1775 (65 page)

Master craftsmen in the building trades, who constructed Philadelphia’s Carpenters’ Hall, were mostly Patriots and large-scale employers of indentured servants. So, too, the Pennsylvania and Maryland iron makers, whose work gangs faced some of the most grueling conditions of the preindustrial era. Charles Ridgely, whose family owned the Hampton-Northampton ironworks, was a leader in Baltimore’s radical Patriot faction. Rhetoric about freedom did not stop the Ridgelys from buying 300 or so white servants,
mostly convicts, and putting them to work with black slaves, mining and hauling ore, feeding the furnaces, and working the forge. One of Ridgely’s escapees was advertised as wearing an iron collar. The family even sometimes speculated in indentures—buying and selling white servants for quick two-month profits.
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As
Chapter 17
will amplify, the ironworks in the Baltimore and Annapolis areas were singled out in a 1775 memorandum by Anglican cleric Jonathan Boucher as prime targets for a British “indentured servant” strategy.
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As for the servant-heavy Northern Neck of Virginia, George Washington worried in 1775 about Mount Vernon being a Dunmore target.

Although no accessible study exists of “Indentured Servants in the American Revolution” or some such, one would surely be informative. How many servants fled to Dunmore in Virginia? What potential did exist for British recruitment in Pennsylvania districts along the Maryland border reputed for high ratios of runaway servants? Despite concern, white servile insurrections did not occur; servants did not band together to seize plantations. But the apparent destabilization of recruitment and of entire regiments in both armies seems to have been a considerable effect.

1775: The Initial Response of Black Slaves and Free Blacks

Fortunately for the colonists, the run-or-stay choices made by hundreds of thousands of black slaves, as word spread of Dunmore’s promise, were more complicated than his lordship might have hoped—or, for that matter, than many a prominent Virginia or South Carolina Patriot might have feared. Even more telling, though, was the extent to which the American rebels saw white psychologies turning in their favor.

Simply put, the loose British notion in 1775 of using white colonial fears of black slave insurgencies to scare southerners away from confronting Britain was poorly thought out. On top of which, Patriot racial psychologies were not the same in Connecticut or Rhode Island as in the plantation colonies, an important divergence.

Save in the overconfident months of 1775 and early 1776, New Englanders generally favored allowing black enrollment in the militia and enlistment by free blacks in the newly authorized Continental regiments. Black military service was well established on land and sea. Scores had served on April 19 and then again on Bunker Hill. However, during the spring and summer,
rage militaire
—cockiness about beating the British—diminished
the importance of black enlistments. Self-perceived Patriot civic and military virtue need not stoop to arming slaves and ex-slaves. New York General Philip Schuyler was still making this argument before the Battle of Saratoga.
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In the South, arousal against Britain’s supposed intentions in 1775 made white southerners broadly oppose any black role in the United Colonies’ military.

In general, plantation colony indignation over supposed British slave-insurrection plans whetted local anger at the king and North’s ministry and drove undecided whites toward the Patriot position. Shrewd British officials understood that from the start. John Stuart noted that “nothing can be more alarming to the Carolinas than the idea of an attack from Indians and Negroes.”
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Nevertheless, the Patriot calculus began to shift in December. George Washington, who in July 1775 had agreed to a ban on black enlistments, underwent a timely change of mind at year’s end. Wariness of Dunmore was a factor, along with a sense that if the Patriots did not enlist blacks, the British would. By allowing this to happen, the American side might have sacrificed 5 to 10 percent of its eventual manpower. On December 31, Washington sent a letter to the Continental Congress urging that black enlistments be reinstated. The larger tide of opinion began shifting in 1776, and by 1779 Congress had moved far enough to recommend that South Carolina and Georgia “take measures immediately for raising three thousand able-bodied negroes.”
⁴⁶
These two states never did, but the number of blacks serving in New England and New York units rose steadily through the war.

