AS EUROPEAN, Indian, and American diplomats debated the future of the continent, people with less influence over world events found themselves caught in the flux of sovereignty. The founding of the American republic did not grant independence to everyone caught up in the Revolutionary War. The uncertainty following the Revolution left some with new opportunities and others with reduced autonomy.
James and Isabella Bruce had lost the war and would see their home ruled by their enemies. They hoped that the peace would provide them with a triumphant return to West Florida but would settle for a new start with land in a still-British colony. Petit Jean, Amand Broussard, and Oliver and Margaret Pollock were on the winning side, but it remained to be seen if victory would indeed improve their lives. War often provided slaves with some opportunities for freedom, especially for men of military age. Like many others, Petit Jean hoped that his wartime service would earn freedom for himself and his family. The Pollocks’ hopes were high for prosperity and prominence in a country they had helped create, while Amand Broussard’s wartime experiences left him eager to become a Louisiana planter within the Spanish empire.
Most people who had lived through the war on the Gulf Coast found the prospects for their economic well-being as uncertain as the borders remained in the 1780s. Many individuals wondered if they had gained independence or lost it.
Freedom and Slavery in a New Order
In statehouses, public meetings, and private conversations across the United States, as black and white Americans imagined the postwar continent, many wondered about the future of slavery. Would enslaved people remain so in the United States, or was slavery incompatible with American ideals of freedom? Would enslaved men and women who served any of the sides in the war earn their permanent freedom? If large numbers who served the Spanish cause became free, might Spain allow them to establish their own communities like Fort Mose in Florida before the Seven Years’ War? Or could they create their own independent states between and allied with neighboring colonies or states?
These ideas seem unlikely in retrospect, but in fact some Georgia slaves headed south on the assumption that Florida, Spanish once again, would welcome runaways, as when Spanish officials had welcomed runaway slaves from South Carolina to undermine British security. Like his predecessors, East Florida Governor Vicente Zéspedes would have to decide whether to honor their requests. And Thomas Jefferson supported a Virginia state bill for gradual emancipation with the provision that young freed men and women should, upon coming of age, “be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, etc. to declare them a free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength.”1
The Treaty of Paris between Britain and the United States said that King George III would withdraw his armies without “carrying away any Negroes or other Property of the American inhabitants.” This short clause endangered thousands of men, women, and children who had sought freedom by fleeing to British lines during the war, including at least seventeen of George Washington’s own slaves. British Commander-in-Chief of North America Guy Carleton thought the treaty’s concession an outrage both because it was unjust to people who had trusted British promises and because it rewarded the rebels by returning their slaves. In violation of the treaty, General Carleton evacuated three thousand black loyalists along with one thousand white loyalists from New York City in the spring and summer of 1783.2
In the meantime, the abolitionist efforts of enslaved and free blacks in the United States began to bear some fruit. As Massachusetts’s 1780 state constitution, drafted by John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin, stated, “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.”3 Although this language did not necessarily abolish slavery, slaves filed freedom suits that eventually persuaded the Massachusetts courts to end slavery in their state. Vermont’s 1777 state constitution also effectively outlawed slavery, and Pennsylvania passed a law to emancipate its slaves gradually as they came of age. Even Virginia, with considerably more slaves than New England or the mid-Atlantic, passed a law encouraging slaveholders to free their slaves. George Washington and some other Virginians freed slaves in their wills. In the years immediately following the Revolution, it was possible that the ideals of the Revolution and the intellectual arguments of black Americans would gradually abolish slavery. Writing his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, Thomas Jefferson expressed the hope that total emancipation was coming. The fact that Jefferson did not follow up his hopes with action for his own slaves illustrates how living up to one’s ideals is less likely when the personal costs are high. Like many wealthy southerners, Jefferson depended on enslaved people for his and his daughters’ financial independence.4
Slavery came under attack on the Gulf Coast as well, but only on an individual level. The war had not sparked the rhetoric of liberty that it did in the thirteen colonies. With no rhetoric of independence with which to charge Spanish policymakers of hypocrisy, individual enslaved men and women prepared their own way for freedom. Seizing opportunities opened by the war, they worked, saved, and served the Spanish crown to emancipate themselves and their loved ones. With claims over a vast land mass north of Mexico and almost no Spaniards both willing and able to come to this far edge of empire, a large population of loyal freedmen and freedwomen might be of great use to Spain.
