Rough Crossings Read online

  For neither the British nor the Americans believed that the threat posed by black insurrection had been disposed of by Dunmore’s eviction from the mainland. The Ethiopian Regiment, now aboard Dunmore’s “floating town” of more than one hundred vessels, had been badly mauled but not destroyed. In the satires against a black army that issued from the Virginia presses there was more than a hint of anxiety as well as contempt. The author of “The Blackbird March,” a parody for the Ethiopians, sneeringly declared it suitable for “their native warlike genius,” scored as it was for “the sprightly, and enlivening barrafoo, an instrument peculiarly adapted to the martial tune “Hungry Niger.”33 “Hail! Doughty Ethiopian Chief,” chuckled the New York Journal, “Though ignominious Negro thief / The black shall prop thy sinking name / And damn thee to perpetual fame.”34 And Richard Henry Lee, like many Virginian Patriots, snorted when he referred to Dunmore as the “African Hero.” The trouble, however, was that Lee, Washington and the rest knew that, even after Great Bridge, he was. When, in the early spring a trio of slaves were taken by an American patrol boat that they had mistakenly thought was a British tender, before they were disabused they declared their “resolution to spend the last drop of their blood in Lord Dunmore’s service.”35 In Cambridge and Philadelphia, the response to this continuing alarm was to ban all blacks, free and slave, from military service with the Continental army. That decision would be reversed only in the dire military predicament facing Washington after he had been chased from New York and New Jersey.

  While Washington in Congress was making it impossible for blacks to serve in the Continental army, escaped slaves such as Thomas Peters were taking the king’s shilling. In February 1776 the sloop Cruizer had appeared off Cape Fear; Wilmington was hastily evacuated, and Peters, like thousands of blacks in the area, was left without a master. For two months Sir Henry Clinton’s fleet of twenty ships controlled the North Carolina coast and sailed up the Cape Fear River raiding plantations. At some point Peters came on board, and when he had reached New York in November was sworn into Clinton’s newly formed Black Pioneers and Guides by its commanding officer, Captain George Martin.36 For the very first time in their lives slaves got to use the words “freely and voluntarily” in a little ceremony that effectively changed them back from thing to human: “I Thomas Peters do swear that I enter freely and voluntarily into His Majesty’s Service and I do enlist myself without the least compulsion or persuasion into the Negro Company commanded by Capt. Martin and that I will demean myself orderly & faithfully and will chearfully [sic] obey all such directions as I may receive from my said Captain…So help me God.”37

  Kitted out in greatcoats, sailor jackets, white shirts and hats, the Pioneers were to have white officers and black NCOs—the latter, along with privates, to be paid at the same rates as their white counterparts. Clinton himself was surprisingly and consistently solicitous for their welfare, writing to Martin that “it is my direction that they are to be regularly supplied with Provisions and to be decently clothed and that they are also to receive such pay as may hereafter be determined…and further that, at the expiration of the present Rebellion [they] shall be intitled (as far depends on me) to their freedom—And from my knowledge of you I shall rely on you and desire that it may be particularly recommended to the rest of the Officers to treat these people with tenderness and humanity.”38

  It was the continuing dread of men such as Peters going to the British and stirring up armed insurrection on top of mass flight that prompted extraordinary, brutal pre-emptive action from the Americans. The string of long, low islands off the coast of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia had become sanctuaries for thousands of escaped slaves, who had somehow made it off the mainland in little boats and were camped between the dunes and the salt marshes, hoping against hope to be picked up by the British fleet. When the ship Scarborough appeared off Cockspur Island, for example, some two hundred to three hundred escaped slaves told Governor Wright of Georgia (who, like his Virginian and Carolinan colleagues, had now made his base on board) that “they were come for the King.”39 By the same token, it became an urgent priority for the troops of the Southern colonies to attack those unarmed camps before the escaped blacks had a chance to become recruits. On the 19th of December, a company of South Carolina Rangers attacked an encampment on Sullivan’s Island just beyond Charleston harbour, where, according to the captain of the British ship Scorpion, he could have taken on five hundred blacks who were eager to fight the Americans. Tipped off about the raid, most of the blacks had been taken off in boats sent from the British ship Cherokee, but eleven were captured and four killed, a punishment that, the Charleston Council predicted, “would serve to humble our Negroes in general.”40

