Rough Crossings Read online

  There would be a lot of ungrateful departures in the years ahead.

  III

  IT STOPPED RAINING in Charleston just long enough for the freshly hanged black man to be properly burned.1 It was the 18th of August 1775, and Thomas Jeremiah, fisherman, pilot, man of property, had been tried just a week earlier, accused of being the very worst thing imaginable in South Carolina: a fomenter of negro rebellion. Still more diabolical, Patriots believed, he had planned this infamy with the British. For there was nothing to which the royal government would not stoop—not even the liberation of slaves—to prevent revolution in the South.

  Desperate to shore up the crumbling power of the Crown and Parliament, but with precious few soldiers to do it (for General Gage in beleaguered Boston could spare none), the royal governors of the Southern colonies had resolved, so it was said in places such as Charleston’s Corner Club, to play the savage card. Secret caches of arms were to be off-loaded from British ships and delivered to Indians and blacks. Once the slaves had slaughtered their masters and burned their houses, they would be rewarded with their liberty. This nightmare is what Thomas Jefferson meant in the Declaration of Independence when referring, otherwise cryptically, to the king having “excited domestic insurrections.” In the world of the slaveholders, nothing demonstrated so well the transformation of royal paternalism into brute despotism as this plot to arm the slaves; there could be no more self-evident cause for revolutionary separation.

  SOUTH CAROLINA, CHARLES TOWN DISTRICT.

  Before Me, Mr John Coram, One of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace, for the said District, Personally came and appeared Jemmy, a Negro Man Slave the property of Mr Peter Croft, who upon His Solemn Declaration saith, that about ten weeks since being in Charlestown at Mr Preolias Wharf, one Thomas Jeremiah, a Free Negro who declared That He had something to give Dewar, a run away Slave belonging to Mr Tweed and wished to see them and asked Jemmy to take a few guns to the said Dewar, to be placed in Negroes hands to fight against the inhabitants of this Province, and that He, Jeremiah was to have the Chief Command of the said Negroes; that He Jeremiah said He believed He had Powder enough already, but that He wanted more Arms which he would try to get as many as He could

  Declared before me on this

  16 June 1775, JOHN CORAM2

  And this was not all.

  Sambo says that about 2 or 3 months ago being at Simmons Wharf, Jerry [Thomas Jeremiah] says to Him Sambo do you hear any thing of the War that is coming, Sambo answered No, Jerry’s reply’s yes there is a great War coming soon—Sambo replies what shall we poor Negroes do in Schooner—Jerry says set the schooner on fire, jump on Shore and Join the Soldiers—that the War was come to help the Poor Negroes.3

  Not everyone was convinced that “Jerry” was guilty; certainly not the last royal governor of South Carolina, Lord William Campbell, himself the target of every kind of insinuation, but helpless to exercise authority or to resist unfounded rumours. Arriving at Charleston in June 1775 aboard HM sloop Scorpion, Lord William found that he had been preceded by a letter sent by Arthur Lee, the American agent in London, to Henry Laurens (about to preside over the Provincial Congress in South Carolina) insisting that the British government had decided to raise the Indians and slaves against the Patriots. Aboard the Scorpion, Lee maintained, were fourteen thousand stands of arms for that nefarious purpose. Although the fourteen thousand guns were a myth, Lee’s letter provoked wrath in Charleston. “Words,” wrote Campbell to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, “cannot express the flame that this occasion’d amongst all ranks and degrees; the cruelty and savage barbarity of the scheme was the conversation of all companies & no-one dared venture to contradict intelligence conveyed from such respectable authority.”4

  Mere suspicions, Campbell believed, would never be enough to “impress the minds of the people with the worst opinion of His Majesty’s Ministers,” namely that the said ministers had become a foe so pitiless as to have no scruple about unleashing African murder on them. Evidence of a plot was needed to demonize British power, and so it was that the unfortunate Thomas Jeremiah had become a victim of “the accursed politicks of this Country.” By the time the governor moved into his residence at 34 Meeting Street on the 18th of June for what would be an exceptionally brief and unhappy tenure, Jeremiah was already incarcerated in the city workhouse while his prosecutors were busying themselves finding evidence against him.

