BLACK FLIGHT: TRACING BLACK REFUGEES THROUGHOUT THE REVOLUTIONARY ATLANTIC WORLD 1775-1812

By

JENNIFER K. SNYDER

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2013

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© 2013 Jennifer K. Snyder

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To Mom(my), Dad, Lauren and Papa.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my entire committee for their thoughtful comments, critiques, and unwavering patience. My chairs, Dr. Jessica Harland-Jacobs and Dr. Jon Sensbach, have my eternal gratitude. Thanks to Dr. David Colburn for his unwavering support, Dr. Elizabeth Dale for pushing me along in this process, Dr. Steve

Noll for his wonderful advice and Dr. Lynn Leverty for always being a source of encouragement. A special thanks to Dr. Liam Riordan and Dr. Brian Ward who’s expert advice and editorial guidance helped craft my two favorite chapters.

Many members of the outstanding administrative staff at the History Department have worked tirelessly to keep me on track. Thanks to Linda Opper, Erin Smith, and

Hazel Phillips for their ongoing help. Likewise, the Depart of Archives and History in

South Carolina, the Georgia Historical Society, and the National British Archive volunteers and staff who have assisted my research in countless ways.

I am tremendously indebted to the fellowships and awards I received along the way. The generous support of those listed below funded my work and made my dissertation possible. I would like to thank the wonderful staff at the Clements Library for the Research Fellowship – specifically Brian Leigh Dunnigan. “Tea Time” contributed to many great finds in the archives. The O. Ruth McQuown Scholarship was such an amazing honor; I sincerely appreciate the entire committee’s wonderful suggestions and faith in my topic. Thanks to Gary and Eleanor Simons for funding the Dissertation Award in Early American History, Dr. William Link for the Milbauer Research grants, the Red

Herring Award (a wonderful surprise by an anonymous donor named Mr. Barber), the

Graduate Student Council for Travel grants, and the UF History Department for its overall funding.

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To my family and friends – what can I say other than thank you. For the countless hours you have given me, for the love, support and frequent eye rolling. To my Mom and Dad who have carried me the entire way; Lauren, Carl and Papa, this dissertation is dedicated to you. To my dear friends: Dr. Patrick Cosby, Dr. Tim

Johnson, and Amanda Allard for the gracious use of your time and editorial guidance.

Dr. Thomas Berson without whose advice and help I might still be floundering in one of his beloved springs. To the countless un-named and un-thanked people who are not listed here – thank you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 8

ABSTRACT ...... 9

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 11

Atlantic Shift ...... 17 Structural Outline ...... 24

2 FREE AND ENSLAVED MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTHERN THEATER ...... 27

Lord Dunmore ...... 31 Back To St. Augustine...... 40 Aftershocks Ripple across the Southern Colonies ...... 51

3 REVOLUTIONARY CHAOS ENGULFS SAVANNAH AND CHARLESTON ...... 56

Black Unrest Grows in the South ...... 58 Black Experiences During the British Southern Invasion ...... 64 Regulating Property in British Occupied Savannah ...... 71 Black Activity in British Charleston ...... 87

4 EVACUATION AND EXODUS IN THE SOUTHERN STATES...... 93

Savannah Evacuation ...... 94 Charleston Evacuation ...... 98 Migration to St. Augustine ...... 101 The Florida Claims Commission: A Window into Black Experiences ...... 107 Slaves Sold, Migrated, Transferred ...... 109 Runaway Slaves ...... 112 Victims of Trickery ...... 116 Arrival of the Spanish and Confusion in the Black Community...... 118 Exodus ...... 120

5 BLACK DIASPORIA FOLLOWING THE REVOLUTION ...... 129

Edge of Empire: The Mosquito Coast ...... 134 Mosquito Coast Evacuation ...... 138 Exodus into the Caribbean ...... 142

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Migration to Belize ...... 146 The Bahamas: Another Caribbean Migration ...... 152

6 USE AND MISUSE OF EX-SLAVES IN THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN ...... 161

The Question to Arm Blacks ...... 162 Early Attempts to Raise a Black American Caribbean Regiment ...... 165 Plan to Find a Pacific Waterway...... 167 Black Carolina Corps ...... 169 Negotiating Control over the Black Carolina Corps ...... 172 Troops as Barrack Builders ...... 178 How to Distinguish Slaves from the Negro Corps ...... 182 Across the Caribbean...... 184

7 TREATY OF PARIS AND BEYOND ...... 190

Treaty of Paris ...... 192 Jay’s Treaty...... 194 War of 1812 ...... 196 Treaty of Ghent ...... 201

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 204

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 215

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LIST OF TABLES

Table page

Table 3-1. List of Slaves requested by the Board of Police, 1780...... 92

Table 4-1. Samuel Bonneau’s List of Slaves ...... 122

Table 4-2. List of American Families and their Black Servants traveling from St. Augustine to Philadelphia ...... 123

Table 4-3. List of Black Slaves Registered in St. Augustine 1783-1785...... 124

Table 5-1. A List of Slaves Attributed to Sarah Cunningham in a 1816 Census of Loyalist Refugee Settlers in Belize...... 159

Table 5-2. American Loyalists and the Number of White Companions and Slaves Moved to the Mosquito Coast...... 160

Table 6-1. List of Seized and Condemned Slaves Registered in St. Augustine on July 22, 1779 ...... 189

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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

BLACK FLIGHT: TRACING BLACK REFUGEES THROUGHOUT THE REVOLUTIONARY ATLANTIC WORLD 1775-1812

By

Jennifer K. Snyder

August 2013

Cochair: Jon Sensbach Cochair: Jessica Harland-Jacobs Major: History

Preparing to evacuate in the waning days of the American Revolution, British soldiers, civilians, and American Loyalists crowded into the last British-held Atlantic seaboard towns of New York, Charleston, Savannah and St. Augustine. Thousands of free and enslaved Africans joined them, some freed by the British during the war, some still held in slavery by the Loyalists, some of ambiguous legal status. They were bound for destinations throughout the British Empire. Few of their identities are known. My paper seeks to cast light on their lives.

This dissertation traces the lives of black refugees through the South during the

American Revolution and into the post-war British Caribbean. In particular, it highlights blacks who left South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and were forced to resettle in the

Bahamas, Jamaica, and the Mosquito Coast. By adopting an Atlantic approach, this dissertation makes several contributions to the fields of Atlantic world and colonial

American history. My dissertation shifts the lens south to understand how the majority of free, quasi-free and enslaved blacks fared during and after the revolution, in so doing,

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recovering the free and enslaved black lives, which made up the diaspora that spread outwards from the American South into the Atlantic World in the wake of the Revolution.

By uncovering these lives, it highlights the ways in which displaced blacks experienced a multi-directional Atlantic that repeatedly transcended the boundaries of nation-states and empires. White and black lives were intimately intertwined: relationships between owners and slaves were neither simple nor static, and power dynamics varied across the Atlantic World. Probing the power struggle between enslaved blacks and white owners, it examines the mobility and im-mobility of enslaved blacks. As white

Americans turned against each other throughout the Northern American British colonies, whites began to struggle against each other for control over blacks, creating a multifaceted power dynamic wherein each party—American revolutionaries, British, and

African-Americans—attempted to gain control.

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Severed limbs bobbed in the bloody wake of Colonel John Maitland’s ship, in

June 1779, as he stood on deck watching desperate black volunteers clinging to the sides begging and pleading for their lives. The Colonel, himself deprived of an arm during a previous battle in the Seven Years’ War, ordered his British crew to hack away at the grasping arms of the desperate and screaming unfortunates. The crew set to work slashing and clubbing frantic stowaways while other blacks, healthy enough to board the ship, could only stand by and watch the mutilation. Maitland left a trail of injured and dead men in his wake as he sped towards Stono Ferry, South Carolina.1

Some of those left behind either swam or rafted to nearby Otter Island where hundreds

“died of camp fever and exposure.” Such was the plight of many African-Americans throughout the revolution; most of these escaped slaves, those healthy enough to be useful to the British cause were conscripted into service while the rest were cast away— often violently—to face their fortunes against the unforgiving elements.

The various black soldiers whom Maitland ordered to be evacuated, abandoned, maimed, and killed represent a significant, yet understudied population of African-

Americans who found themselves attached to the British during, and directly after, the

American Revolution. Enslaved blacks, lured by promises of freedom in exchange for loyalty and service, comprised part of Maitland’s 800-person troop. Malnutrition and disease decimated the 71st Regiment, including Maitland himself, who contracted

1 Wilbur H. Siebert, "Slavery and White Servitude in East Florida, 1726 to 1776," Florida Historical Quarterly 10 (July 1931), 3-23; Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 92.

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malaria.2 Deciding that transporting sick and disease-ridden soldiers would slow troop progress, Maitland demanded the remaining healthy soldiers evacuate Johnston’s

Island, leaving black volunteer soldiers who were too weak or sick for the trek. Sick soldiers, terrified of being abandoned without provisions or forced to return to previous owners, swam to the departing ships in hopes of salvation. Rather than complete the evacuation, the colonel ordered remaining ships to set sail. Both the healthy black soldiers who watched and their less fortunate brethren comprised the same population that were forced to negotiate the tenuous path to freedom.3

The first years of the Revolution uprooted thousands of enslaved blacks, providing the foundation for a confusing and chaotic transition both to and away from

British rule. In Virginia, the royal governor Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation in November

1775 offered freedom to any rebel-owned black male who fought for the British and created an unforeseen opportunity for rebel-owned slaves, but it did not provide the same prospects for slaves owned by Loyalists. Shunned by British military officials, slaves in the South with Loyalist masters had very few options. Some tried to take advantage of the turmoil to elude belligerents on both sides, some stayed on the plantation, while many combined the two options, running away for brief periods and returning later. As the British fought for control over the south, many blacks returned to plantations, were sold to pay off British debts, and a few hundred joined British ranks in

2 Maitland died shortly thereafter.

3 Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Zespedes in East Florida, 1784-1790 (Jacksonville: University of North Florida Press, 1989), 49. However, in East Florida, similar incidents were reported of both free and enslaved black Loyalists who had evacuated to St. Augustine during the war and received “temporary protection,” yet were then taken out of the province for sale in the West Indies.

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the hopes of finding freedom.4 None of these choices afforded a safe or dependable alternative. The year 1783 was a turning point in the war, as the British acknowledged defeat, ushering in the beginning of the largest evacuation in the history of the British

Empire that time. As they evacuated, British citizens began to forcibly move enslaved and free blacks, along with many of ambiguous legal states, to the Caribbean in order to protect their property while Americans, realizing the potential loss of their workforce, began to round up their former slaves. While these stories are not triumphant depictions of the British Empire, they illustrate the varied experiences of Africans in this period.

The American Revolution effectively expelled thousands of white Loyalists from the newly independent United States, along with thousands of African Americans, many of whom had voluntarily joined the British war effort, and many of whom remained involuntarily enslaved to Loyalist masters. Many of the free black refugees settled in

Canada and England. The most famous group of African Americans from the Revolution whose 3,000 names were recorded in the Book of Negroes, (a listing of Africans shipped from New York to relative safety and freedom in Nova Scotia) escaped through

New York to freedom in Nova Scotia. However, black southerners, like these in the above episode, were part of a much larger, more complicated and subsequently neglected story. 5 The majority of white Loyalists who wanted to retain human property,

4 In the edited collection, Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, Keith Mason succinctly summarizes the plight of British Loyalists and their slaves. endeavors to show how North Atlantic societies deserve further consideration. Historians have often neglected the end of the American Revolution and Empire and Nation attempts to bring the reverberations of this event to the forefront. Mason makes several convincing points in discussing the "diaspora" of Loyalists in the Caribbean, as this group, both black and white extended the British Empire’s geographical boundaries. In so doing, Loyalists strengthened bonds to the British Empire. I follow the fascinating ideas this short article has pointed out for future study. This dissertation hopes to understand how black migrants participated in expanding the geographical boundaries of the British Empire.

5 Ernest Graham Ingham, Sierra Leone After a Hundred Years (London: Cassius, 1968); Mary Louise Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists after the American Revolution (Jefferson, N.C.:

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moved into the British Caribbean, hoping to rebuild their personal fortunes on the backs of the slaves they brought with them. Plans for the Loyalist resettlement circulated as different islands attempted to woo the disaffected population. Islands like Jamaica,

Bahamas, and, central to this dissertation, outposts like the Mosquito Coast issued recruitment plans complete with tax breaks, free land, and governmental assistance for white Loyalists. This was a potentially devastating proposition for the transported enslaved population, who faced a terrible choice: flee from the British and risk breaking up already tenuous kinship and community networks or confront the hardships of the voyage to and resettlement in the Caribbean.6 The recovery of these black lives that do not fit neatly into national paradigms will reveal heretofore unseen dimensions of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

My dissertation shifts the lens south to understand how the majority of free, quasi-free and enslaved blacks fared during and after the revolution. 7 Historical works

McFarland, 1999). In 1976, two books published on the subject include James Walker’s The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870 and Ellen Wilson’s The Loyal Blacks. These two works focused on the history of free black Loyalists who settled in Nova Scotia and their subsequent migration to Sierra Leone. Several individual blacks secured certificates signed by British general Samuel Birch guaranteeing their freedom—and a promise that a small plot of land would be waiting for them. Both works describe how Nova Scotia proved to be much harder for the immigrants than originally anticipated. Subject to racial discrimination, re-enslavement, and exploitation, a sizable contingent of free black Loyalists chose to migrate to West Africa in 1792. Wilson portrays these events by following individuals in their journey through the British Empire. While Wilson ends her work in the 1840s, Walker continues the story through the 1870s, arguing that the migration of Nova Scotia’s blacks provided a model for subsequent migrating groups.

6 In the 1970s, Black Diaspora studies developed in tandem with the rise of black history. Diaspora studies homogenized the experience of horror and tragedy African slaves experienced in “The Middle Passage”, and the history of the mass experience dominated historical studies until revisionist historians divulged their theories. Since the 1990’s, historians have deviated from “The Middle Passage” narrative to focus on a more nuanced understanding of the agency and power relationships that fueled the slave trade in its entirety.

7 Building on Benjamin Quarles’s classic work, The Negro in the American Revolution, Sylvia Frey, reconfigured the historical landscape with her 1991 work, Water from the Rock. By shifting the discussion to southern soil, Frey moved the conversation from the simple inclusion of blacks to posit the theory that one essential conflict of the war was slavery fix this sentence. She contends that three forces fought the American Revolution: the British, the Americans, and “at least twenty thousand, maybe more” blacks. This

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and/or genres taken singularly provide an incomplete picture of that African American narrative. American colonial and British imperial histories begin and end where the political and geographical boundaries are drawn, and in many cases, redrawn. The geographical division of differing historiographical traditions and the surprising mobility of black Loyalist slaves have simply prevented historians from fully examining the population. Traditional political history actually isolated blacks from the overall historical context that might have explained their movement. By utilizing an Atlantic focus, this dissertation will uncover previously lost black lives, illustrate varied mobility, show the intertwined nature of black and white lives and portray the different ways blacks became tools of the British Empire.

The first contribution of this dissertation is finding these individuals and recovering their stories. The discussion of enslaved Loyalist blacks, however, is a difficult one. The standard terms—Loyalist, slave, diaspora—are only partially useful often used to discuss African-Americans’ role in the Revolution. Blacks who remained enslaved to Loyalist owners would not necessarily consider themselves loyal to the

British cause. Only in the instances when the British offered some hope for freedom would blacks consider themselves loyal to the empire. In most cases, those were the

“triangular war,” as Frey describes it, became the secondary motivational factor as the British and Americans struggled against each other for land, dominance, and the enslaved population. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Standard works on African Americans during the American Revolution include Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961, reprint 1996); Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983); Peter H. Wood, "'Liberty Is Sweet': African American Freedom Struggles in the Years before White Independence," in Alfred F. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 149-84; Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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slaves of American rebels. Thus, the common phrase “black Loyalist” encompassed a variety of imprecise and contradictory legal distinctions bound in under the British imperial cause.

Perhaps most importantly, this saga of recurring flight and settlement allows us to revisit themes of mobility, transnationalism, and ideas of diaspora close to the heart of much Atlantic World and Black Atlantic scholarship. In the American Revolution and its aftermath, the vast majority of blacks, especially those in the South, remained enslaved and subject to the movement of their masters, be they Loyalists or revolutionaries.

However, refugee slaves belonging to southern Loyalists, unlike the slaves of Patriots, were invariably forced from the North American continent into the British Caribbean.

Tracking their travels adds a new, distinctive chapter to the story of “great migrations or passages” which, as Ira Berlin and others have emphasized, has been the central motif of the African American experience.8 Indeed, mobility has been the unifying factor in the lives of Africans and their descendants, in various stages of freedom and enslavement, across the Atlantic World.

Whites and blacks were intimately intertwined. The relationships between owners and slaves were neither simple nor static, and power dynamics varied across the

Atlantic World. During the Revolution, many plantation owners deserted plantations, leaving blacks to fend for themselves. Thousands of blacks consequently fled to cities seeking shelter, and, upon arriving, acted free. In such a period of turmoil and unrest, it is difficult to label a population that encompassed many degrees of freedom.

Nevertheless, the story of the slaves who accompanied Loyalists out of the colonial

8 Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Viking, 2010), 9.

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South reminds us that celebratory histories of black resistance and agency in the

Revolutionary Era need to be tempered by an appreciation that white legal, economic, social and military power, as racialized instruments of exploitation and oppression, remained preeminent features of most black lives.

Finally, the British institutionalized black flight and black military service as official wartime policies during the American Revolution. Any understanding of black life has to account for the influence and the basic fact of owners’ control over their slaves and weigh it against black agency in the face of this control. This dissertation will probe the power struggle between enslaved blacks and white owners by examining the mobility and im-mobility of enslaved blacks. As white Americans turned against each other throughout the Northern American British colonies, whites began to struggle against each other for control over blacks, creating a multifaceted power dynamic wherein each party—American revolutionaries, British, and African-Americans—attempted to gain control.

My dissertation answers the following questions by examining these intricate networks: How were black communities affected by the war’s chaos in the Deep South?

Where did enslaved blacks of Loyalists migrate? What happened to runaway slaves who were promised freedom in exchange for military service? Did blacks who migrated begin to identify with their own new and changing host societies?

Atlantic Shift

Atlantic World history integrates national narratives into a cohesive perspective by breaking down historical institutionalization of imagined divisions in landmasses.9 A

9 Alison Games, "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities," American Historical Review 111.3 (2006): 749. Ferdinand Braudel was the first to articulate this geographical concept in his

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pitfall of respecting national boundaries is that, in doing so, historians are prevented from tracking the black diaspora’s forced migratory patterns—African-Americans’ various journeys strayed not only geographically, but also against the main east-west migratory pattern established by the Atlantic slave trade. The Atlantic Ocean and its shores were not isolated from the rest of the world, and so a focus upon an ocean, rather than a landmass, illustrates transformations unique to the Atlantic as well as those derived from global impact. The Atlantic, moreover, is a geographic space that has a limited chronology as a logical unit of historical analysis: it is not a timeless unit; nor can this space fully explain all changes within it. The lens of Atlantic World history provides the theoretical structure from which to view this mobile enslaved population.

Historians currently define the field of Atlantic studies as a more comprehensive alternative to the traditional nation-state interpretation. Providing a view of regional processes within the contained unit of a larger, oceanic entity, this theory allows the creation of a field in which historians might break down imagined political divisions in order to follow a truly mobile population.

In general, however, sweeping Atlantic World studies have not always generated enough “bandwidth” to focus on the smaller, chaotic, multi-directional, sometimes atypical migrations that occurred throughout the Revolutionary era and in other eras, too. It is only by close examination of how and why identifiable individuals and groups moved, or were moved, across imperial and state boundaries (while also recognizing that those traditionally understood political configurations still had power to shape their monumental work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). In their work, Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen’s Myth of Continents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), describe how the division of landmasses into continents and nation states is a historical construction. Geographers and historians have since used this concept to shift the traditional historical focus from continents to oceans.

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experiences) that historians can truly understand the nature and meaning of mobility in the Atlantic World.10

The stories depicted in my dissertation fit rather uneasily into dominant conceptions of the Atlantic World. For example, the eastern and southern migrations from the American South run counter to the westward thrust of most Atlantic studies. At a most basic level, this reminds one of the sheer volatility and complexity of the Atlantic

World and of the fact that Atlantic World models are useful in explaining thousands of a- typical transoceanic experiences only to the extent to which they can accommodate such counter-narratives and nuances. These kinds of multi-directional Atlantic World migrations repeatedly transcended the boundaries of nation-states and empires. One attraction of Atlantic World—and of even broader global—approaches is that they can help to identify and explain precisely these kinds of transnational historical processes.11

Yet, Atlantic World experiences were also profoundly shaped by national, tribal, and imperial political and economic interests, legal jurisdictions, and military conflicts such as those which engulfed continental North America and the Caribbean during the late eighteenth century. Juggling these twin interpretive perspectives can be challenging

10 Atlantic World theory developed as a general shift in the 1970s, influenced from the Annales school of thought; however its practical application tended to only inform historians working on the British North American subjects. David Armitage, author of The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) was the first historian to organize the theory’s loose structure. Armitage classified the study of the Atlantic World into three main categories: Circum-Atlantic History, Trans- Atlantic History, and Cis-Atlantic History. Circum-Atlantic History is a broad history of the Atlantic Ocean as a "zone of exchange and interchange" wherein historians focus upon the interaction of cultures around an ocean instead of a series of landmasses or nation states. Trans-Atlantic History is the study of the Atlantic World through comparisons of differing groups surrounding the Atlantic Ocean. The idea revolves around using comparison as the unit of analysis in order to discover meaningful similarities or differences. Even so, the Atlantic World model, for all its insights and utility, has yet to fulfill the ambitions of many of its advocates in moving past artificial national boundaries that have hemmed in historical studies.

11 Martin W. Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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and, for all its insights and utility, Atlantic history has sometimes struggled to move past traditional national and imperial categories. Certainly, much of the literature on free and enslaved Black Atlantic migrants is still largely conceived in terms of nation states and other traditional geopolitical and political economic units, such as Empires.

The two dominant trends in Atlantic History have been to focus upon the overarching imperial structures or to delve into the specific history of individuals, places, or goods. The Atlantic is comprised of many micro histories that when placed together uncover “a larger, but hidden or unknown, structure.”12 The interesting combination of an Atlantic world focus and these series of micro histories shows how a local focus must be seen in articulation with the global. As Arjun Appadurai explains, "locality itself is a historical product and the histories through which localities emerge are eventually subject to the dynamics of the global."13 These individual sinews recreate the connections of the Atlantic; moreover, the spaces between these connections allow historians to grasp how people identified themselves within such a dynamic framework.

Beyond the Atlantic

The imperative to explore the Atlantic World mobility and the significance of successive departures and arrivals has been especially marked in Black Atlantic and

Diasporic studies. Within these are highly politicized discussions about the extent to which early generations of forcibly transported Africans retained their traditional cultures

12 Douglas B. Chambers, "The Black Atlantic: Theory, Method, and Practice," in The Atlantic World, 1450-2000, ed. Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 152-155.

13 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 18.

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or acculturated to Euro-American host societies (which were themselves in flux and being indelibly marked by contact with Africans as well indigenous populations).

Paul Gilroy’s interpretive work The Black Atlantic offers the possibility of framing historical discourse in a new geographical and theoretical setting, ultimately locating national history within an empirical context regarding the relationship between North

America and Africa. Gilroy argues that the Atlantic framework has “created a new topography of loyalty and identity” moving beyond the nation state.14 Gilroy takes the theory one step farther, focusing specifically on blacks. Thus, the Atlantic World can be seen through a black lens.

On the surface, the notion of “diaspora” seems like a useful tool to describe such a wide range of peoples and movement. However, it is those same broad strokes that obscure the fine detail of individual stories. “Diaspora is essentially the Greek word for

‘dispersal,’ though its most common usage has been in reference to the scattering of

Jews throughout the West,” and in reference to African history, the word encompasses the massive forced migration of blacks from the continent.15 In the traditional definition, the dispersal of peoples is in relationship to a “homeland” and Paul E. Lovejoy’s concept of a Diaspora “requires the recognition of a boundary; those on one side are associated with the homeland, if there is one, and those on the other side are in the diaspora.”

Thus, Lovejoy defines a diasporic cultural group in opposition to “host societies” as

14 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 16.

15 Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, Special Issue on the Diaspora (Apr., 2000), pp. 11-45.

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those groups that tend to define themselves differently.16 Distinctions between a

Diasporic people who permanently and successfully rejected the influence of powerful

Euro-American forces and those who adjusted to those forces, risk over-simplifying a highly intricate relationship between peoples of African descent and their host societies in the Americas. Christine Chivallon warns against the perils of the overarching diaspora concept, explaining that the term has had the “appalling task of combining, under one umbrella, the multitude of peoples presumably dispersed from a common origin” or homeland.17 While Africans might share a homeland, what about their descendants born on the American shores? It seems that the subsequent movements of people of African origin after the Middle Passage actually dilutes the concept of diaspora. Every generation born farther from Africa will experience a weakening attachment to the ancestral homeland.

The scholarly concern to identify and celebrate African retentions in the New

World can similarly distort the diaspora concept. Of course, acknowledging the persistence of African traditions represents a legitimate and necessary remedy to older claims that African culture and sensibilities were wiped out during the Middle Passage, and that Africans succumbed readily to enslavement and completely accepted the values of slaveholders, contributing nothing except their forced labor to American and

New World development. Yet, this should not obscure the extent to which blacks

16 Paul E. Lovejoy, “The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery,” Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation II, no.1 (1997): 3-4; James H. Sweet, “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (2009): 279-306; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Douglas B. Chambers, “Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave-Trade and the Creation of African 'Nations' in the Americas,” Slavery & Abolition 22, no. 3 (December 2001): 25-31.

17 Christine Chivallon, The Black Diaspora of the Americas: Experiences and Theories out of the Caribbean, (Kingston, Ian Randle Publications, 2011), XIV.

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inevitably and necessarily accommodated themselves to their New World predicament and even came to identify with and adapt certain attitudes and practices of their host societies. Without denying the importance of the ways in which generations of African

Americans continued to incorporate real and inherited memories of Africa into their personal and shared histories, the tendency to privilege the idea of a diaspora forever looking backwards to Africa and African traditions can come at the expense of studying how diasporic and various host communities interacted with and endlessly reshaped each other. The point here is to recognize that all Atlantic World migrations, encounters, and settlements eventually played out in a series of compromises and fusions—victories and defeats—as reluctant and willing migrants sought to survive and, as best they could, prosper in the New World.

A pioneering exception to the scholarship here is Maya Jasanoff, whose work demonstrates how a transnational perspective on the Loyalist diaspora reveals a migration of peoples that simultaneously disrupted and reinforced—transcended and affirmed—the power of the British Empire.18 Historians of Loyalism such as Simon

Schama and Cassandra Pybus have moved beyond the boundaries of an Atlantic focus, following both whites and blacks exiled to Australia and India. Recent works, such as

Schama’s, primarily focused on the Book of Negroes have touched off a renewed interest in the racial aspects of the American Revolution.19 Pybus’s Epic Journeys of

18 Maya Jasonoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011).

19 In 2005, Simon Schama reworked existing literature into his latest Rough Crossings: Britain the Slaves and the American Revolution and a subsequent BBC DVD. Schama seeks to chronicle how African- Americans exerted their newly won freedom, only to face the aforementioned extreme hardships of building new communities in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. These fugitives formed “by far the greatest exodus from bondage in African-American history until the Civil War and Emancipation,” yet the freedom African-Americans sought eluded them throughout the British Empire in the late eighteenth century. See

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Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for

Liberty follows the arduous route of thirty-two enslaved African-Americans on their journey to freedom, beginning with their emigration with the British to Nova Scotia and the British Isles.20 From there, this small group of blacks sought liberty within two very different colonial contexts—Sierra Leone and the new colony of Botany Bay, Australia.

By traveling from one corner of the British Empire to another, these black migrants became part of a global black British Diaspora.

Structural Outline

This dissertation spans the years preceding the American Revolution and follows the trajectory of black displacement during and after the Revolution. The Revolution upset the delicate racial power structure throughout the American South as whites, terrified of war, fled plantations while blacks chose or were forced to stay or leave.

These decisions were fraught with their own difficult repercussions. Chapter 2 follows this initial displacement. As rumors of conflict traveled the east coast, they led to unrest and desertion of blacks from plantations. Adding to the tension, Lord Dunmore’s

Proclamation sent ripples of unrest throughout black communities in Charleston,

Savannah, and St. Augustine, which contributed to the chaos in the years that followed.

Chapter 3 follows these developments as they rippled through Florida and Georgia

Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London: BBC Publishing, 2005), 8. By presenting the American Revolution from the British perspective, Schama exposes the trans-Atlantic connections blacks created. Schama is a master at synthesizing the literature; however, his work does not provide new scholarship to the discipline.

20 By specifically using an Atlantic focus, the lives of enslaved African-Americans could be brought to light, and yet by not using sources from Georgia and Florida, Pybus neglects a valuable demographic data. Pybus also comments that the British were the best option for enslaved Africans. She proves herself correct according to her data; however, the addition of St. Augustine would have broadened her research to include the thousands of Africans re-enslaved by the British, showing how the majority of blacks who left the continent ended up enslaved.

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between 1777 and 1780. Both Loyalists and Rebels began to raid the countryside, pillaging and burning plantations. In order to divide the rebel army and solidify control over the south, the British invaded Savannah in 1780. Marching through the Georgia backcountry and taking Charleston, the British held the south until its evacuation in

1785. Chapter 4 describes the way in which Charleston and Savannah, under British control, began to restore royal control. Once the British re-established authority over

Charleston, white Loyalists began to petition the newly reinstated government for property seized during the rebel interlude (1776-1780), when fledgling rebel governments seized and confiscated British property. Charleston, once again firmly in the hands of the British, began the long, arduous process of attempting to redistribute confiscated property. The British established the Board of Police, a governing body that heard and attempted to settle local cases ranging from petitions to sell property, grievances against stolen property, and attempts to regain confiscated property. In the process, the Board of Police sought to employ Africans, both slave and free, in the service of the state. Charleston offers an example of how blacks played a key role in the assertion of royal authority. However, the royal Charlestonian government was short- lived. In 1782, the British announced their evacuation policy. Savannah evacuated to

Charleston, Charleston evacuated to St. Augustine, and, finally, in 1785 St. Augustine evacuated into the British Empire. The war’s end brought to the forefront many questions concerning the fate of enslaved and free African Americans associated with the British war effort—specifically, how to dispose of free blacks who escaped to the

British and what to do with seasoned black troops who had fought in the conflict.

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Chapter 5 follows the journeys of a few thousand enslaved blacks from

Charleston to the Mosquito Shore, in present day Belize, immediately after the

Revolution. Most of these black refugees were shipped as slaves, while a few hundred had already earned their freedom. Once the Mosquito Coast was evacuated in 1787, the majority moved south, while the others migrated to the Bahamas and Jamaica.

Chapter 6 examines how General Edward Mathew, commanding officer of British troops in the Eastern Caribbean, ordered black troops be “stationed on St. Lucia to perform arduous fatigue duties and thus save the lives of European regulars.”21 From here, the corps traveled to Grenada and stayed until 1788. The remnants of this company eventually became the First West India Regiment.

By expanding the boundaries of the American Revolution, this dissertation traces how global dispersion of African Americans led to the creation of new Atlantic communities. In the process, it depicts the ways in which displaced people of African descent adapted, reformed, and transformed their identities and their communities and show how enslaved peoples were bound up in complex networks of circulation. This wider perspective also reveals the way in which blacks—enslaved and free— crisscrossed the Atlantic, thus complicating the conventional narrative of forced African migration westward in the transatlantic slave trade.22

21 George Tyson, Jr.,"The Carolina Black Corps: Legacy of the Revolution 1783-1789,” Revista Interamericana 5 (1975-1976): 650. Note: Some sources refer to Mathew, incorrectly, as Edward Mathews.

22 The work of examining subsequent black migrations after the Middle Passage has begun in recent books as Alexander T. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth Century British Atlantic World, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

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CHAPTER 2 FREE AND ENSLAVED MOVEMENT IN THE SOUTHERN THEATER

Since the early seventeenth century, Spanish Florida had been a haven for runaway slaves from the British colonies.1 Blacks used Florida as a shelter from slavery long before white Loyalists began to flee to the last British holdout in the lower South.

The departure of the royal governors of South Carolina and Georgia in 1775 and 1776 was followed by the collapse of British authority in the South, placing those colonies in the hands of Patriots. The change in government brought wholesale adjustments for

Loyalists and blacks alike. Patriots began to target Loyalists—for example, tarring and feathering John Hopkins and Thomas Brown. Brown would later famously carried out his revenge as the head of the Loyalist East Florida Rangers.2 Social pressure, coupled with the fear of violence, forced many Loyalists to move to St. Augustine, and in the process they ripped their slaves away from friends and family.

Between 1776 and 1779, several concurrent developments took place, which combined to create a paranoid white population that wanted to control blacks through propaganda and fear tactics. Stemming from a fear of losing control, the Rebel government cracked down on both the Loyalist and the black populations, unintentionally rousing blacks to flee to British St. Augustine, Florida, and a longtime black sanctuary. The growing migration of blacks who freed themselves from plantations and ran to St. Augustine terrified white Americans so much so that whites

1 To read more about early Florida, see Daniel L. Schafer, “St. Augustine’s British Years, 1763-1785,” El Scribano: The St. Augustine Journal of History 38 (2001). Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687-1790.” Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (April 1984).

2 While Brown may have sought vengeance against the Patriots, his activities were legitimate military operations. See Edward J. Cashin, The King’s Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 20-31.

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responded by mounting three invasions of St. Augustine between 1776 and 1779.

These large raiding parties were able to steal or kidnap a few hundred blacks while driving the remaining blacks deep into the swamps. The chaos in the southern coastal region characterized the ultimate breakdown of the rule of law, beginning a cycle that led Patriots, Loyalists, and British forces to hunt and steal slaves.3

This chapter traces the complex black migration streams in Georgia, South

Carolina, and East Florida from 1776 through 1778 and reveal how enslaved and free blacks navigated the tumultuous waters of the American Revolution. Dunmore’s

Proclamation created an unforeseen opportunity for Rebel-owned slaves; it did not provide the same prospects for slaves owned by Loyalists. Shunned by British military officials, slaves in the lower South with Loyalist masters had few options beyond joining renegade groups, staying on the plantation, or escaping to coastal towns. Some slaves tried to take advantage of the turmoil to elude belligerents on both sides by running to

St. Augustine, long rumored as a safe haven, yet none of the available choices afforded a safe or dependable alternative.

Crowded on a strip of land between the Florida swamps and the Matanzas River,

St. Augustine overflowed with people, leading a few destitute British subjects to turn towards illegal means to make a living—privateering. Just beyond the Castillo, the

Matanzas River turns towards the ocean, creating a natural deep harbor that ships used

3 To read more about the chaos blacks experienced during the American Revolution, please see Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Ira Berlin, and Ronald Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: Published for the United States Capitol Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 2001); Frey, Water From the Rock; Martha Condray Searcy, The Georgia-Florida Contest in the American Revolution, 1776-1778 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985). This dissertation hopes to add to the literature by placing a focus on the southern Loyalist black population and the diaspora, which followed the chaos.

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to carry white and black refugees. Until the British recaptured Savannah in late 1778,

East and West Florida were the chief destinations for Loyalist refugees in the region.

Between 1776 and 1778, a “considerable Emigration from the Rebel Provinces” fled across the swamps and lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia to the urban refuge guarded by the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine.4 Between 1776 and 1778, emigrants trickled across the swamps and lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia into the Loyalist haven protected by the Castillo De San Marcos in St. Augustine. As a result, by 1783 the capital of British East Florida had swollen with approximately seventeen thousand black and white refugees.5

As the population of St. Augustine boomed, so did the demand for land.

Emigrants, who fled with their human and non-human property, found St. Augustine overcrowded and undersupplied. Larger planters relocated their entire slave populations and sought to re-establish their former lifestyles. In order to continue their agricultural way of life, these planters immediately applied to the governor for large-scale land grants. Land was such a valuable commodity that a few Loyalists attempted to bypass the local government by attempting to purchase land directly from local Native

Americans, only to find the Native Americans more reluctant to part with their land.

Planters, who were able to obtain land through grants, purchase, or squatting created their own agricultural niche, though not without some adaptation of the methods used outside of this region. Available land was not suitable for the intensive agriculture practiced elsewhere in the coastal South. Instead, planters looked to alternative outlets

4 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 30 October 1776, Colonial Office Papers (Hereinafter CO), 5/566, no. 27, British National Archives. (Hereinafter BNA)

5 Carole Watterson Troxler, “Refuge, Resistance, and Reward: The Southern Loyalists' Claim on East Florida,” The Journal of Southern History 55, no. 4 (November 1989): 580–3.

