Rough Crossings Read online

  In England, the notion of arming liberated slaves was intensely controversial. During the debate on the speech from the throne in October 1775, William Lyttelton, who had been governor of South Carolina during the French and Indian War of 1756–60, had said forthrightly that, as far as he was concerned, should a “few regiments” be sent to America “the negroes would rise and embrue their hands in the blood of their masters,” making pretty smart work of rebellion.8 The proposal struck the liberal-minded opposition to the government as unconscionably barbaric—” too black and horrid to be adopted,” said John Wilkes.9 A coalition of the appalled rapidly made its voice heard. The sugar and slave interest in Bristol and Liverpool, already alarmed by risings in Jamaica, attacked the tactic as a monstrosity. Friends of America, even when, like Burke, they identified themselves as enemies of the slave trade, dismissed the idea of armed negroes (which might also involve arming Indians) as tantamount to licensed murder.

  There is no sign in Granville Sharp’s correspondence of his views on the strategy of arming negroes, but since he stood by a policy of peaceful persuasion in America, he is unlikely to have been an enthusiast. Although he finally resigned from the Ordnance Office in April 1777, when the patience of his superiors was exhausted, and although many of his friends had finally accepted that the Declaration of Independence seemed to mean what it said, Sharp himself had still not abandoned hope of bringing America back to the imperial fold as a free dominion under the Crown. It remained his conviction that if only Americans could be represented—either directly at Westminster or in legislatures that would have the exclusive right to tax—then the sources of discontent would go away. Since, by early 1778, British arms had occupied both New York and Philadelphia, was not this the moment for prudent magnanimity?

  Sharp went to see the Secretary of State and impressed on him the need to grant the colonies “as fair and equal rights as those enjoyed by the counties of England.” How was it that the most senior men in North’s administration were prepared to give an ex-clerk of the Ordnance the time of day? Because Granville Sharp was also piping for peace. After his brother William had fitted out a fine new yacht, the Union, even more comfortable and capacious than the Apollo, the waterborne concerts were in greater demand than ever before. In early September 1777, while the armies of Howe and Washington were manoeuvring for position in Pennsylvania and preparing for the carnage at Brandywine, the Sharps “played a variety of music, songs and glees” for the king and queen. “We then took our leave by giving three cheers and playing The Retreat.” A year later, in the autumn of 1778, General “Johnny” Burgoyne was marching confidently towards disaster at Saratoga as swallows circled above the plump and cheerful face of Lord North while he enjoyed a little Handel on the Union between Teddington and Kew.10

  AS USUAL, it was blacks who made the difference. On Christmas Eve 1778 a naval squadron carrying three thousand troops—Highlanders, Hessians and New York loyalist Volunteers—anchored off Tybee Island at the mouth of the Savannah River, where, two years before, hundreds of runaway slaves had sheltered. A black pilot called Samson got the fleet over the bar and would guide raiding expeditions off the Georgia and Carolina coast during the next year. His capture or death became urgent for the American and French troops struggling to keep control of the South against the fresh onslaught of the British army.

  Savannah’s best defence against the oncoming troops was its topography: the town was perched on a bluff on the west bank of the Savannah River with the Yamacraw swamp to its north, leaving just one exposed road to secure, east of the city, manned by Georgia and Carolina troops who had taken the precaution of destroying an access bridge. The wooded swamp was watered by the creeks of the St Augustine and Tybee rivers, but there was one firm track through the treacherous mud, and on the 29th of December 1778 Quamino Dolly, an elderly slave, showed Lieutenant Colonel Archie Campbell exactly where it was. The Highlanders (minus their packs) and the New York Volunteers got to the rear of the Georgia and Carolina militia, who now faced an infantry attack from one side and an artillery barrage from the other.11 The American position broke. Four hundred and fifty prisoners were taken, including thirty-eight officers along with forty-eight cannon. Nearly one hundred of the Georgians and Carolinans were counted dead or seriously wounded, and another thirty died floundering in the morass through which they had tried to escape. British losses were three dead and ten wounded. What was left of General Robert Howe’s army disintegrated. The British occupied not only Savannah but outlying small towns such as Ebenezer, where the Hessians were able to speak German with the Salzburger Lutherans who had settled there. “Many respectable inhabitants,” Campbell wrote to Lord George Germain in January 1779, “joined the [British] army…with their rifles and horses who are formed into a corps of rifle dragoons for the purposes of patrolling the country…I have now the honour to acquaint your lordship that the inhabitants from all parts of the province flock with their arms to the standard.”12

  Not all of them were white.

