Rough Crossings Read online

  Simon Schama

  Rough Crossings

  Britain, the Slaves and the

  American Revolution

  for LISA JARDINE,

  my idea of an historian

  Contents

  Dramatis Personae

  British Freedom’s Promise

  PART ONE: Greeny

  PART TWO: John

  Endings, Beginnings

  Notes and References

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Simon Schama

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dramatis Personae

  Henry Washington, escaped slave of George Washinton, freed by British, later settler in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

  Granville Sharp, leading British abolitionist and instigator of first black settlement in Sierra Leone

  William Sharp, brother of Granville, surgeon to King George III and to London poor

  William Murray, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, responsible for seminal rulings on legal status of slaves in Great Britain

  Jonathan Strong, Thomas Lewis, James Somerset: escaped slaves in London, victims of abduction and subjects of court cases brought by Granville Sharp

  Henry Laurens, South Carolina Patriot, merchant, delegate to and president of the Continental Congress

  John Laurens (son of Henry), aide-de-camp to George Washington, abolitionist officer in Continental army

  Anthony Benezet, Quaker American in Philadelphia, correspondent with Granville Sharp

  Thomas Jeremiah, free African-American in Charleston, hanged for alleged conspiracy to raise slave insurrection

  John Murray, Lord Dunmore, last British governor of Virginia, responsible for 1775 proclamation offering freedom to slaves of Patriots in return for military service with the Royal Army

  Lord William Campbell, last British governor of South Carolina

  Thomas Peters, sergeant in the British Black Pioneers, settler in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

  Moses Wilkinson, blind Methodist preacher in Birchtown, Nova Scotia

  Mary Perth, escaped slave from Virginia, freed by British, settler in Sierra Leone

  John Kizell, son of Sherbro chief, escaped slave, loyalist soldier in American volunteers, North Carolina, settler in Sierra Leone

  James Moncrief, British officer in siege of Savannah commanding black loyalist soliders and sappers

  General Sir Henry Clinton, British commander-in-chief in America, patron and protector of British Black Pioneers

  David George, African-American Baptist minister, escaped slave, free settler with his wife Phyllis, in Novia Scotia and Sierra Leone

  General Lord Charles Cornwallis, British military commander in America

  Boston King, and his wife Violet, escaped slaves, loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

  Colonel Tye, former slave in Monmouth County New Jersy, loyalist partisan leader

  Stephen Blucke, free African-American, settler in Nova Scotia

  Murphy Steele, sergeant in the Black Pioneers, friend of Thomas Peters

  Olaudah Equiano aka Gustavus Vassa, London abolitionist, author of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano the African (1789)

  Sir Charles Middleton, MP, abolitionist and Comptroller of the Royal Navy

  James Ramsay, British naval surgeon turned clergyman and abolitionist

  Thomas Clarkson, leading British abolitionist

  Sir Guy Carleton, last commander-in-chief of British force in America, later Governor of Canada

  Brigadier Samuel Birch, commandant of British garrison in New York, signatory of passport, certificate confirming freedom of black loyalists

  Benjamin Whitecuffe, Long Island black farmer, loyalist spy for the British

  William Wilberforce, member of Parliament for Hull and parliamentary leader of campaign to abolish the slave trade

  Jonas Hanway, British reformer and philanthropist

  Henry Smeathman, British scientist and eccentric, original proposer of Sierra Leone as site for black settlement

  Thomas Boulden Thompson, commander of fleet carrying first settlers to Sierra Leone

  Alexander Falconbridge, former slave-ship surgeon, agent in Africa for St George’s Bay (later the Sierra Leone) Company

  Anna Maria Falconbridge, Alexander’s wife, author of A Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone in the years 1791–3

  King Tom, Temne chief in Sierra Leone

  The Naimbana, paramount chief in Robana, Sierra Leone

  King Jimmy, Temne chief in Sierra Leone, destroyer of Granville Town Sir John Parr, governor of Nova Scotia

  Lieutenant John Clarkson, British naval officer, subsequently abolitionist and governor of second black settlement in Sierra Leone

  Michael Wallace, entrepenuer, landowner and council member in Halifax, Nova Scotia

  Benjamin Marston, Harvard-educated ex-merchant, surveyor in Shelburne, Nova Scotia

  Henry Thornton, evangelical banker and abolitionist, first chairman of the Sierra Leone Company

  Lawrence Hartshorne, Quaker merchant, Clarkson’s friend in Nova Scotia

  Dr. Charles Taylor, surgeon appointed by the Sierra Leone Company to accompany the black fleet to Africa

  Cato Perkins, black Methodist preacher, settler in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

