Rough Crossings Read online

  Tye’s death did not end the raiding wars around New York. He was succeeded as leader of the brigade by Colonel Stephen Blucke, a literate free black from Barbados and an officer in the Black Pioneers and Guides. Even as the war was ostensibly winding down after Cornwallis’s capitulation at Yorktown in October 1781, there were still some determined acts of resistance. When General Anthony Wayne attacked the 120 defenders of the Bull’s Ferry blockhouse with 1,000 troops, he failed to storm it and sustained 60 casualties. William Luce’s armed whaleboats, almost always in the hands of black boatmen and known as the Armed Boat Company, continued to hit Patriot posts, and in January 1782 there was a water battle between rebel and loyalist whaleboats off Long Island. On the 23rd of March that year the Armed Boat Company, together with forty Associated Loyalists, attacked a Patriot blockhouse at Tom’s River, killing and wounding several and taking prisoner most of the garrison. Among those most unhappy to be captured and transferred to a prison ship was Tye’s old nemesis, Captain Joshua Huddy.

  The struggle was bitter to the end because so much was at stake. Simsa Herring, William Dunk and Thomas Smith had all left masters at Tappan; Lydia Tomkins had left her master, Elnathan Hart, at Philipse Manor on the Westchester side of the Hudson; Anna had left Edmund Warde in East Chester; Gabriel Johnson had left James Petsworth in Quibbletown, New Jersey; Cathern van Sayl had left John VanderVeer in Monmouth County; Anthony Loyal, of Monmouth County, was free but his wife, Hagar, was not; Thomas Browne had left Ahasuerus Merselis at Hackensack—these and thousands like them around New York were desperate to hang on to their liberty, while they were dimly, terrifyingly aware that their eventual fate was being decided far, far away in the South.46

  RIDING THE THERMALS in the damp Virginian heat, a keen-eyed turkey vulture (and there were plenty of them in the dog days of summer in 1781) would have picked out below, curls of smoke from newly burned houses and fields, a puff here, a puff there; and along the roads beside those charred fields, the gold and green turned to brown and black, a long defile of soldiers, cannon, carts and wagons pulled by patiently plodding horses, the “everlasters,” as they were called in the South,47 their heads breaking the rhythm of the walk to shake away the flies; in some of the open carts heaps of groaning men in dirty bandages; then sleeker mounts, with or without riders, walking not even at much of a trot; an inexplicably sudden charge of light cavalry exploding out of the line three abreast, tearing off somewhere as if they knew where they were going, kicking up red dust and disappearing into the woods or beyond a knoll; and behind the men and the carts and the guns, cattle, driven along and lowing as they went; and behind them, with the baggage train, more men and women and children, most of them black, dressed, when they were dressed at all, in a brilliant motley, as if returning home from a carnival a long way away. There would have been men in silk breeches and nothing else; others in perruques and silk waistcoats, their arms protruding; women in corsets and laced bodices; others in flashy, long-trailing house peignoirs; everything taken from the wardrobes of masters and mistresses who, if they were sensible, had long since high-tailed it out of the theatre of action.48

  Behind the curling train of the army there were: geese, hogs, even cattle butchered but, in the haste to move on, left unconsumed beside smouldering fires or piled up in open wagons.49 But then something still more pungent: the bodies of black men, women and children, near naked, covered with the blisters and running sores of smallpox. “Within these days past,” wrote a Connecticut soldier, almost certainly inoculated, as were the vast majority of the Continental army, “I have marched past 18 or 20 Negroes that lay dead by the way-side, putrifying with the small pox…these poor creatures having no care taken of them, many crawled into the bushes about & died where they lie, infecting the air around with intolerable stench & great danger.” Most of these unfortunates were simply jettisoned, much as had been the case with Dunmore’s forces in 1776. But one letter from General Alexander Leslie in July 1781 suggests a much more sinister intent. Announcing that he would “distribute” seven hundred smallpox-infected Negroes “about the rebel plantations,” the general was obviously attempting to spread the disease among the American army, much as the British had done with infected blankets in the Indian wars, as it closed in on the increasingly defensive British manoeuvres.50 This was the last military use that the British generals had for the blacks who had followed them with dogged faithfulness.

