THE FAÇADE OF UNITY: BRITISH EAST FLORIDA’S WAR FOR DEPENDENCE By ROGER C. SMITH A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2008 1 © 2008 Roger C. Smith 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................4 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................6 2 BRITISH EAST FLORIDA AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION................................20 3 SONS OF LIBERTY ..............................................................................................................38 4 THE REVOLUTION’S SOUTHERN-MOST THEATER ....................................................50 5 REVOLUTIONARY LIFE FOR BLACKS IN EAST FLORIDA.........................................65 6 LOYALIST REFUGE ............................................................................................................80 7 NO MAN’S LAND.................................................................................................................94 8 EVACUATION ....................................................................................................................106 9 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................121 LIST OF REFERENCES.............................................................................................................131 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................138 3 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts THE FAÇADE OF UNITY: BRITISH EAST FLORIDA’S WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE By Roger C. Smith August 2008 Chair: Jon Sensbach Major: History On August 11, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud in the market plaza in St. Augustine, East Florida. The throng of common folk and elites alike became so enraged that they burned John Hancock and Samuel Adams in effigy. The following day, proclamations of loyalty for King George III flowed from the colony’s civil leadership. Over one hundred letters can be found in the George Washington Papers mentioning St. Augustine or East Florida. As early as December 18, 1775, the Commander in Chief was calling for the capture of St. Augustine and its large cache of powder and munitions stored in the Castillo de San Marcos. However, not only did the American army fail to take East Florida after three invasion attempts, but the royal governor did not evacuate the colony until November 19, 1785. The significance of these events is mysteriously lost on generations of historians. The historical omissions that have left the memory of East Florida and the evacuation of St. Augustine relatively unknown are inexplicable. The Revolutionary War involved not only the present state of Florida, but circumstances in St. Augustine were significant in the shaping of southern Revolutionary events. The plight of Loyalists and blacks in East Florida is no less a part of the American narrative than those of other southern colonies, especially considering how many of those Loyalists, free-blacks, and slaves from the traditional southern colonies found 4 their way to East Florida during the war. This study is an effort to restore their place in American history and to return East Florida from the shadows of marginalization. 5 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION On November 19, 1785, with the wind finally in its sails, the HMS Cyrus put the coast of East Florida to her stern and carried the last remnants of a weary, but loyal, colony back to England—though not necessarily back home. Many of these last few refugees from the Floridas, Georgia, and the Carolinas were born in North America and never known an English sunset. Some left behind the only hopes they possessed for a new life, in a new home, on the shores of a land they diligently toiled to make prosperous—only to have it voluntarily abandoned by politicians and diplomats who never experienced the cypress-lined banks of the St. John’s River or felt the warmth of a January afternoon sun in this moderate climate. It was a colony that boasted the rich soils and long planting seasons of the Caribbean without the deadly plagues of malaria and yellow fever. East Florida had become home, with St. Augustine at the heart, for every loyal British subject who was forced to leave its splendor. On this day the last British evacuation vessel in all of North America sailed with the loyal refugees of a long and bitter humiliation at the hands of “civilized allies and unnatural colonists [who] are ungrateful to British designs.”1 The author of these words was Major General Patrick Tonyn, governor of East Florida—Great Britain’s last colony in what is now the United States. To both amateur and professional historians alike, the preceding paragraph has all the plausibility of an imaginative novel based upon “what-ifs” and “maybes,” surrounded by wild 1 “Patrick Tonyn to Lord Sydney, St. Augustine, December 6, 1784,” PRO CO 5/561, P36, p. 8. In several passages located in the documents of the Public Records of the Colonial Office in Kew, England, the word “unnatural” can be found in reference to rebellious actions in the British colonies. During this era of the British Empire, it was viewed that the relationship between the metropole and its colonies was similar to that of a mother and child. Therefore, an act of rebellion was deemed “unnatural” to the propriety of the relationship. Historian J. Leitch Wright contends that “[w]hen East Florida had refused to revolt in 1775, it had followed precedents, because loyalty to the mother country was the colonial norm. It was the thirteen colonies who, by rebelling, had broken with tradition.” J. Leitch Wright, “Blacks in British East Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 54, Issue 4 (April 1976), 435. 6 conjectures of historical fiction. The idea that there was an American colony inside what is today the geographic borders of the United States that remained loyal to Great Britain throughout the course of the American Revolution—holding steadfastly to its grip on the North American continent long after the Battle of Yorktown or the Treaty of Paris—seems ludicrous. The fact remains that this scenario actually occurred and, like many other misplaced pieces of information on the war, is perplexingly absent from the familiar canon of American history. I will argue that historians are thus forced to reconsider the traditional interpretations and memory of a united War of Independence. Closer scrutiny teaches us that from the town meeting to the state legislature to the Continental Congress, American colonists were rarely unified on any subject— what historian John S. Pancake calls a “façade of unity”—forcing many significant questions to be asked concerning what we as a nation know, and are told, about the American Revolution.2 The clarifications of these seemingly hushed topics are readily available, but Americans must be willing to contextualize the discussion from a British perspective. For over two centuries Loyalism during the American Revolution has been viewed primarily from an American standpoint, lending to the vilification of Tories as traitors, dissentionists, and enemies of American liberty. But such a general analysis is far from comprehensive, as the representation of British East Florida for the opposing conscience of the Loyalist discussion will demonstrate. American colonists were equally passionate for loyalty to a British form of democratic government as Patriots were to the Founding Fathers. Loyalists struggled for their own rights and liberties, and the freedom to remain steadfast to their current way of life. They too were Sons of Liberty—British liberty; and they fought for the centuries-old British freedoms that had been won many times on many battlefields. But that’s not the story 2 John S. Pancake, 1777: The Year of the Hangman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1977), 131. 7 historians have propagated upon the American public. The discussion of Loyalist East Florida is removed from Revolutionary dialogue—erasing the story of every human being on the North American continent who faced these Loyalists on the battlefields, smoked the pipe with them in the longhouses, or peered through the bars at them from the slave pens. To marginalize East Florida in the American Revolution into nonexistence is to expunge the memory of a significant portion of early American history. For example, American schoolchildren are taught from an early age that it was George Washington’s rag-tag Continental Army of Yankee farmers and Boston malcontents that shocked the world as they confounded Great Britain’s powerful military machine into submission during the Revolutionary War. But they hear little or nothing of the efforts of America’s southern army—a wholly distinct department from the Minute Men and Continental regulars who fought in New England and other points north. From George Washington’s correspondence with the Continental Congress, the southern army’s existence is verified as early as December 18, 1775, as well as Washington’s concerns for British fortifications in East Florida.3 The American Southern Department’s military