Enslaved men and women had helped Spain to take the Gulf Coast. At New Orleans after the war, General Bernardo de Gálvez formally acknowledged slaves for their “zeal and rectitude” and “dedication to the Royal service.” He gave medals to free and enslaved blacks who had distinguished themselves.5 To slaves who had been wounded, Gálvez gave eighty dollars; others who fought received a few dollars each. Neither employing slaves in warfare nor rewarding them was unusual. For at least five hundred years, the Spanish had awarded wages, bounties, and—for extraordinary service—freedom to slaves who performed military service for the crown.6
Because slaves in the Spanish empire had the right to buy themselves, a financial reward could be the road to freedom. Under Spanish law, if a slave’s master refused to sell or tried to set an unreasonable price, the slave had a right to go before a tribunal to determine a reasonable price. Indeed, in one of their petitions, Massachusetts slaves shamed their white neighbors by pointing out that “even the Spaniards, who have not those sublime ideas of freedom that English men have,” grant certain rights to slaves, including the right of self-purchase and of having one day per week to work for themselves, in which they could earn money toward freedom.7
A loyal and ambitious black population was useful to the stability of Louisiana and the Floridas, but Spanish officials put a higher value on keeping French- and English-speaking white inhabitants happy. Demonstrating to slaveholders and ambitious would-be slaveholders that slavery could grow under Spanish rule was essential to winning their allegiance—or at least their quiescence. If they believed that the Spanish threatened an expanding plantation economy, they might seek British or American assistance or independence. Spain needed to keep its promises. During the war, Spain had pledged to surrendering Britons that, while no free blacks would lose their free status, “the negroes who have been hired out to work on the fortifications will not be taken from their owners, but these will be entitled to keep them along with the rest of their property.” Slaves who had “fled from Pensacola during the siege” would be returned as well. Not only were slaves returned to their owners, but their owners also could rest assured that Spain agreed with Britain that they were “property.”8 The king’s exemption of slave importations from import duties also helped persuade colonists that Spain supported their economic development. As a result of colonists’ ambitions and imperial encouragement, thousands of enslaved Africans came to Spanish Louisiana and West Florida between 1784 and 1800, mostly from the Bight of Benin, as in the French period, and from farther south in West Africa, around Angola.9
Protection and promotion of the system of slavery, combined with opportunities for free blacks and the possibility of individual emancipation, seemed best for stability and economic growth. Spanish dependence on both slavery and a free black population struck a fine balance. In the context of postwar recovery and local misgivings about Spanish rule, promises of stability and growth, plus alliances with powerful Indian nations, seemed likely to expand and strengthen the empire.10
Amand Broussard would benefit from Spanish promotion of plantations. Broussard’s prosperity in Louisiana depended on land worked by bound labor, much as Alexander McGillivray’s did. In 1781, Broussard already owned land and cattle in Attakapas. As the economy of New Orleans improved, Broussard’s cattle and land holdings increased, and he began to buy slaves to work in his growing operation. Their labor in turn would fund more purchases. By 1785, Broussard had bought four slaves to work in the fields and to tend the cattle, and he had his eye on more.11
Amand Broussard and Anne Benoît were building their family independence on enslaved labor, land, and the markets of the Spanish empire. They would eventually have at least eleven children together plus Broussard’s son from his first marriage. Most of their children would marry other Acadians, strengthening their close community with bonds of family and inheritance. For example, three of their daughters would marry grandsons of Amand’s uncle Alexandre.12
At the same time that slavery was growing through the importation of captured Africans, an astounding number of the Gulf Coast’s black men and women were freeing themselves and their loved ones from slavery. They took advantage of numerous and varied opportunities, all with their own risks. Running away was the quickest but also one of the riskiest means of acquiring freedom. As an area of contested sovereignty, the Gulf region and the Mississippi Valley had long provided borders over which many slaves could flee to British, Spanish, Creek, Choctaw, or Chickasaw land, depending on whom they were trying to escape. As borders shifted during the war, this opportunity increased. Hundreds of men and women took advantage of war disruptions to run away and to live on the edges of plantations and in the bayous outside New Orleans. The Spanish called them “cimarrones,” meaning wild or runaway (shortened by the English to “maroons”). These refugee settlements had existed since the 1720s, but their numbers grew during the war. Cimarrones obtained supplies from plantations, by either pillaging or relying on slaves to provide them, often in return for doing some of the slaves’ work in the woods, such as gathering firewood.13
After the war, New Orleans planters demanded that Governor Esteban Miró do something about the problem of the cimarrones, as the responsibility of the empire to its law-abiding subjects. They were frightened of cimarrones’ “robberies and insults” and knew that their success would encourage still more runaways.14 Spanish officials faced a dilemma. If allowed to exist, cimarrón communities could actually protect a colony. In Jamaica, established cimarrón communities at times fought for their colonizers and returned new runaway slaves. Perhaps if Spanish officials had known what a threat the United States would eventually become, they might have developed alliances with cimarrones.
