Rough Crossings Page 16

  Restive for action, Dunmore listened attentively to the Commissioner for Forfeited Estates, John Cruden, who insisted that all was not lost; that no fewer than ten thousand black troops “inured to fatigue” could be mobilized and equipped and “when these men are raised, there can be no doubt that with the force here [in Charleston] they will be able to drive the enemy from the province and open a large door for our friends from North Carolina to join us, till such time as it may be policy, and we have a sufficient command of the sea to enter Virginia.”59 The blacks were to be drawn from the “estates of our enemy” as well as from loyal masters who would be compensated. Endorsing the plan in a letter to Clinton in February, Dunmore added that he would give his black soldiers not just a guarantee of their freedom at the end of the war, but a guinea each “and that they may be fully satisfied that this promise will be held inviolate, it must be given by the officer appointed to command them.”60

  The caution that Dunmore had shown in Virginia seven years earlier was now being thrown to the wind. What he and Cruden, and a number of fight-to-the-end generals, such as Alexander Leslie, had in mind was nothing less than an all-out revolution against the revolution; a huge insurrection, which, together with the stronghhold at Charleston, would make South Carolina (notwithstanding the fact that its countryside was overrun with Patriot partisans) the last-ditch centre of bitter resistance. Daniel Stevens, the South Carolina Patriot who had been scandalized by the “Ethiopian Ball,” was even more outraged when he discovered that “the British tyrants, lost to all sense of honour, have arm’d our slaves against us.”61 At the end of March 1782 (when violent actions were still being carried out by the black and white loyalist irregulars in New York as well), Leslie carried out some hard-riding British cavalry actions in an attempt to save blacks on loyalist plantations from being taken by the Americans and to take others from rebel properties. In July he created a regiment of mounted black dragoons, which included ex-slave captain March Kingston, two lieutenants, one of whom was Mingo Leslie, three sergeants and twenty-three mounted black troopers, who fought a skirmish with Francis Marion’s soldiers at Wadboo River. The regiment stayed in being for a least three more months.62 Although Leslie made clear to Lord George Germain that he himself had no desire to command the new black brigade, the man whom most of the officers believed was right for the commission was James Moncrief, who had been in charge of the defences at Charleston and had proved himself a considerate officer of black troops.

  But Moncrief was himself a realist. In March 1782 he was more concerned that the blacks who had worked tirelessly for him “and who look up to me for their protection in this part of the country” should not be betrayed, like so many others, and that promises made to them should be honoured. Writing directly to Clinton, Moncrief reminded him of “the many advantages which his Majesty’s service has derived from their labour in carrying on the different works in this and the province of Georgia. I would therefore request that your Excellency would be pleased to direct upon what footing they are to be freed before I take my departure.” And he warned that “if the want of proper care and that degree of attention which is necessary to be given them should prove the means of making them lay [a]side the confidence which they always placed in us, it will be very difficult to keep them together, and should any future service be going forward which may require the labour of men carrying on works, I would beg leave to mention as my opinion that great advantage may be gained by [employing] a Brigade of the Negroes of this country.”63 But Clinton was in no position to authorize anything any more. Humiliated, embittered and embroiled in undignified rows with Cornwallis over who bore greater culpability for the fiasco in Virginia, the commander-in-chief had resigned before he could be recalled.

  That same month, March 1782, North’s ministry in London was replaced by a government led by the Marquis of Rockingham, a long-time critic of the American war and strongly in favour of entering peace negotiations, the basic premise of which would be the granting of independence. But a handful, at least, of the king’s black soldiers were not ready, and would never be ready, to sue for peace with their former masters. In 1786, three years after the Treaty of Paris had been signed, a band of some three hundred former slaves, trained in arms by the British during the war, were still operating as freebooting partisans (or, depending on your point of view, outlaws) on both sides of the Savannah River. At a camp on Bear Creek in Effingham County on the border of Georgia and South Carolina, the blacks had created a fortified village, one mile long and four hundred feet wide, within which twenty-one houses had been built for shelter. The citadel was protected by palings, and a barrier just over four feet high of piled logs and sharpened breastworks. Crops were raised to feed what was, in effect, a free black settlement in the middle of the Savannah River marshes—the same swamps through which Quamino Dolly had guided Archie Campbell’s troops seven years earlier to the gates of the city itself. The blacks were so successful and so famous among the field hands thereabouts that, according to Samuel Elbert, one of the officers of the Georgia militia assigned the job of tackling them, “fears were entertained of a servile insurrection.”

