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Chapter Three

A New World Disorder

ON MARCH 25, 1783, American newspapers published the preliminary articles of peace among the belligerent powers. Patriots tolled bells, raised toasts, and set off fireworks to celebrate the formal end of an eight-year war. To the forty to fifty thousand loyalists remaining under British protection in New York City and East Florida, however, the news might as well have been printed on black-edged paper, as death announcements usually were. The thirteen British colonies were no more. And on what terms! Even the British home secretary must have realized how much he was asking when he urged Sir Guy Carleton to “use every conciliatory Effort in your power to obtain the full Effect of the 5th Article”—Benjamin Franklin’s noncommittal nod toward property compensation—“whereby so much was necessarily trusted to the good Faith of the Congress.”¹ Entrusted to faith indeed. The war was over, U.S. independence granted, and now no compensation guaranteed for loyalists at all—Article V of the peace would go down in infamy among loyalists as the greatest betrayal of their interests yet. And loyalists in East Florida would face still worse news when they learned that Britain had agreed to hand their haven over to Spain. Yet to whom else but the British government could these loyalists turn for help? Such was the climate of frustration in which the last and largest British evacuations took place, from New York City and East Florida.

Carleton himself had always resented that the peace negotiations took place in Paris, not in New York—and, by extension, that he had been prevented from playing a major role in them. In New York he had become fast friends with leading loyalists who embraced him as a guardian of their interests. Carleton formed an especially close connection with William Smith, and had long shared Smith’s hopes for some kind of imperial federation with America. Right up to the eve of peace, he told Smith he was “convinced that the Reunion is at our Command, and that if there is a Rent of the Empire it will be our own Folly.”² He felt the treaty to be almost a personal blow, and was “much affected by the dishonorable Terms” respecting loyalists. Adding insult to injury, the feeble provisions now placed on his shoulders the burden of trying, as Whitehall instructed him, to refresh “Harmony and Union between the Two Countries.” He had resisted American independence in the first place; now he had to use his “judgment” and “humanity . . . to effect the conciliation of Individuals, and a cordial oblivion of all personal Injuries committed, or supposed to have been committed on either Side.”³ But all those years in Quebec had taught Carleton much about colonial governance, and out of the wreckage of this civil war he envisioned creative ways forward. He would do all he could for American loyalists, because his own sense of loyalty—and his own vision of empire—depended on it.

Up till now, Carleton had managed evacuations of American cities from a distance. Now by far the largest and most complex surrounded him, on a scale totally overshadowing those of the south. Withdrawing from New York City posed an awesome set of logistical challenges. Winding down a military garrison twenty thousand men strong, entrenched for seven years, was daunting enough. There were cannon and ordnance for a whole fortified city to be packed and loaded, stablefuls of horses to be shipped, forage and provisions for thousands to be located and sent. And this was only half Carleton’s job. Also in New York there were some thirty-five thousand loyalist civilians, almost all of whom, if Savannah and Charleston offered any example, would probably seek to leave. Where would he find the ships to carry them, or rations to feed them? Where would they go and what equipment did they need to get settled? In his New York headquarters Carleton found himself pulled in as many directions as the refugees would travel. He managed a constant stream of entreaties from the disabled and dispossessed. He monitored Indian diplomacy and persisting hinterland violence. He processed requests for aid from Florida, from Jamaica, from Quebec and Nova Scotia. He corresponded with British officials, urging them to adopt generous policies toward the migrants. Yet under these extraordinarily pressured conditions, Carleton and his staff improvised a series of measures that laid the foundations for an Atlantic-wide program of refugee relief.

When the southern evacuations commenced, Carleton had proposed that the British government grant tracts of land to loyalist refugees, free of charges and quitrents, in Nova Scotia, Florida, and other relatively sparsely settled provinces. Some precedent for this could be found in mid-eighteenth-century Nova Scotia, when land confiscated from French Acadians had been redistributed to Anglophone settlers; similar offers of land had also been extended to veterans after the Seven Years’ War, as a good way simultaneously to encourage colonization and provide gainful employment for demobilized soldiers, who were seen as a potential source of social instability. But Carleton’s land-for-loyalists scheme fitted into a larger plan for imperial reconstruction. The loss in America, he felt, had made it “indispensably necessary to establish the most close & cordial connection with the provinces which have preserved their allegiance.” Giving land to loyalists in British North America and elsewhere would ensure that “every man will readily take arms for its defence, & by these means only they can be preserved. Not only quit rents and fees of office of every sort shou’d be dispensed with, but no taxes shou’d be imposed in future by Great Britain.”⁴ The policy thus had a twofold purpose: it rewarded a population whose loyalty had already been confirmed, while reinforcing loyalty and security elsewhere in the British Empire.

