Rough Crossings Read online

  But then, the blacks had something serious to fight for. On the 30th of June 1779 at Philipsburgh, before leaving New York for a campaign in South Carolina with Charleston as the intended prize, Sir Henry Clinton had issued a third proclamation warning that negroes taken in arms fighting for the rebels would be bought for public works. “But I do most strictly forbid any Person to sell or claim right over any Negroe, the property of a rebel, who may take refuge with any Part of this Army; And I do promise to every negroe Who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full security to follow within these lines any Occupation which he shall think proper.”17

  For one American officer who had been at Savannah the lesson could not have been clearer or more urgent, both strategically and morally. In February 1780, from inside Charleston, his home town, the twenty-five-year-old Colonel John Laurens urged the general in charge of the city’s defences, Benjamin Lincoln, to use blacks both in armed battalions and on artillery crews.18 His stay in London from 1774 to 1776 had defined the rest of Laurens’s life. The agony of distance from the accelerating crisis in America had made a passionate Patriot and republican of him, and his friendship with John Bicknell and Thomas Day had made an emancipator of him. Put together, the two causes spelled out the indispensability of black soldiery, without which he thought the American cause would be both morally compromised and militarily handicapped.

  By the time that Laurens became aide-de-camp to Washington in 1777, the commander-in-chief had obliged the Southern states by prohibiting slaves from service in the Continental army. But as the Americans became harder pressed, the exclusionary policy gave a little. In that same year, Vermont became the first and only state to abolish slavery. And when it was difficult, in Rhode Island and Connecticut, to fill the quotas for the Continental army, the deficiencies were made good by blacks, principally within white regiments. But since many, if not most, of those soldiers served as substitutes for white masters, what their presence says about the relative enthusiasm of either of them for the American cause is open to debate. The exception may have been Colonel Christopher Greene’s 1st Rhode Island Regiment, expressly organized after the decimating winter of 1777–78 at the Valley Forge camp as a black fighting force—albeit, as on the British side, with white officers. It initially consisted of about 120 men, of whom two-thirds were slaves—not hard to find, since Newport was still the home port of the African-American slave trade—and who saw action at the battle of Rhode Island in August 1778.19

  John Laurens, all of twenty-three, had been with George Washington when the general wrote to the governor of Rhode Island recommending quota shortfalls be filled with blacks. It was enough to stir his always restive conscience to action. He wrote to his father asking him to free his slaves “instead of leaving me a Fortune.”20 But what he really wanted was to mobilize, equip and lead a full black regiment. Military service, he thought, was the perfect way to fit such men, accustomed only to servitude, for liberty. Henry Laurens, who owned three hundred slaves, unsurprisingly thought differently. Why should blacks, he asked his son, want to leave “circumstances not only tolerable but comfortable from habit for an intolerable. Taken from their Wives and Children & their little Plantations to the Field of Battle where Loss of Life and Limb must be expected by every one every day.”21 The son, however, in keeping with what he had learned from Sharp, Day and Bicknell, rejected his father’s assumption that blacks were passive creatures. They were, he insisted, quite human enough to share the ardour for liberty that sanctified the present struggle.

  With the fall of Savannah, and the alarming news in the late spring of 1779 that Sir Henry Clinton would be sailing south with an army of eight thousand men, the argument about arming blacks suddenly became less philosophical and more strategic. Only “the adoption of my black project,” Laurens wrote to his father, now president of Congress in Philadelphia, could save South Carolina. Perhaps “impending calamity” would finally persuade his countrymen where mere argument and appeals to morality and reason had proved weak. In a page straight from the novels of sentiment and sensibility, the burning idealist son appealed to his father’s hitherto dormant nobility as well (for John was no fool) as to the old man’s vanity. Leading the charge in Congress and in his state, “you will have the glory of triumphing over deep-rooted national prejudices in favour of your Country and humanity at large.”22

