One Hundred and Fifty: John Moultrie’s American Slaves Sent to the Bahamas in 1784

The Moultrie name appears to have been introduced into The Bahamas in 1784. It came from South Carolina by way of East Florida, carried by 150 enslaved people sent there after the American Revolution — without the man whose name they bore.

John Moultrie (1729 – 1798) was not the only man to build an empire in the colonies on enslaved labour and then remove himself to England to enjoy the proceeds. Lord Rolle did the same from his Exuma estates, and the pattern was so common it had a name — absentee slaveowner.

To his slaves, John Moultrie called himself their Patron and Protector. He gave them orders they were not permitted to disobey. He expressed hope that they would be made as happy as their condition would allow. Then he got on a ship and sailed to England, and left them behind.

Their names were Old Frank and Quamino, and a hundred and forty-eight others we may never fully know.

Who Was John Moultrie?

John Moultrie was, by every measure of his era, a man of extraordinary standing. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 18 January 1729, the son of a Scottish physician who had emigrated to the Carolinas, Moultrie became in 1749 the first American-born student to take a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh — then the foremost medical school in the western world. His doctoral thesis on yellow fever, written in Latin, was translated into German and French and published in multiple editions across the century that followed. He was brilliant. He was connected. He was formidably ambitious.

He was also a slave owner. And not a modest one.

By the time Moultrie moved to East Florida in 1767, he already commanded two hundred enslaved people, most of them carried south from the rice and indigo plantations of the Carolina low country. He received land grants amassing nearly 20,000 acres in East Florida, establishing multiple plantations — including “Bella Vista,” a stone mansion four miles south of St. Augustine on the Matanzas River, and “Rosetta” on the Tomoka River, a 2,000-acre estate whose main house, outbuildings, barns, and slave housing were completed by 1777. Moultrie became Lieutenant-Governor of East Florida in 1771, effectively the most powerful man in the colony.

The American Revolution That Ruined Him

The American Revolution did not arrive in East Florida as liberation. It arrived as catastrophe — for the Loyalist planter class.

When Britain conceded defeat to the American colonies and signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Florida was ceded back to Spain. The Loyalists — those who had remained faithful to the Crown and staked their fortunes on British permanence — were left to scramble for whatever British territory they could reach. East Florida’s entire Loyalist population began an anxious exodus. Moultrie, who had chosen the Crown over his own patriot brothers William and Thomas, was among those who lost everything.

His two Florida plantations were gone.

His political position was gone.

The decades of accumulated wealth, built on the labour of two hundred enslaved people across South Carolina and Florida, had been swept away. In July 1784, he sailed to England.

East Florida Loyalists Claims Commission: What Moultrie Claimed — and What He Was Denied

Before he sailed, John Moultrie filed a claim with the East Florida Claims Commission — the British government body established to compensate Loyalists for property lost as a consequence of the cession of Florida to Spain. He claimed £9,432. He was awarded £4,479. The Commission gave him slightly less than half of what he asked.

The itemised schedule of his claim sits in the Treasury 77 papers at the National Archives in London, and in Wilbur Siebert’s published compilation Loyalists in East Florida, 1774–1785 (1929). The categories were standard across all Loyalist claims of this type: land, buildings and improvements, crops and livestock, and — critically — enslaved people.

The land alone was substantial. Nearly 20,000 acres across multiple grants, including the stone mansion and pleasure gardens at Bella Vista and the fully developed 2,000-acre Rosetta plantation with its corn and indigo works, outbuildings, and slave quarters. Comparable planters in their East Florida claims itemised every structure — corn houses, indigo vats, horse mills, overseer’s houses, and the slave cabins themselves — each valued separately. Moultrie’s improved properties would have represented thousands of pounds in this category alone.

The enslaved people were also claimable as property losses. The Commission accepted such claims routinely. Skilled male slaves in East Florida were valued at between £60 and £100 each. If Moultrie claimed even fifty enslaved people at average values, that single line item would account for £3,000 to £5,000 of his total claim.

But here the arithmetic becomes interesting. Moultrie sent approximately 150 enslaved people to the Bahamas in 1784 — before he filed his claim, and before he sailed. He did not lose them to Spain. He shipped them away himself, to another British territory, by his own hand.

The Commission’s decision to award him barely half of what he claimed is consistent with one explanation above all others: they refused to compensate him for enslaved people he still possessed. The 150 men, women, and children dispatched to New Providence were not lost property. They were living assets, relocated at his direction, still legally his. The Commission appears to have told him precisely that.

He claimed them as losses. The Commission may have ruled they were not lost — because he had taken them with him.

Three years of deliberation. An award of £4,479 against a claim of £9,432. He departed for Shropshire dependent on an annuity of £500 a year, a ruined man by the standards of his former life.

In 1784, Moultrie sent approximately 150 American slaves to The Bahamas

In 1784, as Moultrie prepared to depart East Florida for Britain, he sent approximately 150 enslaved people to the Bahamas to establish new plantations.

THE MOULTRIE SLAVES ARRIVE IN NEW PROVIDENCE

NASSAU, November 20th., 1784 The Bahamas Gazette
THE Schooner Peggy, Anthony Stewart, master, having on board a number of negroes, the property of Lieutenant-Governour Moultrie, sailed from St. Augustine for St. Mary’s River the 5th instant; a very heavy gale of wind coming on two days after, and being scarce of water, she bore away for these Islands, and arrived here last Wednesday evening.

Moultrie himself never settled in The Bahamas, though as we will see, he held vast land holdings on New Providence.