In January 1783, an association of New York loyalists dispatched agents to Nova Scotia to scout out a settlement at a place called Port Roseway, an undeveloped harbor about a hundred miles south of Halifax. Although Nova Scotia governor John Parr had not yet received instructions from London about land grants, he offered to provide the refugees with 400,000 wooden boards to build new houses. The planks would be the beginnings of a veritable loyalist metropolis. Initially about six hundred loyalists had joined the Port Roseway Association intending to emigrate. When their fleet prepared to sail at the end of April 1783, “upwards of seven thousand” people had signed on to go.⁵ Carleton’s commissary-general, the able London merchant Brook Watson, processed an imposing list of goods for the pioneers: adzes and saws, water buckets and grease buckets, calipers and pincers, cartridges, powder, shot and shell, lanterns, locks, and ladles.⁶ Ships from Britain set out to meet the settlers, heavy with hatchets and hoes, and all the shingles, “gimblets,” and “wimble bits” they might need.⁷ As the first New York evacuation fleet sat well-stocked and ready to sail in the harbor before him, Carleton wrote to Governor Parr expressing his pleasure that “we are able to give these deserving people, some refuge, which I trust they will amply repay by that increase of wealth, and commerce and power, which they may give in future to a greatly diminished Empire.”⁸ A few months later, Carleton learned that British ministers had approved his recommendations about land grants. The key elements of loyalist resettlement—free passage, provisions and supplies, and access to land—were all in place.

Carleton did not mention another, equally significant dimension of the loyalist exodus to Nova Scotia that he worked hard to facilitate: the emigration of black loyalists. While white loyalists had been devastated by Article V of the preliminary peace treaty, it was Article VII—Henry Laurens’s stipulation forbidding Britain from “carrying away any Negroes, or other Property”—that terrified the blacks. News of the peace, remembered Boston King, a former slave from South Carolina, “diffused universal joy among all parties, except us, who had escaped from slavery and taken refuge in the English army; for a report prevailed at New-York, that all the slaves . . . were to be delivered up to their masters.” King had already endured much to “feel the happiness of liberty, of which I knew nothing before.” He had run away to Charleston from a cruel master, and survived the physical ravages of smallpox and the discomforts of military service. Toward the end of 1781 King had made his way to New York, where, unable to find the tools to resume his trade as a carpenter, he moved from master to master in domestic service, struggling just to keep clothes on his back. At least he had his freedom. But King and his peers spent the spring of 1783 haunted by the spectacle of “our old masters coming from Virginia, North-Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” Consumed by “inexpressible anguish and terror,” some black loyalists in New York were too frightened to eat, and “sleep departed from our eyes.”⁹

It could not have encouraged them to see the handbill posted around New York City on April 15, 1783, reproducing the text of Article VII together with Carleton’s orders that “no Person is permitted to embark as a Refugee, who has not resided Twelve Months within the British Lines, without a special Passport from the Commandant.”¹⁰ Three officers were to examine every departing ship for property—that is, people—illicitly removed. Some of the black loyalists had certificates attesting to their military service; but many of them did not. Was this how their runaway journeys would end: with abduction on the streets, or reenslavement at the docks?

But Carleton had insisted during the evacuation of Charleston that slaves promised freedom should have it—and his word held just as firmly now in New York City. He implemented his own version of the commission General Leslie had established in Charleston, to assess the cases of blacks claiming freedom. Every Wednesday from ten till two, members of this committee (made up of four British and three American representatives) sat in Fraunces’s Tavern on Pearl Street to hear out disputes over former slaves. Those cleared by the board received a printed certificate of freedom signed by the commandant of New York, General Samuel Birch. Then at the docks, inspectors entered the names of all departing blacks into a sprawling register, together with their ages, former owners’ names, brief physical descriptions, and notes—ironically enough, much the same information recorded for slave sales. The register, known as the “Book of Negroes,” forms a genuinely exceptional document of exodus; nothing like it exists for the thousands of white loyalist refugees. The reason for such careful bookkeeping was that these migrants were also exceptional compared to whites. They could be considered property as well as people. The volume that recorded the black loyalists’ freedom thus reinscribed their former status as slaves.¹¹