  Lord William, a scion of the Argyll Campbell clan, which had ruled the western Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the Protestant interest for generations, was convinced there was no truth to the allegations against Jeremiah. He was no stranger to the rice plantation country along the Ashley and Cooper rivers. During the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63, Charleston had been his home port while commanding HMS Nightingale against the French. And he had got on well enough with the slaveowning planters to marry one of their daughters, Sarah Izard, at the end of the war in 1763; they had gone back together to Britain, where Campbell had served, like innumerable Campbells before him, as Member of Parliament for Argyll. From old Scotia he had gone to Nova Scotia as its governor, where he prided himself on his honourable disinterest. But his Scottish pedigree—like that of John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia—only helped confirm Anglo-American Scotophobes such as Jefferson in their conviction that Caledonians were just another species of mercenary. (In December 1775 Jefferson referred to the presence of the “Scotch” along with other “foreign mercenaries” in one of his lists of crimes committed by the Crown and its ministers.) Sarah Campbell, however, had found Halifax too wintry, and it was on her account that her husband, with unfortunate timing, manoeuvred to return to South Carolina.

  Although the crisis in America was hardly a secret in England, Campbell, like so many other Britons, might have imagined that it was, essentially, a New England affair. He reckoned he knew the Carolinans, and they were staunch. But of course he did not. By the time he arrived in Charleston, executive power in the city and the province had fallen into the hands of a thirteen-member Council of Safety, dominated by militant Patriots such as William Henry Drayton. Like its counterpart in Virginia, the Council and the Provincial Congress interpreted the bloodshed with which hostilities had commenced at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 to mean that the Crown meant to resolve its differences with the American colonies by military coercion (as indeed it did), and that a quasi-war was already under way. So the Congress and Council authorized the levying of taxes to pay for the raising of a militia before troops could arrive and make unholy alliance with blacks and Indians. Like all the Southern governors in the spring and summer of 1775, Lord William Campbell felt himself in an unenviable and ultimately untenable position. With virtually no troops available to enforce the will of the Crown, he was forced to depend on His Majesty’s ships, such as the sloop of war Tamar anchored beyond Charleston harbour and unable for the moment to sail over the bar.

  Which is why the case of Thomas Jeremiah had caused such agitation. For “Jerry” was a pilot, perhaps the best and certainly the most independent, in Charleston. Jerry was also a free black—indeed, one who owned seven slaves himself, not to mention property worth close to £1000; a king’s ransom, one might say. Henry Laurens, by no means the most rabid negrophobe in the town, disliked him intensely and described him to his son John, then in London, as “puffed up by prosperity, ruined by Luxury and debauchery and grown to an amazing pitch of vanity and ambition; a silly coxcomb withal.”5 To Governor Campbell it seemed as though Thomas Jeremiah’s real crime was social temerity. When he had got into a fight with a white captain he had been put in the stocks, a serious ordeal in a place like Charleston, where delivering salutory correction to an uppity nigger would qualify as civic duty. In the circumstances Jerry was just a disaster in the offing. He had been conspicuous in helping to put out Charleston’s many fires; why then should he not, when time and occasion presented itself, set them? An
d since it was known that he had expressed willingness to pilot the Tamar over the bar (in fact the royal authorities had made it plain that pilots had no choice in the matter), Jerry was evidently a mortal threat to the Congress and the Council of Safety and everything they represented.

