Dunmore's New World by James Corbett David

Author:James Corbett David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

The loyalists who settled in the Bahamas had undergone a terrible ordeal. The poorest among them had arrived in a shocking state of destitution. In many cases, the government provisions they needed came too late, and in the spring of 1786 they were reportedly dying daily. The plight of Philip Dumaresq was typical. Once an affluent Boston merchant, he served as Dunmore’s aide-de-camp during the 1782 mission to Virginia. In the Bahamas, Dunmore reported, Dumaresq was reduced “to a real state of Beggary with a large family of Children, who to my knowledge have been often crying round him for bread when he had not a morsel to give them.”32

Even those with enough to eat found it difficult to cope. Most had been forced to abandon their homes during the war and then compelled to move again when Britain ceded East and West Florida to Spain in the Treaty of Paris. Dissatisfied with the assistance of the claims commission and relegated to inhospitable corners of the empire, they felt forsaken by the very government for which they had risked their lives and lost their livelihoods. Dunmore’s old associate John Cruden, who moved to the Bahamas after the war, described the choices open to loyalists. They could return “to their Homes to receive Insult, worse than Death, or run the Risque of being murdered in cold Blood (the Fate of many who have sought the Protection of the New States) or take refuge on barren Islands, where Poverty and Wretchedness stares them in the Face, or encounter the Rigours of a Northern Climate, destitute of every Necessary of Life—or become Subjects to Spain, and deny the Religion of their Fathers and abandon their still dear Country.” For many of those who chose to settle the “barren Islands” of the Bahamas, as Cruden did, this sense of alienation only deepened.33

Many of the newcomers had been prosperous planters before the war and viewed the old inhabitants as lazy and uncultivated. They also looked down on an earlier wave of loyalist emigrants from West Florida, who consequently tended to identify with the “conchs.” In turn, the old inhabitants saw the exiled elites as haughty interlopers.

The government did take steps to accommodate the new inhabitants. It established seats in the assembly for recently settled out islands, such as Abaco, and significantly reduced the number of representatives from New Providence, Eleuthera, and Harbour Island, where the old guard predominated. The resulting elections, however, were marred by accusations of fraud on both sides. The new inhabitants came away with only eleven of the twenty-five seats. Believing themselves entitled to a majority, a group of dissidents led by James Hepburn of Cat Island formed an organization called “the Board of American Loyalists.” With the help of John Wells’s Bahama Gazette, they mounted a campaign against the government so intense that Governor Maxwell fled the islands fearing a coup d’état. When the controversial assembly convened in 1785, Hepburn and eight others withdrew in protest and refused to return. Charged

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