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for slave labor, especially in the timber and naval stores trade with the West Indies. As

East Florida Governor Patrick Tonyn noted as late as the fall of 1776, the colony quickly became a major trader with the British West Indies, where the shortage of wood and other naval products such as tar, pitch, and turpentine created significant demand.6

Florida, with its abundant natural resources, provided opportunities for Loyalist refugees who migrated with their slaves. Slave labor was used to build a burgeoning naval export industry that supported the sugar industry in the British Caribbean. Not surprisingly, some slaves would themselves be sold and shipped to sugar-producing islands – even

Barbados. The export business became so profitable that once-homeless farmers began “purchasing new Negroes,” who bolstered the number and diversity of newly founded slave communities in the Caribbean.7

Even as some wealthy landowners expanded their foothold, thousands of

Loyalists arrived as paupers, inundating East Florida. Loyalists from the backcountry of

South Carolina and Georgia left their homes, property, and communities behind and joined new frontier communities in Florida.8 For the most part, they saw St. Augustine as a temporary haven and hoped to return home in the future. Governor Tonyn believed that “many more would have fled, had it not been for the inconveniences & danger of losing their property.”9 When Loyalists fled without slaves and property, they risked their livelihoods in order to protect their lives from roving American bandits and angry

6 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 1 November 1776, CO 5/566, no. 29.

7 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 30 October 1776, CO 5/566, no. 27.

8 Edgar Legare Pennington, “East Florida in the American Revolution, 1775–1778,” Florida Historical Quarterly 9 (1930): 31–2.

9 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 30 October 1776, CO 5/566, no. 27.

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revolutionaries. This “great number” of destitute refugees arrived in St. Augustine with little hope of procuring an income and shortly became dependent upon the royal colony’s charity.

Responding to an increasingly black population, the British governor Patrick

Tonyn created military regiments and work groups ready to capitalize on the fresh pool of laborers. The British response to Loyalist and American runaway enslaved blacks took multiple forms: military corps, barrack building, and even a commission created to deal with the population issue. The British endeavored to control runaways through governmental institutions, thus neutralizing the black threat and co-opting blacks for the war effort. Lord Dunmore’s arming his servants instigated a widespread, paranoid white reaction to the enslaved population. Dunmore’s actions in Virginia had far-reaching effects – shifting social dynamics in the Florida’s frontier and beginning the slow change in British attitudes towards employing slaves. Dunmore’s proclamation, which has captured the imagination, and pens, of historians for decades, must be explained in the context of Virginia, in order to understand its role in Florida.

Lord Dunmore

While Tonyn dealt with black runaways in St. Augustine, Lord Dunmore in the upper south came up with a completely different way of dealing with slaves – arming them. Hours after the shot heard “round the world” in 1776, British soldiers quietly snuck out of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, Virginia, where Lord John Murray

Dunmore remained. Shielded by nightfall, these soldiers silently raided powder from the

Williamsburg storehouse and transported this valuable commodity onto the British man- of-war Magdalen. The town awoke to find their store of ammunition gone. Vulnerable to attack from both British soldiers and slave insurrections, the government council

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published a plea in the Virginia Gazette asking the Earl of Dunmore to restore the powder. The townspeople worried the increased British presence in Virginia inspired mutiny in the slave population. Concerned about the dual threat of "invasions and insurrections,” the colony furnished money to buy powder and protect themselves.

The Gazette blamed the city’s fear upon “some wicked and designing persons [who] have instilled the most diabolical notions into the minds of our slaves, and that therefore the utmost attention to internal security is become the more necessary."10 Expecting trouble from the now Rebel-dominated Williamsburg, Dunmore increased his own protection by arming what the people of Williamsburg perceived as their greatest threat—slaves. Once rumors of his decision to arm both his and any runaway slaves reached the provisional Rebel government, the Virginia Convention quickly assured the governor of his own personal safety. However, the convention expressed its extreme displeasure at this "most diabolical" scheme “meditated, and generally recommended, by a Person of great Influence, to offer Freedom to our slaves, and turn them against their Masters." The idea that slaves would abandon their “rightful” place for British ships terrified American and British whites. Dunmore’s actions confirmed Williamsburg’s fears and crystallized southern white, specifically American fears of domestic insurrection.11

Dunmore replied to the Gazette explaining he had removed powder kegs from the magazine for the town’s protection. He promised to return the powder within half an hour of any local slave insurrection. The powder’s removal forestalled any Rebel move

10 Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg) 22 April 1775.

11 For a full account of how Americans saw revolutionary blacks and even perpetuated this fear well into the nationalist period, see Sidney Kaplan, “The "Domestic Insurrections" of the Declaration of Independence,” The Journal of Negro History 61, no. 3 (July 1976): 243-255

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against Dunmore. After his written response, rumors spread of an insurrection in the neighboring Surry County. The local government demanded payment for the powder to buy new supplies and protect the county from not only slave insurrections, but also the armed servants protecting Lord Dunmore and British regular soldiers who were in possession of the powder kegs.

Angered by rumors relating to the British capture of the Williamsburg stores,

Patrick Henry, the famous beer-maker and firebrand, organized 150 men from Hanover

County to march on the capitol and demand the powder’s return. Along the way, militia from neighboring counties joined the march. As Henry’s troops neared Williamsburg, they numbered several thousand. The Governor, cowed by this show of force, agreed to pay for the powder. Henry accepted the offer and sent his troops home. Humiliated,

Dunmore lost his temper. Williamsburg resident Dr. William Pasteur heard the governor exclaim he would "declare freedom to the slaves and reduce the City of Williamsburg to ashes" if they disagreed with his governmental policies. He boasted he would have "all the slaves on the side of the [British] government.”12

Dunmore’s verbal threat solidified white Virginians’ fear of a British-inspired slave revolt. In May, Dunmore spoke more explicitly of his intention to “proclaim. . .all the

Negroes free, who should join him.”13 Writing to Lord Dartmouth, Dunmore declared he would “arm and set free such slaves as should assist me if I was attacked.” Dunmore admits that his actions had “stirred up fears in [white Virginians] which cannot easily

12 Douglas Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 5.

13 Peter H. Wood, Strange New Land: African Americans 1617-1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 116. Woody Holton. Forced Founders. Ira Berlin, and Ronald Hoffman. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: Published for the United States Capitol Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 2001); Frey, Water from the Rock. Searcy; The Georgia- Florida Contest in the American Revolution.

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subside” as the rebel Americans knew “how vulnerable” they were to slave insurrections.14 John Stuart, the North American Indian superintendent, perceived the southern colonists’ concern over racial unrest when he wrote to Lord Dartmouth that

“nothing can be more alarming to the Carolinians than the Idea of an Attack from

Indians and Negroes.”15 Stuart continued with his duties, presenting several rifles to the

Catawba Native American delegates in South Carolina. This inauspicious act enraged

William Henry Drayton, an American Rebel who would become the South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress. Drayton charged Stuart with attempting to injure the Rebel colony. Shortly thereafter, a mob ran Stuart out of town and into Savannah. 16

Reduced to some 300 Loyalist soldiers and sailors, Dunmore welcomed supporters of any skin color. Surrounded by a sea of American rebels, Dunmore feared for his remaining loyal subjects and his newly armed servants. On November 7, 1775,

Dunmore’s threat came to fruition when he proclaimed “all indentured servants,

Negroes, or others that are able and willing to bear Arms” would be freed in exchange for British military service.17 The proclamation was not a humanitarian act but a strategic one. In actuality, Dunmore owned large numbers of human chattel and carefully limited

14 Governor Earl of Dunmore to Earl of Dartmouth, 25 June 1775, in K.G. Davies, Documents of the American Revolution, vol. 9 (Shannon: Irish University Press), 204. Sylvia Frey believes that Dunmore did not want to start a Rebellion, but that he did want to encourage slave defections. Frey, “Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution,” The Journal of Southern History,” 49, no. 3 (August 1983): 378-379.

15 J. Russell Snapp, John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 159.

16 John Stuart, the Southern Region Indian Agent, previously stationed in Charleston, was forced to evacuate to St. Augustine in 1775. His sudden death in 1779 allowed Thomas Brown to fill the position. Wilbur H. Siebert, ed., Loyalists in East Florida: The Narrative (Deland: Publications of the Florida State Historical Society, 1929), 1:24.

17 Frey, Water from the Rock, 63.

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his proclamation only to able-bodied, male, American slaves.18 This strategy had a very real social impact upon the daily lives of enslaved blacks. Black communication lines would soon buzz with information as friends, family members, and even strangers dispersed the news of a possible escape route. While Dunmore’s Proclamation might have unintentionally caused more hardship for men and women brave enough to cross enemy lines, it did offer hope to blacks who had been maltreated, confined, and even abused by fearful owners. However, hope could not stem the rising tide of whites desperate to retain their labor force.

News of Dunmore’s Proclamation freeing slaves traveled through communication networks in the south. His actions sent rumors flooding down the southern Atlantic coast, which described a British conspiracy to send “seventy-eight thousand guns, and bayonets. . .to America, to put into the hands of N*****s, the Roman Catholics, the

Indians and Canadians.”19 Communication networks informed whites and blacks alike of

Dunmore’s actions. The South Carolina Gazette proclaimed that the British intended to use “all of the wicked means on earth. . .to subdue the Colonies.”20

From this precarious position, Dunmore and the British Navy sailed the coastline encouraging slaves to join British ships. Soon, Dunmore “had more than 300 persons enrolled in his Ethiopian Regiment with the words “Liberty to Slaves” emblazoned

18 John E Selby and Edward M. Riley, Dunmore. (Williamsburg, VA: Virginia Independence Bicentennial Commission, 1977), 38.

19 The quotation is reprinted here as it appears in the original document: South Carolina Gazette, 29 May 1775.

20 Ibid.

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across their uniforms.”21 By the summer of 1776, at least 800 blacks "willing to bear arms" had joined Dunmore’s force and quartered on Gwynn’s Island, Virginia. As word spread along the coast, several hundred slaves joined Lord Dunmore’s troops over the weeks following Dunmore’s proclamation.22

Events continued to conspire in Dunmore’s favor as enslaved men and women began to flee to British ranks, upsetting American leaders. Blacks made “desperate effort to elude their owners and come under the protective wing of the Royal Navy.”23

The Virginia Committee of Safety president Edmund Pendleton noted soon after

Dunmore’s proclamation, “slaves flock to [Dunmore] in abundance, but I hope it is magnified.”24 Pendleton’s statement illustrates how Americans feverishly hoped the rumors of slave desertions and movement to the British was exaggerated. Pendleton’s worst nightmare was coming true; the British had gained an important ally, one that could topple the nascent revolt. This wishful thinking was further expressed in a letter

Pendleton penned to Thomas Jefferson: “[Dunmore’s] slave scheme is. . .at an end, since it is now Public that he has sent off a sloop load [of slaves] to the West Indies, which has made others use every endeavor to escape from him, and will stop his further increase of that Crew.”25 By mid-December, it was clear to Pendleton and the

Committee of Safety that the number of slaves flocking to British lines would continue

21 Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis. To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 101.

22 In contrast to the pre-revolutionary pattern of young men making up the greatest percentage of runaway slaves, those who fled to Dunmore were often family groups.

23 Wood, Strange New Land, 116-117.

24 Frey, Water from the Rock, 63; To R. H. Lee, 27 November 1775, in David J. Mays, ed., The Letters and Papers of Edmund Pendleton, 2 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1967), 1:133.

25 To Thomas Jefferson, November 16, 1775, in ibid., 1:131.

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barring intervention. Consequently, on December 14, 1775 the Virginia Committee of

Safety issued the following declaration:

Whereas lord Dunmore, by his proclamation, dated on board the ship William, off Norfolk, the 7th day of November 1775, hath offered freedom to such able-bodied slaves as are willing to join him, and take up arms, against the good people of the colony, giving thereby encouragement to a general insurrection, which may induce a necessity of inflicting the severest punishment upon those unhappy people, already deluded by his base and insidious arts, and whereas, by an act of the General Assembly now in force in this colony, it is enacted that all negro or other slaves, conspiring to Rebel or make insurrection, shall suffer death, and be excluded all benefit of clergy: We think it proper to declare that all slaves who have been, or shall be seduced, by his lordship’s proclamation, or other arts, to desert their masters” service, and take arms against the inhabitants of this colony shall be liable to such punishment as shall hereafter be directed by the General convention.26

This declaration was probably responsible for George Washington’s subsequent policy reversal the following year, which permitted militias to accept new free black recruits. In fact, by late December 1775, Washington expressed his concern over the success of

Dunmore’s proclamation. He wrote fearfully that if the Governor “is not crushed by spring, he will become the most formidable enemy America has; his strength will increase as a snow ball by rolling; and faster, if some expedient cannot be hit upon to convince the slaves and servants the impotency of his designs.”27

Loyalists’ slaves were one group that was discouraged from joining the British

Navy. Among the approximately 800 slaves who joined Dunmore, some had traveled with their Loyalist owners.28 Dunmore’s Proclamation excluded Loyalists’ slaves from

26 “A Declaration By the Representatives of the People of the Colony and Dominion of Virginia, assembled in General Convention,” 14 December 1775, in Mays, ed., Papers of Edmund Pendleton, 1:138.

27 Wood, Strange New Land, 118.

28 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 113-115.

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the ranks of the Ethiopian Regiment. Despite their exclusion, Loyalists’ slaves still attempted to join British forces. If British slaves could pass for American ones, the

Dunmore Proclamation offered a clandestine means to freedom. In April 1776, the

Virginia Convention ordered Americans in Norfolk and Princess Anne counties to move their slaves into Virginia’s interior regions at least thirty miles away from Dunmore’s fleet in an effort to forestall black escapes. The Convention also mandated that

the Male slaves of such suspected persons, above the age of thirteen, and also the slaves of the persons within the Limits aforedescribed, be immediately taken into the custody and safe keeping of some officer, at out posts in Norfolk and Princess Anne, to be conveyed to some place off Navigation, and to be returned to the owners after they have settled at some secure place, upon the further Order of this Committee.29

Americans began a two-pronged effort to try and prevent slaves from abandoning plantations; articles written in newspapers slandered the British in an attempt to change the hearts and minds of escaping slaves, and Americans began to restrict their property’s already limited freedom. Colonists outraged by Dunmore’s Proclamation and nervous about the potential loss of slaves, tried to combat the rumors by printing letters and broadsides. These letters pointed out freedom was only promised to young, healthy men, and furthermore, if these men ran to British, the brunt of plantation work would be left to families, and more importantly, to women. Broadsides also reminded blacks that the English originally brought the slave trade to America and that if the British lost slaves, the runaways could expect to be sold to the sugar plantations in the West

29 The Virginia Committee of Safety, “Unanimous Resolution for the Evacuation of Parts of Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties,” 10 April 1776 in Robert L. Scribner and William James Van Schreeven, eds., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence, 7 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981), 6:370.

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Indies.30 Virginia declared that any slave found trying to reach the enemy or in the military service of the enemy would immediately be sold in the West Indies and that the masters would be fully compensated for their loss.

While it is difficult to assess the reaction of a largely illiterate black population to these written broadsides and newspaper articles, the actions of the slaves who seized their opportunities to escape illustrate the extent to which these ideas circulated in the black population. The few slaves able to reach Dunmore constituted only a fraction of those who were willing to don red coats—if only the British allowed them. African

Americans were not necessarily pro-British. Primarily, blacks regarded the needs of themselves and their families by taking calculated risks to support the side that held out the greatest hope to improve their lot. Freedom, the cost for enslaved service, was a price neither the British nor their Loyalist allies were truly prepared to pay.

The war was a battle for the control over the black population. Whether siding with the Americans or the British, blacks must have seen this struggle as an unprecedented opportunity to gain their freedom. However, both British and American whites took steps to re-enforce white dominance over blacks. Dunmore’s Proclamation was the act that pushed white Americans over the edge as blacks began to carry arms.

The only plausible reaction, in this case, was to respond with violence. Word spread down the coast, carrying information implicating the British in a conspiracy to arm enslaved and free blacks. As word moved down the eastern seaboard, Charleston and

Savannah took different steps to fight both the British and the threat of a slave revolt.

30 Interestingly, the Americans differentiated themselves from the British, arguing that the British started the slave trade in America, when the descendants of those slave traders were in fact Americans.

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Back To St. Augustine

Lord Dunmore added to the overcrowding in St. Augustine by sending a number of distressed loyal subjects, prisoners of war, and “some Negroes” to the town in

1776.31 The deluge of Loyalists triggered concern; however, as Tonyn wondered how

“numbers of Indians and Emigrants Black & White [would] be fed.” His small colony could not possibly afford to clothe, feed, and house such a large group, as “all of them

[were] destitute” and they would “incur a heavy Expence [sic] for Provisions.”32 In exchange for support, Tonyn drafted the rapidly increasing dependant population into service, establishing and arming companies of provincial troops, which provided work for the needy population and security for the colony.33

Tonyn decided to put the black population to work as laborers, reinforcing the

Castillo in case of attack or invasion. However, Tonyn began to worry about their expenses after several months. His small colony could not possibly afford to clothe, feed, and house such a large force. In official correspondences, he complained

the Earl of Dunmore sent from Virginia a Number of His Majestys distressed Loyal Subjects some Prisoners of War, and some Negroes, all of them destitute, they also incur a heavy Expence for Provisions. A great number have also arrived in equal distress from Georgia and others from the Back Country of Carolina.34

Not only did Dunmore send troops, but also a great number of blacks and whites fled to St. Augustine for protection. These people put great strain on the limited financial ability of the colony to provide for them, as they had nothing of their own. In order to

31 Pennington. “East Florida in the American Revolution, 1775–1778,” 31–2. J. Leitch Wright, “Blacks in British East Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 54, no. 4 (April 1976): 431.

32 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 30 October 1776, CO 5/566, no. 27.

33 Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 9.

34 Patrick Tonyn to Lord Germain, St. Augustine, 8 May 1777, CO 5/557, no. 42.

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offset some of the expenses incurred by the colony by runaway and employed blacks,

Tonyn began to use healthy Africans to bolster the military fortifications of the port city.

As more enslaved men and women streamed into St. Augustine, forced to emigrate by masters lured by hopes of British freedom or just seeking safety from raids, Tonyn contemplated arming “a considerable number. . .who may be trusted with arms, & rendered on such emergency very useful to His Majesty’s Service.”35 Tonyn believed they would be much better soldiers than the “two hundred Roman Catholichs [sic] fit to bear arms at the Smyrna Settlement,” whom he forced to stay on the plantations. 36

Many uprooted blacks who volunteered or were forced to serve as soldiers were stationed to protect the same forts other blacks were forced to repair. Governor Tonyn

“urged in his Council that the inhabitants be ordered to report to the commandant, Major

Jonathan Furlong, the number of their slaves who might be entrusted with arms should the need arise.”37 After gathering statistical information on the numbers of black refugees in the colony, Tonyn established his own Ethiopian Brigade, formed of four companies of enlisted black soldiers.38 Many joined the Ethiopian Regiment or the East

Florida equivalent, pledging to fight for the British in exchange for a quasi-freedom.

Most regular militia units in East Florida were at least one-seventh black. Blacks

“enlisted in the East Florida Rangers” and would help “garrison Fort Tonyn and protect the St. Mary’s frontier.”39 Governor Tonyn explained to Lord Germain that his rationale

35 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 22 March 1776, CO 5/568, no. 7.

36 Ibid.

37 Wilbur H. Siebert, “Slavery in East Florida, 1776 to 1785,” The Florida Historical Society Quarterly 10, No. 3 (January 1932): 139.

38 Searcy, The Georgia-Florida Contest, 57.

39 Wright Jr., “Blacks in British East Florida,” 434-35.

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behind arming the slaves was to frustrate any invasion attempt by the Americans.

Tonyn “established and armed the Companies of militia, who may be employed in ease of invasion, and will be at all times useful in keeping in awe the Negroes who multiply amazingly.”40 The growing numbers of runaway slaves would help protect the last bastion of Loyalism in the southern states.

Tonyn commissioned other militias as well. He instructed Thomas Brown, as lieutenant colonel of the East Florida Rangers, to recruit men from among the refugees.

The governor initially planned to use this force to gather cattle in Georgia to alleviate

East Florida’s food shortage, but later employed the unit to take revenge on the

Rebels.41 In response to the Rangers’ raids, Georgia’s Patriot Council of Safety appointed Jonathan Bryan and Nathan Brownson to plan an “irruption into the Province of East Florida” with the reduction of St. Augustine a “very considerable object.”42 Bryan and Brownson believed that, once the Rebel armies ravaged the “cattle on the east side of Saint John’s [sic]” and forced the inhabitants to “evacuate their plantations and fly into the Castle [Castillo] the scarcity of provisions and the want of fresh supplies of many articles from the country will of itself oblige the Garrison to submit to our arms.”43 The

Rebels wished to reduce St. Augustine both for military gain and to prevent slaves from running south. By driving out the British, the Rebels essentially would prevent “the loss of negroes [sic], either by desertion or otherwise by land.”44 So many blacks had

40 Patrick Tonyn to Lord Germain, St. Augustine, October 30, 1776, CO 5/557.

41 Cashin, The King’s Ranger, 49–62.

42 Allen Daniel Candler, ed., The Revolutionary Records of Georgia 1769-1782, vol. 1 (Atlanta: Franklin- Turner, 1908), 12.

43 Candler, The Revolutionary Records of Georgia, 93.

44 Ibid.

42

deserted the Rebels that the Georgia Council of Safety thought attacking East Florida was the only way to safeguard their property. Bryan and Brownson also argued that an attack on St. Augustine would hinder privateer raids on Georgia, at least until “we are better prepared for them.”45 In order to pay for this direct assault, the council members thought, “plunder which will fall into the hands of the soldiers will well compensate them for the difficulty and toil attending their march.”46 Plunder was surely intended to include assaults upon many black families. Tonyn reported that the theft of slaves was a discernible goal of the invading Patriot army as “they took upwards of thirty Negroes” from the first plantations they reached.47 Tonyn sent several of his slaves to St.

Augustine to help rebuild the Castillo in order to protect his own property.

Others took similar steps to protect their valuable property, even when it meant forcibly disrupting kinship networks, communication lines, and established ways of life.

Enslaved men and women, who stayed on plantations, by choice or force, were victims of Patriot and Spanish raids including invasions of East Florida in 1776, 1777, and

1778. The first raid failed, but the two later invasions succeeded in breaching the initial lines of British land and coastal border defences. While no attackers reached St.

Augustine, they managed to harass the countryside between Savannah and St.

Augustine, burning plantations, stealing cattle, and grabbing any slaves within their reach.48

45 Ibid., 84.

46 Ibid., 181.

47 Pennington, “East Florida in the American Revolution,” 25.

48 “Even a Spanish privateer was now and then successful in plundering plantations on the east coast. At the end of August 1778, a privateer entered Mosquito (now Ponce de Leon) Inlet and carried off thirty negroes.” Siebert, “Slavery in East Florida,” 139.

43

William Taylor, a settler on the St Mary’s River in Florida, was one of those forced to flee from the invaders. He made his way to his employer William Chapman’s estate on Amelia Island and from there composed a letter to Chapman describing the ensuing chaos. Taylor had an “hourly expectation of sharing the same fate and in danger of losing our Negroes I resolved to quit the place which we did that night with all our Negroes and what effects we could carry in our boats.” Yet on Amelia Island the abundant consumption of shellfish and crowded conditions led to widespread illness.

The rest of the slaves were “sick as are likewise one half of the people in general.”49 A large Rebel party also carried off “Mr. Jolie, Mr. Bethune, Mr. Kennedy, & other planters and a party advanced to Nassau River and took off Negroes & Horses.”50

Two or three days after arriving on Amelia Island, Taylor engaged an unnamed man to return to his employer’s plantation and tend to the crops. Taylor also sent “four of the worst of our Negroes” to assist the unnamed man. Three of these black men or women were eventually carried off by the Rebels. The last of these four slaves was not taken, having been rendered lame in an ambush and unable to travel. Not surprisingly,

Taylor felt it was unsafe to return to the plundered and burned plantation on the St

Mary’s River. Instead, he combined his slave population with Martin Jollie’s slaves in order to begin shipping naval supplies. This transient black community lived on Amelia

Island for two months. Taylor describes how the Rebels plundered essentially every plantation between the St Mary’s River and the St John’s River and how Rebel-scouting parties had carried off fifteen prisoners since the first raid. Rebel raiders also drove the

49 William Chapman Folio, Treasury Papers, National Archives of the United Kingdom (Hereinafter TPNA) 77/3.

50 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 6 April 1777, CO 5/566, no. 35.

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agent Stephen Egan and more than a hundred slaves from their plantation on the St

John’s.51

On 1 July 1776, armed Georgians attacked John Wilkinson’s Tobacco Bluff plantation located west of the St John’s River. The Rebels “kept concealed in the

Woods, and were no[t] observed” as they surrounded the slaves laboring in the indigo fields. Patriots “took upwards of 30 Negroes & a Family from an Adjoining plantation.”52

These men, women, and children were abducted and marched directly to Georgia. The plantation house and provisions were also plundered or destroyed. Forced to replace his stolen slaves, Wilkinson purchased additional laborers and resumed operations two years later. These newly arrived blacks would experience the same chaos that victimized the previous laborers.

Incessant raids scared many plantation owners in the borderlands between

Georgia and Florida. Charles Wright, the younger son of Georgia royal governor James

Wright, removed his and his father’s slaves’ safety to Cumberland Island. James Wright built a fort atop an old stockade on the Georgia side of the St Mary’s River that had been originally built for protection against Native American raids. “Mr. Germain & Chas

Wright” retired “from their Estate in this Province & armed their Negroes” at this makeshift fort located “opposite to the Post occupied by His Majesty’s Troops.” Induced by rumors of freedom, safety, or simply food and shelter, slaves from across the area joined Germain and Wright’s black outpost. When a Patriot raiding party attacked the

British fort on the Florida side of the river, the fort served as a safe house and “a soldier

51 Chapman Folio, TPNA 77/3.

52 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 18 July 1776 CO 5/566, no. 18.

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of the 60th regiment in the hospital with the surgeon, and the sailors made their escape to Mr Wright Stockade.” This raid cost Wright “20 of his Negroes.”53 On 31 July 1776, a

Mr. Hazard went to the council in Savannah to claim a “negro wench and two children lately taken near Wright’s Fort.” The Board ruled that she and “her children could not be sold, but that the other negroes taken with her should be sold at vendue by Mr.

Jacobs.”54

Numerous smaller, unauthorized raids took place over the next few years— a symptom of the growing scramble for moveable wealth in this borderland – taking a detrimental toll on the black population. 55 Another brother, Jermya Wright reported that on August 7, 1776 “another large Gang of Rebels commanded by one Joseph Woodruff with a floating battery and two or three other craft.” The Wrights abandoned their camp, leaving blacks at the mercy of the American rebels. Woodruffe

by creeping and hiding through bushes before break of Day following being the Eight of August surrounded this appearers camp on every side and not finding this appearer or his brother…had retreated to Ameila Island, and on this retreat the distressed negroes who had kept Garrison many months and fought on behalf of his Majesty and for so doing had been burn’d out of home drove [sic] from their Cornfields Plantation and necessarys of Life, were obliged to retreat with so much precipitation that many of the same poor negroes to their further distress lost of left behind them their cloathing [sic] and blankets, and this appearer was likewise so much hurry’d that he was obliged to leave live stock and such other provision as he had saved for the support of Life part on Cumberland and part on Amelia Islands56

53 John Wilkinson, TPNA 77/17/16; Alexander Gray, TPNA 77/8/7.

54 Candler, The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 169.

55 Roger Smith, “The Façade of Unity: British East Florida’s War for Dependence” (Master’s thesis, University of Florida, 2008), 65.

56 Candler, Colonial Records, 220-224.

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Many blacks, such as the ones described by Wright were mistreated by the British.

Southern blacks did not have the same kind of opportunities as blacks in the north.

Unfortunately, those freed by the British and given land in Canada tend to dominate the story. Whereas, these blacks who suffered severely from lack of food, clothing and shelter also dutifully fought for the British. Black experience during this period is completely dependent upon both the location of interaction and the British individuals themselves. The Wrights made a decision to saved themselves from the raid at the expense of dependant blacks, leaving them even more vulnerable to raids. These abandoned blacks, like thousands of others, would begin to make their way to Florida.

Tonyn commented on the “numbers of fugitives from the neighboring Provinces” who flooded into St. Augustine seeking safety from Rebel persecution and backcountry violence. As a profitable, and more importantly, mobile form of wealth, blacks were prime targets for raiders. But slaves were not helpless. Many fled to East Florida seeking safety. Tonyn noted a “number of Run-away Negroes from Georgia,” who fled to St. Augustine and the surrounding areas “for protection.”57

During the summer of 1776, large numbers of blacks began travelling to

Cockspur Island located just north of Tybee Island on the Georgia coast. Edward Telfair applied to the Council of Safety in Savannah to stop his “negro pilots from ferrying” blacks there. Telfair hoped to prevent his and other Rebel property from fleeing by confining black pilots “in some secure place”. One month later, a women identifiable

57 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 18 October 1776, CO 5/569, no. 26.

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only as Mrs. Murray made an application “to send some person to Cockspur for her runaway negroes.”58

In July 1776, a Rebel committee composed of Jonathan Bryan, John Houstoun, and Colonel McIntosh reported that to the “east, the inhabitants suffer the ravages of

British cruisers. Their negroes are daily inveigled and carried away from their plantations. British fleets may be supplied with beef from several large islands, well stocked with cattle, which line their coasts, and round which ships may sail.” The committee was very concerned about the “vast number of negroes,” reporting that

“blacks exceed the whites” and that they used the backcountry to “secure retreat which

Saint Augustine affords.” The committee feared that East Florida might even use these blacks to help with the “conquest of Georgia,” as it “would be considered a great acquisition by Great Britain.”59

The growing number of defecting African slaves and Loyalists—among whom was Robert Hope, a wealthy refugee from Georgia who resettled his slaves on a 5,000 acre tract of land close to Chief Justice James Hume’s Cypress Grove plantation— clearly frustrated and alarmed Georgia Patriots like John Houstoun, who demanded an invasion of East Florida. For John Grimke, a major in the South Carolina Continentals, an invasion was needed to prevent deserters such as the six hundred he reported fleeing to East Florida, from uniting with Loyalist refugees.60

58 Candler, Colonial Records, 200.

59 Ibid.

60 Grimke heard rumors that the British under Major General Prevost intended to attack Sunbury, Georgia as a diversion, while other British troops would march into Georgia to be joined by one thousand to twelve hundred disaffected insurgents from North and South Carolina. John Faucherau Grimke, “Journal of a Campaign to the Southward. May 9th to July 14th, 1778,” South Carolina Historical and General Magazine 12 (1911): 63–4.

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News of the impending invasion reached East Florida before a force of twelve hundred Continentals began to march south in early 1777. General Augustine Prevost recommended a scorched-earth policy to keep the outlying plantations from provisioning the invading Patriot army. “Governor Tonyn readily ordered the complete destruction of his own plantation, including two large frame houses, every outlying building and mill, and all 20,000 acres of produce and timber.”61 He evacuated “19 male slaves, all prime

3 of them coopers and the rest Sawyers, 19 women all prime 2 of them House

Wenches, and 16 children from 12 years to 6 months.” 62 These slaves were forcibly moved to the Black Creek estate to rebuild his plantation. They also recreated their own communities in the process.63

Samuel and Mary Tims’ enterprising overseer, Richard Sill, was able to save their slaves from the Rebels. Samuel Tims bought Talbot Island in 1774 and left the plantation under Sill’s supervision before returning home to England to retrieve his wife.

Mary Tims was pregnant when they set sail for Florida in 1777. After a disastrous stopover in Montserrat where the ship’s captain stranded all of his passengers, Mary and Samuel finally arrived in East Florida to find that Rebel raiders had destroyed their home, plundered their provisions, and carried off most of their valuable effects a year earlier. The overseer, however, had moved their slaves to another property south of the

St John’s River, where he attempted to reassemble their plantation.64

61 Smith, “The Façade of Unity,” 55.

62 Searcy, The Georgia-Florida Contest, 88–90.

63 Smith, “The Façade of Unity,” 53.

64 Mary Tims, Memorial, Treasury Papers, 77/17/8, BNA.

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As the Patriot forces made their way closer to St. Augustine, Spencer Mann,

James Penman, and Lt. Col. Robert Bissett begged Tonyn to capitulate. They even proposed to compensate Rebels if “certain properties” went unmolested. These men surely worried not only about the loss of their crops, but also about their valuable slaves. Mann brought eleven black men and nine black women from Connecticut to St.

Augustine for Edward Fenwick. Penman brought four black men and offered personally to meet the oncoming army with a flag of truce if it would help protect his property.

These men were willing to set aside political ideology to preserve their wealth and protect their social standing. Luckily for them, the second invasion never came close to

St. Augustine.65

At the end of April 1778, Governor Tonyn received reports of a planned third invasion. Tonyn believed the considerable force of nearly two thousand Rebel troops was “enticed by the prospect of plunder.”66 Rebels gathered on the St Mary’s River and began raiding plantations only recently repaired after earlier attacks.67 Among these was Jacob Wilkerson’s ten-thousand-acre Padamaran Estate, which after repeated raids in 1776 and 1778, was eventually destroyed. If any slaves remained on this plantation they surely were ripped from loved ones and sent to live under yet another master in Georgia, South Carolina, or further provinces.

Simon Munro, a Loyalist, lost part of his slave holdings and sold the rest in

Antigua after his banishment from Georgia in 1777. Prevented from travelling directly to

65 Patrick Tonyn to Lord Germain, St. Augustine, 8 May 1777, CO 5/557, no. 42; Charles Loch Mowat, East Florida as a British Province, 1763-1784 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 87.

66 Searcy, The Georgia-Florida Contest, 107.

67 Calvin W. Smith, “Mermaids Riding Alligators: Divided Command on the Southern Frontier, 1776-1778,” Florida Historical Quarterly 54 (1976): 439.

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East Florida by American Rebels, he took a circuitous route sailing from the Bahamas,

then to Jamaica, West Florida, and finally settling in St. Augustine. Appointed “Lt.

Colonel of militia” and a “civil Majestrate,” Munro attempted to return home and visit his

family after the British evacuation of Savannah, but was captured and held prisoner by

the Americans. He claimed to have lost twenty-two slaves taken by “a Rebel privateer,”

beyond the twenty-five he recovered and sold in Antigua. Other slaves like “Jack, Lear

& Child, Patty, Wally, Warrick, [and] Jobas” were never found, while three slaves

(“Elsey, Fanny and Fanny’s sister”) were taken by a Rebel party from Munro’s wife while

he was away in Savannah.68 Thus, not only were blacks forcibly moved by Loyalists

protecting their property, but raiders also stole them from plantations and vessels. This

violent migration disrupted kinship networks and spread blacks across the revolutionary

Atlantic. At the same time, blacks were able to capitalize on the chaos and escape by

the thousands to the British to claim their liberty. Sometimes their bold action was

rewarded with freedom; more often, it was not. The British simultaneously freed and

enslaved individuals depending upon the specific local circumstances.

Aftershocks Ripple across the Southern Colonies

The British retaliated against Rebel raids. In a May 1779 attack on All Saints

Waccamaw situated between Myrtle Beach and Cat Island in South Carolina, Samuel

Hasford and several other residents were “robbed of a number of their Negroes, by a

party of the British.”69 The Rebel-owned slaves were placed aboard British ships,

presumably bound for a safe port such as St. Augustine or New York, but the ships

68 CO 13:26, folios 785–6.

69 To the Honorable Hugh Rutledge, esquire, Speaker, and the rest of the Members of the Honorable House of Representatives, Records of the General Assembly, Columbia, South Carolina, Reel 1, 535–54.

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never made it. Instead the ships were captured by two American ships from

Massachusetts and their human cargos were sailed to Boston. In the meantime,

Hasford and other residents of All Saints Waccamaw outfitted a seaworthy vessel with the intention of reclaiming their slaves. After pursuing the captured ships all the way to

Boston, Hasford sought the return of his property—Anthony, Old James, Peggy, Quash,

Robert, Affa Hall, Prince Hall, Joack Philips, Jack Puddy, George Rolly, and John

Rolly—or restitution. However, Massachusetts law entitled all blacks to freedom, and so

Hasford petitioned Massachusetts governor, the famous John Hancock, to reclaim them.70

Some blacks did find freedom in the northern American states and in British

North America. For example, in 1779, fifteen-year-old slave William Winter left William

Sams, a Loyalist turned Rebel who had acted as a magistrate under the British, in order

“to avoid bearing arms against his countrymen.” Sams claimed that the British treated him poorly and confiscated “upwards of forty slaves” while fleeing. Four years later, on

22 September 1783, Winter boarded the Aurora bound for Ostend, Belgium. That same day another of Williams Sams’ slaves, Toby Sams, a 25-year-old “pockmarked, stout fellow,” boarded the Charming Nancy bound for Port Roseway, Nova Scotia.71 Two other slaves of Sams’ also managed to make their way to New York, where they were recorded in the Book of Negroes before reaching freedom in Nova Scotia.