  That Jeremiah’s accusers had no real case against him, Campbell believed, was plain from their haste to try him under the terms of the Negro Act, introduced in the reign of George II, by which slaves accused of inciting or participating in rebellion were tried by a bench of three to five freeholders as well as three judges, rather than by royal justices alone. As a free black, Jeremiah should have been tried as such, and, as someone accused of speech rather than deed, should have been liable to lesser penalties. This important procedural difference had been ignored because, as one of the judges who heard the case admitted, “it might be of the most fatal consequence to the lives and properties of the white inhabitants if these fellows once got it into their heads that free Negroes were not punishable under this [Negro] Act for such an enormous crime.”6

  Nor was the governor at all convinced by the witnesses against Jeremiah. They too had been victims of a terror, generated when black house servants had heard their masters speak at table of insurrectionary plots by slaves. Out of fear of being incriminated themselves, they had been over-ready to point the finger at others. The slave Jemmy was just one such poor fellow who had been indicted as co-conspirator and, so Campbell thought, been made to believe that his only chance of escaping the noose was to incriminate Jeremiah, which he had duly done. But he had later recanted his testimony, insisting after all that Jeremiah was innocent. Then there was the account given to the governor by a Reverend Smith of a prison meeting with Jeremiah. Expecting a confession, the clergyman (as did another man of the cloth) said that he had heard the opposite; that the prisoner continued to protest his innocence, and that “his behaviour was modest, his conversation sensible to a degree that astonish’d them and that at the same time he was perfectly resigned to his unhappy, his undeserved fate. He declared he wished not for life, he was in a happy frame of mind and prepared for death.”

  As the day of execution approached, the governor became daily more distraught about Jeremiah’s fate and his own powerlessness to save him from the gallows. Rather pathetically, he made a last-minute appeal to Laurens to intervene. “Surely, Sir, I may appeal to your feelings for me as the Representative of Majesty in this unhappy Province, Think, Sir of the weight of Blood, I am told I cannot attempt to save this Man without bringing greater Guilt on this Country than I can bear even to think of.”7 To Lord Dartmouth he confessed even greater distress: “I leave your Lordship to conceive the poignancy of my agony…I was almost distracted and wished to have been able to fly to the remotest corner of the earth from a set of Barbarians [the gentlemen of the Council of Safety] who are worse than the most cruel Savages any history has described.”8

  But alas, there was nothing to be done. Street gangs in Charleston were busy intimidating anyone whom they suspected of lukewarm feeling, let alone outright opposition, to the Patriots. A gunner from Fort Johnston overheard abusing the American cause was swiftly tarred and feathered and dragged to the governor’s door. Should he dare to issue a pardon to Jeremiah, “that Monster the Mob which now governs Charles Town,” wrote the Attorney-General, would “erect a Gallows by his Lordship’s Door and oblige him to hang the Man himself.” To conclude this heartrending story, Campbell wrote, “the man was murder’d, I can call it nothing else, he asserted his innocence to the last, behav’d with the greatest intrepidity as well as decency and told his implacable Persecutors God’s Judgement would one day over take them for shedding his innocent blood.”

  In the letter to Dartmouth Campbell predicted “that things are hastening to that extremity which will in all probability oblige me to withdraw from Charles Town, to avoid fresh indignities.” It was the Thomas Jeremiah case that had made him most painfully aware of his vulnerability, and bitterly incredulous that the government at home seemed unwilling to send troops to make its authority felt in South Carolina. A month after Jeremiah’s execution the Council of Safety had taken control of Fort Johnston, where the British had neglected to spike the guns. Perhaps getting wind of the militant Patriot William Henry Drayton’s proposal to take the governor hostage, since it was thought that he might rally the South Carolina backcountry loyalists, Campbell made a break for it and took refuge along with his wife and infant son on the Tamar. It was still raining: sultry downpours peppered the green harbour water like grapeshot.

  Henry Laurens gave Campbell credit for the sincerity of his doubts about Jeremiah’s guilt. But he had none himself. The second slave, “Sambo,” had not withdrawn his testimony, and it was odd that Jeremiah should profess not to have known his accuser, Jemmy, when the man turned out to be his brother-in-law. Guilty or not, there is no doubt that Lord William was too quick, or too naive, to dismiss any possibility that the British government would countenance anything so incendiary as an armed slave rebellion. In fact, for several months the governors of Virginia and North Carolina, Lord Dunmore and Josiah Martin, along with General Thomas Gage in Massachusetts, and in full consultation with Lord North’s government in London, had been considering exactly such a strategy. For all concerned, except the blacks, it was a desperate response to desperate circumstances. In a shockingly brief period, during the spring and summer of 1775, British military confidence had turned into startled pessimism.

