Loyalist and Patriot: George Milligen

George Milligen was one of the staunchest supporters of the British government in South Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution. 

Milligen was born in or near Dumfries, Scotland, probably in the 1720s. After training as a surgeon he joined the British army on 1745. He came to South Carolina in 1753 with the title Surgeon to His Majesty’s Forces in South Carolina and Georgia. 

The title was grander in name than in reality. The number of British soldiers and sailors in the two provinces was usually quite small. He supplemented his government income by medicating civilians as well. Given the prevalence of malarial and other fevers, there was plenty of work for doctors in South Carolina, especially in the late summer and autumn. 

In 1759 Milligen accompanied Governor Lyttleton's disastrous punitive expedition to the Cherokee country. Lyttleton's bungled campaign precipitated the Second Cherokee War and the spread of smallpox across the province. 

In 1763, Milligen published a short but useful book about the local diseases and other aspects of colonial life: A Short Description of the Province of South-Carolina: With an Account of the Air, Weather, and Diseases of Charles-Town. The American Philosophical Society elected Milligen to membership in 1772. 

Up to this point, he seems to have been an accepted member of the Charleston community, active in civic and philanthropic affairs. By the early 1770s, however, the political situation in South Carolina was becoming increasingly polarized, as colonial conflicts with the mother country intensified. 

In January 1775, matters came to a head. Advocates of resistance to British colonial policy, who called themselves Whigs, established a provisional government. The Whigs would later call themselves "Patriots" and those who disagreed with them, "Tories." 

In practical terms, the old Tory Party had ceased to exist in Britain, and the modern one had not yet emerged. Calling someone a Tory in the 1770s was much like calling them a communist. Those who remained loyal to Britain viewed themselves as patriots. They did not generally view themselves as Tories, but Loyalists.  

The Patriot Whigs established a Provincial Assembly and elected Henry Laurens president. They also created a council of safety and other executive committees. The council and committees became a de facto government, rendering the royal administration almost powerless.   

In early June, following the news that British soldiers had opened fire against the Massachusetts militia, delegates to the Provincial Assembly voted to raise two regiments of soldiers. They also approved a document called the Association. It declared that the people of South Carolina would use force if necessary to protect their liberties. 

Whig leaders called on all white inhabitants, including royal officials, to sign the Association. Anyone who refused to sign should be considered "inimical to the Liberty of the Colonies," in other words, as enemies. An amendment requiring that they be imprisoned failed. 

Many citizens refused to sign, including those who held jobs in the royal administration. The council of safety summoned the officials and pressed them to change their minds. They remained defiant. Milligen was one of the most outspoken.

Henry Laurens, the chair of the council, asked Milligen if he agreed that the colonists "possessed the rights and liberties of Englishmen?" It seems an odd question now for a former slave trader to pose, especially to a Scot. Milligen replied without hesitation, "I support the civil and religious rights of mankind." 

It was a riposte worthy of Rousseau. Laurens then asked Milligen if he considered himself a patriot. "I do," Milligen answered. "Then why can't you stand with us?" Laurens continued. Milligen had clearly prepared his answer: 

“For me, patriotism includes support for the king, protector of the rights and liberties of his subjects. For thirty years, I’ve served His Majesty as a soldier and a surgeon, and eaten his bread. Allegiance as a subject, gratitude as a man, honor as a gentleman, and my duty to the king all forbid my joining your Association." 

Laurens dismissed him and asked him to appear before the council again on August 15. Milligen's stance made him a special target of Charleston's radical "Liberty Boys." He had once been friendly with several of their leaders, who, like him, were Freemasons and had helped raise funds for charitable projects. 

The Liberty Boys was an organization modeled on one in Massachusetts. Its members, mostly artisans and shopkeepers, acted as "enforcers" of the policies of the provisional government. They harassed suspected Loyalists (or "Tories") in the streets and even invaded their houses. 

A few days before Milligen appeared before the council of safety, on June 2, the Liberty Boys had inflicted a violent punishment on two Irishmen accused of supporting British plans for subduing the colonists by force. 

James Dealey and Laughlin Martin were accused of publicly cheering news that the British government was shipping guns to the colony to arm blacks, Indians, and Roman Catholics. 

