Reluctant Loyalist: Dr. Alexander Garden of Charleston

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]

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)

The British Evacuate Charleston, December, 1782

On December 14, 1782, British forces evacuated Charleston, South Carolina after an occupation that had lasted two and a half years. The day later became a local holiday: Victory Day. 

Sir Henry Clinton's capture of the city two and a half years before was the greatest British victory of the War for American Independence.  [Image: Siege of Charleston, 1780, by Alonzo Chappel, 1862]

The British and their Loyalist allies had gone on to gain nearly complete control of the state. Lord Cornwallis' decisive victory at the Battle of Camden in August seemed to solidify their conquest. [Image: Battle of Camden, by Granger]

At the height of their success, things began to sour for the British. In fact, the seeds of their ultimate defeat had already been sown. The army's strength was depleted by malarial fevers, dysentery, and possibly yellow fever. A smallpox epidemic was raging as well, although that hurt both sides. 

South Carolinians had an advantage over the British when it came to the local fevers: differential immunity. People who had been born in or lived in the state for years had often developed some immunity or resistance to the fevers. They might get ill, but they were less likely to be prostrated or die than the "unseasoned" British soldiers, and they would generally recover the ability to function more quickly. 

The British commanders knew that the lowcountry was an unhealthy place. But they expected to find relief from the fevers as they moved farther inland. The upcountry had was reputedly much healthier than the lowcountry. 

That may have been true before the region become thickly settled. But it had filled rapidly with white and enslaved black settlers following the French and Indian War (1754-1763). Lowcountry fevers migrated along with them, in their bodies. The British were caught by surprise. 

The consequences were dire. The fate of the 71st Highlanders provides an example. Cornwallis had posted them to Cheraw in June because he had been informed that it was a healthy location. By late July, fevers had incapacitated two-thirds of the regiment. Their commander removed them to another location. The Patriots  interpreted the move as a retreat, and they soon received many new recruits to their ranks.

When Cornwallis arrived at Camden to confront the approaching army of General Gates, he found that a third of his army was too ill to fight. Overall, he had only 2000 effectives, and the Patriot army numbered at least 3000. In spite of this, the British achieved a crushing victory.

But Cornwallis' problems had just begun. He moved his healthy men from Camden to the Waxhaws because it was reputedly healthy, only to find that it was just as sickly. Everywhere he went, fevers followed him. 

Cornwallis himself succumbed, and was virtually incapacitated during the crucial time in early October when the "Over Mountain Men" annihilated Major Patrick Ferguson's Loyalist detachment at King's Mountain. 

The experience of the summer and autumn weighed heavily on Cornwallis. In the spring of 1781, he decided to march his army north to Virginia, and gave as one of his reasons that it was the only way "to preserve the troops, from the fatal sickness, which so nearly ruined the army last autumn." Thus began the fatal road that would end at Yorktown in October. 

From many histories of the Revolutionary War, one could easily conclude that Cornwallis' surrender to Washington and the French at Yorktown ended the conflict. That was true for many parts of the old thirteen colonies, but in South Carolina it was far from the case.

Although the British now recognized the need to make peace, negotiations in Paris dragged on for more than a year. In the meantime, the war in South Carolina continued. 

Local resistance to British control had strengthened after Camden. Partisan bands constantly harassed isolated British detachments and posts, then vanished into the swamps and forests.

When Cornwallis marched North in April 1781, the Southern Continental Army under General Nathanael Greene moved into South Carolina. In September, they fought a British force to a standstill at Eutaw Springs. Both sides claimed victory, but the British retreated to Charleston and soon abandoned nearly all their posts outside of the city. [Image: Battle of Eutaw Springs, by Granger]

Eutaw Springs was the last major battle of the war in South Carolina, although skirmishes continued for nearly a year. In August, 1782, Colonel John Laurens, a firm opponent of slavery, was killed in a skirmish at the Combahee. 

Greene moved his army ever closer to Charleston. The British expected an attack, but Greene waited. At his camps along the Ashley River, his men, especially those from the North, suffered terribly from malaria and other diseases.      

At the end of November 1782, British and American negotiators in Paris agreed on preliminary articles of peace. The British commanders in Charleston did not yet know that, but they had been preparing for an evacuation for some time. The British had already evacuated Savannah, which they had seized in December 1778. 

