Rough Crossings Read online

  The petitions were often anguished. One, addressed to Governor Hutchinson in January 1773 and signed, perhaps sardonically, “Felix,” on behalf of “many Slaves living in the town of Boston” and other towns of Massachusetts, lamented the “intollerable condition” of people who “have no Property! We have no Wives! No Children! We have no City! No Country!…Not even Life itself, but in a Manner as the Beasts that perish.” In April of the same year a second petition signed by four slaves, Sambo Freeman, Peter Bestes, Chester Joie and Felix Holbrook, expected “great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them”: the members of the House of Representatives ought to allow them to work at least one day a week for a wage, from which money might be saved that could send the Africans home to their native country. Two months later yet another petition appeared on behalf of “all those…who are held in a state of slavery within the bowels of a free Country,” insisting “in common with other men [on] a Natural Right to be free and without molestation to injoy such property as they may acquire by their industry.”29 A year later, a similar document declared that “we are a freeborn pepel and have never forfeited that natural liberty.”

  These appeals, whether to consistency or conscience, of course went largely unheeded by both the last British governors and by the Patriot politicians of the Massachusetts General Court. However, in colonies from Virginia to Massachusetts petitions were drafted and circulated by Benezet, Benjamin Rush and their fellow campaigners to halt further importation of slaves or at the very least to impose duties of twenty pounds on each new slave, a tariff heavy enough to act as a disincentive to buy and sell. (Rhode Island, with its major investment in the slave trade, was an exception to the non-importation movement.) In each case the royal governors, acting on instructions from Britain, refused consent. How unfair, it was said by way of explanation, for West Indian planters coming to America to repair their ravaged health to have to pay special import duties when bringing their body servants with them to their place of convalescence! The refusal of official assent allowed Jefferson and Southern Patriots to bounce the accusation of hypocrisy back to the royal government, which, it insisted, was cravenly beholden to the West Indian sugar lobby.

  The charge was fair enough. But what the likes of Jefferson forbore from admitting was that this sudden attack of high-mindedness in the South was owed less to any kind of conversion on the part of the plantocracy to the inhumanity of slaveholding, than to a panic, after 1772, about the imminence of a slave insurrection in regions where blacks already outnumbered whites. This was not idle speculation. Three ferocious and bloody rebellions were under way, in Surinam, St Vincent and Jamaica, and all were widely and apocalyptically reported in the North American press. In Surinam, on the mainland of South America, a small force of European soldiers had been overwhelmed by a black and Amerindian army, perhaps numbering tens of thousands of heavily armed desperadoes. The marauders, it was said, had taken possession of estates and even towns, burned them down, and committed countless acts of robbery and murder against the largely defenceless Dutch colonists. In St Vincent and Jamaica, regiments of British troops withdrawn from North America were tied down just attempting to contain a wildfire uprising that numbered Maroons (free blacks and mulattos living in the interior) along with liberated slaves in its legions.

  So before there was a white American revolution, there were already black and brown ones sweeping through South America and the Caribbean. Although space is seldom given to the Surinam or the St Vincent rebellions in histories of the American Revolution, the connection was critical to the timing of Patriot mobilization in the South. The sudden urgency of armed white American resistance was driven not, of course, by any solidarity with captive people elsewhere in the hemisphere, but by precisely the opposite—by the terror that the insurrectionary contagion might spread north. The most feverish nightmare involved the British actually fomenting black rebellion as a way of intimidating the Patriots.

  These suspicions were not altogether paranoid. By early 1775, many months before Dunmore’s proclamation from the William, there had indeed been suggestions both from royal officials in America and within Lord North’s own government that playing the “negro” card against the presumptions of the colonists might have to be considered, even though North himself (protesting a little too much) professed to be horrified by the idea. When the mounting evidence of an insurrectionary spirit sweeping through the world of the slaves was put together with the independent black voices heard in the Massachusetts petitions, it robbed nervous Patriots of their sleep. Abigail Adams’s comments to her husband in the summer of 1774 about the selectiveness of Patriot rhetoric on liberty were made in the context of news of a “conspiracy of Negroes” who had had the temerity to ask the governor for arms so that they could fight for the king in exchange for their liberty!

