FIVE Abiding Ambitions, 1781–1796

Even accepting that American loyalists came in all shapes and sizes, with backgrounds and motives as disparate as the colonies themselves, those who populate Dunmore’s story are something of a revelation. Mainly from the South and West, they possessed none of the staid rationality, reverence for tradition, or moderation of mind that define familiar icons of loyalty.1 Hardly hidebound, they were quick to challenge authority and perfectly willing to break with the past in order to advance the empire and their place in it. Some betrayed republican leanings after the war by agitating for stricter standards of representation and decrying political corruption. A few even formed business partnerships with Catholic Spain—something that many Protestants considered a deal with the devil. Most striking of all were those who, like Dunmore, continued to pursue expansion in North America in the wake of Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris. With worldviews more Romantic than Enlightened, they were the last to give up on the war and the first to attempt to roll back its losses. They shared an openness to new strategies, a propensity for risk, high levels of personal ambition, and a passion for promoting not only “the British Name” but also “the Scale of the Empire.”²

Plenty of Britons held out hope for redemption in America after the war. The counterrevolutionaries who restructured colonial government in Canada in the 1780s, for instance, had more in mind than preventing future rebellions; they sought to create a model mixed government, a beacon of order and liberty that would inspire the thirteen colonies to rejoin the empire upon their inevitable descent into anarchy. While certainly sympathetic to this project, Dunmore and his associates took a more aggressive approach. They sought to reconquer the United States and expand into the West, forming what North Carolina loyalist John Cruden predicted would be “the greatest Empire that ever was on Earth.” To dismiss such hopes as delusional, as some historians have, is to underestimate the power of contingency and undersell the loyalist political imagination. Favorable conditions for a British resurgence in North America persisted into the nineteenth century, particularly in the Old Southwest, where Creeks and Cherokees still predominated. That all of Anglo-America did not develop along the path of Dominion, as Canada did, is partly an accident of history. A committed counterrevolutionary imperialist, Dunmore did everything in his power to restore British rule in what is now the United States. Despite his ultimate failure, these efforts illustrate, often with spectacular vibrancy, just how uneven, uncertain, and undeniably interesting Great Britain’s turn away from the West truly was.3

In the downcast days following Yorktown, there was a sense in Charleston that all had not been lost—not quite. A British garrison town, the city was now a refuge for the low country’s most devoted loyalists. When Dunmore arrived there in late 1781, he fell in with a group of men with big dreams and little influence, including Cruden, the commissioner of sequestered estates for the Carolinas. Like many in Charleston, Cruden felt the world he knew slipping away. Desperate but not defeated, he and others met the gloom with bold proposals for getting the war back on track. They had no illusions about what they were up against. In a letter to Dunmore, Cruden acknowledged the probability that “the Nation at large will insist on the American War being relinquished.” Parliament would indeed vote to end offensive operations less than two months later, but Cruden believed a window for “Vigorous Steps” still existed.⁴ As commissioner, he was responsible for managing confiscated rebel property, including slaves, whom he employed to protect captured estates. Based on this experience, Cruden devised a plan to arm ten thousand South Carolina bondsmen. With the help of the British forces then at Charleston, he believed the slave soldiers could drive the rebels out of the colony and go on to reconquer North Carolina and Virginia.⁵

The strategy was bound to appeal to Dunmore. As little success as he had had in the Chesapeake, he remained convinced that black troops could turn the tide. In a letter to General Henry Clinton, then in New York, he recommended Cruden’s plan wholesale, save for one point. Cruden had no intention of emancipating the slaves he enlisted. “Let it be clearly understood,” he told Dunmore, “that they are to Serve the King for Ever, and that those Slaves who are not taken for His Majesty’s Service, are to remain on the Plantations and perform as usual the Labour of the Field.” Dunmore disagreed. He insisted that all slave soldiers be guaranteed freedom, even those belonging to loyalist masters, who would be compensated for their losses. That the slaves “may be fully satisfied that this promise will be held inviolate,” he wrote to Clinton, “it must be given by the officer appointed to command them.” Dunmore also proposed that the troops be modestly paid. Above all, he stressed the importance of keeping the promise of freedom in order to sustain the tenuous trust that existed between slaves and the government.6

As a channel of influence, Dunmore proved a dead end. Clinton, already emerging as the scapegoat for the Yorktown debacle, was in no position to promote anything; Colonial Secretary George Germain accepted his resignation in February, shortly before stepping down himself. While Cruden’s plan had the support of Major General Alexander Leslie, the senior military commander in the southern colonies, and eventually found its way to General Guy Carleton in New York, it went no further.⁷

In Charleston, Dunmore also met Robert Ross, a merchant-planter who had been driven from his home on the Mississippi River during the Spanish takeover of West Florida. After participating in a failed attempt to retake Natchez in 1781, Ross fled to Charleston and began promoting a plan for Britain to annex the lower Mississippi Valley. The objective, as he explained it to Dunmore in March 1782, was to provide “friends of Government in America a place of retreat where no power of the rebels can oppress them.” Ross believed Spanish Louisiana was ideally suited to permanent British settlement. The soil was congenial to tobacco, rice, and indigo, and with access to the Ohio River via the Mississippi, settlers could trade with northern Indians even in the event of American independence. Perhaps most importantly, the region could serve as a gateway to the trans-Mississippi West.

The insurrections then underway in the Andes Mountains and New Granada made this prospect particularly attractive. “If it is true that the convulsions in the Southern provinces of Spain have reached” New Mexico, Ross wrote, Louisiana would “afford the means of an intercourse with the Revolters, an event which might be attended with very happy consequences, for it is well known that the Eastern parts of New Mexico are regarded as the grand future resource for Mines.” (The revolts had not, in fact, advanced so far north, nor were they fundamentally hostile to Spanish colonialism.) Lest anyone question his commitment or expertise, Ross concluded his letter to Dunmore with detailed plans for an attack on New Orleans. Impressed, Dunmore immediately sent Ross’s observations to the ministry. His sympathy for suffering loyalists, his drive to contribute something significant to the cause, and his interest in preserving North America as an arena for British land speculation all predisposed him to support projects like these.8

Dunmore remained in an offensive frame of mind when he left Charleston for New York in the spring of 1782. In addition to the Cruden and Ross proposals, he was also promoting Lieutenant Colonel James Moncrief’s plan to reestablish a British presence in Virginia. On his arrival in Manhattan, Dunmore described the details to Clinton, who then contacted Moncrief: “Lord Dunmore … tells me you think that a post might be established at Old Point Comfort and Sewell’s Point that would secure James River.” According to Dunmore, Moncrief had already begun stockpiling materials for the project. Clinton was surprisingly receptive. If “it should be in our power in better days,” he wrote, “to go there in such force and remain long enough to establish a post, and it can be kept afterwards with a small force, I request you to go on providing such materials as you shall judge necessary.” Dunmore also spoke to Clinton about arming slaves, having recently sent a request to the ministry for “Command of all the Provincials … and Liberty to raise several Corps of Blacks upon the Promise of Freedom.” Clinton was reluctant to commit on this subject, telling Moncrief that “the arming of negroes requires a little consideration.” He suggested that Moncrief visit New York in June to discuss these matters further. Less than a month later, Clinton relinquished his command and sailed back to England.⁹

Dunmore was close behind, disembarking in London in mid-June. He continued to press for offensive operations even after resuming his seat in the House of Lords. Within a week of his arrival, he was granted an interview with the king.¹⁰ The contents of that discussion are unknown, but neither the meeting nor the ensuing summer did anything to diminish Dunmore’s interest in America. In August, he wrote a long letter in support of Ross’s Mississippi Valley plan to Home Secretary Thomas Townsend, 1st Viscount Sydney. Dunmore’s introduction struck a tone of sober determination:

As I think it a duty incumbent on every well wisher to his Country to offer their sentiments to those who are empowered by Our Sovereign to put them in execution at a period too when the fate of the Empire seems impending, I will take the liberty as an individual to offer you my poor sentiments relative to a part of it that once was the glory of the Empire, and which now seem[s] to be on the eve of being wrested from us, I will not say by whose fault, or by what means, but so it is, and my only wish is now to point out, as far as my poor abilities go, by what modes I think it is still recoverable, and that too, by means no ways expensive to the Country, and by which it will risk the lives of but very few of its Inhabitants.

If Parliament’s resolution against offensive operations in America turned out to be a prelude to total withdrawal (as Dunmore believed it would), “what must become of the Provincials and Loyalists,” he asked, “who have shewn (I think you may and will say) more zeal for their Sovereign and their Country, than any set of men ever known to do in the most supersticious times for their Religion.” Genuinely concerned, he submitted several suggestions. Government should, in the first place, offer to send loyalist refugees back to America with enough ships and arms to regain the country themselves. If this was deemed inconsistent with the late resolution of Parliament, “you should offer to land them on the Missisippi, there to provide for themselves, in the best manner they can.”

Echoing Ross’s account of the region’s virtues, Dunmore placed special emphasis on the potential for recovering the thirteen colonies:

Being in possession of this country and pushing your settlements up the Missisippi, and Ohio, you may soon open a communication with Canada. Between it and New Orleans there is a Navigable communication with only Twelve Miles of Land Carriage, and you will open an easy passage for every man on the Continent, who wishes well to the Country or who prefers this Government to the Tyranny and opression of Congress, to join you. You will also secure the friendship of the Indians, with whose assistance you have it at any time in your power, to drive the Thirteen united Provinces into the Sea, besides receiving the Fur Trade. You have it also in your power to give every aid you please to the Spanish Southern Provinces now in Rebellion.

Here was a vision of North America’s future in which the British Empire was not only predominant but expanding. As Dunmore implied, its fulfillment was only possible with the help of groups that were, and are, traditionally understood as existing outside the empire. Having recently recommended the arming of ten thousand slaves in South Carolina, he now reminded Sydney of the role that Indians might play across the hemisphere in a British resurgence.

True to form, Dunmore offered to lead part of the proposed mission himself. “To shew you that I conceive no very indifferent Idea of the success of this Plan,” he wrote, “or that I think it is by any means a desperate one; I am most ready and willing to go to America, to be the conveyor and proposer of it, and to take what part in it the Provincials and Loyalists, shall please to allot me.” He had not been back in England for three months, and he was already asking to return to America. He promised that, in the absence of a response, he would press the scheme no further. Although Sydney expressed an interest in recovering West Florida around this time, nothing came of Dunmore’s letter. Any window for bold, government-sponsored action had evidently closed. If he wanted to pursue his ambitions in North America, Dunmore would have to act the renegade.11

Dunmore devoted much of his time in England to the cause of the American loyalists. Uprooted and ruined, many of these refugees were in dire need of financial assistance. The British government had already agreed to reimburse those who had lost property during the war as a direct result of their loyalty, but a system for doing so had yet to be established. In February 1783, exiled Americans gathered in London to select a committee of delegates from several colonies to promote their interests. Dunmore was chosen to represent Virginia, a position he occupied for the next four years.¹²

The Treaty of Paris officially ended the war. Some had hoped that the new state governments would assist with the return of loyalist property, but the treaty contained only the vaguest assurance from the United States. A last-minute provision stipulated that all fugitive slaves behind British lines be returned to their patriot owners, but General Carleton, who oversaw the British evacuation of New York City, refused to honor it, and Whitehall supported him. After this, the states were in no mood to reinstate loyalist property. The task of addressing loyalist losses, therefore, fell to Great Britain itself. Even before the treaty was signed, Parliament had established a commission to evaluate individual claims and determine appropriate levels of compensation. It was a remarkable step, one based on strikingly modern assumptions about the role of the state. All Britons, no matter how remotely situated, had a right to the protection of the king, but the claims commission seemed to suggest that government was financially responsible when that protection failed. While some members of Parliament refused to concede that any contractual obligation existed, most agreed something must be done. The rebellion had called the benevolence of the British Empire into question, and the claims commission, like the subsidies enjoyed by refugees, lent the government a measure of moral credibility.¹³

In order to apply for compensation, claimants had to submit reports, or “memorials,” detailing what they had lost along with supportive evidence, typically in the form of letters from respected members of the community. The more eminent the witness, the better. As a peer of the realm and a former governor, Dunmore was in high demand. He took the role quite seriously, writing letters of support, certifying claims of good character, and personally testifying before the board on behalf of loyalists of all backgrounds. Some, like Isabella Logan, had been “reduced from a State of great Affluence to the deepest distress.” Her deceased husband, George, had been a leading Virginia merchant. Dunmore told the commission that the house they owned near Kemp’s Landing was one of the finest he had seen in the colony—“elegantly furnished” with four rooms to a floor. He also confirmed the “many hardships” to which their loyalty had exposed them, including nine months in the floating town. Isabella claimed to have lost property worth £26,000, an enormous sum.14 Dunmore also supported far more modest applications, like that of James Tait. According to the commission, Tait “was in a Low Situation & his Losses were small, but he is highly spoken of for his Loyalty & Services & [we] think it would be proper to pay him after the rate of £20 a year.”¹⁵ It was a small victory, but one that might not have been possible without Dunmore’s help.