  And that is what Cornwallis’s army was capable of as it accomplished the remarkable feat of defeating itself, rather like Laocoön thrashing in the tightening coils of serpents and thus ensuring strangulation. That the North Carolina and Virginia marches were its endgame no one could have predicted. After the crushing defeat of the Americans under General Horatio Gates at the battle of Camden in August 1780 the cause of the Crown looked anything but done for. Despite a brutal war of competitive marauding in South Carolina, each side outbidding the other in violence to civilians as well as to soldiers, the South, and Virginia in particular, seemed open for a final and definitive conquest. Or so, at any rate, it seemed to Cornwallis, who in late April 1781 decided to take his troops from North Carolina into Virginia for what he thought would be the knock-out blow, north towards the tobacco country by the shore. Now you would think, even with the promise (so Cornwallis would later claim) of reinforcements from Clinton’s army in the North, that redcoats and loyalists, black and white, would have seen quite enough of the Chesapeake, of the broken shore with its sandy islands and inlets, marshes and pines. After Benedict Arnold had torched and pillaged Richmond (with Governor Jefferson in situ) he had returned to the scene of Dunmore’s brief triumph and eventual disaster, Kemp’s Landing and Great Bridge, in a second attempt to create a fortified position blocking the route to and from North Carolina. This time, in March 1781, it was black labourers and Pioneers who built the fort and demolished the long access bridge. The outcome was not much better than it had been for Dunmore. Lafayette’s army and Destouches’ fleet converged on Great Bridge; the blackflies and gnats of spring began to bite; and black soldiers and labourers started to go down with fevers, the speciality of the Virginia lowlands.51 Only the news of a squadron sent from New York and the arrival of another two thousand men under General William Phillips got them off the Great Bridge more or less intact. The raiding started again up the James River: a flotilla taken at Portsmouth and tobacco chests burned.

  For all the chaos and brutality; for all the untended sickness and the abandoned sick; for all the slaves forced on to public works, some of them even sent back to masters; for all the chronic uncertainty about their eventual fate; for all the rumours (mostly untrue) that they would be sent to the Caribbean and sold; wherever the British army went, in big battalions or small, in North Carolina and then in Virginia, slaves still continued to pour into their camps by the score, then in hundreds and finally thousands.52 Many of these were slaves who had initially decided to sit out the war on their plantations, fearful of being caught by American patrols, especially after it had been made clear to local American commanders that “severe examples must be made of all negroes who carry provisions of any kind, aid or assist or carry any intelligence to…the enemy…all such negroes shall suffer death.”53 But staying put could also seem like a death sentence since it made them targets for the brutal raids carried out by both sides. Crops were cut even while they were green, and animals slaughtered. In June 1781 John Cruden, the loyalist Commissioner for Sequestered Estates in Charleston reported that many plantations were “totally destitute of that most indispensable necessity”—the harvest. “The slaves in general were almost, if not altogether naked, very scanty supplies of cloathing having been attainable for many years.”54

  So, the ongoing social catastrophe accelerated the flow of slaves to the British army, with the black refugees hoping desperately for some source of sustenance, even when the choice seemed to be between dying of hunger or dying of smallpox, since yet another wave of the disease, along with “cam
p fever,” had hit the British camps. This was the time when the Middletons in South Carolina and the Lees, the Carters, Jefferson, George Mason and Madison in Virginia all lost substantial numbers of slaves to the British. William Lee had all sixty-five of his go; and his brother Richard Henry reported that neighbours of his had “lost every slave they had in the world…this has been the general case of all those who were near the enemy.” Of the seven hundred slaves belonging to Thomas Nelson, the Secretary of the Virginia Council, only eighty to a hundred remained.55 And while they exchanged laments for their losses, the planters were forced to concede that they had never seen or heard the British coercing the blacks to join them; in which case the phenomenon could be explained only by “fraud.”

