Migration, Freedom and Enslavement in the Revolutionary Atlantic: The Bahamas, 1783–c. 1800 Paul Daniel Shirley October 2011 UCL PhD thesis 1 I, Paul Daniel Shirley, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Signed: _____________________________ (Paul Daniel Shirley) 2 Abstract This thesis examines the impact of revolution upon slavery in the Atlantic world, focusing upon the period of profound and unprecedented change and conflict in the Bahamas during the final decades of the eighteenth century. It argues that the Bahamian experience can only be satisfactorily understood with reference to the revolutionary upheavals that were transforming the larger Atlantic world in those years. From 1783, the arrival of black and white migrants displaced by the American Revolution resulted in quantitative and qualitative social, economic and political transformation in the Bahamas. The thesis assesses the nature and significance of the sudden demographic shift to a non-white majority in the archipelago, the development of many hitherto unsettled islands, and efforts to construct a cotton-based plantation economy. It also traces the trajectory and dynamics of the complex struggles that ensued from these changes. During the 1780s, émigré Loyalist slaveholders from the American South, intent on establishing a Bahamian plantocracy, confronted not only non-white Bahamians exploring enlarged possibilities for greater control over their own lives, but also an existing white population determined to defend their own interests, and a belligerent governor with a penchant for idiosyncratic antislavery initiatives. In the 1790s, a potentially explosive situation was inflamed still further as a new wave of war and revolution engulfed the Atlantic. The various ways in which Bahamians responded to the prospect of the new possibilities seemingly opened up by the Haitian Revolution would have lasting consequences. Whilst engaging critically with both the detail and general interpretive tendencies of existing Bahamian historiography, the thesis seeks to demonstrate the manifold, complex, and contingent nature of the relationship between the eighteenth- century revolutions and the Atlantic slave system. As such, it aims to show the potential of an Atlantic history integrating local and more general perspectives to facilitate a more nuanced and fully transnational account of the ‘Age of Revolution’. 3 Table of Contents Front Matter…………………………………………………………………………...1 Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..3 Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….5 List of Abbreviations………………………………………………………………….6 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………7 Chapter One: The Problem of Revolution in the Age of Slavery…………………….40 Chapter Two: The Diaspora of Defeat………………………………………...……...78 Chapter Three: Rescuing the Bahamas from Insignificance: Transformations, Compromises, and Resistance in the 1780s…….……………….……………..….110 Chapter Four: ‘Disentangled from the Disgraceful Shackles of Slavery’: Lord Dunmore and State Manumission in the Bahamas, 1787–1793…….…………….155 Chapter Five: ‘The Dread of our Country Becoming the Theatre of such Horrors’: the Haitian Revolution and the Bahamas, 1791–1797…………………..…...…...191 Conclusion……………..………………………………………………...………….239 Bibliography………………………………………………………...………………261 Appendix: Bahamian Manumissions, 1782–1800…………………...………...……294 4 Acknowledgments Writing this dissertation has been a tortuous, and at times torturous process, and I am glad to be able to offer at least some recognition of the help I have received along the way from a great many splendid people. As supervisors, Stephen Conway and Catherine Hall have been an unfailing source of enthusiasm, insight and erudition. The former, especially, has been relentless in his good humour and optimism regarding an uncommonly vexatious student. Nat Millet first suggested I do some research on the Bahamas more years ago than I care to remember. Since then, among the host of other scholars who have been more than generous with their time, expertise, support and friendship, I would especially like to thank Mary Turner, Betty Wood, Christopher Abel, Trevor Burnard, and Adam Smith. Errietta Bissa prompted something of a conceptual breakthrough by encouraging me to think in terms of crop yields. Having more or less decided to abandon the project, Katharina Rietzler was uniquely successful in convincing me that it was almost finished. The staff of the UCL Bentham Project, particularly Philip Schofield, Michael Quinn, and Oliver Harris, have helped to fill in some of the more glaring gaps in my understanding of scholarship, eighteenth-century Britain, and the finer points of annotation. This dissertation was primarily funded by a UCL History Department Research Studentship. My research in the Bahamas and the United States was made possible by grants from the UCL Graduate School, the University of London Central Research Fund, and the Royal Historical Society. I am grateful for the invaluable assistance of the staff of the various libraries and archives I visited on both sides of the Atlantic, and especially that of Gail Saunders and her team at the Bahamas Department of Archives. My parents, Jean and Bill Shirley, have provided unconditional support, moral, emotional and material, throughout this project. That the fabulous Jaclyn McGlasson has put up with it and me for so long is a daily source of wonder and delight. 