In early December they began loading transport ships for departure from Charleston. This was not an ordinary military evacuation. In addition to the British soldiers, the fleet removed over three thousand Loyalists and their families. The transports were also loaded with  five thousand Africans who had fled to British lines in return for promises of freedom from General Clinton. 

Some of the ships were bound for the West Indies or St. Augustine in British Florida. Some were headed directly to England. The rest, especially those carrying the liberated Africans, were to the last British stronghold in the former thirteen colonies, New York. 

The evacuation was remarkably peaceful, even dignified. By prior agreement between the commanders on both sides, Greene's soldiers did not enter the city  until the ships were ready to depart. The last to board the transports were British and Loyalist soldiers, who marched from their lines at Boundary Street (now Calhoun) to the wharves, closely followed by Greene's men. The two forces were separated by only a few hundred yards, but not a shot was fired. 

The whites who remained cheered the entering American army as heroes. Many of them had also cheered the British when they arrived two and half years before. Such is war. 

The definitive peace treaty was signed in Paris in September 1783. The British evacuated New York two months later. Most of the Africans there were taken to Nova Scotia. Some of them later helped to found the British freedmen's colony of Sierra Leone in the 1790s. [See History and Other Stuff: Boston King: Black Loyalist, Minister, African Colonial Leader (mycandles.blogspot.com)]

[Image: The Evacuation of Charleston by the British, by Howard Pyle, 1898, Delaware Art Museum]

 

Most of the sources for this post come from Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011/2014.

The British Seize Charleston, May 12, 1780

[A somewhat fanciful depiction of The Siege of Charleston from the British lines by Alonzo Chappell, 1862.] 

On May 12, 1780, Charleston, South Carolina surrendered to a British army under the command of Sir Henry Clinton. It was the worst Patriot defeat in the American War for Independence. Clinton not only took the city, the most important in the South, he also captured most of the garrison, more than 5000 soldiers. It was not until the Surrender at Bataan in World War II that more American soldiers surrendered to an enemy army. [Image: Sir Henry Clinton]

The victory was the culmination of a campaign that had begun three months before, when Clinton had disembarked an army of more than 8000 men on Simmons (now Seabrook) Island. Marching through the difficult terrain of Simmons and James Islands, they crossed the Ashley River onto Charleston Peninsula on March 29. 

They immediately began to construct siege lines that moved them and their artillery ever closer to the city. The map below shows the gradual encroachment of the British lines. 

Thousands more British and Loyalist soldiers from Savannah and New York soon joined Clinton, as did thousands of black runaways attracted by his promise of freedom. Many of them were enlisted as Black Pioneers, auxiliaries to the British Army. 

The American commander, Benjamín Lincoln of Massachusetts, had advocated Colonel John Laurens' idea of arming enslaved men on the same promise. The state legislature voted the proposal down by a large majority. Some local leaders argued that allowing the British a free passage through South Carolina was preferable to the prospect of arming Africans.

By late April the British had completely surrounded Charleston. Lincoln proposed to escape with his army before the British had encircled the city. He backed down in the face of local hostility to the move. [Image: Benjamin Lincoln]

Acting Governor Christopher Gadsden (of "Don't Tread On Me" flag fame) led an angry crowd to Lincoln's headquarters. Gadsden accused Lincoln of cowardice. One of his entourage threatened to open the gates to the enemy and attack Lincoln's soldiers before they could get to their boats. [Images: Christopher Gadsden and his flag]

Most of Lincoln's officers also opposed a withdrawal at this point. Lincoln agreed to remain. In the end, cut off from escape and reinforcements, running out of food, and under increasingly heavy bombardment, he accepted Clinton's terms. Ironically, Gadsden and others who had accused Lincoln of cowardice earlier now demanded he surrender to save the city from destruction. 

Under Clinton's terms, the Continental soldiers became prisoners of war. They were interned in and around the city. The militia were paroled. They could go home, as long as they did not take up arms against the British. Lincoln, Laurens, and other officers were also paroled not long after. They were able to return to active service after being exchanged for British prisoners of equivalent rank. 

