Rough Crossings Page 14

  In the experience of both David George and Boston King (the best sources we have for the experience of blacks in the Revolutionary War), the British could appear as both benefactors and thieves, hard-hearted and kind-hearted; yet there was never any question about the ultimate allegiance of these two. And overall the royal army, for all its rigours and even cruelties, was, for many of those hoping to make their escape from servitude permanent, an asylum and a source of hope rather than of despair. Despite all the physical and material ordeals, brutal disappointments and betrayals endured by the blacks, the stark fact that the British were their enemies’ enemies made them keep coming to the royal standard. The majority of slaves wanted nothing to do with the new American republic of bondage.

  That was the view, at any rate, of the Methodist Boston King, who certainly experienced his fair share of suffering at the hands of both sides.35 After a battle with Americans, Captain Grey, the British officer who had tended him when he was sick with the smallpox, was brought wounded to the field hospital, allowing King “to return him the kindness he had shewed me.” Once the bond was tied—not as slave and master, but as officer and servant, which was altogether different—Boston King stayed loyal. Left alone with a white officer who had decided to desert to the Americans, who had stolen fifty horses, and who threatened King with being put in irons and “a dozen stripes every morning” if he did not follow him, King remained steadfast. Managing to escape from the officer, he walked for days to reach the British position and tip them off about the defection. “Three weeks after,” he recorded laconically, “our Light horse went to the island, and burnt his house; they likewise brought back forty of the horses, but he escaped.” On another occasion at Nelson’s Ferry, where the British were faced with a much larger American force, King walked and ran nearly thirty miles to bring reinforcements for its relief. The British army was full of such blacks who rowed, rode, hacked tracks through the woods and carried messages at extreme peril to themselves, all to give the British troops an edge.

  There were, of course, moments of doubt. Like many Southern blacks caught in an increasingly ferocious war—for the taking of Savannah and Charleston merely launched a new and brutal phase of the conflict in which competitive marauding was the only rule—Boston King made for what he imagined was the more secure loyalist haven of New York. Working as a pilot, he was captured by an American whaleboat and taken to New Brunswick in New Jersey. He was, he says, “used well” by his captors, but “my mind was sorely distressed at the thought of being again reduced to slavery and separated from my wife and family.” Escape seemed difficult or impossible, given the breadth of the rivers he needed to cross to reach either New York or Staten Island. Sorrowing, King prepared to reconcile himself to servitude. But then he went to see a “lad” whom he had known in New York, who had attempted escape and been caught, and the excruciating agony of slavery rose again within him as he recalled the misery of bondage and the terror of flight.

  He had been taken prisoner and attempted to make his escape, but was caught twelve miles off. They tied him to the tail of a horse and in this manner brought him back to Brunswick. When I saw him, his feet were fastened in the stocks and at night both his hands. This was a terrifying sight to me as I expected to meet with the same kind of treatment if taken in the act of attempting to regain my liberty. I was thankful that I was not confined in a jail, and my master used me as well as I could expect; and indeed the slaves about Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York have as good victuals as many of the English for they have meat once a day and milk for breakfast and supper and what is better than all many of the masters send their slaves to school at night, that they may learn to read the Scriptures…But alas all these enjoyments could not satisfy me without liberty! Sometimes, I thought, if it was the will of God that I should be a slave, I was ready to resign myself to his will; but at other times I could not find the least desire to content myself in slavery.36

  As so often, and against steep odds, the burning thirst for freedom overcame the fear of capture and the understandable need for a settled life. Boston King stepped gingerly into the river near Perth Amboy at low tide around one o’clock in the morning, and then carried on wading deep into the cold black water even when he heard a sentry say, “I am sure I saw a man cross the river.” Later he wondered whether they were reluctant to fire at him for fear they would be punished for letting him get that far. But there were no shots. King reached the far bank and “when I got a little distance from the shore, I fell down upon my knees and thanked God for this deliverance.” He walked on through the night until dawn, then hid again until it got dark. Even so, he carefully followed the course of the road north through reedbeds and marshes, rather than walk directly on it in case he might be discovered. Opposite Staten Island he took another chance by cutting the rope of a moored whaleboat and paddling it over to the island. The narrative of the escape concludes with a statement so matter-of-fact that it belies what in the lives of slaves such as Boston King was a revolutionary alteration of their world: “the commanding officer, when informed of my case, gave me a passport and I proceeded to New York.”