Blacks constituted 10 percent of those enlisted in some New York regiments, and more in several from Connecticut and Rhode Island. One such, the First Rhode Island, passed in review after the victory at Yorktown in 1781, and Baron Ludwig von Closen, aide to General Jean-Baptiste Rochambeau, the French commander, observed that “three quarters of the Rhode Island regiment consists of Negroes, and that regiment is the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in its manuevers.”
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In another 1781 visit to the American army at White Plains, New York, Closen estimated that blacks were a quarter of its force.
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Advances in information technology have facilitated greater cataloguing and retrieval of what British officials were saying or doing in 1774 and 1775—plans and activities that included discussions in Parliament of emancipation and slave recruitment, tacit acceptance of black enlistment by officials from Lord North in the Cabinet to General Gage in Boston, and
most vividly, the repeated pronouncements by Dunmore in Virginia. These various plans and pursuits left a contemporary trail of partial information and rumor, which many slaves took as British rescue intentions. They built hopes accordingly, and then in 1775 fled toward British camps and ships by the thousands.

Whites in the South, however, took British words, court rulings, and actions, inflamed by Patriot-faction overstatement, as evidence that North and his ministers, some British generals, and governors like Dunmore were plotting slave conspiracies, insurrections, and mass escapes. Although this was exaggerated, it was not baseless. Sylvia Frey, a British historian who remarked on “the moral absurdity of a society of slaveholders proclaiming the concepts of natural rights, equality and liberty,” also assembled a sweeping documentation of open and covert British activities in her book
Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age.
⁴⁹

“In the end,” Frey concluded, “the British strategy of manipulating conflict between the races became a rallying cry for white southern unity and impelled the South toward independence.”
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To whites, it was not credible when some British denied what others of their countrymen were actually doing, saying, and putting in writing.

For blacks, the wide attention given to the
Somerset
case in 1772 and thereafter provided a milieu for hope. James Somerset’s name entered black folklore, and not a few slaves talked about somehow getting to England. In 1773 General Gage was presented by Boston slaves with three petitions for their freedom; a year later he received two more from blacks offering to fight if he would arm them and promise freedom.
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In 1775, Gage advised the secretary at war, Lord Barrington, that “we must avail ourselves of every resource, even to raise the Negros [
sic
] in our cause.”
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Lord Dartmouth, in turn, had a letter from Lord Dunmore in May about the latter’s plan to raise black troops. In July he responded by hoping that the governor had succeeded “among the Indians, Negroes & other persons.” Gage sent Dunmore some additional officers.
⁵³

In early 1775, word came to America from England that a proposal calling for the general emancipation of slaves had been discussed—not introduced—in
the House of Commons. It was aimed at “the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern colonies,” and the effort was dismissed by Edmund Burke as diversionary in a speech on March 22, 1775.
⁵⁴
This was not a single event. On October 26, 1775, William Henry Lyttleton, an ally of North and a former royal governor of South Carolina, introduced into the House of Commons “something like a proposal for encouraging the negroes in that part of America to rise against their masters, and for sending some regiments to support and encourage them, in carrying the design into execution.” So backed, said Lyttleton, “the negroes would rise and embrue their hands in the blood of their masters.” After eliciting broad disapproval among government supporters, Lyttleton’s motion failed by a vote of 278 to 108.
⁵⁵

Intriguingly, this proposal appeared during the week when the ministry was developing its plan for a southern invasion—detailed in
Chapter 13
—and escalating the number of regiments to be employed from five to seven. To Frey, “even without access [by historians] to interministerial discussions,” racial issues “were precipitating factors in the shaping of Britain’s Southern strategy.”
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Indeed, North had told the king that “we all know the perilous situation of three of them [colonies] from the great number of their Negro slaves, and the small proportion of white inhabitants.”
⁵⁷

Just how many servile risings actually took place below the Mason-Dixon Line in 1775 and early 1776 is unclear. Not very many. In Maryland, Dorchester County Patriots disarmed local blacks, taking “80 guns, some bayonets, swords,” but no whites were attacked. Maryland’s royal governor, Robert Eden, advised Lord George Germain that Marylanders were “extremely agitated by Lord Dunmore’s proclamation giving freedom to the slaves in Virginia; our proximity to which colony, and our similar circumstances with respect to Negroes augmenting the general alarm.”
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As for Virginia, despite the thousands of black slaves who ran to the British—a single planter, John Willoughby in Norfolk County, alone lost 87—no slave insurrection in the usual sense of the word occurred. Freedom-minded flight substituted for insurrection.