A few weeks later, Clinton returned to his headquarters in New York. He left General Lord Cornwallis in command in the South. The two men despised each other, a fact that would cause serious problems for British operations for the rest of the war. [Image: General Charles, Lord Cornwallis]

Before leaving, Clinton made a serious mistake. He decreed that men who had taken parole had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown. In effect, they might have to fight for the British against their former comrades. 

Anger at Clinton's proclamation helped fill the ranks of the partisan forces that soon emerged in the backcountry under Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. Cornwallis won a decisive victory over General Gates at Camden in August, but his inability to subdue the partisans (and Carolina fevers) led him to march his army to Virginia and Yorktown.  

Footnote: On the same day Charleston surrendered to Clinton, an enormous tragedy occurred. As the Patriots were surrendering their weapons at the powder magazine (on Magazine Street), the powder exploded, killing scores and injuring hundreds. The dead and wounded included soldiers from both sides, women from a nearby brothel, and most of the "lunatics" at the adjacent poorhouse and hospital. Each side blamed the other, but the explosion was most likely caused when a soldier threw down a musket that had not been unloaded and discharged into the magazine.

Further Reading: 

Carl P. Borick, A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. 

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The Tower of London's Only American Prisoner: Henry Laurens

The Tower of London, originally a royal castle-palace, later a royal prison, has housed many famous prisoners in its thousand year history, including the Little Princes, Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More. But only one was an American: Henry Laurens, during the American War for Independence. [Image: Henry Laurens, Boston Magazine, 1784]

Laurens, who had made a fortune in the slave trade in his native Charleston, South Carolina, and owned several plantations, became a leading Patriot during the conflict between colonists and mother country. He served as President of the Continental Congress in 1777-78. Congress then named him minister to the Netherlands. He made a successful voyage there in the spring of 1780, gaining some financial assistance from the Dutch. On a second voyage that autumn, a Royal Navy frigate captured his ship at sea, along with a draft of a treaty with the Netherlands, a document that led the British government to declare war on that country. 

The British government lodged Laurens in the Tower on suspicion of treason. Laurens recorded that the guards of the Tower serenaded him with a rendition of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" when he arrived to take up residence, passing through Traitors Gate on the Thames. (below)

Laurens remained in the Tower for more than a year. During that time two artists painted his portrait, an indication that his treatment was not especially harsh. The portraits are by Lemuel Francis Abbott and John Singleton Copley.

The mildness of Laurens' treatment owed something to important British friends, notably the enormously rich Richard Oswald, a former slave trading partner. Laurens had been Charleston agent for the slave factory at Bunce (AKA, Bance) Island, Sierra Leone, in which Oswald was heavily invested. [Image: 18th century drawing of Bunce Island]

Oswald secured Laurens' release from the Tower on bail in December 1781. Not long after, the British government exchanged Laurens for Lord Cornwallis, the British general who surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in October 1781. Oswald later became chief British negotiator at the peace talks in Paris. 

After Laurens' release, the US government ordered him to join the American peace delegation of John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin. [Image: Benjamin West, American Peace Delegation, Paris, 1782, unfinished. Laurens is in the red coat, Franklin, Adams, and Jay to his right.]

Laurens put off going to Paris for months, pleading ill health. He did not arrive until late November, the day before the preliminary treaty was to be signed. He insisted on an addition to the treaty: that the British government return all runaway slaves to their American masters. Thousands had run away to British lines. Despite the fact that the British government had promised the runaways freedom, Oswald agreed to Laurens' addition, and the clause went into the final document. 

The runaway clause proved largely unenforceable. Sir Guy Carleton, the new British Commander in America, refused to hand over thousands of them under his protection in New York. Before evacuating the city, Carleton shipped them to Nova Scotia. Some of them later went to Sierra Leone, where they established a freedmen's colony and the current capital, Freetown. [Image: Early Freetown]

After the preliminary treaty was signed, Laurens returned to Britain and served briefly as US minster to the former mother country. In 1784, he returned to South Carolina. He spent his remaining years restoring his fortune and estates. He avoided politics, dying at his favorite plantation, Mepkin in 1792, surrounded by his slaves. His body was cremated, allegedly one of the first cremations in the United States. Today, Mepkin is a Trappist monastery, Mepkin Abbey.

[Images of Mepkin, by Charles A. Fraser, early 19th century]