Blacks participated alongside whites in the political culture of loyalist suffering, though almost always without receiving comparable benefits. Their memorials employed the same themes and language as those of whites. In a joint claim with three other men (at least one of whom was also black), the Guinea-born George Mills noted that his “Principals of Loyalty” had rendered him “Obnoxious to Congress.” The memorials are full of this phraseology, but observing convention did not guarantee success, especially for black claimants. Having served under both Dunmore and Admiral Howe, Mills submitted an individual claim for ten pounds, which was denied. “This Man is in the same predicament with most of the Blacks,” the commissioners wrote. “He gives no proof at all of his Case.” Although he did “not pretend to great Losses & he is Candid enough to admit that he gained his liberty by the Rebellion[,] we are clearly of Opinion that he has no right to ask or expect any thing from Government.” The board believed that the British Empire had done quite enough for people like George Mills.¹⁶

Peter Alexander also initially lacked evidence to support his claim. Once a free black sawyer, he joined the Ethiopian Regiment, perhaps with a view to liberating his wife and three children, who remained in slavery throughout the war. According to his memorial, his service occasioned the loss of “some Chests of Cloaths, 20 Hogs, 4 feather Beds & Furniture & 200 Dollars,” all of which Dunmore enlisted in the war effort. The commissioners thought this “a very incredible Story”—why would he have joined the Ethiopian Regiment if the governor had stolen his property? Never mind that scores of white loyalists also listed property seized by the British army and navy. “This is the sort of thing which would have required pretty strong proof to Support,” the commissioners wrote, and since Alexander admitted that he had no additional evidence, “we pay no Credit to the Story & think him in no degree entitled to the Bounty of Government.” Not to be denied, Alexander reached out to Dunmore, who agreed to intervene. While Dunmore’s testimony removed all doubt about the veracity of Alexander’s account, the commission only saw fit to award him £10.17

Dunmore had sympathy for the loyalists and a strong sense of duty in the pursuit of reparations on their behalf. But having shared their ordeal, he also shared their financial interests. According to his own reckoning, he had been forced to abandon property worth upwards of £35,000 in America, including thousands of acres of land, over fifty slaves, about a dozen indentured servants, teams of farm animals, race horses, and all sorts of household furnishings. The government had already taken steps to address these losses. When he first returned to England in 1776, he was given a lump sum of £15,000 and saw his salary as governor of Virginia rise from £2,000 to £3,000 a year. He seems also to have received an annual allowance of £750 from the Treasury. Around the time of the Paris peace, the young prime minister, William Pitt, informed Dunmore that his salary was at an end and directed him to the claims commission to recoup the remainder of his losses, which stood at nearly £10,000.¹⁸

Dunmore submitted his memorial the following year. In a separate letter, he asked the board to grant him a new allowance pending satisfaction of his outstanding losses. Flooded with the claims of less fortunate sufferers, the commissioners responded with stern disapproval. “When we consider that ours is the very unpleasant task of literally giving bread to those who want it,” they wrote, “We cannot express our Astonishment that his Lordship should be put upon this miserable List.” The commissioners acknowledged that Dunmore had lost “very considerable Property,” in addition to “a very lucrative Government,” but they felt that he had been amply compensated already. In addition to his annual allowance and the money he received in 1776, Dunmore had also drawn a salary as governor throughout the war. “It would be highly improper in us to comment upon this & to say that he has received it [the salary] too long,” the commissioners wrote. “It is enough for us to say that he has received it for some years longer than any other Governor.” It was not merely that Dunmore had enjoyed privileged access to the generosity of the state. As one of the sixteen peers of Scotland in the House of Lords, he occupied what the commissioners referred to as “the highest Station in this country.” In order to be “qualified” for that position, they reasoned, he must have possessed “a great & independent Fortune.” Since Dunmore admitted freely that he had only a small estate in Scotland and a large family to support, the implication here was that he was not, in fact, qualified for the office. In any case, the board concluded that Dunmore “ought by no means to have made this application” and that “it would be highly improper (& dishonorable to the Noble Lord himself) if we were to recommend any Allowance.”19 No doubt, these pointed words stung almost as much as the decision.

Truthfully, Dunmore had little cause for complaint. About two-thirds of the more than three thousand claimants who applied to the commission received some sort of compensation, but the average award represented just 37 percent of the original claim. By this standard, the state had done quite well by Dunmore.²⁰

Still, the few echoes of his postwar life leave a decidedly gloomy impression. In 1786, he was planning to spend some time at Dunmore Park when he learned that his distinguished cousin, John Murray, 4th Duke of Atholl, was looking for a place to stay in Edinburgh. Ever eager to serve a potential patron, Dunmore offered Atholl the use of his house in the city. The agent who inspected the property for the duke found “no furniture at all, scarce three fourths of the panes in the windows unbroken, the paper and hanging[s] in tatters, [and the] stable and coach house unroofed.” Needless to say, the duke found other accommodations. With only small, marginally profitable estates, Dunmore lacked the wherewithal to maintain residences in London and Edinburgh.²¹

In 1785, Dunmore was rumored to be in the running for several American appointments. “Lord Dunmore is certainly appointed Governour of Jamaica,” the British Chronicle declared in May. English reports in Antigua had him as the inaugural executive of a united Bermuda and Bahama Islands. And that fall, Lady Dunmore learned that her husband would soon be named the next governor of Bermuda. This was welcome news. Apart from a new salary and a return to political relevance, the appointment would provide a platform from which to pursue his American ambitions. But week upon week passed without any official notification. In November, his patience worn thin, Dunmore reached out to an unknown patron, possibly Lord Gower, to confirm the news. In the letter, he ventured some telling opinions about Bermuda and its role in imperial defense. He was “astonished” that the government had not taken steps to better secure the colony. “There is not a sp[o]tt of Sand belonging to His Majestys dominions (The British Isles excepted),” he wrote, “of half the consequence to the welfare (I had almost said the very existence) of the Trade of this Country, that that Island must be, were we at War with either France, Spain or the American States.” For Dunmore, periods of peace were but intervals in an ongoing war for America.22

As it turned out, he was not destined for Bermuda or Jamaica. Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 1786, the ministry informed him that he had been named governor of the Bahamas Islands, an archipelago province of about 11,000 inhabitants. Before its founding as a British colony in 1718, the Bahamas had been a haven for pirates, who preyed upon ships entering the Gulf Stream. After the American Revolution, the Crown purchased the islands from their original proprietors and invited loyalist refugees to settle there. The resulting migration roughly trebled the population, introducing some 1,600 whites and 5,700 blacks, mainly from South Carolina and Georgia by way of East and West Florida. Doubly displaced, the elites in this group clashed with the existing inhabitants, whom they looked down upon and disparaged as “conchs,” for the marine snails they ate. In 1785, hostilities became so severe that Governor Richard Maxwell, who supported the old inhabitants, fled the colony. He remained titular governor, but when the acting executive died, Whitehall decided to make a change. In light of “the constant opposition which was given to your administration,” Home Secretary Sydney told Maxwell, the king decided to appoint “some Person entirely unconnected with the present Inhabitants.” This must have been meant to cushion the blow, for Dunmore, with his extensive ties to American loyalists, hardly fit that description.²³

The Bahamian capital, the town of Nassau on the island of New Providence, was home to arguably the most contentious political culture in the entire British Empire. Since it was also situated amidst the Spanish colonies of East Florida and Cuba and the French island of Saint Domingue, it was a war zone within a war zone. Dunmore understood this. If anything, he took the embattled state of his new government too much to heart.

The commission was signed on 19 May 1787, and for once Dunmore did not tarry. Taking the summer to prepare, he left England that August. The voyage out was long and, he thought, “tedious,” but after eight weeks at sea, he sailed into Nassau Harbor. The approach proclaimed the colony’s forbidding beauty. According to Johann David Schoepf, who visited four years earlier, the harbor was guarded by a chain of jagged rocks “over which mad, foaming seas eternally break”—and this in the absence of a single beacon or lighthouse. Shipwrecks were so common, in fact, that their cargoes helped sustain many of the old islanders. (By law, the governor collected a fifth of all profits from the “wrecking” industry.) There were other perils as well, including extreme weather, political volatility, and a majority slave population. Because of these dangers, most of Dunmore’s family stayed behind in England. At least one son, Alexander, accompanied him across the Atlantic, but it would be nearly a decade before Dunmore saw his wife and daughters again.24

MAP 4. The Bahamas and Caribbean, c. 1787

MAP 5. The Gulf Coast, c. 1790

Safely ashore, the governor took the oath of office on 26 October. His surviving correspondence reveals little about his initial impressions of the islands, but Schoepf’s book suggests a number of things that likely caught his attention. Even more remarkable than the “white and dazzling sand,” Schoepf thought, were the hollow rocks that gave the shoreline “a sharp jagged look, thousand-pointed and knife-edged.” Further inland, fig trees abounded, with their low-hanging branches forming new trunks as they reentered the ground; one example, known as “Blackbeard’s tree,” reportedly shaded a circle nearly one hundred yards in diameter. There was not much green space, but the color palette was extraordinary. Schoepf was amazed by the clarity of the sea water: “The boat swims on a substance of crystalline fluidity, in which, as in air, it seems to hang.” He was equally impressed by “the high splendid, contrasting colors with which most of the fishes are adorned,” noting that “the most glowing red, the purest blue, green, and yellow are as common among them as such high colors are rare among European fishes.” There were remarkable birds as well. In 1789, Dunmore sent two pink flamingoes to London as special gifts to Queen Charlotte. That spring, Dunmore declared the climate “the most agreeable” he had ever known.25

Nassau, however, was a poor excuse for a capital city. With 2,500 people, most of them Scots and free blacks, it was large enough, but the built environment was ramshackle and impermanent. Most of the structures were made exclusively of wood, and glass windows were rare. There was a brand new vendue house for the sale of slaves and produce on Bay Street, which ran along the waterfront, but the principal public buildings were all insufficient to their purpose. Two years after Dunmore’s arrival, the administration of government and justice remained confined to a single, dilapidated structure. One of its two rooms was used by the assembly and provincial court, which were unable to meet simultaneously; the other served as the town jail. This, Dunmore told Sydney, left no “place for an office or for the Juries to retire into, and no place whatever for the Governor and Council to meet in, or for the Council to sit in as a Branch of the Legislature.” Nor was Government House, where Dunmore was expected to live, commodious enough for business. Schoepf had admired its elevated position atop Mount Fitzwilliam at the south end of George Street, but Dunmore was used to far less cramped quarters. “The house is so small,” he wrote, “that I have not room either for my secretary[,] His Office or servants.” The Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg it was not.26

The colony was a backwater in other respects as well. Anglican religious education was practically moribund throughout Dunmore’s tenure, the occasional missionary notwithstanding. There was a church in Nassau, but when the sole minister on New Providence (one of only two in the colony) had to leave for health reasons in 1789, there was no one else to officiate services.²⁷ Access to news and information was also limited. Despite its strategic location in the Gulf Stream, packet boats were infrequent. And while the colony’s first newspaper, the Bahama Gazette, had been established in 1784, there was as yet no royal printer. When Dunmore asked the ministry to hire one, he reported “that neither our Laws nor any other proceedings of the General Assembly have ever yet been printed.”²⁸

The Bahama Islands range over more than five hundred miles of ocean, so transportation was vital.²⁹ Dunmore argued that boats befitting the dignity of his office were hard to come by in Nassau, where the wreckers and fishing vessels all had “very small Cabbins” and “stinck enough to poison a person not accustomed to it.” For years, he tried to get the ministry to pay for the construction of a new boat for travel within the colony, but his superiors insisted that he rent what he could, eventually granting him £600 per year for the purpose. Well into his administration, he was still hiring conveyances for every little trip to the out islands. Apart from being expensive and troublesome, he wrote, it was “humiliating for me to be obliged to go in any dirty stinking thing I can get.”³⁰

Its remote, diffuse situation also made the Bahamas an expensive place to live, and Dunmore was not going to get rich there on government pay alone. His salary was £1,500 per year. Sydney estimated that he could expect to receive another £500 in fees, such as those he collected from successful wrecking expeditions. His enemies accused him of raising fees on entering office, but it appears that he had some cause to do so. Prior to his arrival, the assembly removed the governor’s right to a percentage of the profits from vessels engaged in illicit trade. “God knows all the other emoluments of my Govt. will hardly keep me in provisions,” Dunmore complained, “which are both very scarce & expensive.”31 In truth, he had far larger goals in mind than augmenting his emoluments. Before leaving London, he had been instrumental in establishing Nassau as a free port, open to Spanish and French vessels carrying goods that were either unavailable or prohibitively expensive through British channels. This effort turned out to be part of a larger scheme to capture the Native American trade in Spanish Florida and push Spain out of North America altogether. But before he could attend to that ambitious project, he would first have to master the intricacies of Bahamian politics, which were daunting enough in themselves.