Instead, slaveholders persuaded Governor Miró to crack down. While Bernardo de Gálvez and Miró had occasionally sent Louisiana’s free black militias to keep the cimarrones in check, French slaveholders demanded tougher action—and from white troops. Until the cimarrones were destroyed, slaves would have to carry passes from their masters if traveling, and free blacks would need to show papers proving their status. Any who disobeyed would receive twenty-five lashes. Miró also reiterated existing regulations requiring masters’ written permission to conduct trade or to assemble and forbidding slaves from buying liquor, selling clothing, traveling by horse, and bearing arms (with exceptions for hunting or military service). In the spring of 1783, Miró sent out regular soldiers and militia, including “colored” troops, into the bayous below New Orleans.15
Miró also sent an enslaved man named Bastien to infiltrate the cimarrón camp, and he eventually led the militia to the cimarrón hideout. The cimarrones dispersed into the bayou, but the soldiers and militia used canoes to track them down in the waist-deep water. Bastien’s master wounded the man rumored to be the main leader, Jean St. Malo. The militia recaptured over a hundred others. As they canoed back to New Orleans with their captives, inhabitants of the plantations along the bayou rushed out to thank the soldiers and to give them food and drink. The Spanish hanged St. Malo and three other men in the Place d’Armes, New Orleans’s main square. Others were eventually either executed, branded, whipped, or sold to another colony. St. Malo’s wife, Cecilia Canoy (or Conway), got her death sentence postponed due to pregnancy, and Gálvez eventually suspended her sentence, perhaps not wanting the spectacle of a woman dangling in the public square, even if she was a black runaway. Although Spanish officials might have preferred to ignore the problem, New Orleans slaveholders had brought the power of the colonial state down on their side.16
Running away was too risky a choice for most slaves, including Petit Jean and his wife. Even before the hangings in the Place d’Armes, they had chosen to stay put and work for their masters and for the Spanish crown. Slaves’ beliefs about rights and liberties were as complicated as everyone else’s in the age of revolution. Freedom without security was usually not worth the risk.17
Nonetheless, Petit Jean preferred freedom to enslavement. When he and his wife could do so safely and legally, they seized their freedom. Petit Jean earned his freedom through service to the crown. As Petit Jean had worked for his master and for the Spanish military and his wife had sold goods or services in her small amount of free time, they had been saving their earnings in hopes of freedom. At the end of the war, in 1782, Spanish officials freed him by paying four hundred dollars to his master and helped Petit Jean negotiate with his wife’s master to buy her freedom with money they had saved. It was an important day when Petit Jean and his wife held their “cartas de libertad.”18
They joined many others in exercising their right to self-purchase using wages and bounties earned during the war. In the war years and the two decades following, between one thousand and two thousand slaves in Spanish Louisiana and the Gulf Coast were freed by purchase. In Louisiana alone (not counting the Floridas), enslaved people and their families and friends spent at least $250,000 on freedom (five to ten million dollars today). Louisiana’s free black population rose from under 200 in 1770 to about 1,500 in 1795 and was still rising. The Revolutionary War did not start self-emancipation, which had always been possible in Spanish colonies. Still, the opportunities provided by wartime service brought self-purchase within the grasp of more people. The astounding numbers attest to the devotion slaves put to the task. Gálvez’s bounty of eighty dollars could be a significant down payment on freedom, but a slave’s price would be at least twice that, and often much more, as the $400 price of the skilled slave Petit Jean attests. The influx of African slaves after the war actually helped self-emancipation by keeping the price of slaves from rising.19
When there was no clear path to freedom, measures of independence and autonomy within slavery had made Petit Jean’s life better than it might have been. But when the possibility of freedom came, Petit Jean and his wife seized it as quickly as they could, making sure that they had their emancipation papers approved by the court in New Orleans. If she was still of child-bearing age, it was especially important to secure her freedom so that any subsequent children would be born free. As Broussard and McGillivray built their fortunes on enslaved labor, Petit Jean and his wife simply looked forward to a life of freedom.20
The Loyalists’ Predicament
After Pensacola fell, James and Isabella Bruce sailed with their children and their furniture and papers on a Spanish ship. While most loyalists quietly stayed on in the rest of West Florida, Pensacola was different. The town’s long months of waiting for attack before the siege had made its fall more bitter, and all but a handful of British settlers decided to leave. General Gálvez returned slaves to West Florida slaveholders who pledged loyalty to the Spanish crown, but those colonists who fled Spanish rule could not take their “property” with them. The Bruces’ slaves became the property of the Spanish crown, who either sold them to locals or used them in public works.21
As on her journey twelve years earlier, Isabella’s ship stopped at a southern port before turning north. This time it was Spanish Havana rather than British Jamaica. In Havana, the Bruces and the other refugees had to listen to the celebrations emanating from the city as Spanish subjects hailed the conquest of West Florida. From there, the ships took them to New York City, which in July 1781 was still occupied by the British. There, the Bruces found space among more than thirty thousand other refugees and tried to imagine a future without the land, slaves, and position that had promised a good life. For now, the Bruces were among their friends, people who had helped to make Pensacola a home.22
