Rough Crossings Read online

  By contrast, the proclamation of John Murray, Lord Dunmore, the last colonial governor of Virginia, from HMS William on the 7th of November 1775 unequivocally promised outright liberty to all slaves escaping from rebel plantations, reaching British lines and serving in some capacity with the army. The promise was made from military rather than humanitarian motives, and for every British Freedom who lived to see it kept, there were many more who would be unconscionably betrayed. Yet from opportunist tactics, some good might still arise. Dunmore’s words, sanctioned by the British government and reiterated by Generals Howe and Clinton (who extended the definition of those entitled to liberty to black women and children), took wing in the world of the slaves, and they themselves took off, in their tens of thousands, shortly after. Seeing the Revolutionary War through the eyes of enslaved blacks turns its meaning upside down. In Georgia, the Carolinas and much of Virginia the vaunted war for liberty was, from the spring of 1775 to the late summer of 1776, a war for the perpetuation of servitude. The contortions of logic were so perverse, yet so habitual, that George Washington could describe Dunmore as “that arch traitor to the rights of humanity” for promising to free slaves and indentured servants, whilst those who kept them in bondage were heroes of liberty.

  For blacks, the news that the British Were Coming was a reason for hope, celebration and action. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, a Pennsylvania Lutheran pastor, knew what he was talking about when he wrote that the black population “secretly wished the British army might win for then all Negro slaves will gain their freedom. It is said that this sentiment is universal among all the Negroes in America.”10 And every so often truth broke through the armour of Patriot casuistry. In December 1775, Lund Washington wrote to his cousin George of both blacks and indentured servants, who were departing from the Washington properties at speed, that “there is not a man of them but would leave us if they believ’d they could make there [sic] escape…Liberty is sweet.”11

  The Founding Fathers were themselves candid about the extent of the disappearance of their slaves, not least because so many of them experienced serious personal losses. During the few weeks in the spring of 1781, when Lord Cornwallis’s troops were not far from his home, Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, who had seen his own attempt to incorporate a paragraph attacking slavery in the Declaration of Independence stricken out by Congress, lost thirty of his own. He believed—and the judgement of most modern historians, such as Benjamin Quarles, Gary Nash, Sylvia Frey, Ellen Gibson Wilson and James Walker concurs—that at least thirty thousand had escaped from Virginia plantations in attempts to reach the British lines.12 The same went for the rest of the South. As early as 1858 the historian David Ramsey estimated that two-thirds of the slaves in South Carolina had run away; many, though certainly not all, defecting to the British. In all, between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand slaves left the plantations during the war.13 The more sententious the noises coming from the Patriot leaders about American enslavement to the odious Hanoverian tyrant, the more their own slaves voted with their feet. Ralph Henry, for example, evidently took his master Patrick Henry’s theatrical announcement of “Give me Liberty or give me death” very much to heart, but not quite in the way its author intended, since he ran away at the earliest opportunity to the British lines.14 (Ironically, that same slogan would be invoked as a rallying cry by black abolitionists in the nineteenth century and black liberators such as Malcom X in the twentieth!) Others among the signatories of the document which asserted that “all men are born free and equal” and who lost slaves were James Madison and Benjamin Harrison (father of the ninth president, William Henry Harrison), who lost twenty, including Anna and Pompey Cheese, who were destined to make it all the way to New York, Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. The South Carolinan signatory Arthur Middleton lost fifty; Governor John Rutledge’s Pompey and Flora went over to the British; and Edward Rutledge, the youngest signer of the Declaration and the ardent opponent of black enrolment in the American army, also lost slaves. General Francis Marion, the “swamp fox” of South Carolina, whose slaves are depicted in Mel Gibson’s movie fantasy The Patriot as eager to follow their master into the fight for freedom, had at least one, Abraham Marrian, who defected to the British. He may have been among the small company of mounted Black Dragoons mobilized in the summer of 1782 who fought (more plausibly) against Marion, not alongside him, at Wadboo Plantation, South Carolina.15 And, not least, while George Washington was encamped in early 1776 on Cambridge Common, wrestling with arguments, pro and con, about the desirability of recruiting blacks, his own slave, Henry Washington, born in West Africa, was finding his way to the king’s lines. In exile with other black loyalists in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, Washington would describe himself, movingly, as a “farmer,” but it was the Union Jack that protected his forty acres and his freedom.16