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 with nonattendance and contempt, they were formally expelled and replaced by moderates in by-elections. The loyalist-led opposition came away from these events with a pronounced sense of grievance. There were even accusations that some, including Cruden, began plotting for Bahamian independence.³⁴

The loyalists were pleased with Dunmore’s appointment. “A Governor of his elevated rank was universally considered as no small acquisition to an infant Colony,” one wrote, “but his attachment to his King and Country during the late rebellion, was what rendered his appointment peculiarly grateful to the Loyalists.” For the new inhabitants, however, only one question truly mattered: Would Dunmore dissolve the assembly and call new elections? He had done so on taking office in Virginia, where it had been the custom, but none of his predecessors in the Bahamas had, including the two loyalists who presided during Maxwell’s absence.³⁵ Despite this history, loyalists deluged Dunmore’s office with requests for dissolution. Like so many of the petitions he saw over time, these were deferential in form only. Some openly accused Maxwell of having packed the legislature. In each case, Dunmore responded with the same flat refusal: “I do not think it expedient to His Majesty’s service to dissolve the House of Assembly at this period.” There would not be another general election until 1794.36

The loyalists were not entirely innocent in the struggle for political control in Nassau. They occasionally resorted to the same tactics of intimidation and coercion that their enemies in the United States had employed during the Revolution. Thirty-eight signers of one dissolution petition subsequently renounced the document, stating that they had been “called out of their beds in the night” and misled into signing.³⁷ Those who sympathized with the old inhabitants saw the loyalists as firebrands. A resident of New Providence summarized the situation:

These islands since the peace, have been in a continual uproar, by a violent and rancorous dispute between the inhabitants and the American refugees, the latter conceiving themselves entitled to the greatest share in the affairs of government, and every other indulgence, to the total exclusion of their more honest fellow subjects. As soon as lord Dunmore arrived, they, in a tumultuous manner, and in terms far from polite, addressed, or rather required of him, immediately to dissolve the house of assembly, because some of the old inhabitants were [in] the legislature, and set forth that their respectable corps were not sufficiently represented, not forgetting to remind his lordship of their unshaken loyalty during the American contest, and the great sacrifice of property they had made, in support of the royal cause; his lordship has thoroughly investigated the affair; and the malignity and turbulent spirit of these fugitives appearing fully to his lordship, he has refused to comply with their unreasonable requisitions.³⁸

Dunmore took an immediate dislike to the opposition. At best he thought them “malcontents,” at worst a “Lawless Banditti.” He was not alone. Anthony Stokes, the agent for the Bahamas in London, ascribed the colony’s factious politics to “a desire in several violent, unprincipled Men, to crush the Old Inhabitants, who behave in the most dutiful manner to Government.” The ministry took the same view. After examining the petitions and endorsing Dunmore’s refusals, Sydney assured him “that there is every inclination on the part of His Majesty’s Servants to discountenance the Leaders of Opposition and to cooperate with you in the pursuit of such steps as may be likely to suppress that Party Spirit which has for some time past unfortunately prevailed within your Government.”39 Whatever the merits of their grievances, the opposition had given the loyalists a bad name.

American independence confirmed for Whitehall what Dunmore had always believed about colonial government: executives were too weak, and legislatures too strong, to sustain imperial rule. The postwar reorganizations of British Canada and India both reflected this conclusion. The prevailing mood of “proconsular despotism” in the empire suited Dunmore to a tee. Complimenting Prime Minister Pitt on a speech he had given to Parliament on the need for a stronger military presence in India, Dunmore wrote, “All the real well wishers to Govt were made extreamly happy to find that the mode of Govt. in all our distant Colonies is to be changed from the present into a Military one, which in my opinion will be the most fortunate event that ever happened to them…. His Majesty may then look upon them realy as his Colonies, where in their present situation they can only be looked upon as so many Nurseries of Rebellion, for be assured had we a war with America to Morrow the Loyalists here … would be those I should have the greatest reason to fear.” As this suggests, Dunmore supported the permanent establishment of martial law in the colonies. This put him well outside the mainstream, but while the ministry ignored his views on military rule, Dunmore took it upon himself to establish a more autocratic regime in Nassau.⁴⁰

On the first day of April 1788, William Wylly, a recently arrived loyalist, allegedly approached the chief justice of the Bahamas, John Matson, on the street and, in the presence of at least one onlooker, called him “a Damned Liar.”⁴¹ This kind of confrontation would have had serious personal consequences anywhere in the British Empire, but in the agitated atmosphere of Nassau, it threatened the very foundation of public life. Whether fact or fiction (there were conflicting accounts), the insult was part of a chain of events that temporarily paralyzed the colony’s justice system and allowed the governor to indulge some of his authoritarian inclinations.

Originally from Georgia, Wylly had not been in the colony six months when the controversy began. His reputation as an attorney preceded his arrival. Dunmore, seeking to welcome him with “a Mark of confidence and distinction,” immediately appointed him solicitor general. The courtship continued for several months. One evening in December, the governor sent Matson to Wylly’s Nassau home. Company was present, so the two men adjourned to the piazza. It was dusk. According to Wylly, Matson offered him a captain’s commission in the militia in exchange for his support against the opposition, which was still agitating for new elections. Despite an avowed contempt for “ordinary militia” duty, Wylly accepted. After learning that someone he did not respect had been made colonel, however, he changed his mind. With the discussion turning into an argument, Matson allegedly said, “at present Lord Dunmore seems disposed to serve you—it is very much in his power to do so, and You ought Sir to take a Party.” Several months passed without event, but that spring, Wylly heard that Matson had denied telling him to choose a side. This revelation set the stage for the “Damned liar” incident of 1 April.42

Immediately following the episode on the street, Matson had an assistant judge of the General Court issue a warrant for Wylly’s arrest. Dunmore disapproved of this, but by the time he learned of it, the wheels of justice were already in motion. Because of the chief justice’s direct involvement, the case was heard by the assistant judges at a public hearing the next day, 2 April. Again, Dunmore disapproved; the arrest warrant had directed that the hearing take place in private session rather than open court. With no chambers available to them, the judges had to deliberate while huddled in front of a packed courtroom, where they were exposed to the barbs of defense attorney Robert Johnston, perhaps the most incendiary member of the opposition. After presenting several affidavits in Wylly’s defense, Johnston brazenly interrupted the deliberation, at one point exclaiming, “Tell me ye Judges learned in the Law what neither of you speak.—do consult.—perhaps what one has not in his wig the other may have in his Tail—You would probably consult better over a bottle of Brandy.” Intimidated by these theatrics and unwilling to submit their warrant to the scrutiny of a jury, the judges ordered Wylly’s release.⁴³

It was exactly the sort of humiliation that Dunmore had feared when he first learned of the arrest. He was furious at all the judges involved. In the space of a week, he told Matson to return to England and suspended the assistant judges indefinitely. He took the latter step with the unanimous support of the council but without any qualified replacements at hand, so the justice system had to be temporarily shut down. This was not the first time someone had suspended colonial courts. Virginia patriots had done it in response to the Intolerable Acts of 1774, and Governor Maxwell had done it in the Bahamas in 1785. Defending his actions, Dunmore argued that this was the only way to restore order and prevent the courts “from falling into perfect disrepute and contempt.”⁴⁴ On the voyage back to England, Matson carried a letter from Dunmore to the ministry that accused the opposition of seeking independence and proposed the institution of martial law. “Nothing less than making this a Military Govt. can efectually eradicate the seeds of Rebelion from amongst them,” Dunmore wrote. The General Court soon reopened for capital cases (critics charged that the replacement judges were not even lawyers), but it remained closed to civil trials for nearly a year. This exposed Dunmore, as it had Virginia patriots, to the charge that he was using political unrest to shelter debtors from creditors. Whatever truth there was to this accusation, Dunmore had effectively instituted martial law for the second time in his career. Not until the arrival of the new chief justice, Stephen DeLancey, in February 1789 did the General Court reopen in full.45

Following his release, Wylly committed himself to Dunmore’s downfall. He sailed for London not far behind Matson and, on his arrival, submitted a set of grievances to Sydney, together with statements from several Bahamians who had effectively lost legal actions due to the discontinuance of the General Court. Wylly got a cool reception at Whitehall, but Sydney took note of his charges and ordered Dunmore to answer them in detail. Even without the governor’s input, the home secretary knew enough to pass certain judgments. Matson should not have been permitted to leave as he did, Sydney said, and while the assistant judges deserved to be fired (they should have arrested Johnston for contempt), closing the court all together had been a mistake. Still, Sydney remained supportive pending Dunmore’s explanations, stripping a lucrative appointment from a leading Bahamian radical to prove it.⁴⁶

Dunmore had no trouble justifying his actions to the ministry. It all began, he explained, when he had refused to appoint Wylly to the vice admiralty court because of his support for the opposition, and matters simply escalated from there. He admitted making a few errors, but in light of the circumstances in Nassau, these were forgiven. Rebuffed by the ministry, Wylly was forced to take his grievances to the public. In 1789, he detailed the case against Dunmore in an anonymous pamphlet, which, valuable though it is to historians, did little to undermine the governor’s standing at Whitehall.⁴⁷

Black Bahamians played a key role in Dunmore’s battle with the loyalists. Before the American rebellion, the Bahamas had been among the least oppressive environments in the Americas for Africans and African Americans. New Providence was home to a large community of free blacks, and slaves throughout the islands enjoyed more autonomy than their counterparts in neighboring colonies like Jamaica and Saint Domingue, where plantation agriculture was far more profitable. Unsuited to the cultivation of sugar, the rocky soil of the Bahamas had yet to produce a staple of its own by 1783. A good deal of salt-raking and subsistence farming notwithstanding, the economy remained predominantly maritime.48

The loyalists were eager to begin planting cotton in the Bahamas. While they had little experience with the crop in South Carolina and Georgia, they possessed one requisite in abundance—slaves. Some 5,700 blacks came to the Bahamas in the wake of the Revolution, most of them enslaved. For all the prosperity it promised, the influx of labor raised the colony’s black majority from just over one-half to three-quarters of the total population, making the priorities of oversight and discipline more pressing than ever before.⁴⁹

Many former slaves came to the Bahamas believing that their days in bondage were over, only to be reenslaved upon their arrival. Virtually all of the ninety-seven blacks who sailed from New York to Abaco in 1783, for instance, were labeled “F.P.” in British records, denoting “Formerly Property of.” Evidently, this indicated that they had earned their freedom by joining the king’s troops, in accordance with the policy first established by Dunmore’s proclamation. Yet, they were also described as being in the “possession” of particular whites, occasionally the very people listed as their “former” masters. Whatever their true status, this ambiguity reflected the vulnerability of black freedom in the postwar Bahamas.⁵⁰

