George was impressed to discover that his family, just like the white refugees, was entitled to free passage to other British domains. They sailed on one of the first convoys out of Charleston, at about the beginning of November 1782.78 Though the majority of ships were bound for New York or St. Augustine, the Georges had a more unusual destination. They and their five hundred or so fellow passengers were headed for Nova Scotia, where they would be among the first of thousands of loyalist refugees who flooded into the British North American province in the year ahead.79
Coincidentally, William Johnston may have been one of the officers who cleared George for departure. As one of eleven men appointed to Leslie’s board of inspectors, William spent some of his last days in Charleston hearing out the stories of black women and men who had fled from slavery. Elizabeth Johnston gave birth to the couple’s first daughter, Catherine, in the comfort of a stately sequestered house. Around her in the emptying city, “everything is in motion, and turned topsy-turvy.” “It is impossible to describe what confusion, people of all denominations, seem to be in,” one soldier noted. “The one is buying everything he can to complete his stock of goods, the second is searching for a passage to some other garrison of His Majesty’s troops; the third is going from house to house to collect his debts.”80 Though the Johnstons had no property to handle in Charleston, they also faced fresh choices. William’s regiment was due to ship out to New York City, along with most of the Charleston garrison. Far away and likely facing imminent evacuation itself, New York made little sense as a destination for Elizabeth and the children. This time they decided that she would head for St. Augustine separately and stay with William’s relatives until he could join them there, to establish their first real family home.81
In early December 1782, Elizabeth Johnston stepped into a small boat with her toddler son, infant daughter, and a black nurse, and rowed out into the harbor to board a Florida-bound schooner. It was like cruising into a jigsaw puzzle. Above her loomed the curved wooden walls of a city afloat, dark with slime and tar, the outlines of figures scurrying along decks and rigging, canvas sails stretched on a lattice of masts. Skiffs and rowboats traced ripples across the water, ferrying loyalists and slaves, barrels of food and supplies, furniture and livestock—even the valuable bells of St. Michael’s Church—to the waiting ships.82 More than twelve hundred white loyalists and twenty-six hundred blacks plashed out to join a convoy bound for Jamaica. Another group of two hundred black loyalist soldiers gathered to sail for Saint Lucia. A few hundred individuals, including various government officials, joined a convoy for Britain. Finally, on the afternoon of December 12, the soldiers began assembling on the city wharfs to board the transports for New York. Two days later, the Americans formally reoccupied Charleston, while the Johnstons swayed out to sea in opposite directions: he with the garrison to New York City, she to join the rapidly growing loyalist community in East Florida.83
Together, the evacuations of Savannah and Charleston set more than twenty thousand loyalists, slaves, and soldiers on the move: so many people separated, so much left behind, so many lives bent on unpredictable routes. What unfolded during these evacuations exposed contradictions that would follow the refugees into exile. Loyalists left for reasons of pique as much as principle, primed to find fault with the administrators they nonetheless relied on. Free blacks and slaves traveled on the same ships, leaving their status open to confusion and abuse. The Johnstons and the Georges, who had been evacuated twice, pointed to another recurring phenomenon: many of these refugees would end up moving again and again. Yet for all that their emigration, with its many uncertainties, could make loyalists worry about the worst, it could also promise change for the better—a chance to rebuild fresh lives as British imperial subjects. Though less frequently voiced than anxieties and laments, some refugees offered more optimistic assessments of evacuation. Out of so much loss, one might find something new. That was how John Cruden saw things when he sailed for St. Augustine, his dreaming not yet done. “This moment,” he felt, was “perhaps the most important the World Ever beheld.”84 And what was the value of being on earth at such a time as this, if not to capitalize on its opportunities?
AS THE SHIPS sailed out of Charleston, one year after Yorktown, loyalists had come to terms with the reality of defeat and begun, literally, to move on. The war was over, U.S. independence assured. At least eight thousand white and black refugees had already settled in other British colonies, notably East Florida. But there were still some loyalist hopes hanging in the balance. What would the United States provide for loyalists by way of protection against retaliation and compensation for their losses? It was up to the peace commissioners in Paris to hash out the answers, which would have great bearing on the decisions of loyalists still uncertain about whether to stay or go.
The terms of Anglo-American peace rested in the hands of a mere five men, each of whose personal attitudes would carry significant weight. The seniormost member of the American peace commission was Benjamin Franklin, who was joined in Paris by the New York lawyer John Jay and John Adams of Massachusetts. A fourth American commissioner, South Carolina planter Henry Laurens, would come to meet them later. The British side in the negotiations was superintended by just one man, Richard Oswald, appointed to the post by the prime minister, Lord Shelburne. Oswald had striking, not to say surprising, credentials for the job. Nearly eighty years old, the Glasgow-based merchant had built a fortune in the Atlantic trade, primarily shipping tobacco to Britain from the Chesapeake and slaves to America from a trading fort he and his associates owned on Bunce Island, in Sierra Leone. Oswald had invested significantly in East Florida land. Above all, he had many close American friends, including Franklin and Laurens. Indeed he was so much a “friend of America,” in this sense, that many did not think he could be trusted to speak loudly enough for British interests. Other government ministers sent a deputy to keep tabs on him, Henry Strachey, a deft civil servant who had cut his teeth as secretary to East India Company commander Robert Clive, and who, like Oswald, owned a sprawling estate in East Florida and had close ties with Laurens.85
In hotel suites, over dinner tables, and in letters crisscrossing the quarters of Paris, the negotiators wrangled over how to disentangle the thirteen colonies from the British Empire. By the late fall of 1782, only a few sticking points remained. Americans wanted access to the codrich shores of Newfoundland, and to clarify the western and northern boundaries of the United States. Many Americans owed money to British creditors, and there was some debate over how these debts should be resolved. But the most nagging outstanding question concerned the loyalists: what, if anything, would the United States do to compensate them? Bit by bit solutions were brokered. Oswald conceded the fishing rights. The two sides agreed to mark the western border of the United States at the Mississippi River. John Adams then helpfully observed that the question of debts should be treated separately from the question of loyalist property—a decision that “struck Mr. Strachey with peculiar pleasure; I saw it instantly smiling in every line of his face”—and insisted, as a point of Yankee honor, that all American prewar debts be paid.86
That left the loyalists. Moral responsibility aside, Lord Shelburne and his ministers knew that failing to secure concessions for the loyalists would open them up to attack from their political opponents, and he instructed Oswald and Strachey to take the issue seriously.87 But as they sat down to negotiate this last point—the only diplomatic obstacle left between war and peace—they may not have realized what firm resistance they would face in one of their American counterparts. Benjamin Franklin adamantly opposed granting anything to the loyalists. Even Jay and Adams were surprised by Franklin’s passion on the subject: “Dr. Franklin is very staunch against the Tories, more decided on this point than Mr. Jay or myself,” Adams noted.88 And as the weeks wore on, Franklin’s resolve seemed only to harden. If Britain demanded compensation for loyalist