  Sure enough, Henry’s scepticism—although soon to return with a vengeance—gave way to an improbable surge of idealism. But the elder Laurens also knew that his fellow planters in the South Carolina low country were in a bind. The state was having trouble filling its militia ranks precisely because adult whites were needed on the plantations to guard against the likelihood of slave insurrections and mass flight. Ironically, then, young Laurens’s proposal could be promoted as a way of actually controlling black violence by harnessing it against the enemy, rather than risking it being turned on the masters. Even so, with a number of his own slaves gone to the British or taken by them, Washington was worried about the possibility of an escalating armed-slave race, each side outbidding the other. In the end the slaveholders of the South had the most to lose. Alexander Hamilton, protégé of Washington and mentor to John Laurens, supported his young friend’s scheme. But whether his argument for doing so—that slaves were either sufficiently abject to wear military discipline well, or else sufficiently savage to fight like demons—gave the general much reassurance seems questionable.

  Yet on the 29th of March Congress authorized the raising of three thousand able-bodied blacks in Georgia and South Carolina, to be commanded by white officers. Owners would receive $1,000 compensation per slave, since each black who served satisfactorily was to have his freedom and $50 after the war. This would have been a revolution indeed, and at a stroke would have disposed of British accusations of hypocrisy. But it was precisely because a New Hampshire delegate to Congress, William Whipple, believed that “such a measure will produce the Emancipation of a number of those wretches and lay a foundation for the Abolition of Slavery” a huge loophole was included. In view of the “inconveniences” that the measure would cause the two Southern states, they would reserve the ultimate power to judge its practicality. The bitter conflict between North and South that would poison the new republic was there from the very start.

  The outcome was predictable. When the black regiment was debated in the South Carolina House of Representatives at the end of August 1779 it managed to secure just twelve votes out of seventy-two, even with the British virtually at the gates. “It was received with horror by the planters,” wrote Dr David Ramsay, a Pennsylvanian transplanted to Charleston and an early historian of the Revolution, “who figured to themselves terrible consequences.”23 And just as suddenly as he had been a convert, Henry Laurens was now a sardonic obituarist for the grand design. “I learn your black Air Castle is blown up with contemptuous huzzas,” he wrote to his furious, bitter son, adding, with a note of unsympathetic sarcasm as if he had had no part in it, “A Man of your reading & of your Philosophy will require no consolatory reasonings for reconciling him to Disappointment.”24

  John Laurens, however, had not entirely given up on his plan. Early in 1780, with the British armada on its way, Congress reminded the South Carolinans of its proposal, and Laurens, thirsty for action as always, was in Charleston to press it on his countrymen. He managed to persuade General Lincoln, to request one thousand slaves from Governor Rutledge. But no one who mattered would hear of it. Five thousand slaves from low country plantations had, in fact, been impressed to work on Charleston’s fortifications; but, unlike the blacks who had done the same for the British in Savannah, they did so without any promise of freedom. None of them, of course, was armed; and none was used, even without arms, on gunnery crews. Laurens’s measure, the House of Representatives judged, was still “premature” and should be adopted “only in the last extremity.”

  The last extremity duly arrived. Black pilots found British frigates a way over the sandbank guar
ding Charleston harbour just as Quamino Dolly had got them through the Yamacraw swamp. In April black and white sappers dug the lines of trenches that advanced slowly and inexorably down the peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper rivers until they were in range to bombard the city. Caught between British ships in the harbour and British guns behind them, not to mention slaves disappearing en masse from plantations throughout the low country, Governor Rutledge—to John Laurens’s horror—made an offer of South Carolina’s neutrality for the duration of the war in return for the preservation of the social order, meaning the slaveholding society. In May the American garrison surrendered, delivering to the British more than five thousand prisoners, including John Laurens. It was, he wrote to Washington, “the greatest and most humiliating misfortune of my life,” and he remained convinced that a black army could have saved the city and the state.25 But the Southern states wanted a white army and used slave bounties as incentives to recruit white volunteers. In October 1780 the legislature of Virginia voted to give every recruit who pledged to serve until the end of the war three hundred acres, plus a choice of either “a healthy Negro” between thirty and sixty years old or else £60 in gold. In South Carolina, in April 1781, General Thomas Sumter instituted the practice of giving captured loyalist slaves as bounties to white recruits, and Georgia followed suit by offering to give a slave outright to every soldier who could prove he had fought in a campaign. When money was tight, slaves were sometimes given to soldiers in lieu of pay.26