  Stephen Skinner, New Jersey loyalist and Shelburne settler

  Captain Jonathan Coffin, master of the Lucretia, John Clarkson’s flagship

  Isaac Dubois, American loyalist, Carolinan cotton planter, settler in Sierra Leone, friend of Clarkson

  Isaac Anderson, free black carpenter from Charleston, settler in Sierra Leone, militant campaigner for black rights

  Nathaniel Wansey, leader, with Isaac Anderson, of revolt against goverment of Sierra Leone

  William Dawes, acting governor of Sierra Leone after John Clarkson

  Zachary Macaulay, governor of Sierra Leone, father of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay

  Thomas Ludlam, fourth governor of Sierra Leone

  Paul Cuffe, free black, landowner, trader with Sierra Leone, Quaker and abolitionist

  Frederick Douglass, escaped slave-turned-abolitionist orator

  The Hutchinson Family singers: Jesse, Abby, Judson and Asa, white religious and folk singers, abolitionist fellow passengers with Douglass on SS Cambria

  Captain Charles Judkins, ex-slaver turned abolitionist, master of Cunarder SS Cambria

  BRITISH FREEDOM’S PROMISE

  TEN YEARS after the surrender of George III’s army to General Washington at Yorktown, British Freedom was hanging on in North America. Along with a few hundred other souls—Scipio Yearman, Phoebe Barrett, Jeremiah Piggie and Smart Feller among them—he was scratching a living from the stingy soil around Preston, a few miles northeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia.1

  Like most of the Preston people, British Freedom was black and had come from a warmer place. Now he was a hardscrabbler stuck in a wind-whipped corner of the world between the blue spruce forest and the sea. But he was luckier than most. British Freedom had title to forty acres, and another one and a half of what the lawyers’ clerks in Halifax were pleased to call a “town lot.”2 It didn’t look like much of a town, though, just a dirt clearing with rough cabins at the centre and a few chickens strutting around and maybe a mud-caked hog or two. Some of the people who had managed to get a team of oxen to clear the land of bald grey rocks grew patches of beans and corn and cabbages, which they carted to market in Halifax along with building lumber. But even those who prospered—by Preston standards—took themselves off every so often into the wilderness to shoot some birch part
ridge, or tried their luck on the saltwater ponds south of the village.3

  What were they doing there? Not just surviving. British Freedom and the rest of the villagers were clinging to more than a scrap of Nova Scotia; they were clinging to a promise. Some of them even had that promise printed and signed by officers of the British army on behalf of the king himself, that the bearer so-and-so was at liberty to go wherever he or she pleased and take up whatever occupation he or she chose. That meant something for people who had been slaves. And the king’s word was surely a bond. In return for their loyal service in the late American war, the Black Pioneers and the rest of them were to be granted two gifts of unimaginably precious worth: their freedom and their acres. It was, they told themselves, no more than their due. They had done perilous, dirty, exhausting work. They had been spies amidst the Americans; guides through the Georgia swamps; pilots taking ships over treacherous sandbars; sappers on the ramparts of Charleston as French cannonballs took off the limbs of the men beside them. They had dug trenches; buried bodies blistered with the pox; powdered the officers’ wigs; and, marching smartly, drummed the regiments in and out of disaster. The women had cooked and laundered and nursed the sick; dabbed at the holes on soldiers’ bodies; and tried to keep their children from harm. Some of them had fought. There had been black dragoons in South Carolina; waterborne gangs of black partisans for the king on the Hudson River; bands of black guerrillas who would descend on Patriot farms in New Jersey and take whatever they could, even (if the Lord was smiling on their venture) white American prisoners.

  So they were owed. They had been given their liberty, and some of them even got land. But the soil was thin and strewn with boulders, and the blacks had no way, most of them, to clear and work it unless they hired themselves or their families out to the white loyalists. That meant more cooking and laundering; more waiting on table and shaving pink chins; more hammering rocks for roads and bridges. And still they were in debt, so grievously that some complained their liberty was no true liberty at all but just another kind of slavery in all but name.

  But names counted. British Freedom’s name said something important: that he was no longer negotiable property. For all its bleak hardships, Preston was not a Georgia plantation. Other Prestonians—Decimus Murphy, Caesar Smith—had evidently kept their slave names as they had made the passage to liberty. But British Freedom must have been born, or bought, as someone else. He may have shaken off that name, like his leg irons, on one of the eighty-one sailings out of New York in 1783, which had taken thirty thousand loyalists, black and white, to Nova Scotia, for no one called British Freedom is listed in the “Book of Negroes,” which recorded those who, as free men and women, were at liberty to go where they wished. There were certainly others who changed their names to reflect their new status: James Lagree, for instance, the former property of Thomas Lagree of Charleston, became, in Nova Scotia, Liberty Lagree. It is also possible that British Freedom could have found his way to Nova Scotia in one of the earlier loyalist evacuations—from Boston in 1776 or from Charleston in 1782. In the frightening months between the end of the war and the departure of the British fleets, as American planters were attempting to locate the whereabouts of escaped slaves, many of them changed their names to avoid identification. British Freedom may just have gone one step further in giving himself an alias that was also a patriotic boast. Whichever route he had taken, and whatever the trials he was presently enduring, British Freedom’s choice of name proclaims something startling: a belief that it was the British monarchy rather than the new American republic that was more likely to deliver Africans from slavery. Although Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, had blamed “the Christian King” George III for the institution of slavery in America, blacks like British Freedom did not see the king that way at all. On the contrary, he was their enemy’s enemy and thus their friend, emancipator and guardian.