  Escapes were now imagined to be the prelude to a concerted rising. From New York to Georgia the tempo of reported runaways gathered ominous momentum throughout 1773 and 1774. In New York concern about illicit “assemblies” of negroes was so serious that instructions were issued to apprehend any blacks appearing in any sort of numbers after dark. To the jumpier Americans it did not bear contemplating what might happen should the slaves, especially in the Southern plantation colonies, take it into their heads that the vaunted liberties of Old England somehow applied to them, and that, as reported in 1730, they had a royal licence to disobey. Sambo Freeman in Boston had already alluded, in one of the petitions, to “those sublime ideas of Freedom that Englishmen have,” contrasting the aspirations of blacks to those of their unfortunate counterparts in Spanish colonies who could expect nothing but despotism. If affected slaveholders are to be believed, these intoxicated delusions about British freedom had spread deep into the South. Educated flight had begun. In the Virginia Gazette, one of many advertisements offering rewards for the recapture of runaways mentioned a Gabriel Jones and his wife, said to be on their way to the coast to board ship for England “where they imagine they will be free (a Notion now prevalent among the Negroes greatly to the vexation and prejudice of their Masters).”30 Now where could slaves get such absurd ideas from? Another advertisement supplies the answer. One Bacchus, it seems, in Augusta County, Georgia, ran away, leading his master to believe that he too might head for a port, there “to board a vessel for Great Britain from the knowledge he has of the late determination of the Somerset case.”31

  What was this? Did slaves read law reports? How could it be that a judgement rendered in June 1772 by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in the court of the King’s Bench in the case of a runaway African, James Somerset, recaptured by his master, could light a fire in the plantations? Mansfield had set Somerset free, but had taken pains not to make a general ruling on the legality of slavery in England. However, the “Negro frolicks” in London celebrating the court decision had swept legal niceties aside. Across the Atlantic word spread, and spread quickly, that slavery had been outlawed in Britain. In 1774 a pamphlet written by “Freeman,” published in Philadelphia, told American slaves that they could have liberty merely by “setting foot on that happy Territory where slavery is forbidden to perch.” Before the Patriots knew it, the birds had already begun to fly the coop.32

  Part One

  GREENY

  I

  MINCING LANE in the Ward of Cheap in 1765 was neither the worst nor the best address in the City of London. The Sisters of St Helen, known as “Minchen,” who had given the street its name, were long gone, and piety had, unsurprisingly, been replaced by profit. Solid mercantile chambers and warehouses, many of them connected to the colonial trade, lined the street. At regular intervals in the morning, carts bearing chests of sugar and tea, coming from the East and West India wharves, would rumble up the lane from Great Tower Street, carve a path through the throngs of pie vendors, ale wagons, flower girls, beggars and balladmongers, pass through broad gates and unload in the cobbled inner courtyards. In sh
ort, there was not much to detain the curious tourist other than the Clothworkers’ Hall, set back from the street and boasting a ceremonious row of Corinthian pilasters along its interior façade. It was all very middling. What was not middling, however, was the line of the woeful that trailed down the lane from a doorway at the northern, Fenchurch Street, end of the lane. These were the sickly poor: the bloodied and the bent; emaciated women and grimy, hacking drunks; small children on whom the first blisters of the pox had already erupted; and their places of domicile were assuredly not Mincing Lane. They came to the door on the lane from the empire of squalor that stretched beyond the Tower, through the Ald Gate and the Bishop’s Gate, into the rookeries of St George in the East, Shadwell and Wapping, where refuse, human and animal, brimmed in the reeking alleys, and twopenny whores lifted their skirts to sailors observed by cutpurses and yowling cats.