The Bruces hoped that they would return to West Florida once it returned to British rule. James had sworn in Pensacola that he would not live under Spanish rule, so they would not seek their future in the Spanish Floridas. Instead, he, Isabella, Archibald, and Charlotte, along with many other West Florida refugees, left New York for England, arriving in June 1782. They viewed London not as their new home but as a temporary haven for a temporary exile. That summer, the Bruces heard that high-level imperial officials had laid a plan before the crown to retake West Florida and take Spanish New Orleans. James Bruce added his voice to the call. The plan emanated from Lord Dunmore, the former governor of New York and Virginia. After General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Dunmore sailed to Charleston, which British forces still occupied. There, in conversation with West Florida refugees, Dunmore created a vision of a continuing British empire in mainland North America that accepted the loss of some of the northern colonies. He proposed leading a large force from Charleston, plus ten thousand slaves, who would contribute their assistance simply in return for their freedom.23
Writing on his authority as an eighteen-year resident and officeholder in West Florida, James Bruce promised the Earl of Shelburne, the British secretary of state, that retaking West Florida would be easy. Its defenses were “ruinous.” Ignoring what had actually happened in the Revolutionary War on the Gulf Coast, he asserted that loyalists and Indians would eagerly fight alongside His Majesty’s troops. West Florida, with its healthy climate and fertile lands, would more than make up for the loss of the rebellious colonies.24
Although James Bruce exaggerated the ease of taking West Florida, he was on firmer ground in describing how it could take the place of the thirteen colonies in the British imperial economy. With its ports and navigable rivers, West Florida was poised to provide the West Indies with lumber, rice, corn, and naval products: pitch, tar, turpentine, masts, timbers, and planks. James Bruce believed that it could dominate the fur trade, taking advantage of the fact that Indians were “unanimous in their aversion to the American revolters” (somewhat true) and “so implacable in their hatred to the Spaniards” (not true at all). Bruce doubted that Oliver Pollock’s and Bernardo de Gálvez’s promises of prosperity and security for West Floridians and Louisianans had persuaded the region’s colonists. Spain surely would not encourage the development of indigo and tobacco plantations because they would create too much competition with its other colonies, and in any case Indian opposition to Spain meant they “will never permit settlers under that Government to enjoy security either for their property or lives.” In contrast, if Britain took West Florida, it would thrive under Britain’s “mild and equitable laws.” Britain would regain the loyalty of its own colonists, attract loyalists “who have been ruined by the War,” woo French and Spanish colonists with British liberty and markets, and demonstrate to “the deluded colonists” in rebellion “the difference between the happiness and prosperity of His Majesty’s subjects settled in that colony, and those of their own divided and distracted States.” Missing “that envied state which they once enjoyed,” they might even “return to their natural connection with Great Britain.”25
If the British regained West Florida, the Bruces and other West Florida loyalists could reclaim their property and begin rebuilding their family independence based on land, slaves, and access to British markets. Of course, James Bruce and Lord Dunmore proposed uniting people with contradictory visions of the future. Slaves would be fighting for their freedom, but white loyalists expected to restore and improve on the lives the Revolution had taken from them, which included plantations worked by slaves on the lands of Britain’s Indian allies.
In any case, the 1783 Treaty of Paris ended talk of invasion, and the Bruces never regained their wealth and prominence. While in London, James filed a petition to the crown, asking for payment for losses caused by the Revolutionary War. Like many other loyalists, the Bruces believed that the empire owed them compensation for the havoc that the Revolution had wreaked on their lives. In establishing political independence, the United States had destroyed the lives that the Bruces and others had built playing by the rules and being enterprising imperial subjects. The suffering of wives and the diminished prospects for children were an important part of the claims. There were so many loyalist petitions that Parliament established the Commission for Enquiring into the Losses, Services, and Claims of the American Loyalists. James Bruce requested payment for his lost plantations on the Amite and Mobile rivers and Thompson’s Creek as well as for the family’s home in Pensacola and a cattle pen on the town’s outskirts. He also filed for eight thousand pounds in lost revenue that he figured he would have netted from the Amite River plantation between James Willing’s 1778 raid and the Bruces’ departure from West Florida in 1781. He also hoped to recoup salary and commissions from customs he would have collected had the colony remained British.26