  In May 1780 a band played “God Save the King” as Sir Henry Clinton rode through Charleston in triumph. Among the musicians was likely to have been John Marrant, literate, black, a Methodist convert and master of both the fiddle and the French horn. Born in New York, Marrant had had an eventful past: brought to South Carolina; converted by the Methodist missionary preacher George Whitefield; captured by the Cherokee; saved at the last minute from being burned alive by the intercession of the chief; minister to a small flock while still wearing buckskins and braids and bearing a tomahawk; and impressed (for his music) on HMS sloop Scorpion, which had seen a lot of action, from Dunmore’s raids in 1776 through to the taking of Charleston four years later. Marrant certainly knew of Clinton’s Philipsburgh proclamation, but it was the Indian riding with him down Broad Street who caught his attention, for it was his old friend, benefactor and convert, the “king” of the Cherokees. When he saw Marrant he “alighted off his horse and came to me; said he was glad to see me; that his daughter [whom the black had also converted] was very happy.”27

  But if, after the fall of Savannah and Charleston, the blacks of the low country expected South Carolina and Georgia to turn from hell to heaven, or at least from bitter servitude to heady liberation, many of them were destined for cruel disappointment. Twenty-five thousand blacks—a quarter of South Carolina’s slave population, and a third of Georgia’s—left the plantations in what was by far the greatest exodus from bondage in African-American history until the Civil War and Emancipation.28 But it was precisely those huge numbers of escaped blacks pouring out of the farms and plantations and towards the British that created a massive logistical crisis. Where Dunmore’s original proclamation had been impelled by a manpower shortage, now Clinton, and his successor, Cornwallis, were faced with too many bodies and not enough food, clothing or arms. And many of those bodies were, predictably as in Virginia in 1775 and 1776, seriously ill, either from smallpox or from typhus; these conditions were not helped by extreme want, as the plantation system collapsed in late 1779 and 1780.

  The response of most British commanders, as might be expected, was dictated more by the cold-blooded needs of military self-preservation than by the warmth of humanity. This was certainly true of Howe and Cornwallis, the former of whom shared Alexander Innes’s distaste for using black soldiers in the Northern theatre. On the other hand Sir Henry Clinton, arguably the most important of the three throughout the war, was a much more complicated case. He was certainly no abolitionist, and like most of the senior officers had no interest in alienating the loyal or neutral planters by convincing them that he was out to destroy their world. When a slave rebellion broke out at the plantation of Ralph Izard (the late Governor Campbell’s brother-in-law) Clinton promptly sent troops to crush it.29 When slaves were taken in situ from rebel plantations, rather than received as runaways under the terms of the Philipsburgh proclamation, they often remained slaves and were impressed on public works or even given as rewards to loyalists. But any commander-in-chief who used the word “tenderness” in his instructions to junior officers concerning the treatment of the Black Pioneers was evidently not a conventional general. In fact Clinton never ceased to be as concerned about the Pioneers, whom he regarded as his personal project, as of the engineers and artificers working with Moncrief. Nor was he always indifferent to the fate of the thousands of civilian “Followers of Army and Flag.” On the 3rd of June, before leaving Charleston (where there were at least five hundred blacks working on the fortifications) for New York, Clinton wrote a memorandum for his successor as commander in the Southern theatre, Cornwallis, much of which concerned the treatment of blacks.30 Slaves who had run away from loyalist plantations, he directed, should be returned to their masters only after those masters had given a formal undertaking “in the presence of the Negro, not to punish runaways for “past offences.” Should loyalist slaveowners be proved to have inflicted punishment notwithstanding this order, “he or she shall consent to forfeit their claim to the Negro.” Negroes belonging to rebels, Clinton thought right to emphasize yet again to Cornwallis in case he did not share his view, which indeed he may not have done, after faithfully serving “are entitled to their freedom.” They were to have “adequate pay provision and clothing” and be “under the care and protection of some humane person with a proper salary.” Even more surprising, the same letter to Cornwallis proposed what would not be done, if done at all, until Reconstruction after the Civil War some eighty years later: “Why not settle the Negroes on forfeited land after the war?”