Other free blacks came to the islands from East Florida when that colony was handed over to Spain in 1784. With labor in high demand, loyalist planters had begun enslaving any black refugee who could not produce a certificate of freedom. Among other things, more slaves entitled planters to larger government land grants. “It is with great Pain of Mind,” one official wrote in 1786, “that I, every day see the Negroes, who came here from America, with the British Generals’ Free Passes, treated with unheard of cruelty by Men who call themselves Loyalists. These unhappy People, after being drawn from their Masters by Promises of Freedom and the King’s Protection, are every day stolen away.”⁵¹

Having fled for freedom during the war, many of the reenslaved chose to run once again. Some found refuge among the free blacks of Nassau. Others helped to form maroon communities in the Bahamian wilderness. When Dunmore arrived, he informed the ministry that these maroons were “committing Outrages” against whites on several of the islands. On Abaco, he wrote, “the outlaying Negroes went about with Muskets and fix’d Bayonets, robbing and Plundering.” His approach to the problem made him few friends among the loyalist opposition. On the first day of his administration, he published a proclamation offering amnesty to all runaways who surrendered themselves in due course. A week later, he extended the grace period in a second proclamation, which sought to address the concerns of the reenslaved:

And WHEREAS many of the said Negroes may be apprehensive of surrendering themselves lest they may be still deemed Slaves, notwithstanding their claiming their Freedom, therefore Notice is hereby given, that such Persons claiming their Freedom shall apply, upon their Surrender, to the Receiver-General and Treasurer of these Islands, to enquire into the Nature of such Claims of Freedom; and if properly founded, the said Receiver-General will give a Certificate of such Freedom, which will be certified under my privy Seal and Sign Manual, and a Register thereof kept in the Secretary’s Office.52

This policy originated with Governor Maxwell, but from 1783 to 1787, it produced only eleven emancipations. Dunmore promised to give it teeth. Virtually all of the administrative mechanisms of imperial authority would be brought to bear to certify legitimate claims of freedom. The proclamation even offered to pay to transport black petitioners to Nassau to have their cases heard. The document bore the date 7 November 1787, the twelfth anniversary of Dunmore’s first proclamation of emancipation. The governor may have believed the date would resonate with runaways and help to instill trust, or it may have been a coincidence that resonated anyway. Regardless, the proclamation succeeded in drawing runaways out into the open, and Dunmore made good on his promise to investigate their claims.

He established a special tribunal, composed of the receiver general and two magistrates, with complete jurisdiction over cases of contested status.⁵³ The very existence of such a court presupposed sympathy for black petitioners and suspicion of their purported owners. Dunmore made no secret of this prejudice. Some Bahamian loyalists, he told the ministry, had acquired “a great proportion of their property by decoying these poor Creatures from the different Towns, when we evacuated them on the Continent of America, under pretence of saving them from the Hands of their Old Masters.” By the spring of 1788, the court was righting these wrongs with some regularity. While it helped dozens of individuals escape bondage for a second time, however, Dunmore regretfully acknowledged that “a much greater number have been carried off from the different islands by force to the Spanish & French Islands & there Sold.”⁵⁴

In the face of these injustices, Dunmore acted decisively—and illegally. That spring, he instructed the owner of the vessel he was renting, a man named Mackay, to sail to Spencer’s Bight on the island of Abaco with a body of armed men. Once there, they were to seize a store of smuggled corn and remove “all the rebel property Negroes,” presumably to give them a hearing before the slave tribunal in Nassau. The mission threw Spencer’s Bight into confusion. According to a petition signed by eleven area planters, many slaves “came in open day before your Memorialists faces, and put their baggage on board said Mackay’s boat.” The whites managed to prevent the boat from leaving, but in the midst of the disorder, approximately forty slaves, some of them “household-servants,” disappeared into the woods. The petitioners implored the governor to remedy the situation, which they feared would escalate into “an Insurrection” and force them “to relinquish their houses and plantations, [leaving them] destitute of every subsistence for themselves, their wives and children.”55

To prevent the abandonment of the settlement, Dunmore sailed to Abaco himself and established a slave court at Spencer’s Bight. Allowing slaves to initiate hearings on their word alone, the court inspired most of the fugitives to come out of hiding. “Those that were entitled to their freedom were declared so,” Dunmore wrote, “and the others returned peaceably to their owners.” In actuality, only one of the thirty who applied to the court was granted liberty. Despite the lopsided results, Dunmore was pleased with the proceedings and claimed that “the utmost harmony” prevailed on the island upon his departure. The Abaco planters were indeed relieved and wrote to the governor to express “the extreme gratitude” for the “fair, candid, and impartial” hearings. One of these men, Philip Dumaresq, Dunmore’s former aide-de-camp, would remain a close political ally.⁵⁶

In this light, “the Negro Court” appears to have been a charade designed to legitimize reenslavement, but the loyalist opposition did not see it that way. In 1788, a grand jury heard various grievances against the government, including “the Negro Court,” which encouraged slaves “to elope from their Masters, under pretended Claims of Freedom.”⁵⁷ In his pamphlet, Wylly denounced the tribunal as an instrument of arbitrary power, one that, among other things, trampled slaveholders’ right to trial by jury. Wylly also alleged that Dunmore was coopting the labor of slaves with pending petitions before the court. The entire system, he said, had been conceived as a means of establishing “two or three cotton Plantations for a rapacious and needy individual.” Although echoed by other members of the opposition, this charge appears to have been unfounded. Whatever the reasons for the planter-friendly outcome at Spencer’s Bight, the proceedings there were part of a broader slave court system that affirmed the freedom of forty-one individuals during Dunmore’s tenure, more than double all other administrations combined.⁵⁸

The law that created the Negro Court required freed slaves to leave the colony within three months, pay a £90 fine, or face reenslavement. How faithfully these rules were enforced is unknown. Wylly alleged that Dunmore permitted a “considerable village” of free blacks to exist behind Government House, which served as “an Asylum for runaways and Negro Offenders of every description, and no white Person dares make his appearance within it, but at the risk of his life.” According to Wylly, crimes against white men were committed with impunity in this neighborhood: “Many have been assaulted, and nearly destroyed there, and though several of the Offenders have been prosecuted to conviction, the Governor has interposed and protected them from punishment.” Dunmore appears here, as he so often did in Virginia, as a traitor to his race—the overlord of a lawless black banditti.59

For free blacks, Dunmore was a useful patron. One evening in December 1787, the governor awoke to “cries of Murder” from the village behind Government House. He reportedly rushed to his window, where a group of children explained that “five or Six Gentlemen with swords & Pistols” had broken into their home, beaten their mother (“a free Mullatto woman”), wounded one of their sisters, and “otherwise abused & alarmed the rest of the family.” The intruders, they said, were now trying to burn the house down. Dunmore dispatched several servants to intervene and “save the house if possible.” The leader of the offending party was Josiah Tatnall, a loyalist vice admiralty judge, who had apparently “knocked one of the poor Girls down” during the invasion. When Dunmore’s servants ordered Tatnall to leave the family alone, he was reportedly “impertinent,” telling the emissaries that “he neither cared for His Majesty or any other Man.” All of the offenders were arrested and imprisoned before posting bail. “If this had been a drunken frolick there might have been some sort of excusing made for them,” Dunmore wrote, but the following day, Tatnall allegedly swore that “he would burn every house belonging to the free Negroes in that quarter of the Town.” In response, the governor vowed to do everything he could “to give these poor people redress,” so as “to convince others that whilst His Majesty is pleased to continue me in my present situation, such outrages shall not (if in my power to avoid) go unnoticed.”⁶⁰

Dunmore’s attitudes about slavery and freedom were more complex than his reputation for self-interested opportunism allows. In 1788, he received a questionnaire from the ministry about slave life in the Bahamas. His responses show that he saw similarities between blacks and whites where others saw differences. When asked, “Could an European Constitution subsist in a West Indian Climate, under the Labour necessary for cultivating a West Indian Plantation,” he responded, “yes it might.” When the question was repeated in a different form—“Would it be possible to cultivate to Advantage the West India Islands by the Labour of Europeans or of Free Negroes?”—he answered in the affirmative again. And when asked about life expectancy, reproduction, and susceptibility to disease, he emphasized similarities between blacks and whites across the board. Even by the standards of his time, he was no progressive. In January 1789, he purchased nine slaves along with a few hundred acres of land in the very section of Abaco where he had sent twenty-nine runaways back to slavery the previous year. As a slaveholder and the chief executive of a slave society, he wanted above all to maintain order. Not long after the Abaco sessions of the Negro Court, he happily assured the ministry that “there has been no kind of disturbance whatever amongst the Negroes on these Islands in consequence of the reports of an Abolition of the Slave Trade [in Parliament], nor do they seem in the least anxious about it.” If Dunmore ever expressed any moral compunction about slavery or the slave trade, the evidence has not survived.61

And yet, black liberty had no greater friend in the Bahamas. In addition to supporting the large, controversial free black community behind Government House, he also promoted black land ownership, issuing several patents to free people of color. Amelia Smith, a free mulatto women, received 325 acres on Exuma, and five other free blacks, two of them women, were among the original grantees of “Dunmore Town,” the village the governor designed and named for himself on Harbour Island. Despite the results of the slave tribunal on Abaco, Dunmore seems to have done everything in his power to honor the empire’s commitment to those it freed during the war. His enemies felt he went too far. As Dunmore saw things, reenslavement threatened Britain’s status as the global standard-bearer of liberty. The ministry agreed and gave him high marks for protecting “such as may have been unjustifiably deprived of the Freedom they had acquired from their Services during the War in America.” While some of the conclusions British officials drew from the war validated Dunmore’s conservative views on government, his relationship to black freedom was out of step with the trend toward increasing racial subordination and hierarchy in the empire.⁶²

Slavery and freedom were elastic concepts in Dunmore’s mind. He did not consider liberty to be reserved for whites alone, nor did he see lifelong bondage as an exclusively black condition. Around the time he took office in the fall of 1787, Britain withdrew from the Caribbean coast of present-day Nicaragua, a region then known as the Mosquito Shore. Making way for Spanish authorities, most of the more than 2,500 English-speaking inhabitants moved to Belize. But about two hundred from the island of San Andrés came to the Bahamas. Although these exiles insisted that Dunmore treat them “not as American Refugees, but as Britons born,” their situation mirrored that of the loyalist settlers in several respects. They arrived in desperate need of provisions, as had many loyalists, and looked to the government to supply them. In both cases, moreover, the vast majority of the refugees were enslaved. But here also was a difference—the Mosquito Shore slaves were American Indians not blacks.63

Native American slavery was relatively rare in the British Empire. After flourishing in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, it had dwindled in most places by the middle of the eighteenth. The Mosquito Shore was controlled by the Miskito Indians, who routinely enslaved other Natives in the interior and sold them (mainly in exchange for firearms) to British traders, who then distributed them to whites along the coast. Over the course of the century, there were perhaps 200,000 victims of this trade, most of them Sumus, Matagalpas, Caribs, and Jicaques. One white refugee in the Bahamas explained that such people, whom she referred to simply as “Musquito Indians,” were bought and sold “daily” on the Shore. In many places, she said, they were “even more numerous than the Negroe Slaves.”⁶⁴

Dunmore’s involvement with Indian slavery began through an obscure series of events. In late January 1788, he paid a visit to the Nassau home of George Barry, the treasurer and receiver general of the Bahamas. Also present were Attorney General Edmund Wegg and an enslaved Indian woman named Sprightly. According to Wegg, the conversation focused on “the legality and Propriety of the Sale of Indians.” Sprightly told the men that her owner, the Mosquito Shore refugee Mary Brown, had ordered her to find a new master following some recent misconduct. Interested, Dunmore told Sprightly to fetch a man named Seth Yeoman, who lived with Brown and helped to manage her affairs. (Why Brown was not consulted herself is unclear.) In the negotiation that followed, Dunmore expressed “some doubts” about the legal status of Indian chattel, and though Wegg mentioned having encountered such cases in West Florida, the governor was skeptical. He agreed to purchase Sprightly, another woman named Diana, and possibly others, but not before their status was confirmed by the Negro Court. It was an odd choice of venue, even though the colony was still without a fully functional General Court, particularly since none of the Indians in question were contesting their status. In any case, Yeoman apparently agreed to hire out several of Brown’s Indians, including Sprightly and Diana, for work on Dunmore’s plantation pending the trial.⁶⁵