Many petitioners received recompense for losses due to the rebellion; however, West Florida was not covered because it was not “in the revolted provinces.”27 Its losses mostly resulted from the war with Spain, not the rebels. Impressed with a letter that former West Florida governor George Johnstone wrote commending James Bruce’s character, property, and service, the Commission awarded him £135 salary covering 1781 for being Britain’s commissioner of customs at Pensacola and recommended that he receive an allowance of one hundred pounds per year for the damage that the “rebel” James Willing had caused to the Amite property, valued by James Bruce at £2,134. But the Bruces could claim nothing for their other losses. The Commission ruled that, while James Bruce had “certainly lost by the war,” it could not consider most of his losses, which were “not within the limits of the United States of America” and had been “destroyed by a Foreign Enemy.”28 When he went to collect the salary that the Commission had awarded, he learned that the Pensacola officers were not on the list to be paid. He appealed again, both to justice and to the fact that he had “a family totally unprovided for after serving His Majesty for upwards of twenty-two years,” first in the Seven Years’ War and then in Pensacola as collector of customs and a member of His Majesty’s Council.29
The West Floridians found themselves with losses that, somehow, did not count. James Bruce, Adam Chrystie, and thirty-six other heads of household petitioned British Prime Minister Lord North that West Floridians were “equally entitled to a compensation for their losses, as their other fellow sufferers on the same continent.” In 1787, they petitioned the House of Commons and published their petition as a pamphlet. They emphasized that their loyalty had caused their losses, reminding Britons that West Florida was “solicited by Congress to join in their confederacy, and declare the province of West Florida an independent state,” but they had stayed true to the empire instead. With an exaggeration that General John Campbell would have vehemently disputed, they claimed to have “raised a considerable sum of money, by voluntary subscriptions, for erecting redoubts, and formed themselves into volunteer companies for their defense,” some joining the militia and others the provincial army.30 The crown instead offered them lands in Canada or the Bahamas, which the Treaty of Paris had returned to Britain. In 1790, Adam and Charlotte Chrystie took lands in the Bahamas for themselves and their daughters. The crown appointed Adam Chrystie colonial secretary of the Bahamas and West Florida’s attorney general.31 Chrystie rebuilt his family’s life in the Bahamas, but there is no evidence that the Bruces ever moved there. If they did, they must have had so little success that they do not appear in the land or government records. They may have gone to Canada with similar results or stayed in Britain, perhaps harboring hopes of returning to the Floridas to reclaim their lost property and position when imperial boundaries shifted again.32
Whether Isabella Bruce lamented her family’s loss of property and position or rejoiced to return home to Britain—the sources do not tell. What is clear is that for women, the Revolution could bring dramatic and often devastating change in individual circumstances but did nothing to change the institution of patriarchy under which they lived. Again, it was her husband’s status and men’s decisions that sent her back across the Atlantic and his success or failure in petitioning and in other economic pursuits that would determine her possibilities. What was increasingly becoming clear was that the sacrifices she had made to raise her children in a place of better opportunities had failed.33
The Debts of Victory
It is not surprising that James and Isabella Bruce found themselves adrift after their side lost the war. But Oliver and Margaret Pollock, who had backed the American cause and Spanish alliance from the beginning, should have had much brighter postwar fortunes. In reality the United States found itself ill equipped to repay debts. As tensions rose between Spain and the United States, the Pollocks’ association with Spain began to shift in American minds from patriotic to suspicious. The years after the war would not bring the rewards and opportunities the Pollocks had imagined.
The Pollocks needed Congress and the state of Virginia to pay what they owed. With the war over, Oliver Pollock’s New Orleans creditors expected to be paid for what they had provided the rebels on Pollock’s account. One of Bernardo de Gálvez’s parting actions as he left New Orleans in the summer of 1781 was to loan Pollock another five thousand dollars “on account of not having received the funds which should have been remitted by Congress.”34 That same summer, Congress was considering Pollock’s receipts, on the insistence of Pollock’s old business partner Robert Morris, now the superintendent of finance. Letters from Pollock and Gálvez were read on the floor of Congress, and the Commercial Committee resolved that the U.S. Treasury should pay Pollock more than twenty thousand dollars as well as repay Gálvez the money he had lent Pollock. Staying in Gálvez’s good graces was part of Congress’s motive. Morris drafted a letter from Congress to Gálvez in November 1781 to convey its gratitude, its respect for “your character and that of your nation,” and its “wish for an intimate connection with your country.” Unfortunately for all concerned, Congress had no funds to pay the bill.35
