Carolinians Alexander Aikman (1755-1838) and his wife, Louisa Wells Aikman (1755-1831), prospered in the newspaper business, as John Wells had in the Bahamas.

Beautiful to newcomers, Jamaica was a dangerous place because “diseases such as yellow fever and malaria led to mortality rates among whites as high as one in eight” (250). For Elizabeth Johnston, this suggested her family would thrive, as her husband, William Johnston (circa 1754-1806), was a doctor. However, diseases killed three of her children before the family relocated to Nova Scotia.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, Jamaica had a population of 18,000 white settlers and 210,000 enslaved people. The loyalist exodus added 3,000 white refugees and 8,000 enslaved people. White Jamaicans feared revolts from those they had enslaved, remembering the notorious uprising known as Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760. White Jamaicans oppressed the majority Black population with restrictive laws and routine violence. Plantation overseer Thomas Thistlewood (1721-1786) left a “dispassionate record of Jamaica’s everyday sadism” (249) in his diaries, a valuable primary resource for historians.

George Liele worked off the debt he owed for purchasing his family’s freedom, ending his indentured servitude. Liele became an influential Baptist preacher, spreading the American religion throughout Jamaica. Although the loyalist preacher always spoke in favor of the crown and state, authorities arrested him on suspicion of treason, acquitted him, but reimprisoned him for debt owed on the church he built. Once released, Liele ended his public career, but the Baptist faith flourished.

In postwar Jamaica, with the constant presence of death, religion offered a sense of security. Elizabeth Johnston, for instance, found comfort in the Baptist faith. Maria Nugent (1771-1834), daughter of loyalist general Cortlandt Skinner (1727-1799) and wife of Jamaican governor George Nugent (1757-1849), considered religion a source of happiness. Maria Nugent’s diaries hold immense value for historians. 

Black loyalists in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were even less likely than their white counterparts to receive adequate land grants. Frustrated by the situation, formerly enslaved North Carolinian Thomas Peters (1738-1792) heard news about a new colony of free Black settlers in Sierra Leone, “the first ‘back to Africa’ project in modern history” (285). Peters traveled to England where he met with key abolitionists, including Granville Sharp (1735-1813), who sent John Clarkson (1764-1828) to Canada to recruit Black settlers. Clarkson’s journals remain helpful for historians.

In Nova Scotia, Clarkson met with Governor John Parr (1725-1791), who showed disinterest, and Stephen Skinner (1725-1808), a loyalist from New Jersey, who initially resisted the Sierra Leone plan. Nonetheless, approximately 1,700 people—a third of the Black loyalist refugees in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—agreed to join the new African settlement in Freetown. Settlers included Baptist preacher David George and Methodist preachers Boston King and Moses Wilkinson.

Under the threat of disease, attacks by wild animals, and lack of land allotments and supplies, the new Freetown community grew frustrated soon after landing in Africa. Thomas Peters argued that Clarkson failed the people he led to Sierra Leone, but Clarkson managed to win back popular opinion. Freetown residents sorely missed Clarkson when he left for Britain in 1792. His successors were less popular, especially Zachary Macaulay (1768-1838), who took charge of Freetown in 1794. Macaulay failed to protect the Sierra Leone settlement from looting and destruction by French naval forces in 1794, after Britain and France once again went to war in 1793. Freetown settlers also grew angry about taxes levied on their properties, as the taxation contradicted prior promises.

Amidst this tension, Freetown hosted an unexpected visitor. William Augustus Bowles, transferred from Spanish to French custody, jumped ship off the coast of Africa and escaped, reentering the British Empire at Freetown in 1798.

Political stress continued. In 1799, Freetown elections brought Macaulay’s rivals into local government. Macaulay left for Britain. Black loyalists asserted the right to appoint their own judges and set their own laws, steps that led to conflict with British authorities in 1800. This was the “largest armed challenge to imperial authority” in the loyalist diaspora (304). Contextualized by the French Revolution, which culminated in 1799, this uprising seemed a serious threat to British authority, but British troops quickly defeated the Freetown rebels. 

This chapter explores the movements of Beverley Robinson’s relatives to indicate the increasingly sprawling nature of the British Empire and the degree to which American loyalists found their lives connected to its expansion.

The 1794 Jay Treaty, named for John Jay, normalized trade relations between Britain and the United States. Britain agreed to give up its western forts along the Great Lakes, sapping British support for Joseph Brant and dooming his project to establish an independent Native community. William Augustus Bowles returned from Sierra Leone to the American South in 1795 and reattempted to form the Native community of Muskogee. Betrayed to the Spanish, Bowles died a prisoner in Cuba.

After the Jay Treaty expired—and partly due to British conscription of American sailors, British fear of American imperial aspirations, and British insistence that the United States avoid trade with France—President James Madison (1751-1836) began the War of 1812. American forces looted and burned York in Upper Canada in 1813. The British retaliated, burning Washington in 1814. The war officially ended with the Treaty of Ghent in early 1815, but Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) dealt one last blow to the British at the Battle of New Orleans before news of peace arrived. The War of 1812 created new tensions and allegiances among Native proxy forces, a sense of loyalist pride in Canada, and curtailed British imperial ambitions in North America.

British imperial attention turned east. By 1815, India was “the largest, most economically valuable, and strategically significant domain” in the British Empire (335).

David Ochterlony (1758-1825), born in Massachusetts, joined the British military in 1777 and deployed to India, while his family in America supported the loyalist cause. He chose to stay in India, living an opulent lifestyle far removed from his New England roots. William Gardner (1770-1835), from a loyalist New York family, went to India with the British army in 1790. Gardner married a Muslim Indian woman and wrote an autobiography of his unusual life on the subcontinent. Benedict Arnold sent his children to India starting in 1799, and his son George Arnold (1787-1828) fathered a half-Indian daughter. George Nugent transferred from Jamaica to serve as commander in chief of India in 1811, and Maria Nugent continued to produce valuable journals.