British assurances of freedom held good. But Americans were none too pleased. On a Tuesday morning in early May 1783, Carleton sailed up the Hudson on the aptly named Perseverance toward the broad waters of the Tappan Zee, to hold a conference with George Washington. The commanders had exchanged chilly letters for a full year, but this was their first meeting in the flesh. Sizing each other up on the shore, each man may have been disconcerted to detect a hint of himself in the other: standing roughly eye to eye at about six feet tall, big-nosed and thin-lipped, exuding authority as much by their braided uniform coats and tall boots as by their innate gravitas. The commanders had pressing items of business to discuss, including the ongoing depredations of partisan raiders in the countryside, the exchange of prisoners of war, and the timetable for evacuation. But Washington started off the conference by lecturing Carleton on what, to him, was the most urgent matter of all: the removal of human property from New York. Carleton calmly explained that a fleet had already embarked for Nova Scotia with registered black loyalists on board. “Already imbarked!” exclaimed a startled Washington. (He might have been yet more surprised to know that one of the blacks embarked, Harry Washington, had once belonged to him.) Carleton replied that he could not abide by anything in the treaty “inconsistent with prior Engagements binding the National Honor, which must be kept with all Colours.”¹²

That evening, from his quarters in Orange, Washington wrote Carle ton a letter bristling with rebuke:

I was surprized to hear you mention that an Embarkation had already taken place in which a large Number of Negroes had been carried away. Whether this conduct is consonant or not to, or how far it may be deemed an Infraction of the Treaty, is not for me to decide. I cannot however conceal from your Excellency, that my private opinion is that the measure is totally different from the Letter & Spirit of the Treaty.

He demanded to hear from Carleton exactly what procedures had been put in place to prevent such miscarriages in future. But Carleton could match his counterpart’s accusations point for point, meeting outrage with moral superiority. It was odd that Washington should be “surprized” by the news, Carleton dryly observed, when everything had been conducted in the most open manner. All the ships for Nova Scotia had been inspected, and the only disputes “arose over negroes who had been declared free previous to my arrival. As I had no right to deprive them of that liberty . . . , an accurate register was taken of every circumstance respecting them.” Besides, he concluded, “Had these negroes been denied permission to embark, they wou’d, in spite of every means to prevent it, have found various methods of quitting this place, so that the former owner wou’d no longer have been able to trace them, and of course wou’d have lost, in every way, all chance of compensation.” In short, he had acted entirely in keeping with the spirit and letter of British law. “The negroes in question . . . I found free when I arrived in New York, I had therefore no right . . . to prevent their going to any part of the world they thought proper.”¹³

Back on Pearl Street, the commission continued its weekly work under the hospitable roof of Samuel Fraunces—reputedly part black himself. They handed out certificates of freedom by the hundreds, and at the waterfront the register of names grew apace, with the particulars of “stout” and sometimes “sickly wenches,” “likely girls,” “fellows” both “feeble” and “fine.” By the time the commissioners finished, more than two thousand names had been entered into the Book of Negroes. Boston King sailed for Port Roseway with his certificate in hand and his new wife, Violet, twelve years his senior, by his side, among the 132 free blacks (Harry Washington included) looking for a new life beginning on L’Abondance. Members of the Black Pioneers, including Murphy Stiele, who had been haunted by voices about a great black army winning the war, and Thomas Peters, a future leader of black loyalist refugees, took their tickets to freedom on the Joseph bound for Annapolis Royal.

Carleton’s principled defense of the black loyalists stands out for its clarity of conviction, and highlights an emerging contrast between certain American and British attitudes toward slavery. Carleton’s hand-picked personal secretary, Maurice Morgann, was an articulate abolitionist, who in 1772 published Britain’s first proposal for a gradual emancipation of slaves in the West Indies.¹⁴ Carleton himself was not an abolitionist as such; he had not explicitly set out to free the slaves. His actions spoke in part to a sense of personal honor. Promises had been made, promises must be kept. But they also reflected his commitment to a concept of national honor—and the paternalistic government’s responsibility to uphold it—that would rapidly gain momentum among the rulers of the postwar British Empire. His time as governor of Quebec had honed his belief, in common with a number of his fellow administrators, that an empire of diverse subjects was best ruled by a strong executive. After all, he might well have thought, what was imperial power for, if not to be exercised by the rulers who had it on behalf of those subjects who did not?