  The door opened and out stepped an angular man looking older than his thirty years. His tall but meagre frame, hollow cheeks, lantern jaw and short curled wig gave him the air of either an underpaid clerk or an unworldly cleric; the truth is that Granville Sharp was something of both. He had taken his customary late afternoon walk to his brother William’s surgery from his own place of work at the Ordnance Office in the Tower, where he managed to fill five or six hours managing the supply of saltpetre and the conduct of unruly gentlemen cadets. Sharp’s mind, however, was usually on much more important matters: for instance, his severe differences with Dr Kennicott on the catalogue the doctor had presumed to publish, listing the Temple vessels restored to the Jews by King Cyrus in the time of the prophet Nehemiah.1

  Most evenings the Sharp brothers and sisters gathered at William’s house for rehearsals of their Sunday concerts. Their origins were plain and provincial: the children of an archdeacon of Northumberland. But since coming to London in 1750, two of Granville’s older brothers, James and William, had prospered. Deprived by their father’s limited means of the Cambridge education given to two older sons destined for the Church, James had had to make his way as an ironmonger, whilst William had applied himself to medicine. For the most part, this meant setting broken bones, trepanning skulls and dispensing remedies to the poxed, but William had flourished in his art. Now risen all the way to being one of the surgeons to the king, he flattered himself that he had not forgotten the humble, and his way of showing it was to minister, gratis, to London’s poor.

  William Sharp, then, had something of a name, for how many organ-playing, horn-blowing surgeons were there, let alone physicians of such exemplary Christian benevolence, within the square mile of the City of London? On concert Sundays his rooms in Mincing Lane filled with pretty much everyone who mattered: David Garrick, James Boswell and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The attraction was the exemplary harmony exhibited by the family: James played the jointed serpent, often with parts he had transcribed from the violoncello; sister Judith played the lute and the theorbo; Eliza (before she had to go and marry Mr Prowse of Wicken Park, Northamptonshire) was mistress of the harpsichord; and Frances sang as sweetly as a trilling lark. Granville, who sometimes signed (or sealed) himself G# and was working on A Short Introduction to Musick for the use of such Children as have a Musical Ear and are Willing to be Instructed in the Great Duty of Singing Psalms, played the flute, his long, nimble fingers flying over the stops. Sometimes “to the delight and conviction of many doubters who had conceived such an accomplishment to have been impracticable,” as William Shield, the Master of His Majesty’s Band of Musicians, commented, Granville would play two flutes simultaneously.2 Proud of their performances, the Sharps rehearsed together every evening with any additional musicians and singers they had recruited. But these meetings were also domestic, convivial affairs, with tea, dainties, gossip from the City and family news from Durham. In return, members of the clan living beyond the City would receive news of the doings in London from a circulated Common Letter, which took it as a point of honour to list, comprehensively, the dishes consumed at dinner as well as the items played in concert. The Sharps stayed close, always. “Whatever other engagements took place,” Eliza recalled, “it was all our party.”

  So when Granville emerged from William’s surgery and pulled up short at a figure whose dreadful condition horrified even someone inured to looking at the unfortunate, his impulse, once he had heard the poor black man’s story, was to turn on his heel and straight away bring his brother out to help. It was not unusual to see blacks on London streets. There were at least five thousand and perhaps as many as seven thousand scattered over the metropolis, some living in fine town houses where, suitably got up in embroidered coats, powdered wigs and silk breeches, they served, ornamentally, as footmen or body servants to the quality.3 Some, like Dr Johnson’s Francis Barber, were minor celebrities, sketched and painted as charming “sable” curiosities. The less fortunate made a living as musicians or waiters in the taverns and brothels of Covent Garden, and went home to a bare, verminous room in neighbouring St Giles, where they were called “blackbirds.” Far more congregated in the dockland parish of St George in the East, in the filthy streets that led from Nicholas Hawksmoor’s eccentric church. Many of them were sailors, bargemen, haulers, carters and stevedores; and some for a few pence boxed barek-nuckle or played on drums and fifes to crowds in the streets and piazzas. The “blackbirds,” then, were mostly poor, and were known for flitting in and out of trouble. There would have been nothing out of the ordinary in seeing one in the queue for William Sharp’s surgery that evening in 1765. But this particular black had very little left of his face.