Rebel Americans were not the only maritime raiders on the eastern seaboard.

Since the British acquisition of Florida in 1763, Spaniards had been a constant threat to

70 I am not able to trace what happened to these blacks. Ibid.

71 “Black Loyalist Institute, “Book of Negroes,” http://www.blackloyalist.com/canadiandigitalcollection/documents/official/black_loyalist_directory_book_tw o.htm (accessed December 12, 2009).

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plantations along that coast. In fact, it was their example that had led both enterprising

Britons and Americans to cruise the Florida-Georgia coast in search of plunder.72 In

1779, Spain began to attack the southern coastline of Florida. In one instance, a

Spanish privateer “landed and carried off Eighteen Negroes from Smyrna,” (a mile from

St. Augustine) and rumors of the raid travelled up the coast.73 After another devastating raid by Spanish privateers, Loyalist Alexander Bissett submitted a claim for compensation of £660 for the loss of his plantation and shortly thereafter moved his remaining slaves to a five-hundred-acre plantation north of St. Augustine. When East

Florida was returned to Spain under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Bissett sent eighty-two of his remaining slaves to Jamaica where they sold for £2,282.74

The migration of planters, their slaves, and other moveable property to the apparent safety of St. Augustine became so large that the town, despite its relative prosperity after 1776, had difficulty adjusting to the influx. Governor Tonyn sent a

“detachment of the King’s Troops to co-operate with the Marine for the protection of that district, and to prevent the Planters removing, some having taken the alarm and to the very great loss of their constitution have fixed nearer to this place and upon Saint John’s

72 Wright, “Blacks in British East Florida,” 432; Siebert, “Slavery in East Florida,” 139; In one instance, the British war sloop Otter and the armed schooner George sailed from St. Augustine in pursuit of a Rebel privateer that had “carried off 30 Negroes from the Smyrnea [sic] Settlement.” The ships were lost off Cape Canaveral in a violent storm, but the crew survived to tell the story. Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 20 August 1778, CO 5/569, no. 62; In one instance, the British war sloop Otter and the armed schooner George sailed from St. Augustine in pursuit of a Rebel privateer that had “carried off 30 Negroes from the Smyrnea [sic] Settlement.” The ships were lost off Cape Canaveral in a violent storm, but the crew survived to tell the story. Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 20 August 1778, CO 5/569, no. 62.

73 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 16 July 1780, CO 5/569, no. 90. James W. Walker, “The Blacks as American Loyalists: The Slaves’ War for Independence,” Historical Reflections 2 (1975): 51-67.

74 Daniel L. Schafer, “William Elliott, Stobbs Farm at Mosquito Lagoon, and the Elliott Sugar Plantation at Indian River,” unpublished summary for Canaveral National Seashore Historic Resource Study, 2008.

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River.”75 Tonyn also desperately sought aid to deal with the “increase of Negroes within these few years,” which he estimated had more than “quadroupled [sic].” Tonyn believed that they needed to be “under more restraints than the Laws of England have laid upon Servants” due to the “great deal of licentiousness that prevails amoungst them.”76 In addition, as word spread about the flight of blacks to East Florida, Governor

Tonyn became concerned about the legal system’s ability to handle the “prospect of numberless claims to [lost] Negroes.”77

By the war’s end, the southern port towns that remained in British hands—St.

Augustine, Savannah, and Charleston—overflowed with black refugees that had arrived by various means; some arrived by their own volition having escaped their Rebel masters to join the British, while other enslaved blacks journeyed with their Loyalist masters or with the Loyalist raiders who stole them from British slave masters. Still others were simply swept up in the maelstrom. Many received freedom from the British upon their arrival in St. Augustine, but many more remained enslaved or lived in a kind of legal limbo.

The border conflicts that characterized the first few years of the American

Revolution were just the beginning of the upheaval in the South. The chaos in the southern coastal region exemplified the ultimate breakdown of the rule of law and beginning a cycle of slave-stealing raids and retaliatory counter-raids among Patriots,

Loyalists, and British forces. Loyalists forcibly move slaves to protect their property and maintain their lifestyle. Masters removed blacks from their families and communities in

75 Ibid.

76 Patrick Tonyn, St. Augustine, 1 July 1779, CO 5/569 no. 79.

77 Ibid.

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order to protect their assets. Raiders stole blacks from plantations and vessels, disrupting already tentative kinship networks and beginning the dispersal of blacks across the Revolutionary Atlantic. Tensions rose as black resistance turned violent.

Whites attempted to maintain control, thus increasing black resistance and desertion and feeding the cycle.

Once the British Empire reestablished control across the south, African

Americans simultaneously sought to capitalize on the chaos by escaping by the thousands to the British to claim their liberty. The British created individualized policies and institutions to deal with the large numbers of blacks, and the problem over what to do and how to deal with the larger numbers of quasi-freed blacks was debated throughout the war and continued to be discussed, examined, and implemented after the Loyalist exodus into the British Caribbean

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CHAPTER 3 REVOLUTIONARY CHAOS ENGULFS SAVANNAH AND CHARLESTON

White Control and Black Resistance During the Southern British Invasion

The three Rebel invasions, discussed in the previous chapter, had a very real impact, not just upon the daily lives of enslaved blacks in the borderland between

Savannah and St. Augustine, but also on blacks in the surrounding countryside. These raids inflicted violence upon the black community in order to regain and maintain control over fractured communities. The raids increased anxiety across the South. As rumors of an impending invasion swirled throughout the South, white American overseers began to punish anyone—white and black—perceived to be helping the British. Fear inspired violence towards “traitors.” There were a few localized violent acts caused by Africans.

Whether motivated by the rising tensions, paranoid whites, personal grudges or a combination thereof, we will never know.1

While the last chapter focused on the larger official British structures, this chapter explores how the newly reinstated British government adjusted to the local conditions to control rebels and Loyalists, white and black. In the years leading up to the British invasion of Savannah in 1778, fear saturated the Deep South. Various local American governments passed laws allowing owners the right to kill slaves who escaped from plantations. The rebel government in Wilmington, North Carolina declared a curfew on blacks and banned enslaved persons from handling weapons.2 British governments in

1 Written accounts from various sources indicate a rise in black resistance during the Revolution era. Comprehensive research indicates few records are extant, but if there were more at one time, most likely the accounts were either destroyed or lost. Without documentation of some sort, much of the black resistance during this era may never be known. However research does indicate that there was a rise black resistance in the years leading up to the Loyalist invasion.

2 Jeffrey J. Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 37, no. 1 (January 1980): 79-102.

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Charleston and Savannah also sanctioned an increase in police protection at night for fear of insurrection and coordinated attacks by blacks. Yet, blacks continued to resist oppression in the face of a volatile and increasingly violent white population. The British invasion of Savannah provided a release valve for the black population—a distraction as well as a destination for the enslaved who had been too fearful to flee prior to the

British arrival.3

The newly installed British governments inherited a nervous Rebel American population, a revenge-minded Loyalist contingent, and a black population harboring hopes of freedom. In order to control a larger segment of the population, the local British government began to take an interesting legal shift. Blacks began to appear as plaintiffs in the court records of Charleston. By offering nominal protections, the local British government in Charleston experimented with their treatment of the black population in an attempt to win the support of and thus control a segment of the inhabitants. The

British showed concern not just over the control of slaves, but also with “the employment of Negro manpower.”4 While local governments differed across the south, the short-lived royal British government in Charleston created its own solution to the black issue by co-opting blacks in exchange for the mere hope of freedom. The

3 For a history of blacks in the court records, see Peter Michael Voelz, Slave and Soldier: The Military Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas (New York: Garland, 1993); Brian Dyde, The Empty Sleeve: The Story of the West India Regiments of the British Army (St. John's, Antigua, WI: Hansib Caribbean, 1997); Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795-1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

4 George Smith McCowen. The British Occupation of Charleston,1780-82 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 98. Most work done on the southern colonies in the revolution are local or genealogical studies. A few works look at larger geographical areas, see Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775-1782 (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 2008). David Lee Russell, The American Revolution In the Southern Colonies (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2000); Robert Stansbury Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists in the American Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987).

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governmental experiment in Charleston is an early indication that official British policy would begin a slow shift to incorporate blacks into the larger social structure. The haphazard implementation of the shift would play out over the next 50 years, until the

British abolished slavery in 1833.

Black Unrest Grows in the South

In the early years of the revolution, the chaos of impending war provided increased opportunities for black resistance. Escape was the major form of protest.

Incidents of escape clustered around the first few months of the revolution and seem to grow substantially in the summer months between 1778 and 1779 just before the British invaded Savannah. Black methods of resistance also included slaves acting violently towards white masters and attempting to free themselves, their friends or their families.

Henry Laurens received many letters from his overseer Henry Lewis Gervais describing the way in which Laurens’ slaves acted over the years leading up to the revolution.

These letters provide an interesting lens with which to view activity across South

Carolina and Georgia. However, black violence did not just occur towards overseers and plantation owners; blacks, also targeted expensive property—themselves.

One very telling incident involved an enslaved man in South Carolina cutting off part of his own hand to prevent his return to the field. In June 1777, an enslaved driver,

March, “was very Saucy” when a white overseer accused him of stealing rice. The overseer “laid hold of him, but the Negro proved to be the Strongest & threw him.”5

5 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 26 July 1777, in Collection of John Lewis Gervais Papers 1772- 1801, 43:96, South Carolina Historical Society (Hereinafter SCHS.). To read more about Henry Laurens: David Duncan Wallace, The Life of Henry Laurens, with a Sketch of the Life of Lieutenant-Colonel John Laurens. (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1915); David. R. Chesnutt, ed., The Papers of Henry Laurens, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968); and Henry Laurens and Philip M. Hamer, The Papers of Henry Laurens (Charleston, S.C); Farley, M. Foster, “The South Carolina Negro in the American Revolution, 1775-1783,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 79, no. 2, (1978): 75-80.

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Other slaves refused to obey the overseer’s orders to help him subdue March, so the overseer left. He returned shortly afterward to find that March had cut off part of his own left hand “above the thumb.” March “came up to him with a knife in his right hand” to the overseer of Henry Lauren’s slaves, John Lewis Gervais. Gervais believed March intended to kill him. Only then did the other slaves intervene, stopping March’s assault.

By mutilating the only object March had control over, his body, March was truly able to express his frustration at his working conditions and to echo the ideals of a revolution ostensibly based upon freedom. March would never again function as effectively as his undamaged peers. Through such a meaningful gesture, March was able to regain some control over his life, albeit an exceedingly high price. March’s rebellion was “so extraordinary” that Gervais believed his only course of action was to “prosecute [March]

& punish him in the plantation in presence of all the negroes” as a warning. After he was sentenced to the workhouse, Gervais sent March to Savannah to be treated and then lodged in a workhouse to recover from his injuries.6

This was not the only recorded incidence of enslaved blacks’ attempting to harm their masters. Colonel Alexander Innes, the Inspector General of Provincial Forces, brought the Board a letter describing the “ill behavior and insurrectious conduct of Mr.

Gards Negroes towards their overseer.” The Board, so appalled at the behavior of blacks towards their owners, ordered a “party of soldiers under a Sergeant to be sent to

Mr. Gard’s plantation.” This military group was informed to “inflict such punishment upon the principal offenders” as to “prevent such behavior” and to discourage insurrections against Rebel Americans in the future.

6 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 26 July 1777, SCHS 43:96.

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When plantation violence did not garner its intended results, enslaved men and women began to run away. Rebels in Georgia and South Carolina rigidly enforced slave codes and remained vigilant in order to prevent blacks from escaping to the British.

However, these slave codes did little to stop runaway blacks. Just a few days after

Gervais punished March, “4 Negroes ran away from Mepkin” and another “four negroes ran also away from Sante.” The violent warning Gervais hoped would stifle any more insubordination might have inspired eight additional slaves to flee. Rumors indicated that these “eight blacks ran to British occupied Savannah.”7 Many other slaves migrated to the perceived safety of the coastal towns such as Charleston, Savannah and St.

Augustine. Henry Laurens wrote to Ralph Izard in June 1777 describing how his

“Negroes are continually deserting the plantations” and going to Charleston, “where I have no doubt many of them would have embark’d in Men of War and other Vessels.”

Coastal cities, especially islands just outside of major port towns became bottleneck points for fleeing Africans. Slaves continued to run away well into 1778. Gervais reported to Laurens in a letter from Charleston dated July 2, 1778, “there are several run-aways besides from Sante and Wright.”8

Laurens attributed the slaves’ flight to two causes: “the Tyranny and Villainy of

Overseers and Sometimes to. . .their own vicious Designs,” that is, a desire to find freedom with the British.9 Slaves deserted plantations across South Carolina in numbers great enough to lead the legislature to solidify the slave laws already in place.

7 Ibid.

8The rest of the page was torn. John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 2 July 1778, SCHS Collection of John Lewis Gervais papers, 1772-1801, 43:96.

9 Henry Laurens to Ralph Izard, 9 June 1777, SCHS 11:350.

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Americans, terrified that blacks could aid the invading British army, took drastic measures; slaves deserting plantations could face the death penalty if caught. Gervais ordered the execution of a slave who had taken three women and two children with him and was “endeavouring to go on board the Men of War.”10 Gervais does not explain if the women and children were also executed or simply returned to their plantation.

On June 19, 1778, Gervais wrote to Henry Laurens reporting that the “Villian

March” who “in return of the Indulgence shewn him after his great Crime” ran away. A neighbor, Mr. Roderick saw March at the plantation near Mepkin. Exasperated, Gervais planned to sell March as he was deemed a “worthless fellow.”11 Two weeks later, as the hot weather descended upon Charleston and the surrounding lowland, March and his companions returned to their plantation. The beginning of the document is unreadable, but Gervais described how “the Boat of negroes came in the small canoe.” The group came bearing news that a slave, Pompey “died of a fever being only sick 24 hours.”

Tom Peas also became very ill “of the same disorder, he had bled and blistered.”

Gervais sent for Doctor Kennedy to see to him and “sent a Wench to nurse him.” Tom

Peas “upon the whole. . .a good Negro” died two weeks later.12

Gervais mentioned that “Doctor Coffee and March are in the boat,” but did not describe if the runaways came back of their own volition. Gervais intended to give them both a “well deserved Correction & after wards to sell Coffee at public Vendue.”

Insistent upon punishment, Gervais wanted to punish Doctor Coffee even though he

10 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, Aug 2, 1777, SCHS 11:414. This short description could have referred to a husband or brother attempting to smuggle his family away from the plantation.

11 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 19 June 1778, SCHS 43:96.

12 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 16 July 1778, SCHS 43:96.

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would be sold. Tradition dictated owners forgo punishment when selling slaves, but

Gervais chose to “deviate from” tradition in order to make “Coffee as an example to others.” He sold Doctor Coffee to a man living in the backcountry named “Robert

Harkinson for two thousand pounds currency payable the first of next month.” As for

March’s fate, Gervais changed his mind about selling the slave. Instead Gervais decided to “send March to Mepkin with orders to keep him very strictly at such work as he may be Capable.”13 Gervais sent “directions to punish him and to keep him at the hardest labour he is able to perform.” Over the years, March ran to Mepkin multiple times, either to see family or friends. Gervais permanently moved to Mepkin. While it was a hard, violent road, March navigated the compromise. Gervais also commented on the “several run-aways. . .from Sante and Wight Savannah” who made their way to his

Mepkin plantation. His overseer, Mr. Baillie was “not displesed to have them there.”14

Gervais sent the rest of the healthy blacks back to load the boat with “Ruff Rice” and to sail it into Charleston. However, they also did not get off without punishment. A woman named “Mentas” who was working on “Board of some Vessels in consequence were of they were taken” was also severely punished, as well as a man named Debat.15

Debat, an older man, was placed in a workhouse until Gervais could find a buyer. In comparison to Debat, Coffee was “likely younger and his fault was not so great.”16

13 Ibid.

14 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 2 July 1778, SCHS 43:96. The rest of the document was torn and missing.

15 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 16 July 1778, SCHS 43:96.

16 Ibid.

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Mentas, however, was “rather sore from his whipping” so Gervais “kept him in Town till the Flat returns.”17

Whites grew increasingly intolerant of enslaved rebelliousness—specifically runaways. As a result, owners began to mete out harsher punishments. In February

1778, Pennsylvanian Ebenezer Hazard witnessed the recapture of a runaway slave near Pocotaligo, South Carolina. While another slave bound the runaway, the master watched from horseback, gun in hand. The “poor Negroe’s looks, arising from terrible apprehensions of future punishment, were such I think must have affected a savage.”18

After several fugitives belonging to Henry Laurens and other planters were recovered, John Lewis Gervais told Laurens that he would sell one of them as punishment and give the others “a Severe Correction at the Work house.”19 A few days after this runaway slave report, Gervais wrote to Laurens describing a situation involving a runaway slave named Collonel. Collonel was part of the original four who ran to

Charleston and he came to Gervais begging for his life. Due to his return and ‘sincere’ regret at his actions, Gervais “ordered Collonel a gentle whipping at the workhouse” after which Collonel was “well satisfied” and “very happy to get off with a gentle correction.”20 According to whites, Collonel was thankful to return home with a whipping;

17 Ibid.

18 H. Roy Merrens, “A View of Coastal Carolina in 1778: The Journal of Ebenezer Hazard,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 73, no. 4 (October 1972): 187.

19 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 16 July 1778, SCHS 43:96.

20 For complete military explanation of the Southern Invasion, please see: John Alden, The South in the Revolution, 1763 to 1789 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University ,Press, 1981); Hugh Bicheno: Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolutionary War (London, 2003); Dan Morrill, Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Nautical & Aviation Publishing, 1993); David Syrett, "The British Armed Forces in the American Revolutionary War: Publications, 1875-1998,” The Journal of Military History 63, no. 1 (January 1999): 147–164; David K. Wilson, The Southern Strategy:

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historians can only wonder as to his disappointment of being caught. Plantation masters meted out harsh punishment across the south as rumors of impending war encouraged slaves to act out. However, in 1778, there were no longer rumors of war; the British invaded Savannah, finally bringing the hard reality of war to the south.

Black Experiences During the British Southern Invasion

On December 29, 1778, the British retaliated against the small-scale raids of

American Loyalists by launching an invasion that would eventually conquer the south.

The British landed in Savannah, winning the city with the aid of one enterprising enslaved man, Quamino Dolly, who led British Commander Prevost’s men to victory.

While Dolly was an unusual exception, he does show how the British utilized blacks through the next few years of invasions. In 1779, the British moved throughout the backcountry of Georgia and into Charleston. After taking Charleston in 1779, the British possessed the southern states for the duration of the war. Until 1782, the British attempted to bolster their rule throughout the south by confiscating Rebel property, including slaves, for the funds necessary to extend their power. Both the Charleston and

Savannah governments used blacks to rebuild and maintain public works while simultaneously extending protections by the court systems. For the first time in the south, blacks could take problems to the court and sue for protection or support.

The British invasion of the South began on December 23, 1778. Sir Henry

Clinton, the Commander of the British forces in America, dispatched General Archibald

Campbell, who had been an American prisoner for three years prior to his service in

Savannah. Clinton hoped to bring Rebel Americans to their knees by squeezing the

Britain's Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775–1780 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).

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country into submission from the north and the south. Perhaps due to the ultimate defeat of the British, historians tend to overlook how this moment changed the landscape for the enslaved and free black populations. Overshadowed by the more significant northern battles, the southern invasion has only recently garnered attention from scholars. The invasion upset traditional hierarchy by providing a white population seemingly more sympathetic to blacks. While works on Loyalists in the south have recently come into vogue most works give blacks a minor part at best.21

The British invasion intensified the revolutionary chaos in Georgia and South

Carolina. The British captured and retained Savannah for four years and Charleston for two years. The arrival of the British fleet sent Rebel Americans fleeing to the backcountry with their slaves in tow.22 American and British raiding parties took advantage of the chaos, stealing slaves from the countryside. Meanwhile, hundreds of blacks on plantations (either left by Rebel Americans or kept by Loyalist or nonpartisan masters) fled to the marching British army. Adding to the maelstrom, many slaves ran from Loyalist plantations to follow Campbell’s army as it marched into Charleston.

21 To read more about the American Revolution in the South, see Robert Stansbury Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists in the American Revolution, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987); John W. Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution: A Battlefield History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003); John Drayton and William Henry Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution As Relating to the State of South Carolina (New York: New York Times, 1969); John Drayton and William Henry Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution From Its Commencement to the Year 1776, Inclusive, As Relating to the State of South-Carolina and Occasionally Referring to the States of North-Carolina and Georgia (Charleston: A.E. Miller, 1821); David Ramsay, The History of the Revolution of South-Carolina From the British Province to an Independent State, (Trenton: Isaac Collins, 1785); Martha Condray Searcy, The Georgia-Florida Contest in the American Revolution, 1776-1778 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985); William Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution So Far As It Related to the States of North and South Carolina, and Georgia (New York: D. Longworth, 1802); and Edward J. Cashin, The King's Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).

22 Campbell to Tonyn, 5 December 1778 and Campbell to A. Prevost, 5 December 1778, in Campbell, Journal, 11-13.

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Citizens of both Savannah and Charleston wrestled with what to do the growing black itinerant population.

Before and during the invasion, blacks were looked upon as human chattel and as a form of currency. However, over the next two years, British policy transformed the role and use of blacks in American society. Soon slaves became used not only as payment to soldiers, but also as public works employees who fixed roads and transported garbage. At this time, the Charleston Police Court began to hear black grievances. As the British situation in the war deteriorated, so did the progress towards emancipation that blacks struggled to create and maintain. As the war ended, free blacks were once again transformed into a mobile form of wealth, a veritable bond that evacuating loyalists moved into the Caribbean.

Shortly after British General Campbell landed his fleet on Tybee Island, the

British realized that a large contingent of American soldiers was preventing the two

British armies from converging. At this time, a “confidential Slave from Sir James

Wright’s Plantation” volunteered important information that aided in accomplishing this goal. Unfortunately, historians know little about this enslaved man, then the property of

British Governor Wright. Speculation still exists around his name, either Quash or

Quamino Dolly. In addition, perhaps more interestingly, only conjecture can be made about his motivations for helping the British. Familiar with the low country swamps surrounding Savannah, Dolly knew of a cut through the swamps that would lead the troops directly to Savannah. After questioning the man, Campbell “found that he could

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lead the Troops without Artillery through the Swamp upon the Enemy’s Right” allowing his army to meet up with Augustine Prevost’s contingent.23

The southern British campaign would have never been successful without the help of Quamino Dolly. Dolly’s expert information led the British around Rebel troops with few casualties (twenty-six British were lost) and led to the capture of 450

Americans.24 Some historians have discussed how Dolly must have shared this information out of loyalty to his masters.25 This might be true; however, it must also be considered that he hoped that volunteering such critical information would lead to his freedom and the freedom of his kin.

As the British marched from Savannah to Charleston, large numbers of slaves deserted plantations. Blacks fled the Georgian countryside, hoping to reach freedom once they arrived at the British lines. One slave owner from Georgia, Samuel Stiles wrote that “when Col. Prevost came to Georgia. . .two of our most Valuable Carpenters named Sampson and Sam went to Mcgerts Scouting party,” while a carpenter named

Jack, his wife, Cumba, and a “Yellow boy” named Swan joined Campbell immediately after the capture of Savannah. Stiles claimed the return of only three of his slaves, and suffered a significant financial loss.26

23 Archibald Campbell, Journal of an Expedition Against the Rebels of Georgia in North America, ed. Colin Campbell (Darien, GA: Ashantilly Press, 1981), 26.

24 Campbell, Journal of an Expedition, 27-28, 110, fn.; Alexander A. Lawrence states that the slave agreed to guide the British for “a small reward,” in “General Robert Howe and the British Capture of Savannah in 1778,” GHQ, 36, no. 4, (December 1952): 317. There is no mention of this in the British accounts, although it is possible Campbell later compensated the slave for his services; Coleman, Revolution in Georgia, 121.

25 Coleman, Revolution in Georgia, 121.

26 Samuel Stiles to William Telfair, 21 February 1779, Edward Telfair Papers, Georgia Historical Society.

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On January 20, 1780, South Carolina Rebel Nathaniel Hall complained, “thirteen of my Negores have run away, and are gone over to the Enemy.” Two other slaves he owned in Georgia had been taken by the British, while another two had been “carried off by an Overseer of Lord Wm. Campbell,” evidently a Loyalist who had taken the slaves with him when he went to join the British.27 Plantation owner Mr. Wright from Georgia noted on February 5 that “near 50 Negroes” had run away.28

Rumors of the British march northward spread across the south, bringing opportunity as well as danger to the black population. “Negroes are a very precarious

Tenure, anywhere near the Environs of Georgia,” one Georgia citizen stated.29 Oliver

Hart observed in mid-February that since the British had arrived in Georgia, “Negroes in abundance” had joined them, including “some Hundreds” who had escaped from South

Carolina. Blacks who thought the journey to St. Augustine was too long and difficult now fled to Georgia.

British Major General Augustine Prevost took on “swarms of negroes” as he marched from Savannah to Augusta and then onto Charleston. As the British set off to reclaim the backcountry of Georgia, runaway blacks attached themselves to the troops in exchange for providing services and aid to the British. These blacks were used as scouts, guides, cooks, diggers, and for any other menial labor the British needed. A few blacks also willingly helped hunt down stolen or runaway slaves with the intention to return these people to the plantation. Blacks thought loyalty to the British—even at the expense of their friends’ and neighbors’ freedom—would be repaid with freedom.

27 Nathaniel Hall to Benjamin Lincoln, 20 January 1779, Lincoln Papers Microfilm, Reel 3.

28 Mr. Wright to Benjamin Lincoln, 5 February 1779, Lincoln Papers Microfilm, Reel 3.

29 Oliver Hart to Joseph Hart, 16 February 1779, Oliver Hart Papers, SLC.

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When word reached the countryside that the British were marching, Americans began to raid surrounding plantations for anything of value—including slaves. Prevost marched from Savannah into the backcountry and secured Johnston’s Island with an entire contingent of newly manumitted blacks. Lieutenant Colonel John Maitland was left in charge as Prevost ultimately marched back to Savannah. In June, “Maitland evacuated his post, and took only a part of the negro refugees with him.” Many of those abandoned by Maitland were wounded or too sick to travel. A large number of the remaining blacks tied themselves to the sides of Maitland’s boats rather than be left behind to face the impending punishment of their former masters. The British soldiers used bayonets to cut the former slaves loose, leaving them to drown. Other blacks either swam or rafted to Otter Island where hundreds “died of camp fever and exposure.” Over three thousand refugees survived the ordeal only to be shipped to the

West Indies and sold back into slavery by their British comrades.30 Similar instances were reported in East Florida of black Loyalists, free and enslaved, who evacuated to

St. Augustine during the war and “received temporary protection, then were taken out of the province for sale in the West Indies.”31

British scouts caught a Rebel raiding party close to Zubly’s Ferry, who were removing Loyalist slaves to Purisburgh, South Carolina. The light infantry pursued the raiding party, but could not follow the group past the river. Eventually Campbell arrived at the riverbanks with his troops. Spying the raiding party, which was still very close to

30 Siebert, “Slavery in East Florida,” 140; see also Frey, Water from the Rock, 92.

31 Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Zespedes in East Florida, 1784-1790 (Jacksonville: University of North Florida Press, 1989), 49.

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the river’s edge, Campbell came up with a brilliant plan to use the blacks who followed his military unit as a way to lure the Americans to the other side of the river.

A growing group of enslaved men and women began trailing Campbell’s marching troop. Unwilling to turn away the slaves, Campbell utilized them for the army’s needs: cooking, cleaning, digging trenches, and any other hard labor. One unnamed escaping slave in particular, a “confidential Mulatto” who “attached himself” to William

Campbell during the Siege of Savannah became Campbell’s confidant and assistant.

The mulatto took a “number of negroes” to the River bank and called out to the Rebels to return the boats and save “his master’s slaves from falling into the hands of the

King’s Troops.” William Campbell then sent Captain Lieutenant Charles Campbell and his 71st Regiment to hide in the woods along the riverbanks. The group of blacks lead by the mulatto then began to cry out in the “most pitiful manner for Relief.” The

Americans sent back the boats that the British regiment seized, rowed across the river and stole 83 slaves.32

On February 11, 1779, Campbell camped just outside of Augusta, Georgia. As he was waiting for dawn to approach to light the way for his attack, he heard a “very great Noise and scattered Firing took place across that part of the Swamp.” Assuming it was Rebel Americans, he sent his “Piquets” to advance “and meet them.” Campbell discovered “Four Negroes on Horseback, swimming towards the Bank.” These men

“surrendered their Arms and informed them that they had stolen their Master’s Horses and made the best of their Way to our Army.” However, their escape went unnoticed.

“They were closely pursued by the Rebels” who fired upon any noise heard in the

32 Campbell, Journal of an Expedition, 34.

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swamps.” The Rebels “this Evening by the Infamy of their Deserters became awake and perfectly watchful.”33 Military historians have long since questioned the rationale behind

Campbell’s decision to ignore Augusta, even though British soldiers outnumbered the town, leaving the town vulnerable to Rebel sympathizers. As the author who found this journal speculates, the reason may have been that he wanted to spirit away these blacks. If Campbell’s army had been outnumbered, blacks returned as slaves would have suffered greatly at the hands of their spurned masters. To add to the confusion,

Campbell’s army would have had a difficult time attempting to find Americans spread thinly through the woods.

British ships also captured black men and women who were subsequently sold back into slavery. Benjamin Springer captured 116 slaves in the private war sloop the

Juliana who were “the property of some or one of the Rebellious Inhabitants there.” On

July 22, 1779, 166 slaves were registered in St. Augustine as seized and condemned property.34 All of these people, men, women, children, were then under the governmental control in Savannah and were eventually sold by the Court of Admiralty to the general population in St. Augustine. Other blacks were simply caught by individuals and sold off to the highest bidder.

Regulating Property in British Occupied Savannah

By 1780, the British soon controlled the entirety of the Deep South and attempted to regain Savannah in 1779, but did not succeed in winning the city back. With the

British firmly entrenched in the city, General Campbell marched through the Georgia

33 Ibid., 63.

34 See Table 6-2 for a list of recorded names.

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backcountry and into Charleston. The British civilian authority returned to power.

However, the British authorities entered into a tenuous social and legal situation between angry British citizens, defiant rebels, and citizens willing to change alliances in exchange for the safety of person and property. Another issue lay in wait for the British government—what to do with the black population? The British used blacks in the building and defense of Savannah. Thousands of blacks had run to British troops across the south and followed triumphant soldiers into the city. Faced with a nominally free black population, the British set up the Board of Police to deal with these problems. As will be seen, blacks played a pivotal road in defending Savannah, attached themselves to troop movements, and finally increased in numbers to prompt the local British government to deal with the black issue.

On September 12, 1779, the French landed off the coast of Georgia and General

Count d’Estaing sent a letter requesting the immediate surrender of Savannah. The

British governor Wright replied with a request for additional time. His letter delayed the

French attack for a month. These 30 days were of crucial importance to the British; during this time all available free and enslaved blacks, both men and women, were ordered to fortify and repair the aging barracks surrounding the city. It was through their hard labor that Savannah was able to withstand the French attack.

On November 9, 1779, Count d’Estaing attacked the British controlled port of

Savannah. A number of Rebels from South Carolina met the fleet on the coast after

“taking several prisoners, negroes, and horses” along the way.35 The appearance of the

French fleet and Rebel regiments sent the Loyalists in the surrounding areas scurrying

35 Frank Moore and John Anthony Scott. The Diary of the American Revolution, 1775-1781 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), 108.

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for the safety of the city limits. Hundreds of whites, free blacks, and enslaved blacks moved into basements, boarding houses, and stables hoping for the protection of the

British army. Anthony Stokes, the Chief Justice of Georgia, wrote to his wife about his experiences just days after the siege. A few weeks later, the Rivington’s Royal Gazette published his letter.

Stokes’ letter described life in Savannah during the month-long siege. Bombs fell, killing innocent civilians and slaves. Stokes had multiple near-death experiences, which would have been typical for those who survived the siege. Stokes was in the process of moving his household, including his slaves, to Savannah as the French were landing.

After the siege, Stokes found his household looted, missing “wine, provisions, furniture, some books and other articles.” He also left several slaves behind. All of these were stolen by the French except for Fanny who “ran into the woods to avoid being taken.”36

Bombs and shells would rip through houses forcing many people to take shelter in basements. One shot struck Stokes’ house and “passed through the kitchen, from which the negroes had then lately come down; and had they not luckily moved away, it is probably that several of them would have been killed.”37 Around three o’clock on the following day the bombings resumed. He hid with two of his slaves, George and Jemmy, in Captain Knowles’ cellar. The other slaves remained back at the house. During this round of bombings, Stokes’ house caught on fire. George ran back to the house before

Stokes could return and “drew out of the flames the two black trunks with some of my apparel, etc., that I brought out with me, and then removed them over to Captain

36 Moore and Scott, The Diary of the American Revolution, 109.

37 Ibid., 110.

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Knowles’ passage, which was all the property I saved.”38 The bombing continued. Yet

Stokes did not want to lose the remaining pieces of property. He called out to his slaves to carry the trunks to the cellar, but “no negro came to my assistance, and I was informed that mine, who had slept at the quarters, being frightened at the shell, had ran away.”39 Stokes’ slaves had not actually run away. Frightened by the carnage, blacks hid all over the city. “In danger of being smashed to pieces with a shell, or shot in tow with a cannon ball” his and many other slaves hid across the city. Stokes finally abandoned the trunks in favor of retaining his life.40

Governor Wright realized the civilian population of Savannah was not safe. He ordered his slaves to make an encampment for Savannah refugees who had lost their houses in the bombing. As Stokes made his way in the middle of the night to the encampment, which was made between the Savannah and Yamacraw rivers, he fell into a trench close to the camp that was very crowded both “inside and out, with a number of whites and negroes, who had fled from the town.” Women and children were

“flocking there, melting into tears, and lamenting their unhappy fate, and destruction of their houses and property.”41 However, the British were able to hold back the French and American forces, who retreated a short three months after. Now that the British held at least governmental control over the region, both Savannah and Charleston set to work bolstering the British.

38 Ibid., 111.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., 112.

41 Ibid.

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The British governments in Charleston and Savannah began to assert authority by creating a viable structure to organize the re-won south. In the previous few years,

Rebel Americans administered both cities, replacing royal officials’ positions with those loyal to the nascent American cause, re-distributing British Loyalist wealth and even establishing new committees and law enforcement bodies. During this period, both governments became more involved in the personal lives of constituents and began to assert authority over the daily lives of the free, enslaved, and itinerant black populations.

Shortly after acquiring Savannah, the British became concerned with keeping control over the fleeing population in the newly won territory. Having little experience with civil governments, the British set up new governing bodies to oversee the occupation and most importantly monitor all forms of property including slaves. The

British legislature in Savannah resolved to create a General Committee of twelve people made up of two people from each of the six Georgia counties to oversee the property transition. The Royal Georgia House elected: William Walker and Walton Harris (Wikes

County); Archibald Beal and James McNiel (Richmond County); John Twiggs and

Daniel McMurphy (Burke County); Caleb Howel and Abraham Ravott (Effingham

County); Joseph Woodruff & James Dunwoody (Liberty County); and Samuel Stirk and

Charles Odingsells (Chatham County). Charleston and thereby South Carolina controlled the area through a Commandant “assisted by an appointed Board of Police and several commissions whose members were returning loyalists or had taken the

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British oath."42 The first Lieutenant General of the Board of Police was James Simpson

Esq.

The Savannah General Committee believed that “much personal and other property” had been removed from Georgia without permission of the British government.

Committee members searched for stolen property, reported their findings, and delivered any recovered property to the Savannah Council. In an attempt to stop the population hemorrhage of whites and, more importantly, blacks, the Savannah government issued a proclamation that took aim at absentees’ property. The proclamation required “the

Citizens who have fled from this State to the Northward to repair within the same, if in

South Carolina within the space of thirty days, if in North Carolina—sixty days, if in

Virginia Ninety days, and in Other states to the Northward of Virginia four months.”

Anyone who refused to take heed of the Proclamation would have their land tax tripled and the money would be used to support the British troops. The proclamation went on to threaten those who ran away in order to support the enemy, stating that any property of “Absentees who have joined the enemy and such Persons as have been Ordered into the Enemies Lines…shall be immediately Collected, and Placed in the hands of

Commissioners.” Commissioners would then “let out Such Property” —essentially renting blacks to Loyalists.