FEW OF THE thirty-five thousand or so loyalist civilians in New York City could have expected their lives would ever come down to a choice between emigration and endangerment. Through the spring and summer of 1783, they sifted through a competing series of promises and threats, deciding if, when, and where to go. In the words of “The Tory’s Soliloquy,” a satirical patriot verse published in various American newspapers: “To go or not to go—is that the question? / Whether ’tis best to trust the inclement sky / That scowls indignant o’er the dreary Bay / of Fundy...or stay among the Rebels! / And, by our stay rouse up their keenest rage, / That, bursting o’er our now defenceless heads, / Will crush us.”¹⁵

News of the peace brought patriots back into New York City to reclaim their property, but loyalists making the reverse journey found conciliatory feelings in notably short supply. “Almost all those who have attempted to return to their homes have been exceedingly ill treated, many beaten, robbed of their money and clothing, and sent back,” Carleton told the British ministry.¹⁶ In Westchester County, an elderly member of the prominent loyalist DeLancey family had been beaten “in a most violent manner” and told to “run to Halifax, or to his damned King, for that neither he nor one of his breed should be suffered to remain in the Country.”¹⁷ Another town announced that loyalists “shall not be permitted to continue longer than seven days, after being duly warned to retire, on pain of experiencing the just punishment due to such infamous parricides.” Citizens of Poughkeepsie declared that loyalists deserved nothing “from this country but detestation and chastizement. The spirit of 75 still beats high, and must beat high, or American freedom is no more.”¹⁸ An author calling himself “Brutus” issued a sinister warning, widely reproduced in regional newspapers, “TO All Adherents to the British Government and Followers of the British Army Commonly called TORIES.” “Flee then while it is in your power,” he ordered, “for the day is at hand, when, to your confusion and dismay; such of you as reject this seasonable admonition, will have nothing to deliver them from the just vengeance of the collected citizens.”¹⁹

Offsetting such worrying reports, positive propaganda appeared in the New York press under the signature of loyal emigrants, boasting about their new climes. A settler at Port Roseway described quantities of fish veritably leaping from the water: trout, salmon, cod, “hollaboat (a most delicate fish indeed),” and herring so numerous that “I am told that a single person with a scoop net, may take twenty barrels in one day.”²⁰ “Often I thank God I came to this place,” said another, “and I sincerely think Port Roseway, in a little time, will be one of the most flourishing capital places in North America.”²¹ From Saint John, on the Bay of Fundy, an emigrant boasted of the bracing climate, fertile soil, and a toothsome menagerie of “Moose, (which I think excels any beef ) Hares, Rabbits, Partridges, Pidgeons.”²² Loyalists on St. John’s Island (today called Prince Edward Island) declared, “We were told, as perhaps you may be, the worst Things possible of the Country; such as, that the People were Starving; We should get nothing to eat, and should ourselves be eaten up by Insects. . . . We have found the Reverse too true. . . . Come and see, and depend on the Evidence of your own senses.”²³ And if none of these northern locales appealed, there were also the turquoise-bordered islands of the Bahamas, an archipelago that “wants only inhabitants, and a small degree of cultivation, to render it as flourishing as any of the West-India Islands.”²⁴

By late summer 1783, New York City witnessed a continuous parade of loyalist departures, and some patriot returns. It must have been an eerie thing to watch one of the largest cities in America turning inside out. “No News here but that of Evacuation,” one bemused (undoubtedly patriot) commentator wrote, “This . . . occasions a Variety of physiognomic, laughable Appearances.—Some look smiling, others melancholy, a third Class mad. To hear their Conversation would make you feel merry: Some . . . represent the cold Regions of Nova-Scotia as a new-created Paradise, others as a Country unfit for any human Being to inhabit. Tories are vexed with Tories; they curse the Powers to whom they owe Allegiance, and thus render themselves rebellious.”²⁵ Advertisements crowded the columns of the Royal Gazette announcing sales and business closures, and informing loyalists when and at which wharf to board their ships. British regulars and Hessians packed their gear and began to leave by the regiment-load. Cannon came down from the ramparts, munitions were crated up. The commissary’s office sold off its surplus stock: 63,596 pairs of shoes and 68,093 pairs of worsted stockings, 10,100 shoe buckles, 21,000 needles.²⁶ On summer Wednesdays and Saturdays, the Wagon Office auctioned its draught and saddle horses, carts, and equipage.²⁷