Without Gálvez in New Orleans to protect him, Pollock faced financial ruin. By January 1782, Pollock had run through Gálvez’s line of credit, while a bill from Fort Jefferson for an astounding $237,320 arrived, an amount that exceeded all of Pollock’s assets. The intendant in New Orleans demanded that Pollock immediately pay all of his debts or face imprisonment. Pollock shut down his store and sold his stocks of goods as well as his plantations, indigo works, house, furniture, and most of his slaves. As other slaveholders were taking advantage of peacetime to buy more slaves, the Pollocks were losing theirs. In May, Margaret said farewell to Oliver as he boarded a ship to go to the United States to argue his case in person. He carried notarized copies of his correspondence with Congress and the governors of Virginia, plus a letter from Governor Miró attesting to his service to American independence and describing “the sad situation” in which Pollock and his creditors found themselves. As he sailed away, Oliver lamented with “the anguish of my tortured soul” over leaving his wife and children “reduced to extreme misery and distress” for his choice “to serve a country whose gratitude and justice I had too much confidence in.”36
Whether an ardent American partisan herself or not, Margaret Pollock’s fortunes were, like those of Isabella Bruce, tied to those of her husband. If she had had wealth in her own name, Spanish law would have protected it from his creditors, but Oliver had made their fortune, and he had borrowed on it to aid the Americans. Now she did not even have a home. When Oliver Pollock sold the house, he arranged for the buyer to let Margaret and their four children stay in an upper part of the house and have use of the kitchen. That situation was humiliating enough, but when that buyer sold the house, the new owner, a Mr. McCarty, did not honor the agreement as dutifully. According to a letter that Margaret Pollock wrote Governor Esteban Miró, McCarty began sending his slaves to harass her in the streets of New Orleans with demands that she vacate his property. When complaints to McCarty went nowhere, she called on Miró, her husband’s friend and comrade during the conquests of Manchac and Baton Rouge, hoping that “the cause will be a sufficient apology for the liberty I take” in addressing the governor directly. She asked Miró to give her “that justice…which is due a woman.”37
Margaret Pollock might have no economic power, but she trusted that the combination of her class, her sex, and her husband’s connections would protect her from the ultimate affront in her world—public insults from black slaves. But things got worse. McCarty established a cooper (barrel-making) shop on the ground floor of the house and staffed it with, in Margaret Pollock’s words, “a band of Negroes” and “a banditti of whites,” who have “insulted me and beat my servants.” Pregnant and confined to bed, she was tormented by noises from downstairs “which no human creature can bear.” From her room she sent McCarty “message after message begging” that he do something about the noise, “but it appears that he is destitute of all human feeling.” Through the birth of her daughter Lucetta and a frightening two weeks with a sick child, the noise continued. We have only Margaret Pollock’s version of the events, and she was not blameless in the conflict. She admitted that “I did strike a Negro boy of his, though it was not half the punishment he merited,” but otherwise she was “much at a loss how to account for this treatment to me.”38 Her abuse of McCarty’s slave could explain his workers’ rudeness to her. Perhaps she had long been tyrannical and now, with her husband’s ruin and departure, they could strike back. Or perhaps she lashed out from frustration at her decline. What is clear is that Margaret Pollock found herself without the financial means or protection that her class, race, and sex had led her to expect, all due to the support her husband had given to the American cause.39
Unfortunately, in the fall of 1783, Margaret Pollock offended the very man she had hoped would protect her. Their conflict exposes how both men and women could muster gender roles to make their case. The Pollocks’ cook, an enslaved woman, was accused of a crime and imprisoned awaiting trial. Margaret Pollock confronted Governor Miró in person and by letter to request that “my cook that I certainly do miss” be released, and charging that “you have no right to detain her on any pretense whatever.”40 Miró responded that her comments were “very insulting to the authority of the government.” If you continue, Miró threatened, “I shall let you know that the government has authority over women.” He warned Margaret Pollock that she could submit petitions to the governor like any other subject but that their personal relationship had ended. He concluded, “I shall accept no other letter from you.”41 She did write again, and this time she abandoned all pretense of propriety. “So you threaten me,” she began. She agreed that Miró did have authority “against ladies” but reminded him that wise leaders (whether governors or husbands) ruled not by “making one feel their influence” but by governing fairly. For her part, she believed she was enacting her proper role by promoting the cause of “the feeble and the innocent,” her falsely accused slave. If he would not help the women for their own sake, he should remember her husband’s importance to Spain and that the king was “indebted to render him justice.”42 Miró did not reply.
Meanwhile, Oliver Pollock was on his way to seek justice from the people who owed him money. After landing in Wilmington, North Carolina, he rode the 250 miles to Richmond, where he discovered that the Virginia Assembly was not in session. His attorney, Daniel Clark, had already written to Virginia Governor Benjamin Harrison that Pollock was in debt more than eighty thousand dollars “for the purpose of supporting your army to the Westward, which could not possibly subsist, or continue in that service, had not Mr. Pollock generously exerted himself on their behalf.” His family, who once “lived in affluence and ease,” were faced with “misery and distress.” As Clark put it, “Ruin, from a victorious British enemy, Pollock might reasonably expect, but from a victorious friend, from Virginia, to whose service his life and fortune have been devoted, he had reason to expect a just, if not a general acquittal.”43 But Governor Harrison was powerless to act without the legislature’s approval.
