Excerpt from The Legacy of the American Revolution to the British West Indies and Bahamas, Vol. 16: A Chapter Out of the History of the American Loyalists From the beginning of the Revolutionary War, East Florida served as a'retreat for loyalist refugees from the Carolinas and Georgia. As early as 1776, lieutenant-colonel Thomas Brown, himself a fugitive from Savannah, formed a regiment, in whole or in part, of these refugees, which he called the East Florida Rangers. This he supplemented in the spring of 1778, by engag ing three hundred and fifty men from the same colonies to defend the frontiers of the peninsula. These men were organized at first into a regiment known as the South Carolina Royalists under the command of Colonel Innes, and the next year were re-organ ized as a regiment of infantry under the title of the King's Rangers.1 They formed part of the English force in East Florida, as recounted by a deserter on his arrival at Charleston in the early summer of the same year, a force which, he said, also included eight hundred regular troops, one hundred Florida Rangers, one hundred and fifty provincial militia, and two hundred Indians.2 All told Colonel Brown enlisted as many as twelve hundred men, if we may credit his own statement in a letter to Sir Guy Carle ton, and of these he proudly asserted that five hundred were killed in the course of the constant and distant service in which he and his men were engaged throughout the War.3 Doubtless most of his recruits were gathered in Georgia and the Carolinas. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.