Colonel Beverley Robinson had an especially close look at the loyalist plight during these last hectic months of British occupation. As one of three inspectors of refugees, he and his colleagues visited and assessed the needs of hundreds of “distressed Loyalists” who had poured into the city from as far away as Florida. The inspectors distributed nearly £9,000 (New York currency) to 529 refugees for the first quarter of 1783 alone.²⁸ He surely knew personally some of the 212 New Yorkers on that list, reduced to destitution from positions of perfect comfort. Now he, like them, had to decide where to locate his family in future.

The Robinsons had fought a good war. Colonel Robinson himself played a role in one of the revolution’s most notorious incidents, the 1780 defection of Continental Army general Benedict Arnold to the British. As patriot commander of West Point, Arnold had taken up residence in Robinson’s confiscated house, just across the Hudson River from the fort, and there plotted to surrender West Point to the British. Robinson was the perfect British decoy to establish contact with Arnold. Sailing up to West Point on the British warship Vulture, he solicited a meeting with Arnold on the pretext of personal business related to the house, and Arnold made his infamous escape to the British on the Vulture a short time later. Soon enough, Robinson’s eldest son Beverley Jr. was campaigning behind the turncoat general in Virginia. Meanwhile his sons Morris and Phil Robinson had become patriot prisoners of war. The colonel spent eighteen months trying to get the boys released and succeeded at last “in consequence of the embers of friendship that still remained unextinguished” between himself and George Washington.²⁹

American independence, Robinson could see, would force “the Loyalists of America to depend on the mercy of their enemies for the restoration of their possessions, which we are well assured they will never grant.” The terms of the peace treaty only confirmed his view that a future in the United States would be untenable. Robinson’s Loyal American Regiment had been promised land grants in Nova Scotia. His men, like the majority of loyalist veterans, traveled north together to settle tracts assigned by regiment, trading in their comradeship in arms for neighboring farms. The colonel himself preferred to go to Britain, “with the hopes that the government . . . will not suffer us to starve but allow us a small pittance.”³⁰ (His New Jersey counterpart Cortlandt Skinner made the same choice, moving his large family to England while his former regiment settled in the Saint John River valley.)³¹ But as Robinson confessed in an embarrassed memorial to Carleton, “my circumstances are so very distressing that I cannot leave this place, without some assistance from Government.” He required a six-month advance on his pay to actually make the move.³² In the late summer of 1783, Robinson set off for England with his wife, daughters, and some of his sons. Beverley Jr. went to Nova Scotia with the Loyal Americans, while Phil remained garrisoned in New York City with his British infantry unit. This parting of the ways scored a painful line in the Robinson family, one among many clans dispersed by emigration. In years to come, the scattered relatives remained connected through affectionate, newsy letters—but several would never meet again.

Of course, in New York as in other British-held cities, not all loyalists left. Some families chose to split the challenges of staying and going, with female family members remaining in situ to pursue property claims (in some states, dower property had been excluded from confiscation) and men going on ahead to scout out new places of residence. Yet considering how much stronger the pull of stasis can be over change, the striking thing is just how many people did choose to go. Ultimately the total recorded exodus of New York loyalists to Nova Scotia alone amounted to nearly thirty thousand. A further twenty-five hundred or so traveled to Quebec and to Abaco, in the Bahamas.³³ All told, the evacuation of New York City may represent the largest (proportionate to population) civilian transfer in American history.