  For escaped slaves, British New York was a haven. From newspaper advertisements for escaped slaves, at least 519 are known to have made their way there; but if, as was the case in South Carolina, one in four masters actually published runaway notices, the number rises steeply and credibly to more than 2,000.37 As in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, the closer New York and New Jersey came to war, the greater the number of runaways, so that by 1775 patrols were being mounted and pre-emptive arrests made of any parties of blacks seen before sunrise and after dusk. As deterrents against revolt, the usual brutal punishments—flogging, hanging in chains, the display of heads after execution—were resorted to with more frequency. But the black population of the region, 18,000 by 1771, had been difficult to control, precisely because it was either already partly urbanized or else dispersed in relatively small farms from Long Island to the lower Hudson valley. That dispersion might also have made it harder for blacks to organize their resistance, except for the fact that they represented, compared to the South, a better educated and often highly skilled workforce, undoubtedly alert to the shifting fortunes of the embattled armies and the implications of the war for their own destinies. Blacks around New York undoubtedly knew of Dunmore’s Proclamation, and even those who did not would certainly have been aware of General Howe’s formal reissue of freedom for service for those slaves who deserted rebels, made in 1778 and printed in the loyalist press over many months. William Fortune, a twenty-nine-year-old slave belonging to John Morgan of Harrington New Jersey, got to know of the Proclamation and departed.38 Two years earlier, a slave from Colt’s Neck in Monmouth County, New Jersey, known as Titus, shortly to be reborn as “Colonel Tye,” escaped from his Quaker master (for not all Quakers were averse to slaveowning) and made it all the way to Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. As one of a hundred black soldiers who survived the epidemics in Virginia and the Chesapeake, Titus came back to New Jersey with a vengeance and fought in the campaign of 1777. At the critical battle of Monmouth, where John Laurens fought on the other side, Tye took prisoner Elisha Shepherd, a soldier in the Monmouth County Militia, who could not have been happy about being marched off by Tye and incarcerated in the Sugar House in New York.39

  There were certainly blacks, especially from southern New Jersey, Rhode Island and Connecticut, who fought on the Patriot side, but with little prospect of liberation if they were not already free. In 1777 the American governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, wanted to include in the state constitution a clause allowing for abolition of slavery, but “the house thought of us in too critical a situation to enter in on the consideration of it.” When an abolitionist minister, Jacob Green, had the courage to preach from the pulpit, “I cannot but think that our Practicing Negro Slavery is the most crying sin in our land,” his church was destroyed by a hostile mob and the minister forced to keep quiet.40


  To see the embryo of the first authentically free African-American society one has to look to the Union Jack.41 At the end of 1776, when the American army evacuated New York, an incoming British soldier saw “black children of the slaves hugging and kissing each other” with joy and relief.42 Life during the years that followed would fall short of euphoria. Not long after the British took possession of New York a violent fire, possibly begun by rebel arsonists, destroyed a quarter of the city’s property, very little of which was rebuilt during the war. Many of the incoming and escaped blacks lived in “Canvas Town” tents in fields west of Broadway, and, during the terrible winter of 1779–80, when snow lay three feet deep, must have suffered cruelly from exposure to the cold. Others lived in overcrowded dormitory “Negro Barracks” in lower Manhattan on Broadway, Church Street, Great St George Street and Skinner Street, and in Brooklyn near the navy yard, where many of them worked as pilots and carpenters. Conditions, as usual, were perfect for typhus and smallpox.

  And yet, for all the hardship, this was a new life for African-Americans. They could worship at the Anglican Trinity Church, where they could also be legally married, something impossible under slavery. Their children could be baptized, and parents were encouraged to do so by Anglican ministers who also undertook dangerous baptizing missions into the neutral zone of eastern New Jersey, one alone performing six ceremonies a week. Blacks could go to the theatre—to see Othello if they liked, since Shakespeare underwent a sudden revival during the British occupation. There was horse-racing (so that Boston King could see racehorses without being beaten by the trainer) and boxing matches at which pugilists, such as Bill Richmond (the first great black boxer on either side of the Atlantic), fought under the patronage of the army in bare-knuckle contests, usually against white, especially Irish, opponents. Blacks could frequent taverns, where they could listen to their own banjo, drum and fiddle music, and go to the “Ethiopian Balls” where spectacularly dressed black women acted as hostesses and where, as in Charleston, blacks and whites danced freely together. This was, in its way, another small milestone: the first time that the two races had come together in any sort of social festivity. Predictably, the Patriot press thought the very idea of mixed-race dancing—the Sambos and the gentry having a ball—repellent and ridiculous: “At the entertainment lately given by the officers of the Royal African Regiment, his Excellency opened the ball with Colonel Quaco’s Lady and danced very gracefully to the music of a full orchestra of banjoes and hurdygurdies.”43 Never mind, the soldiers of the king marched to African-American music, or at least African-American musicians, for there was not a regiment that did not have its black (usually ex-slave) drummers, fifers and trumpeters. General Benedict Arnold had two trumpeters he particularly liked and who would leave with the loyalist diaspora for Nova Scotia when Arnold went back to England. And the Hessians, who also recruited blacks for their own regiment, had no fewer than eighty black drummers on their regimental books. For the Patriots, this music served as further proof of the beastliness of the foe: decadents entertained by primitives.

  Still, they knew from experience that, given a chance, the blacks would fight, if not enthusiastically for the British, then certainly against Patriots and sometimes with a fierceness that belied all the platitudes about feeble, comical Sambo. There may have been as many as eight hundred blacks, including the remnant of Dunmore’s Ethiopians, fighting for control of Brooklyn Heights at the battle of Long Island in 1776. In February 1777 deserters from the British army reported that there was a company of one hundred black soldiers stationed at Newport, Rhode Island. Although, in the interest of purging the army of what he presumed to be undesirable elements, Alexander Innes, inspector-general of the provincial corps in 1777, had ordered the discharge of blacks and mulattos (thus following the American precedent), hundreds of blacks who had escaped from owners in Essex, Monmouth, Somerset and Middlesex counties found work as cartmen and foragers in General Howe’s army as it pursued Washington’s retreat through New Jersey. As in the Southern theatre, they also served as woodcutters, labourers, batmen, boatmen, musicians, couriers and spies.