  Looking to the King of England as a benefactor had a long tradition. When plans for a slave uprising in Raritan County, New Jersey, were discovered in 1730, one of the black informers told a Dr Reynolds that the cause was “the pack of villains” who had defied “a positive order from King George, sent to the G-[overnor] of New York to set them free.”4 A generation later, blacks conspicuously excluded from the blessings of American liberty derided “what they call Free in this Cuntry [sic]” in the words of Towers Bell, a “true Brittam” as he signed himself. Bell wrote to the British military authorities at the end of the war that he had been taken from Britain against his will to Baltimore, and “sold for Four Years as a Slave which I suffered with the Greatest Barbarity in this Rebellious Cuntry.” Now, with the hostilities over, he wanted nothing better than to return “home to Old England.”5

  Tens of thousands of African-Americans clung to the sentimental notion of a British freedom even when they knew that the English were far from being saints in respect to slavery. Until 1800, when its courts decisively ruled the institution illegal, there were slaves, as well as free blacks, in Nova Scotia, and there were hundreds of thousands more in the British Caribbean. Nonetheless, in 1829 one of the first militant African-American emancipationists, David Walker, wrote from Boston in his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World that the “English” were “the best friends the coloured people have upon earth. Though they have oppressed us a little and have colonies now in the West Indies which oppress us sorely—Yet notwithstanding they [the English] have done one hundred times more for the melioration of our condition, than all the other nations of the earth put together.” White Americans, on the other hand, with their posturing religiosity and their hollow cant of freedom, he consigned to the lowest reaches of hypocritical infamy.6 Parliamentary abolition of slavery in 1834 did nothing to change this generous assessment of British benevolence towards Africans, nor the Royal Navy’s pursuit of slavers (some of them American) on the West African coast. In 1845–47, touring Britain as he lectured on the iniquity of American slavery, the black orator Frederick Douglass echoed Walker’s fulsome view of the “English” as the emancipators. In 1852 he would ask in an Independence Day oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and would answer that “your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us…you may rejoice, I must mourn.”7

  Whether the British deserved this reputation as the most racially broadminded among nations and empires is, to say the least, debatable. During the American Civil War of 1861–65, both policy and people leaned if anything towards the slaveowning Confederacy rather than the Union, not least because it would check the threatening expansiveness of the American republic. But during the Revolutionary War there is no question that tens of thousands of Africans, enslaved in the American South, did look to Britain as their deliverer, to the point where they were ready to risk life and limb to reach the lines of the royal army. To give this astounding fact its due means being obliged to tell the story of Anglo-American conflict, both during the revolution and after, in a freshly complicated way.

  To be sure, there were also many blacks who gave the Patriots the benefit of the doubt when they listened and read of their war as a war for liberty. If there was a British Freedom, there was also a Dick Freedom—and a Jeffery Liberty—fighting in a Connecticut regiment on the American side.8 Blacks fought and died for the American cause at Concord, Bunker Hill, Rhode Island and finally at Yorktown (where they were put in the front line—whether as a tribute to their courage or as expendable sacrifices is not clear). At the battle of Monmouth in New Jersey black troops on both sides fought each other. But until the British aggressively recruited slaves in 1775 and 1776, state assemblies, even in the North, as well as the multi-state Continental Congress, flinched from their enlistment. New Hampshire was typical in excluding lunatics, idiots and negroes from its militia. By the autumn of 1775 blacks who had already served in the Patriot militia were ordered to be discharged. George Washington, despite the voiced hostility of fellow officers and civilian delegates to his camp
at Cambridge, was reluctant to let black volunteers go, so he put the question to Congress. There, the horror expressed by Southern representatives such as Edward Rutledge at the idea of arming slaves predictably overcame the lukewarm gratitude for black service. Even armed free negroes were a worry. Could they be trusted not to spread the seeds of insurrection among the unfree? In February 1776 Congress instructed Washington that, whilst free negroes might be retained, no more should be enlisted. Slaves, of course, were altogether excluded from the Continental army set up by Congress.9