What the pair did not know was that the news, published in the South Carolina Gazette, was fake news. Its purpose was to anger and frighten people into supporting the resistance to the British government. It seems to have accomplished that aim, but also "outed" two treacherous "papists" who appeared ready to help the British. 

Dealey and Martin were both Roman Catholic, although their neighbors may not have known that before. The practise of their faith was not yet legal in South Carolina, and they likely kept it a secret. Most South Carolinians shared British prejudices against the "popish" religion. 

Liberty Boys assembled an illegal citizens' court to hear the "evidence" and pass judgment. They sentenced Dealey and Martin to be dressed in "An American Suit of Clothing." This was a euphemism for tarring and feathering. 

The enforcers came prepared with a barrel of hot tar and a bag of feathers. They removed the upper clothing of the guilty parties, poured hot tar over them, then dropped the feathers on the sticky tar. The procedure was humiliating, painful, and potentially dangerous. 

[Image: A Tarring and Feathering in Boston. Here, the Patriots are pouring tea into the mouth of the "transgressor."]

In early August the Charleston Liberty Boys tarred and feathered a British soldier. His accuser claimed that Sergeant Walker had refused a toast of "damnation to King George" and said he would "drink damnation to rebels instead." A hastily assembled crowd that included newly raised provincial soldiers demanded that Walker be tarred and feathered. 

After the enforcers had suitably "dressed" him, they put him in a donkey cart and dragged him around town. They pelted him with stones and filth along the way. Their route took them to the houses of several alleged Tories. At each house they forced Walker to drink damnation to the residents. 

At one house, Milligen sat on the porch with his mother-in-law. Some in the crowd charged towards him, shouting that he should join Walker in the cart. A melee ensued in which his wife, who had come out to see what the matter was, fainted. He carried her to safety and with the help of a "faithful" black servant, held off the attackers. 

The crowd dispersed soon after. They dumped the battered Walker in the harbor, where he might have drowned. A boat rowed by crew from a British ship rescued him, but he had sustained severe burns and damage to one eye. [Image: Charleston Harbor at the time of the Revolution. The Old Exchange is in center background, flanked by St. Michael's (left) and St. Philip's churches.]

Several of Milligen's friends, including one member of the council of safety, possibly Henry Laurens, urged him to flee the colony before worse happened. He agreed but refused to leave just yet. The council had summoned him for another interview. He told his friends that he felt honor bound to attend. 

Standing before the council in the State House, Milligen remained as defiant as ever. On this occasion Laurens was absent. Charles Pinckney was in the chair. The others present included Arthur Middleton, Thomas Heyward, and Thomas Bee. The first two would later be signatories to the Declaration of Independence. 

The council president, Henry Laurens. had excused himself, pleading indisposition. Perhaps he did not want to be part of what was planned for Milligen. The council asked Milligen sign an oath that he would not do anything to oppose or counteract the actions of the Provincial Congress and its committees. Milligen refused. 

Arthur Middleton asked him if he understood the possible consequences of his refusal. " I do," Milligen replied. "I have observed the justice meted out by liberty mobs," an obvious reference to the tarring and feathering incidents. Middleton protested that those were the justified actions of the people, not a mob. 

The council dismissed Milligen. As he left, Middleton advised him to "be careful of your attire" and remember to take his kilt along. It was a joke, perhaps, but also a threat and an insult. After Milligen left the council room, followed by laughter, Middleton added another joke. The "good doctor," he said, was sure to "gain a high place in Scotland after kissing some Tory behinds."

Milligen left the building and immediately jumped into a waiting carriage. It sped off to a nearby wharf, where a naval skiff waited to take him to safety aboard a British sloop in the harbor, HMS Tamar. His escape had been arranged by the Royal Governor, Lord William Campbell. Campbell himself would flee there a few weeks later. 

Milligen arrived in England around the end of September aboard a mail packet. During the trip he wrote a report on the situation in South Carolina which he delivered to the government. In it, he characterized the rebels as having used lies, threats, and violence to achieve their "wicked" ends. 

Many of the people who signed the Association, he claimed, did so under duress. They were faced with threats of economic ruin and/or physical intimidation. Others were frightened into signing by carefully spread but false rumors of British-inspired slave rebellions and Indian attacks. 