North Carolina had one panic and one rising. In the summer of 1775, Wilmington’s Committee of Safety disarmed local blacks and put the town under martial law. Revolutionaries charged that Captain John Collet, the British commander at Fort Johnston, “had given Encouragement to Negroes to Elope from their masters & they [the British] promised to protect them.” Questions were also raised about Governor Josiah Martin.
⁵⁹
The uprising was partly carried out in July 1775 in the eastern New Bern-Pamlico Sound area. Several hundred blacks had gathered, and 40 were jailed.
⁶⁰

Low-country South Carolina, with a black majority, had its great scare in June 1775. Drums sounded, night patrols were mounted, and Patriot leaders orated that the possibility of a British invasion or a slave uprising
demanded strong defensive measures. However, the evidence of an actual plot or insurrection was unconvincing. Not so with July’s planned uprising in St. Bartholomew’s Parish near Charleston. Plotters there confessed to planning “to take the Country by killing the whites.” The impetus came from black preachers who talked about how the Old King had received a book from the Lord about freeing the blacks, but he had not. Now the Young King (George III) was about to do so.
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One slave was charged as a principal instigator and executed.

That southern Patriots achieved political gains from blaming reported or rumored slave insurrections on British encouragement or actions is beyond doubt. Dunmore was an easy target because of his own boasts. His influence also carried into North Carolina. In November 1775, when Patriot Colonel Robert Howe marched to assist Virginia troops in Norfolk, the route chosen had a dual purpose: to block any southward move by Dunmore, but also to keep the black slaves in two northeastern North Carolina counties from seeking liberation under Dunmore’s banner.
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One historian familiar with Governor Martin’s correspondence said he “did not entirely dismiss the idea of arming slaves,” pointing out to Dartmouth that black populations would “facilitate exceedingly the Reduction” of the plantation colonies.
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In May 1775, slaves in South Carolina were aroused by a rumor—begun by American William Lee in a letter from London—that they were to be set free in June when the new governor, Lord William Campbell, arrived.
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The vessel bringing him was said to have 14,000 stands of weapons, which was untrue. White Charlestonians were quick to perceive a plot and an intended insurrection. A free black named Thomas Jeremiah was charged on weak evidence and executed. To one chronicler, Charleston acted out a kind of collective neurosis, but to others, the public was overinterpreting a considerable array of real knowledge. Southern colonial governors from Martin in North Carolina to Wright in Georgia all complained about false accusations.
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On the other hand, Eden in Maryland put some of the blame on Dunmore’s verbosity, and others may also have complained privately.

Stirred by Dunmore, thousands of blacks ran away from masters during 1775. In Virginia, Frey estimated 800 reached Dunmore, but many more must have reached some form of British protection. Three hundred or so joined Dunmore’s new Royal Ethiopian Regiment, which fought credibly at Kemp’s Mill in November. A month later 35 of its soldiers were taken prisoner after the British defeat at Great Bridge and sold as slaves in the West Indies or Bay of Honduras.
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Runaway slaves in South Carolina and Georgia, lacking the equivalent of an Ethiopian Regiment in which to enlist, made their way to little-populated coastal islands—Sullivan’s in Charleston Harbor and Tybee downriver from Savannah—where hundreds found military protection extended by the British. In November information that parties of blacks and British sailors from Sullivan’s were landing nightly on the South Carolina mainland to take provisions from local plantations prompted the Provincial Congress to send a company of rangers, apparently including friendly Catawba Indians, to patrol the coast. On the nineteenth of December, 54 Rangers landed on the island, killing several black slaves and capturing others, along with sailors from the British sloop
Cherokee
who were leaving in boats. Other runaways had already been taken to North Carolina in a second vessel, HMS
Scorpion.
At this point, 200 soldiers of the First South Carolina Regiment threw up a battery of eighteen-pounders to control the island, and Sullivan’s was no longer a workable refuge.
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