  In view of this very partial success against an elusive quarry, a more draconian solution was proposed in the spring of 1776 when it was learned that at least two hundred escaped slaves were sheltering on Tybee Island off the Georgia coast. To Henry Laurens, who, decent as always, flinched at the idea, Colonel Stephen Bull said forthrightly that “it is far better for the public and the owners if the deserted Negroes…be shot if they cannot be taken.” Perhaps in guilty recognition that for white soldiers a massacre in cold blood might be a little much, even if their victims were runaway slaves, Bull recommended that the wholesale killing be done by Creek Indians. “If Indians are the most proper hands let them be employed on this Service,” Laurens replied to Bull as he agreed, Pilatically, to the expedition, “but we would advise that Some discreet white men be encorporated with or joined to lead them.” Whether the slaughter was then carried out is not known; but, given the state of hysteria prevailing throughout the South in the spring and summer of 1776, there is no reason to rule it out. (Since Tybee Island now enjoys a happy reputation as a prime spring and summer resort, complete with Beach Bum Festival and birding amidst the woodstorks and herons, it seems safe to assume that no one is going to go poking round the dunes looking for the remains of African-Americans.)

  By the late spring and summer of 1776, both sides were making grand promises of liberty while both were delivering death. On the 13th of May a three-man committee—John Adams, Richard Henry Lee and Edward Rutledge—presented to Congress Adams’s draft preface to a resolution that was an irreversible act of separation and stated that “humble petitions…for the redress of grievances” having gone unanswered, “it is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown [of Great Britain] should be totally suppressed.”41 Some weeks later Jefferson’s long passage on slavery, pinning the blame on the “Christian King” and heralding its abolition in the new republic, was entirely stricken in the editing process, “in complaisance,” Jefferson’s notes record, “to the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina.” The delegates included Arthur Middleton and Edward Rutledge, whose slaves—John and Lucy Banbury, and Pompey and Flora Rutledge—were at that moment enjoying the protection of Lord Dunmore and the British fleet.

  The enjoyment must have been limited. For all around them, whether on board or on land, was disease and distress. Dunmore’s fleet of over one hundred vessels, big and small—and there were twenty-nine more under the command of Sir Henry Clinton attempting, and failing, to take Fort Sullivan at the mouth of Charleston harbour—looked, on the face of it, formidable. But there was something defective about the authority of an armada that, running low on supplies, tacked along the coast from island to island, looking for havens that were close enough to allow tenders to go out and forage, and mount raids on plantations, while steering clear of American shore batteries that could do a surprising amount of damage. Even worse was the unmistakable fact that what Dunmore had hoped to be his great advantage—the recruitment of escaped slaves—was now turning into a liability. For although, as he reported to Lord George Germain, six to eight blacks came to him every day, their number was immediately wiped out by deaths from smallpox and an unidentifiable “fleet” fever, probably typhus.

  Overcrowded conditions
on the ships and on the island encampments, initially at Tucker’s Point near Portsmouth in Virginia, all but guaranteed an epidemic.42 Smallpox struck the blacks with disproportionate ferocity. The fleet surgeons recommended inoculation, but while this procedure, which involved creating an infection through deliberately contaminating an incision, had a high chance of reducing the fatality rate, it also meant that those who had been inoculated would be incapable of labour or military duties during the active cycle of the disease, a matter of months rather than weeks. Since Dunmore felt he could not afford to do without either his white or black soldiers and labourers, in late May a ruthless decision was taken to cut his losses by leaving the hopelessly ill behind and sailing north to another harbour: Gwynn’s Island, at the mouth of the Piankatank River. But things went no better there. Although the Ethiopians had been inoculated, they were placed in a separate camp from the white soldiers and sailors, where, languishing for want of decent food and adequate clothing, they sickened and died in hundreds of the “rotten fever” that was eating alive the strength of Dunmore’s rapidly depleting troop. By early July, wrote the captain of the Roebuck, Andrew Snape Hamond, the little regiment was “too weak to resist any considerable force.”