  It was along the ragged borderline between the two Americas, loyalist and Patriot—through the “neutral” zone of eastern and northern New Jersey; especially Monmouth and Bergen counties, and on the other side of the Hudson in southern Westchester—that the violence was most brutal and blacks were, as in the Carolinas, most enthusiastic in committing it themselves or in helping white loyalists to do so. It was here that old scores were settled; that slave and free black miniature armies used the war to make their points in cattle, property and blood. This is not to say that many of them were not also genuine enthusiasts for King George; undoubtedly many were, since they believed him to be their sponsor, protector and even liberator. What was so striking about the guerrilla war on the lower Hudson is that black and white loyalists acted together; and that some of the most implacable actions were taken against Patriot irregulars or militia identified as having acted brutally or summarily against Tories.

  It was, somehow, personal; or at any rate it certainly was for “Colonel” Tye, the rank given as an honorific by the British as they often did to soldiers not formally attached to the provincial corps but who, as in Tye’s case, merited some recognition. Tye’s “Black Brigade” does seem to have been connected, in the first instance, with a regiment of the Queen’s Rangers under the command of the famously pitiless Banastre Tarleton. For the most part, though, his companies operated as near-autonomous units targeting Patriot militia officers in northern New Jersey, or Patriot irregulars who themselves were conducting raids on British camps on Staten Island or Long Island.44 From Tye’s base at Sandy Hook detachments—often supported by the white loyalist Refugee Cowboys who operated alongside the Black Brigade—would sally out, usually at night, to hit isolated farms or houses, especially if they were known to have caches of arms or even cannon. Cattle were taken for the British army; guns spiked or seized; houses burned; prisoners taken back to New York and some of them, if thought guilty of violence against Tories, sometimes killed on the spot. Memories were long and mercy was in short supply. It was no accident that one of Tye’s first recorded raids in the summer of 1779 was at Shrewsbury in Monmouth County, where he had been a slave. Eighty head of cattle were taken, twenty horses and, doubtless satisfying for him, two prisoners.

  In the bleak winter of 1779–80 organized and sometimes armed units of blacks became important in supplying the army and the loyalist militia with fuel and cattle, while denying the supplies to the American side. At Fort Lee and especially at Bull’s Ferry, loyalist partisans (for that is really what they were) combined business and guerrilla war by establishing armed bases from which black woodcutters and foragers would go forth and take timber in Bergen County for both the army and civilian New York. Blockhouses were built (as at Kingsbridge on the southwest tip of what is now the Bronx, from which logs were floated to Manhattan) that were half warehouse, half fort, manned by 150 blacks and whites known as the Loyal Refugee Volunteers. When Patriot troops or militia, exasperated by the removal of valuable resources, attempted to wipe them out with a display of superior force they not infrequently ended up with a bloody nose.

  Often, the battles took the form of vendettas between rival bands of irregulars. At the end of March 1780 Tye took out John Russell, a Patriot marauder on Staten Island, burned his house and badly wounded his son. For a while in the spring and summer of 1780 Tye’s guerrilla army seemed so unstoppable that Governor Livingston of New Jersey declared martial law. It had no effect at all on Tye’s operations. In June, over the course of just two weeks, he killed one of the most conspicuous executioners of loyalists in Monmouth County at his house; then took twelve prisoners after an all-out battle at the house of one of the leaders of the Monmouth County Patriots (and a famous racehorse entrepreneur), Barnes Smock; and, finally, leading a force of nearly one hundred men, black and white, sacked the houses of Monmouth militia officers, taki
ng to Refugeetown at Sandy Hook eight prisoners, including a captain and the second major of the militia. Tye’s Black Brigade took no casualties at all.

  All this was a prelude, however, to getting to Tye’s main mark: a determined and courageous Patriot called Joshua Huddy, a captain in the Monmouth County militia. Huddy was someone out of the ordinary. He had married a Jewish widow from the little community known, alas, as “Jewstown” and had taken over her first husband’s tavern, which became a headquarters for the local Patriot militia in which Huddy served as captain. He had many raids on British-held Staten Island to his credit, so Tye’s attack on Huddy’s house at Colt’s Neck on the 1st of September 1780 was a showdown. For the black colonel, however, it went fatally wrong. Although massively outnumbered, Huddy and a woman friend, Lucretia Emmons, held off Tye and his men for two hours, fighting from room to room of the house at Tom’s River, New Jersey. Eventually the house was torched, smoking Huddy out (he later escaped by jumping off the whaleboat taking him to New York), but during the fighting Tye had been shot in the wrist, a wound that developed into the lockjaw that killed him not long afterwards.45