While this proclamation does not refer specifically to blacks, it goes on to explain what would happen to property if American Rebels advanced into Georgia. If the Rebels advance to the “interior part of the state” then Commissioners or renters would be able to move the property “out of the State, to Such Place of Security as the Commissioners

42 Robert Stansbury Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists In the American Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), 132.

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Shall Direct.” The proclamation refers to “property,” which included not just personal items, but also slaves. Concerned over Rebel slaves, the Council attempted to maintain control over Rebel slaves and Loyalists renting abandoned property.

A year after the Committee’s inception, the Savannah Commissioners appointed a Committee for Absentee Estates and on August 18, 1781 authorized the committee to sell all “Personal Property except for slaves for the benefit of the State, except such

Articles as may be wanting for the use of the Troops.” Slaves were needed to complete public works projects. One such project was a jail in Augusta. A hotbed of Rebel activity, as it had never been fully taken over; Augusta became a focus point for the British. The

British lost little time in building a jail, which had both symbolic and practical uses in the effort to bring order to the city. Significantly, they used black labor to build it. The

Committee developed an idea to start a subscription to procure “Negroes to cut the timber for a Goal, and if a Sufficient number is not obtained by this means, that they be

Impressed, from such Persons as Can best spare them.” 43

The Commissioners of the Sequestered and Confiscated Estates were in charge of disposing of any property belonging to Rebel Americans. The Commissioners sold property to remunerate Loyalists dispossessed of large amounts of property. The commissioners claimed to have disposed of “three thousand Six Hundred and twelve pounds seventeen shillings and two pence.”44 Angry at the loss of such an amount, the governor requested each agent “make out, and return to Council an Account of all the land; and other Confiscated Property, that there may be in each County” in order to

43 Allen D. Candler, “Journal of the House of Assembly from August 17, 1781, to February 26, 1784,” Revolutionary Records of the State of Georgia, Vol. 3, part 2 (Atlanta: Franklin-Turner Co., 1908), 70.

44 Ibid.

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understand where this money had come from and perhaps where it went to. However the question of where the money went did not stop the governor from authorizing the commissioners to sell “Confiscated Estates, in the same manner that the aforesaid

Commissioners.”45 While the Council dealt with the buying, selling, and renting of both land and human property, the British needed another body to oversee the newly conquered areas.

The newly installed British government came to power in a very uneasy time.

Both American Rebels and non-partisan citizens were nervous about British occupation and retribution. In order to appease the population, Governor Campbell designed the

Board of Police as a judicial body that received, heard, and judged complaints made by the mixed loyal and Rebel populace in 1780. While it was intended as a temporary entity, the Board lasted the entirety of the British occupation. The Commandant was in charge of the occupying military force and its prisoners; however, each commandant generally left the daily governing to the Board of Police. Originally, a suggestion by

General Clinton, the Board of Police was established as “a similar institution in British- occupied New York and in Philadelphia.”46 The Board held a dual role, advising the military commandant and as a court for resolving personal and financial grievances. The

Board of Police “consisted of former crown officials, spokesmen from the planting and mercantile interests, and military officers representing the British forces governing the city.”47 The official British rationale for such an institution was to administer “Justice and conducting the Civil Polity, until the Reins of Government with Propriety be resigned to

45 Ibid., 71.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

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the constitutional officers.”48 For almost two years, British colonial administrators heard cases relating to day-to-day activities, and even heard cases brought forth by blacks.

Once the British came to power, the many people stepped forward with grievances from the previous five years. Both British and American whites began the process of using the courts to claim stolen or damaged property. This widespread reclamation was largely from Rebel Americans’ selling Loyalist slaves. Once the new

British government was installed, the Board of Police declared Rebel slave sales illegal.

For instance, Smith Clarandom charged John Night with “unlawfully taking and carrying away a Negro wench named Leuy.”49 Leuy belonged to Clarandom’s child. She might have been a nanny or a housemaid, but Night had purchased her at an illegal sale.

Therefore, Leuy was returned to Smith Claradom. The Board of Police began to deal with these illegal sales, as one way to prove their legitimacy. Property disputes and inheritance became the main function of the Board.

The Board also stepped beyond just property disputes as blacks in Charleston began utilizing the Court system. Once the court heard black grievances, it also began to expand into black communities and lives. In its relatively short existence, the Board ruled on a wide range of cases including petitions to sell property, grievances against stolen property, and arguments over confiscated property. Charleston was placed under the jurisdiction of a military commandant during the British occupation, the first of which was Brigadier General James Patterson, who was later succeeded by Nisbet Balfour

48, Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/520; Miscellaneous Records, 11 July 1790, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (Hereinafter SCDAH).

49 Ibid.

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and finally by Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Allen who only served during the last few months before the evacuation.

One of the first cases the Council dealt with was the question over what to do with the numerous blacks who followed the British army into Charleston. On Tuesday

June 13, 1780, at a Council meeting overseen by James Simpson, Alexander Wright, and Robert William Powell, the Commandant informed the Board about several matters relating to blacks. William Powell represented “the trading part of the community,”

Alexander Wright represented the “planting interest,” and Colonel Alexander Innes represented the military.50 Lieutenant Governor William Bull replaced Simpson, who was serving as the “head of the Board of Police,” “after Simpson left Charleston in

February 1781.” The rest of the Board consisted of Sir Egerton Leigh, Thomas Knox

Gordon, Assistant Justice Edward Savage, Thomas Irving, and James Johnson.

The Commandant, James Simpson, complained of the many “inconveniences” caused by “Negroes. . .coming to the British Army.”51 Lieutenant Colonel Banastre

Tarleton, who had witnessed large numbers of blacks following British troops into

Charleston, “all the negroes, men, women, and children, upon the arrival of any detachment of the King’s troops, thought themselves absolved from all respect to their

American masters, and entirely released from servitude. . .they quitted the plantations, and followed the army.”52 The newly created board had so many issues with blacks that

Simpson, complained that he was “almost pestered to Death with Vexatious Complaints

50 Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, in the Southern Provinces of North America (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1787), 89-92.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

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about the Negroes.” One way to deal with the complaints about blacks was to send the recently runaway population back to their masters. The Commandant asked the

Council’s opinion on how to send the previously enslaved blacks back to their masters.

One option he discussed was the possibility that each “slave could be persuaded to return voluntarily to the service of his Master.” In order to accomplish this the Council would have to take certain measures to “prevent the Negroes being punished by his

Masters for any Offences which the Master might think was committed by the Slaves in leaving his Service to Join the King’s Army.” Worried about the “advanced season of the year” and the need of the “Labour of the Negroe to cultivate the Crop which otherwise must be lost” the Council attempted to protect blacks who ran from their masters.

Another issue that vexed the Council was what to do with errant blacks wandering the streets of Charleston. Concerned that blacks would “contract bad habits” if they remained in such a “State of Idleness,” the Council wanted to put such a treacherous element to work.

In order to prevent blacks from becoming “dangerous to the Community,”

Simpson proposed to the Council to return blacks to their masters. The Council voted to appoint a group of “gentlemen. . .[to] take care of all the slaves who have come into the

British Lines.” The Council announced a final decision on how to return blacks to their rightful owners. The Council requested that masters “shall make application to any of the three Gentlemen,” being William Carson, Robert Ballingall and Thomas Inglis to have their slaves returned. Once the Council was satisfied the black man or woman belongs to the applicant, the owner was given a certificate that authorized “him to take

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up such slave or slaves.”53 However, this system relied upon the master’s “solemn promise” that he would not punish any slave who chose to run away. If any master punished a slave who ran away, the Council would seize the enslaved person. Any slaves who ran from their Loyalist master and were returned only to receive punishment and run away again would find the Council unwilling to lend “any assistance to get him

[the slaves] returned.”

In the meantime, the Council provided the runaways with “property, Food, and also kept to some Employment,” in order to prevent bad habits from forming. Blacks were paid one shilling a day. The first project the Council utilized the contingent of runaway black workers for was the construction of a public “road from the Ten Mile

Horse to Monk’s Corner and from there to Cook’s Landing.” Blacks who ran to the

British and followed the army as it triumphantly captured Charleston now found themselves fed only rice and forced to work on public works projects. Once again, these men and women were subjugated and humiliated by those who lured them into service with the promise of freedom only to force them to labor until their former masters could claim them.

When American masters finally claimed the deserter blacks, the Board of Police were once again in need of cheap labor to repair Charleston’s fortifications. The Board issued a request for citizens to donate their blacks for the repairing of Charleston fortifications believing it to be “absolutely necessary that several hundred Negroes, should, at this time, be employed to repair the Fortifications and for other works in

53 Miscellaneous Records, 7 November 1780, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/520.

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Charles Town.”54 The Board did not to have the money to pay for this labor. Instead the

Board decided to draft “two hundred male slaves from the district” to be returned after a span of one month. The Board issued a request for ten slaves each from Thomas Bea,

John Mathews, Philip Smith, Wm Clay Snipes, and Joseph Glover; 15 slaves each from

William Skuriy and Thomas Osborne; and 20 slaves from Thomas Ferguson. The slaves were to be “taken care of” and protected by overseers or “other white persons to take the charge and care of them.”55 These overseers would also be well taken care of during their month long task and receive just “rations and rum, and have proper

Accommodations with whatever Encouragment they may deserve.”56

The Board of Police did not just employ slaves, but also oversaw the shipment and sales of blacks. “Several Negroe[s], the Property of various Persons, Inhabitants of this Province, having been carried off the same by Masters of Trading vessels and others,” the Board of Police wished to regulate shipping.57 The Board of Police ruled that ships would receive a L50 fine if they did not comply with the two acts the General

Assembly passed regarding the entrance of ships into Charleston. The Board of Police had no authority or money to find and return these blacks to their rightful owners and instead opted to hand down fines in an attempt to discourage further practice. Owners such as John Majory, began to request permission of the Board of Police to carry off or

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid. See Table 3.1

56 Ibid.

57 Miscellaneous Records, 29 August 1780, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/520.

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sell their slaves to the West Indies. Majory wished to migrate forcibly three or four of his own slaves.

After leaving during the evacuation, Majory claimed that he had “several Negroes but at present makes no Claim for them as they are not taken away. Some are in

Jamaica & the rest are in Charlestown in the hands of his Agent. He believes they permit his Agent to keep the Negroes under an idea that they belong to his Children.”58

What the Board of Police termed an illegal sale might have been a proper public auction of war booty under the American government. Because McKinnon was a Loyalist, the sale was deemed illegal and Weyman was forced to provide compensation. The Board dealt with many disputes that involved illegal sales and this is an example of how this new institution was attempting to re-organize black and white lives and determining the future of this family. Charles William McKinnon was a staunch Loyalist who was forced to leave South Carolina when the Rebels installed a new government. McKinnon sailed the Clarissa with his slaves bound for the Loyalist haven of St. Augustine. While awaiting the tides off the sand bar in St. Augustine, an American vessel under Captain

58 Daniel Parker Coke, The Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American Loyalists (Oxford: Printed for presentation to the members of the Roxburghe club by H. Hart, at the University press, 1915), 96-97. Kingsley was born in Bristol, England, the second of eight children to Zephaniah Kingsley, Sr., a Quaker from London, and Isabella Johnstone of Scotland. The elder Kingsley moved his family to the Colony of South Carolina in 1770. His son was educated in London during the 1780s; Zephaniah Kingsley, Sr. purchased a rice plantation near Savannah, Georgia and several other properties throughout the colonies and Caribbean islands, owning probably around 200 slaves in all. Like other British loyalists, Kingsley, Sr. was forced to leave South Carolina without his family, for New Brunswick, Canada in 1782 following the American Revolutionary War. Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr. returned to Charleston, South Carolina in 1793, swore his allegiance to the United States, and began a career as a shipping merchant. His first ventures were in Haiti, during the Haitian Revolution where coffee dominated his interests. He lived in Haiti for a brief period while the fledgling nation was developing a social system of former slaves transitioning into free citizens. Kingsley traveled frequently, prompted by recurring political unrest among the Caribbean islands. The instability affected his business interests but a sharp increase in demand for slaves in the Southern U.S. occurred around the same time and Kingsley began to travel to West Africa to procure Africans to be traded as slaves between America, Brazil, and the West Indies. In 1798 he became a Danish citizen in the Danish West Indies; he continued to make his living trading slaves and shipping other goods into the nineteenth century. He became a citizen of Spanish Florida in 1803.

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Turpin captured the ship and returned her to Charleston, South Carolina. The American

Court of Admiralty, acting “under the authority of Congress. . .liberated and condemned” the ship. The slaves were placed for sale at a public auction. Edward Weyman bought two “of the Negroes called Charles and Fanny.” Once Charleston came under British purview, these two blacks were “found on the Plantation of the said Weyman.”59

Weyman refused to return the two slaves he purchased for “Eight Hundred and twenty

Pounds Carolina Currency.”60 The Board of Police ruled that these Negroes were valued at “sixty Pounds Sterling each.”

British governments in both states also attempted to preside over legal slave sales, condemning some property for the auction block. John Berrick, a debtor absent from Charleston during the Board of Police inquiry, held four slaves: a “Negroe Fellow named Gribut and three Wenches Amy, Lina and Hester.”61 In order to pay off his debt, the Board of Police seized what could have been a black family or, at the very least, a small community of blacks and authorized their division and sale. The “monies arising from the sale thereof might remain in the hands of the sheriff,” who would pay Berrick’s debt accordingly. By dealing with property in this way, the Board inserted itself into these property disputes and used slaves and property to buttress the wealth of

Loyalists. Unfortunately, British organization came at the expense of Rebels and the loss of freedom for blacks.

59 Miscellaneous Records, 6 November 1780, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/520.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

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Rulings over debt cases could bring about violence from losing litigants as

Samuel Gruber, the deputy under the sheriff James Brisbane, found out. Gruber alleged that he was ordered to seize a black man named Edmand who had previously been the property of James Slanymae. At the time of his master’s death, Edmand was “rescued and taken out of his possession by Captain Mec Campbell of the South Carolina

Royalists.”62 Irritated by the court’s ruling, Campbell returned the recently freed black.

He verbally threatened Gruber that he would “split down the head any person” who would show up from the Board of Police again and “take hold of the said Negroe and alleged he was Campbell’s property.”63 This violent threat was enough to prevent

Gruber from executing his assigned seizure and Edmand became the recognized legal property of Campbell.

The Council also dealt with many individuals who felt the late Rebel government treated them unfairly by thwarting rightful executions of wills and deeds. Robert

Rowand’s interesting case is an example. Robert Rowand claimed that the Rebel

Barnard Elliot withheld a considerable number of blacks from transferring into his possession. At the time of Barnard’s banishment, as he was a Loyalist, he claims the number of blacks dropped from 100 to “not quite eighty.”64 Unfortunately, “many deaths have ensued” in the black population. The court case was never decided and in the

62 Miscellaneous Records, 7 November 1780, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/520.

63 Miscellaneous Records, 23 October 1781, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/523.

64 Miscellaneous Records, 11 July 1780, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/520. Thomas Law Elliot bequeathed his estate to his son and daughter. The son died in infancy and the daughter married Barnard Williot, but remained childless. The daughter died and Charles Elliott and Mary Rowand were the only “Brother and Sister of Thomas Law Williott.”

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interim, blacks died. Court cases became so entangled between British and Americans that many extended into the 1820s.65

Black Activity in British Charleston

The chaos of war, especially in the coastal regions of the Deep South, not only led to confusion over property rights, but also continually disturbed individual lives and interrupted black communities and kinship networks. However, the majority of blacks in the south attempted to live as normally as possible under the duress and chaos of war.

Blacks occupied the same revolutionary world as whites, acting and reacting to battles, deciding to hide, migrate or volunteer to fight. Many blacks fled from the countryside to the city seeking safety, just as whites did. Savannah, Charleston, and St. Augustine became hubs for the creation of new black communities that endeavored to survive— living, loving and burying the dead. While occupying Charleston the British walked a fine line between appeasing slave-owning Loyalists and co-opting enslaved blacks for state sponsored labor, including fortifications, street cleaning, and agricultural work. The

Charleston Board of Police worked to return slaves owned by Loyalists. Blacks were also paid to work for the city until the owner requested the return of their slave. At the

65 By the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the American loss of slaves had enough importance to be incorporated into the seventh article of the peace treaty stating that the British could not “carry away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.” But the language failed to resolve this contentious problem. Through the remainder of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, the U.S. and Britain negotiated over fair compensation for property the Americans claimed was stolen but the British claimed belonged to them. Thomas Jefferson and, later, John Jay sought compromises but failed. The British maintained that slaves who crossed their lines, whether by choice or accident, were British property. The American government disagreed, arguing that the act of running to the British, whether in New York or St. Augustine, failed to change enslaved status and American ownership. This debate simmered across the Atlantic and additional negotiations in 1826 led to an agreement by Great Britain to pay for the lost slaves, thus ending a long-standing dispute over the return and compensation for refugee slaves. For an early assessment of post-Revolutionary relations between the United States and England regarding the return of slaves, see Arnett G. Lindsay, "Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Great Britain bearing on the Return of Negro Slaves, 1788 - 1828," Journal of Negro History 4 (October 1920): 391 - 419.

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same time, the Board provided a court system, which heard cases brought by blacks, by instituting a few protections the British tried to ingratiate itself with the black population.

Unable to work on destroyed plantations or moved forcibly to Charleston; slaves became a large mobile workforce for the shipping industry and later the Board of Police itself. The docks became a major source of employment for slaves. Free and enslaved blacks began to compete with whites for already scarce jobs on the docks. The Board of

Police accepted many worker disputes, even one from two free black men. On July 11,

1780, two free black South Carolinians, James and Thomas Hayman, petitioned the newly created Board of Police. According to their deposition, the Haymans were fisherman who supplied Charleston with seafood, a very common occupation for the free blacks The Haymans appeared before the court to complain about a violent incident wherein George Pagett, a white pilot, “violently beat and bruised” them.66

Pagett, seemingly upset about the little available work due in part to the large number of free black pilots willing to hire out their labor, physically and verbally abused the two black men, threatening to “run them down in their canoe” if he ever saw them working on his wharf again.67 The Board requested the appearance of Pagett to explain and possibly defend his violent actions. While some blacks, such as the Haymans, legitimized the Board by appealing to it for a solution to personal disputes, the Board expanded its powers in black communities and lives, ruling on community housing, and hiring blacks as cleaners, grave diggers, and road workers, the same jobs blacks held in

66 Miscellaneous Records, 11 July 1780, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/520.

67 Ibid.

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the British army. The Board essentially became a precursor to the way in which the

British Empire would come to use and depend upon non-plantation black labor.68

While the Haymans worked on the docks, blacks found varied occupations. The local baker paid “two Negroes” to help bake “125 loaves of bread.”69 The baker, Mr.

Bennie, requested the Board to fix the price of bread. The revolution had interrupted his normal stores and increased the price of flour and firewood. As he had to pay his free black workers, or maybe even runaway workers, he needed to stabilize the price of bread in order to stay in business.

Itinerant blacks came to the city looking for jobs and housing. Charleston served as a temporary place for communities. Many free and itinerant blacks made their way to the city and squatted in vacant houses. Whites began to look at black housing as being a disruption to polite white society. The war disrupted traditional white power by funneling men into the army and disrupting plantation life. The visual reminder that slaves could and would run away scared many whites. The Commissioners of the

Markets informed the Board that it needed to “pull down a small house built upon the public ground near the Lower Market” because it became a nuisance.70 “Negroes and disorderly persons” flocked to the free housing, disrupting the white community.71 Even though the Board recommended tearing down the house, Charleston still continued to be a riotous place. Late in April 1782, the Board revoked liquor licenses on the wharf

68 Ibid.

69 Miscellaneous Records, 7 September 1781, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/552.

70 27 March 1782, Miscellaneous Records, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/552.

71 Ibid.

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due to the “disorder and irregularities committed.”72 The Board removed bawdy houses as well as alcohol from the black district in an attempt to control black communities.

The black cemetery resided outside the Charleston city limits. This sacred space interred the dead for decades before the American Revolution. However, military skirmishes had “taken up” the burying ground.73 As a result, blacks began to dig graves inside the city limits, under any easily movable ground. These bodies hastily buried within the city limits, rapidly decomposed in the summer heat and thunderstorms. The

Board of Police ruled this makeshift practice to be “a public nuisance and whereby obnoxious to the Inhabitants.”74 The Board ordered that the secretary begin to “lookout for and set apart some proper place as burying ground for Negroes.”75

Over the next two years, the government began to rely upon black labor not just for cleaning, clearing and repairing, but also for military purposes. In these and other ways, blacks were increasingly important in the day-to-day activities of the economy as well as the government. In short, the British government came to depend on the cheap labor blacks provided. During the occupation, the British Government inserted itself as father figure to the black community—simultaneously controlling and protecting blacks.

However, this attitude towards blacks did not ingratiate the new governments to Rebel

Americans who could only watch as the British confiscated and sold their property to and used the profits to bolster the new regime.

72 Ibid.

73 Miscellaneous Records, 18 July 1780, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/552.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

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Anger over the loss of slaves during this period only grew. The British surrender in 1783 unleashed a series of official and impromptu evacuations mobilizing the population and exposing the vulnerable state of blacks. In 1782, the British admitted defeat and planned to evacuate the south. Previously restrained by the British government, the announcement opened the floodgates unleashing two years of anger and resentment. Blacks fled in all directions, doggedly pursued by Rebel and Loyalist masters alike, without even the minimal protection of the British. By the war’s end, the southern port towns that remained in British hands—St. Augustine, Savannah and

Charleston—were swamped with black refugees. One year later, approximately 17,000 refugees both black and white fled to St. Augustine, the only remaining British city in the south.76

76 Carole Watterson Troxler, “Refuge, Resistance, and Reward: The Southern Loyalists' Claim on East Florida,” The Journal of Southern History 55, no. 4 (November 1989): 580-583.

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Table 3-1. List of Slaves requested by the Board of Police, 1780.

Owner Number of Slaves requested

Thomas Ferguson’s 20

Thomas Bea 10

William Skuriy’s 15

John Mathews 10

Thomas Osborne’s 15

Philip Smith 10

Wm Clay Smipes 10

Joseph Glover 1077

77 In the Council Chambers, Friday the 8th day of September 1780

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CHAPTER 4 EVACUATION AND EXODUS IN THE SOUTHERN STATES

Preparing to evacuate in the waning days of the American Revolution, British soldiers and civilians crowded into the last British-held Atlantic seaboard towns of

Charleston, Savannah and St. Augustine. Thousands of free and enslaved Africans were forced along the journey. The British freed some during the war, some were still held in slavery by Loyalists, and many were of ambiguous legal status. Few of their identities are known.

This chapter seeks to cast some light on these lives by tracing enslaved refugees through the chaos of evacuation, in particular highlighting the lives of blacks who left

South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and into the Caribbean. The single largest displacement of people in the western hemisphere occurred after the British surrendered on October 17, 1781, following the famous battle at Yorktown, which effectively ended the American Revolution. Sir Guy Carleton, the acting head of the

British army, ordered the British evacuation of Georgia, followed by South Carolina and finally, a year later, the Floridas. Confusion set in as tired and weary evacuees moved north from Georgia seeking safety, only to be evacuated immediately south to Florida.

Hundreds of families moved multiple times before finding themselves at this final destination, looking out onto the Atlantic Ocean and an uncertain future.

Revolutionary evacuations brought into focus one question that circulated throughout the war: what to do with free (and those who believed they were free) blacks? Lord Dunmore brought this question to the forefront of the American Revolution.

Any slaves who worked for the British were freed under the Proclamation, leaving subsequent colonial governments in the south to deal with the ramifications of his offer.

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The lack of a uniform British policy on how to provide freedom to the runaway black population caused legal turmoil in southern cities. Officials were inundated with the myriad of legal issues regarding black property. Each evacuating port city attempted to cope with the growing diaspora of both white and black refugees in different ways. Local royal governments passed regulations and proclamations, dealing with the evacuation of the black population, coordinated the movement of people into coastal regions or islands just off the coast, and finally organized the black and white exodus to different locales still under British control. Savannah evacuated too quickly to deal with the black freedom problem thoroughly. Leaders in Charleston, however, offered an interesting option for blacks living under British rule: the creation of a Black Negro Corps, which allowed blacks to enter into His Majesty’s Service in exchange for nominal state freedom. St. Augustine never created a plan to deal with blacks; instead, the government struggled with the population increase, the incoming Spanish government

(who wooed the black population into desertion) and the final evacuation.

Savannah Evacuation

On July 4, 1782, the royal Georgia legislature announced the evacuation, the first of countless migrations that displaced white Loyalists and their slaves for almost 4 years. The government gave British merchants twelve months to “dispose of their

Goods and settle their concerns” in order to migrate to any British port under the protection of the British army. The majority of British citizens and slaves fled northward to Charleston, while a few hundred moved west into the backcountry, south to St.

Augustine, and east into the Caribbean. Upending the last few years of relative stability, people scattered to find safety. Most blacks, tied to white masters, did not have a choice

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of where their journey would end, instead the majority found themselves in the first stage of a multistep journey.

One family from Georgia, the Johnston family faced a difficult future without the help of Mr. Johnson, stationed at the St. Augustine fort. Elizabeth Johnston would have had to sell any personal property, animals, or slaves the family owned in order to move the entire family to a safer area. While the British government hoped that “merchants will not take advantage of the Necessities of the People but continue to sell their Goods at such Prices as they have done to the British; making a reasonable allowance for difference of Payments,” but prices, including the price of slaves, dropped throughout the southern colonies.1 This precipitous drop in market values forced many British subjects to try to sell their property abroad.

So many British attempted to exploit stolen property abroad that the Georgia

Council met in the bustling town of Ebenezer on July 3, 1782, to discuss several questions regarding the exportation of black slaves. How could the government stop

British citizens from taking American owned blacks? What could the government do about the large number of blacks who flocked to the British lines and who then fell under the “protection” of evacuating soldiers? How would the evacuating British government pay soldiers without an available cash supply? In Savannah, Charleston, and St.

Augustine, each ruling body attempted to deal with the specific local circumstances that faced the evacuating population.

As the Georgia evacuation continued, most remaining British subjects moved their worldly belongings to Tybee Island, an island just off the coast of Savannah, to

1 Candler, The Revolutionary Records of Georgia 1769-1782, 113.

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await transport to safer harbors. Tybee Island became the makeshift embarkation point for the civilian Loyalist evacuation. In response, the Georgia Council acted to restrict quick sales of slaves on Tybee Island as refugees flooded docks and boarded ships.

The Council also recommended that the British Commandant try to prevent blacks from being shipped from the American coast and proclaimed that no “Negroes or other

Property belonging to an American Subject of this or any of the United States will be

Permitted to be Transported or carried off” by any British subject or military personnel.

Brigadier General Clark stated he intended to prevent “any negroes or other Property belonging to the Citizens of this State being carried off by any Person or Persons under his Command.”2

However, while attempting to block the unlawful sale of slaves, as well as the stealing or flight of legal slaves, the members of the Council also feared that their actions would “irritate the good people of this state” and potentially spark more controversy and disobedience.3 In order to keep the peace, the Georgia Governor granted property owners the ability to make claims against those believed to have stolen property.4 The Commissioners for the Sales of Forfeited Estates purchased several “Negroes, now within the Enemies lines and in Possession of Persons Attained of high Treason, and others, which Negroes so Purchased shall afterwards be disposed

2 Candler, The Revolutionary Records of Georgia 1769-1782, 127-130. Sir James Wallace was a Loyalist and a Captain in the Royal Navy. Before he could evacuate to Tybee Island, he lost seven slaves. Straggling rebel forces marched through his Ogeechee plantation, just outside of Savannah, before he could evacuate to Tybee Island. These rebel forces plundered his plantation. Losing seven valuable slaves during the pillage, Wallace made sure to protect the other 30, who were shipped through Tybee Island to Jamaica. Wallace insured his remaining 30 slaves in their journey from Savannah through St. Augustine and finally to his new plantation in Jamaica. But many slaves were simply sold outright in Tybee Island to pay for passage to other British territories.

3 Ibid. 127.

4 Ibid.

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of in the most general and Public Manner for the benefit of this State.”5 The Governor granted individuals permission to purchase slaves, provided however, that if those purchased blacks were stolen goods, then those “Negroes so Purchased, shall be returned to their respective owners gratis.”6

The Royal Georgia government also dealt with the resale problem of stolen slaves and banned the purchase of illegally obtained American slaves. However, the chaos of the evacuation provided the perfect cover for illicit sales. When these illegal sales continued, the British council simply banned any and all legal sale of American or

British slaves at Tybee Island.

Despite such efforts to control transactions involving slaves, this illegal slave trade became so widespread that Americans flocked to Tybee Island, hoping to profit from the evacuating refugees. In order to pay for the passage into the British Caribbean and beyond, many Loyalists sold their slaves. Dire circumstances forced Loyalists to sell blacks for much less than their worth. The Council resolved “no Person or Persons except known and acknowledged friends to American Independence; and Free holders of this State, for the Purchasing Negroes from any Person or Persons at Tybee or elsewhere, who are on their departure from this State under the British commander

Protection.”7

So many people flocked to Tybee Island that the combination of extreme heat, brackish water, and crowded living conditions caused an outbreak of dysentery that rampaged through the makeshift port. Loyalist Anthony Stokes almost died awaiting

5 Ibid., 112-114.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., 130.

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transport. Sick for two weeks, Stokes finally made it aboard a transport to New York then on to England.8 Stokes observed how disease ran rampant on the island, but was fortunate to escape. Many blacks were not so fortunate and succumbed to the sickness.

Those who managed to survive evacuated into the Caribbean, like Hagar.

Charleston Evacuation

In the last months of the revolution, the Johnston family, along with their slaves, evacuated from Tybee Island to Charleston. The Johnstons arrived in Charleston to chaos. Unready for the thousands of refugees, the royal Charlestonian government scrambled to take care of the deluge of people. The city’s infrastructure proved unable to handle such an increase in population. As a result, Charleston held lotteries to generate money for the growing displaced population. Notices appeared in the

Charleston Gazette throughout 1782 advertising that lottery profits would help alleviate the Loyalist plight. To make matters worse, British citizens were banned from trading with Americans, which increased the demand for black market goods. The royal

Charlestonian government had little time to deal with the smugglers, a few short weeks after the Savannah evacuation; Sir Guy Carleton announced the evacuation of

Charleston.

Once announced, Charleston descended even further into chaos. People began to round up blacks as a way to make money. Samuel Bonneau of Charleston went before the Board of Police to complain that a relative, Edward Bonneau stole 16 slaves.

Edward Bonneau waited until December 1782 to “convert to his own use and advantage as this defonent is informed and believes the following Negroe slaves to wit Elsea,

8 Anthony Stokes, A Narrative of the Official Conduct of Anthony Stokes, of the Inner Temple London ... His Majesty's Chief Justice, and one of his Council of Georgia (London: n.p., 1784), 96.

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Linus, Jemmy, Sambo, Sambo Jerry, Long Sambo, Cepis, Ben, Sawyer, Remus,

Nelley, Doll, Bina, Darcus, Robbin, and Jeffory.” In order to verify that the slaves had not been sold within the state, Samuel Bonneau was required to list the slaves names and their appearance. Table 4-1 shows the detail with which Bonneau recorded his slaves. According to the appraisers, Thomas Harwon, Thomas Ashley, and John Ashley

Board, the slaves were worth £1670.

The Board of Police, the British judicial court, dealt with many incidents of whites’ attempting to secret away black property into the British Caribbean. Slave prices in the

Caribbean remained steady throughout the war, while American prices dropped dramatically after the evacuation announcement. Loyalists faced with the loss of their property, including land, personal items and even runaway slaves, tried to recoup their financial losses by selling both owned and stolen slaves in the Caribbean. Other

Loyalists attempted to sneak out of Charleston to avoid their debtors. In both situations, blacks were used as commodities on which Loyalists constructed their financial futures.

Loyalists, looking to capitalize on the governmental transition, used this opportunity to slip out of the city with goods, furniture and slaves – some of which were not their own. One such Loyalist, Samuel Prioleau attempted to leave Charleston with

“four Slaves and sundry articles of Household Furniture.”9 On May 3, 1782, he was detained by the Board of Police for not paying a debt to Mr. Robert Williams, a

Charlestonian lawyer. The Board of Police detained Prioleau, stating that he was banned from carrying his “Negroes and other Effects out of this Garrison” until he paid his debt.

9 Mr. Robert Williams To Samuel Prioleau, 3 May 1782 (South Carolina: Commissioners of Forfeited Estates Account Book, 1782).

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In order to settle the debt, the newly installed American Sheriff sold Prioleau’s

“slaves and furniture” and used the profit to pay Williams.10 Prioleau still claimed the slaves taken by the American Sheriff in his claim to the British Board of Trade.

Prioleau’s claim stated that he was “no way indebted to” Williams. Prioleau claimed “one

Negro Woman named Pall a very healthy, handy, House wench and seamstress. . .one ditto also a very handy healthy House wench with her two children; one a girl about seven years old and the other a Boy about four.” The family was divided and sold.11

Prioleau’s slaves must have been together for at least 4 years, as the youngest child was four at the time of the sale. The historical record leaves no discernible clues as to how the division occurred or where these lives headed.12

Moving slaves, both stolen and legally owned, into the Caribbean, Loyalists sold blacks to the vast Caribbean sugar industry hungry for labor. Captain Thomas Newland was one such slave peddler who appeared before the Board of Police. He concealed and conveyed six blacks aboard his ship, Polly, during a trip to Jamaica. These raids became so prevalent that the Board of Police passed legislation fining ships £50 if they did not comply with the two acts passed by the General Assembly regarding the entrance of ships into Charleston. Reports continued of blacks as “the Property of various Persons, Inhabitants of this Province having been carried off the same by

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Another slave, a “Negro Woman named Priscilla” was also seized and sold, but then returned to Prioleau after the evacuation. John Richardson later laid a claim to her, stating that he was her rightful owner. However the Richardson claim disappears from historical purview leaving Priscilla’s fate unknown. Prioleau listed his forfeited black property alongside £210 of household furniture and £609 in house rental fees for his part ownership of a house on the corner of Bay Street and Broad Street.

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Masters of Trading vessels and others.”13 The Board of Police began to require that any owner who wanted to remove their property, including slaves, from the providence would have to request permission to move.

Migration to St. Augustine

During her sojourn in Charleston, Elizabeth Johnston welcomed her third child whom she named after her mother, Catherine. However, any joy she may have felt was short lived. Elizabeth, her newborn, and her “two little ones, embarked with a nurse on board a small schooner for St. Augustine.”14 The city of St. Augustine was more accessible to evacuating Loyalists like Elizabeth Johnston. During the revolutionary years, the city had become a prosperous asylum for those seeking shelter from the violence of war. Troops crisscrossed the southern countryside searching for enemy engagements and wreaked havoc upon plantations in their path, forcing tens of thousands from their homes. Between 1782 and 1783, 12,000 new-comers traveled the well-worn trails leading south through the swampy Georgia low-country into St.

Augustine, only to find a small, overcrowded town cramped on a dry strip of land wedged between the swamps and the river. In late July 1782, Carleton announced the evacuation of Charleston and designated St. Augustine as the evacuation destination.

Like most refugees, the Johnston family attempted to set up a life in the burgeoning town of St. Augustine. After the surrender of Charleston “in 1782, within two days no

13 Miscellaneous Records, 29 August 1780, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Board of Police, 1780-1782, CO 5/520.

14 Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist, 222.

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less than 16 vessels, bearing refuges and their effects,” one of these ships bore the

Johnston family.15

St. Augustine became a safe haven for blacks in the years leading to 1783.

Loyalists’ slaves, free blacks and self-liberated slaves, from both rebel and British owners, streamed into the city searching for a safety. Over half of the 12,000 newcomers were black, adding to the already large to total around 17,000 blacks inside the city limits. A small black Anabaptist gathering sprung up next to the Spanish

Cathedral where a black minister held sermons. Blacks searching for moral guidance, or simply a friendly face, would convene in the open without worry of religious or racial persecution. However, this small peaceful town erupted into chaos when Charleston evacuated. A few diaries from the era – Johann Sch pf and Josiah Smith – reveal interesting details about black lives.

While St. Augustine might offer a safe harbor, getting there was fraught with danger. Not all ships made the journey successfully as a treacherous sandbar protected

St. Augustine. One ship “went to pieces here and many persons lost their lives.” Shortly before the ship’s arrival, a pilot who had served for “20 years, went out in stormy weather to meet a ship at the risk of his life.”16 Most ships needed a guide to help steer around the hidden sandbar. However, “the avaricious ship-master refused to promise the pilot his customary fee.” The pilot attempted to return to shore, but even he could not escape the tortuous seas; “his boat. . .was capsized by the seas and the worthy

15 Johan David Schopf, Travels in the Confederation (Philadelphia: W. J. Campbell, 1783?), 228.

16 Ibid., 229-230.

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man went down with 4 negroes.”17 These four blacks had built their own lives in St.