Given the chance, Mary Brown would have disputed this account. Wegg swore under oath that Yeoman had confirmed these facts before his lawyer advised him not to sign anything. Although her reaction to Wegg’s affidavit has not survived, Brown did file a formal complaint with the ministry about the Indians’ appearance before the slave tribunal. In a petition prepared by her attorney, none other than William Wylly, she maintained that all of the bondswomen in question “had either been born Slaves” in her “Family” or were “fairly and legally acquired by purchase.” If they were “entitled to their Freedom under any Law,” she was prepared to renounce her title to them, but only “upon the event of a Legal Trial.” She (and Wylly) did not consider the slave tribunal a legitimate body. She also either disapproved of Yeoman’s hiring the women to Dunmore or disputed that he had done so, for she insisted that the governor had no authority to employ her slaves while their case was pending. To see her property “converted to the use of another Person,” she wrote, “is palpably oppressive and unjust.” Dunmore did pay Yeoman for the eight and a half months that Diana and Sprightly were with him. Brown, however, maintained that Dunmore had had the benefit of three, not two, of her slaves. This likely referred to a woman named Polly, who, according to Wegg, had only stayed with Dunmore for a night before returning to Brown with her two children, Comfort and Nero.66

Mary Brown accompanied Wylly on his trip to London in the hopes of presenting these complaints to the ministry in person, but they were denied a hearing. As it turned out, she need not have worried. In August 1788, Diana and Sprightly were both adjudged slaves in Nassau. At that point, Dunmore seems to have returned the women to Yeoman, who sold them to an unknown party at public auction for a sum exceeding that which the governor had agreed to pay the previous January. Why Dunmore did not buy the women according to the original terms is a mystery. There are other unanswered questions as well. Were Sprightly and Diana hired legally or arbitrarily appropriated? Why did Polly leave after only one night? Why was she permitted to? In what capacity did the remaining women work? What was their relationship to the black slaves in the governor’s household? Whatever the details, Dunmore’s ability to so quickly accommodate Indian slavery within his moral framework is noteworthy. If nothing else, it provides additional evidence that he did not view slavery and freedom in racially binary terms.⁶⁷

Of all the issues Dunmore faced in the Bahamas, none was more important to him than defense. While he was justifiably criticized for sinking too many public resources into the cause, it is hard to imagine a more appropriate priority for someone in his position. In order for the colony to flourish, people with property had to feel safe enough to settle and do business there. The strategic location that made the Bahamas valuable to the empire—from the Caribbean and points south, it commanded the navigation of the Gulf Stream, the Windward Passage, and the east coast of North America—also made it vulnerable to attack from Spain, France, and the United States.68 The geographic diffusion of the islands made them difficult to defend, whether from outright invasion or smuggling, which was a constant problem even after the Free Port Act of 1787 opened Nassau to goods from Spain and France. “American Vessels and other Smugglers come armed into the very Ports and Harbours of these Islands,” Dunmore told Sydney, “declaring that they will fight their way in, and have actually landed the produce of their Country and carried off Cotton in return.”⁶⁹

There were internal threats to contend with as well, including a large slave population and an unruly class of politically aggrieved whites. Disorder was so deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life, in fact, that the inhabitants hardly took notice of episodes like Tatnall’s attack on the free black family behind Government House. But for all its strategic significance and its many needs, the Bahamas was obscure in the minds of London officials, many of whom had no idea where the colony began or ended. Even if the ministry grasped the need to properly secure the islands, the government was not in a financial position to do so. Because of this, Dunmore opted, not unreasonably, to take matters into his own hands.⁷⁰

The colony could not have asked for a more committed advocate in the struggle for imperial resources. Dunmore always believed that the Bahamas needed a standing army. This view suited his temperament and gratified his ego, but it also reflected the circumstances on the ground. When he took office, the four companies of the 37th Regiment stationed in Nassau were ready to leave and awaiting embarkation instructions. Alarmed at the prospect of losing the troops, Dunmore used the Abaco slave rebellion as a pretext to delay their departure and managed to keep them on New Providence for nearly two years. He was constantly fending off orders to downsize the colony’s modest military apparatus. When told to return weapons and ammunition to England, he not only refused but requested that more be sent.⁷¹

Nor did he wait passively for the ministry to comply with such demands. With the 37th Regiment finally set to depart in the summer of 1789, Dunmore was feeling anxious. “It is an exceeding unpleasant thing, not to have a single Man to take care of three Forts, Magazines and Stores,” Dunmore wrote, “for which purpose I shall be obliged to Arm some Negroes.” The terms under which he sought to mobilize blacks are not known. If indeed he followed through with this step, it is telling that even the cotton-growing opposition seems not to have objected.72 Dunmore also tried to address the looming security void by detaining a British sloop from Jamaica that had the misfortune to lay anchor in Nassau Harbor just days before the departure of the regular troops. After that ship also sailed in late August, the colony remained virtually defenseless for almost a year. It was not until the summer of 1790, when the Spanish capture of a British trading operation on the coast of Vancouver Island brought both empires to the brink of war, that reinforcements finally arrived in the form of the 47th Regiment. While he hardly relished the threat of a sudden attack, the governor finally had his troops. All he needed now was a suitable place to put them.⁷³

The replacement of Fort Nassau was the largest undertaking of Dunmore’s life, and (appropriately) it was accomplished almost entirely without the permission of his superiors. As symbols of sovereignty, fortifications served political as well as military ends. They reinforced the community from within and without, instilling confidence among subjects and legitimizing those in power while deterring outsiders. For Dunmore, whose sense of personal and imperial purpose remained as grand as ever, these were weighty considerations. Fort Nassau was not only embarrassing but dangerous, even in a rare period of peace. According to Dunmore, its “confined and low situation” contributed to the deaths of about fifty members of the 37th Regiment as well as several of the women and children who traveled with them. It was cheaply constructed, he argued, and the barracks were located far too close to town, where drilling annoyed the inhabitants and easy access to liquor tempted troops to dissipation. Hoping to convert the site into a public building complex, Dunmore began a new fortification to the west called Fort Charlotte.⁷⁴

He did this purely of his own initiative. The project would ultimately take seven years to complete and consume more than £32,000 in public funds. Fort Charlotte still stands today. Despite having room for forty-two large cannons, it has never seen a single shot fired in anger. Still, a new fort in Nassau was once a less ridiculous proposition than it now seems. When he first learned of it, Sydney praised Dunmore’s desire to place New Providence “in a respectable state of Defence” and even promised to pay for the completion of those sections that were already underway. Given the prevailing calm in that part of the world, however, he asked that no new works be started before the Ordnance Department had a chance to approve them. Dunmore evidently never got this message. In December 1788, he complained that he had not received a single communication from Whitehall during his first year in office and reported that work on Fort Charlotte was advancing apace. He assured Sydney that he had gone to great lengths to minimize expenses, but the bill had already reached £4,000. If he was not genuinely sensitive to the cost constraints involved, Dunmore at least knew enough to pay them lip service.75 The architectural plans arrived in London in early 1789, and while Sydney agreed to place them before the Board of Ordnance, he ordered Dunmore to cease construction pending its review. In response, Dunmore vowed to continue working only on those parts of the fort that were “in great forwardness and nearly finished.” When the 47th Regiment arrived, he took the opportunity to begin a new barracks on the grounds.⁷⁶

William Grenville, the son of George Grenville, succeeded Sydney as home secretary in 1789. Alarmed by the enormous expense of Dunmore’s pet project, he ordered a moratorium on all work and a full accounting of the costs incurred to date. The following year, the ministry dispatched officers from the Corps of Engineers to survey fortifications in the Bahamas and throughout the West Indies. Dunmore attempted to charm the man assigned to Nassau by naming part of Fort Charlotte in his honor, but the inspector was not so easily influenced. The report he filed in England was mostly negative, though not as damning as the loyalist opposition would have liked. Aside from the sheer expense involved, there were concerns about fraudulent accounting practices. The allocation of public funds was never a transparent process in the Bahamas, and past administrations were criticized for this just as Dunmore’s was. Following Grenville’s review, Dunmore was forced to pay for a few items that he had improperly charged to the state, but no serious irregularities were found.⁷⁷

In the end, the Treasury paid for Fort Charlotte, a structure that the ministry had neither ordered, authorized, nor wanted. Remarkably, when war broke out with France in 1793, Dunmore had enough political capital left (and sufficient nerve) to erect another fort, which he built on top of the ridge overlooking Nassau and named Fincastle for his son. Fort Fincastle, like Fort Charlotte, still stands today, both monuments to the futility of metropolitan authority in America. While they have earned Dunmore his fair share of criticism over the years, they also testify to his considerable skill in the game of imperial politics and the force of his will to make a mark in the world.⁷⁸

While lavishing resources on Bahamian defense, Dunmore continued to pursue his ambitions on the North American mainland—and not without reason. The fate of the Floridas and the lower Mississippi Valley was far from settled. If Britain reestablished a foothold there (and most contemporaries expected them to try), virtually anything was possible. Dunmore might even return one day with legal title to his lands on the banks of Lake Champlain. Stranger things had happened.

Despite the changes introduced by the Treaty of Paris, the geopolitics of the Old Southwest remained very much in flux. On paper, the Floridas and Louisiana now belonged to Spain, but its presence was limited to a handful of ports. Despite winning vast claims between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, the United States had yet to establish control there, a fact that did nothing to stop Americans from streaming into the area from Georgia and elsewhere. Standing between these settlers and the Spanish Empire were about fifty thousand Indians, mainly Creeks and Cherokees but also Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. The Creeks used this position to obtain military support from Spain, which underwrote their opposition to Georgia settlers for a time, but such alliances were subject to change. Much depended on Great Britain. Firmly entrenched in Canada, slow to evacuate forts in the Old Northwest, and still the Indians’ preferred ally, the British had no intention of leaving the continent to their rivals, whatever the Treaty of Paris said.79 They had been eager to retake Florida ever since surrendering Pensacola to the Spanish in 1781. Dunmore’s interest in the region dated back to his time in Charleston, where he had heard Robert Ross extol its many virtues. With easy access to the peninsula and Gulf Coast, Nassau was a natural staging area for British operations in North America, and Dunmore came to the Bahamas fully intending to use it as such.⁸⁰

The southern Indians, though embattled, remained the most important political and military force in the region. They occupied and controlled most of what is now Alabama, Mississippi, southwestern Georgia, and Florida. The only remaining bulwark against American expansion, they were also avid consumers of European goods, including blankets, clothing, leather shoes, pots and pans, all sorts of tools, tobacco, rum, salt, firearms, and, most importantly, gunpowder. In exchange for these items, the Indians tendered deerskins, which Europeans used to create a variety of leather goods. This trade was both highly profitable and diplomatically imperative. In order to ensure that the Indians did not ally with Britain or the United States (and begin raiding its settlements), Spain needed to prove its value as a trade partner. The Indians, however, were accustomed to British goods. Given its limited resources and strict shipping regulations, the Spanish Empire could not compete with these products on volume, quality, or price. So, at the persistent behest of an influential Creek chief named Alexander McGillivray, Spain turned to established British traders in the region to help keep its new Indian neighbors happy.81

As this situation suggests, life in the lower Mississippi Valley did not lend itself to the strict observance of imperial boundaries. McGillivray’s career, indeed his very existence, attests to this. The son of a Scots trader and a half-French, half-Koasati Indian mother, he was raised in Indian country and educated in Charleston. McGillivray rose to prominence among the Upper Creeks during the 1780s on the strength of his mother’s family connections and his experience with whites. Playing Britain, Spain, and the United States against one another, he managed to enrich himself while protecting the lands of the Creek confederacy.⁸²

His partnership with a merchant named William Panton was integral to his success. In 1784, McGillivray accepted a silent interest in Panton, Leslie, and Company, a loyalist trading firm whose partners—Scotsmen all—had opened up shop in East Florida after being run out of South Carolina and Georgia during the war. In exchange, McGillivray convinced Spanish authorities to allow the company to continue doing business with the Indians after the British evacuation of East Florida. Underscoring the risks involved in neglecting the Indian trade, he secured the goods his people wanted and demonstrated his ability to negotiate with high-level Spanish officials. The deal both reflected and consolidated his growing influence.⁸³

By the time Dunmore took office, Panton, Leslie, and Company had a de facto monopoly on the Indian trade throughout East and West Florida. In other words, a British firm, owned and operated by Scots, had an exclusive right to do business in the empire of His Catholic Majesty, King Charles III. The Panton organization remained loyal to George III, of course, just as it had during the American rebellion, but it never let political or religious commitments get in the way of business. As long as the two powers remained at peace, loyalties could be divided. Born of Spain’s inability to adequately supply its Indian allies, the partnership reflected Spanish weakness in the region. The interimperial character of life in the borderlands of the Old Southwest was, in this sense, a function of instability.

