The Travels of Arthur Bowler, Rhode Island Loyalist

Over on the Small State, Big History blog, Jane Lancaster has published an article titled “Should They Stay or Should They Go?: Rhode Island Black Loyalists after the American Revolution.”

Lancaster draws on “The Book of Negroes,” a listing of people of African ancestry who evacuated from Crown strongholds at the end of the Revolutionary War. Some of those people had come from Newport, Rhode Island, which the British had held until a couple of years earlier.

After general discussion, the article starts to profile individuals, filling out the bare entries in “The Book of Negroes” with other sources. Here, for example, is a profile of a man enslaved by a former Rhode Island judge in the house shown above:

Arthur Bowler, a “stout fellow” of thirty-four, brought from Africa as a boy and enslaved by Metcalf Bowler of Newport, wealthy merchant, colonial official and British spy, stayed in Rhode Island longer than any of his fellows, finally leaving in 1781.

He traveled from New York to Nova Scotia with his…wife and twelve-year-old daughter, both freeborn in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. They were taken initially to Port Mattoun, which almost immediately failed, and then to Birchtown where he was eventually awarded forty acres of land. He had not yet seen it, let alone started clearing it, when he decided to go Sierra Leone where he lived long enough to see his grandchildren go to school.

He was probably a Baptist, (his second wife was the widow of a Baptist elder) and thus a member of a more moderate faction in Sierra Leone. The Methodists were considerably less accommodating. In Newport he had worshiped in the “Negro Section” of the Anglican Trinity Church. In Rhode Island he was acquainted with leading members of the black community such as the entrepreneurial diarist Cesar Lyndon (who elected to stay, while one of his fellow slaves, Pompey Lindon, opted to go).

Soon after Bowler arrived in Sierra Leone he frightened a leopard away from the hut where his wife and daughter were sleeping. He outlived his erstwhile master by at least twelve years; by comparison, Metcalf Bowler died in poverty, though with his reputation intact, as his spying remained undiscovered until the 1920s. Arthur Bowler lived with a modest competence and his freedom.

The fact that Bowler had spent some childhood years in Africa might have prepared him to return to that continent, albeit probably to a different region. It’s reassuring to read an account of a black Loyalist that ends with success after so many trials.