  In May 1786 Governor John Mathews, who had served with Nathanael Greene, ordered a descent on the camp at Bear Creek. In a four-day operation, using South Carolinan as well as Georgian troops and Catawba Indians, the fort was penetrated and taken. The houses were burned and the crops destroyed, although, according to Elbert, “numbers escaped who, concealing themselves in tangled brakes, continued, as opportunity occurred, their work of theft and violence.”

  To the affronted slaveholders, the blacks of Bear Creek were just a criminal gang. But to the blacks of the South they were something more. They were exactly what they had decided to call themselves: “The King of England’s Soldiers.”64

  V

  THE FIFTH OF MAY 1783: a hostile day on the Hudson; the sky low, the wind easterly and the dull surface of the river torn by waves slapping angrily against the hulls of two British frigates as they beat ponderously upstream. In this weather the Greyhound lagged and the Perseverance (thirty-six guns, master Captain Lutwyche) persevered, as did its principal passenger, Sir Guy Carleton, His Majesty’s last commander-in-chief of British forces in the thirteen revolted provinces of America.1 He was sailing to an appointment with George Washington, although against the advice of his friend the loyalist Chief Justice, William Smith, who had told Carleton he should not do such a thing until British prisoners had been satisfactorily exchanged and the Americans had agreed to restore confiscated loyalist property or to recompense its owners for the loss. In any case, Smith suspected that Washington would “fish” for intelligence and that the “ceremonial civilities” of such occasions would cause the loyalists of New York acute pain. But Carleton was determined, and Smith accepted the invitation to accompany him, to ensure that no more careless damage would be done to the loyalist cause.2

  Sir Guy Carleton had been in America for exactly a year and had yet to meet Washington. For months he had been seeking just such a conversation, but now that had been arranged—at Washington’s invitation, not his—Carleton was feeling surprisingly out of sorts. It was not just the inconvenient touch of ague that made him wheeze and sweat, but rather a spreading sourness within. Generally, Sir Guy was not a bilious fellow. He had always sought to do his best by the Empire, which meant taking as well as giving knocks. But since returning to America the previous spring following the calamitous surrender at Yorktown, and at the express request of the king himself, he had been undercut and undercut until he had no idea of the ground on which he stood, or, indeed, where there was any left on which to stand. When he disembarked in New York his ambition had been noble, his resolve firm. He would bring rebellious America back to where it truly belonged: within the benevolence of a magnanimous, chastened (yes, he would admit as much) but more pliable British Empire. Veteran soldier though he was, Carleton knew that such a reunion could never be accomplished by force of arms alone. It
would need altered dispositions and wise reforms on both sides of the ocean.

