hangdog contrition, imploring Lichtenstein to support the family in their need.60 What was worse, William’s behavior opened a rift with his own father and sisters. “You know not how wretched you have made me,” Elizabeth opined, “and tis cruel to distress a Father whose sole wish & care, is to see his children happy.”61 Dr. Lewis Johnston, with his wealth and influential connections, was not a man to be alienated lightly. A rift with him would cut off the young couple from their best source of support and patronage.
So when British power collapsed around her in Savannah, Elizabeth Johnston followed her impulse and her spouse: “My husband would not like the separation, and I positively refused to remain.” Not once did she mention the issues of principle involved in leaving her home. Nor, more strikingly, did she note the obvious impetus for her extended family’s departure. Every single one of Johnston’s close male relations had been proscribed under the Georgia Confiscation and Banishment Act, including William Johnston, his father Lewis, and her father John Lichtenstein. In her own telling, Johnston did not leave for reasons of political sentiment but for emotional ones, the bond of conjugal love.
The Johnstons arrived in Charleston to find that city, too, in the throes of pre-evacuation mayhem. Day in, day out, British officials coped with shortages of food, rum, ships, and cash; rising disorder and falling morale; and more than ten thousand civilians clamoring for relief and reassurance. “The perplexity of civil matters here is so much beyond my abilities to arrange, that I declare myself unequal to the task, nor have I the constitution to stand it, from morning till night I have memorials and petitions full of distress, &c. &c. before me,” moaned Charleston commander General Leslie.62 Patriot advances had cut off the city’s food supply, forcing Leslie to send forage parties out to raid the countryside for grain.63 Soldiers grew restless and undisciplined, falling “into all kinds of dissipation,” and, increasingly, running away.64 An attempted deserter was hanged before a crowd of two thousand; two other men were flogged with “500 lashes each at the most public parts of the town and then drummed out of the garrison, for harboring two deserters.”65 Conditions among the impoverished refugees were not much kinder. From November 1781 to November 1782, a neighborhood coffin maker crafted 213 wooden boxes for the loyal dead: a poignant list of spouses, grandparents, and, especially, children; for a teenager named “America,” and for individuals of whom no more was recorded than their heights.66
Within a week of the publication of evacuation orders in August, 1782, 4,230 white loyalists announced their intention to depart with the British, along with 7,163 blacks, chiefly slaves.67 Following the Savannah precedent, East Florida was the destination of choice. But in Charleston, a far larger and more economically developed city than Savannah, the evacuation of so many slaves posed special complications.
During the British occupation, about a hundred patriot-owned estates with five thousand slaves had been “sequestered” and run for the benefit of the British military by the loyalist commissioner of sequestered estates, John Cruden. Now, with evacuation imminent, many loyalists whose own slaves had been seized by the patriots wanted to take sequestered slaves as compensation. Logical though the swap might appear, it was also illegal, since loyalists had no title to these patriot-owned slaves. To make matters more difficult, hundreds of black loyalists lived and worked in Charleston—David George and his family now among them—who had legitimate claims to leave with the British as free people. Patriots balked at the prospect of any of their valuable slaves, sequestered or freed, sailing off into the empire. How could Britain evacuate blacks so as to prevent wrongful seizure of patriot-owned slaves, on the one hand, while upholding promises of freedom to black loyalists on the other? Leslie wrote to Carleton for instructions. “In whatever manner we may dispose of such of them who were taken on the sequestered estates,” he felt, “those who have voluntarily come in, under the faith of our protection, cannot in justice be abandoned to the merciless resentment of their former masters.”68 Carleton emphatically agreed: “Such as have been promised their freedom, must have it.”69
With loyalists and patriots clamoring for fair allocation of property, and blacks both free and enslaved facing him with their plight, Commissioner John Cruden had his hands full and his capacities stretched. Not least, Cruden was terribly in debt: numerous people had failed to pay him for hired labor and produce from the sequestered estates, and his public accounts were £10,000 in arrears.70 (He and his younger brother had meanwhile racked up such personal expenses that their poor father, a Presbyterian minister in London, had asked his brokers to stop extending the boys credit.)71 But John Cruden had always been one to see the bright side of things—witness the proposal he had sent to his patron Lord Dunmore, after Yorktown, to raise an army of free blacks and continue the war. When provisions were running low in Charleston in the summer of 1782, Cruden equipped a flotilla of galleys and dispatched them into Low Country waterways to seize patriot grain supplies.72 In the months ahead Cruden would do whatever he could to ease loyalists’ distress—even when his ideas and methods became unconventional indeed.
Cruden prided himself on his management of the sequestered estates, many of which he averred were “in higher Cultivation than when I took them into my Charge, [and] would have been torn to pieces by needy Creditors” without his care. Surely, he thought, it would be simple enough to resolve disputes over slaves. Putting forward his own version of the golden rule, he endeavored to return all sequestered slaves to their patriot owners “in the hope & firm belief that it will produce a similar effect on them by Exerting them to restore the property of the British Subjects.”73 Cruden thus vigilantly policed loyalists from taking away patriot-owned slaves that did not belong to them. He trusted patriots to be equally respectful, in turn, of loyalist property and the freedom of black loyalists. To him there was no contradiction between upholding the rights of slaveowners in one domain and supporting the liberty of free blacks in another: that was what honor was all about.
As the first ships prepared to sail from Charleston in October 1782, Leslie and the patriot governor of South Carolina agreed on terms respecting the exchange of prisoners and the transfer of sequestered property. “All the Slaves, the Property of American Subjects in South Carolina, now in my Power, shall be left here, and restored to their former Owners,” ordered Leslie, “except such Slaves as may have rendered themselves particularly obnoxious by their Attachment and Services to the British Troops, and such as have had specifick Promises of Freedom.” To placate the patriots and “in order to prevent the great Loss of Property, and probably the Ruin of many Families,” he volunteered to pay a fair price for black loyalists whose former owners contested their cases.74 But the enormous numbers of blacks claiming freedom as loyalists made Leslie blanch at the “monstrous expense” that would be involved.75 Instead, Leslie appointed a board of inspectors to interrogate blacks who had “come in under the faith of various Proclamations and promises, in hope of obtaining their freedom,” and judge their veracity.76 American inspectors were given the right to search outbound ships for illicitly removed slaves. Leslie’s handling of this issue provided an important model for the still larger evacuation of blacks that Sir Guy Carleton would soon superintend in New York.
David George and his family were among those whose freedom was confirmed by the board, and numbered among an estimated fifteen hundred free blacks evacuated from Charleston.