  His name, as the Sharp brothers learned, was Jonathan Strong, and once perhaps he had been. But his master, David Lisle, a lawyer from Barbados, had been so much in the habit of thrashing him senseless on the slightest pretext that Jonathan Strong had become crippled. London was full of the spectacle of pain. Sluggish cart horses were mercilessly flogged until they dropped; vagrant beggars were whipped until their backs had become beefsteaks; felons were stoned in the public pillory and sometimes died as they sat there; servants, both male and female, were cuffed and smacked in public; schoolboys were thrashed for insolence or troublesome high spirits; men caught by the press gangs were beaten with sticks as they were hauled off to the waiting ships. But what Lisle had done to Jonathan Strong seemed savage even by the rough standards of the day. The negro’s face was reduced to crimson gore, the result of a pistol whipping so savage that after repeated, relentless blows the mouth of the gun had separated from the handle. Strong had been blinded with blood and when, finally, his master saw that there was nothing left to maim he had been thrown into the street to die. The negro had staggered to William Sharp’s surgery, where he patiently waited his turn in the line of sickness and pain that gathered along Mincing Lane. Some time later, Strong himself remembered that

  I could hardly walk or see my way where I was going. When I came to him [William] and he saw me in that condition, the gentleman take charity of me and gave me some stoff to wash my eyes with and some money to get myself a little necessaries till next day. The day after I come to the gentleman and he sent me into the hospital and I was in there four months and a half. All the while I was in the hospital the gentleman find me in clothes, shoes and stockings and when I come out he paid for my lodging and a money to find myself some necessaries till he get me into a place.4

  When Strong emerged from Bart’s Hospital William Sharp found him work with the apothecary Brown, who supplied his surgery with most of its drugs, splints and bandages. Strong was still lame from his beatings and never fully recovered his sight, yet was well enough to run errands for the apothecary, picking up and delivering medical supplies to the City surgeons and hospitals. There were times too when he served as body or household servant for the Browns. On one of those days in September 1767, two years after the Sharps had found him, he was standing footman behind Mrs Brown’s carriage when he had the misfortune to be seen by his old tormentor, David Lisle.

  And what Lisle noticed
was not the ruin of a creature that he had discarded in the gutter, but a disconcertingly trim and inexplicably repaired Jonathan Strong. Anger—with himself for throwing away an investment; with Strong for surviving; with whomever it was who had robbed him (for so he already thought of the matter) of his property—welled up in him, competing with an equally sudden surge of cupidity. Perhaps something could be done to redeem his loss. It was, after all, 1767. Four years before, peace had been signed with France, and the Caribbean was the engine of fortune. The market for slaves to work the West Indian sugar plantations, especially on the boom island of Jamaica, had never been hungrier, even for the likes of broken-down Strong. Among the city’s black population were many who had originally been brought to London by American or West Indian masters—most of whom, if they were rich enough, kept up seasonal establishments in the capital of the empire—and who, as body servants, footmen or musicians, lived in a state of relative liberty. Some, such as Dr Johnson’s Francis Barber or Lord Montagu’s Ignatius Sancho, were given freedom after years of loyal service. Others had taken it by escaping into Cheapside or Wapping, where they could work for wages that would protect them against an enforced return to America or the West Indies. The pursuit of these runaways was the work of slavecatchers who prowled the coffee-houses and inns, eager to collect the many rewards posted in London and American newspapers. Once caught, such blacks were imprisoned, resold (for there were regular sales and auctions in London) and bundled off to waiting ships at Gravesend, destined for Jamaica, Havana, Santa Cruz or Charleston.