  THE MASTER HAD GONE. His carts and his people had rolled off north, leaving them all behind. It was time, now, to go to the British soldiers; time to be born again, to be free. So the preacher David George gathered together his wife, Phyllis, and their children and all the slaves, fifty or more, along with their sticks and their bundles, and they all started to walk in the opposite direction from the plantation, their backs to Augusta, making for the fort at New Ebenezer, between the Ogoochee and Savannah rivers, where they had been told the soldiers of the king were.13

  So many journeys. The first had been that of his mother and father, taken from Africa and brought to Virginia, to the Nottoway River in Essex County on the western bank of the Rappahannock River. They were called John and Judith. John slaved in the tobacco and cotton fields for Mr Chapel, while Judith cooked, and the two of them produced for their master eight children besides David, all set to work while they were still small fetching water for the hands and carding the cotton. But the children grew up restive, seeing bad things, having bad things done to them, wanting to be gone.

  My oldest sister was called Patty; I have seen her several times so whipped that her back was all corruption, as though it would rot. My brother Dick ran away, but they caught him and brought him home and as they were going to tie him up he broke away again and they hunted him with horses and dogs, till they took him; then they hung him up to a cherry tree in the yard, by his two hands, quite naked except his breeches with his feet about half a yard from the ground. They tied his legs close together and put a pole between them at one end of which one of the owner’s sons sat, to keep him down and another son at the other. And after he received 500 lashes or more, they washed down his back with salt water and whipped it in as well as rubbed it in with a rag and then directly sent him to work in pulling off the suckers of tobacco.

  David, too, had been flogged over and again. His back’s pink lacing told his story, line by line. But the worst of the pain had been to see his mother, her clothes torn off, on her knees sobbing and begging for mercy, her body cut by the whip anyway. She was so ill used by this treatment that she died of it, and it was when she lay on that death bed, her eyes rolling up, that David, maybe twenty or twenty-one, sickened of weeping, ran off and made his first journey.

  Men said the Church saved, so he ran to the English church at Nottoway even though he drank, had no thought of heaven and no belief in hell, for whatever demons there were could surely be no worse than Mr Chapel. There were many rivers to cross on his way south: first the Roanoke, and then the Pee Dee in North Carolina, where he found white people who took him aboard their boats and would not give him up even though there was a reward of thirty guineas for his capture. But when the slavehunters were coming the men on the Pee Dee River told him to go south, all the way to the Savannah River, and he did. Still the hunters came for him, so he fled again up the Okemulgee deep into the wooded hills of backcountry Georgia, and there the Creek Indians took him and knew him b
y his tracks for a black man because, while there was a hollow in the underside of their feet, his own lay flat on the red dirt as he ran. The king there was called Blue Salt and David became his prize, digging holes for the corn rows, eating bear and turkey, and looked after kindly until Mr Chapel’s son came all the way into the Creek Nation, tracking him with hounds like a deer. And Blue Salt would surely not have given up his black prize, but Mr Chapel’s son offered rum and linen and a gun, so he was tempted, and before it could happen off went David again, westwards, to King Jack of the Natchez people. And there was a man called John Miller, who came to the Natchez for deer pelts and sold them to the great Indian agent George Galphin, who lived in Silver Bluffs, South Carolina, and this man Miller and King Jack and Mr Chapel’s son (who was tired now of all this following and ready to be paid off) agreed between them on a price. So King Jack sold David to John Miller, and for two years David sewed skins and tended the horses and made sure they didn’t stray. Every year he took the skins downstream, piled high in a leather canoe, to Mr Galphin at Silver Bluffs. And there must have been something of a fatherly way about the man, for David asked if he might live with him and he said yes. David stayed with the Indian trader four years.