  In a logistical pinch, even Clinton was capable of returning slaves to masters as a way of discouraging a tide of fugitives if their numbers threatened to overwhelm short supplies. If they were disabled by sickness, they were even more of a nuisance. Blacks who were already ill and half starved were strictly isolated, often with little or no sustenance or shelter, to prevent infection from spreading to the troops. (The Continental army practised much the same policies of prophylactic isolation.)

  Boston King was one of those countless blacks who suffered from the conventions of military self-preservation. King had been born on a plantation twenty-eight miles from Charleston, and had served a racehorse trainer, who beat him unmercifully for other people’s transgressions, for example, when nails went missing.31 Evacuated with his master after the British had taken Charleston, King borrowed a horse to visit his parents, twelve miles away. Impetuously, he lent the horse to another servant, who promptly disappeared with it for days. Terrified by the certainty of brutal punishment, King took the step that thousands of blacks like him had already made. “To escape his cruelty, I determined to go to Charles-Town and throw myself into the hands of the English. They received me readily and I began to feel the happiness of liberty of which I knew nothing before altho’ I was much grieved at first to be obliged to leave my friends and reside with strangers.” The happiness, however, was fleeting.

  In this situation I was seized with the smallpox and suffered great hardships; for all the Blacks affected with that disease, were ordered to be carried a mile from the camp, lest the soldiers should be infected and disabled from marching. This was a grievous circumstance to me and many others. We lay sometimes a whole day without any thing to eat or drink: but Providence sent a man who belonged to the York volunteers whom I was acquainted with, to my relief. He brought me such things as I stood in need of; and by the blessing of the Lord I began to recover.

  By this time, the English left the place; but as I was unable
to march with the army, I expected to be taken by the enemy. However when they came and understood that we were ill of the smallpox, they precipitately left us for fear of the infection. Two days after, the wagons were sent to convey us to the English army and we were put in a little cottage (being 25 in number) about a quarter of a mile from the Hospital.32

  The British record towards their black charges, then, was neither one of exceptional compassion, nor one of unalloyed callousness and inhumanity. For every General Prevost who had no compunction (like Dunmore before him) about dumping the sick on places such as Otter Island, where hundreds died uncared for, there were individual British officers, for instance Boston King’s benefactor, who tried to do something about their plight. David George, who also succumbed to smallpox in his cabin outside Savannah, survived because his wife, Phyllis, earned something by working as laundress for the British army and for a while for General Clinton himself. As David’s condition deteriorated Phyllis finally agreed, in anguish, to his demand that she abandon him so as to “take care of herself and of the children, and let me die there.” Although David was on the verge of perishing when the cornmeal his wife left him was eaten by a dog, he somehow came through the crisis. He was by no means friendless. One white loyalist, Joseph Wright, let him have the use of his vegetable garden and field near the Ogeechee River, and posted a notice in Savannah that “any person Molesting or disturbing [this] good subject of King George [and] Free Negro…in the possession of the premises will be prosecuted to the utmost rigor of the law.”33 With the help of another sympathetic white, “Lawyer Gibbons,” he got back into Savannah, where he was reunited with his family and ran a butcher’s stall for two years. David’s half-Indian brother-in-law supplied him with fresh meat; and even after he was robbed of it by British cavalry, the Savannah blacks rallied round and lent him money to buy the hogs that he took to Charleston, along with his family. Staying in Charleston for two years until the evacuation following Yorktown, David adds that “Major P”—Major-General James Paterson—” was very kind to me.”34