Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff

Author:Maya Jasanoff [Jasanoff, Maya]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781400041688
Google: 84rJ77ALstEC
Amazon: B004CFAW7U
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

HE MUST HAVE demonstrated himself to be a reliable provider by bringing meat and deerskins for his prospective bride, perhaps also a blanket and some clothes. He might have built a house for them to live in, too, a neat foursquare dwelling with white- or red-plastered walls and a roof of cypress bark.93 With his broad shoulders and strong features, he certainly looked like a good enough warrior, yet at about sixteen years old, the groom was only just a man, not even fully grown. And for all that his skin had darkened under the Florida sun, no amount of weathering could obscure a revealing mark of his ancestry: his deep-set eyes twinkled blue.94

Many teenage boys in colonial America might have fantasized about such a life, inverting all those bloodcurdling tales they had been reared on: running away to live with the Indians, dressing in buckskins, wielding tomahawk and scalping knife, savoring imagined woodland freedoms of sex, violence, and drink. The precocious Maryland-born William Augustus Bowles had done all this in his teens and more. (Even this marriage to the daughter of a Creek chief was his second; he had fathered at least one child already by a Cherokee first wife.)95 Bowles had begun his adventures at the age of fourteen, in 1777, when he earned a commission as ensign in a regiment of Maryland loyalists. But he adapted poorly to a military career that combined immense boredom with exceptional discomfort. In late 1778, his regiment traveled to Pensacola to reinforce the city against an anticipated Spanish attack. He hated this steaming, stinking, sickness-filled port, judged by a fellow officer to be a hell on earth: “Satan and all his angels should be banished to this place.”96 Stir-crazy and insubordinate, Bowles quarreled with his commanding officer and got struck from the rolls. When a delegation of Creek Indians who had come to Pensacola to collect presents from the British returned to their villages, Bowles “threw my red Coat with indignation into the Sea” and traveled with them.97

Bowles became one of hundreds of white men to dwell among the Creeks in the later eighteenth century.98 (The Creek leader Alexander McGillivray was the son of one of the most prominent, Scottish trader Lachlan McGillivray.) Bowles “went native” to the extent of forming a Creek family, and when he led a Creek war party to the defense of Mobile, a contemporary described him “grown out of recollection, and in every respect like a savage warrior.”99 But he never renounced his allegiance as a British subject. In 1780, Bowles even ended up rejoining his loyalist regiment, which meant that at the end of the war he was entitled to a land grant for his service. He chose to move to the Bahamas, close to his adoptive southeast. Circulating restlessly in the postwar years between the Bahamas and the North American mainland, Bowles became another of those loyalist refugees—like John Cruden—whose wartime wanderings anticipated a peripatetic postwar life.

In April 1788, Bowles appeared in Nassau with an alarming tale.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.