  Cornwallis had decidedly mixed feelings about this immense, un-stoppable migration. Paradoxically, the closer the British came to a conquest of the South; the more reluctant he became to engineer, even inadvertently, the wholesale destruction of its slaveholding social system. Loyalists, after all, had been guaranteed in the possession of their negroes. Some of the British commanders, notably Tarleton, came from dynasties of slave traders; and all of them were anxious not to alienate “neutrals” in the South, whose allegiance might well make the difference between victory and defeat. Whatever else he was, Cornwallis was emphatically no abolitionist. In South Carolina he had already been sufficiently anxious about the effect of so many black camp followers on the army’s resources that he ordered those without a proper “Mark,” indicating to which regiment or military department they were attached, to be driven, or if necessary, flogged out of camp. But it was like Canute resisting the tide. Later in the campaign as he slogged from one end of North Carolina to the other, he dealt with the inflow of yet more slaves by assigning as many as six, male and female, as servants, maids, cooks, laundresses and batmen to each of his officers and one to each of the NCOs. By the time the campaign turned north to Virginia the army was like an immense swarm of red soldier ants, marking a swathe of voracious destruction and consumption through the plantation South, grabbing what it could before its enemies got there first.

  Whatever Cornwallis thought of the blacks, they still thought of him as benefactor and protector, right to the bitter end when he would do something as predictable as it was monstrous. But in August 1781, en route to that ultimate calamity, he was to Sergeant Murphy Steele of the Black Pioneers the man appointed by God to lay low the new Pharaoh: George Washington. Go down, Moses-Murphy, the vision had said to him, go down down and tell them thus it must be!

  AUGUST 16TH, 1781. OFFICE OF THE ADJUTANT-GENERAL

  Murphy Stiel [sic] of the Black Pioneers Says, That about a fortnight ago at Noon, when he was in the Barracks of The Company in Water Street he heard a Voice like a Man’s (but saw no body) which called him by name and desired him to go and tell the Commander in Chief, Sir Henry Clinton to send word to Genl Washington That he must Surrender himself and his Troops to the King’s Army and that if he did not the wrath of God would fall upon them.

  That if General Washington did not Surrender, the Comm. In Chief was then to tell him that he would raise all the Blacks in America to fight against him. The Voice also said that King George must be acquainted with the above.

  That the same Voice repeated the aforesaid Message to him several times afterwards and three days ago in Queen Street insisted that he should tell it to Sir Henry Clinton upon which he answered that he was afraid to do it as he did not see the Person that spoke. That the Voice then said that he must tell it, that he was not to see him for that he was the Lord and that he must acquaint Sir Henry Clinton that it was the Lord that spoke this; and to tell Sir Henry also, that he and Lord Cornwallis was to put an end to this Rebellion, for that the Lord would be on their Side.56

  God must have been joking, for he let Cornwallis march or stagger into the trap carefully laid by Washington and Rochambeau, whilst Clinton let him stay there. The two British commanders had not seen eye to eye over Cornwallis’s obstinate decision to take the campaign north into Virginia, the tardy timing of which determined its eventual fate. But if Clinton had not been deceived into thinking that an attack on New York was imminent and decided therefore to stay put, he might have put obstacles in the way of Washington’s move south and perhaps have prevented the union of French and American forces closed in on Cornwallis’s dug-in position on the York peninsula.

  The siege began on the 23rd of September and would end almost a month later with the capitulation. British America, then, ended where it had begun more than 150 years earlier in the reign of King James I: on the Chesapeake. The French fleet under de Grasse prevented an escape into the bay, and French and American troops sealed off exit routes by land. Bombardment began and was returned. By the second week of October, ammunition and food had run disastrously low. A desperate British sortie was attempted on the night of the 15th of October, but was pushed back. After that, the outcome was just a matter of time. Cornwallis took to sulking in his tent.