When no uprisings occurred, some people had begun to question the rumors. The rebel leaders responded by arresting several blacks in late June and claiming they had found evidence that a revolt was planned. An illegal tribunal condemned one of them to death, a free black named Thomas Jeremiah. He was hanged and his body burned on August 18. Milligen wrote that the rebels had sacrificed Jeremiah to achieve their goal of frightening the public. 

After returning to Britain, Milligen settled in Dumfries, Scotland, his place of birth. His mother was the last of her family line. In her memory he added her maiden name, Johnston, to his own, becoming Milligen-Johnston. He died in Dumfries in 1799. 

Further Reading: 

George Milligen, A Short Description of the Province of South-Carolina, With an Account of the Air, Water, and Diseases at Charles-Town. [1763]

The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. See Volumes dealing with the 1770s.

John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution 2 vols., Charleston, 1821. 

The Charleston Tar-and-Feathers Incident of 1775 | Charleston County Public Library (ccpl.org) This thoroughly researched article provides a detailed and insightful analysis of the tarring and feathering incident involving James Dealey and Laughlin Martin.

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011, 2014. 

Report by George Milligen, Surgeon to the Garrison for His Majesty's Forces in South Carolina, dated 15 September, 1775. National Archives, Kew CO_5_396_037.pdf

The Man Who Drew Alice: Sir John Tenniel

Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) was one of the most popular British cartoonists of the 19th century. Victorians regularly viewed and loved his illustrations. For decades he was the chief political cartoonist for the most successful satirical magazine of the day, Punch. 

Tenniel also illustrated two of the most popular and enduring books of the 19th century: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). 

Tenniel created 42 images in the Alice books, fixing them forever in our minds. Here are just a few. In order: The Cheshire Cat, The Caterpillar, The Mad Hatter's Tea Party, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty. 

Tenniel and Carroll did not get along, and Tenniel never agreed to work for Carroll again. Both were perfectionists with different ideas of perfection. But working together, they created works of endless fascination. 

Tenniel joined Punch in 1850 as joint cartoonist with John Leech, and became principal cartoonist after Leech died in 1864. Tenniel produced more than 2000 cartoons for the magazine. They often reflected public opinion, which in that day was generally liberal and reformist at home but tended towards imperialism and racism abroad. How far they reflected Tenniel's views is moot, but they certainly matched the outlook of his editors at Punch.

Tenniel often attacked Irish nationalists, who sometimes resorted to terrorist tactics, including bombings and assassinations.  His cartoons of Irish Fenians depicted them as knuckle-dragging ape-like creatures or monsters. Two examples:

In 1893, Queen Victoria knighted Tenniel. He was the first cartoonist to be so honoured. In 1878, another famous caricaturist, "Spy" drew the image of Tenniel below for the magazine Vanity Fair. He died aged 96 in 1914, just before the First World War. 

One wonders what he would made of that.

 

"The Glorious Fourth": A Poem on Independence Day by Hannah Griffits, 1785

The 250th anniversary of American independence is in 2026. Given how Trump is undermining the principles the US was founded upon, it is worth looking at the views of an intelligent women who was ambivalent about the whole thing. 

Hannah Griffits was a Quaker poet who lived in the late colonial and early national period of American history. She witnessed a lot of changes: her life spanned 90 years (1727-1817).

Hannah decided to be a poet when she was just a child. At age 10, she promised God that she would not write poetry about "trifling themes." She kept her promise. 

Griffits came from a prominent Pennsylvania family. She supported colonial resistance to British rule. In addition, she was also a proto-feminist who wrote poems celebrating the efforts of the Daughters of Liberty to boycott British goods in response to the attempts of Parliament to tax colonial imports.  

But she was also a devout Quaker. She abhorred violence and advocated a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Once hostilities commenced she denounced the behavior of both sides and the suffering and divisions they created. The war divided Griffits' relatives into Patriots and Loyalists, a common outcome in many families.

She was appalled by the carnage of the first major battle after the Patriots had declared independence, the Battle of Long Island.  [Image: "The Battle of Long Island" by Alonzo Chappell, 19th century recreation.]