Augustine during the war years. Ironically, the ship they died trying to dock was carrying loyalists whose arrival would be detrimental for many other blacks with a tenuous hold on freedom.

Florida was only a temporary haven for Loyalists. One year after the evacuation of Charleston, Sir Guy Carleton announced the evacuation of Florida. The Treaty of

Paris traded Florida for control over Gibraltar. News of Florida transferring from British to Spanish rule sparked panic. The evacuation was an “utmost confusion.”18 For nearly three years, the colony remained in limbo between two authorities: the British Governor

Patrick Tonyn and the new Spanish Governor Vicente Manuel de Zespedes. This hectic and chaotic transition period placed many free and enslaved blacks in harm’s way.

Panic gripped the city. Over the next few months, whites began to round up free, enslaved and lost blacks seeking safety in St. Augustine. Slaves were one of the most mobile forms of wealth, and thus became a profitable commodity for those willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to make a quick buck.19 Tens of thousands of these Loyalists migrated from Savannah to Charleston, then St. Augustine and into the British

Caribbean with their newly acquired slaves. Over 7,500 refugees reached East Florida over the next year, inflating the total population to more than 17,000, including the previously mentioned 12,000.

Johann Sch pf, a German immigrant who kept a diary of the evacuation, commented on the complete lack of infrastructure and the general societal breakdown

17 Ibid., 228.

18 Ibid.

19 Frey, Water From the Rock, 185.

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of St. Augustine. He writes that after the “relinquishment of Georgia and Carolina the town and the surrounding country received a considerable number of new inhabitants in the emigrant royalists,” thousands of whom tried to make Florida home. However, once the British Crown gave up Florida, these Loyalists “found no continuing place here, but must go further if they do not wish to be under the Spanish yoke.” People flooded into the port of St. Augustine to await transport, causing the town to become surrounded with temporary housing. Sch pf commented, “Round about the town stand hastily built cabins of these poor fugitives, walled and thatched with palmetto (yucca) leaves.”20

Josiah Smith, an evangelical Christian who partook in the Great Awakening, was part of a group of American Rebels taken prisoner, thrown in a prison ship and shipped to St. Augustine along with their black servants. A total of 29 rebel prisoners and their enslaved property moved to St. Augustine for a period of 2 years. An adamant rebel,

Smith refused to pledge loyalty to the British and under the Articles of Capitulation,

Smith fell under the category Prisoners of War. Lord Cornwallis wrote a letter to the prisoners explain how they were changed with fomenting the recent hostilities and would therefore be placed in parole in St. Augustine. Interestingly, the British allowed the Americans to take along their slaves.21

Americans enjoyed a level of freedom as prisoners of war in St. Augustine.

While, they could not move past the physical boundaries, they could move around the town. However, the rebels placed “some badge of distinction on their Negroes and other

Domesticks so as they may be known.” Blacks enslaved to Americans could move with relative freedom around St. Augustine, mixing with the population and experiencing the

20 Sch pf, Travels in the Confederation, 231.

21 See Table 4-1

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recent boom of population. The only hindrance to their movement was the requirement to wear “round their Necks a red Colour’d Badge, made in the Form of a Heart, the which they have since decorated in such a handsome manner, as to render it a real

Ornament to their dress.” However, not everyone was thrilled with the ornament. Smith explains in his diary that “the form & colour we are told, is not pleasing to the [British]

Officers.”

American slaves also had free reign to catch food at the harbor. Smith discusses how the Americans granted “liberty to our Servants, to go about the harbor, and down to the Barr for th Catching of Fish and Oysters for our use.” However, in order to have permission, Smith had to go through Mr. Brown the Commissary. Mr. Brown apparently had been very kind to the American prisoners explaining that his “kindness towards us, and Civilitys experienced in his family, have far exceeded any other Person in this place.”

Blacks forced to leave homes and move to St. Augustine attempted to create community in Florida. Dealing the best they could with the circumstances, blacks made friends and connected to others stuck in the same predicament. However, as with all communities, not all contact was congenial. Smith records in his diary that on Thursday

January 18, Scipip a “likely Young Negro fellow” died suddenly, Scipip belonding to

Anthony Toomers and had been sick for almost a week. Smith goes on to speculate that

Scipip was the victim of treachery. He was “thought” to be “Poisoned by a Fellow here.”

Rumors abounded that Scipip had grown close to a married female slave. Once this intimacy was discovered, Scipip fell ill. The man in question was interred and interrogated.

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Slavery placed blacks in a tenuous situation. Enslaved peoples were not only susceptible to conditions such as disease, overcrowded conditions, and scarcity of food and clothing, but also to intangible predators such as white greed, false promises, and the newly delegated Spanish government. Loyalists used their slaves as currency, paying for accommodations and food as the evacuation lasted years longer than expected. Many evacuees thought their sojourn into East Florida was merely a stop on the way to other destinations in the British Empire, but the evacuation stretched on, continuing two years after the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783. Exacerbating the situation was the large quantity of presumably free blacks in St. Augustine who were manumitted en masse by Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, the Philipsburg Proclamation, or at will by any British field officer who felt that a slave had performed exemplary service in battle.

Loyalist and rebel citizens preyed upon blacks who believed themselves free, kidnapping and selling black men, women, and children and breaking up already tenuous kinship networks. Others were tricked into moving and were enslaved once they reached their destination. This practice was not just limited to bandits and ex- soldiers; the makeshift British and Spanish governments captured and sold enslaved people toward the end of the evacuation.22 Finally, thousands of slaves were simply transported to another plantation society in the Caribbean.

22 Helen Hornbeck Tanner, s e es in ast lori a, -1790 (Jacksonville: University of North Florida Press, 1989).

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The Florida Claims Commission: A Window into Black Experiences

After the American Revolution the British permitted Loyalists who suffered property loss to petition the government for reparations. British citizens “whose property, real and personal, had existed previous to the War in a remote part of the world” could begin to request payment for such losses. “Undoubtedly … a very arduous and delicate undertaking,” the British set up a Claims Commission to deal with each individual claim.23 Each claimant and witness were examined apart “Witnesses were more easily cross-examined, and encouraged to speak the truth, and to give full answers to the questions which were put to them.”24 Then the Commission organized the claims into a rubric, 1 indicating the most Loyal and 10 being the least. The 11th category was reserved for those Loyalists who were granted relief but unable to procure it.

1st, Loyalists who had rendered Services to Great Britain 2nd, Loyalists who had borne arms in the service of Great Britain 3rd, Zealous and Uniform Loyalists 4th, British subjects resident in Great Britain 5th, Who took the oath to the Americans, but afterwards joined the British 6th, Who bore arms for the Americans, but afterwards joined the British 7th, Ditto, losses under the Prohibitory Act 8th, Loyal British Proprietors 9th, Subjects or settled Inhabitants of the United States 10th, Claims disallowed and withdrawn 11th, Loyal British Subjects who appear to have relief by the Treaty of Peace, but state the impossibility of procuring it

The Commission proposed to pay the “1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 whose liquidated Losses did not amount to more than ten thousand pounds each, the full amount of their Losses; and if they should exceed the sum of ten thousand pounds, to deduct the sum of 10 per cent”

23 Eardley-Wilmot, J. (1815). Historical view of the Commission for enquiring into the losses, services, and claims of the American loyalists, at the close of the war between Great Britain and her colonies, in 1783: with an account of the compensation granted to them by Parliament in 1785 and 1788. London: Printed by J. Nichols, Son, and Bentley; and sold by them [etc.], 22. 24 Ibid, 66.

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and capped requests to 35,000. 72 By 1784, there were 2,063 claims amounting to

L7,046,278 for real and personal property and L2,234,125 for debts.25

The Commission also drew a boundary around the colonies agreeing to pay those Loyalists for losses “sustained in East and West Florida” or out of the limits of the

United States. However, the person must prove their residence was in one of the colonies lost in the war. 113 Even before Loyalists could petition the Commission for losses, the Florida required migrating British citizens to register themselves and their slaves. The British required all Loyalists intending to ship their slaves into the Caribbean to register with the Vice Admiralty Court in Florida. The Court’s records were collated with the Florida Claims Commission and sent back to London. However, most of these records have not survived. The East Florida Claims Commission documents were transferred to the Rolls House in 1847. For 50 years, the papers suffered from sewer water damage, while lying in the Treasury cellar.”26 Few readable documents survive.

During this period, the East Florida Claims Office “heard 372 claims between 1787 and

1789, including some form the Bahamas, Jamaica, and elsewhere. A total of

£647,405/6/9 was claimed, and £170,351/11/0 was awarded.”27 Many of these claims portray an interesting picture of St. Augustine during the revolutionary years, showing how blacks were stolen, sold, migrated, tricked and some ran away in the face of impeding enslavement or re-enslavement.

25 Ibid, 111. 26 Charles McLean Andrews, Guide to the Materials for American History to 1783 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1912), 265.

27 Papers of the East Florida Claims Commission, TPNA 77.

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Americans and Loyalists alike roamed St. Augustine and the surrounding territory preying upon enslaved men and women awaiting passage into the British Empire. The

East Florida Claims list John Nicol and John Jamison as both losing blacks in the chaos. John Nicol requested reparations for two blacks, Tom and Jacob, who were carried off by Americans in East Florida. Similarly, John Jamison, Esq., claimed that the rebels stole three or four of his slaves awaiting transport. Sch pf, a witness to the frantic slave round up, commented on the wretched state of those who fled. The evacuation’s chaos created an ideal situation for criminal behavior.28 A few “malefactors had taken advantage of the confusions and disorder which the time and circumstances had caused among the inhabitants, (conditions, however, chargeable to the authorities), and were robbing on the roads and plundering houses without let or hindrance.”29 These brigands drove vulnerable whites and blacks to the city seeking safety and as a result increased panic within the city walls. Tom and Jacob were just a few individuals who were forcibly stolen; others were forced back to the American plantations they fled from, others were sent to unfamiliar American plantations, and many to awaiting ships for departure.

Slaves Sold, Migrated, Transferred

As more and more people streamed into St. Augustine, the town became volatile for free and escaped blacks who suddenly became more in danger of losing their newly acquired freedom. Like most refugees, the Johnston family attempted to set up a life for themselves in St. Augustine, until word reached the town that the crown had given

28 Sch pf, Travels in the Confederation, 241.

29 Ibid.

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Florida to Spain. Like so many slave owners, William Johnston could not afford the cost of evacuating his family and his slaves, so he sold his slaves for “four hundred & fifty pounds” to Colonel Brown. In times of crisis, slaves were sold to purchase the safety of white families. Undergoing yet another transformation from labor, to currency, and back again to labor, slaves dispersed from St. Augustine into the countryside to work for new

American plantations. Loyalists not only sold slaves to rebel plantation owners, but also slave traders from the Caribbean and even a few hundred to the Spanish Empire. In an effort to recoup lost income, Loyalists tried many options to prevent bankruptcy. Many of these actions had severe consequences for the blacks involved.

Many Loyalists entrusted their property to an intermediary. Ann Wobley brought her case in front of the American Loyalist Claims Commission. She and her late husband, Edward Wobly, had resided in St. Augustine since 1768 and lived there for fourteen years. Edward was a merchant, and after he died in 1782, Ann was unable to recover debts owed to him. Upon her husband’s death, she settled his affairs and traveled to England. Ann moved in August 1782 to No4 George Lane in “Little east

Lindon.”30 Upon her migration, she left behind her “two negro women bought by her husband in June 1779 which cost L80” with Master Dott who removed the slaves to

Charleston upon hearing news of the cession of East Florida to the Spanish Empire.

Ann never heard what happened to her two slaves or to the intermediary Master Dott.

She petitioned the Commission, claiming, “she left behind her two negro women bought by her husband in June 1779” and wanting entitlement to a “sum of four hundred and

30 Petition of Ann Wobly, 19 Sept 1786, AO American Loyalists Claims Series I, East Florida.

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thirty seven pounds seventeen shillings and two pence.”31 Even though her petition claimed two Negro women, she produced a receipt for a “Negroe woman and a Negroe boy.” After facing so much hardship after her husband’s death, Wobley must have desperately needed these funds. As for her own human property, they were likely sold to new American owners.

Americans sold off the plantation and lands of Loyalist Colonel Elias Ball from

South Carolina. Banished from South Carolina, Ball moved to East Florida and bought land on the Saint John River where he settled the over “one hundred Negroes” for a year and a half.32 In court, he claimed “to the best of his Rememberance 175 Negroes” made the journey from South Carolina to East Florida. He took “a dozen or fifteen of them to St. Augustine and left the rest upon some lands on the west side about 25 or 30 miles from the mouth of St. Johns River where he first landed.”33 Ball’s slaves were

“chiefly employed in raising Provisions, that they likewise sawed some Lumber,” however their maintenance cost more than their production.34 His whole objective, he explained, was to “keep them alive till affairs took a more favorable turn” at which point, they could be sold. While his goals were lofty, Ball failed, and 30 of his slaves died in

April 1784. In order to recoup his losses, he sold 140 blacks to his cousin who had remained in South Carolina. Whites attempted to protect their futures by handling blacks as future savings. Witnessing the chaos surrounding them, blacks began to protest with their fee and run away.

31 Ibid.

32 Petition of Elias Ball, 13 Oct 1786, AO American Loyalists Claims, Series I, East Florida; BNA 12/3/19.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

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Runaway Slaves

Amidst the chaotic departure from St. Augustine, Robert Robertson petitioned the

Loyalist claims court for compensation for the “loss of a Negroe man named Jack who run away at embarking for Halifax from his dread of encountering so cold a climate.”35

The claim states that in 1783 Jack ran away from St. Augustine to Charleston either in pursuit of his family or in an attempt to gain his freedom. Looking out onto the Atlantic

Ocean, many blacks must have felt similarly when faced with an overseas voyage taking those thousands of miles away, thus inspiring thousands of enslaved blacks to run either to safety, back home or to supposed safe havens such as St. Augustine.

Loyalists attempting to establish new lives found came to rely upon black labor in the chaotic town of St. Augustine conditions in which many slaves attempted to run away. As many self-freed blacks moved into St. Augustine found, work was difficult to find. One way for blacks to work was to hire oneself as a laborer. Robert Robinson, a native Liverpudlian, had his slave Phillis runaway. Robinson hired laboring blacks to build his home in St. Augustine. Robinson moved to South Carolina in 1773. He settled in Charleston as a butcher until 1788 when the rebel government forced him to leave.

Robinson refused to swear allegiance to the rebellious government. On May 23, 1778,

Robinson moved his family to St. Augustine to reside at “17 Griffiths Building…It was a square House, had 6 rooms on each floor.”36 Robinson owned other slaves, Phillis and her husband whom he had bought at a public sale in 1780. He sold the man shortly thereafter and (not shockingly) Phillis “absconded before he left Augustine.” Her

35 Ibid.

36 Petition of Robert Robinson, 27 Oct 1786, AO American Loyalists Claims Series I, East Florida; BNA 12/3/26.

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husband must have been too far out of reach or even lost, because shortly thereafter

Phillis “delivered herself up to Mm Slater was sold after his departure for 30.17.3.”

The unnamed husband must have endured hard labor working for Robinson during his time as a slave. Robinson explains his house

had a flat roof upon it, which he repaired and made into a pitch roof. That there was one room down which he built up and put a new Chamber over it. That the Gable End was likewise entirely down and he rebuilt it Tat [sic] he put up a Chimney, two now [sic] windows one of which cost 5 the other not quite half so much; a Back Door which cost upwards of one Guinea; a new stable built of wood and covered with Tiles an oven and a slaughter House and sunk a well. That he fenced in the Lot with Post, Nails, and Clap boards, it might take 100 posts with two or three nails between the posts and clapboards nailed upright, that be brought the posts and rails. That the repairs and buildings which were done soon after the purchase might take up about a month exclusive of the force.37

The husband performed most of this hard labor, occasionally getting help from another “negro Carpenter.”38 According to his statement, black carpenters earned from

“7.6 to 9 per day.” During this brief period, Robinson bought one additional black slave from Francis Pallisier before he moved to Hallifax, Nova Scotia. This slave, a “Negroe man (Jack) ran away from him on the day of his departure for Hallifax.”39 Jack ran away

“at embarking for Hallifax from his dread of encountering so cold a climate.” Historians are left to wonder if Jack did not entertain more complex reasoning to run away from such a dangerous voyage. Before the voyage, Robinson had also sold his “negro wench” to whom Jack may have been her father, brother, son or even husband.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

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Although on the record as fleeing due to a fear of climate, Jack may have fled to be with his family.40

Major Nicholas Welsh was one Loyalist who traveled to the Bahamas after the evacuation. Welsh’s claim describes how he arrived in East Florida from Georgia in May of 1782. Thinking that he would settle in Florida, as many others thought, he built a home on the St. John’s River “about 9 or 12 miles” from the ocean.41 Welsh claims that he hired “3 negroes at ½ p day and man of Samuel Gray and one white man as workman and overseer.”42 In April 1783, Welsh left the plantation in the overseer’s care.

The three hired blacks ran away, so he hired two more “stragglers from the same person at the same price.”43 These slaves may have formed a core family unit or could have been related in some way, but they were more than likely split among sellers eager to profit from Loyalist desperation.

Another Loyalist, James sold his property in 1783. He owned 10 slaves, four of which were left in the county at his plantation and six, named Barrick, Will, Yella Adam,

Cato, Moses, and Titus ran away from Florida back to Georgia, only to be captured and re-sold into slavery. Thousands of enslaved blacks would attempt to run away either to return home or to land in supposed safe havens such as St. Augustine.

Passage between colonies was fraught with danger. Ships traveling the eastern seaboard between St. Augustine and New York were vulnerable to attack, leaving any

40 Ibid.

41 Petition of Nicholas Welch, 13 Oct 1786, AO American Loyalists Claims, Series I, East Florida; BNA 12/3/19.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

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blacks on board susceptible to re-enslavement or, in rare circumstances, leading to their freedom. Mary Webb lost her husband John at the end of the Revolution. Following this tragic loss, Mary decided to move with her two female slaves “Sarah and the other

Aperina” and “one box of apparel and provisions necessary for the voyage.” Suddenly,

Mary became ill and was “obliged to go to shore.” She lost her passage but sent the two women ahead. An American privateer captured the British ship and took it to Boston, a city that did not uphold slavery. In one of the rare happy cases, Sarah and Aperina accidently sailed to Boston and, essentially, their freedom.

Major William Cunningham was a British Loyalist who witnessed the frantic slave round up and testified to its voracity in front of the Board of Trade.44 Cunningham lamented his inability to remove his property. He claimed to have had “frequent opportunities of removing these Negroes from East Florida between February 1784 and

May 1785;” instead, he left them behind with an agent.45 Hoping to one day return and collect his slaves, Cunningham set off to the Bahamas to find suitable land. However, he was forced to sell his enslaved property once the return trip became untenable.

Cunningham sold four slaves: Davy and Sam who were “common field Negroes” about

22 years old, Linty an 11 year old girl, and an unnamed Negroe woman.46 However, when asked to prove his losses, Cunningham provided only a bill of sale from Cuthbert

44 He testified well after the revolution on October 7, 1786.

45 Petition of William Cunningham, 7 October 1786, AO American Loyalists Claims, Series I, East Florida,; BNA 12/3.

46 Ibid.

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Mobley “dated November 15th 1783 of a negroe woman, who was about 50 years old, a boy who was about 12 or 13 and this girl for 60 guineas.”47

Victims of Trickery

Many blacks found St. Augustine less of a haven than expected. One crook,

Jesse Gray, made quite a career of tricking free and enslaved blacks into working for false documents of freedom. One of his victims, Mary Postell, resided in Charleston at the end of the war and evacuated with the British to East Florida after she received her certificate of freedom. She lost her documentation in the turmoil of the evacuation. With no proof of her newly acquired free status, she had little choice but to travel with her husband and children and to follow the British evacuation south to St. Augustine. Once they arrived in St. Augustine, Mary was able to find paid work as a housemaid to the same Jesse Grey, who would later trick her out of her freedom.

Jesse Grey attempted to take advantage of the overburdened court system and claim the Postell family as his slaves. He forcibly moved her and her family from St.

Augustine to Nova Scotia where he sold Postell to his brother Samuel. Postell disappears from the historical record, only to reappear in Shelburne’s court in Nova

Scotia petitioning for her and her family’s freedom. Postell found two witnesses in

Birchtown who testified that she worked for the British building fortifications. The British promised to reward slaves who worked for them, but many slaves never received this compensation. Despite her witnesses’ testimony, the court ruled in favor of Gray and returned Mary to his possession. The magistrates had Loyalist ties; many of them were slaveholders unsympathetic to the plight of freed blacks who risked re-enslavement at

47 Ibid.

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every turn. Probably as a deliberate punishment for running away, Gray sold Mary to

William Maugham for a hundred bushels of potatoes; she was enslaved once again.

While Mary Postell ended up in Canada, not in the Caribbean, her account gives historians a rare glimpse into the complicated and uncertain situation blacks faced during and after the revolution. Regardless of the low status and relative inability of slaves to control their own freedom, blacks were still able to exert some influence over their futures by navigating official channels such as the court system. In the short time

Mary Postell lived in St. Augustine, she would have witnessed a profound change in the tiny town. Postell’s sad story of deception was relatively typical for the rising population of Africans residing in St. Augustine. The chaos, however, did not just extend to blacks; white citizens were also caught up in the chaos experienced transitioning from British to

Spanish rule.

William Cunningham was one British Loyalist who might have understood what it was like to be an enslaved man or woman, kidnapped and shipped to an unfamiliar land

(in this case, Cuba). Before Cunningham became a victim of the revolution, he evacuated from Charleston in 1782. Traveling to East Florida, he rented land from Lady

Egmont on the banks of the St. John’s River. He built a few negro houses, cleared and planted fifteen acres of corn. Cunningham returned to East Florida in May 1785. Shortly after, he had a dispute with the Spanish government and was taken prisoner and sent to

Cuba. The interesting details of his experiences in Cuba are lost, however we do have a few letters. Wilbur Henry Siebert, a historian who first wrote on Cunningham, describes how Zespedes wrote to Tonyn suggesting that “Cunningham, and other British subjects had been recently confined in ‘filthy dungeons’ by the Spanish authorities on criminal

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charges. . .[they] were destined to be sent to a place where it would be out of their power to give further trouble.”48 From Cuba, Cunningham made his way to Canada and back to London. Here, he submitted his claim before the Board. However, the

Commissioners could not find any witness to confirm Cunningham’s claim. Cunningham requested that the Commission accept witnesses examined before the Governor of the

Bahamas. In the meantime, he would keep his claim open.

Arrival of the Spanish and Confusion in the Black Community

The Spanish governor, Vicente Manual Zespedes y Valasco, arrived in St.

Augustine on June 27, 1784. Valasco issued a proclamation on July 14, 1784 proclaiming the creation of a Spanish government. The proclamation gave British inhabitants 18 months to sell property and remove themselves from the colony. He issued a second proclamation, which ordered “slave-owners who lacked title deeds to enter the slaves in the secretary’s office, and ordered unattached Negroes to take out permission to hire themselves for private employment or to work for the public; failure to do so would result in the individual’s being considered as a slave of the King of Spain.”49

The political upheaval was not limited to physical violence; it also interrupted systems of classification and oppression. During this transitory period, thousands of slaves simply had no legal documents proving their ownership and as a result were able to live as free persons in St. Augustine. The difficulty in determining the actual status of many blacks led the royal Zespedes to issue a proclamation requiring slaves to show proof of freedom or be seized as Crown property. Zespedes’ attempt to classify blacks

48 Wilbur Henry Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785; The Most Important Documents Pertaining Thereto, Edited with an Accompanying Narrative (DeLand: Florida State Historical Society, 1929), 174.

49 Mowat, East Florida as a British Province, 145.

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indicates the varied and complex categories through which this diverse population was understood at the time. The proclamation stated that there are four different classes of blacks in the province:

The first are blacks absolutely free, the second are them who deserve their liberty by virtue of different proclamations ordered to be published to British Generals during the War; the third belong to British subjects known to be their owners; and the fourth are Blacks, who have no Owner, and are strolling about this Town and province—this last class of Blacks whenever they will present themselves within [twenty days] shall by virtue of the proclamation be considered as free, but them that after that time…did not come and present themselves should be considered… as vagrants.50

Free blacks had to register in 20 days in order to receive work permits. The British authorities who still presided in the city promptly protested that under British law, slave- owners held such chattel without written deed. Nevertheless, Zespedes continued to prosecute wandering blacks, taking many free and enslaved Loyalist blacks for the

Spanish crown.51

Many blacks did not possess proper documentation to verify manumissions and were therefore in violation of Governor Zespedes’ decree. Chief Justice Hume interpreted Article Five of the treaty to include “every individual, black as well as white,

Slave as well as freeman that was under the protection of the British Government at the arrival of His Excellency Governor De Zespedes.” The chief justice believed that five out of six blacks in St. Augustine would be adversely affected by this new law.52

50 Vicente Manuel de Zespedes to Patrick Tonyn, CO 5/561; 80. As inhumane as these categorizations may sound, Zespedes showed a very enlightened approach to blacks as human beings, who also happened to be property. The normal perception of this era was “the brutal absurdity of racial classifications that derive[d] from and also celebrate[d] racially exclusive conceptions of national identity from which blacks were excluded as either non-human or non-citizens.”

51 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 6.

52 Patrick Tonyn to Lord Sydney, 6 December 1784, CO 5/561; 47-48.

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Exodus

The evacuation of the British from St. Augustine, the last British held port in the

American colonies, resulted in the dispersal of Loyalists and their slaves into the British

Caribbean and beyond. Between 1782 and 1785, British citizens and their slaves created the largest diaspora of English-speaking refugees, never before had such numbers of British subjects and their slaves been scattered more widely across the globe. As a result, the empire blackened significantly. African Loyalists could be found in Canada and even Australia in the years following the evacuation.

By the war’s end, the southern port towns that remained in British hands—St.

Augustine, Savannah, and Charleston—overflowed with black refugees that had arrived by various means; some arrived by their own volition having escaped their Rebel masters to join the British, while other enslaved blacks journeyed with their Loyalist masters or with the Loyalist raiders who stole them from British slave masters. Still others were simply swept up in the maelstrom. Many received freedom from the British upon their arrival in St. Augustine, but many more remained enslaved or lived in a kind of legal limbo. When the British evacuated these towns between 1782 and 1785, some slaves emigrated with them as freed people. However, most never gained their freedom and were destined for harsh new lives as plantation laborers in Barbados, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. Governor Tonyn shipped his own slaves to the British island of Dominica.

Once there, he arranged for their sale and coordinated additional slave sales for Jacob

Wilkerson and the Earl of Egmont with a Spanish merchant from Havana. The process took so long that fifteen of the seventy-nine offered for sale—including Sam, Primus,

Peggy, Amey, Sampson, Israel, Frank, Billey, Jack, Pero, Celia, Kate, Nancy, and

Linda—died before they could be sold. One black man named Newport was sent to St

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Kitts and sold for £60.53 The only remaining records simply list their names, leaving historians to speculate on any number of personal details.

In such a chaotic time, blacks were a constantly changing commodity: used as cash to pay for debts, as a means of moving wealth into the Caribbean, and as a labor source. Blacks transitioned from human, to commodity, and finally to a fighting force in the Caribbean. In an era without stable banks or currency, slave owners used enslaved populations as a means to invest in the future. Previously enslaved men and women struggled to control their own fate, create communities, worship freely, and even volunteer for service. Inevitably governmental, legal, and personal disputes broke out between parties interested in utilizing black labor. The next chapter follows those blacks who ultimately stayed with their masters and traces their negotiations throughout multiple migrations through the Mosquito Shore, Belize and finally to the Bahamas.

53 The Memorial of Patrick Tonyn, TPNA Papers of the East Florida Claims Commission.

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Table 4-1. Samuel Bonneau’s List of Slaves

Elseck A Capital Fellow abo 25 One hundred and fifty years of age a jobing Pounds carpenter Driver

Lymus A Capital Fellow abo 30 One Hundred and thirty Years of age a good Pounds Boatman Sawyer Jimmey A capital Prime fellow One hundred and fifty abo 30 years a good Pounds Boatman Sawyer Capital Fellow abo 25 One hundred and thirty Cooper Sambo years of age a good pounds Cooper boatman Ferry Sambo Young Prime abo 20 One hundred and thirty Years a Cooper boatman Pounds Sawyer Long Sambo About 25 years of age a Ninety pounds good Sawyer Scipio About 25 years of age – One hundred and thirty a good field slave pounds Ben Abo 26 years of age. One hundred and thirty Jobing Carpenter a good pounds Indigo Maker and field slave Jeffry Twenty seven years of Seventy Pounds age – a field slave (s)Lawyer About 25 years of age. A One Hundred Pounds good waiting man Venus An elderly wench a good Seventy Pounds cook and field slave Nelly About 30 years of age, a One Hundred Pounds Compliat Washer Ironer, Seamstress, and House maid Doll A Young Field Slave Eighty pounds Binah A Young Field Slave Eighty pounds Darchus A Young Wench. Cook, Ninety pounds washer, ironer, and house maid Robin Darchus son abo 7 years old Forty pounds Mulatto Total Amount sixteen hundred and sixty pounds sterling

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Table 4-2. List of American Families and their Black Servants traveling from St. Augustine to Philadelphia

Families and Single Men Women Children Negro Negro Negro Persons Men Women Children James H. Thomson and his 1 1 1 Family Nathaniel Lebby 1 1 4 Sarah Wakefield 1 6 Martha Bourdeaux 1 6 2 James McBride 1 Charlotte Cross 1 Ann Davis 1 John Ernest Poyas and his 1 1 2 1 2 Family Edward McCrady 1 1 2 1 2 Joseph Ball 1 1 1 3 Stephen Shrewsberry 1 1 6 1 1 1 John Langford 1 1 1 2 Ralph Atmar 1 1 2 Francis Gross 1 1 3 2 Abraham Mayzett 1 Elizabeth Girraud 1 1 1 William Stone & Family 1 1 1 2 4 Thomas Smith 1 1 4 1 Arthur Stafford 1 1 1 1 John Welch 1 1 6 1 Robert Way 1 1 James Wilkins 1 1 5 John Bonnistt 1 1 2 1 Ann Glaze 1 1 Thankfull Moore 1 3 William Wilkie 1 9 Total 18 24 60 9 16 7

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Table 4-3. List of Black Slaves Registered in St. Augustine 1783-1785

Name Male Female Infant Children Girl Woman Boy Man Sylvia 1 Bina 1 Rose 1 Drummor Billy 1 Kate 1 Bilia Jonny 1 Martha 1 1 George 1 1 Lydia 1 Pegg 1 Tibby Quash [Capardra] [Sink] Sarah 1 1 Quash 1 1 Plenty 1 1 Bristol 1 1 Ceasar 1 1 Frank 1 1 Morris 1 1 Dick 1 1 Bristol 1 1 Stephon 1 1 Harry 1 1 Jack 1 1 Davey 1 1 Sam 1 1 Shallow 1 1 Hopney 1 1 Sampson 1 1 Williby 1 1 children (3 Willby) 3 Hagar 1 1 children (3 Hagar) 3 Syrah 1 1

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Table 4-3 continued.

Name Male Female Infant Child Girl Women Boy Man child (Syrah) 1 Hannah 1 1 child (Hannah) 1 Mary 1 1 Child (Mary) 1 Nancy 1 Toner 1 Sally 1 Betty 1 Celia 1 Betty 1 Diner 1 Juno 1 Negroe Boy 1 1 Lester 1 1 Tom 1 1 Tom 1 1 Cloe 1 Belinda 1 Monday 1 Hannah 1 Princess 1 Beck 1 Sipe 1 1 Cate 1 1 Cooper 1 Betty 1 Venus 1 Quin 1 Edward 1 Bella 1 Ben 1 1 Billy 1 Rose 1 Jonny 1 Will 1 Monday 1 Archer 1

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Table 4-3 continued.

Name Male Female Infant Child Girl Women Boy Man Joffry 1 1 James 1 Daniel 1 Sampson 1 Ceasar 1 Molly 1 Daniel 1 Nelly 1 Tobie 1 1 Flora 1 1 Bristol 1 1 Torro 1 1 Sam 1 Joe 1 Robbin 1 London 1 Dinah 1 Jack 1 1 Harry 1 1 Kings 1 Harry 1 Will 1 1 Abram 1 1 Julet 1 1 Children (3 Julet) 3 Marannia 1 1 Jacob 1 1 Sarah 1 1 Bina 1 Jenny (child of Bina) 1 Fanny 1 1 Carolina 1 1 Frank 1 1 Peter 1 1 Dan 1 1 Brick 1 1 Sue 1 1 Jenny 1 1

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Table 4-3 continued.

Name Male Female Infant Child Girl Women Boy Man Sary 1 1 Leister 1 1 Ned 1 1 Sam 1 Sarah 1 Nancy 1 1 Binah 1 1 2 Girls 2 2 Polly 1 Jany 1 1 Hannah (child of Jany) 1 1 Sam 1 1 Paul 1 John 1 Dick 1 1 Abraham 1 Mingo 1 Sarah 1 Rose 1 1 Will 1 1 Bob 1 James 1 Ned 1 Cooper 1 Jack, 1 Jack 1 Little Jack 1 Sam 1 Charles 1 Omer 1 Tom 1 Isaac 1 York 1 Suffolk 1 Sally 1 Mary 1 Pinder 1 Luncy 1

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Table 4-3 continued.

Name Male Female Infant Child Girl Women Boy Man Rose 1 Meriah 1 Mary 1 Ceilia 1 Harry 1 Patty 1 Scipis 1 Ned 1 Princess 1 George 1 Philis 1 Primus 1 Mary 1 Lizza 1 Bacchus 1 Biana 1 March 1 Boatswain 1 Jack 1 Jupiter 1 Ferry 1 Peter 1 1 Philis 1 1 Covam 1 Sue 1 Jimmy 1 1 Sally 1 1 Pollydow (son of Sally) 1 1 Sampson 1 1 Primus 1 Dick 1 Lymus 1 1 Malborogh 1 Charlotte 1 Mancha 1 Bella 1 1 Fortune 1 1 Jacob 1 TOTAL 106 72 18 5 18 7 39

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CHAPTER 5 BLACK DIASPORIA FOLLOWING THE REVOLUTION

In 1777, a Loyalist refugee from Savannah named Mary Port Macklin arrived in

St. Augustine, Florida, in flight from the violence that engulfed the South. For the next six years, she kept a diary describing her family’s struggle to survive in a port town increasingly crowded with displaced Loyalists like herself.1 Macklin’s husband turned to privateering part-time in order to make ends meet. In one of Robert Macklin’s privateering raids, he stole the slave couple, Nancy and Robert.2 Mary Port Macklin arrived home late one night after caring for a sick neighbour and woke Nancy and

Robert. She ordered Nancy to make a cup of coffee, but when it arrived, she complained that it was too cold and too weak to drink, and refused it. Whether or not

Nancy intentionally did her job poorly out of protest is, of course, impossible to know, but she may have derived satisfaction from Macklin’s annoyance. Nancy and Robert’s story is tantalizingly thin. Before being stolen by Robert Macklin, were they escaping to freedom? Were they being sold to the Caribbean? In such seemingly mundane, every- day episodes, black and white refugees tried to negotiate their newly entwined lives under the duress of displacement by war. This story is only one small episode in the daily lives of black and white refugees who would soon find themselves scattered across the British Empire. This chapter follows the haphazard journey of a few Loyalists and slaves from the American shore into the Mosquito Coast, through Belize and finally to the Bahamas.

1 Mary Port Macklin. The Life of Mary Port Macklin. (1823?). Miscellaneous memoirs, Smathers Library Special Collections, University of Florida.

2 The records indicate Nancy and Robert were a couple, as Macklin referred to Robert as “Nancy’s husband.”

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John Macklin was one loyalist who turned to looting blacks from wayward ships in order to make a living. Mary Port Macklin and her husband John once prosperous and resourceful restaurant owners—they had converted an old, unseaworthy vessel into a gentlemen’s dining club at the Savannah docks—arrived in St. Augustine as paupers.

John Macklin then took command of the privateer Polley to make a new living by plundering rebel slaves. On his first expedition, he intercepted a vessel bound for St

Eustatius and profitably netted three young black men, Primes, Jems, and Pollichor, as prizes. Leaving these slaves in the capable hands of his wife, Macklin returned to sea in search of more valuable commodities.3 On his second voyage, he stole two middle- aged slaves, the couple Robert and Nancy. Again, he left them with his wife, then took two of the previously seized young men aboard the privateer for a third voyage, but this time he was unsuccessful.4 All the while, Mary Macklin kept an informative diary.

