People who supported the British government during the American Revolution were a varied lot. Loyalists were rich and poor, white and black, men and women. They included recent immigrants and members of established colonial families. Above all, they were caught in a web of circumstances beyond their control.
Each had their reasons for choosing the British side, reasons often much more complicated than rooting for a football team or trying to profit in some way. Loyalists usually had friends and family on the other side.
William Franklin, illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, remained staunchly loyal to the British Crown, which had appointed him Royal Governor of New Jersey. Dr. Alexander Garden of Charlestown (Charleston after 1783) was less staunch in his loyalty, but in the end the victors branded him as a Loyalist.
Most writing about Garden focuses on his contributions to natural history. My focus here is on Garden's attempts to negotiate the treacherous waters of revolutionary America, a subject that has received much less attention. [Image: Portrait of Alexander Garden.]
Garden was born in Birse, Aberdeenshire, Scotland in 1730. His father was minister of the village church. In his teens, Alexander studied medicine at Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities and received an MD from Edinburgh.
He served as a surgeon in the British navy for several years, but resigned, he said, because he was always ill at sea. A lung complaint, perhaps tuberculosis, may also have played a part in his decision. The air below decks in the ships of the day was always foul. In later life, he always dreaded ocean voyages.
Garden emigrated to South Carolina in 1752 in hopes of improving his health and his income. In the latter goal, certainly, he succeeded. South Carolina was not only the wealthiest British North American colony, it was also the unhealthiest. He suffered from the local fevers as all newcomers did, but survived what people called "The Seasoning."
A few years after arriving, he wooed and married a wealthy heiress, Elizabeth Peronneau, whom he called Toby. Three of their children survived to adulthood, a son, Alex, and daughters Harriette and Juliette. He soon developed a flourishing practice, aided by his adoption of inoculation for smallpox, one of the most dreaded scourges of colonial America.
By the early 1770s Garden was one of the richest physician in town. He established a network of close friends among the planter and merchant elite, many of whom used his medical services. Garden developed an especially close friendship with Henry Laurens, former slave trader and merchant/planter. Garden tutored Laurens' eldest son John to prepare him for education in England.
In his spare time -- he never had enough, he complained -- he pursued his life's passion, natural history. He corresponded with and sent botanical and zoological specimens to leading natural historians in Europe. Among them was Sweden's Linnaeus, who developed the modern system of biological classification. Linnaeus named the gardenia for Garden.
In 1773, the prestigious Royal Society of London elected Garden to membership for his contributions to science. Benjamin Franklin, then working in London as a colonial agent, nominated him.
In the same year, Garden bought a plantation in Goose Creek from fellow physician John Moultrie, Jr., who had been appointed Lt. Governor of British East Florida. Garden renamed it Otranto, perhaps after Horace Walpole's recently published novella, The Castle of Otranto. Garden was also amassing other properties in and near Charleston.
In the early 1770s, all seemed to be going well for Garden. Then history took one of those turns that forces people to make difficult, often agonizing, choices. For some years, tension between Britain and its colonies in North America had been growing.
The real issue, as so often, was about power. Who should have the preponderance of it, the British government or the colonial legislatures? Interestingly, Garden realized the heart of the issue as early as 1765, during Stamp Act Crisis. The conflict, he wrote to a friend in England, was really about sovereignty.
In the northern colonies, resistance took the form of a rejection of taxes imposed by the British Parliament. In the southern colonies, that was an issue as well, but another concern drove many wealthy southerners to cooperate with their northern neighbors.
In 1772, the Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench in London, Lord Mansfield, ruled that slavery was illegal in England; that it had no basis in common law. The Somerset Ruling, as Mansfield's decision is known, aroused panic among many southern slaveholders. They concluded, wrongly, that the ruling would soon be extended to the colonies. The best way to prevent that possibility, they decided, was to renounce British claims to legislate for the colonies.
In the spring of 1775, tension gave way to violence and war. Talk of independence was in the air. The issue of armed resistance and independence immediately divided Americans into Whigs or Patriots and Loyalists or Tories.
In South Carolina, the Whigs took control and formed an extra legal Provincial Government. It took over the functions of the royal administration and the old assembly. The new Provincial Congress voted funds to raise an army. and demanded that all (white, male) citizens swear allegiance to the new regime. Holdouts were to be labeled "obnoxious persons". Some legislators demanded they be imprisoned.
Garden faced a terrible dilemma. Before coming to South Carolina, he had served for several years as a naval surgeon. He had taken an oath to the Crown. As a youth in Scotland, he witnessed the terrible costs of joining a rebellion against the British Crown, in 1745-46.
His father had remained loyal to the Hanoverian king, George II, but some of his relatives joined the Jacobites, led by the overly romanticized "Bonnie Prince Charlie." A crushing Hanoverian victory, at Culloden in 1746, ended the Jacobite threat. Scots families who had supported the Stuart cause often lost their land, their freedom, and sometimes their lives. They were labeled traitors.
Similarly, Garden had friends on both sides of the American divide. Like many people in the colonies, perhaps as many as a third, he wanted to remain neutral. Events made that choice increasingly difficult to sustain. Some of the more extreme Patriots harassed him, trying to get him to join them. More moderate Whig friends, including Henry Laurens, tried to protect him but urged him to take the various oaths of allegiance to the new regime.