5 List of Abbreviations Add. MSS Additional Manuscripts Series, British Library, London BDA Bahamas Department of Archives, Nassau, Bahamas CO Colonial Office Papers, National Archives, London CUP Cambridge University Press DCRO Derbyshire County Record Office, Matlock FHQ Florida Historical Quarterly HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission JCBL John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island JNH Journal of Negro History JSH Journal of Southern History LC Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. OUP Oxford University Press RGD Registrar General’s Department, Nassau, Bahamas S.C. Bahamas Supreme Court Papers: General Court Minutes WMQ William and Mary Quarterly WO War Office Papers, National Archives, London 6 Introduction In the spring of 1788, a sequence of strange events unfolded on the island of Abaco, in the Bahamas. On Sunday 4 March, the planter Richard Pearis was having dinner with friends at his estate at Spencer’s Bight, one of several settlements recently established on Abaco by Pearis and other American Loyalist émigrés, when proceedings were interrupted by the arrival of Samuel Mackay, captain of the Bahamian governor’s schooner, the Shearwater . Mackay declared that he was looking for contraband corn, and demanded the keys to the plantation house and cellar. Pearis refused, asking Mackay ‘repeatedly to show his Authority, and Warned him at his peril from breaking or attempting to force any of [his stores], or to molest any of my property’. In response, after threatening ‘to make everyone present Prisoners’, Mackay ‘went to his Boat and brought up Armed White Men and Negroes whom he placed [as] Sentrys’ around the estate. He then had ‘Armed Negroes with an Axe’ break down the doors to Pearis’s stores, and seized 401 bushels of corn ‘in the King’s Name.’ 1 Many details of what happened next are ambiguous. It is clear that in the wake of this episode large numbers of the people held as slaves at Spencer’s Bight ‘absconded’; Pearis lost at least two of his own slaves, and reported that ‘some of our Neighbours are left without their House Servants, and all have more or less of our slaves gone to the Woods’. 2 What remains uncertain is why this mass flight happened, what the motives of the runaways were, and the precise role, if any, played by the crew of the Shearwater in provoking it. Several weeks later, Pearis stated that the slaves ‘who have been retaken, or come in, uniformly declare that they were misled by Captain Mackey and his Crew who told them he had the Governor’s Authority to carry them to Nassau [the colonial capital] and that all the Rebel Property Negroes would be made free.’ Petitioning the 1 Affidavit of Richard Pearis, 16 May 1788, CO23/29/304–5; Pearis to William Coleman, Spencer’s Bight, 16 May 1788, CO23/29/303. Before the American Revolution, Pearis had been a substantial landowner, first in Virginia, then in South Carolina. During the War of Independence, after being arrested and imprisoned by the Charleston council of safety in 1775, he served in various Loyalist provincial corps, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel by 1780. See Lydia Austin Parrish, ‘Records of some Southern Loyalists. Being a collection of manuscripts about some eighty families, most of whom immigrated to the Bahamas during and after the American Revolution’, Harvard University, Houghton MS. AM 1547 (photocopy typescript in BDA; cited hereafter as ‘Parrish, “Records”’), 419–20; Sandra Riley, Homeward Bound: A history of the Bahama Islands to 1850 with a definitive study of Abaco in the American Loyalist plantation period (Miami: Island Research, 1983), 253, n. 8. 2 Pearis to Coleman, Spencer’s Bight, 16 May 1788, CO23/29/303. 7 governor for assistance, other white residents of Spencer’s Bight were still more explicit, claiming that ‘many of their slaves… came in open day before your Memorialists faces, and put their baggage on board said Mackay’s boat’. 3 According to Pearis, Mackay displayed a letter of authority signed by the governor, ‘but would neither