She was particularly harsh in condemning Thomas Paine (one of my heroes), calling him "a Snake beneath the grass" whose extreme rhetoric drowned out that of moderates. The British came in for a drubbing as well. They exhibited evidence of a "deep degeneracy of nature." 

In the wake of the war, she wrote a poem expressing disillusion with the costs and results of independence. It is short and simple, but immensely powerful. It sums up, I think, the feelings many people have today about the current situation of the United States. It deserves wide dissemination at this perilous time. 

"The glorious fourth --  again appears,

A day of days -- and year of years,

The sum of sad disasters,

Where all the mighty gains we see,

With all their boasted liberty,

Is only change of masters." (1785)

Griffits' poetry received little attention in her time. The literary establishments of the day were hostile to women authors. Griffits never tried to publish her poems. A few did get published but not through her own efforts. Many others survived in commonplace books kept by relatives and friends. 

Further Reading: 

Hannah Griffitts - Wikipedia

Hannah Griffitts | History of American Women (womenhistoryblog.com) by Maggie Maclean

If you enjoyed this post and would like to become a follower of my blog, just click on the blue "FOLLOW" button on the right side of the first page. Below there you can also find my previous posts. Thanks!

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)

South Carolina's Last Royal Governor: Lord William Campbell

The last royal governor of South Carolina, Lord William Campbell, arrived in Charleston (Charlestown) in June 1775. It was an inauspicious time. The previous royal governor, Charles Montagu, had been greeted with the ringing of church bells, large cheering crowds, saluting cannonades, and a sumptuous dinner at Dillon’s Tavern. Now there were no crowds and no cheers. No welcoming dinner, either. 

The waterfront was eerily quiet as his ship, HMS Scorpion, glided up to the wharf near The Exchange. A detachment of blue-coated soldiers stood ready to escort Lord William, whether as dignitary or prisoner was not clear. None of the leading gentlemen of the town had come out to welcome him.

Lord William had been to Charleston before, during the French and Indian War. In 1762 the Royal Navy assigned him to serve there as captain of a Royal Navy frigate, HMS Nightingale. 

On that occasion the citizens had treated him as a hero. He fell in love with and married the daughter of a wealthy local family, Sarah Izard. Their wedding in 1763 was a great event. After all, he was a son of the Duke of Argyll, the most powerful man in Scotland. [Image:  Sarah Izard Campbell, by Charles Fraser, said to be a copy of painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds] 

After the wedding, the couple returned to Britain. Lord William served in Parliament, then as royal governor of Nova Scotia. In that position he had earned a reputation for fair and honest governance. 

A couple of months before he arrived, in April 1775, the simmering conflict between the colonies and the mother country had boiled over into open rebellion in Massachusetts. Other colonies, including South Carolina, had established provisional governments, and begun to prepare for war.

Lord William had another disadvantage as royal governor. He was a Scot. Soon after George III had come to the British throne in 1760, his political opponents concocted a story that liberty hating Scots were conspiring to gain control of the government, and intent on reducing English liberty. English Whigs accused the king’s former tutor, Lord Bute, of being the chief plotter. 

Initially a favorite of the young king, Bute had become Prime Minister in 1762. In order to pay the enormous expenses of the recent war with France, he proposed to levy new taxes in Britain and its colonies. The attacks on Bute caught on in America, and lasted for years after Bute lost all influence over government policy. 

In 1772, another Scot, Lord Mansfield, gave the conspiracy theory more life. As Chief Justice of the King’s Bench Court in London, he ruled that slavery had no basis in English law. The Somerset ruling sent shock waves through the American colonies.

The shock was especially severe true in the southern colonies, heavily dependent as they were on enslaved African labor for their wealth. Southern planters feared that Parliament could extend the Mansfield ruling to the empire. The solution they embraced was to deny Parliament’s power to legislate for the colonies, which led to rebellion.

The Scottish conspiracy theory was bogus, but the Crown had appointed many Scots to colonial offices after the accession of George III, posts that some colonial leaders, like William Henry Drayton, had sought. 

Another colonial leader, Christopher Gadsden, threatened to use "imported Scotchmen" as a foundation for the wharf he was building in Charleston. Gadsden resented having to compete with newly arrived Scottish merchants.  