Moultrie’s slaves were not strangers to displacement. Many of them had already been uprooted once before — moved from South Carolina to Florida when Moultrie accepted the Lieutenant-Governorship and dismantled his Carolina properties. They had cleared virgin Florida land before. They had built what became his fortune before. Now they were being sent to another island chain, to do it again, on Moultrie’s behalf, and in his absence.

They were skilled. They had to be. These were men and women who knew how to clear land and plant crops in subtropical heat — rice and indigo from the Santee River country, provisions crops of corn, beans, and potatoes from the East Florida years. That knowledge would prove transformative.

Moultrie’s enslaved people, once settled on New Providence and other Bahamian islands, pioneered the cultivation of long-staple cotton — the very strain so prized in the antebellum history of Beaufort District in South Carolina and the Georgia coast. They brought Bahamian agriculture a cash crop that would sustain the colony, however briefly, in the generation to come.

Moultrie’s Vast Land Grants 1,000, 200 and 200 acres on New Providence

John Moultrie held a total of 1,400 acres on the western end of New Providence — Loyalist plantation country, prime cotton land — and never set foot on a single one of them.

A island survey maps show his grants spread across the western plantation belt — Gambier, Little Coco Hill Tract and South West Bay Street — land that his one hundred and fifty slaves were sent to clear and cultivate while their owner retired to Aston Hall in Shropshire.

By 1921 Clotilda Huyler was claiming co-ownership of the [James] Moss and [John] Moultrie 1,000 acres shown in map above.

“As Happy as Their Condition Will Admit”

On 16 May 1784, Moultrie sat down and wrote what he called his “Thoughts that may be of use to my people and plantation in the Bahamas and orders that I beg may be obeyed.”

The document is remarkable for what it reveals about the mind of a slaveholder who fancied himself humane. The bulk of the text is medical — advice on treating fevers, infections, and common ailments that Moultrie, the Edinburgh-trained physician, believed his enslaved workers might face. Then he turned to the management of people.

He named individuals. Old Frank. Quamino. Others. He gave instructions about their treatment. And then came the sentence that crystallises everything:

“I would have them made as happy as their condition will admit.”

The condition he referred to was, of course, enslavement. The happiness was bounded by chains. And Moultrie described himself, without irony, as a “Patron and Protector as well as master” to the people he owned.

He was not unusual in this self-conception. The planter class throughout the British Atlantic world fashioned itself as benevolent stewardship rather than what it was: ownership of human beings, enforced by violence and law. The enslaved, in this framing, were to be grateful for the relative quality of their bondage. They were not people with desires and rights of their own — they were subjects of his patronage, his management, his instructions. And when Moultrie sailed away, those instructions were the last thing he left them.

The manuscript — six folio pages in Moultrie’s own hand, dated 16 May 1784, written likely from St. Augustine

Quamino and Old Frank, The Trusted Slaves of John Moultrie

Among those named in the manuscript, Quamino and Old Frank stand apart. Moultrie’s instructions concerning them were specific and protective in a way that no other passage in the surviving text matches:

“Quamino has never behaved amiss, always well has never had a blow and beg he never may, he I think will never deserve it — I desire to make him independent of the Overseers he must be alow’d to go about among my people giving them good advice and seeing that they do not do amiss he is an old planter and may be of service in directing the negroes but he must not be struck by any manager or overseer.”

Quamino is an Akan day name — the Twi name for a male born on Saturday, from the Gold Coast of what is now Ghana. 

Moultrie calls him “an old planter” — meaning a man with decades of agricultural expertise, the institutional knowledge of how to make tropical land yield. He had cleared Carolina land. He had cleared Florida land. He was being sent to clear Bahamian land. Moultrie understood that Quamino’s knowledge was essential to whatever the Bahamas plantation was going to become. He also understood, or feared, what overseers did when the master’s back was turned. The instruction that Quamino “must not be struck”.

The only published reference to Old Frank in Moultrie’s own words is this single passage:

“he is [?] and so is old Frank and may keep the keys of any stores, &c.”

That is it. Old Frank appears only in that one sentence — and only in conjunction with Quamino. The passage establishes that:

• Old Frank held equivalent status to Quamino in Moultrie’s trust hierarchy

• Both men were authorised to keep the keys to the stores

What became of Quamino and Old Frank after 1784 is unknown.

What happened to the other 148 Moultrie Slaves?

John Moultrie died in March 1798.

The British Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833. That is a 35-year gap, and the enslaved people he sent to the Bahamas in 1784 were someone else’s legal property long before compensation was ever contemplated.

The chain of sale likely went one of three ways:

—Moultrie sold before he died — asset-poor, dependent on an annuity of £500, with Bahamian land and the people on it among the few remaining assets his estate held, selling through an agent in Nassau would have been financially rational, possibly necessary. James Moss, a well known slave owner and slave trader may have been the purchaser of Moultrie’s slaves. Moss’s name is noted with Moultrie’s on land survey maps for property in the south western part of New Providence.

—His widow or children sold after his death — Eleanor Austin Moultrie survived him by nearly three decades, dying in London in 1826, and Bahamian property held by absentee English heirs was routinely liquidated, the more so as the cotton economy collapsed after 1800.

—Or the enslaved people were simply absorbed into another planter’s holdings – possibly that of James Moss.

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The Moultrie name came to the Bahamas in the hold of a storm-battered schooner, carried by people who had no say in the crossing. Their voyage was not complete until they made these islands their own. Bahamian Lives, Bahamian Legacies is a series dedicated to discovering and preserving the stories of those who built this nation — the named and the nameless, the recorded and the forgotten, the ones history filed under someone else’s account.