  The story of this mass flight, aptly characterized by Gary Nash as the Revolutionary War’s “dirty little secret,” is shocking in the best sense, in that it forces an honest and overdue rethinking of the war as involving, at its core, a third party.17 This third party of African-Americans, moreover, accounted for 20 percent of the entire population of 2.5 million colonists, rising in Virginia to as much as 40 percent. When it came to the blacks caught up in their struggle, neither side, British nor American, behaved very well. But in the end, as British Freedom and multitudes like him appreciated (even when they happened to be free blacks already), it was the royal, rather than the republican, road that seemed to offer a surer chance of liberty. Although the history that unfolded from the entanglement between black desperation and British paternalism would often prove to be bitterly tragic, it was, nonetheless, a formative moment in the history of African-American freedom. In Sergeant Thomas Peters, it produced the first identifiable African-American political leader.18

  Born an Egbe prince, Peters was enslaved by the French, taken to Louisiana, flogged and branded for repeated attempts at flight, then sold to a plantation owner in Wilmington, North Carolina, from where he escaped to the British. Sworn into the Pioneers by Captain George Martin, he was twice wounded in combat and promoted to sergeant. Subsequently he settled, first on the north shore of Nova Scotia and then in New Brunswick, becoming a petitioner to the Crown in London on behalf of his fellow blacks. Peters was an authentic captain of his people: tenacious, brave and, though illiterate, evidently articulate, from the indirect evidence of a succession of whites, all offended by his presumption. That he is (with a few honourable exceptions) conspicuously missing from the pantheon of African-American heroes, a name utterly foreign to high school history texts in the United States, is a scandal explained entirely by the inconvenient fact that Peters happened to fight for the Wrong Side. The same is true for blacks in Boston who chose the British rather than the American cause. Crispus Attucks has been canonized as one of the fallen in the Boston Massacre, when British troops shot down rioters in 1770. But the story of Newton Prince, the black barber who testified on behalf of the redcoats is, unsurprisingly, much less well known. For his temerity, Prince was tarred and feathered by infuriated Patriots, so naturally in 1776 he opted for General Howe and was evacuated with the British. Likewise Black London, another barber, who in 1776 told the commissioners for loyalist claims after the war that he had been compelled by his employer to join the Patriot militia, deserted as soon as he could and served for four years with Sir Henry Clinton and then aboard two warships.19

  However awkward for the orthodox history of the Founding Fathers and their revolution, the genesis of African-American liberty is, then, inseparable from the British connection during and after the war. If free black politics were born from the fires of that conflict, so were many of the distinctive forms of their Christian gathering. It was among the loyalist Africans that some of the earliest free Baptist and Methodist churches were created in and near Shelburne, Nova Scotia; there too that the first whites to be converted by a black preacher were baptized in those red rivers by the charismatic minister David
George. The first schools expressly for free black children were opened in the loyalist diaspora of Nova Scotia, where they were taught by black teachers like Catherine Abernathy in Preston and Stephen Blucke in Birchtown. In Sierra Leone, where more than a thousand of the “Nova Scotians” ended up after journeying back across the Atlantic, this time as persons not property, the American blacks experienced for the first time (and all too ephemerally) a meaningful degree of local law and self-government. It was another first when an elected black constable, the ex-slave Simon Proof, administered a flogging to a white sailor found guilty of dereliction of duty.