Dunmore was on a collision course with Panton before ever setting foot in the Bahamas. While making preparations to depart London in 1787, the governor had successfully lobbied Parliament to establish Nassau as a free port, a status that permitted Spanish and French merchants to trade there. During that process, Dunmore befriended John Miller, a member of the Bahamian Council and a partner in the Nassau trading firm of Miller, Bonnamy, and Company. After working together for the passage of the free port law, the two men shared the voyage from England to New Providence. With plenty of time to discuss their mutual aspirations, they formed a partnership. Dunmore was open to any scheme that combined the aggrandizement of Great Britain with personal profit. Miller was hungry to expand his business at the expense of Spain, which had taken everything he owned during the capture of West Florida and sent him to prison in Havana for outfitting privateers during the subsequent occupation of Nassau. Likewise, Miller had plenty of reason to resent Panton, Leslie, and Company. Miller and his partner, Broomfield Bonnamy, had been on the losing end of the firms’ commercial rivalry for years. They were also West Floridians, and Panton’s people were all eastern seaboard loyalists, a circumstance that put them on opposite sides of the great divide in Bahamian politics.84

Hostilities between Panton, Leslie, and Company and the Bahamian government escalated after Dunmore’s arrival. At one point, the governor seized 6,000 piastres as contraband from one of its vessels. Dunmore was eventually forced to return the money, but plenty of bad blood remained. Before long, a new opportunity to undermine Panton’s monopoly presented itself.⁸⁵

In the winter of 1787–88, the Creeks were in crisis. Spanish authorities had been bankrolling their war against the Georgians, but after several impressive Creek victories, Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró of Louisiana abruptly withdrew this support, at least partly in an attempt to woo the frontiersmen away from the United States. Spurned by Spain and as desperate as ever to keep the Americans off of Creek land, McGillivray was suddenly a free agent, open to assistance from virtually any quarter.⁸⁶

Enter the incomparable William Augustus Bowles. Raised in western Maryland, Bowles left home at the age of fourteen to fight for the British in the American Revolution. He never returned. His service took him to New York City, Philadelphia, Jamaica, and Pensacola, where, only sixteen, he resigned from the army and fell in with a group of Lower Creeks. He traveled widely thereafter, sometimes as a prisoner of Spain, all the while moving deftly between the Indian and white worlds. He was living with his Creek wife, Mary, and her father, Chief Perryman, along the Chattahoochee River when the Spanish pulled away from McGillivray. Eager for influence, Bowles sailed to Nassau to seek a solution to the crisis. He had known Miller at Pensacola and no doubt planned to seek his assistance. On his arrival, he aligned himself with Dunmore’s party, accusing several loyalists, Cruden among them, of having attempted to involve him in a scheme for Bahamian independence during an earlier stint in the colony.⁸⁷

FIGURE 11. Thomas Hardy, William Augustus Bowles as an Indian Chief, 1791. (©NTPL/Angelo Hornak)

Dunmore liked the swashbuckling Bowles. The two men had a lot in common. Both were hot-tempered, keen for adventure, and pathologically enterprising. As Bowles’s first biographer put it, “the leading feature of his soul is ambition, to which every other passion is made subservient.” The same could be said of Dunmore, though Bowles, still only twenty-five, possessed much of what the governor lacked, including charisma. Dunmore could hardly have dreamt up a more useful partner.88

With instructions from the governor and Miller, Bowles returned to Florida to gauge McGillivray’s receptiveness to aid from New Providence. The immediate goal was to install Miller, Bonnamy, and Company in the Indian trade, a development from which Dunmore and Bowles almost certainly stood to profit directly. But there was a broader agenda as well. In order to enhance the illusion of official backing from Britain, Bowles was outfitted with a gold-laced suit of regimentals and a sterling silver sword. George III knew nothing of these events, but Dunmore and the other conspirators hoped to wrest control of the region from Spain on his behalf. The meeting with McGillivray took place at Coweta, the principal town of the Lower Creeks. The two men, though destined to be rivals for Creek influence, had been friendly at Pensacola, and their needs were now aligned. They reached a deal whereby Bowles would provide the Indians with supplies in exchange for McGillivray’s promise not to interfere with Miller, Bonnamy’s activities in the region. The needs of the Creeks thus compelled McGillivray to risk his relationship with Panton, a friend as well as a business partner.89

Back in Nassau, Dunmore was making preparations for an expedition to East Florida. Miller outfitted two vessels with goods for the Indians and plied potential recruits with free food and drink. No doubt, promises of land and plunder were also made. Dunmore allegedly opened the jail to fill out the ranks and used the public arsenal to arm them. About fifty men made the trip, most of them Florida loyalists. Under the leadership of Bowles and Bonnamy, the two-ship fleet reached the east coast of Florida in October 1788. Over one hundred pack horses from the Lower Creek towns met them near the mouth of the Indian River. As planned, Bonnamy then returned to Nassau to hire an armed vessel, which was to rendezvous with Bowles at Apalachee Bay for a coordinated attack on Panton’s Wakulla River warehouse on the other side of the peninsula, not far from the Spanish fort at San Marcos. In the meantime, Bowles was supposed to seize another store, Concepcion, on the St. Johns River, and gather Creek and Seminole auxiliaries while moving west toward Apalachee Bay.

None of this came to plan, and neither store saw any action that fall. Bowles was indecisive, and the troops, suffering severe privation, turned themselves in to Spanish authorities. Had he made it to Apalachee Bay, Bowles would have encountered a far larger force than he expected, as Panton had received word of the expedition from Nassau and arranged for reinforcements. As it was, Bowles took refuge among the Lower Creeks and lived to fight another day.⁹⁰

The failure of this mission makes the ambitions behind it seem absurd, but it convinced the Spanish to immediately reinstate their military subsidy to the Creeks. Nevertheless, the Dunmore-Miller-Bowles platform still had an audience in Indian country. Many southern Indians were unhappy with Panton’s high prices and low inventories, and a joint Creek-Cherokee conference convened in the spring of 1789 to address the situation. Those present wanted to establish their own free ports and looked to Britain to help protect them.91 A few months later, Bowles addressed a grand council of Lower Creeks and Seminoles at Coweta. Styling himself “Director General of the Creek Nation”—“Estajoca” to the Natives—he delivered a stirring performance. The council empowered him to travel to England to solicit the support of George III. A nearby meeting of Chickamaugas (separatist Cherokees) appointed a few of its own chiefs to join him. With this modest mandate—far from universal among the Creeks let alone the Cherokees—Bowles set out to secure a British alliance for an independent Creek-Cherokee state, which he called Muskogee.⁹²

Before crossing the Atlantic, Bowles and the other chiefs came to Nassau to consult with Dunmore. Their presence incited a new round of partisan wrangling. Panton, Leslie, and Company had recently hired Wylly as legal counsel and filed a petition at Whitehall accusing the governor of conspiring with Bowles. Dunmore flatly denied the charge, but the Indians now at Government House did not help his case. That summer, the Bahama Gazette reported his involvement in the Florida campaign. Bowles tried to take sole responsibility in the Lucayan Royal Herald, the new organ of government in Nassau, insisting that neither Dunmore nor Miller had known anything about it. It was an overreaching denial, too comprehensive to be credible.⁹³

Bowles left no stone unturned in his efforts on behalf of Miller, Bonnamy, and Company. While still in Nassau, he wrote to Secretary of State José Moñino y Redondo, conde de Floridablanca and other Spanish officials to convince them that it was in Spain’s interest to open the Indian trade. Panton, Leslie’s price-gouging was alienating the Indians, Bowles argued, and Miller’s participation would raise volume and lower prices. He stressed the new Creek-Cherokee alliance, estimating its combined force at twenty thousand warriors, and claimed that they had refused offers from American settlers “to penetrate into and Attack His Catholic Majesty’s Subjects in Louisiana and other parts beyond the Mississippi.” Without improved trade conditions, he warned, there was no telling how long such forbearance would last. The Spanish agreed with Bowles’s assessment of their situation—Panton was not perfect, and the Indians would certainly welcome competition—but they never trusted “Estajoca.” They were probably right not to. Since Dunmore had been behind the 1788 expedition, it is safe to assume that he retained some influence over Bowles’s actions. And if the governor had anything to do with these letters, Bowles’s vows to honor Spanish rule were almost certainly made in bad faith.94

Rumors of war with Spain in 1790 suddenly brightened the prospects for a British-Muskogee alliance. The prior year, Spain had shut down a small British trading center on present-day Vancouver Island, seizing vessels anchored in Nootka Sound and imprisoning the men on board. To defend their access to Pacific Ocean trade, both sides prepared for war. It was during the ensuing standoff that the ministry finally sent troops to the Bahamas. Dunmore may have welcomed the Nootka crisis on other grounds as well, for it lent fresh relevance to his work with Bowles. Before crossing to England, the Muskogee delegation stopped in Canada to convince authorities there to arm the southern tribes. In the event of war with either Spain or the United States, Bowles argued, the Indians would be invaluable allies. Reactions in Halifax and Quebec were mixed, but Governor John Parr of Nova Scotia thought enough of Bowles to pay for his passage to England.⁹⁵

Bowles was a sensation in London. He socialized with eminent Britons, had his portrait painted, and saw a heroic account of his life rushed to publication. Crowds turned out to watch him and his fellow chiefs take in the sites. Amid widespread enthusiasm for war with Spain, the doors of government were flung open to them. Secretary of State Grenville was particularly welcoming. Bowles was neither the first nor the last adventurer to try to enlist his aid in Spain’s undoing. Francisco de Miranda, “el Precursor” of Latin American independence, was in London at that very moment lobbying the ministry to support his own project. Grenville was impressed by the Muskogee proposal and arranged for the delegation to meet the king. A formal alliance was nearly at hand when, just before the scheduled audience, news of an accommodation of the Nootka crisis arrived. Spain was in no position to defend its sovereignty along the Pacific Coast alone, and with France in the midst of revolutionary turmoil, Charles IV blinked. In the interest of reconciliation, the meeting between George III and the Muskogee emissaries was cancelled. Bowles remained active in the cause despite the tantalizing turn of events. Double dealing as usual, he made frequent visits to the home of the Spanish ambassador to press the case for free trade in Florida, all the while plotting with Whitehall to push the Spanish off the continent. In the end, Grenville agreed to allow Muskogee trade at Nassau, an encouraging nod to Creek-Cherokee sovereignty. Anything more was, for the moment, out of the question.⁹⁶

The Muskogee delegation spent five months in London, and the Treasury subsidized the entire trip. Generous as this was, Dunmore was hoping that the state would also pay for the 1788 Florida expedition, for which Bowlesowed Miller, Bonnamy, and Company £1,500. Miller argued that he had extended this credit in “support of the British Interest in the Creek and Cherokee Nations.” Since no one had asked him to do this, and since he had stood to profit handsomely from the risk, the request for reimbursement was denied.97 In June 1791, with the delegation back in Nassau, Dunmore broached the subject again in a letter to Grenville. Although insolvent, Bowles could not be imprisoned, the governor wrote, because it would “destroy the Idea which the Indians entertain, from the great attention paid to them in England, that they are not deserted by Great Britain.” If the empire valued “the Attachment of those Indians who had formerly been her friends,” Dunmore concluded, “and whom she might probably at some future period, think proper to employ in her service,” Bowles’s tab should be paid. That Britain might need the Indians for an offensive operation in North America was indisputable. Yet the ministry continued to treat the Florida expedition as the filibuster that it was. Bowles was still more pirate than privateer.⁹⁸

Understanding how quickly these labels could change, Dunmore remained committed to covert action. He had reason to believe that Panton and the Spanish were more vulnerable than ever. In 1790, McGillivray and a number of other Creek chiefs traveled to New York City to negotiate with the United States. By the public terms of the treaty they signed, the Creeks ceded some three million acres in what is now Georgia, land that was already heavily settled but still in dispute. For its part, the federal government vowed to protect the Creek claim to lands then used for hunting. The agreement also included a number of secret articles by which McGillivray swore an oath of allegiance to the United States in return for a brigadier general’s commission and an annual pension. Despite some adroit diplomacy on McGillivray’s part, the Treaty of New York was a failure. The Georgians ignored it, and President George Washington (whatever his intentions) was unable to restrain them. Equally problematic was the disapproval of many Creeks, who resented the cession of any land to the Americans and felt betrayed by the chiefs who had planned and profited by it. Together with the unpopularity of Panton’s trade regime, these events inspired Bowles to challenge McGillivray for leadership. If successful, he would be in a position to pursue not only Muskogee but also a grand British-allied Indian confederacy stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast.⁹⁹

“A new flag was displayed here on Wednesday,” announced the Bahama Gazette in August 1791, “that of the Creek nation, worn by the vessel carrying General Bowles and the Indian chiefs to the American continent.” The colors and the state it represented were new, but the objective remained the same. Once again, Dunmore, Miller, and Bonnamy backed the trip in the hopes that Bowles would be able to unite enough of the southern Indians to finally establish a trading base and, if necessary, oust the Spanish. Posing as a British superintendent of Indian affairs and dodging Spanish ships sent to intercept him, Bowles made his way to Coweta, where he addressed a council of Upper and Lower Creeks, Seminoles, and Chickamaugas. He denounced Panton and McGillivray, stressed the importance of allying with the northern tribes, and promised easy access to goods (including military supplies) from Canada and Nassau. Some Upper Creeks who remained loyal to McGillivray walked out in protest, but the speech was generally well received. The attendees approved the creation of two free ports, one at Indian River on the east coast and another near the mouth of the Ochlockonee River, not far from San Marcos.