  On the 9th of July, before an assault could be mounted, Dunmore abandoned Gwynn’s Island, along with the most incurably sick, overwhelmingly black population. Some of the smaller boats and many of the infected cabins were burned, together with the bodies inside them. Then Dunmore set sail to the mouth of the Potomac, where he made a base for a few weeks on St George’s Island and raided some of the tidewater plantations and houses, but found once more that he could seldom get close enough to do serious damage before presenting a target to the American guns. Finally, on the 6th of August, he admitted (probably prematurely) the hopelessness of his task. Of the 103 remaining vessels, 63 were burned, and the remaining 40 split into three squadrons. One sailed north to New York to continue the fight, another south to St Augustine in eastern Florida, whilst the third returned to England.

  When the Virginia shirtmen landed on Gwynn’s Island they were greeted by an appalling spectacle. “We found the enemy had evacuated the place with the greatest precipitation and were struck with horrour at the number of dead bodies in a state of putrefaction strewed all the way from their battery to Cherry Point, about 2 miles in length without a shovelful of earth upon them.” Some of the sufferers were still alive, but barely “gasping for life…some had crawled to the water’s edge who could only make known their distress by beckoning to us.”43 Captain Thomas Posey found bodies, not all of them dead, “strew’d about, many of them torn to pieces by wild beasts.”44 The American soldiers also discovered the remains of those who had burned in the final conflagration. It was hard to count the bodies, half-rotted and charred as they were, but there were at least five hundred. Perhaps some, before catastrophe overtook them, had felt for a moment at least that the world had indeed been altered; but there was no way to tell from the piles of corpses strewn among the scuttling crabs.

  TWO MONTHS EARLIER Lord William Campbell, that most reluctant warrior, had done his duty. A fleet of 29 British ships commanded by Commodore Peter Parker had appeared at the mouth of Charleston harbour. Carrying 270 guns and nearly 2,000 soldiers and marines, it seemed highly likely that they were capable of taking the fort on Sullivan’s Island, after which they could, in effect, blockade the port. Campbell quartered himself aboard the flagship Bristol. But the task was much harder than it seemed on paper. In an ill wind two ships, including one of the most recently commissioned, the Actaeon, ran aground while attempting to sail close enough to put shore guns in range of the ship’s cannon. A raid on the fort and then on an island close by were botched. The closer the flotilla came, the more furious the fire. Lord William himself manned one of the Bristol‘s guns and while he was at it, took a large splinter of decking in his thigh. The wound never healed, and the last royal governor of South Carolina died two years later, his planter wife by his side.

  IV

  IT WAS NO GOOD. Granville Sharp could not go on as before. The undeniable fact was that he had no stomach for the fight. It had been all very well issuing instructions from the Ordnance Office for the dispatch of so many powder horns, so many flintlocks, to Trichinopoly or Trincomalee. But to think that it had been his hand that had supplied the bayonets puncturing American breasts at Bunker Hill, or that had delivered the grenades that had put the houses of Charles Town to the torch—why, his conscience revolted at it. The dead might be friends of his Philadelphian correspondents Anthony Benezet, Dr Rush or Benjamin Franklin—Quakers, men of peace, haters of slavery. It would be as if he had signed his letters in blood. So when, on the 28th of July 1775, he read in the Gazette of the battle near Boston and received urgent demands from the beleaguered General Howe for munitions of all kinds, Sharp wrote at once to his superior, Mr Boddington, declaring his “objections to being concerned in any way with that unnatural business.”1 The gentlemen of the board might well have asked him in which office did he suppose he served? Remarkably, they did not. Such was the esteem, even the affection, for their cranky subordinate with his nose in the Pentateuch and his heart on his sleeve that they dealt mildly with him, recommending he ask for two months’ leave, a consideration that would be taken “more kindly” than an abrupt resignation in the midst of a war.