  The history of black loyalism, however, is much more than a catalogue of “firsts.” The story also gives the lie to the stereotype of the Africans as passive, credulous pawns of American or British strategy. Whether they opted for the Patriot or for the loyalist side, many of the blacks, illiterate or not, knew exactly what they were doing, even if they could never have anticipated the magnitude of the perils, misfortunes and deceits that would result from their decision. Often, their choice was determined by a judgement of whether, sooner or later, a free America would be forced to honour the Declaration of Independence’s principle that the birthright of all men was liberty and equality; or whether (in the South especially), with the spectacle of runaways being hunted down and sent to labour in lead mines or saltpetre works, fine-sounding promises were likely to be indefinitely deferred. It was not a good sign of things to come when enlistment incentives offered to white recruits in Georgia and South Carolina included a bounty of a free slave at the end of the war.

  To their credit, there were a few Patriot leaders who, long before the revolution, had recognized the embarrassing discrepancy between the rhetoric of liberty and the reality of slavery. The “enslavement” of Americans by British governments was a commonplace of the most grandiloquent Patriot broadsides (especially in Boston) against the Stamp Tax in 1766 and dutied tea in 1773. A typical pamphlet of the Tea Party era thundered that the “baneful chests [of tea] contain in them…something worse than death—the seeds of SLAVERY.”20 James Otis, the fiercest of the Boston firebrand lawyers, was no exception in railing against the wicked insidiousness of such schemes of enslavement; but he was alone among Massachusetts Patriots in extending the logic of his argument to blacks, maintaining, outlandishly, that freedom was not racially divisible. “The colonists are by law of nature freeborn as indeed all men are, white or black. Does it follow that ‘tis right to enslave a man because he is black?” Otis wrote in his incendiary The Rights of the British Colonists Asserted and Proved. “Can any logical inference in favor of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or a short face? Nothing better can be said in favor of a trade that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty…”21 And he warned that “those who every day barter away other men’s liberty will soon care very little for their own.”22 But Otis’s forthrightness only confirmed to less adventurous spirits his reputation for rashness, or even mental instability. John Adams, a younger but much cooler head (and evidently no egalitarian), commented later, “I shuddered at the doctrine he taught and I have all my life shuddered and still shudder at the consequences that may be drawn from such premises.”23

  Other American Patriots, too intelligent not to notice the contradiction and too honest to side-step it entirely, tried to disarm accusations of hypocrisy by confronting them head on, while always laying blame for the original sin of slavery on the British themselves and in particular His Majesty’s Royal African Company, which had been chartered back in 1662 to trade in slaves, precious metals and timber. The “Well, you started it” school playground plea of mitigation was most aggressively converted into an indictment in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. But long before his tour de force of disingenuousness, others had become adept at turning defensiveness into sanctimonious indignation at being so shockingly misunderstood. No one did this better than Benjamin Franklin, who had let it be known to friends of the slaves, such as the Quaker Anthony Benezet in Philadelphia and Granville Sharp in London, that he himself frowned on the iniquitous trade in humans and wanted nothing better than to hasten its end.24

  In 1770, during his last year in London lobbying on behalf of his fellow independence-minded Americans, Franklin, apparently stung by Granville Sharp’s attacks on American hypocrisy, published “A Conversation between an Englishman, a Scotchman and an American on the Subject of Slavery” in the Public Advertiser. “You Americans make a great Clamour upon every little imaginary Infringement of what you take to be your Liberties and yet there are no People upon Earth such Enemies to Liberty, such absolute Tyrants,” Franklin has his Englishman say, directing the affronted American to read Sharp’s treatise. The indictment was, of course, overstated, allowing the American to respond that Sharp was making the gross and insulting error of lumping all his countrymen together, even though there were many, indeed at least as many, in the colonies as in Britain who wholeheartedly detested the iniquitous traffic in humans and were working for its destruction. That the accusation of double standards frequently found its mark, though, was betrayed by the hurt tone of the American’s wounded complaint that it was “particularly injurious to us at this Time to endeavour to render us odious and to encourage those who would oppress us, by representing us as unworthy of the Liberty we are now contending for.”25 The transparent uneasiness of the defence was not improved when the “American” went on the counter-attack by accusing the English of inflicting a kind of servitude on their “working poor,” who if they were “not absolutely Slaves there seems something a little like Slavery, where the Laws oblige them to work for their Masters so many Hours at such a Rate and leave them no Liberty to demand or bargain for more but imprison them in a Workhouse if they refuse to work on such terms.” When the Englishman raised the inhumanity of the slave laws and in particular their prescribed punishments, the American responded that in colonies such as Virginia, where whites were so outnumbered by blacks, there was no alternative: “Perhaps you may imagine the Negroes to be a mild tempered, tractable Kind of People…some of them are indeed so. But the Majority are of a plotting Disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful and cruel in the highest Degree.” Even odder, to the “Scotchman’s” criticisms the American replied that in Scotland there were also slaves, who worked in coal mines and who were “bought and sold with the Colliery and have no more Liberty to leave it than our Negroes have to leave their Master’s Plantation. If having black Faces indeed, subjected Men to the Condition of Slavery, you might have some small pretence for keeping the poor Colliers in that Condition: But remember that, under the Smut their skin is white.”26

