seemed a better option, but these well-settled islands had little uncultivated land available, and were known for their high cost of living and high chance of dying of tropical disease.
That left only one British territory as an attractive possibility for southern slaveowners: the neighboring loyal province of East Florida. More or less similar to Georgia in climate and ecology, and unfolding in mile upon mile of uncultivated land, East Florida appeared to loyalist planters like the last best hope for reproducing their existing lifestyles. The ambitious governor of East Florida, Patrick Tonyn, enthusiastically encouraged loyalist immigration. “Upon the unfortunate defeat of Earl Cornwallis” he issued a proclamation inviting “the distressed and persecuted Loyalists in the neighbouring Colonies” to “become settlers in this Province.”49 Hundreds had already arrived. The only trouble was that in Carleton’s initial orders, St. Augustine had also been slated for evacuation. Dismayed loyalists and sympathetic officials chorused in protest against the measure, as did Governors Wright and Tonyn.50 Under loyalist pressure, Carleton canceled the evacuation on the grounds that Florida would give loyalists “a convenient refuge, whither the most valuable of their property may without much difficulty be transported, and in a Country where their Negroes may continue to be useful to them.”51 East Florida henceforth became the destination of choice for southern loyalists—underscoring the importance of property concerns, and slavery in particular, in determining the course of the loyalist exodus.
Loyalists in Savannah were the first to confront a situation that would be replayed on successively larger stages in the months ahead. Seven thousand white civilians and slaves prepared to depart in less than four weeks’ time. How or if loyalists readied themselves psychologically for leaving can never be really known, but there were concrete chores aplenty. The city’s neat grid of angles and squares turned into a moving mosaic. Days became busy with selling and packing, transactions and farewells. Soldiers piled up military stores and ordnance below the fort walls to be rowed out to the coast. Slaves hauled furniture and baggage and gathered by the hundreds to ship out with their masters. Ultimately almost all of the five thousand enslaved blacks in Savannah would leave, transported from the city as loyalist property. On July 11, 1782, the garrison trooped into flatboats and rowed around the grassy curves of the river mouth to the sea. “Nothing can surpass the sorrow which many of the inhabitants expressed at our departure,” a New York soldier noted in his diary, “especially those ladies whose sweethearts were under necessity of quiting the town at our evacuation; some of those ladies were converted and brought over to the faith, so as to quit as well and follow us.”52
If it is hard to know just what went through the minds of departing loyalists, it is especially difficult to gain insight into the attitudes of the majority of people who left, those five thousand or so enslaved blacks, who outnumbered the white migrants by more than two to one. George Liele, though, part of the tiny minority of free blacks to evacuate, did provide some account of what made him go. Liele may have found a higher solace in his journey, for he followed two masters to the seafront—if you counted the one in heaven as well as the one on earth. For about three years, Liele had been living in Savannah as a free man, ever since his former owner, a loyalist who had manumitted him before the war, had been killed, his hand blown off by a patriot bullet. Liele may well have worked in Savannah as a carter, like many other free blacks, helping to provision the British as his friend David George was doing from his butcher’s stall. But the labor that really consumed Liele (and George) was the Lord’s: preaching among the blacks in town, as he had done in the cornfields, clearings, and barns around Silver Bluff. Though David George moved his family to Charleston in anticipation of disruptions in Savannah, Liele stayed on and preached till the very end of the British occupation.
Freedom, Liele had learned, could be a precarious condition. Once, he had been jailed by whites who did not believe his old master had really freed him. Only by presenting his manumission papers did he get released, with the support of a white benefactor, a backcountry planter and loyalist officer called Moses Kirkland. (It was Kirkland who had taken in Thomas Brown after the latter’s torture in 1775.) Liele owed Kirkland something more. Liele’s wife and four small children had all been born slaves, and Kirkland apparently helped him purchase their freedom. In return, Liele agreed to renounce a portion of his own liberty by indenturing himself to Kirkland for a period of a few years. Now the British were leaving Savannah, Kirkland was banished, and George Liele was “partly obliged” to follow, no longer a slave, and yet neither entirely free. Like everyone else, he had important preparations to make before his departure. Standing in the shallows of the Savannah River in the shadow of the city walls, Liele baptized Andrew, Hannah, and little Hagar Bryan, three slaves belonging to a loyal Baptist, bringing three new members into the church. As the Lord willed that Brother George would carry the word beyond American shores, now it was for Brother Andrew to continue his work among Georgia blacks.53
On July 20, 1782, Liele and his family sailed on the first convoy out of Savannah, bound for Port Royal, Jamaica.54 His reason for evacuating with the British might seem clear—to protect some limited freedom for himself and his family. But the moment Liele stepped on board he would have seen overwhelming evidence of why so many whites left: to protect their enslaved property. The sloop Zebra (a suggestive name given the racial breakdown of its passengers) and its twelve flanking ships carried a mere fifty white loyalists on board. The vast majority of its passengers were nineteen hundred blacks, almost all of them slaves.55 Whole slave communities sailed out together: more than two hundred belonged to governor Sir James Wright alone, the remnant of an enslaved labor force numbering more than five hundred souls that Wright had once put to work across eleven plantations. They had survived the war only to be transported to Jamaica in the custody of one of Wright’s associates, Nathaniel Hall, there to be hired or sold into the notoriously punishing conditions of Caribbean slavery.56
The next day, a second evacuation fleet left for St. Augustine. This convoy would also be numerically dominated by slaves; Georgia’s lieutenant governor John Graham took charge of no fewer than 465 black men, women, and children belonging to himself and others.57 Thomas Brown, meanwhile, escorted another, more unusual nonwhite contingent. About two hundred of the Creek and Choctaw warriors who had fought with him against the patriots were returning to their villages, after spending a year at war.58 Their presence on board represented a rare British concession to southern Indian allies, and a unique counter-flow within the exodus: for them, and them alone, this voyage out was a voyage home. The St. Augustine convoy also carried most of William Johnston’s extended family: his father Lewis Johnston Sr., his brother Lewis Jr., and his sisters with their husbands and children. The Johnstons had a strong reason to favor Florida. With seventy-one enslaved men, women, and children in his household, Lewis Johnston Sr. figured as one of the largest slaveowners among the Georgia refugees.
Elizabeth and William Johnston, though, joined the fleet bound for Charleston with William’s regiment. It was an unusual choice for Elizabeth to go to Charleston with William, rather than to St. Augustine with her in-laws—not least because she was then seven months pregnant, and passed up the offer from a patriot friend of William’s to stay in Savannah under his protection until she was “fitter for moving.” But the Johnstons had already been apart for much of their short married life, and Elizabeth wanted no more of it. She had suffered the loneliness of raising their firstborn son, Andrew—a “handsome sweet fellow” with a “large proportion” of his father’s “passionate temper”—while William was away at war. And she had acquired another reason to wish William close at hand. For beyond her watch, William had fallen into his old habit of gambling, “a vice so destructive and ruinous in its nature” that it threatened to wreck their growing family.59