His authority under attack, McGillivray dispatched three warriors to assassinate Bowles, but they could not get anywhere near him. The “Vagabond,” as McGillivray now referred to him, enjoyed strong support among the Lower Creeks, Seminoles, and Chickamaugas and was making inroads with the Upper Creeks. Of course, all of this was based on his ability to secure the promised supplies from Dunmore and Miller.100

Work soon began at the Ochlockonee site, where a town was laid out beneath the Muskogee flag. As construction progressed, Bowles grew impatient for the goods from Nassau. Eager to consolidate his gains, he began to consider an attack on the Panton warehouse at San Marcos, just six miles up the Wakulla River from the Spanish fort. Panton had allegedly embezzled a store of goods from the Indians during the evacuation of St. Augustine and, more recently, put a $2,000 bounty on Bowles’s head. This was all the justification “Estajoca” and his associates needed.¹⁰¹ With about one hundred Creek and Seminole warriors and a handful of whites, he seized the store on the evening of 16 January 1792. Guns and provisions were distributed among the Indians and prices on the remaining stock were slashed by 25 percent. With Bowles’s force encamped outside the warehouse, the fifty Spanish soldiers in the nearby fort did not dare to intervene.

When reinforcements arrived, the Spanish commander approached Bowles and offered to take him to New Orleans to negotiate with the new governor, Francisco Luis Hector, baron de Carondelet. No doubt flattered by the invitation, Bowles accepted. Just a few days after his departure, the long-awaited goods from Nassau arrived at Ochlockonee. This time, Dunmore had outfitted the vessel himself. Surprised by Bowles’s absence and discouraged by the number of Indians and deerskins at the port, the captain turned around without unloading the cargo. The force that Bowles had left behind at the San Marcos warehouse eventually dispersed but not before appropriating nearly all of the remaining goods. Panton later claimed to have sustained losses in excess of £2,500 during the affair.102

In their investigation of these events, the Spanish had to wade through a morass of unreliable information. Some of the least credible intelligence came from a defector from Bowles’s party named William Cunningham. After giving a self-serving, altogether unlikely account of his involvement in the raid, Cunningham claimed to have examined Bowles’s private papers. Aside from an inconsequential “instruction from Lord Dunmore & Mr. Miller,” he found no evidence of official backing from Britain. “The whole of it was a plot of conspiracy,” he said, designed by Dunmore and a rogue’s gallery of land speculators including Elijah Clark of Georgia, Governor William Blount (author of the subsequent Blount conspiracy), John Sevier of the State of Franklin, and several others with ties to the Yazoo land companies. This group, he said, intended to “open the navigation of the Mississippi River, & to make themselves independent of the United States & Britain with the support of British merchants.” According to Cunningham, they had secretly raised 18,000 men for this purpose over three or four years of planning.¹⁰³ It is hard to know what to make of this story, except to say that Cunningham connected a variety of regional interests hostile to Spain with a conspiracy theorist’s eye for grand design. His examiners did not believe a word of it.

Meanwhile, Bowles had walked into a trap. Rather than negotiating with him in New Orleans, the Spanish put him in shackles and shipped him off to prison—in the Philippines. As Dunmore tried in vain to persuade Whitehall to intervene on Bowles’s behalf, plans for the Ochlockonee port proceeded. In January 1793, the governor hosted several Indian chiefs in Nassau. The Creeks in Coweta called him “our Good friend the Island King,” and Dunmore did all he could to live up to the appellation. At that very moment, in fact, he and Miller were outfitting another vessel for Ochlockonee. When the aptly named Resolution left Nassau, eleven Creek and Cherokee headmen were on board, including Philatouche Upaiahatche, the Tiger King, whom Dunmore commissioned to train Indian warriors to fight alongside the British in the event of war. The Resolution, however, never reached Ochlockonee. The Spanish intercepted the ship en route, having increased patrols between Nassau and the Gulf. For Dunmore, it was a crushing blow. In October, the ministry declined to protest the seizure, virtually eliminating any chance that he might recoup his investment.104

In 1796, Dunmore’s eldest son, George, told the manager of the family estate that his father was begging “most particularly to send him over his Grants of Land in America.” The aging governor evidently believed he might still have some use for them. But thereafter his involvement seems to have been limited to pestering the ministry to reimburse him for Bowles’s adventures. Even so, the Muskogee dream lived on. While being transported from Manila back to Spain, Bowles managed to escape his captors in Sierra Leone. Perhaps he encountered former members of Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, whose ongoing search for freedom had taken them from Nova Scotia to Africa. By 1800, Bowles was back in the Old Southwest and making significant progress on Muskogee. No doubt tired of all the failed promises and misrepresentations, the Creeks ultimately turned him over to Spain. He died while a prisoner at Havana’s Morro Castle in 1805, still only in his early forties.¹⁰⁵

Removing the Spanish from Florida and Louisiana was Britain’s best chance to link its West Indian holdings to Canada and possibly reverse the outcome of the American Revolution. Whether they were trying to establish a British colony for displaced loyalists or supporting the creation of a multiethnic Indian state along the lines of Muskogee, British imperialists retained an interest in the region into the nineteenth century. Dunmore’s activities, which anticipated the better-known schemes of Citizen Edmond Genet and William Blount, put him in a colorful tradition of early American dreamers, but his efforts should not be dismissed as quixotic. Napoleon Bonaparte sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803 in part to avoid the expense involved in protecting the colony from British ambition.¹⁰⁶

These were extraordinary times in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and the wider world. Although Dunmore continued to put off new elections, he was losing ground in the political tug-of-war in Nassau. Early on, he had enjoyed cozy relations with the legislature, so much so, in fact, that in 1789 Wylly counted that body among the colony’s “oppressive and contemptible oligarchy.” Even without a dissolution, however, the assembly gradually turned against him, as the expense of Fort Charlotte rose and loyalists gained seats in occasional by-elections. By about 1790, the division between old and new inhabitants had given way to a more conventional arrangement of interests, in which popular forces associated with the assembly opposed the protectors of royal prerogative. Some vestiges of the original alignment survived. For instance, the poorest among the old inhabitants remained loyal to Dunmore. An Anglican missionary agreed with the prevailing view on Harbour Island that “the Governor and Council act humanely in protecting the old inhabitants who are all very poor ignorant people from the oppression of the new who effect to despise them.” Hostilities between Dunmore and the assembly peaked between 1791 and 1793. During this period, the governor made a habit of calling the legislature into session when he needed money and, disgusted with its proceedings, quickly proroguing it. It was a familiar cycle in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.107

Without much success, Dunmore tried to use his power to grant lands to broaden his base of support. The ministry rejected his proposal to bar the opposition from grants while rewarding members of the council with them.¹⁰⁸ Whitehall also denied his request to allow “the very poor industrious” people of Harbour Island and Eleuthera to survey land free of charge, a privilege once enjoyed by the loyalists. In 1790, the ministry placed a moratorium on all automatic grants to loyalists, a move that some believed reflected uncertainty at Whitehall about the governor’s ability to administer them fairly.¹⁰⁹ According to Wylly, Dunmore “prodigally squandered away the Crown Lands upon himself and his friends (who besides having no just pretentions to them, have no slaves for their cultivation)” while withholding them from deserving cotton planters. This charge does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. Dunmore was indeed generous with himself (5,355 prime acres) and his family (a son received 1,773 acres), but the biggest beneficiary of loyalist land was the dissident Thomas Brown (6,300 acres). Other political enemies received grants as well. Three of them were given lots in the newly laid out Dunmore Town on Harbour Island.¹¹⁰

Party strife in Nassau softened in 1793 in response to what George Chalmers, the colony’s agent in London, called “the unhappy event of the Murder of the French King.” The subsequent war with revolutionary France gave Britain an opportunity to permanently disable French naval power while pursuing expansion in the Caribbean. Suddenly, everyone in the Bahamas took an interest in defense. Acting on behalf of the assembly in London, Chalmers joined Dunmore in protesting the number of troops stationed in the islands, which, Chalmers told Home Secretary Henry Dundas, hardly amounted to “more than a Guard for the Police.” Under these circumstances, Dunmore was able to continue work on Fort Charlotte and complete Fort Fincastle. Because of its strategic location, the Bahamas was never more important than during wartime, and before long the garrison at New Providence was raised to the highest level in the colony’s history.¹¹¹

The Haitian Revolution was also underway by this time, as were British efforts to prevent the spread of radical ideas to its West Indian holdings. Dunmore had visited Saint Domingue in 1789 and dined on the very estate where the slave uprising began two years later. Given the Bahamas’ proximity to the action—several of the islands were closer to Saint Domingue than New Providence—counterrevolutionary measures were taken quite seriously. Yet everything seemed to be under control in the spring of 1792, when Dunmore reported “that there is not the least appearance of any disorderly behaviour among the Slaves in this Government and that we have very little communication with any French West Indian Islands.” Writing from London, Chalmers nonetheless urged vigilance with respect to all foreigners as well as “such Books as may be circulated among the Servants and Slaves.”112

Sugar-rich Saint Domingue, the jewel of the French Antilles, was the most profitable colony in the Caribbean. In an effort to capitalize on the unrest there, Britain invaded and occupied San Domingue in 1793. This did little to assuage anxieties about a possible contagion of liberty among British slaves. Just before the French National Assembly issued its famous emancipation decree in 1794, Dunmore signed “An Act for Laying Certain Rates, Duties and Impositions on All French Negroes and Other French Persons of Colour Now within These Islands, or Who May Hereafter Be Brought within the Same.” The situation in the Bahamas worsened after the emancipation decree and the subsequent breakdown, in 1795, of the British occupation. Suddenly, white Bahamians had to worry about black prisoners of war as well as the radicalized slaves of French refugees. Just when planters on Long Island were requesting new protection against slave insurrections, Dunmore reported the discovery of a plot to burn Nassau, free French prisoners, and massacre all whites. He put the militia on alert, and a new tax put an end to the importation of French slaves. Nothing ever came of the purported plot.¹¹³

The pivotal development of 1793 for Lord Dunmore had nothing to do with revolution or world war. The secret marriage of his daughter Augusta to Prince Augustus Frederick Hanover would forever change his relationship with the king—and by no means for the better. The couple met and fell in love in Rome, where they were wed without the knowledge of their parents on 4 April.¹¹⁴ Under normal circumstances, this would have caused a scandal, but in this case it happened to be a crime as well. The Royal Marriage Act of 1772 forbade the descendants of George II from marrying without the approval of the reigning monarch before the age of twenty-five. While his bride was in her early thirties, Prince Augustus was himself only twenty.