  The Massachusetts fights at Lexington and Concord in April had triggered mass recruitment to the provincial militias and transformed debates within the provincial assemblies and congresses. The second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, which began in May, remained torn between outright independence and using resistance to effect dignified reconciliation. In an effort to forestall a radical Patriot victory, a last good-faith effort at compromise was made by Lord North’s government graciously “forbearing” to tax the colonies on condition that they agreed to share the costs of common defence. But, aside from raising hackles by simultaneously forbidding the colonists to engage in any trade outside the British Empire, the “conciliatory” measure failed to grant what the assemblies most wanted: an acknowledgement of their exclusive right to levy their own taxes and duties. And the government refused to yield on that point because a majority in Parliament—including some of the staunchest friends of America, such as the Earl of Chatham—still insisted that the right to tax, along with the power to regulate imperial trade, belonged in the end with themselves.

  Inevitably, then, the more radical wing in Congress prevailed to the extent that a Continental army was mustered, and in June 1775 George Washington was appointed to its command in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some eleven thousand British and Hessian regulars were now effectively besieged in Boston by twenty thousand American troops. In July, any thought that the rebel soldiers would be no match for the redcoats disappeared in the slog and carnage of Bunker Hill. With the bulk of its army pinned down on Massachusetts Bay, and more troops needed to defend Quebec and Lower Canada against incursions, how was Britain to contain or deter rebellion in the South? In Richmond, Virginia (if his first biographer is to be believed), Patrick Henry had delivered the famous speech in which he insisted that, whatever his less aggressively minded compatriots might imagine, a war had, in fact, already begun. In the circumstances, British generals, such as Gage, and governors, such as Dunmore in Virginia, Josiah Martin in North Carolina and Sir James Wright in Georgia, were bound to exploit whatever small advantage might be gained from raising a black army.

  Even so, it was not the British, as the Patriots assumed, who had put ideas of insurrection into the heads of the slaves of the American South; they were there already. “Uncle Sommerset” and his British freedom were, as the runaway advertisements appearing in the Virginia Gazette made clear, well known through the tidewater country from Maryland to the Carolinas and in the interior too. News so electrifying spread fast, widely and ir
reversibly. John Adams, writing in his diary while staying in South Carolina later that year, learned that “the negroes have a wonderful art of communicating intelligence among themselves; it will run several hundreds of miles in a week or fortnight.”9 There seemed no question but that the slaves, more of whom were escaping from plantations with every month that passed, were in a state of heightened expectation. In late 1774 James Madison had reported that, in anticipation of the liberty that would be brought by the British, some negroes had secretly met and chosen a captain who would lead them to the safety of the king’s army and to freedom.10 In Charleston, according to William Henry Drayton, the slaves “entertained ideas that the present contest was for obliging us to give them liberty” and the rumoured arrival of arms with Lord William Campbell had “occasioned impertinent behaviour in many of them.”11

  In late April 1775 the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had barrels of gunpowder taken from the Williamsburg “Powder Horn” to the safety of HMS Fowey off Yorktown lest they should fall into the hands of forces ill disposed to maintaining the British connection. As a result, a group of blacks came to his house and asked for arms with which they would fight for the Crown in return for their liberty. For the moment Dunmore, who owned slaves himself, affected horror and aversion at the very idea, ordered the blacks to “go about their business” and warned them of “his severest resentment should they presume to renew their application.”12 But news of Lexington and Concord changed Dunmore’s mind fast. His own position at Williamsburg was not much better than Campbell’s in Charleston, protected as he was by a mere handful of troops. He would, he wrote to Dartmouth, in early May, arm all his own negroes “and receive others that will come to me whom I shall declare free.”13 At the very least, he calculated, the threat to liberate slaves would give the rebels pause in their headlong rush to arms, and at the worst, if they could not or would not be stopped, it would supply him with a black army that might hold the fort until regulars arrived.