Garden eventually found ways to satisfy the oaths without, in his view, compromising his neutrality. With help from Laurens and other Whig friends, he was able to remain free and continue his medical practice for five turbulent years. His doctoring skills protected him as well. People on both sides respected his ability and employed him to treat their diseases and wounds.
The British capture of Charleston in May 1780 changed everything. Garden refused to take the Oath of Loyalty to the British Crown, which many so-called Patriots rushed to do. He seems to have reasoned that he had already taken such an oath when he joined the Royal Navy, and had done nothing to violate it. He also refused to take a position in the new British administration. It seems he still desired to remain neutral, but felt safer under British rule.
A few months later, Garden made what in retrospect seems a major mistake. In August 1780, General Lord Cornwallis won a crushing victory over a Patriot Army at Camden. It seemed that the American rebellion was doomed, at least in the Lower South. Garden, perhaps thinking that British rule was secure, agreed to sign a memorial of congratulations to Cornwallis. Whether he did so voluntarily or under pressure is not clear.
The congratulations proved premature. Fevers, partisan attacks, and the arrival of another Patriot army under General Nathanael Greene undermined the British control of the Carolinas within a few months. In the Spring of 1781, Cornwallis decided to march his army north to Virginia. He wrote his superiors that he could not subject his men to another deadly summer in feverish South Carolina. His decision led directly to Yorktown and surrender.
The force Cornwallis left behind was unable to maintain control of the Carolina backcountry. By the early autumn of 1781, partisan forces and Greene's army had occupied most of the state outside of Charleston. The British held on in that enclave for another year. In December 1782, they withdrew, knowing peace would soon be declared. When the British fleet left Charleston, Garden and most of his family were aboard one of the ships. The decision to leave was not his choice. [Image: The Evacuation of Charleston by the British, by Howard Pyle, 1898, Delaware Art Museum]
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At the beginning of that year, the South Carolina State Assembly met at Jacksonville, about 30 miles south of Charleston. It was the first legislative session since the British occupation. A major item on the agenda was how to punish Loyalists. Some were merely amerced (fined) but the assembly banished many of them from the state and confiscated their property.
Garden was among those banished. His sin was to have signed the memorial congratulating Lord Cornwallis. A few delegates, including John Laurens, tried to commute his punishment to an amercement, or fine, but in vain. Vengeance was the order of the day. Henry Laurens was far away in England and unable to help his friend.
The War for Independence proved disastrous for Garden, not only financially. It also divided his family. During the British occupation of Charleston his daughter Harriette fell in love with and married a British officer, Major George Benson. Benson was particularly disliked by the Patriots as he was in charge of the arrest of a group of active revolutionaries, who included Christopher Gadsden, Arthur Middleton, and Garden's medical friend and colleague, David Ramsay.
In the summer of 1781, Garden's son Alex returned from education in Britain -- in defiance of his father's wishes. Soon after his arrival, he ran off and joined the Continental Army of General Greene. He became an aide de camp to Greene and rose to the rank of Major.
Because he had joined the Patriot side, Alex was allowed to keep the Garden plantation at Otranto, despite the suspicions of some Patriots that he had joined the Patriot side to save the family estate. That possibility cannot be ignored. During the Jacobite rebellions in Scotland, many Scottish families had done exactly that.
Dr. Garden always denied any collusion with Alex. He denounced his son's decision to join Greene's army and never reconciled with him. The South Carolina government later restored some of Dr. Garden's property and rescinded his banishment, but he never returned to Charleston or benefited from the change. One of the reasons seems to have been his fear of another long ocean voyage.
After the war, Alex married Mary Anna Gibbes, daughter of one of his father's old friends. He wrote two books about the Revolution. Alex was not good at managing his affairs, however, and fell into debt. His wife and children predeceased him (as so often happened in the deadly lowcountry). Otranto passed to an adopted nephew, Alester Gibbes, after Alex's death in 1829. [Image: Major Alexander Garden, artist unknown]
In 1783, Dr. Garden, his wife Elizabeth, and younger daughter Juliette settled in London, at a house on Cecil Street, off the Strand. Soon after he settled in, he activated his membership in the Royal Society, and a few years later was elected its vice-president.
He spent years trying to obtain compensation from the British government for his losses in the war. He finally received some, but it was a fraction of his losses. Shortly after the government awarded it, he died, probably of a lung disorder, in 1791.
Garden's wife Elizabeth (Toby) survived until 1805. His eldest daughter Harriette prospered. Her husband, George Benson, became a general. She died a wealthy widow in 1847. His younger daughter, Juliette, did not fare as well. She married a British soldier as well, Captain Alexander Fotheringham. They had five children. All five died within one week in an epidemic. She and her husband died within days of one another in 1820.
Further reading:
Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, Alexander Garden of Charles Town (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969)
Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011, 2014.
James Edward Smith, A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus and Other Naturalists (2 vols., London, 1821)
The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. Volumes dealing with the 1760s and 1770s.)
John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution 2 vols., Charleston, 1821. Based on documents John's father William Henry Drayton had collected prior to his death.
Alexander Garden (Major Garden), Anecdotes of the Revolutionary War in America (Charleston, 1822) and Anecdotes of the American Revolution (Charleston, 1828)
Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies & Sparked the American Revolution (Naperville, Illinois: Source Books, 2005)
Alexander Garden - History of Early American Landscape Design (nga.gov)