Unsuccessful in Virginia, Pollock next went to Philadelphia, where in September he outlined to Congress all of his dealings and debts. He concluded, “I have labored without ceasing, I have neglected the road to affluence, I have exhausted my all, and plunged myself deeply in debt, to support the cause of America, in the hours of her distress, and when those who called themselves friends, were daily deserting her.”44 Again Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris recommended that Congress make good on the debts, as did a special Congressional committee, which agreed that “public faith, justice and humanity require that the sundry accounts should be liquidated and the balances paid.” The devil was in the detail at the end of the sentence: “whenever the state of our public funds shall render it practicable.”45 The entire debt was in the tens of millions of dollars, and many others were coming to Congress for payment, while speculators were scooping up the scrip held by soldiers and other small investors at a fraction of its face value. President of Congress John Hanson wrote Miró, assuring him that it was Congress’s “firm determination to do justice to Mr. Pollock” but explaining that Congress had no money and no power to tax.46 In the meantime, the Virginia legislature came back into session and resolved that Virginia indeed owed Pollock $136,466, to be paid in annual installments of ten thousand dollars, starting immediately. But it too had no funds to start paying.47
Back in New Orleans, Miró was no longer in the mood to accept assurance of future payments. He did not mention his altercations with Margaret Pollock, but they surely were on his mind when he responded icily to Oliver Pollock in October 1783 that he could no longer expect Virginia to come through. Miró reminded him that “one of your principal and most sacred obligations” was to repay Louisiana’s “generous citizens,” who “have suffered enough by bearing with you the long time of four years.” He enclosed a list of debts totaling over seventy-four thousand dollars to the Spanish crown and over eighty-nine thousand dollars to individuals, details Pollock surely already knew by heart.48 By the time Oliver Pollock received Miró’s letter, he had heard from his wife. Unfortunately, their private correspondence does not survive, but we can see in Pollock’s next letter to Miró how he tried to protect and excuse her. He charged Miró that “I little expected such treatment from a person I so highly esteemed, and always looked upon as a friend and a distinguished gentleman.” Clearly Miró was not acting properly, but in case Margaret Pollock was also at fault, Oliver Pollock hedged a bit, asking the governor that “in case the person I hold most dear does not merit the former friendship and politeness your Excellency once pleased to honor us with, I hope your Excellency will not forget what is due to her sex” as well as to his old friend and “very obedient and humble servant, Oliver Pollock.”49
In the meantime, unable to pay Oliver Pollock, Congress in June 1783 gave him an appointment as a commercial agent for the United States at Havana. Perhaps Pollock could start again, as he had in the 1760s, importing and exporting goods through Havana to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. He sailed to Havana with new hope and two shiploads of goods, calling for his family to join him from New Orleans. Margaret Pollock must have been mightily relieved as she and the children boarded a Havana-bound ship and scraped the mud of Miró’s New Orleans from their boots.50
However, Oliver Pollock found 1783 quite unlike the 1760s. Back then, he was one of very few merchants who could legally trade in both the Spanish and British empires, and he took advantage of his privileged position and the demand for his products. Now he represented the United States, a nation which Spanish officials were beginning to see as an international bully with no funds or military to back up its demands. When Pollock arrived in Havana in the fall of 1783, the governor of Cuba was none other than Luís de Unzaga y Amezaga, Bernardo de Gálvez’s predecessor as Louisiana governor, the man whom Pollock had worn out with his requests to aid the American rebellion back in 1776 and 1777. Pollock was shocked to discover that Governor Unzaga had just issued a proclamation that no American vessels would be admitted in the port of Havana.
Angry about American and British dealings in Paris, the Spanish crown had determined to use its economic power to show the young upstart nation its true place in the world order. Governor Unzaga allowed Pollock to enter but required that his goods stay on board ship floating in Havana’s harbor. In February 1784, Unzaga went further, ordering all American merchants to leave Cuba or face arrest. To Spain, the new nation could not sign whatever treaty it liked with their common enemy and then expect to retain the economic and military benefits of connections with the wartime allies it had just slighted.51
U.S. officials in the early years after the Revolution tended to think that they could operate as neutrals, free from the entanglements of empire, with good diplomatic relations and open ports to all of Europe. Their ambitions were similar to Payamataha’s for the Chickasaws, but their diplomacy was less consistent and their claims more audacious. The failure of Americans’ self-perception to line up with European (and Indian) views of the United States as presumptuous and transient led to many surprises like Pollock’s, in which U.S. representatives were insulted and demeaned by imperial powers.52
Pollock’s creditors in New Orleans received the news that his trips to Philadelphia and Richmond had not improved his financial situation. They sent a petition to Cuban Governor Unzaga, whom some of them knew from Louisiana, to imprison Pollock for debt. In May 1784, Unzaga did just that. An officer and two soldiers approached Pollock’s house in Havana with bayonets fixed to the ends of their muskets. They took custody of his carriage, mules, and black coachman. While other American merchants and their families could leave Havana if they could liquidate enough assets to pay for passage, Pollock could not even do that, as the governor would not grant him a passport until he paid his “rebel debts.”53 One ship’s captain seemed willing to take Margaret and the children but then left harbor with the family’s baggage on board, deserting them “without a second change of clothes.”54 Having believed she would be safe from insults in Havana, Margaret Pollock must have been utterly devastated. Late in August, Unzaga finally agreed that she and the children could leave for Philadelphia, but Pollock would have to remain until he could provide “satisfaction to the many creditors who have presented themselves.”55 The ship that carried away Margaret and the children also bore more letters from Oliver Pollock to Philadelphia and Virginia begging for his money.56
With the British empire gone, trade should have flowed freely among the allied ports of New Orleans, Pensacola, Havana, Veracruz, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Instead, Spain and the United States clashed over their visions of the future, especially in the North American interior, and the Pollocks found themselves caught in the middle. Like Isabella Bruce, Margaret Pollock would have to make a new home for her children when her husband’s ambitions faltered. Women’s relationships of dependence—with husbands and other important men—were supposed to protect and provide for them. When those same men could not or would not fulfill their part in a system of patriarchy, everything fell apart.
