In the deep south, loyalists fought desperately to preserve British power. William Johnston and his father-in-law John Lichtenstein remained at the forefront of these efforts, by commanding cavalry brigades that patrolled the swampy outskirts of Savannah. Two weeks after Yorktown, Johnston and his men were relaxing at their base when they saw three hundred patriots advance from the woods. Rapidly surrounded—and doubtless not eager to follow the fate of his brother Andrew, slain at Augusta—Johnston was on the verge of surrendering his sword to the opposing commander when a patriot soldier struck out at one of Johnston’s men. Fired up by the insult, Johnston promptly began a vigorous defense of their position. Fortunately the outnumbered loyalists were soon rescued by a detachment of Thomas Brown’s Rangers, commanded by a Johnston family friend named William Wylly.32
Johnston’s brush with death was just one of many such episodes in the southern civil war. “The rage between Whig and Tory ran so high, that what was called a Georgia parole, and to be shot, were synonyms,” recalled one American officer.33 Patriots and loyalists struck truces that held only as long as tempers. Brown may never have embraced his reputation for savagery, but another loyalist officer described with positive pride how he ranged through the Carolina borderlands burning his enemy’s houses, stringing up deserters from trees, taking hostages, and stealing slaves and horses.34 All this fighting left the Carolina and Georgia backcountry “so completely chequered by the different parties” that no livestock, not even any squirrels or songbirds, animated the land; just the bald, red-headed turkey vultures, tearing at the corpses.35 In the spring of 1782, American forces encamped a few miles outside Savannah, busily fomenting desertion from the British ranks. Thomas Brown sortied from the city, intending to link up with three hundred Indian allies and drive the Americans back. But Brown failed to make the connection and his skirmish ended in stalemate. A few weeks later, the Indians were also rebuffed and the surviving warriors streamed into the safety of British lines. The struggle to save British rule in Georgia was over.36
This was the backdrop against which Carleton set in motion a momentous train of events: the evacuations of British-held Savannah and Charleston. Carleton saw this step as “not a matter of choice, but a deplorable necessity in consequence of an unsuccessful war.”37 There simply were not enough British troops to hold these cities, let alone send badly needed reinforcements to the Caribbean. In early June, 1782, a letter from Carleton marked “Secret” reached British headquarters in Charleston. “A day or two after the receipt of this letter,” it warned the commanding officer Alexander Leslie, “you may expect off the bar of Charles-Town a fleet of Transports: these I send for the evacuation of Savannah, and of St. Augustine; to bring off not only the Troops, with the Military and public Stores of all sorts; but the loyalists who choose to depart with their effects.”38 General Leslie immediately forwarded the news to Savannah, asking Georgia governor Sir James Wright to notify “the King[’s] Loyal subjects . . . to provide for whose ease and accommodation on this distressing occasion . . . has been an object of prime consideration with the Commander-in-Chief.”39 Two months later Leslie faced exactly the same task when he was ordered to evacuate Charleston.
What looked like a strategic necessity to Carleton looked like a disaster to the thousands of loyalists in both cities. News of evacuation prompted outcry and anguish. A mere five hundred more troops, Governor Wright believed, could “have drove the Rebels entirely out of the Province.”40 Yet instead the British were abandoning it. “The distress and misery brought on His Majesty’s Loyal Subjects here, you cannot conceive,” Wright reported, “and the very great property given up...I apprehend your Excellency has no idea of.”41 In Charleston, a handbill authored by a self-styled “Citizen” (not, notably, a “subject” of the British crown) wryly proposed various ways loyalists might try to curry favor with the incoming patriots:
[O]ne man intreats his wife or some friend to write letters intercessory for him;—then, there is another person has a cousin of his wife’s aunt now in the American camp;...and last of all, one pleases himself with the charming thought, that he was always a friend to the American cause in his heart—though perhaps he now and then does duty at the City Guard in a Red Coat.42
But British withdrawal was no jesting matter for most loyalists. They heard terrifying reports of what was happening outside the city limits, of loyalists hunted down and murdered by vindictive patriots.43 Confiscation acts passed by the Georgia and South Carolina patriot legislatures in 1782 expelled some five hundred prominent loyalists as traitors on pain of death, taking their property, and subjecting “divers other persons” who “did . . . traiterously assist abet and Participate in . . . treasonable Practices” to similar penalties.44 And when delegations of loyalist merchants went to meet with patriot authorities to find out what treatment they might expect if they stayed on, the answers were far from encouraging. Savannah loyalists were told they could take “reasonable time . . . to dispose of their property and settle their pecuniary concerns,” but that the Continental Army could not promise total protection, and of course “traitors” (vaguely defined) could always be prosecuted under the Confiscation and Banishment Act.45 Similar terms in South Carolina convinced Charleston merchants that the patriots were “retaliating upon & punishing the innocent.”46 Prospects hardly seemed any brighter for the hundreds of humbler refugees, such as those dwelling in Charleston’s makeshift camp of “miserable huts.” Eight hundred “distressed refugees” were dependent on cash handouts from the British army, and had scant hopes of finding much better if they returned to their war-ravaged homes.47
What were they to do? Here was a country coming out of civil war, with the possibility of anti-loyalist reprisals, and the good chance that their property had been seized or destroyed in their absence. There were the British ships, offering free passage to fresh domains. Amid so much confusion, one thing at least was clear. Loyalists who left would enjoy the security of remaining in the British Empire. Within a matter of weeks of the evacuation orders, the majority of civilians in Savannah and Charleston made up their minds to go.
In the twenty-first century, such scenes of mass human displacement, of cities emptying out, have come to seem depressingly common consequences of war. But in the 1780s there were simply no British precedents for civilian evacuations on this scale. Nor have any histories of the American Revolution described the British withdrawals in detail. Yet what unfolded on the ground during the last months of British power in America held up a startling mirror to the familiar images of United States nation-making. For while American patriots considered how to fashion the thirteen colonies into a United States of America, following Thomas Paine’s injunction to “begin the world over again,” thousands of refugees set off into the British Empire, as one loyalist put it, “to begin the world anew.”48
SO WHERE would they go? For many white loyalists in Savannah and Charleston, the choice of destination hinged on one overriding consideration to do with a very special kind of property, at once portable, valuable, and alive: slaves. The question of how best loyalists might sell or employ their slaves crucially influenced decisions about whether and where to go into exile. During the war, most refugees who had left the colonies had traveled to Britain or Nova Scotia. But in Britain, slaveowning had been effectively illegal since the early 1770s, while Nova Scotia, a preferred locale for New England and New York refugees, was seen as climatically unsuitable