  Beneath the impeccable coat and heavy frogging of the Irish military man, then, was an incurable romantic on the subject of British America. His large, dark eyes would mist at the thought of it. For how could Sir Guy not be keenly sensible to its splendour when he had been at Quebec with his friend James Wolfe and seen him die a hero’s death so that British America might live? He had inherited the legacy; defended Quebec against the rebel invasion of Canada; turned back Benedict Arnold’s forces on Lake George, resisted the siege that followed and stoically forbore when he was blamed for failing to take the frontier fort of Ticonderoga, and, worse, the ensuing disaster that was, in truth, the fault of his military colleagues Johnny Burgoyne and William Howe. But Canada had not become the fourteenth state of the rebel republic, so there was still a British America. Like many of his old friends and companions in arms, Carleton persisted in believing that the rebellion had been the work of a few headstrong and malevolent individuals, who time and again had mischievously frustrated efforts to abate the fury. What had been the result of their success? The wreck of the country; havoc and misery; orphans and widows. The same malcontents had purported to establish an independency that he knew could not possibly be the wish of most Americans who, given proper assurances that taxation would be entirely their own business, would like nothing better than to return to their former allegiance. The trouble, Carleton believed, had been the damnable revolutionary assemblies, too easily taken and held in thrall by vicious demagogues. Once Britain’s aristocratic constitution—a system admirably contrived to ensure that the weight of interest prevailed over the heat of faction—was transplanted to America, moderation and temperance, the source of political felicity, would assuredly return and British America would be possessed once more of its brilliant, commanding future.

  Or so Carleton understood his mission to be on his arrival on the 5th of May 1782.3 His official appointment, shared along with Admiral Robert Digby, was, after all, “Commissioner for restoring peace and granting pardon to the Revolted Provinces.” Sir Henry Clinton, the butt of rebel derision and loyalist obloquy, was about to depart for England—and good riddance too. On the 22nd of February, on the motion of General Conway, an old friend of America, the House of Commons had passed a motion to cease offensive operations, much to the displeasure of loyalists crowded in New York. In March Lord North’s government had fallen, to be replaced by a ministry led by the Marquis of Rockingham and Lord Shelburne, both of whom had thought the war, from its beginning, imprudent and unjust. None of which meant that Shelburne in particular was in favour of independence, for up until now, at least, he had been emphatically against it. So even at this moment Carleton did not think all was lost—not even, should it come to it, the war. There remained eighteen thousand British, Hessian and loyalist troops in and around New York and he had been dependably informed that, with rebel militia going home in multitudes, Washington would have difficulty in getting together much of an army for a further spring campaign. Carleton had ordered two thousand German troops, ostensibly going to Nova Scotia, to decamp to New York instead. And Vermont, to which many New England loyalists had gone, was said to be crowded with friends of Britain and on the brink of repudiating Congress. As for the Royal Navy, his confidence that it would get the upper hand over the French, breaking any blockade, had been triumphantly vindicated by Admiral Rodney’s destruction of de Grasse’s fleet in the Caribbean in April—a retribution for the French admiral’s part in the humiliation in Virginia. So, for a few months in the spring of 1782, everything seemed, to Carleton, in abeyance, and an independent America far from a foregone conclusion. He had been besieged by fervent loyalists imploring him, should Congress prove unyielding, to march.

  But then, in July, as the rebels were celebrating the sixth anniversary of their Declaration, had come the deadly blow. A long-awaited letter of instruction from the new government had arrived in which Lord Shelburne, freshly designated Secretary for Colonial and Home Affairs (an office he seemed to have invented), condescended to inform the commander-in-chief that there was, in effect, nothing more to command. Unbeknownst to Carleton, the government had decided to accept Congress’s adamant position: any negotiations must presuppose the fact of national independence. All at once Carleton’s lofty vision of a repaired, restored and reunited British-American empire vanished like a castle in the air. He was told that his primary concern was now the detachment of America from its unfortunate dalliance with France, and to that end he should busy himself with “captivating hearts.” But Carleton was a general; in his own mind a statesman too, not much concerned with exercises in captivation. Instead of being the proconsul of a regenerated British America, he was now reduced to being merely an “inspector of embarcations.” His task, apparently, was simply to manage the removal of all British troops, and as many loyalists as wished to depart, in as orderly and a timely fashion as was possible. (Even this, he realized as he was pressed by the Americans to do the same, would be a Herculean task given the shortage of vessels.) Worst of all, it appeared that the discussions concerning a peace treaty taking place in Paris between British and American emissaries had already conceded independence. Not content with what Carleton let it be known he thought “a capital error,” these negotiations were now proceeding without any reference whatsoever to His Majesty’s commander-in-chief in America itself.