Soon after landing in Charleston, Lord William learned that he was virtually powerless. Most local leaders refused to cooperate with him or treat him as anything but suspicious. Some of the more extreme  Carolina “Whigs” (later “Patriots”) had even considered preventing him from landing in the first place.

Charleston was awash with rumors of Indian attacks and slave rebellions allegedly fomented by the British government. Colonel John Stuart, the British Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the Southern Region, had already been forced to flee to Florida, pursued by a liberty mob and false charges that he was organizing Native American risings in the backcountry. 

Shortly after Lord William arrived, local authorities arrested several blacks on suspicion of plotting a slave rebellion. They charged one of them, Thomas Jeremiah, and tried him in a slave court, although he was a free man. The court found him guilty on flimsy evidence and sentenced him to be hanged and burned.

Lord William intervened, calling the trial a farce. He tried to have Jeremiah pardoned but discovered his complete lack of authority. Worse, “Liberty Boy” rioters accused him of being involved in the plot. They threatened him and attacked other royal officials, some of whom left the colony.

Convinced of the danger, he fled his residence at 34 Meeting Street in the dead of a September night. He took refuge on HMS Tamar, a British naval sloop stationed in the harbor. His wife Sarah joined him there later after being harassed herself. [Image: 34 Meeting Street, Charleston, where Lord William Campbell lived during his brief governorship]

 

 

Lord William remained close to the city for a couple of months, commanding a flotilla of three small naval vessels. In November they fought an inconclusive engagement with a rebel ship commanded by William Henry Drayton near Hog Island.

Meanwhile, Lord William landed some of his men on Sullivan’s Island at the entrance to the harbor. Enslaved black runaways soon joined them and together, they conducted raids on plantations in Christ Church Parish (now Mt. Pleasant) to secure food and supplies.

Just before Christmas 1775, Patriot leaders decided to end this threat before the island became the center of a slave rebellion. They sent a force of two hundred Whig Rangers to clear the enemy off the island. Disguised as "Indians," they attacked shortly before dawn. They achieved complete surprise, killed dozens of runaways and captured others, including a few whites. Some of those in the camp escaped to the British ships or to Morris Island across the harbor.

After the attack, Lord William sailed off to the British stronghold at St. Augustine in Florida. From there he returned to Britain. In reports, he referred to the execution of Jeremiah as a “judicial murder” and called those responsible “barbarians.”

Lord William was not yet through with South Carolina. In June 1776, he was present when a British fleet attacked the rebels hastily built palmetto log fort on Sullivan’s Island. The Battle of Sullivan’s Island ended in disaster for the British, and for Lord William. He was wounded in the leg by a flying splinter of wood. The wound never healed properly, and he died, probably of infection, in 1778. He was 48. [Image: The Battle of Sullivan's Island, by John Blake White]

Lord Williams' wife Sarah remained in England, where she died in 1784, aged 39. Her brother, Ralph Izard, became a prominent Patriot. 

[The portrait of Lord William Campbell in his naval uniform is by Thomas Gainsborough]

Further Reading: 

J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty (Yale University Press, 2009)

William R. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution 2 vols., (Charleston, 1821) 

The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. Volumes dealing with the 1760s and 1770s.)

Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies & Sparked the American Revolution (Naperville, Illinois: Source Books, 2005)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A South Carolina Loyalist's Voyage into Exile, 1778: Louisa Wells Aikman

One of the most interesting narratives produced during the War for American Independence was by a woman, Louisa Susannah (Wells) Aikman. She left a detailed record of her voyage from Charleston, South Carolina to London in 1778. It was a voyage into exile because she was a Loyalist from a family of Loyalists. 

[Image: Louisa Wells Aikman, from a miniature painted c. 1815.]

Louisa was born in Charleston in 1755. Her parents, Robert Wells and Mary Rowand, married in 1750. Three years later they emigrated to Charleston. They moved there in part because members of her mother's family in Scotland had been implicated in the failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, on behalf of "Bonnie Prince Charlie." 

Mary's family had been forced to change their name, from Ruthven to Rowand. The Ruthven name, like the tartan, had been outlawed after the rebellion. 