  Later, “a mass of sin,” he was ashamed of how he had lived at that time, but God helped him find a wife, his part-Indian, part-black Phyllis, and their first child was born. But he still lived so badly that when Cyrus, a black man from Charleston, told him if he carried on so he would never live to see the face of God in glory, he began to pray. But when he was not praying he was sinning, and so he went on praying and sinning and sinning and praying all the time with Mr Galphin at Silver Bluffs, until one day his saviour on this earth came and he was called George Leile and David was born again and became in his honour David George. Now the wonder of it was that David had known this Leile in Virginia when they were boys together, but since then he had seen God and was much altered. And when he preached, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” David told him how it was with him. Together they went to a church some distance from Silver Bluff, where Brother Palmer preached in a big old mill of Mr Galphin’s. Brother Palmer then came to Silver Bluffs and spoke directly to some of Mr Galphin’s men, and baptized eight, David and Phyllis among the flock, in the rushing mill stream amidst the rocks and flashing trout. A church was built at Silver Bluffs, and David and the rest took the Lord’s Supper and sang the hymns of blessed Isaac Watts, and as the spirit crept on him, so others saw it and asked him to preach. Ashamed because he was a stammerer and unlettered, he turned away from the task until Brother Palmer told him not to be a Jonah lest he offend the Lord, and so it was that he became Brother David and an Elder and began to speak to the people at Silver Bluffs and have them turn their faces to the shining countenance of the all-forgiving God.

  When the war came to the low country of rice and swamp, the masters stopped ministers such as Brother Palmer from coming to the blacks in case they got ideas. So there was nothing for it now except for David to minister to his flock of more than thirty souls, and as he had the care of them, he thought he had better learn to read. But this too was forbidden, so David went to the white children and practised his abc with them until he could make out words and then pages of the Bible. The little children gave him his lessons, and David would go away and recite them in his head and then go back to the children and ask if it was right and repeat it until it was so. And now he could preach and teach and read and write and the whole glory of Scripture was his—and his church, did he but know it, was the first black church in all of America.

  Now it was Christmas 1778 and they were told that they were in peril. There were said to be British ships off the islands, and soldiers, thousands of them, were coming. At dinner they heard talk about how the British would raise the Indians, and suddenly there was a lot of yelling and running around and carts loaded with people and dogs and a few fine things like mirrors, and off they went, the children looking back at the house with sorry faces. Mr Galphin, being warm for America and knowing the Indians as he did, was one who left in a real hurry, so now David and his flock were quite alone with nothing and no one to keep them, but also not much in the way of food in the hard, grey winter.

  AT LEAST FIVE THOUSAND of Georgia’s slaves, one-third of the total, went from their plantations, knowing that the British had offered freedom and protection in return for service to the king. This was what had made up David George’s mind and put him and his flock (now numbering fifty) on the Augusta-Savannah road. Twenty miles from the city they reached Ebenezer, where Hessians and Highlanders had already occupied the fort. But the British general was deluged with incoming blacks and sent them away again, over the Ogeechee to a place called Savage’s Plantation. It was full of white loyalists who, seeing David leading his flock, accused him of marching them away from Savannah and towards the Patriots. Despite his protests that this was the opposite of what he was doing, he was thrown in prison and stayed there for a month until one of the British officers, Captain Brown, came and fetched him out.

  At Yamacraw by the marshy woods David George was reunited with George Leile and his family, and the two of them preached the word of God together until in the summer of 1779 an allied force of more than five thousand American and French troops, bent on retaking Savannah, closed in fast; so the Georges, fearing capture by the Americans, moved into the town. Once there, they found more than six hundred blacks, including fifty-nine Pioneers, digging deep ditches, building up the palisaded ramparts, cutting and sharpening the abatis breastworks that were designed to impede and impale oncoming attackers, and manning the redoubts. James Moncrief, the Scots captain commanding the Engineers, looked after them, making sure they were properly fed, clothed and (to the consternation of Tory planters who were slaveowners themselves) armed. By early October 1779, when the French and Americans were finally ready to advance, Savannah was girdled by formidable defences that covered its entire western flank, from the broad river basin to the creek-run swamps.