However, it still contains many silences about the lives of enslaved refugees in her care.

Did Mary sell the young men at auction in St. Augustine, and if so, for how much and to whom? John Macklin resurfaces in a later Loyalist claim, stating that he lost “2 Negroe

Pilots delivered on Board the Roebuck.”5 These might have been the same men he had taken with him to capture more blacks on the high seas. He also claimed three slaves taken by Rebels in 1777 or 1778. These slaves might have been stolen, or perhaps abandoned when the Macklins and the other Loyalists were forced to leave St.

3 Macklin, Memoir, 120

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

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Augustine.6 Savannah, Charleston, and St. Augustine would soon have to deal with the growing black population and what it meant for royal control.

The fates of Nancy and Robert, the slaves of Mary Port Macklin in St. Augustine whom we met at the beginning of this chapter, illustrate the varying degrees of freedom blacks experienced in this era and locale. Caught in the tides of war, Nancy and Robert lived, loved, and lost in their attempt to create a life, both during and after the

Revolutionary War. Mary Macklin fell ill with a debilitating disease during the last few years of the war. Losing control of her body for three years, she became dependant on

Nancy and her neighbours for care. Her husband, captured by the Rebels, never returned to St. Augustine and never saw his wife again. Destitute and ill, Mary was moved to the Bahamas, where she spent the last few years of her life. She was accompanied by Nancy, but Robert is not mentioned in later diary entries and seems not to have joined them. In many unwritten and lost stories, black tragedies mirror white ones. Historians can only guess what happened to Robert: Perhaps he was sold, to pay for Nancy’s journey, or he might have run away in the chaos of the Revolution. We can assume, however, that the tragic separation Mary and her husband endured hurt Nancy and husband Robert just as profoundly. Their intertwined story is merely one example plucked from the whirlwind of wartime uncertainty, flight, and evacuation that pushed ever farther to the south as the Revolution upturned thousands of lives, permanently separating black families, communities, and traditions.

Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, discussed in the second chapter, was just one of the thousands of Loyalists who made the journey from Savannah to Charleston and

6 Ibid., 112-125.

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then to St. Augustine. Pregnant with her third child, Johnston moved her young family through a total of five migrations, two of which were transatlantic. The Johnston family journeyed with their black nurse, known as Hagar. Setting sail from St. Augustine, the

Johnstons moved back to England, then relocated to Jamaica and finally settled in

Canada. Johnston’s diary was published with previously unseen letters. In these letters,

Johnston reveals that the nurse was her “negro slave, Hagar.”7 Johnston refers to her nurse during the evacuation and then again in Jamaica. It is extremely plausible, with

Johnston’s young family and absent enlisted husband, that Johnston kept her nurse throughout the evacuations. Hagar’s story is both unique and ordinary. Hagar was one of only a few hundred blacks who traveled to England after the Revolution, creating what Gretchen Gerzina terms the beginning of “Black London.”8 Yet, Hagar’s fate was tied to that of her white owner. As the plight of thousands of evacuating Loyalists and their slaves, these lives were swept up a series of forced and sometimes voluntary migrations. Thousands of black lives, especially those who were freed, were dependent upon white British decisions not just during the evacuation, but also in the years before due to Dunmore’s Proclamation.

Hagar’s story is just one of the tens of thousands, which make up the Black

Atlantic. The variety of black circumstances, locations, destinations and ultimate destinies make up what historians have designated the Black Atlantic. By looking at the black diaspora within the context of the Atlantic World, scholars can appreciate the global dispersion and settlement of African-Americans; they settled abroad both

7 Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist, 222.

8 Ibid. See also Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

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voluntarily and involuntarily, maintaining a consciousness of their identity and homeland whilst adapting to new societies. Chambers argues that the Black Atlantic is composed of many smaller micro histories, that when placed together uncover "'a larger, but hidden or unknown, structure.’ Increasingly that structure is being conceptualized as the

Black Atlantic."9 The interesting combination of an Atlantic world focus and these series of micro histories show how a local focus must be seen in articulation with a global. This chapter follows the individual paths of a few blacks, like Hagar, on the generalized migration from Savannah to Charleston and beyond to St. Augustine, while acknowledging blacks experienced a wide variety of emigrations, migrations, and return migrations. By focusing on the small individual threads, like Hagar, this chapter weaves together a fuller depiction of how the British understood black freedom and non- freedom.

As the American Revolution drew to a close, British Loyalists and their slaves fled the newly freed southern colonies to coastal cities. Looking out onto the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, the evacuating population must have felt apprehension facing a journey into an unfamiliar world. Unbeknownst to these revolutionary refugees awaiting ships on the edge of the British Empire, this evacuation would begin a new series of migrations in and around the Atlantic World. One Loyalist, Lieutenant Colonel

James Moncrief, the Chief Engineer for Georgia and South Carolina, migrated his property three times, transporting both free black laborers and his own “considerable estate” of slaves from East Florida into Jamaica and then to the Mosquito Coast.10

9 Chambers, The Black Atlantic, 152-155.

10 James Moncrief American Loyalist Claim, TPNA 1/688/241-242. While these slaves earned freedom by laboring on southern military fortifications, the majority remained on American and Loyalist plantations,

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Using Moncrief and his retinue as a focal point, this chapter follows the path of a few thousand southern refugees into the British Caribbean, on to the Mosquito Coast, and then traces their dispersal to Honduras and the Bahamas.11

Edge of Empire: The Mosquito Coast

Robert White, the British agent and mediator for the Mosquito Coast, saw the

Loyalist evacuation as a way to expand the British Empire into sparsely populated

Spanish territory in Central America. White “presented to both Secretaries of State, a plan for the Mosquito Coast’s future population and settlement.” Often under- represented in histories of the Atlantic World, the Mosquito Coast occupied a parlous and consistently shifting position in relation to British and Spanish New World ambitions.

Located on the far western side of the Caribbean in present-day Nicaragua and

Honduras, the Mosquito Coast stretched down the shore of the Yucatan peninsula occupying the western-most edge of the British Empire and the unfortified middle of the

Spanish Empire. Although never an official colony, the Coast had long been a small outpost of the British Empire. The few Spanish conquistadors who had ventured into the

choosing familial networks over an uncertain and dangerous promise of freedom. While the historical record is unfortunately silent on the treatment of these nominally free slaves, Moncrief probably considered them his personal holdings, while, at the same time, the enslaved men and women might have acted, and felt, otherwise. Moncrief’s decision to remove blacks who were not his property seems unusual for the southern evacuation. However, when considered in the context of how many opportunities American blacks had to flee in the revolutionary chaos, black decisions to keep families together must have been paramount. However, either choice—to flee or to stay—generally concluded with the same outcome. The majority of southern Loyalist blacks remained enslaved and were shipped into the Caribbean.

11 Many historians have made references to the number of migrating enslaved Africans during the American Revolution. See, Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution, 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960); Richard B. Morris, The American Revolution Reconsidered (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). For a summary of the debate, see Cassandra Pybus’s “Jefferson's Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly 62, no.2 (April 2005): 243-64.

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area a century earlier met fierce native resistance, dense mangroves, swamps, torrential rain, and, of course, mosquitoes.12 In 1630, John Pym and the few Puritans, tired of the un-Godly behavior of their neighbors in Barbados, chartered the Company of

Adventurers to lead a Puritan expedition to the island of Providence, 140 miles off the

Mosquito Coast, claiming more land for the British Empire.13 Operating under a policy of benign neglect, the coastal region became a haven for adventurers and minor traders who founded settlements on this unprotected and isolated Central American Caribbean coast.

Olaudah Equiano, arguably the most famous black Atlantic personality, was among those who helped to settle the Mosquito Coast in the 1770s. His narrative is famous for its portrayal of the horrors of the Middle Passage; his plantation adventure in the Mosquito Coast is less well known, but no less compelling.14 As the first shots of the

American Revolution rung out, Equiano was embroiled in a plan to ship Jamaican slaves to the Mosquito Coast to capitalize upon the European demand (and high prices) for exotic woods, like mahogany. Equiano and a few other enterprising British citizens

12 Captain Nathaniel Uring, who wrote an early description of the area, remarked, “that neither Mouth, Nose, Eyes or any part of us was free of” the pesky insect. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, 1789, in The Project Gutenberg EBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15399 (accessed Mary 10, 2009). Barbara Potthast- Jutkeit, “Indians, Blacks and Zambos on the Mosquito Coast, 17th and 18th Century,” América Negra 6 (1993): 53-65. More than a hundred years later, Equanio ventured into the area and still complained of the swarms of “musquito flies, and they proved troublesome to us.” However, this area was not named after the insect, but rather the Miskito Indians who refused to acknowledge nominal Spanish control over the region. The word “mosquito” is apparently of North American origin and dates back to about 1583. See Marston Bates, The Natural History of Mosquitoes (New York: Macmillan, 1949).

13 Pym and his fellow Puritans imported Africans to perform difficult plantation labor in their “godly” community. However, the lawless, tropical frontier proved irresistible to rogues, pirates, and prostitutes and the island became one of the more famous pirate lairs of the Caribbean. The Adventurer’s Company opened trade with the Miskitos, leading the way for a small migration to occur from the island to the mainland.

14 Vincent Carretta, Surprising Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987).

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paved the way for the migrants who would flee there from war-torn America a decade later, several hundred of whom were enslaved blacks from the South Carolina region where Equiano claimed he was born.15

In the wake of the American Revolution, Robert White hoped to build the

Mosquito Coast outpost into a colony by enticing well-established southern planters. He proposed the “most liberal provision” specifically for “for the loyal Americans.”16 White believed that granting land to Loyalists would be beneficial for planters and the Empire.

By rewarding “loyal Americans,” the Empire would reinforce Loyalist attachment to the

“Parent State; and, in consequence, advance, in the highest degree, its commercial interests and naval power.” Rewarded for their loyalty, Loyalists who traveled with their enslaved property would be welcomed into the mosquito-infested coast in the proverbial back yard of the Spanish Empire. This backwater colony was “being erected into a

British Government,” which would “supply to this nation, in far greater perfection, the loss of whatever was most precious and valuable in all the southern colonies of North

America, such as indigo, cotton, rice, tobacco, &c; as well as numberless (many of them hitherto unknown) plants, shrubs, and trees, useful in medicine and for dying of

15 Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20, no. 3 (December 1999): 96-105.

16 It also included a provision for the distressed Baymen of Honduras, who had been unceremoniously run out of Honduras by the Spanish in 1779. Spain burned down Belize City in a surprise attack in 1779. Robert White, The case of the agent to the settlers on the coast of Yucatan: and the late settlers on the Mosquito-Coast. Stating the whole of his conduct, in soliciting compensation for the losses, sustained by ... His Majesty's injured and distressed subjects (London: printed for T. Cadell, 1793), 70-85; Robert White, The case of His Majesty's subjects having property in and lately established upon the Mosquito Coast in America: Most humbly submitted t [sic] the King's most excellent Majesty in Council, ... Parliament, and the nation of Great-Britain at large (London: printed for T. Cadell, 1789), 135-80; John Alder Burdon, r hives o ritish Hon ras eing tra ts an r is ro Re or s, ith a s (London: Sifton, Praed & Co., Ltd, 1931).

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colours.”17 Thus, the Mosquito Coast became a viable destination for Loyalist refugees because it was envisioned as an alternative source for many of the raw materials lost to

Britain from the southern colonies as a result of the Revolution. A few thousand

Loyalists were wooed by the description of a new “southern colony” in Central America.

Moncrief oversaw the removal of hundreds of runaway slaves, some of whom had previously defected from Patriot owners. During the war, he transported “eight hundred negroes in the engineer and ordnance departments to Florida.”18 Claiming he was worried over the “crueltys which would have been inflicted upon them by their former Masters,” he was able to send 400 of these previously enslaved men and women into the West Indies as a protection from angry owners.19 If Moncrief was, as he claimed, motivated by concern for the well-being of these former bondsmen, it is also true that his intervention proved personally very lucrative. In 1784, he applied to

General Campbell, then Governor of Jamaica, requesting permission to move these blacks to the Mosquito Coast for the “purpose of cutting mahogany.” Campbell approved his application, whereupon Moncrief registered these nominally free blacks as his slaves, increasing his own wealth exponentially. Along with other Loyalists, Moncrief thus began the process of recreating the slave society they had fashioned in the colonial American South on the Mosquito Coast. However, just a few short years after their arrival, they would be faced with yet another evacuation.

17 White, The Case of the Agent, 76-78.

18 Siebert, “Slavery in East Florida,” pages??

19 Moncrief Loyalist Claim, CO 1/688/241-242.

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Mosquito Coast Evacuation

The political situation in the Mosquito Coast was perilous at best. The British and the Spanish interpreted the 1783 Treaty of Paris which ended the American

Revolutionary War in vastly different ways. The sixth article of the Treaty restricted

British subjects “from any other parts [than those expressly given to them by the said article] whether on the Spanish Continent, or in any of the islands.”20 In essence, Spain retained undisputed sovereignty over areas inhabited by Spanish settlers in Central

America, including the Mosquito Coast. However, the Treaty also implied that areas under British control would remain so, thus, in British eyes, keeping the Mosquito Coast

“under the domination of his [British] Majesty.”21 The Spanish, however, disagreed.

In September 1785, the British and the Spanish entered into discussions over the

Mosquito Coast and Honduras Bay colonies. A key part of the negotiations was the

British requirement that “all runaway negroes and others should be returned from the

Spanish to the English settlements.”22 Clearly many nominally free and legally enslaved

African Americans, irritated at their forced migration and their treatment by the British, had fled to the backcountry. While there is no record of any concerted Spanish effort to harbor these runaways, it seems likely that enough blacks had previously “disappeared” from British holdings to warrant an official clause stipulating that in future the Spanish should return any fugitive British slaves.

20 “The Definitive Treaty of Peace 1783,” Our Documents, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=6&page=transcript (accessed April 3, 2008); Thomas Southey, Chronological History of the West Indies (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), 550.

21 White, The Case of the Agent, 74.

22 Ibid.

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Reverend Stanford, an evangelical Episcopal Chaplin stationed in the Mosquito

Coast and later Belize certainly believed that the Spanish offered blacks incentives to flee the British. Writing back to his archdiocese in England, he explained that blacks in the Mosquito Coast fled to the Spanish because they claimed to treat their slaves much better than did the British. Rumors and tales tempted blacks who, according to Stanford, were apparently promised “two days of the week are his own, on which days, he may work for his master at a stated price; and when his tally of those days that he has worked for his Master, returned by him to the office and compared with his Masters plantation Book. . .untill his freedom is accomplished.”23 It was well known on the

Colonial plantations of Georgia and Florida, where many of the slaves transported to the

Mosquito Coast originally lived, that the Spanish gave special privileges to those who escaped to their jurisdictions in the Floridas. This knowledge, coupled with inconsistent

British policies towards slavery in the Americas, encouraged many enslaved to flee to

Spanish controlled areas or to the undeveloped backcountry.

On July 14, 1786, British and Spanish representatives in London signed a convention to prevent "even the Shadow of Misunderstanding which might be occasioned by Doubt, Misconceptions, or other causes of Disputes between the

Subjects on the Frontiers of the two Monarchies, especially in distant Countries, as are those in AMERICA.”24 British citizens agreed to evacuate the Mosquito Coast and in return, Spain extended Belizean forestry boundaries, agreed to permit mahogany cutting and fishing, and conceded the right to occupy St. George's Key and other

23 W. Stanford to Bishop Porteus, Westmorland, 22 July 22 1788, BNA Fulham Papers, 18, 65-70.

24 White, The Case of the Agent, 76-78.

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islands to the Spanish. To complicate matters further, the Spanish governor of

Guatemala “was instructed to dislodge the Shoremen by force if they did not leave within the treaty's eighteen-month grace period.”25

The Convention of 1786 prevented British citizens from “raising, by cultivation, the smallest article of produce.” The Spanish government interpreted this article so strictly, that Captain Don Juan Bautista Gual, a Spanish commissary sent to oversee the

British evacuation of the Mosquito Coast in May 1787, ordered plantations of plantain- trees, and other “excellent vegetables” burned and destroyed, “in conformity to the convention and his instructions.” In his letters back to Britain, the Superintendent of the

Mosquito Coast, Colonel Edward Despard rationalized the Captain’s actions. Despard claimed that Bautista Gual did not carry out his duty “wantonly, or from malice for he did it with the greatest reluctance, and passed by many plantations that he knew of, which not being in fight he did not consider himself obliged to take notice of, but merely in conformity to the convention and his instructions.”26 Despite Gaul’s “moderation,” most

British settlers did not view his actions as a conscientious execution of the convention, but as a blatantly aggressive assault on British property and, therefore, an act of war.

Believing that the treaty allowed them to grow enough food for consumption, British colonists began to take matters into their own hands or in this case their slaves’ hands.

British settlers “privately furnished their negroes with arms, and in an underhand manner told them to defend their plantations.”27 Arming enslaved blacks only fueled

25 Frank Griffith Dawson, “William Pitt's Settlement at Black River on the Mosquito Shore: A Challenge to Spain in Central America, 1732-87,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 4 (November 1983): 677-706.

26 James Bannantine, Memoirs of Edward Marcus Despard (London: printed for J. Ridgway, 1791), 20.

27 Ibid., 20-22.

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hostilities between the British and Spanish soldiers. Rumors circulated that Bautista

Gual would destroy the “little plantations of these people.” Feeling angry and attacked, the white inhabitants “made the most threatening declarations, in so open and publick a manner, as to reach through the whole of the Province and particularly to myself.” On the eve of evacuation, the Mosquito Coast erupted in violence.28

The British government once again gave American Loyalists little choice but to abandon their homes and communities once more, this time leaving the Mosquito Coast for destinations either in Honduras or elsewhere in the British Caribbean. As Moncrief did not actually reside in the Mosquito Coast himself and would die shortly before the evacuation was completed, he charged a Lieutenant McCerras with the sole task of moving his slaves and his ostensibly free blacks to Jamaica and then “discharging them as he saw fit.” McCerras traveled to the Mosquito Coast from where he reported back that it was “governed by no Law.” He complained “that the greatest confusion and disorder everywhere prevail’d—All the valuable Negroes taking advantage of the general confusion, deserted and never could be recovered.” James Moncrief incurred heavy losses during this chaotic time, when 350 enslaved men and women ran off into the countryside. Moncrief’s claim recorded in the British Parliament’s Commission of

Enquiry into the Losses and Services of the American Loyalists describes how

McCerras was forced to make three dangerous voyages back and forth between

Jamaica and the Coast, but was only able to “bring away with him 51 of the Negroes

28 British subjects in the Mosquito Coast were able to secure a seven-month reprieve from their slated relocation to the Bay of Honduras so that arrangements could be made to move the “little plantations at Convention town, where the greatest number of the poor people are settled.” These poor people might have included a few free blacks. These evacuations concerned British officials; General Clarke believed that this mass departure would be the first of many until not a single “article of British property will be left in this Country a twelve month hence.” Bannantine, Memoirs of Edward Marcus Despard, 20-22.

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consisting of Women and Young Children with the exception of 4 or 5 old Men.” The 51 recovered blacks were sold in Jamaica for £2000. Historians have no way of knowing if any of these 51 enslaved blacks had once been free in continental North America prior to the Revolution and evacuation. However, it seems likely that the 350 people who fled from Moncrief and evaded McCerras to stay on the Coast did so to improve their lot; they could have carved out a variety of spaces between the moderately more benign slave regime of the Spanish, the precarious freedom afforded by joining with Natives, or starting their own independent communities.29

Exodus into the Caribbean

However, most never gained their freedom and were destined for harsh new lives as plantation laborers in Barbados, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. Hagar, the nurse of famed memoirist Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, was one slave swept up in the tide of refugees who relocated from Georgia to St. Augustine and were scattered across the

British Empire. Johnston, in the last months of her pregnancy, evacuated first to

Charleston where on 23 August 1782, she bore a daughter named Catherine, after her mother. Shortly thereafter she and her “two little ones,” “embarked with a nurse on board a small schooner for St. Augustine.”30 Like most refugees, the Johnston family attempted to set up a life in their new home, until news spread that the Crown had given the Florida colony to Spain. With no other options, William Johnston sold his slaves for

“four hundred & fifty pounds” to Colonel Brown. Elizabeth Johnston kept “Hagar as a nurse” in preparation for another child, Lewis, who would be born in St. Augustine on 10

29 Moncrief, Loyalist Claim, TPNA 1/688/241-243.

30 Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist, ed. Arthur Wentworth Eaton (New York: M. F. Mansfield, 1901; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Co., 1972), 73.

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March 1784.31 Hagar probably travelled with the family from Georgia to Charleston and then to St. Augustine. It is also very likely that Hagar went with the family on their next voyage to Greenock, Scotland. Johnston recalled in her memoir that “Rachel, a younger sister of Mr. Johnston, and my nurse and three children, were put into the attic story” of a local inn to await the arrival of William Johnston.32 The Johnston’s’ and their nurse then crossed the Atlantic once more to Jamaica, where they bought more slaves.33

There is little mention of Hagar in Johnston’s’ memoir. Historians are left to imagine how

Hagar felt about being ripped away from her community and forcibly moved south to St.

Augustine, then east across the Atlantic Ocean to Scotland, and finally to the repressive sugar colony of Jamaica. Hagar’s story is indicative of the experiences of innumerable blacks swept up by revolutionary convulsions and carried around the Empire.

Obviously, not all the African Americans who joined the Loyalist exodus from the

South were able to find even this modicum of freedom. The patchy historical record means that it is sometimes impossible to be definitive about the fate of these exiles.

Still, the evidence suggests that even many of the southern blacks who had been granted or promised their freedom by Loyalists like Moncrief in return for military service, some of whom migrated willingly from the American South at the conclusion of the war, lost that freedom in the transition. This pattern is also suggested by the case of

Robert English, another white British Loyalist exile.

English was the son of an Irish Quaker in Camden, South Carolina who became a colonel commanding the First Camden Regiment of Loyalist Militia. By 1782, he was

31 Johnston, Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist, 222.

32 Ibid., 76.

33 Ibid., 85.

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banished by the rebel General Assembly for his Loyalist tendencies. The American government confiscated his property. English fled South Carolina, migrated to East

Florida with his moveable possessions—including 26 slaves—and accompanied by nine free blacks. These nine free blacks might have earned their freedom by laboring for

English or they could have been free or enslaved deserters who joined English on his escape down the Georgia coast. English reappeared onto the historical record at Black

River, Belize in 1786 with six white persons and “thirty-one Negroes.” The document lists slaves, but does not mention any free blacks. It is possible that the net gain of five slaves under English’s ownership during these four years was the result of births.

However, it is more likely that some or all of the free blacks who were traveling with

English were subsumed into enslaved families. On November 29, 1804, Robert English requested that he “be granted a portion of his deceased fathers confiscated Estate.”

James English, his father, died during the Revolution, leaving his estate to be confiscated by the South Carolina government. English’s petition was registered 19 years after he left the American continent. Interestingly, English concurrently requested that he be able to move his property back to the American continent, provided he gain custody of his deceased father’s estate and remain “unmolested.”34

In the migrations of the Revolutionary Era, African Americans who had been promised freedom by the British often found themselves returned to a slave system which was deemed to be particularly harsh and inflexible. It was not surprising, therefore, that so many should eventually try to escape the clutches of slaveholding

British Loyalists like English and Moncrief. Yet decisions to run or to stay were never

34 St. John Robinson, “Southern Loyalists in the Caribbean and Central America,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 93, no. 3/4 (July/October 1992): 205-220.

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easy. There was always the threat of lethal retribution to consider for fugitives who were caught. Even more important were concerns about breaking the community and familial ties which helped African Americans to survive slavery and preserve their humanity.

Most African Americans made every effort to remain with friends and, especially, families. It was a sense of priorities that could play out in quite unpredictable ways during the post-Revolutionary migrations when white Loyalists also made efforts to preserve their extended, multi-racial families, albeit ones which rested on slavery and the sexual exploitation of black women. As the experiences of Sarah Keeffe within the household of Andrew Cunningham illustrates, African Americans sometimes accepted a place within white-headed families in order to keep kinship networks intact.

Andrew Cunningham was a South Carolinia Loyalist who evacuated from

Charleston in mid-December 1782 for East Florida. He brought along with him his wife, two children, and his three black female slaves, including Sarah Keeffe, who was also his mistress. Cunningham took his dependents to Jamaica where he became an officer in the Duke of Cumberland’s Regiment in Kingston, and then to the Mosquito Coast. In

1787, Cunningham petitioned the local magistrate to move his family once more, this time to Honduras Bay. His petition described how his wife had died during childbirth in the Mosquito Coast leaving Cunningham to raise his children with his black slaves, including Sarah Keeffe who, it was revealed, had borne Cunningham seven more children.35 Another child, named after Cunningham’s previous wife, Sarah Cunningham, was baptized on September 26, 1807.36 In 1810, Samuel Cunningham was baptized as

35 The Memorial of the Loyalists residing at Black River, 5 November 1786, CO Mosquito Coast, 137/86, 166-170.

36 See Table 5-1

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the “property of Miss Sarah Keefe.” In the 1816 census Keeffe was even listed as the owner of all Cunningham’s property including 28 slaves. What is striking here is that

Keefe may have been Cunningham’s mistress and eventually inherited all his property, yet she is always referred to as a slave, never as a free woman. Although Keefe probably had more leverage in her relationship with Cunningham than most slaves, she could not extricate herself legally from slavery. Still, she chose to stay with her family and remain a slave, rather than escape to freedom like those who fled into the backcountry to avoid relocation from the Mosquito Coast under Moncrief’s plan.37

Migration to Belize

Evacuation of the Mosquito Coast began in March 1787 and was completed smoothly and efficiently under the direction of Superintendent William Pitt Lawrie and his assistant, Captain Marcus Hunter, with the support of men and ships from Jamaica.

Lawrie was the last to leave Black River and arrived at Belize aboard HMS Camelia on

July 7, 1787. Of the 2,650 people evacuated the vast majority, 537 whites, freedmen, and 1,677 slaves, went to Belize. The remainder elected to travel by English warships to

Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Roatan. Lawrie delivered formal possession of the Coast to Spain on August 29, 1787, and the Spanish flag was unfurled at Black River.38

Evacuating Mosquito Coast residents found Belize less than inviting. The

Superintendent of Honduras received instructions from the British government to help and accommodate the large influx of refugees but in fighting within the colony and the land claims of previous inhabitants made this request difficult to grant. Colonel Despard

37 Robinson, “Southern Loyalists,” 220-224.

38 "Disposal of Mosquito Shore Settlers," July 1787, CO 123/6, 18-19.

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sent reports back explaining the “insurmountable difficulties” of the social situation in the

Bay. The older settlements were “claimed by one or other of the Baymen; but even the additional territory ceded by the Convention, was every spot of it claimed as the property of some of them.” Older settlers, many of the descendants of a failed British colony on Providence Island, were unwilling to share land with the new settlers, consisting “chiefly [of] American loyalists” who found their situation crowded and ultimately, unbearable. Despard agreed that these “old settlers claimed immense tracts of country, and combined to prevent new settlers, either from the Mosquito Coast, or elsewhere, from having any benefit in the produce and trade of the district, which was this monopolized by a very few individuals, styling themselves the principal inhabitants.”39 As a result, new migrants from the Mosquito Coast moved to the outskirts of towns, technically onto Spanish land.

Despard’s “laudable attemps to accommodate the new settlers” might explain the intense hatred towards him expressed by older inhabitants, who were convinced that the newcomers received preferential treatment from the British government.40 Loyalists

Robert English and Samuel Harrison, a native of Lynch Creek, South Carolina and a member the South Carolina British Rangers, who arrived in Belize having initially been evacuated from Charleston to East Florida with his five slaves, complained to the local

British superintendent about “ill treatment of the Mosquito Coast refugees by the older settlers.”41

39 Bannantine, Memoirs of Edward Marcus Despard, 24.

40 Ibid., 24.

41 Memorial, CO 137/86, 166-170.

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While exiled southern white British Loyalist did not always fare well in Belize, such was the diversity of Atlantic World migratory experience that some American blacks, as well as “mixed peoples,” benefited from the move. One Belize inhabitant,

Alfred Clarke, observed that there were a “great number of People of mixed colour” in the colony.42 The Treaty of 1786 had forced white Loyalists and their black charges out of their homes on the Mosquito Coast and in the process deprived them “of many

Previleges common to His Majesty’s other subjects,” in Belize the British government would, upon “application grant such Previliges and Immunities to Persons of this description, as their Conduct and situation in Life intitle them.”43 Consequently, some

“free people of mixed color” were bestowed with “priviliges and Immunities as may to them appear proper, according to the Behaviour, Character, property or Station of such

Person of colour who may make application to His Majesty’s Superintendent and the

Committee for such privileges.”44 These privileges included the right to own property and participate in the local government—a very different experience for these particular

“persons of colour” than that endured by the majority of people of African descent in the

Americas.

James Yarborough’s slaves never enjoyed such privileges. Nor did they have a stable life in either the Mosquito Coast or Belize as his relatives fought over them for more than 30 years. In November 1781, a “Major” Yarborough and his party drove cattle off the estate of Eliza Pinckney’s son for British army use without compensation. In

1782, Yarborough was banished from America for being a Loyalist and his property was

42 Alfred Clarke to Lord Lyndsey, 30 May 1790, CO Jamaica 137/88, No.7.

43 Ibid.

44 Alfred Clarke to Lord Lyndsey, 30 May 1790, CO Jamaica 137/88, no. 6.

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confiscated before he set sail for Jamaica. He managed to recover only part of his enslaved property, later claiming losses of £2,995. He appears to have either moved to the Mosquito Coast and later evacuated to Belize or gone directly to Belize as he registered at Black River with one white dependent and 30 black slaves.45 Sarah

Yarborough, possibly James Yarborough’s second wife or perhaps a mistress was the guardian of Mary Amelia, the first of James’ children. In 1800, after James died, Sarah announced her intention to leave Belize and claim land and property in South

Carolina.46 This was by no means uncommon. For decades after the American

Revolution began, American Loyalists and their widows and heirs attempted to claim the land, possessions, and human property that they believed had been wrongfully taken from them in the war, or which had been lost in the forced migrations which followed it. 47

The court records do not indicate if Sarah Yarborough was ever able to secure ownership of the slaves. Nevertheless, it is clear that the evacuation of the Mosquito

Coast had generated multiple claims for personal damages, including lost and runaway slaves. One complexity of the Atlantic World was the overlapping legal jurisdictions which Yarborough, Moncrief, and Robert White, the agent for the Mosquito Coast settlers, each tried to negotiate and manipulate to their benefit. White estimated £1,009 in Jamaican currency for all the lost slaves. While Colonel Moncrief died before the evacuation occurred under Lieutenant McCerras’s supervision, his estate claimed a loss

45 See Table 4-2

46 Robinson, “Southern Loyalists,” 223-224.

47 See Arnett G. Lindsay, “Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Great Britain Bearing on the Return of Negro Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 4 (October 1920): 391-419.

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of “70 Negroes, more or less, on evacuating the Mosquito Coast” as part of that loss. 48

Lacklin McGillivray, Tomas Clark, John Nicholson, and David Lamb each requested compensation for lost wages, homes, and slaves. Unfortunately, these records do not contain any information about who these slaves were, their location, or the migrations they made.49 Robert Douglas, Attorney to John Davidson and to the Estate of James

Grant and formerly of Black River on the Mosquito Coast, placed the most detailed claim. His notice requested compensation for “two slaves who ran away at evacuating that Country in 1787 the one named, Caesar, £60 and the other named Deptford £40,

Jamaica currently making together.”50

In Belize, many blacks fled to the woods rather than face the prospect of yet another migration into the British Indies, a prospect which loomed large in the summer of 1797 when rumors circulated suggesting that the Spanish intended to attack the remaining British colony. This prompted white slave owners to call an emergency assembly. Rather than risk the potential loss of property, life or limb, residents voted to abandon Belize. John Nicholson, a militiaman from Georgia who owned 13 slaves and had moved to the Mosquito Coast after the evacuation of Savannah, was one of those who voted to leave. Once the slave community heard about the potential attack, black men and women began to desert for the local friendly native tribes rather than endure

48 White, The Case of the Agent, 177.

49 Mr. Lacklan McGillivray, of Black River, claimed “Houses, Plantations, Negroes, Craft, and Mahogany” that amounted to £665. Mr. Tomas Clark, of Great River, claimed “Houses, Plantations, cattle, Mahogany, and a Negro,” for a total of £509. Mr. John Nicholson, of Black River, claimed “Mahogany, Craft, Provisions, and Negroes.” amounting to £655. Mr. David Lamb, of Black River, claimed “Provision grounds and Negroes,” totaled £270.

50 White, The Case of the Agent, 178.

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the unpredictability and hardships of life on the sugar plantations of the British

Caribbean.

The fact that the British settlement in Belize was so close to both Spanish outposts and friendly native tribes gave its slave system a distinctive dynamic.

According to one Belize resident, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Clarke, British citizens believed that blacks were enslaved in the towns “by choice only.”51 If this was an exaggeration, the British did feel the need to adapt laws and customs because blacks had rather more, if still sorely limited, options than elsewhere in the New World. For example, the Spanish openly encouraged blacks to flee to their settlements where, by embracing the Roman Catholic religion they could enjoy many privileges under Spanish law. This tempted many enslaved American blacks “to elope from their owners.”

Unfortunately, Clarke complained, “many of the settlers of this Country have been entirely ruined from these circumstances, and all experience great and heavy losses” from their slaves fleeing to the Spanish.52

Letters back to England explained how the British addressed this situation by adopting more benign practices towards their slaves. On the account of “very great laborer attending this business, more care and attention is paid to their health than in other parts of the West Indies,” reported Clarke. By this account, blacks were healthy and happy, as they were “better fed and clothed and live more comfortably than the laboring People of any other country whatever.”53 Dependent upon black labor, the

British were willing to negotiate, at least indirectly, with the enslaved population.

51 Alfred Clarke to Lord Lyndsey, 30 May 1790, CO Jamaica, 137/88, no. 12.

52 White, The Case of the Agent, 179.

53 Ibid., 180-182.

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Although they doubtless greatly exaggerated the creature comforts enjoyed by those they kept in bondage, there does appear to have been an effort to partially alleviate their day-to-day situation, knowing that in so doing British slaveholders might prevent a black exodus to the Spanish and personal ruination.

The Bahamas: Another Caribbean Migration

By May 1789, many Loyalists were increasingly frustrated by the worsening situation in Belize, particularly when a mixture of Spanish intervention and “some regulations made by the old inhabitants,” prevented them from engaging in logging.

Concerned about the “hardship which the poor people here have sustained from the conduct of the old inhabitants” a number of the migrant Loyalists began to request permission to “be removed to some other country, and particularly mentioning the

Bahaman Islands.”54 Others even suggested a return to the Mosquito Coast: a prospect which caused considerable alarm in British government circles.

For white Loyalists, the specter of any major transplantation raised the possibility of more slave desertions. Meanwhile, there were great fears among British officials and observers that those who moved back to the Mosquito Coast would soon be subsumed within the Spanish Empire. Alfred Clarke even wanted to send a warship to prevent the possibility of a re-migration to the Coast. Despard, however, thought that the British government could placate these Loyalist settlers by providing them with “lands” and “six months provisions.” He added that since the Loyalists were relatively wealthy, as they each “possess[ed] from three to thirty slaves each” and are well “fit for the culture of

54 Bay of Honduras, 26 May 1789, CO 137/88, 52. Those few who stayed received special dispensation from the Spanish government as local ambassadors to the Natives.