  The leave granted, Granville travelled north to see his older brother, Dr John Sharp, now an archdeacon. He found him in the craggy red ruin of Bamburgh Castle, where Dr Sharp gathered the infirm and destitute, nursed their bodies and schooled their minds (to the general astonishment of the country thereabouts), and sent out riders to scan the stormy shore for signs of wrecks or the odd survivor washed on to the rocks. As his leave expired, Granville wrote once more to Boddington, distressed by the failure of efforts at reconciliation between Britain and the colonists. He still found himself unable, he confessed, to “return to my ordnance duty whilst a bloody war is carried on unjustly, as I conceive, against my fellow subjects.”2 At once the brothers rallied round to allow Greeny to exercise his conscience as he thought fit. James, the serpent-playing ironmonger, wrote that perhaps there would be a change in the direction of public opinion, but if not,

  and you should think it proper to give up your employment—I will now speak for my brother William as well as for myself—we are both ready and willing, and God be thanked at present, able, to take care that the loss shall be none to you; and all that we ask in return is that you would continue to live amongst us as you hitherto have done without imagining that you will, in such a situation, be burthensome to us, and also without supposing that it will be your duty to seek employment in some other way of life; for if we have the needful amongst us it matters not to whom it belongs.3

  Sharp’s superiors were still reluctant to let him go. Were his worries not the admirably affecting mark of a Christian sensibility? Doubtless they would abate as his natural patriotism and sense of duty returned. Three months’ additional leave was granted.

  But his pessimism only deepened. On the 26th of October 1775 the king opened Parliament. The speech from the throne—written, of course, by his ministers—was adamant.4 Under the guise of a protest against grievances, imagined or real, a conspiracy of rebellion had been prepared and had now been consummated. Its design, now and always, had been for an independency: the outright severance of the American colonies from their proper allegiance to Crown and Parliament. Before anything positive could be attempted in the way of answering grievances, that rebellion had to be put down. Critics of the government, in both the Lords and the Commons, dismissed the premise of the argument. Their American friends were not, they insisted (somewhat behind the news), committed to independence; they had merely been put in a posture of so seeming by the blundering brutality of the government and its dependence on odious military force. Knowing his Philadelphians to have been loath to embrace outright separation, Sharp was of a similar opinion.

  And he wor
ried about the effect that a war would have on Benezet’s endeavours to make his fellow Americans aware of the abomination of slavery. Sharp himself had never shrunk from pointing out to them the inconsistency of their claims to liberty while denying the same to their black brethren. In his 1774 Declaration of the People’s Natural Right to Share in Legislature, a broadside that he meant to be applied as much to the overtaxed and unrepresented English as to the Americans, he had spoken frankly: “Let them put away the accursed thing before they presume to implore the interposition of divine providence!”5 The great work of persuasion had indeed been started, thanks to Benezet. Two hundred and fifty copies of the Declaration had been sent to Franklin after he had returned to Philadelphia in the hope that he would circulate them to those who mattered. Sharp had every hope that America would recoil from appearing before the world as “the land of the brave and the land of the slave,”6 and his hopes seemed to be rewarded. In April 1775 the very first American anti-slavery society had been established in Philadelphia. Five days later British soldiers and Patriot Minutemen exchanged shots on Lexington Green. Not a lot would be heard from the Philadelphia Society for years to come.

  There was no way, of course, for Sharp to know that the arrival of British troops in America, far from setting back the cause of liberty for slaves, had accelerated it. When Sir William Howe’s armada of 260 sail en route to Philadelphia passed tantalizingly close to the New Jersey shore blacks flocked to it, whilst “scarce a white person was to be seen.” In a single day the ships picked up 300 escaped slaves. But they were the more fortunate ones, who had managed to reach the fleet in small boats or canoes. Others, when vessels came close to the shoreline, tried to reach them by swimming and as often as not were drowned in the attempt.7