Not many loyalist civilians were left in New York by November 1783, when Carleton fixed the date for his own departure. The fleet waiting off Staten Island on Evacuation Day was Britain-bound, carrying government personnel, along with the remaining troops and refugees. Nineteen-year-old Phil Robinson was among the last British troops to march out of the city on Evacuation Day, “the only one of the family that witnessed that most humiliating scene.”³⁴ Carleton’s confidant William Smith also lingered till the bitter end. He wrote up a power of attorney for his wife, Janet, who was staying on to manage family affairs, drafted his last will and testament, packed his trunks, and rowed out with Carleton to the Ceres—the same ship that had carried the commander in chief to America eighteen months before. Crammed into a cabin “where five pens are scribbling around one Table,” Smith wrote fondly back to Janet on shore. “Give yourself not a moment’s uneasiness,” he reassured her. “Every Comfort is to be found here.” Still, Smith could not hide his impatience to set off, especially when they remained inexplicably at anchor a week later and he watched the celebratory fireworks exploding over Bowling Green. Writing yet “another Farewell” to his wife, he hoped that “no Accident happens by the Fireworks which I see. . . . Adieu to you all. Imbrace Harriet, and tell her I shall never forget to love her, if she loves you and obeys all your commands. Yours ever ever WS.” Two days later the Ceres rounded Sandy Hook and headed into the open sea.³⁵

With it, the British occupation of the United States officially ended. Henceforth the story of loyalist refugees would continue in other parts of the British world, from Halifax to Nassau, to London and to cities yet to be founded. But even with New York City formally surrendered, the loyalist exodus was not finished. For at the southern tip of British North America, on the beaches of East Florida, loyalists were about to perform the last, least expected, and most vigorously contested evacuation of all, as they learned in horror that their asylum was to be ceded to Spain. From hopeful place of refuge to last point of departure, East Florida bridged two phases of the refugee experience, linking the displacements initiated by war to the ongoing quest for a haven in peace.

IT HAD TAKEN Elizabeth Johnston three tedious weeks to travel down the Georgia coast to St. Augustine, boxed up on shipboard, always in motion, even in her sleep. When at last they turned into the St. Augustine inlet, they felt a stomach-dropping thud as their boat struck a sandbar. Fortunately, they managed to clear the obstruction, which was more than could be said for another Charleston convoy, wrecked against the shoals and ruining many refugees’ carefully exported property. Half a dozen ships keeled askew on the sand, sentinels of loss. Johnston’s first impressions of this flat, foreign place were not good. She found all her in-laws “much dissatisfied with their situation,” grumbling over their future prospects. Little Andrew had been sick; the weather seemed “constantly wet or cloudy,” and as she wrote her husband, she “repent[ed] sincerely of not going with you to New York... for what is life when separated from my kind William.”³⁶

But a touch of sun and time to settle in soon awakened Johnston to the charms and curiosities of this “very salubrious” spot. She would have recognized dozens of familiar faces from Savannah there, though Georgia this was not: she could see that much in the compressed shells of the coquina stone houses, the balustrades of the former Convento de San Francisco, now the army barracks, 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.”⁵¹ At a dinner a few nights after the terrible news arrived, 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,” Dr. Johnston returned to St. Augustine “as much at a loss as ever where to direct my steps with my unfortunate Family.”⁶⁶

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 on “having been able to avert the catastrophe . . . without resorting to the calamitous and dangerous necessity of using force, which might have bathed 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 the ship against the bar. Taking in water at a rate of six inches per hour, the frigate crawled back to shore for repairs. Tonyn spent an uncomfortable two months at St. Mary’s until new vessels arrived from the Bahamas to fetch him.⁸⁶

On November 13, 1785—two years after Evacuation Day in New York, four years after Yorktown—Tonyn and the last of the Florida refugees finally put out to sea. “It is shocking and lamentable,” Tonyn had written on leaving St. Augustine, “to behold a Country once in a flourishing state now in desolation—a once beautiful City lying in ruins; these . . . may be compared to my own misfortunes, and those of a deserving, considerable Loyal People, who from a condition of happiness and affluence . . . are by a cruel reverse in human affairs reduced to indigence and affliction.”⁸⁷ If he and his fellow passengers looked back to shore, they might have seen heaps of cast-off planks scattered over the sand. Unable to sell their houses to incoming Spaniards, loyalists had dismantled the frames, hoping to take them away for reassembly in the Bahamas or elsewhere—but there was not enough room for them on the ships.⁸⁸ Rebuilding a house would be hard enough. Rebuilding lives and communities posed an altogether more daunting task. But when the last Florida refugees faced the Atlantic before them, at least they were heading in a promising direction. They were bound for Britain, where the blueprints for reconstructing loyalist fortunes—and imperial ones—were being drawn up.