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cotton” the government ought to do all it could to retain the loyalty of these productive citizens.55

Clarke was also concerned about the prospect of an increased slave population fleeing to the Spanish should Loyalists return to the Mosquito Coast. He jokingly proposed to the Governor of Jamaica, John Dalling, a plan to free any British slaves on the Coast, ship them to the Bahamas, and provide them with six months provisions; a proposal which betrayed an appreciation that the only way to prevent large-scale desertion was through the offer of freedom, just as it affirmed that any such emancipation was out of the question. Clarke flattered himself that he was “particularly informed of the intentions of the people of colour” but conceded that “in my present situation I know but of one way to prevent it, [large scale desertion] which would be to declare their negroes free, and assure them of lands in the Bahamas Islands and six months provisions; but I should not be warranted to give them any such assurance, neither is it a measure which I could in humanity adopt in any case.”56

Although Clarke could not “in humanity adopt” such a radical measure, his concerns over whether Loyalists would remain loyal to the Crown and whether their slaves could be kept in British hands on the Mosquito Coast, encouraged him to urge that migrant Loyalists and their enslaved property should be offered land in the

Bahamas. The Governor of Jamaica “received an application from the inhabitants…on the coast of the Mosquito Coast, which by the late convention with Spain is now to be

55 Bay of Honduras, 27 May 1789, CO 137/88, 53.

56 Ibid.

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evacuated, requesting that I will remove them to your government.” These refugees were

chiefly employed in the cultivation of cotton, of which they had favourable accounts from the Bahamas, and if you have room for them, may become valuable settlers; but I do not wish to encourage them to go there with their slaves and effects, until I hear from you that they can be easily accommodated with lands suited to their purposes, and upon what terms. They consist of about three or four hundred persons of all descriptions and complexions and they will be supplied from home with provisions for a few months after their arrival.57

On February 23, 1787, the Governor of Jamaica wrote to the newly established

Governor of the Bahamas, Lord Dunmore, to discuss the possibility of the islands becoming the latest Caribbean refuge for displaced southern Loyalists and their black charges. Dunmore had his own history with American blacks. By issuing a proclamation in 1775 offering freedom to any blacks enslaved by rebel Americans, Dunmore had earned the nickname the “Great Liberator.”58 After evacuating Virginia during the War,

Dunmore had fled to England. Subsequently, he was appointed Governor of the

Bahamas, where he inherited a problem partly of his own making. Thousands of enslaved blacks, some legally owned and some stolen by Loyalists, had been transported to the islands after the war. A few of them had been promised freedom but were then, in a familiar story, re-enslaved at the War’s end.

John Maxwell, the intermittent Bahamian Governor from 1780 to 1784 recorded a few shipments of Loyalists. While Maxwell’s accounts are not exhaustive, he does point to the large number of Loyalists and blacks who sailed into the Bahamas. Maxwell wrote

57 Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography. (London: Edward Stanford, 1879-1892), 134. [Emphasis in original]

58 Benjamin Quarles, “Lord Dunmore as Liberator,” William and Mary Quarterly 15, no. 4 (October 1958): 494-507.

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to Lord Sydney describing the sheer numbers of refugees who traveled to the Bahamas over 4300 in a period of 2 years. He explains that just after the evacuation of East

Florida, “the Loyalists are about five Hundred Whites and one Thousand Blacks” arrived on the islands. On June 19, 1784, four transports of the “first Division of Transports from

St. Mary’s” arrived with about “Two Hundred Negroes on Board each.” From June to

October, Maxwell claimed he “victualling the following Loyalists from East Florida Vizt

323 white men, 64 white women, 2300 Negroes.” The numbers of migrants grew until the end of 1785.59

As the Bahamas was an established destination for Loyalists and their slaves,

Dunmore concluded that several islands could be a “comfortable asylum” for the new

Loyalist migrants from Belize. It was, “impossible at present to point out a particular situation for them, it would be advisable that three or four of the most intelligent and respectable of those people. . .visit and inspect these islands in order that they may be enabled to fix on a proper spot.” On September 11, 1787, the Governor and Council of the Bahamas having received a favorable account of the Island of Andros, commissioned the ship Commoreo to convey Loyalists and their slaves to St. Andro. In

1788, Daniel M'Kinnen toured the island, by this time known as San Andreas, possibly because some of the British Loyalists who went there migrated from St Andreas Island off the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, and found “twenty-two white heads of families, and seven planters, with 132 slaves.”60 While not the numbers Clarke promised, 132

59 Maxwell to Sydney, Bahamas CO 23/25. 60 Daniel M'Kinnen, A Tour Through the British West Indies, In the Years 1802 and 1803 (London: Printed for J. White, 1804), 255. See also, R. W. Burchfield and Roger Lass, The Cambridge History of the English Language: English in Britain and Overseas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For legends surrounding the settling of San Andreas, see Washington Daily News, 13 October 1937.

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enslaved blacks had apparently moved no doubt with varying degrees of enthusiasm, from the Mosquito Coast to San Andreas. In 1833, they would finally be emancipated under the Slavery Abolition Act.

While James Moncrief never had to deal with the legal ramifications of increasing his property holdings by essentially enslaving once-free blacks amid the legal and migratory flux of the Revolution, Dunmore was forced to deal with many blacks who felt cheated out of their freedom. In 1787, Dunmore judged a court case where “Loyalists had been hijacking free Blacks from America and were selling them to the French at

Hispaniola.”61 Among free blacks anger at this practice turned into violent protest as small groups began to act out, “disturb[ing] the peace in Nassau.” Soon discontent spread from the capital into the “Out Islands.” Finally, gathering behind the courthouse in Nassau, enslaved blacks claiming to have been freed during the American Revolution built a makeshift camp. Fortified by growing numbers, the members of this illegal camp flaunted their newly declared freedom. Blacks also established another small illegal camp near Fort Charlotte as an asylum for runaways where "no white person dares make his appearance. . .but at risk of his life." Lord Dunmore, having arrived in the

Bahamas only two days previously, attempted to deal with the problem of this very aggressive black bid for freedom, by issuing a proclamation bestowing pardons upon any fugitive blacks who surrendered themselves. Those who came forward would have their story heard in court. Dunmore's attempt to reconcile conflicts over property claims for runaway slaves resulted in the re-enslavement of 29 of the 30 slaves who appeared before his Negro Court. Despite his earlier emancipationist rhetoric in Virginia and

61 Sandra Riley, Homeward Bound: a History of the Bahama Islands to 1850 with a Definitive Study of Abaco in the American Loyalist Plantation Period (Miami: Riley Hall, 2000), 169.

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apparent moderation towards fugitive blacks in the Bahamas, Dunmore clearly decided in favor of white slave owners and their property rights, not least his own: the re- enslaved blacks were not returned to their former masters but became Dunmore’s property, “legally stolen from their loyalist ‘owners’ only to be enslaved by one of the gouvernour’s friends.”62 Just as Moncrief had acquired more human property under the guise of helping displaced and vulnerable blacks, so the contradictory rhetoric and self- serving actions of the “Great Liberator” exposed the fragility of black freedom and the potency of white power in the Revolutionary Atlantic.

Overshadowed in much of the historiography of the Revolutionary Era by events in the northeastern theater, what happened in the American South—and in the

Caribbean to which it was so intimately and intricately connected—has often been pushed to the very edges of British Empire and American history. By focusing on the experiences of southern Loyalists as they and their slaves abandoned Continental North

America for a series of other locations in the Americas, this chapter refocuses attention on the region’s myriad Atlantic connections. Fragmentary though the historical record often is, in the particulars of this story we can see a multi-directional movement of peoples that spanned multiple empires, colonies, islands, and communities within the

Atlantic World revealing the larger imperial, social, legal, economic and political networks in which particular groups and individuals were implicated and ensnared.

Most important, however, the story of the men and women of African descent embroiled in the Loyalist exodus from the South, of their struggles to maintain familial and communal ties and to claim, or reclaim, various kinds of freedom, reminds us of the

62 Riley, Homeward Bound, 169; Proclamation, CO 23/27, 76-79.

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sheer diversity of Black Atlantic experiences. Indeed, these particular stories raise much broader issues relating to how power, agency, and mobility operated during the

Revolutionary Era. Moncrief and other white Loyalists traveled around the Atlantic World searching for personal advancement and economic opportunity. Blacks also moved around the Atlantic, but in very different circumstances and for different purposes. As we have seen, faced with yet another move when the Mosquito Coast was evacuated a few years after their arrival, approximately 350 of Moncrief’s enslaved blacks sought refuge in the Spanish backcountry rather than be subjected to another move and possible separation from family and communal ties. In this context, mobility allowed them to exercise a modicum of control over their destinies and personal life.

Yet, while “mobility”—forced, voluntary, opportunistic, and planned—seems to connect black and white experiences, the term implies a kind of freedom, a degree of volition and power that does not reflect historic realities: choices to move or not move were made but, especially for blacks, rarely made freely. If mobility, the traversing of traditional boundaries of state and Empire, is one of the central themes of Atlantic history, the story of the southern black and white Loyalist migrations after the American

Revolution reminds us that Atlantic World mobility worked in many ways and ran in many directions. One-way blacks, seemingly, achieved a modicum of freedom was to volunteer for the British military.

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Table 5-1. A List of Slaves Attributed to Sarah Cunningham in a 1816 Census of Loyalist Refugee Settlers in Belize.

Name Age (Years) Adam 9 Ariadne 17 Bella 5 Bellusa 40 Brister 4 Cumberland 15 Cynthia 36 Diana 12 Eve 4 Frank 14 George 35 George Sambo 4 Green 15 Harriet 18 Johnny 35 Julius 35 Margery 25 Moco Cynthia 36 Nancy 3 November 20 Patience 2 Quashie 50 Rebecca 8 Royal 1 Sabina 50 Stephen 1 Venus 20 William 18

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Table 5-2. American Loyalists and the Number of White Companions and Slaves Moved to the Mosquito Coast.

Displaced White White Negroes Loyalists Persons James D. Yarbrough 2 30 Robert English 6 31 Samuel Harrison 2 7 Lachlan McGillwray 1 23 Donald McPherson 1 Absolum Bull 3 1 And:w Cunningham 3 1 John Blythe 1 17 Daniel Dewalt 3 2 John Nicholson & DMP 2 13 Jacob Hoover 2 6 William Bennett 3 Drewey Smith 4 James Hickson 1 George Rabon 4 Rutledge Nelson 4 Joseph Waleston 1 Benj.n Parker 1 George Lovel 1 Edw:d Marcey 1 James Surcy 1 Rich:d Snelling 4 3 William Fowler 2 2 Peter Devalt 1 John Clapper 4 John Bird 2 3 L. Bird 2 Richard Raborn 3 Total 66 143

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CHAPTER 6 USE AND MISUSE OF EX-SLAVES IN THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN

As has been previously illustrated, British officials on the American continent promised enslaved blacks freedom in exchange for fleeing to the British. The ploy worked. Thousands of slaves, both American and Loyalist, fled to the British. Yet, there was no organized policy in the southern colonies to deal with the refugees. Most blacks who volunteered, hoping for freedom, found themselves re-enslaved. However, a small minority found a quasi-freedom in the military ranks that allowed a certain degree of control over their own destiny. The idea of arming blacks in the Caribbean circulated the

British Caribbean for a century before the American Revolution. It took the foresight and tenacity of Governor Mathew for the idea to come to fruition.

Mathew believed that American blacks provided the perfect solution. American blacks held no familial loyalty to enslaved Caribbean blacks. As a result, British official

General Mathew came to believe that American blacks would be less likely to encourage plantation revolts. In the eyes of British government officials, they became a perfect, non-native military presence—a temporary solution that would help solve both the military shortage in the Caribbean and alleviate the problem over what to do with blacks freed by British proclamations. Mathew requested the Black Carolina Corps become the first standing black military force in the Caribbean.

The Black Carolina Corps sailed from the American continent and entered into a politically complicated situation in the Caribbean. The British Caribbean sharply distinguished between black and white. There was very little upward social movement for free blacks or free people of mixed race. The stark social situation proved a tricky position to for the newly freed black American troops. It was first proposed that black

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American troops help to secure the Mosquito Coast in British Honduras in order to find a passage from the Caribbean to the Pacific Ocean. Only a few freed black soldiers helped with this scheme, while the majority were shipped at the end of the revolution to

St. Vincent and then Grenada as barrack builders. The troops encountered British officials who believed the troops were simply an enslaved force, to be put to work in their households or pet projects. Governor Mathew tried to return the troop back to its previous intentions as a military force. In order to replenish the diminishing ranks, he began recruiting troops from Canada—the same previously freed blacks who sailed from New York to Nova Scotia. By 1794, the remnants of the Carolina Corps, along with the new Canadian recruits, became a permanent contingent of the West Indian regiment.1

The Question to Arm Blacks

The earliest record of recruiting and arming slaves dates back to the 1660s in

Barbados, yet there was no broad concerted effort or long term sustainable black military force until after the American Revolution. The British tradition of arming slaves, especially during wartime or in emergency situations was a common, effective and, most importantly, a temporary solution to a problem that plagued all empires: labor shortage. European powers, short on white labor and ravaged by disease, made limited use of blacks for military service in the Caribbean. Freeing blacks and conscripting them

1 Peter Michael Voelz, Slave and Soldier: The Military Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas (New York: Garland, 1993); Wilbur Henry Siebert, The Legacy of the American Revolution to the British West Indies and Bahamas: A Chapter Out of the History of the American Loyalists (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1913); James W. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870 (New York: Africana Pub. Co., 1976); Henry Lumpkin, From Savannah to Yorktown: The American Revolution in the South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981); Beverley A. Steele, Grenada: A History of Its People (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2003); and Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina in the Revolution, 1775-1780 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901).

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into service or simply arming enslaved blacks was “never part of a deliberate or concerted policy but rather was warily adopted as an urgent measure in response to a crisis.”2 The American Revolution simply tapped into and codified a long running, if inconsistent, policy of temporarily arming slaves.

Colonial society, in both the Caribbean and the American mainland, developed an inherent ambiguity over blacks soldiers. White British citizens vacillated between

“keeping firearms out of the hands of slaves and arming them whenever it seemed necessary or useful.”3 In specific circumstances in the “Caribbean, frontier, and maritime settings,” some enslaved blacks “regularly had access to guns.”4 Slave owners in frontier areas armed slaves when they lived in close proximity to Native Americans or when faced with other threats. Weapons were carefully guarded by colonists during slave revolts.”5 While there were numerous reports of enslaved blacks being armed for purposes of personal protection across the British colonies, officials viewed arming blacks as a “dangerous expedient, but one resorted to frequently.”6 Whites outnumbered slaves in the northern American colonies. In these regions, the arming of an enslaved population was generally discouraged by planters.

However, the southern British colonies experimented with arming enslaved blacks during the Queen Ann’s War in 1734 and the Yamassee War in 1739. Armed slaves were even used in offensives as evidenced by General James Oglethorpe’s

2 Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 182.

3 Ibid., 183.

4 Ibid.,187.

5 Ibid.,185.

6 Ibid.,187.

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invasions of St. Augustine. By the mid-1750s there were still little to no consensus on arming blacks.7 The empire-wide discussion over arming blacks waxed and waned in response to the threat of slave revolts. Incidents of violence scared proponents into silence. Rumors of slave uprisings “escalated in times of conflict, especially during the

Seven Years’ War (1755-63) and Pontiac’s War (1763-64).”8 Virginia was a veritable hotbed of rumors about slave resistance between 1755 and the American Revolution.9

While the British Empire’s policy “zigzagged erratically” throughout the war, the revolution proved to change attitudes towards arming slaves in the Caribbean.

According to Philip Morgan and Andrew O’Shaughnessy, the American Revolution had

“more profound consequences for arming slaves in the British Caribbean than anywhere else in the Americas.”10 The first mention of arming slaves for the American Revolution was Sir William Draper’s pamphlet in the Public Advertiser that appeared on November

23, 1774. After returning from an extended tour of America, Draper published a pamphlet describing how to put down the rebellion. He argued that the British crown could easily regain and rally those loyal to the empire; especially as only a few of the offices were firmly in the hands of the rebel Americans. The empire should “proclame

7 French Caribbean islands had little to no protection from the crown. Thus French Islands created a bureaucratic structure codifying the use of black soldiers.

8 Woody Holton, “Rebel Against Rebel: Enslaved Virginians and the Coming of the American Revolution,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 105, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 165.

9 David, Jay and Elaine Forman Crane, The Black Soldier: from the American Revolution to Vietnam (New York: Morrow, 1971); Edgerton, Robert B., Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America's Wars (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001); Thomas Truxtun. Black Soldiers - Black Sailors - Black Ink: Research Guide on African-Americans in U.S. Military History, 1526-1900 (Chesapeake Bay [VA]: Moebs Pub. Co, 1994); Eric Grundset, Briana L. Diaz, Hollis L. Gentry, and Jean D. Strahan, Forgotten Patriots: African American and American Indian Patriots in the Revolutionary War: A Guide to Service, Sources and Studies (Washington, D.C.: National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 2008).

10 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaugnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Arming Slaves from Classical Times to the Modern Age, ed. Morgan and Christopher Leslie Brown (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006), 180.

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Freedom to their Negroes; then how long would they [the Americans] be a People?”11

Considered within the context of this long history of arming enslaved blacks, Lord

Dunmore’s famous proclamation on November 7, 1775—in which he offered rebel owned slaves’ freedom if they deserted their owners and joined the British war efforts— represented the “culmination of an existing trend rather than a dramatic departure” from current practices.12 Even though Dunmore’s Proclamation only applied to a segment of the black population, openly freeing blacks caused a massive uproar. Planters blamed black unrest on Dunmore’s proclamation. Dunmore opened the way for the British

Crown to use and arm previously enslaved men who flocked to the British hoping to gain freedom. However, the Crown faced a massive problem at the war’s end. What were they to do with armed, previously enslaved blacks?

Early Attempts to Raise a Black American Caribbean Regiment

At the same time British commanders in the American colonies wrestled with this question, John Dalling, the governor of Jamaica between 1777 and 1782, began looking to solve his own manpower problems. Governor Dalling’s first attempts to raise a black

Corp sparked the planters’ anger. Jamaican planters wanted white troops to protect valuable, sugar producing Caribbean regions. As the British Empire struggled over what to do with the lack of troops, Dalling believed he had a solution. Dalling perceived North

American blacks as isolated and vulnerable, living without any local family, friends, or knowledge of the terrain they occupied. They would make perfect mercenaries in the

Caribbean islands. When Charleston evacuated at the end of the revolution, Dalling

11 “Viator” [William Draper], The Thoughts of a Traveller Upon Our American Disputes (London; J.Ridley, 1774), 21.

12 Brown and Morgan, Arming Slaves, 189.

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sent a recruitment team to the city in order to woo potential soldiers, including white

British Loyalists and free black men and women. A few years later, he sent recruiters to

Nova Scotia to solicit troops from the nascent free black American community. While these recruiting trips were not successful, they demonstrated Dalling’s interest in creating a Caribbean regiment made up of American blacks. In fact, Dalling had a larger goal in mind. Echoing the ideas of Richard Hakluyt, Dalling wanted to connect the

Caribbean with eastern Pacific trade. By using the meager contingent of Jamaican soldiers to invade and conquer the sparsely populated Spanish territories in Central

America, he would be the first to find a passageway across the narrow isthmus. In order to achieve such a monumental task, the British Caribbean colonies would need to recruit a much larger workforce, train a new pool of soldiers, and plan the attack—while simultaneously defending threatened sugar plantations. Dalling believed that American blacks could provide the necessary labor.

In the same year as Henry Clinton's Philipsburg Proclamation indiscriminately freed any American black who ran to the British, Governor Dalling submitted a plan to raise two black, light infantry regiments to defend against and potentially attack Spanish troops on the Mosquito Coast. While the British in America lured refugee slaves to bolster their military might, Dalling’s two black Jamaican regiments was comprised of free mulattoes and free blacks. According to Dalling’s plans, either the regiments would serve for the duration of the American Revolution or for three years, whichever came first. As in the states, Dalling’s plan to use free mulattoes was met with fierce resistance from fearful, minority white plantation owners.

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Unwilling to give up on his dream of a conscripted force of black soldiers,

Governor Dalling came up with what he believed was a perfect solution—one which would appease white plantation owners and provide the necessary protection which the

British West Indies so desperately needed. West Indian planters refused to arm

Caribbean slaves, mulattoes, and free blacks, but free and enslaved American blacks did not pose the same threat. American blacks did not harbor any local loyalties and were not likely to encourage slaves to revolt. Allegiance became a matter of practicality.

American blacks did not know the landscape, and were dependent upon and “loyal” to the British for provisions, and more importantly, their freedom. In order to put this plan into action, Dalling entrusted Major William Odell, Charles Montagu, and Captain Jeffrey

Amherst to recruit soldiers from the American shore. They specifically targeted imprisoned white Americans and the itinerant black population turned away by the

Philipsburg proclamation.

Plan to Find a Pacific Waterway

“An active and spirited young officer,” Odell proposed that the British army raise a battalion of the Loyal American Rangers from the “refugees, deserters, and the prisoners of war in British hands in America.”13 Odell succeeded in enlisting over 300 men in New York where he found a willing population in the panic-stricken city. Forced to evacuate, Loyalists then flocked to New York as one of only two British-held cities throughout the war. Odell’s recruits, dubbed the Loyal American Rangers, arrived at

Kingston on February 8, 1781. Shortly thereafter, Odell boarded another transport headed to Pensacola, Florida to recruit more soldiers. Ironically, the Spanish had just

13 Albert W. Haarmann, “Jamaican Provincial Corps 1780-1783,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 48 (Spring 1970): 9.

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taken Pensacola in the days before Odell’s arrival was scheduled. Unprepared for battle, British ships (including Odell’s transport) made a quick retreat back to Jamaica where Odell’s New York recruits were incorporated into the Duke of Cumberland’s

Regiment, led by Charles Montagu.14

Charles Montagu recruited the rest of the Duke of Cumberland’s Regiment in

1780 from Charleston, South Carolina. Montagu sailed into Charleston to spend a few months recruiting men and within a few days of February 10, 1781, 369 men and four black pioneers had agreed to serve. The Cumberland regiment served in Jamaica for the duration of the American Revolution until August 24, 1783 when the regiment was disbanded.15

Of the recruiters working for Governor Dalling, Captain Jeffrey Amherst had the worst luck recruiting British troops. After traveling to New York and then Charleston,

Amherst could only raise one company of 100 men. These men joined either the Loyal

American Rangers or Montagu’s regiment upon its arrival in Jamaica. Overall, Governor

Dalling’s attempt to recruit a provincial corps met with mediocre results.16 However, while small in number, Dalling dreamed of grand designs for these previously enslaved blacks.

Finding an eastern passage had long been a dream for the British Empire. First sparked by Richard Haklyut’s Discourse on Virginia Planters, the British had long been

14 Haarmann, “Jamaican Provincial Corps,” 9-11.

15 Both black and white veterans were permitted to settle in Jamaica or Nova Scotia.

16 Haarmann, “Jamaican Provincial Corps,” 9-11.

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infatuated by finding a cheaper, more reliable path to the east.17 Dalling believed that a canal could be carved directly through the sparsely populated corridor from British

Honduras through the inland and to the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish used the Pacific

Ocean to pass goods unmolested up and down the coast of their large empire. Hoping to capitalize on lax Spanish oversight in the area, Dalling planned to attack the Spanish, capture the land for the canal and begin a Caribbean to China trading line. In order to carry out his risky plans, Dalling used the few troops he had lured from the American

Revolution. The plan for the new trade route went awry however, as the lack of labor and inclement weather forced the troops to surrender.

Royal governors across the British Empire used blacks as soldiers, when it was convenient. While Dalling’s troops fought in Central America, the Carolina Negroes fought for the British in Charleston. There was not a coordinated effort to move

American blacks into fighting positions in the Caribbean; rather it was a series of individual decisions which moved the Carolina Corps into the region. Even after the recruitment and movement of Carolina blacks into the Caribbean, governors and officers continued to argue over their use.

Black Carolina Corps

The Carolina Corps had been raised in South Carolina in 1779 from a cadre of free black men who had remained loyal to the King when other colonists rebelled. The unit consisted of nearly 300 soldiers, divided into units of Pioneers, Artificers, and

Dragoons. Pioneers, specialized troops, helped to prepare the way for marching troops by removing trees and brush and building or repairing roads for the passage of infantry,

17 George Bruner Parks and James Alexander Williamson, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (New York: American Geographical Society, 1928).

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artillery, and supply wagons. Artificers was a classification used to designate any skilled workers who could aid a marching army, including carpenters, blacksmiths and farriers, tinsmiths, coopers, wheelwrights, horse-collar makers, and even miners. Skilled horsemen, or Dragoons, were infantrymen who rode horses to the scene of battle and dismounted to fight on foot. Equestrians were difficult to come by. Even rarer were previously enslaved blacks who learned to ride on plantations. By 1782, South Carolina did not know what to do with the Black troops. Letters were furiously sent between the governor of South Carolina, Sir Guy Carleton, and the leaders of the troops. Finally, after the American Revolution, the Black Corps left for Grenada and eventually also served in St. Vincent, before their consummation into the West India Regiment in

1795.18

Grenada’s governor, Edward Mathew, was a proponent of using black troops.

Edward Mathew was confirmed in his rank of Major General in 1779 and returned to

England in 1780. In November 1782, Mathew was appointed Commander in Chief,

West Indies as Lieutenant General and served as Governor of Grenada from 1784 through 1795. Mathew was Jane Austen’s inspiration for the curmudgeonly father figure in the obscure Northhanger Abbey.19 General Mathew could be “an autocratic, hot tempered despot as well as a very soft old veteran with a selfless love.” One literary historian argued that Mathew was “never as mean as Tilney” but Jane Austen used the

18 Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987).

19 Jane Austen’s older brother married Edward Mathew’s sister, Anne Mathew from Laverstroke, England. Anne Matthews was the daughter of the Duke of Ancaster, Lady Jane Bertie, who was married in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor to one of the most promising men in the Coldstream Guards—Captain Edward Mathew.19 General Mathew’s bitter, stiff, dictatorial presence frightened Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra. In fact, Jane Austen memorialized his demeanor as the basis for her character General Tilney in Northhanger Abbey. Honan, Jane Austen, 92.

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“emotionally laden, striking effects a personality had had upon her—but James Edward seems right in believing that she never took a whole personality from life.”20 Jane

Austen’s father-in-law—Edward Mathew—had so excelled as a Guards captain that he became first equerry to King George III and then brigadier-general in New York. There, he led part of the infantry attack on Fort Washington. After fighting in Virginia and New

Jersey, Mathew returned to England where he was asked twice by the King to be the

Governor of Grenada. He accepted the position and became the governor of Grenada in 1781.21

The following year, Governor Mathew successfully recruited the first official black corps used in the protection and defense of the British Caribbean colonies. However, this success was shortly overshadowed. British colonies did not have any experience dealing with black troops. Caribbean governors constantly bickered over who had jurisdiction over broad policies, such as joint military operations, thus creating a power struggle in the empirical hierarchy. White governors became territorial over blacks, which resulted in hardships for the Carolina Corps as well as disagreements over their utilization from inception.

20 Honan, Jane Austen, 232.

21 In 1792 the Mathews were billed for “over £11,000”; (The total which the General had drawn in Grenada as legitimate salary from the Royal Exchequer) and since the King had lost his memory they were later billed for £24,000: the price of the original debt and the compounded interest. The family paid this amount after Edward Mathew died in 1805. George III’s poor memory and the Treasury demand affected not only the lives of General and Lady Jane Mathew, but those of James Austen and his wife. James, as a clergyman, was not rich; his and Anne’s combined income was ”300£ a year,” as their daughter Anna discovered. General Mathew had married on the assumption that £7,000 from Lady Jane’s estate would be settled on his wife (something is missing here…). Half of this sum was indeed settled on Anne when she married James Austen in March 1792, and the remainder was thought would be paid when the General died. Honan, Jane Austen, 92, 232.

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Negotiating Control over the Black Carolina Corps

Mathew sent the Carolina Corps, under the authority of Major W. Chester to St.

Vincent—an island transitioning from French to British rule after the revolution. Chester was charged with repairing the barracks and fort to protect citizens from outside attack as well as create a show of force to the remaining French population angry at the transition to British rule. However, the Governor understood the arriving black troops to be under his jurisdiction. Edmund Lincoln, Governor of Grenada (1783–1787) began issuing orders and taking blacks for his own personal use. While the mundane issue of jurisdiction might be mistaken for a simple miscommunication, the British Empire had never dealt with a question over black troops before. The inclination of the governor and most plantation masters was to simply re-enslave the blacks and use them for personal purposes. However, attitudes were shifting. As a result, the argument between the

Governor of a small island and a military commander represents more than just a simple squabble over jurisdiction, but the difficult transition the British Empire was undergoing in its understanding and use of black individuals. By the War of 1812, attitudes had changed enough to where the blacks who evacuated with the British requested their own land and were settled in Trinidad as free farmers.

In the spring of 1784, word reached British command that the French were smuggling arms into St. Vincent in an attempt to reclaim the island. The Island of St.

Vincent had long been a point of contention between the two empires, passing back and forth between France and Britain with dizzying frequency. The 1763 Treaty of Paris bestowed St. Vincent to the British, only for the French to re-capture the colony by force in 1779, while the American Revolution distracted the British. The 1783 Treaty of Paris returned St. Vincent to British rule, along with Grenada, Dominica, St. Christopher's (St.

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Kitts), Nevis and Montserrat along with an agreement that guaranteed French colonists the right to remain on the island. St. Vincent’s French colonists resented the treaty. The

French began to organize and plot ways to return the island to French rule. Edward

Mathew hoped to stem the tide of French discontent by sending out the Black Carolina

Corps as a police force to keep the colonists at bay.

In May 1784, Edward Mathew applied to the commander of the only vessel in the

Grenada Bay, Experiment, for permission to embark from Grenada for St. Vincent with the Carolina Negroes. He planned to re-connect the divided Carolina Corps in order to protect St. Vincent from both internal strife and a French military attack. The Experiment sailed with the Light Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 60th and a detachment of 30

Carolina Negroes armed with the “spare small arms in store.”22 In the same letter,

Mathew implored the Governor of Dominica to send the “flank companies of the 30th

Regt” to bolster his troops. Mathew felt that there were inadequate troop numbers and that the best action was to combine all available troops, including one of the “four

Regiments from Jamaica, to see the 19th in their former station, from whence I was directed to send it to Jamaica in January 1782.”23 By re-establishing the Carolina Corps as a single black unit, Mathew believed the regiment would have enough men to protect

British interests on the island.

As the French military departed the island, Mathew reported the colonists were simultaneously importing arms into St. Vincent. Rumors circulated that the French imported a “quantity of arms and ammunition,” as much as “thirty barrels of powder, and

22 Edward Mathew, Governor of Grenada Headquarters, 31 May 1784, CO 101/26, Folios 118-122.

23 31 May 1784, CO 101/26.

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300 to 400 stand of arms.”24 Mathew believed that some French citizens intended to use imported weapons to protect property from the British. However, the importation of arms coupled with the rumors of hostility encouraged Mathew to take a harder stance. He decided to intimidate the French colonists into submission. He gathered “157 Rank and file of the 35th and 67 Men of the Corps of Artillery,” not nearly enough for the show of force Mathew desired. The total troop numbers, both black and white, were “not equal to the common Garrison Duties, consequently very inadequate to offensive operations.”25

Mathew decided to press on with the meager numbers and sail the Carolina blacks to

St. Vincent, hoping to combine forces with other pieces of the Carolina Negro Corps

Mathew had already requested set sail to St. Vincent.

On May 5, 1784 this two contingents of the Carolina Negro Corps met in St.

Vincent. This was undoubtedly a bittersweet reunion for some as they exchanged tales of their toil and travels. However, the homecoming did not come without issues. Major

W. Chester, placed in charge of the black troops by Governor Mathew, would soon find his troop in a bureaucratic predicament.

Mathew gave Chester authority over all troops in St. Vincent in order to lead the barrack and fort repair, however, Governor Lincoln believed that his authority as

Governor trumped Chester’s newly created position. When Chester arrived in St.

Vincent, he busied himself with the task at hand. He gave an order to employ the

American Negros brought from Grenada and those already stationed in St. Vincent to begin preparing the land for the new military barracks. The order requested that all

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

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blacks would aid in the “clearing and leveling the Ground, in front of the New Barracks” and then proceed to fix the barracks.26 The local engineer in charge refused to give the order to American blacks already station in St. Vincent. Half of the corps did not show up to work the next day.

Governor Lincoln believed he had full authority over the island, while Chester believed he was invested with the Commander of the West Indies authority to look out for the safety of the troops. In order to clear up the confusion over authority, the

Governor and Major Chester agreed to meet over dinner. However, dinner only brought a short respite from the confusion. As the men talked, tensions rose. Chester explained that as a result of his command from Mathew, he was in command of all American blacks across the Island. Governor Lincoln, on the other hand, believed that the governor’s authority trumped any military command. There were at least eight American blacks who worked in his own Governor’s household. Interestingly, these specific blacks in question were probably serving dinner and cleaning up afterwards while eavesdropping on a conversation about their future. Chester explained that he had no knowledge of the Governor’s slaves, and agreed to defer fortification work to spare black labor for the Governor’s house. Major W. Chester promised to send back the slaves until the Governor could spare them. According to Chester, Governor Lincoln capitulated and agreed he would “not interfere any more with my command over the troops.” On June 7, 1784, Chester wrote Governor Lincoln a letter from Dorsetshire Hill explaining how Lieutenant General Mathew had placed Chester in charge over all the forces in the British Caribbean. Chester explained that he would give the assistance of

26 10 June 1784, CO 101/25/28.

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the “Troops under my command, you should have it in the full extent consistent with the rules of the Service only requesting that you would signify your desire to me, either by letter or through your Major of Brigade.”27 The two men seemed to have worked out exactly how to precede, thus Chester began to rebuild the barracks.

The understanding between these men was short-lived, as the Governor served

Chester with papers threatening repercussions if Chester tried to usurp the Governor’s powers. Just a month after they struck an agreement, a new liaison, Major of Brigade, brought General Order “N1” to Major Chester. The order explained that if Chester took control over the black companies, Lincoln would “report it to His Majesty’s Ministers, as he was determined to have the command of the Troops in the fullest extent or not at all.”

Governor Lincoln demanded that Major Chester comply with his written orders. Even if the governor only had “twenty-Five Black Pioneers,” Lincoln refused to allow Chester any power over them. The next day, Chester wrote his response, which emphatically described that his orders were to take control over the troops and serve the best interests of the empire by protecting the island.

Governor Lincoln commissioned a warrant to court martial Chester, in an attempt to wrest control over the black troop from Chester. On a hot and humid June day, just a few months after arriving, Chester appeared before the court and listened to the grave charges against him. Chester rose and declined to comment. He claimed later in a letter to General Mathew that he had in fact complied with the Governor’s request to use black soldiers as servants as long as he officially asked.

27 Ibid.

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Both Chester and Lincoln felt they held authority over the Negro Corps, and in a way they were both correct, as blacks—even those who were free—were subject to the authority of whites. The British Empire did not have a way of dealing with the exceptional case the Negro Corps posed. Lincoln believed the British King appointed him “Commander in Chief of all Troops within his Government, and that no Person, whatsoever had a right to give them Orders but himself.” Even though Major Chester continued to assert that he had “acted according to the Rules and Customs of the Army” his efforts were in vain. Chester believed that Governor Lincoln wanted the “Feathers of his Commission in his Cap; But the substance of it in his Hands,” meaning that Lincoln desired not only the honor of Chester’s commission but also the black soldiers for his own use.28

Still angry over the court martial, Major Chester began to attack the Governor for failing to support the troops with provisions. Major Chester chose this opportune moment to write the governor and complain that his Garrison had been “upwards of five months upon the Island without fresh meat for the sick, who have suffer’d much from the want of it.” His soldiers had also been “without candles even for the Guards, without a form to sit down on, or a Table to eat off, in show without Utensills of any sort.”29 By writing these complaints to Lincoln, Chester hoped to show not only how negligent the

Governor had been, but also begin to make a case for his authority.

Lincoln replied in a letter expressing that he had indeed offered to provide the troops with supplies, but that Chester turned down the offer. Angry at the implication

28 Major W Chester to Arthur Leith Campbell, 20 June 1784, CO 101/25; Major Chester to Governor Lincoln, 7 June 1784, CO 101/25.

29 20 June 1784, CO 101/25/28.

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Chester’s letter “repeatedly apply’d to me on behalf of the sick and that I had refused or neglected to supply their wants,” Lincoln vehemently disagreed. Lincoln

offered at my own risk to purchase Cattle and fatten them for the use of the Garrison knowing as I do the necessity of fresh Provisions for the sick and convalescent, and anxious as I am about their Health, but you then refused my offer, saying you had a fund belonging to the Regiment that would last some time and which you appropriated to that purpose.30

Lincoln believed that Chester had never officially applied for provisions. Instead of officially applying, Lincoln believed that Chester hoped to blame the Governor for his oversight. Lincoln’s letter went on to describe how he offered medical attention to the troops, ordering Doctor Young to examine the military hospital. Young also reported on the quantity and quality of the remaining provisions. The Doctor reported that 80 pounds of meat a week would be necessary to feed the sick soldiers, and that amount was ordered supplied by the governor. Lincoln observed that it was “customary to allow candles, forms, tables and utensills” but that he wanted to first check with Mathew to see what he had supplied the troops; however, in the meantime he needed “to supply what was indispensably necessary.”31 Major Chester declined the Governor’s proposal, instead, he asked Lincoln to supply the hospital with fresh meat for the sick. Healthy soldiers could go without meat, but Mathew believed it was a requirement for the ill recruits.