  But the British ability to defend Savannah from an allied attack owed itself to black help in another, decisive respect. On the 16th of September the allies issued an ultimatum to the British general Augustine Prevost to surrender the city in twenty-four hours. But Prevost knew, or at any rate hoped, that help was on its way, a detachment of troops under Colonel James Maitland coming from Beaufort. Black guides speaking Gullah, the dialect of the sea islands where slaves had first been landed after the wretched crossing from Africa, had shown Maitland a way round the blocking French army, through otherwise impassable bogs and under a shroud of dense Georgia fog in a country known only to “bears, wolves and runaway Negroes.”14 Tipped off that these reinforcements were fast approaching, Prevost used his twenty-four hours to stall; and sure enough Maitland’s troops arrived, enough of them to make the British confident that they had a decent chance of surviving whatever the French and Americans threw at them. Then the city waited; 250 armed blacks stood in the centre of the defenders on the ramparts, some of them manning the guns—slaves waiting to kill their masters.

  A week later, on the 23rd of September, the bombardment opened up, with eight-and ten-inch mortars and more than fifty cannon firing from both batteries and from frigates moored in the river.15 From the 3rd to the 8th of October the artillery fire was incessant, shot and shell raining relentlessly down on Savannah. Scarcely a house in the neat grid of streets was spared and a choking mantle of smoke hung over the town. But most of the artillery missed the fortifications completely, as though terror were the main point. Despite collapsing buildings and burning debris, few were hurt, and before long black children ran through the streets looking for spent cannon balls to play with. Not everyone thought the French were playing games, however. When a shell came straight through the roof of the stable where the Georges were living, David and Phyllis, anxious about their children, Jesse, David and Ginny, thought better of staying and went back to Yamacraw, whe
re, for a time, they hid beneath the floor of an abandoned house and survived as best they could.

  Once d’Estaing, the French commander, thought the city sufficiently softened up, an attack was ordered for dawn on the 9th of October. Belatedly, for it was already light, his grenadiers climbed Spring Hill at the north end of the defences, emerging from a dense fog just in time for their brilliant white coats to supply a perfect target: as they plodded grimly upwards they fell under fierce musket fire. An American cavalry company led by a Pole rode at the defences, got tangled in the abatis and was shot up. Their commanding officer, Pulaski, died snarled up in the sharpened poles, his body riddled with shot. Carolinans, commanded by John Laurens, followed and made it to the ramparts just long enough to plant a flag before being fired on from two sides. British grenadiers and marines now charged over the palisades with bayonets, and for an hour a brutal hand-to-hand fight ensued; soldiers of five white nations—American, English, Scots, German, and French—blazed and stabbed, clawed and bludgeoned at the top of a greasy bluff over a smoke-dark river. And in the middle of them all were blacks, cutting and firing, as they must have thought, for their freedom. (There were free blacks from St Domingue on the Franco-American side too, but they were held in reserve so that a tragic scenario of black fighting black—which happened elsewhere in the Southern theatre of war—did not materialize on the heights at Savannah.)

  When the firing ceased, the ditches were full of French bodies, white coats dappled with blood. Two hundred and three more bodies were picked off the breastworks, between the carcasses of impaled horses, and buried. Others had galloped downhill headlong into the swamp, where their riders had drowned. In the debacle the allies lost nearly eight hundred dead and wounded, although Prevost claimed more than one thousand; the British just eighteen dead and thirty-nine wounded. It was a Bunker Hill in reverse. Nine days later the Americans gave up the siege, and three days after that d’Estaing set sail. Prevost, who was not in the habit of handing out compliments, wrote of the blacks (as if he were slightly surprised) that “they certainly did wonders in the working way and in the fighting they really shewed no bad countenance.” This new courage showed itself—alarmingly to the Patriots—beyond the ramparts of Savannah. After the siege was lifted, out at McGillivray’s Plantation a company of black troops, probably those under Captain John McKenzie of the British Legion, fought a pitched battle with Patriot soldiers and drove them from their positions, retreating (with one dead and three wounded) only after their ammunition had run out.16