It was not until the summer, when Augusta became pregnant, that Prince Augustus informed Lady Dunmore of the situation. Presumably, Lord Dunmore also learned of it around this time. Lady Dunmore later admitted to having known that the union was illegal but said that she “looked upon it as valid in the sight of God,” never mind that she had not been to church since Christmas.115

All was shrouded in secrecy when Augusta returned to England with her mother in the fall of 1793. The prince had preceded them at the behest of the king. Although alerted to an inappropriate relationship, George III did not know his perpetually infirm son was capable of anything like an unauthorized marriage. The Roman wedding had been officiated by an Anglican, but Lady Dunmore encouraged the couple to marry again on English soil to ensure the legitimacy of the child. The second ceremony took place at St. George’s in Hanover Square on the morning of 5 December. To preserve anonymity, the bride and groom simplified their names and dress. The only other person present who knew their identities was Lady Dunmore’s sister, Lady Euphemia Stewart, and even she attended in a veil. The mother of the bride passed the morning nervously at her home on Lower Berkeley Street in Manchester Square, where she was relieved to learn that everything had gone smoothly. A few weeks later, on 13 January 1794, Augusta gave birth to a son, the future Augustus Frederick D’Esté. Loved with a vengeance by his mother, he would inherit his father’s poor health but not his royal status. On top of an ambiguous social position, D’Esté was cursed with multiple sclerosis. His life proved a torment.¹¹⁶

The entire affair came to light shortly after the boy’s birth. A brief, romantic account of the relationship, complete with engravings of key events, appeared in London. Jealously protective of the royal blood, the king was outraged and launched an investigation. Several of those involved were dragged before the Privy Council to be questioned by the leading lights of British public life, including the Archbishop of Canterbury John Moore; Lord Chancellor Alexander Wedderburn, 1st Baron Loughborough; Foreign Secretary William Grenville; Commander-in-Chief Jeffery Amherst; Chief Justice Lloyd Kenyon; President of the Board of Trade Charles Jenkinson, 1st Baron Hawkesbury; and Home Secretary Dundas. Lady Dunmore was composed but defiant during her testimony. Ordered to produce the letter in which the prince first informed her of the marriage, she refused, explaining, “it is a private letter written to excuse my child for her reserve towards me, and surely it will be very hard to oblige me to produce it.” When she returned for further examination the following day, she told the board that she had burned the letter the night before at the request of her daughter. There was no copy. When asked who conducted the ceremony in Rome, Lady Dunmore claimed to have no idea. This was untrue. At that very moment, she was being blackmailed by her Italian servant, a man named Montichelli, who, having let a Reverend William Gunn into the house on the night of the wedding, threatened to reveal his name to the king. At the urging of her daughter and the prince, who protected Gunn’s anonymity for many years, Lady Dunmore evidently paid up.117

George III was not impressed by Lady Dunmore’s performance before the Privy Council. “I cannot say the evidence of Ly. Dunmore either raises my opinion of her capacity or principles,” he wrote. Although both Lady Dunmore and Lady Stewart were adjudged liable to prosecution for their parts in the matter, neither was charged with a crime. The Court of Arches officially annulled the marriage in July.¹¹⁸

The scandal led to a retreat among Dunmore’s political patrons, notably Lady Gower. The Marchioness of Stafford, as she was then known, was mortified by the news and wrote a frantic letter of apology to the king assuring him that she had had no “knowledge of this lamentable affair.” When she visited Lady Dunmore after hearing rumors in the country, she was told that Augusta was too sick to see her. This was not true, of course, but it spared her, if only for the moment, “the misery of knowing that so near a relation had caused so mortifying a sorrow to” His Majesty. When she came face to face with Augusta during a subsequent visit, there was no hiding the truth. “I enter’d into no conversation with her,” Lady Stafford wrote. “She cried, & I said nothing to her. Nor do I mean ever to see her again if that is what your Majesty chuses.” Lady Stafford had been close with Augusta, paying for her portrait to be painted by George Romney in the early 1780s. But she despised all “the Bustle and Talk” about the situation in London, and while she regretted “the Disadvantage to and Distress of Lady D. and her whole family,” she knew there was nothing even she could do about it. Through no fault of his own, young Jack Murray lost a sought-after promotion because of the marriage. Nor did it bode well for his father. Controversial governors of obscure colonies were by no means indispensable.¹¹⁹

In February 1797, the London Gazette announced that “the King has been pleased to appoint John Forbes, Esq; to be Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over the Bahama Islands, in the room of the Earl of Dunmore.” Actually, Dunmore retained the title of governor, and Forbes was made lieutenant governor, but the effect was the same. For the first time in a career that spanned more than four decades, Dunmore had been fired. The case against him involved drunkenness, extravagant spending, mistresses, irregularities in the granting of land, and the suspension of the justice system in 1788–89. The charges were not new. A few years after William Wylly first brought them to London, George Chalmers took them up on behalf of the Bahamian Assembly.120 Why, then, were they suddenly sufficient to drive Dunmore out of office?

Alleged corruption was just one of several factors that led to Dunmore’s downfall. Certainly, the scandal surrounding Augusta’s marriage did nothing to endear him to the king. Years later, when the royal family wanted to prevent Augustus Frederick D’Esté from joining his parents in Berlin, the Prince of Wales threatened Dunmore and his daughter “with very unpleasant consequences.” In 1794, the governor’s position was further destabilized by a reshuffle at Whitehall that pushed Gower (by then the Marquess of Stafford) out of government, sent Dundas to the War Department, and ushered William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland into the Home Office. There was ill will between Portland and Dunmore dating back to the East India bill of 1783, which sought to increase parliamentary control of the East India Company at the expense of royal patronage. The bill passed in the Commons but failed in the Lords, where Portland, then prime minister, had unsuccessfully sought Dunmore’s support. The defeat was the deathblow for the Fox-North coalition, which Portland led. According to Dunmore, Portland had never forgiven him for voting against the bill, and his new position as home secretary gave him an outlet for this resentment. “The fact is, and I can prove it,” Dunmore told Prime Minister Pitt, “that ever since his first entrance in Office he has formed a scheme for my ruin.” Whatever the reason, Portland proved more receptive to the case against Dunmore than any of his predecessors.¹²¹

News of the recall came by the hand of Dunmore’s replacement, a loyalist associate of William Panton’s named John Forbes. The official explanation for Dunmore’s removal cited excessive and improper use of public funds. Dunmore believed that this was merely a pretext for personal revenge. That Portland immediately approved Forbes’s completion of Fort Charlotte, he argued, showed that the objection had not been to the impropriety of the expenditures but rather to the man who made them. Even if true, this was cold comfort. When Dunmore demanded a fuller explanation from Portland, the home secretary replied “that it was wisely placed by the constitution in His Majestys power to chuse and dismiss his Servants free from any controul or account what ever.” With his unusually aristocratic bearing, the Duke of Portland did not waste time with unnecessary explanations. That Dunmore affected the same high-handed style himself from time to time made him despise it all the more in others.122

Appraisals of Dunmore’s administration fell along party lines. Forbes believed that Dunmore had fleeced the public, packed the assembly, and illegally “protected defaulting Treasurers with Handsome Wives,” a reference to his alleged affair with Rebecca Dumaresq, the wife of the receiver general. As in Virginia, the governor and his allies were also tainted by charges of piracy. According to Forbes, “The lower order of white here being rather a lawless race, the descendants of Pirates, they have not departed from the principles of their ancestors, though their practices may assume the different names of wrecking vessels and Privateers. Between my predecessor and these People a sort of reciprocity of Abuse was established; and a species of implied compact of mutual conniving at the violation of the law by the one and the Peculation on the British side by the other.”¹²³ With loyalists now in complete control of the government and the press, this view became the dominant version of history.

Yet Dunmore was not without friends and admirers in the Bahamas. Residents of Crooked Island praised his “benevolent disposition” and thanked him for his “constant and patriotic attention to whatever appeared for the advantage of these Islands in general and in particular the indulgences which your Excellency was pleased to shew this Island at its first settlement.” They expressed particular gratitude for his lifting of trade restrictions on the United States during an acute agricultural crisis, something “which has alone prevented that calamity which must without such precaution have proved their ruin.” Dunmore’s removal even inspired a “disinterested friend” in Nassau to verse. The poem extolled the “monumental” Fort Charlotte and maintained “that none heretofore discharg’d better his trust, / Or acted on grounds more equal, more Just.” Wishing him a safe voyage back to England, the poet concluded, “May Heaven preserve you while on the rough Main, / And speedily send you to govern again.”¹²⁴

Sixty-six years old and still facing a mountain of debt, Dunmore did indeed harbor hopes of a return. He claimed to have incurred most of his outstanding obligations in the course of his public duties. For months after returning to London, he waited “in constant expectation” for the Treasury to pay his creditors. Ignored, he grew desperate. “Let me know for God’s sake when they may expect their Accounts will be paid,” he implored Pitt. “During this interval of suspence, my mind, my health, are all suffering.” It was not merely his own fate that hung in the balance but those of his lenders as well. “I fear the utter ruin of many of them & their poor families.” No doubt, John Miller was suffering. When Dunmore learned definitively that the Treasury would not pay his bills, he blamed Portland and again urged Pitt to intervene. “Your love of justice will I am sure induce you to protect an old servant of the Kings,” he wrote, “and the unshaken friend of your Administration.” Here, Dunmore employed the same instrumental flattery that marked so many of the petitions he had received from subjects over the years.125

In 1797, his situation had become so desperate that he stooped to asking Portland to reappoint him to the Bahamas, a humiliating and hopeless request. Even “if I was at liberty to recommend Your Lordship to the King for that appointment,” Portland replied with relish, “I should consider it my duty to enter my most decided protest.”¹²⁶ It was probably only out of spite that he responded at all. Nearly two years after returning to London, Dunmore still had not had a single word from Pitt. After decades of “hard, & faithfull services” to government, Dunmore complained to the prime minister, he was now living on a £600 pension. On this “nominal” sum, he was supporting a number of his grown children, including the young Virginia, who never married and struggled with money throughout her adult life. His plea to Pitt continued, “May I now Sir request that you will immediately either employ me, in any way you may think I can be of service, or make me such Allowance as you think my past services may entitle me to.” This was the only way, he concluded, that “I may pass in some degree of comfort, the short time I expect to remain in this World.” He stayed in London solely for the purpose of receiving Pitt’s reply. By this point, he should have known better.¹²⁷

In most histories of the American Revolution, the loyalists are a principled but inert group, slow to respond to the world-changing events around them and meek in the response. The historian Wallace Brown put it this way: “Too many Loyalists simply gaped in astonishment as the Revolution ran its course, as if the sun had suddenly started to rise in the west and set in the east. Even when finally roused, they did not act boldly or decisively; they lacked the quality attributed by the Reverend Charles Inglis to Tom Paine—’that daring, decided spirit which seldom fails.’” Reduced finally to despair, they could only hope that their reward would come “in a future life.” Dunmore’s story should put this interpretation to rest. The loyalists in his orbit responded to the rebellion in bold and imaginative, if not always admirable, ways. Dunmore himself freed slaves and armed them against other Britons. He issued military commissions to some Native Americans while enslaving others. He built unauthorized fortifications at great public expense. He helped to stage filibusters against Spain and its British partners (who happened to be fellow Scots loyalists). That someone with Jacobite roots could do all of this and more without compromising his allegiance to the king is a testament to the elasticity of loyalty in the British Empire. Although unsuccessful, Dunmore and his associates were undeniably dynamic.128

When a Virginia newspaper incorrectly reported that Dunmore had been recalled from the Bahamas in 1789, Lucy Ludwell Paradise hoped it was true. “He is trying to get the Indians to cut our throats,” she told Thomas Jefferson. It had been thirteen years since Dunmore left Chesapeake Bay after trying to raise the Indians against the patriots, but Paradise was right to worry. The last royal governor of Virginia was, even then, working with the Creeks and Cherokees to undermine American independence. The issues and characters of the Revolution survived in the minds of people like Paradise, in part because the drama was still unfolding.¹²⁹

It is fitting, then, that Dunmore’s grandson Augustus D’Esté was among the vanquished British soldiers at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Had the War of 1812 gone another way, Dunmore’s ambitions in that part of the world might bear a much different complexion than they do now. But, of course, it takes more than a “daring, decided spirit” to wind up on the right side of history.¹³⁰