  How was he to deliver these stony truths to the loyalists who had looked to Carleton as their champion and protector? They had cheered him on his arrival, and admired his fortitude in dealing with Washington over matters such as the exchange of prisoners and the securing of their confiscated property. Should it come to it, they expected him to be their general, a match even for Washington and a welcome change from the dismal procession of vainglorious incompetents who had preceded him. All this accumulated esteem, however, evaporated on the 2nd of August, when Carleton, much pained at having to be the agent of an act of monstrous bad faith, informed leading loyalists of what the government in London truly had in mind for them. William Smith, Chief Justice in New York and one of Carleton’s earliest and best friends in America, was aghast. He too had been imagining a new kind of British America: one with an American Parliament invested with full fiscal authority, thus removing the great source of rancour without the trauma of imperial separation. Now he was being told that, since the British government had already conceded independence, all such speculation was futile. In response he told Carleton that so unprincipled and cowardly an act of betrayal would not only cause consternation in loyal America but must certainly “light up civil war in Great Britain.” Government ministers would not be safe from assassination on the streets of London for their infamy. The abandonment was so iniquitous, Smith informed Carleton, that in their rage good loyalists were capable of throwing themselves into the arms of the Most Catholic King of France.

  When the news got out to a wider circle later that month, horrified loyalists urged Carleton to fight. If he would lead an army of whites and blacks, they would follow, for death was preferable to living in republican America. When the general declined the role of leading a last-ditch resistance his standing with the loyalists plummeted, no matter how much he protested (mostly in private) that he too felt deeply the ignominy of so craven an accommodation. A week later a group of leading New York loyalists petitioned the king himself to reconsider the views of his government—but the sovereign, alas, seemed bafflingly deaf to their entreaties.

  Overnight an entire community of three-quarters of a million souls, 100,000 in New York alone, had been written off in the greatest loss-cutting exercise in British history. “Our fate seems now decreed,” one of them wrote bitterly, “and we are left to mourn our days in wretchedness [with] no other resource but to submit to the tyranny of exulting enemeys or settle a new country.”4 Loyalists would have the choice of exile or of believing Carleton when he told them that Congress would “recommend” the restitution
of confiscated property for those opting to stay in the new republic. (The “recommendation” was never included in the published form of the treaty, which was as well since it was mostly ignored.) Carleton, shamed by the dishonour of it, wanted to resign; but he decided for the moment to stay, if only as the conscientious steward of the uprooted loyalists. On his own initiative, and knowing from first-hand experience the trials of Canadian settlement, he promised them free transportation, substantial grants of land and free supplies for a year, provisions that the home government subsequently endorsed. It was the least, thought Carleton, the guilty could do for the betrayed.

  Predictably, the peremptory liquidation of British America generated rage and panic amongst the beleaguered loyalists holed up in Savannah, Charleston and New York, islands of British allegiance in a tidal surge of American patriotic euphoria and recrimination. If the situation looked forbidding, none had better cause for apprehension than the tens of thousands of black slaves who, one way or another, had served the British cause, and who (if they had them), clung to their “certificates of service” as a lifeline to freedom. Those certificates were, to be sure, just pieces of paper, albeit printed with words that had never before seen the light of day in America: an IOU liberty, the entitlement to go where the bearers pleased and to work at whatever they wished. And although such entitlement may have been contemptuously brushed aside by loyalists hustling their own slaves on to ships bound for the West Indies, or by army officers grown accustomed to having their own servile orderlies, or by the unscrupulous, who, in the economic sauvequi-peut that accompanied the evacuations, thought to profit from the sale of blacks in the Bahamas or Jamaica, for all that, there were plenty of cases where the scrap of paper was honoured. One such certificate, held by Phillis Thomas, a free black in Charleston, licensed her to “go to the island of Jamaica or elsewhere at her own option.”5