African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution

On August 16, 1781, Murphy Steele, a Black Loyalist who had escaped from his North Carolina master, Stephen Daniel, three years earlier, related a dream to General Sir Henry Clinton, British commander-in-chief for North America. In his dream, Steele “heard a voice like a Man’s (but saw nobody),” that said Clinton should “send Word to General Washington That he must Surrender himself and his Troops to the King’s Army.” Failing that, “the wrath of God would fall upon him.”

On October 19, 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered his army of 8,000 men to Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, effectively ending the Revolutionary War and Steele’s dreams. The English government agreed to negotiate peace terms that recognized the national freedom of the United States. Cornwallis’s defeat crushed the hopes of one hundred thousand Loyalists of whom at least ten percent were former enslaved people such as Steele.

Loyalists battled until mid-1783 when they accepted inevitable exile and departed aboard British ships for Nova Scotia, England, the West Indies, and scattered global destinations. Embracing a Spirit of 1783, Black Loyalists survived slavery to gain freedom within the British lines. Male and female Black Loyalists served as soldiers, spies, pilots, servants, laundresses, and munitions workers. In British redoubts, Black Loyalists organized military companies, earned wages, shaped religious denominations, and formed families. Leaders such as Boston King, Thomas Peters, Stephen Bleuke, and George Liele emerged. Black Loyalists distinguished themselves in the campaigns around New York City, Philadelphia, and South Carolina.

Black Loyalism originated when Virginia Crown Governor Lord Dunmore promised in 1775 freedom to all Blacks willing to help suppress “the present horrid rebellion.” Thousands of enslaved Blacks joined Ethiopian Regiments supporting Dunmore. Decimated by smallpox and hampered by Dunmore’s ineptitude, many died. Survivors moved north to British-occupied New York City or south to Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. Their numbers were amplified by a steady stream of refugees from slavery encouraged in 1779 by Sir Henry Clinton’s Phillipsburg Proclamation that granted freedom to all African American enslaved people. Scholars debate the numbers of Black Loyalists, with estimates ranging from 15,000 to 100,000. Regardless of the actual total, Black Loyalism was the largest revolt of enslaved people in North America before the Civil War.

Departure of Black Loyalists from New York, Charleston, and Savannah was controversial. General George Washington and Sir Guy Carleton, who replaced Clinton as British commander-in-chief, quarreled about Article 7 of the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the war. Article 7 required the return of all seized property. Innumerable slaves fled Washington’s plantations and he, like Thomas Jefferson, wanted them back. Carleton demurred, contending that the Black Loyalists were free by orders made in the King’s name; returning them dishonored the King. Black Loyalists were terrified by the possibility of return to their American masters. Boston King, from South Carolina, reported New York City Black refugees as embittered: “For some days we lost our appetite for food, and sleep departed from our eyes.” To their immense relief, Carleton stood by the royal promises.

To mollify an enraged Washington, Carleton agreed to judge each Black Loyalist’s claim to freedom, rejecting those who arrived in British camps after 1781. Carleton’s agents listed every departing Black Loyalist in a huge “Book of Negroes” that recorded a brief physical description, date of escape, name of former master, military affiliation, and destination. The New York ledger compiled nearly 3000 names of men, women, and children, many of whom had served the British war effort since 1775. Those approved for departure received a “General Birch Certificate,” which was the first passport issued to African Americans.

The great exile began. At least 776 Black Loyalists departed from New York City and Charleston, South Carolina, for Antigua, Saint Lucia, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. In Jamaica, George Liele founded the Ethiopian Baptist Church, which spawned a significant missionary movement. As many as three thousand eventually found succor in the West Indies. One unit of Black drummers, serving under Baron von Riedesel, went to Germany. An unknown but substantial number fled from South Carolina and Georgia into Spanish-controlled Florida and joined the Seminoles. In 1783 roughly two hundred Black Loyalists arrived in London, England. They found the British government indifferent to their plight. Hampered by local racism, these valiant veterans fell into poverty, becoming known as the Black Poor. Soon, they searched for an alternative.

Nearly three thousand Black Loyalists embarked in 1783 for freedom in Nova Scotia. They faced long delays securing promised land grants and severe discrimination during the frozen winters; for example, White Loyalists received provisions gratis while Blacks were commanded to public labor for their food. By 1787, the colonial government canceled all grants of provisions. Today, Afro-Nova Scotians who sustained communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are celebrated as the founders of Black culture in Canada. One of the most celebrated is Rose Fortune, who arrived from New York at the age of ten, later founded a successful delivery service, and welcomed survivors of the Underground Railroad.

Undeterred, Black Loyalists, often organized by their military regiments and later by religious denominations, toiled for success. Colonel Stephen Bleuke led the Black Pioneers in the construction of army barracks, storehouses, and wharves. The Black Pioneers then built Birchtown, the first Black city in North America, in 1784. Bleuke received a larger land grant than his followers, yet even he was unable to complete home construction the first year. An Anglican, he purchased a pew in a White congregation; the vast majority of Black Loyalists were Baptists or Methodists. Religion and the Spirt of 1783 kept the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia together for a while. Boston King and Thomas Peters joined Bleuke in combining religious with civic leadership, but virulent racism burdened their efforts. Peters traveled to England to meet with the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, led by Ottobah Cugoano, author of a famous tract attacking slavery. Through the intervention of Henry Clinton, Peters presented a memorial to Secretary of State Baron Grenville about the Black Nova Scotians’ despair.

Black Loyalists in London, England found a way to assuage their plight, aided by Cugoano and abolitionist leaders Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Clarkson, who financed the departure of about 350 Black Poor for Sierra Leone. Thirty-five died in transit. The British government had failed to notify local Sierra Leoneans of their arrival, and many died soon after arrival in a settlement that became known as Granville Town.

Despite corruption, mismanagement, and high mortality, the Sierra Leone experiment attracted discontented Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia. Disregarding Stephen Bleuke’s pleas, almost 1200 Black Loyalists left Nova Scotia in 1792 bound for Sierra Leone.

The migrants to Sierra Leone in 1792 established Freetown, gradually incorporated with residents of Granville Town, and survived incompetent British administration and a surprise attack by the French navy in 1794 to become successful traders and a Black freedom society. Peters and David George helped create a radical republican democracy based upon ancient English precedent. Over time the Nova Scotians became the Sierra Leone elite.

They were later joined by two groups. One was a small number of Black Americans discontented with racism and a resurgent slavocracy in America that spurred them to migrate in 1815. Their disastrous experience became one reason for American Black rejection of the American Colonization Society. Nonetheless, American and Sierra Leone Blacks maintained contact. Much larger migrations occurred in 1795 when Jamaican maroons agreed to depart for Sierra Leone, and after the War of 1812 when 5,000 American Blacks, mostly from Virginia, fled to the British fleet and went into exile first in Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone.

In the decades after the American Revolution, a Black Spirit of 1783 provided spiritual and political support for Black Loyalists who established leadership, liberation theologies, and freedom-minded communities around the Atlantic basin. Along with free Blacks in America, they sustained the first generations of Black freedom internationalism and served as models for future Black Nationalisms.

Graham Russell Gao Hodges is the George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of History and Africana & Latin American Studies at Colgate University. He is the author of several books, including Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day (Rutgers University Press, 2018), David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), and The Book of Negroes: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution , co-edited with Alan Edward Brown (Fordham University Press, forthcoming November 2021).