Robert Wells soon established a successful printing and bookselling business in Charleston. He also published Charleston's second newspaper, The South Carolina and American General Gazette. It competed with the older South Carolina Gazette, owned by Peter Timothy. The two became bitter rivals. 

Wells amassed considerable property, including a house at 71 Tradd Street that survives. In 1775, he claimed to have the largest stock of books of any bookseller in the North American colonies. [Image: Wells' house on Tradd and East Bay]

Ironically, Wells' newspaper was the first in South Carolina to publish the Declaration of Independence, in August 1776. Ironically, because Wells was a Loyalist who staunchly defended the British government in his editorials. 

Wells had left Charleston for London the previous year, declaring that he could not live under the rebel government of South Carolina. His younger son, William Charles Wells, soon followed him, determined to pursue a medical degree at Edinburgh. William was then an apprentice to Dr. Alexander Garden, the naturalist for whom the gardenia is named. His wife Mary and daughters Priscilla and Helena went to England after William. 

Robert placed the management of his business in the hands of his eldest son John, assisted by Louisa, his eldest daughter. John had apparently shared his father's political views, but as the inevitability of independence and war approached, he joined the Patriot side. It was John who published the Declaration of Independence, enthusiastically, he claimed. 

John's sincerity may be doubted. He switched sides again in 1780 when the British captured Charleston, and then again when they evacuated it in 1782. He became the black sheep of the family before dying in poverty in the West Indies in 1799. 

Louisa remained committed to the British cause, and like many other Loyalists, was banished from South Carolina in 1778 for refusing to sign an Oath of Allegiance to the state. 

A major fire in Charleston that January had destroyed much of the family property. The Patriot government confiscated the rest. Louisa no longer felt bound by the promise she had made to stay in Charleston and preserve the family property "as long as one stone stood upon another." 

In late June, Louisa, her uncle Robert Rowand, his son, and other Loyalists boarded the ship Providence, bound for Rotterdam. From there, they hoped to get passage to England. Louisa's maid Bella came with her. 

Was Bella enslaved? Louisa does not say. If she was, she would have been legally free once she landed in Britain. Chief Justice Mansfield's decision in the Somerset Case (1772) had declared slavery illegal in England.

As the ship began to leave Charleston harbor, many boats were busy bringing palmetto trees into town to celebrate the second anniversary of the "ever inglorious 28th of June 1776." [Image: Charleston Harbor, c. 1773, Library of Congress]

She was referring to the Battle of Sullivan's Island, the first major defeat the colonists had inflicted on the British. As they passed Fort Moultrie at the entrance to the harbor, she noted that they could see British cannon balls "lodged in the [palmetto] logs as in a sponge." 

The ship was stuck at the harbor entrance for a few days by adverse winds. On July 1, they went bumpily but safely "over the bar," guided by a "Black Pilot" named Bluff. The passengers paid him $100 in addition to the ship master's fee. 

Louisa remarks on Bluff's skill and pointedly mentions that the passengers had chosen a black pilot in preference to a white man. Many of Charleston's most respected harbor pilots at the time were of African origin.  

Once upon the open ocean, they celebrated their deliverance from "the dominion of Congress." As they sailed away on a brisk Southwest wind, the last bit of Charleston to disappear from sight was the black steeple of St. Michael's. Originally white, as it is today, the revolutionary government had ordered it painted black so that it would be harder for British ships to see. (It wasn't, except perhaps in the dark.) 

Many hair-raising adventures lay ahead. On the 4th of July (how ironic!) their ship was captured by a British navy vessel, The Rose. Its captain, James Reid, first thought Providence was French. It had been built in France. He then decided the passengers were American rebels. Despite their protests he ordered Providence taken to New York as a prize, hoping to claim its cargo.

A few days later, nearing the British stronghold of New York, they were pursued by a French fleet under the Comte d'Estaing. They managed to reach safety in the harbor. 

At first it seemed they were in danger of being treated as rebels in New York, but influential Loyalist friends intervened to ensure they weren't. While waiting for a judgment on the disposal of the ship's cargo, Louisa spent several weeks in Flushing with old friends, Colonel Archibald Hamilton and his "Lady," granddaughter of Cadwallader Colden, long-time Lt. Governor of New York.