  It seems astonishing that Franklin should have thought a double-dose of colour prejudice should actually have strengthened his case. But double-thinking was a staple, even of those who cheerfully owned up to it, none more bare-faced than the Virginian Patrick Henry. Writing to Anthony Benezet from Hanover, Virginia, in January 1773, Henry worked up an impressive lather of indignation against the atrocity of slavery, especially since it was enduring “at a time when the Rights of Humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a Country, above all fond of Liberty.” But having unburdened himself of amazement that such an evil should persist in an Enlightened age, Henry goes on with disarming candour: “Would anyone believe that I am master of Slave(s) of my own purchase?” As his reason for violating his own professed principles, however, Henry could manage nothing more than the lame, if honest, excuse that “I am drawn along by the general Inconveniency of living without them. I will not, I cannot justify it; however culpable my conduct I will so far pay my duty as to own the Excellency and rectitude of her [Natural] precepts and to lament my want of conformity to them.” Henry prayed that there might come a time when this would all change, but, pending such great reformation, he hoped at least to treat his slaves “with lenity.” No wonder, then, floundering in the morass of
his own bad faith, all he could do by way of ending his letter to Benezet was to write, with unconvincing theatricality, “I know not where to stop, I could say many things on this Subject, a serious review of which give a gloomy perspective to future times; excuse the scrawl and believe me, with esteem etc…”27

  Predictably, the exacting consciences of John and Abigail Adams would not allow themselves the same kind of careless breeziness as Patrick Henry when it came to the sin of the Great Contradiction. Reporting to her husband one of the many stories circulating in 1773 and 1774 of a black insurrection nipped in the bud, and anxious not to pour fuel on what was obviously a dangerous tinderbox, Abigail confessed to her husband that she wished “most sincerely there was not a slave in the province [of Massachusetts]” since “it always appeared to me to be a most iniquitous scheme…to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”28

  Abigail Adams’s nervousness that American blacks might pounce on the glaring discrepancy between Patriot professions of liberty for all, and their unwillingness to extend it to slaves was well founded; 1773 and 1774 saw no fewer than five “humble” petitions written by blacks to the last colonial governors of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson and General Thomas Gage. A number of articles in newspapers all demanded, with varying degrees of urgency and indignation, that something be done about the treatment of Africans as chattels. In an impassioned essay printed in the Essex Journal and Merrimac Packet in August 1774, Caesar Sarter, a freed man who “bore the galling yoke of bondage for more than twenty years,” insisted that slavery was “the greatest, and consequently most to be dreaded, of all temporal calamities,” whilst “its opposite, Liberty, the greatest temporal good with which you can be blest.” Deprived of dropping a tear over the separation of dear friends “who were clinging to you, you must be plied with that conclusive argument, the cat o” nine tails to reduce you to what your inhuman masters would call reason.” “Now,” Caesar Sarter addressed his Patriot readers, “are you willing all this should befall you? If you can lay your hand on your breast and solemnly affirm that you should, why then go on and Prosper! For your treatment of the Africans is an exact compliance with the above mentioned rule.”