A few months later, Oliver Pollock finally received some good news. On February 4, 1785, Bernardo de Gálvez stepped off a ship in Havana. Rewarding Gálvez’s victories, the king had made him captain general of Cuba in addition to governor of Louisiana and the Floridas. Importantly for Pollock, Gálvez was now Governor Unzaga’s superior. Pollock wrote a letter detailing his travails since they last met, including the fact that he was under arrest right nearby. To Gálvez, Pollock’s plight was an unwelcome reminder of the contrast between American ambitions and American irresponsibility. Gálvez informed Pollock that he had no power to overturn Unzaga’s local decisions but that he would see what he could do in the courts.57
Before Gálvez had time to help Pollock, word came from Spain that the king had named Gálvez to succeed his father as viceroy of New Spain. Now bound for Mexico, Gálvez had no time to address Pollock’s problems through the legal process. However, he personally pledged security for Pollock’s debts and granted him passage on the king’s frigate to New York. Pollock gratefully boarded the ship along with other imprisoned American merchants and Spanish envoy Diego de Gardoqui, on his way from Gálvez’s briefing to his negotiations with John Jay.58
Back in the United States, Pollock contrasted Gálvez’s literal grant of freedom with what Congress was inflicting on him. True independence would come only when Congress paid its debts, for now Pollock’s family, which “had formerly enjoyed affluence,” was in “a state of dependency.” In either a rented house or the home of a friend, Margaret Pollock gave birth again in June 1785, adding a newborn son to her other seven children, including the two-year-old who had been born over the cooper’s shop in New Orleans. In St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Philadelphia, they christened him Bernard Galvez Pollock. Coming of age in a well-to-do New Orleans family, Margaret had looked forward to a life in which she and her children would be comfortable dependents of a responsible husband and father, not outcasts dependent on charity for their food and shelter. What a difference a revolution had made—and being on the winning side no less. For Pollock and his family, winning the war for independence produced nothing of the sort.59
At last, in late 1785, Virginia made the first installment on Pollock’s reimbursements, giving him enough capital to begin his business again. He outfitted a ship and loaded it with flour from Philadelphia and slaves from the West Indies. The shipment made a good profit at New Orleans, where aspiring planters like Amand Broussard were clamoring for slaves. Pollock was able to fund another voyage and make a down payment on a house in the countryside between Philadelphia and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he already had a farm he had inherited from his father. His sister Mary lived on the farm, but, as the son, Oliver inherited. Small-town Pennsylvania was a long way from New Orleans, but Margaret surely was relieved to have a house again, and they also at some point acquired a home in Philadelphia, two blocks from Independence Hall. Still, her husband was merely “on parole,” and his profits were far from enough to satisfy his creditors. Pollock wrote Congress again that he did not “know the moment the injured creditors may once more force me to part, and leave [my family] to the bounty of strangers for support.”60
Conclusion: Individuals and Their States
Individual men and women found themselves caught up in the uncertainty of who was in charge after the war. Although the Gulf Coast had not experienced a political revolution that turned governance upside down, shifting imperial borders changed people’s lives. Some, like the Broussards and Petit Jean and his wife, made the most of opportunities unavailable before the war. Others, such as the Bruces and the Pollocks, found their circumstances changed for the worse by the victories of the American republic and the Spanish empire.
At the same time, many U.S. citizens believed that the lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi were key to the independence the Revolution had promised them. As these speculators and settlers pushed west, they would both clash with Spaniards and Indians and imagine ways of combining with them that might be more advantageous than remaining in the United States. From Natchez to Little Tallassee to Nashville to Augusta, people imagined futures of independence and prosperity and wondered what polities, if any, could promote them.