Troops as Barrack Builders

The documents describing the travails of the Carolina Negro Corps end with

Chester turning down Lincoln’s offer. The Carolina Corps appear in the documents

30 20 June 1784, CO 101/25/28.

31 Governor Lincoln’s Order to Major Chester 7 June 1784, CO 101/25/28; Miscellanea, 7 June 1784, CO 101/25/28.

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almost a year later in Grenada as Mathew decides to use the troops to repair the

Barracks and the Fort. Grenada, just as St. Vincent, shifted ownership frequently. The

British returned to find the Fort almost unusable. Mathew decided to repair the Fort, both for Mathew’s personal housing and auspiciously for the protection of the colony.

The first French settlers built the original groundwork for the fort around 1715 and since this time, each succeeding regime added haphazardly to the fort. The fort became

Mathew’s project when he “placed the first stone of the Principal redoubt, which we named Fort George.” Fort George became Mathew’s lasting legacy of his service to the

British Empire. Mathew used black corps repair the Fort for military and personal reasons.

Mathew found his own accommodations, the Old Government House at Fort

George, lacking. So, Mathew moved into the officer barrack, which he then slated for a complete refurbishment, alongside the fort repair. The officer barrack was an old wooden building, which had not fared well in the rigors of a Caribbean climate. In a letter to Lord Sydney, Mathew explained how Colonel Kemble surveyed the work and wrote a report that explained, “it would be endless to expend any more money upon” the barrack. Mathew ordered a “new and substantial Stone Barrack to be built, where the old one now stands, The stone is found upon the spot and very good for the purpose,

The Lime will, I hope, be furnished by the Colony.”32

In order to undertake such a large project—the repair of the fort and the refurbishment of the officer barracks—a large contingent of blacks were needed to provide the labor. This large number of laborers would be also be necessary for

32 30 March 1785, CO 101/26/30.

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Mathew’s growing designs. Mathew wanted to build the “Apartments of the Officer’s

Quarters Bombproof, in order to serve as effectual covering in the event of a siege, some time is still required to complete them.” The barrack would be large enough for “an

Officer and 30 Men, which small detachment, with some heavy Guns, will fully occupy the Post, and be in most compleat security.” The barrack would be built by almost one hundred of the Carolina Negroes, from the Artificers and Pioneers Corps at “one Bit per day and Rum, the expence calculated at 6d sterling per man – The common hire of

Field Negroe is four Bitts per day.” 33 By utilizing black soldiers, farmers would not have to spare field slaves from the sugarcane fields. The Barracks would be built on a prime piece of land near the sea and would be purchased by the colony. Mathew ordered the

Master General to pay “L848.9.8.5 for 62 acres.”

In order to help speed the process, the colony voted to buy additional slaves to help with the rebuilding. The colony voted to buy “120 able Negroes” to add to the

Carolina force as “a permanent aid to the Engineer, which in the present state of the

Colony, I cannot but consider as a very liberal effort.” To house both the enslaved and free military blacks, Mathew ordered “comfortable huts to be built for their reception.”34

Mathew believed that if the government withheld “hire of Negro Labor, independent of that granted by the colonies, the works will everywhere go on very slowly.” Concerned about the likelihood of French uprisings, and his own place to live, Mathew wanted the work to be done quickly.35

33 30 March 1785, CO 101/26/30.

34 Edward Mathew from St. Christopher’s (St. Kitts), 20 May 1789, CO 101/29/6, Folios 16-23, 16.

35 2 April 1789, CO 101/28/95. The Carolina Negroes became “attached to the 9th but from the situation of the regiment I have been induced to grant.”

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Mathew’s first object for the newly transported troops was to complete the barrack and repair the Battery at Fort Shirley. Their second project would be to reinforce the “outer Cabrite being surrounded towards the sea with very bold and abrupt rocks; on its summit is a level, on which, if found necessary, orders may be given hereafter to construct a Block houde.” Mathew believed that the Island would “furnish considerable assistance in negro labor for the works at this post, tho’it declines furnishing for any other operation.”36 Reinforcing the Battery at Fort Shirley became such a priority that blacks were pulled from all other projects. Frazer had always been an advocate “for this station, and for making the Defences more considerable, was perfectly reconciled to post pone any Establishment upon the western Cabrite, by way of Citadel, till the works now directed shall be completed, when the operation of them may be more distinctly ascertained.”37

On June 1791, Mathew expressed how the fortification at Richmond Hill was progressing. In order to save the colony money, he wanted to furnish a working party of

128 men from the Carolina Corps whose service “is found much more effectual than that of common Laborers.”38 Once he received permission, Mathew dismissed all the hired laborers and “employed a daily working party of upwards of 120 men, from the Carolina

Corps—and that the House of Assembly had granted an aid of twenty Negro masons with one Master Mason and one Master Smith, for six months, towards completing citadel on Richmond Hill.” Mathew also wanted a shed Barracks built. Capt Johnson

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 4 June 1791, CO 101/31/63, Folios 222-223.

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charted out his estimate for the labor and materials necessary to erect a barracks on

Mount Cardigan. (Table 6-1).

How to Distinguish Slaves from the Negro Corps

There had been little to no distinguishing factors between enslaved blacks and those blacks who occupied a quasi-free position working in the military Corps for the

British government. As shown by the issues with St. Vincent, Mathew continued to battle against ingrained administrative and personal ingrained prejudices which placed the Negro Corps on the same footing as slaves. The situation became even more pronounced when the Grenada voted to buy slaves to help speed the along the project.

The new slaves would be working alongside the auspiciously free Black Carolina Corps, thus creating an illusion of the enslavement of the Corps.

As slaves began to work alongside the Carolina Negro Corp, Mathew began to institute small markers to distinguish the two groups, mainly through the allotment of provisions, leadership, and punishment. Mathew began to distinguish the Carolina

Corps. He believed that the black troops should be provided provisions whereas hired blacks would eat from the land. The Carolina Corps would be provided from “the King’s stores, rather than to supply them, as before; with Negro men by contract.”39 Enslaved men were supposed to grow their own food and tend to their own needs, while the colony would provide provisions for black soldiers.

As for leadership, Mathew recommended to Grenville that Lieutenant Colonel

Nicolls, a white man, taking command. Nicolls would lead the “Carolina Corps, with the provincial rank of Colonel, would be a situation in which he could render great service to

39 14 July 1791, 101/31/75, CO Folios 252-253.

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Government. The want of a commanding Officer is, at present, a consistent inconvenience; and should the Corps be recruited, as has been proposed to Your

Lordship, such an appointment would be very necessary.”40 In order to garner respect for his new Corps, Mathew attempted to provide them with the same structure as white corps. In so doing, the Carolina Corps were also held to the same standard in terms of punishment. In St. George, four soldiers from the 60th Regiment were indicted for

“Capital Crimes.” All men were sentenced to death. Mathew wrote of Lieutenant Inman, one of those sentenced to death, who had served in the Black Dragoons and

requested the vacancy might be kept open ‘till I had a proper person to offer as a successor:— on this Island, Mr James Greene, who served several years as an officer in the 28th Reg presents himself, he is recommended to me, as equal to fill the station with credit to himself, and to the Corps.41

At the same sessions a “Carolina Negroe was found Guilty of a Capital Offence and sentenced to suffer Death. His Execution took place at the same time with the above soldiers.42 In March 1785, Mathew reported to Lord Sydney that “Soldiers of the

60th Regiment indicted of Capital Crimes were found Guilty and sentenced to suffer

Death.” The trial was held in the town of St. George. At this same session, three soldiers were given long prison sentences and a “Carolina Negroe was found Guilty of a

Capital Offence and sentenced to suffer Death. His Execution took place at the same time with the above soldiers.”43 The Carolina Corps received the same provisions and

40 17 July 1791, CO 101/31/77.

41 15 April 1789, CO 101/28/102, Antigua Folios, 348-349.

42 19 March 1785, CO 101/26/29, Grenada Folios 116-117.

43 Edward Mathew to Right Honorable Lord Sydney, 19 March 1785, CO 101/26. Mathew explained that the Corps never received any “Cloathing, or allowance in lieu of it; or examining the return of that Date, I find that even the Cloathing then delivered was not completely sufficient for their numbers, and I now find myself under the absolute necessity of permitting the Three Captains to write a joint Letter, under my authority, to Messieurs Bishopp and Brummell, to order out cloathing for their effective numbers,

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leadership as white soldiers, but were subject to the same punishment as their white counterparts.

Across the Caribbean

In the fall of 1790, Governor Mathew decided to return the Carolina Corps to military service; however, he needed to bolster the ranks in order to create a viable troop. Mathew tried to recruit free blacks and mulattos from the islands. However, this was met with serious resistance from the Antiqua Governor. Rebuffed in the Caribbean,

Mathew turned to Canada. Mathew then set his eyes on the blacks Governor Carleton removed to Nova Scotia. Mathew began a recruiting operation in which a few blacks signed up for military service. The ranks grew to support the troop becoming a viable fixture in the Caribbean.

As work progressed in Grenada, Mathew wanted to transition the Carolina Negro

Corps away from manual labor return the Corps to their original intention—as a black military force. Mathew began to discuss his “design to discipline them as soldiers.” In order to carry out his plan, Mathew believed he would need to bolster the ranks that had been ravaged by disease and then “disperse them again, to execute the fatigue and servite duties of the Troops in this country.” Mathew embarked on a plan to recruit free blacks into the Negro Corps.

Mathew needed more troops. In order to increase the size of his force, he hatched an idea to use “volunteer Free Blacks or Mulattoes, to whom Soldier’s pay, rations, and

according to the Plan I had formerly proposed: inclosed is the Estimate for Three Suits, Dragoon Artificer, and Pioneer; this is cheaper than the cloathing used by the Infantry, I shall pay the amount, with the freight, but a warrant on the Deputy Pay Master General here, and I have to request of your Lordship to forward to me His Majesty’s Commands on this Subject.” Dundas was constructing a wooden Barrack for the Detachment on Mount Cardigan. He “ordered the Carolina Corps to furnish their Artificers; and also laborers to carry up the materials.”

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clothing would be allowed.” In order to recruit free mulattos to join military ranks,

Mathew appealed to Louis La Grenada. La Grenada a “Mulatto. . .of considerable property, well known for many years, and upon many occasions.” For years, Grenada officials sought La Grenada’s advice as a respected elder of the community on how to deal with the free mulatto and runaway Negro population. La Grenada was very receptive to the idea of opening military service to free mulattos. After meeting with

Mathew, La Grenada began “suggesting this idea to his Friends, over whom he has great influence, from his character, property, and situation as Captain of a colored

Company, attached to the St. George’s Regiment.” La Grenada himself had an impressive military career. He earned a Black Ribbon from Lord McCartney as a “mark of distinction in consequence of his former services.” La Grenada became an advocate for the incorporation of free mulattos into the Black Corps.44

While La Grenada believed the incorporation of mulattos was a viable option, Sir

Thomas Shirley, the Governor of Antigua vehemently disagreed. Shirley believed that the recruitment of free Caribbean mulattoes was tantamount to fomenting a revolt. The free mulatto population shared too many commonalities with the enslaved black population. He recommended that the House of Assembly reject the military recruitment of free mulattoes.

Governor Mathew, however, was not deterred. He responded to Shirley’s outburst by changing tactic. Instead, he suggested that “[By recruiting two] Blacks per company for the nine Regiments here, and ten for each station of Royal Artillery, might

44 Mathew even went so far as to request an extra medal be attached to his former awards as a result of La Grenada’s advocacy for the Black Corps. Mathew requested “for the Kings sanction of a Gold Medal to be appended to the Ribbon as this would be a very favourable moment to bestow so honorable a mark of Royal Favor, on a subject whose zeal in the cause of Great Britain has been very often manifested.”

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be much better raised, and with very little expence, in the Provinces of Nova Scotia and

New Brunswick.” While blacks in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were free, Mathew believed they would be amenable to military recruitment. Mathew believed that “a great number of free negroes, who had been employed as Pioneers the Army serving in the southern states of America, took refuge the close of the last war” and these blacks would be interested in leaving Canada. Mathew believed that the crop cultivation in the northern rocky climes was very difficult for free blacks. His correspondences explained that the now Nova Scotia blacks were “very needy; gaining precarious subsistence as day laborers, and dissatisfied with the long winters of that climate, to which they have not been accustomed.” By giving these blacks an opportunity at a military career in a warmer, “more suitable” climate, Mathew believed he could solve the ongoing military shortage. The recruitment of northern blacks who won their freedom under Sir Guy

Carleton’s protection could be the next available pool of labor.

Mathew argued that the cost of recruiting in Canada would be much cheaper than the actual purchase of blacks from the islands, especially when the plantations were not willing to give up its profitable labor source.45 Mathew explained that the expense would not nearly be as great as buying slaves to supplement the regiments.

This great “expence of purchasing would be wholly avoided; instead of new Negroes, we should gain able bodied men, equal to all the fatigue duties, and already trained to such service, and we could at the same time raise a sufficient number of Recruits to complete the Carolina Corps, which at present wants sixty Men of its full establishment.”

45 “No opportunity shall be lost of [e]nlisting Free Negro’s or People of Color for this Corps but I am apprehensive, it may be found necessary for this purpose to send an officer to Nova Scotia, on the recruiting service.” 7 May 1791, CO 101/31/57, Folios 202-203.

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He summarized the genius of his plan by writing the northern “provinces where

[previously enslaved American blacks] now reside would be eased of an incumbrance; the [blacks] would be gratified with an improvement of their situation; and the Islands relieved from an expence.”46 Thus, Mathew hoped to save the Caribbean islands the money for expensive white troops by bolstering the Black Corps with recruits from

Canada.

By 1795, the disparate contingents of American blacks formed the first West

India Regiment. The West India Regiment became the first black troop in the Caribbean.

The largest American regiment, the Carolina Corps went on to serve at Britain's capture of Martinique, St. Lucia and Guadeloupe in 1795. The Corps also served at St. Vincent and Grenada in 1796 when the Carolina Corps formed part of the garrisons in St.

George’s and later part of the first West India Regiment. The West India Regiment helped to found the first official black corps stationed in the Caribbean.47

Once the troops received official status as the West India Regiment, the troop remained as a normal part of the military service. The space had been created for a free black and employed presence on the islands. While the Spanish and to a lesser extent, the French, Empires had instituted ways to deal with free blacks, the British Empire began to widen the gap between free and enslaved. The British response to blacks after the American Revolution paved the way for those blacks freed after the War of 1812.

The War of 1812 was fought, in part, as a response to the lingering anger over stolen slaves. The British, relying upon a tactic that worked so well in the American Revolution,

46 1 March 1791, CO 101/31/43, Page 17.

47 There might even have been a Carolina man or his Grenada-born son at the battle of New Orleans in 1812.

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began to raid for slaves up and down the east coast. At the end of the war, the British yet again shipped these blacks off with the intention of bolstering its military ranks.

However, these slaves requested land. They wanted to build a life for themselves. Thus, after much debate, the first free black community on Trinidad was founded by American blacks. The British institutionalized ways for blacks to control their own destinies.

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Table 6-1. List of Seized and Condemned Slaves Registered in St. Augustine on July 22, 177948

NAMES Philip Venus Amaritta Caesar Sarah Juliet Flora Jack King Quasheba Little King Daphene Tira Toney Philips Moll Titus Charlotte Kinda Jupiter Diana Sally Hannah Linda Jereny Mary Anne Kate Billey Nanny Sue Ben Pamela Little Ben Betty Hercules Lizey Jack Phoebe Ryna Flora Carolina Chloe Sam Venus Rose Nancy Abira George Little George Bob Joe Hagar Jack Rachael Jack Jacob Peter Clarinda Nobie Little Peter Judy Abraham July Quash Lilley Abigail Sam Brutas Amelia Roger Stephen Elk April Phobe Ishmail Rynah Myrtilla Little Ishmail Phoebe Eve Fasinny [?] Arron Febra Rona Tiva Pompey Abigail Jane Sampson Mily Nancy Seabore Polydore A Child Prisse Sylvia Lynda Bince Felix Dye Juda Minah Tim Moll Abraham John Phoebe Smart Boss Charles MaryAnne Jack Owen Frank Ansel Lydia

48 Court of Vice Admiralty Papers, TPNA The Papers of the East Florida Claims Commission, 77/26.

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CHAPTER 7 TREATY OF PARIS AND BEYOND

Hacking his way out of a rotting jail cell in Charleston, South Carolina in 1776,

Scipio Handley, a free black fisherman accused of spying for the British, made a heroic escape by jumping into the sea and swimming after a departing ship. American Rebels caught Handley carrying messages between British battalions and condemned him to death as a spy.1 Interestingly, while most Africans fled from white oppression, Handley chose to go to the sugar-producing islands of the Caribbean, where slavery dominated the economy and the culture. Because he was a free man and a sojourner, his movement was not limited as were those of enslaved blacks and he later was able to depart for the American mainland during the siege of Savannah, where he suffered a permanent debilitating injury when he was shot through the leg by a musket ball.2

Historians can only speculate as to Handley’s reasoning: did he have enslaved family members; did he feel loyalty to the British; was he paid; or was his motivation strictly revenge? Whatever his motivations may have been, Handley barely escaped the hangman’s noose. Handley was a free black whose remarkable story demonstrates the varied Atlantic connections formed by people of African descent out of the uncertainty created by the American Revolution.3 While Handley’s story was certainly an amazing

1 Memorial of Scipio Handley, British National Archives (Hereafter BNA) 13/119/431, 12/47/117 and 12/109/160, London, Audit Office at the British National Archives. (Hereafter AO).

2 Handley later made it to London, where he appeared before the Loyalist Claims Commission requesting compensation for his losses, one of only a handful of claims made by blacks. By returning with the Loyalists as a free man, Handley was able to benefit from opportunities not afforded to the majority of the remaining enslaved blacks. Yet even as a free man—and the successful recipient of Claims Commission support of £20—the disabled Handley could not escape life as part of London’s growing vagrant, black poor. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 211–12.

3 Ibid.; Walter J. Fraser, Charleston! Charleston!: The History of a Southern City (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), 152.

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escapade; however, he only represents one of the thousands of blacks who forcibly migrated from the American colonies. The majority of mobile blacks, unlike Handley, remained enslaved.

Many Americans who either lost slaves or knew friends and neighbors who lost property began a long campaign to recoup their losses. This final chapter illustrates how the memory of stolen black property, and runaway property like Handley, loomed large in American imagination. Rising concerns over the loss of slaves became a defining feature of early American foreign relations with the British Empire. The 1783 Treaty of

Paris included an article that dealt with the question about what to do with stolen property. However, Americans believed the British violated the treaty terms. For a decade, the cases languished in court. Finally, in 1794 John Jay traveled to Britain specifically to work out not only a trade agreement, but also to broker a deal for the unpaid stolen slave property. Slavery came to play an integral role in the diplomatic relations of the early republic. Jay, an outspoken critic of slavery, brought up the issue multiple times with his British counterparts. Uncomfortable pressing for the compensation of stolen slaves, Jay could never secure a compromise on the issue.

Thus, Jay’s Treaty never mentioned blacks. The inability of Jay and his British counterparts to make a decision on the issue regarding black property simply prevented the language from entering the treaty.

In 1799, a commission formed to deal with the unresolved black issue. The new commission still could not reach an agreement on the article regarding the repayment for property stolen in the evacuation. The commission dissolved in 1802. When the War of 1812 broke out, the British attacked United States soil. During the war of 1812, the

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British systematically attempted to lure blacks away from American shores with promises of freedom. Learning from the previous engagement, the British adjusted their official military strategy to include the recruitment of American slaves. In so doing, the animosity between the US and the British smoldered well into the mid-1830s, illustrating that while the war came to a conclusion, the battle to control black lives raged on.

Treaty of Paris

The 1783 Treaty of Paris was important for many reasons; the document sparked the largest migration from the American shore, it was the first recognition of the free and independent United States, and the seventh article outlined the ownership of “stolen” property – specifically blacks. The treaty included the most important issues to the

United States at the time of its creation. The right to own property and slaves were a key foundation and one which warranted a lengthy description in the treaty that concluded the American Revolution.

The seventh article of the peace treaty specified that the British would not remove property during the evacuation and laid out the way in which both parties would deal with the issue of stolen property. It stated specifically the British could not carry

“away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.” By stipulating the illegality of stealing American blacks, the Treaty provided the legal basis for which

American citizens could begin a process to reclaim stolen goods or people.

However, British and American military officials disagreed as to ramifications of the treaty. Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander who migrated 3,000 blacks to Nova

Scotia believed that the slaves who fled to the British were no longer property of

American owners. Once the blacks crossed the British lines, Carleton considered them free and therefore not applicable to the rules laid out in the Treaty. Carleton and

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Washington met in Orangetown on May 6, 1783 in order to settle “the Business” concerning

the setting at Liberty the prisoners, the receiving possession of the posts occupied by the British Troops, and the obtaing. the Delivery of all Negroes & other property of the Inhabitants of these States in the possession of the Forces or subjects of, or adherents to his Britannic Majesty4

In a maneuver that seemed like it was an “express Stipulation to the contract in the Treaty,” Washington demanded the British return the blacks. Carleton explained that the Treaty did indeed require the British to return any black property, however, he interpreted the treaty to mean that the property “at the

Time,” meaning that blacks who fled to the British before the signed treaty.

Carleton went on to describe how the -Treaty simply restricted from “carrying it away” and not the delivery of any runaway slave.

Both parties disagreed on the treaty’s implementation. If the leaders disagreed on the treaty’s meaning, how would the officials overseeing the evacuation in the South act? As communication grew erratic and the evacuations more chaotic, British officers individually decided how to deal with blacks. Those who escaped to New York benefited from Carleton’s personal interpretation of the treaty. The majority of blacks in the South did not enjoy the same luck. After the British evacuated, resentment grew as Americans clamored for lost property compensation.

4 George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, (New York: G. P. Putnam's sons, 1732-1799) 241.

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Jay’s Treaty

A few years later, one of the original Treaty of Paris authors, John Adams, became the first American minister to the British court. In 1785, Adams was charged with negotiating all violations of the Treaty of Paris, including the slave issue. A war with the Dutch interrupted the diplomatic mission for more than a decade. On April 16, 1794,

Chief Justice Jay accepted the lead diplomatic position to resolve these outstanding issues. Jay would travel to Britain and negotiate “a settlement not only of the questions which had recently sprung up by reason of the war in Europe, but also of all infractions of the Paris treaty.”5 Even though Jay disagreed with slaveholders, he was tasked with finding a diplomatic solution to the wrongs committed twenty years before.

Jay and his British counterpart British Foreign Minister William Wyndham began negotiations under the specter of an impending war with Napoleon and the French

Empire. On May 12, Jay set sail from New York and landed in Falmouth on June 8. By the end of July 1794, both Jay and Greenville were in the midst of negotiations. “Matters progressed smoothly” that is until a disagreement over why the treaty of 1783 was initially broken. All blacks who fled to the British lines were considered British property.

Military officials boarded many of these previously enslaved blacks. The Treaty of Paris outlined an understanding that the British empire would pay Americans for their loss of slaves. However, the British justified the removal and nonpayment of such property by arguing that blacks who wandered into British camps were British property. Therefore, the British should not repay Americans for British property, as the human property was obviously British. Jay explained that neither party could reach an agreement and it was

5 R. Ream Rankin, The Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation between Great Britain and the United States, 1794 (Berkeley: The University Press, 1908), 278.

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“impossible to come to any agreement whatever.” John Jay, an ardent anti-slavery advocate stated, “We could not agree concerning the negroes. Was that reason to forfeit the treaty?”6 Therefore, Jay made a decision to mention slavery in the Treaty, but to include wording that set up a Commission to deal with the issue in the future.

While Jay’s Treaty never specifically mentioned enslaved blacks, it did however contain multiple articles outlining the creation of a commission to deal with the

“considerable losses and damage” sustained during the American Revolution. The

Treaty declared, “full and complete compensation for the same will be made by the

British Government to the said complainants.” It went on to explain that there will be 5

Commissioners appointed:

They shall receive testimony, books, papers and evidence in the same latitude, and exercise the like discretion and powers respecting that subject; and shall decide the claims in question according to the merits of the several cases, and to justice, equity and the laws of nations.

Only 3 of the 5 Commissioners were needed to made a decision. The final decisions of the justices would stand and the “amount of the sum to be paid to the claimant; and His

Britannic Majesty undertakes to cause the same to be paid to such claimant in specie.”

Two boards of commissioners were established to carry these articles into effect.

Each consisted of two British and two American commissioners with a fifth appointed by the other four. In 1799, the Council of 12 was deadlocked on many of these article 6 claims and so the British government, as a counter-measure, suspended its proceedings under the seventh article. In 1802, the two countries signed a new convention for the mutual payment of claims. The board constituted under the seventh

6 Rankin, The treaty of Amity, 98.

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article of the treaty of 1794 resumed its work and the American government undertook to pay the sum of £600,000 in satisfaction of the money they might otherwise have been liable to pay under the terms of the sixth article.

To deal with claims by British merchants and Americans who had remained loyal to the Crown, three commissioners were appointed in Britain under the Distribution of

Certain Monies Act 1803. Two of these commissioners had previously represented

Great Britain on the former board established for this purpose under the 1794 treaty, while the third had sat on that board as its fifth member.

Commissioners considered claims amounting to nearly £5 million of which

£1,420,000 were paid. Successful claimants received dividends pro rata from the money made available by the American government, which, with interest, amounted to

£659,493. The commission made its final adjudication on claims in 1811 and presented its last report to the Treasury in June 1812 just as the first shots of the 1812 war began.

War of 1812

The War of 1812 was an outgrowth of the Napolenoic Wars. The war officially began on June 18, 1812. The British learned from the previous war that if it offered freedom, blacks would escape to the British lines causing unrest and panic on inland plantations. Governor and Commander in Chief of Guadalupe, Alexander Cochrane accepted a position in 1813 as the commander of the Northern American Station.

Cochrane commanded the North American front. As a previous Governor of a British

Caribbean colony, he had experience with not only Loyalists, but also the integral nature and dependence colonies had upon slavery. Cochrane approached the conflict w intended to capitalize on this knowledge and wrote a proclamation that would have lasting repercussions in the African American community.

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The proclamation he wrote in 1812 was very different from the hasty declaration

Dunmore made in 1775. The Dunmore Proclamation offered freedom only to able- bodied males who deserted to help fight the British. Moreover, the Dunmore

Proclamation was a rogue document unsanctioned by his superiors. The Phillipsburg

Proclamation, which was issued a few years after Dunmore’s, attempted to align British policy towards blacks. The Phillipsburg expanded the previous proclamation to include all American slaves even those who did not choose to fight. The Cochrane proclamation illustrates a marked shift in British wartime policy.

On April 2, 1814, Cochrane issued a proclamation that not only offered freedom to all blacks – men and women – who crossed the British lines before he arrived on the American shore, but also provided a relocation plan. The proclamation was circulated by word of mouth and was printed in the Niles

Weekly Register nine days after Cochrane issued the proclamation. The proclamation stated:

WHEREAS it has been represented to me, that many persons resident in the United States, have expressed a desire to withdraw therefrom, with a view of entering into his majesty’s service, or of being received as free settlers into some of his majesty’s colonies, This is therefore to give notice, That all those who may be disposed to emigrate from the UNITED STATES, will with their families, be received on board his majesty’s ships or vessels of war, or at the military posts that may be established upon or near the coast of the UNITED STATES, when they will have their choice of either entering into his majesty’s sea or land forces, or of being sent as FREE settlers, to the British possessions in North America or the West Indies, where they will meet with due encouragement.7

7 Niles Weekly register, IV, No.15, 11 June, 1814, p. 242.

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Cochrane planned the proclamation and its intended disruptive influence from

Bermuda. His action illustrated a shift in official British policy. Cochrane occupied the plantation of Dungeness for the duration of the war to lure enslaved blacks to

Cumberland Island, Georgia. Freedom was not the only enticement. The British increased the stakes for blacks to pursue freedom. This proclamation stipulated that blacks could choose one of two careers. They could join either the military forces

(presumably the Negro Corps already stationed in the British Caribbean) or settle in the

Caribbean. Within 30 years, the British not only accepted and institutionalized the idea of freeing slaves of an enemy, but also provided an extra step to offer transportation and a choice of occupations.

Once Cochrane wrote the proclamation, he set sail to America, landing in

Virginia. His arrival began a series of raids and counter raids against plantations beginning in Virginia and moving through the south. The cycle of raids increased as British began to arm previously enslaved blacks. The Washington Monitor reported that the army of Native Americans employed by the British that “one hundred armed negroes” had joined the troop for the sole purpose of “joining

M’Queen.” The troop wasted little time stocking up on provisions and equipment in order to march into Florida. As a unit, the multiracial group moved into Florida to “ascertain who and where are enemies in that nation or in Florida are, and what their strength, with a determination, if possible, to destroy them.”

Cochrane launched a series of raids and counter raids, the same tactic used in the American Revolution, which upended the social order and plagued Virginia until his departure. Just after his arrival, Americans retaliated, sending 1200 soldiers to the

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Potomac where they caused a lot of damage. The American force landed and attacked

“houses that were not burned were wantonly damaged – the windows and doors broken, floors cut up, &c.” The troops then went after the crops and the livestock. They

“burned the wheat stacks, bravely shot several horses,” and then moved onto the human property. The Americans “gallantly kidnapped about 130 negroes.” However, one black escaped the raiding party. One black, left at Mrs. Thompsons, explained to

Cockburn that the spirits left on the table was poisoned. Cockburn went into a “dreadful passion” and burned the house to the ground. The author of the piece believed that the drink was in fact not poisoned as “col Parker, that he himself had drank of the spirits but a few moments before the British came up, and that it was impossible it could have been poisoned – of this the admiral seems to have been perfectly satisfied”

Cockburn inflicted more destruction on the countryside as he continued to gather blacks. He returned to his ship, the Kinsale, and then “sanctioned the burning of about thirty houses.” He continued to gather blacks and was rumored to provide “some negroes in British uniform.” Continuing the search for extra military personnel or any deserters, “they have proceeded in considerable force several miles in the country.”

Cockburn received orders to move south into Georgia in order to set up a blockade along the eastern seaboard. Cockburn sailed south along the coast until he caught sight of a mansion built in a strategic position. The Dungeness mansion was the tallest structure on Cumberland Island – three stories constructed from a Tabby seashell material. Sailors had long used the home as a solid navigational marker since it was constructed before the American Revolution. George Cockburn landed on

Cumberland Island and set up his headquarters at the Dungeness mansion. Cockburn

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declared the island part of occupied territory. Almost immediately, “a group of 66 slaves paddled 23 miles in a wooden canoe to reach the island. In all, approximately 1,500 enslaved Africans joined the British squadron on Cumberland Island.”

The British invaded America for some very specific reasons – Negroes and tobacco. An American captain, Joshua Barney stationed in the flotilla service, wrote to the Secretary of the Navy about a British deserter. The deserter, Danish by birth, left the frigate Severn when the British landed in St. Mary’s on July 19. The deserter was part of the party that burned the “Huntington & Calvert court house.” The deserter explained to

Barney that the “sole object” of the attacks “as he heard the officers say was Tobacco &

Negroes, with some fresh provisions.” Cochrane sailed from Bermuda with “About 8 or

900 Marines that about 300 was with the division above stated.” As the troops landed, they “burnt a tobacco house.” The Dane went on in detail, describing how the officers bragged that they “destroyed all that was in their power.” The troops wreaked havoc in the countryside and then waited for “further orders from the Admiral.”8

More than just healthy, military age men fled to the British – women and children were also specifically mentioned in the proclamation and some took advantage of the opportunity. Generally, women clustered around the provisions and the encampments.

One report mentioned that near a quantity of “provisions at Tangier” there were a

“number of Black Women and Children” who gathered. These dependents were

8 Captain Joshua Barney, Flotilla Service, to Secretary of the Navy Jones US Cutter Scorpion off Nottingham July 24th 1814. in W. S. Dudley and M. J. Crawford, The Naval War of 1812: a Documentary History (Washington: Naval Historical Center, 1985). 148.

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completely independent of the Garrison.9 As women and children fled to the British for freedom and protection, Americans demanded their return.

In one incident, two American commissioners demanded the return of their runaway enslaved property, both men and women who ran away. The Commissioners arrived with the proper “Authority, to demand the private property and Slaves, agreeable to the first Article of the Treaty.” The British official, however, refused, stating that he had no “private property” as there were no slaves at Tangier. The only people that could be construed as property were the “Wives and Children belonging to the Black

Batallion.” Interestingly, women and children were considered property of their husbands, but those black men who fought for the British were not considered property.

The British official refused to give any person in the British camp to the Americans. Not only that, but he also refused to return “those that have Entered on Board the different

Ships.” Obviously, the British official was completely opposed to the return of any person to the Americans. Instead, he offered to write to Mr. Baker for his opinion on the subject. Until that letter arrived, he did not “consider myself at all Justifiable in giving them up, untill I receive directions from you.”10

Treaty of Ghent

Just as the American Revolution ended with the Treaty of Paris, the War of 1812 concluded with the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. Both treaties mentioned runaway slaves and the illegal confiscation of property. The Treaty specifically describes how all

9 Captain John Clavell, R.N. to Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn, R.N His Majesty’s Ship Orlando in the Patuxent Feby. 23d 1815, in Ibid., 349. 10 W. S. Dudley and M. J. Crawford, M. J. The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, (Washington: Naval Historical Center, Dept. of Navy, 1985), 349.

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property and possessions shall be restored with all “practicable” means. Treaty stated that:

There shall be a firm and universal Peace between His Britannic Majesty and the United States, and between their respective Countries, Territories, Cities, Towns, and People of every degree without exception of places or persons. All hostilities by both sea and land shall cease as soon as both parties as hereinafter mentioned shall have ratified this Treaty. All territory, places, and possessions…shall be restored immediately and without causing, any destruction, carrying…, any Slaves, or other private property…as far as may be practicable, forthwith restored and delivered to the proper authorities and persons to whom they respectively belong.

Cockburn gave orders to not leave a single black behind. In a letter, he gives orders to

“bring with you all the Ordnance and Stores of every description from Tangier Island.”

Cockburn references the treaty, stating that according to it, things that were “captured thereon are to be left.” However, the Commander in Chief gave other orders in regards to the blacks who fled to the British. The Commander gave orders that “on no account a

Single Negro be left, except by his own request, if he joined you prior to the Ratification of the Treaty which took place at 11PM of the 17th February.” The Commander probably gave such an order knowing that it would be virtually impossible to prove the exact time and date of enlistment. He assumed any black would choose to lie in order to depart with the British.

The story that opened this dissertation described the desperately sick and ailing black recruits acted upon as they clung to the sides of a departing British ship. The story of the men and women of African descent embroiled in the Loyalist exodus from the

South, of their struggles to maintain familial and communal ties and to claim, or reclaim, various kinds of freedom, reminds us of the sheer number and diversity and numbers of

Black Atlantic experiences. Indeed, these particular stories raise much broader issues

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relating to how power, agency, and mobility operated during the Revolutionary Era.

Moncrief and other white Loyalists traveled around the Atlantic World searching for personal advancement and economic opportunity. Blacks also moved around the

Atlantic, but in very different circumstances and for very different purposes. As we have seen, faced with yet another move when the Mosquito Coast was evacuated a few years after their arrival, approximately 350 of Moncrief's enslaved blacks sought refuge in the Spanish backcountry rather than be subjected to another move and possible separation from family and communal ties. In this context, mobility allowed them to exercise a modicum of control over their destinies and personal lives.

And yet, while "mobility" forced, voluntary, opportunistic, and planned seems to connect black and white experiences, the term implies a kind of freedom, a degree of volition and power that does not reflect historic historical realities: choices to move or not move were made but, especially for blacks, rarely made freely. If mobility, the traversing of traditional boundaries of state and empire, is one of the central themes of

Atlantic history, the story of the southern black and white Loyalist migrations after the

American Revolution reminds us that Atlantic World mobility worked in many ways and ran in many directions.

By 1815, the British changed not only the official attitude towards the recruitment of blacks in wartime, but also their treatment afterwards. The blacks who fled to the

British in 1815 found their way into the Caribbean, but this time not as slaves. Instead, these blacks moved willingly into the Caribbean as free men and women – as black

British citizens.

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The Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg) 22 April 1775.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

After graduating from the University of Georgia with her B.A. in History and

Political Science, Jennifer K. Snyder entered into the doctoral program at the University of Florida in 2004. She received her M.A. in 2007 and her Ph.D. in 2013. The long and windy road to the completion of her dissertation is dotted with many wonderful experiences working for the Reubin O’D. Askew Institute, The Bob Graham Center, and an award winning and innovative design firm, Local Projects. Currently, she is living and working in St. Petersburg for the Florida Humanities Council.

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