  On both sides of the redoubts, embrasures and trenches at Yorktown were thousands of blacks. A German observer wrote that as many as one in four of the Continental soldiers were black; which means that in addition to the one hundred or so of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, and many hundreds of slaves and free blacks from St Domingue (who were not far from their own revolution), an extraordinary percentage of the Southern troops must have been black substitutes. But the notion, much aired, that this represented an “integrated” army ought to be qualified by one of the few illustrations made of a black Continental soldier: the very image of a grinning Sambo, complete with grotesquely enlarged goggling eyes, thick lips and exotically plumed hat.

  At least, however, the black American soldiers were decently fed, dressed and, most important of all, inoculated. On the British side, the terrible distress that hit the black “Followers of Army and Flag,” as well as the Pioneers, only got worse as the siege tightened. In mid-October Cornwallis, who had already cast off the sickest to fend for themselves in the woods, and who had ordered the slaughter of horses to pre-empt their death by starvation, now took the brutal decision to expel the blacks from the camp. “We drove back to the enemy all of our black friends,” wrote the Hessian Johann Ewald, “whom we had taken along to despoil the countryside. We had used them to good advantage and set them free and now, with fear and trembling they had to face the reward of their cruel masters.” Some of the British senior officers were deeply troubled by what they had to do. General Charles O’Hara, who would undertake the formal capitulation a week later (since Cornwallis declared himself “indisposed”), wrote that “it ought not to be done,” knowing that the expulsion was a death sentence for those who were ill, and a sentence of re-enslavement for those who were not. Although he turned away four hundred blacks in his own charge, he attempted to leave them in the care of relatively sympathetic local Virginians whom he asked to be humane to the terrified and suffering blacks.57

  Black drummers beat the muffled slow march out of Yorktown, just as they had beat the triumph at Charleston eighteen months earlier. John Laurens (at liberty after a prisoner exchange), whom Washington had appointed commissioner in charge of the surrender formalities, refused to grant the British the dignity of a march out with colours, bitterly remembering Clinton’s refusal of the same courtesy to the defeated Americans in South Carolina. The ignominious capitulation was not just the best possible news for the American cause; it was also the beginning of the end of the great American slave uprising. White Virginians lost no time at all in rounding up as many errant slaves as they could, and if humanity was piously invoked as the reason, so was property. Governor Benjamin Harrison—who had lost slaves himself—made it an immediate high priority to track down as many fugitives as could be found and have them returned to their masters. On the day of the surrender General George Weedon posted sentinels along the shoreline of the York peninsula to prevent any blacks from escaping to British ships. (Despite everything they had suffered, multitudes
still made desperate efforts to do just that.) Apprehensive blacks in Savannah (where a corps of 150 armed ex-slaves served in an infantry regiment under Colonel Thomas Brown) and in Charleston could have been under no illusions about what lay ahead for them should they too be discarded by, or taken from, their British protectors. In April 1782, 46 loyalists were taken from the British ship Alert; 11 of them were black and were promptly auctioned at a tavern in Trenton, New Jersey.

  When the British prime minister, Lord North, heard the news of the surrender at Yorktown he famously cried, “Oh God, then it is all over!” It was indeed with him and his government. But it was far from self-evident that, from a purely military standpoint, the war had been irreversibly lost. Among those who refused to throw in the towel was Lord Dunmore, who returned to Charleston in December 1781 after the British position to the north had collapsed. There was an air of defiant unreality in the South Carolinan city, evidently mingled with some apprehension. There were still thousands of blacks there in both military and civilian work. Lavish “Ethiopian Balls” were held, such as the one given at 99 Meeting Street by Hagar Roussell, Izabella Pinckney and Mary Fraser, three black women who had usurped their former mistresses’ names in a neat reversal of the conventions of slaveholding nomenclature, and that so disgusted Daniel Stevens, an American officer with General Greene, that he held it as a mark of the “shame and perfidy [that] the officers of that once great Nation [Britain] has arriv’d too [sic].”58