A Vice Admiralty court ruled in favor of the Providence. Louisa and the other passengers recovered their property and were allowed to leave. In mid-October they embarked on the Mary and Charlotte, bound for England, accompanied by a convoy of naval and mercantile ships. After having survived storms and avoided French and American privateers, they became lost in dense fog for eight days off the south English coast, unsure of their location. 

When the fog cleared they found themselves off the rocky coast of Cornwall. That night another ferocious storm struck. Five of the six ships in their group were lost. 

Louisa's ship survived, and they anchored near Dover on November 27. Contrary winds prevented their landing, but she and other passengers were able to disembark a few miles down the coast at Deal. Observing the stone walls of Deal Castle, she remarked that the British should build forts of palmetto logs!

She described her emotions when finally stepping onto "British soil": "I could have kissed the gravel on the salt beach! It was my home: the country which I had so long and so earnestly wished to see. The Isle of Liberty and Peace." 

It seems a rather ironic statement from a woman born in South Carolina of Scottish parents as she arrived on the South coast of England! Especially as her mother's family had supported the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 against the Hanoverian monarchs. 

From Deal Louisa and her uncle took a coach across the Chalk Downs (hills) and passed through Canterbury, Rochester and Greenwich to London. Along the way, she remarked how remarkably green the countryside was compared to America in late November.

She ended her journey at the home of her parents at 47 Salisbury Court, just off Fleet Street. The street was then known colloquially as the printers' street because it was home to so many printing establishments. It was a natural place for Robert Wells to settle, and he had built a successful printing business there. 

Louisa fell ill of a fever shortly after she arrived. Her parents sent her to Bath Spa to recover. The journey must have been unpleasant because she claimed that she would rather have made a voyage to the West Indies. 

Ironically, that is where she soon went. In 1782 she married Alexander Aikman, Printer to the House of Assembly and King's Printer, in Jamaica, and a member of the Assembly. 

The couple had known each other in Charleston. For four years they had worked together in her father's business. On her way to Jamaica to marry Aikman, Louisa's ship was seized by a French naval vessel. She was interned in France for several months before being allowed to resume her journey. 

The couple had 10 children, only four of whom survived to adulthood. Such appalling child mortality was typical of malarial Jamaica and also of Louisa's native South Carolina. It was in part a consequence of an economy based on enslaved African labor.

Around 1820 Louisa moved to Cowes on the Isle of Wight, perhaps for health reasons or to be with her daughter Susannah. Louisa died in Cowes in 1831, aged 76. 

A few months after her arrival in London in November 1778, Louisa wrote the work from which most of this information comes, The Journal of a Voyage from Charlestown, S.C., to London (1779). The journal is an important primary source for social life during the Revolutionary Era generally. 

Due to the loss of his Charleston property, ill-advised lending, and a paltry pension from the British government, Robert Wells fell into debt in the 1780s, leaving the family in comparative poverty. He suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1791 and died three years later. Mary Wells survived him, dying at Camberwell in 1805. 

Louisa's brother William became senior physician at St. Thomas' Hospital in London. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of London, the most prestigious scientific society in Britain. His written works include one in which he articulated the theory of natural selection, more than 40 years before Charles Darwin. William Charles Wells died of a heart condition in 1817. 

Louisa's sister Helena married and authored two novels. She died in 1824. We know little of her other sister, Priscilla, except that she never married. She died in 1843, outliving her siblings. 

Louisa played an important role in the preservation of popular musical scores. Along with a large load of books, Robert Wells had brought hundreds of song sheets from the British Isles to Charleston in 1753. Many of them have survived because Louisa created a personal songbook of about 110 sheets of the music. 

In 1992, the Music Division of the Library of Congress purchased the book. Individual sheets are available for viewing at the Library online. https://www.loc.gov/notated-music/?all=true&q=Louisa+Susannah+Wells&sp=1

Further Reading: 

Louisa's journal was published in 1906 by the New York Historical Society. A copy can be accessed online at the Internet Archive:

The journal of a voyage from Charlestown, S. C., to London, undertaken during the American revolution by a daughter of an eminent American loyalist : Aikman, Louisa Susannah Wells, 1755?-1831 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011, 2014. 

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. See Volumes dealing with the 1770s.