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Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty*

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Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty* IURP(SLF-RXUQH\VRI)UHHGRP5XQDZD\6ODYHVRIWKH$PHULFDQ5HYROXWLRQ DQG7KHLU*OREDO4XHVWIRU/LEHUW\ &DVVDQGUD3\EXV &DOODORR9ROXPH1XPEHU:LQWHUSS $UWLFOH 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV '2,FDO )RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH Access provided by University of Prince Edward Island (18 Aug 2016 16:52 GMT) C A L L A L O O from EPIC JOURNEYS OF FREEDOM Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty* by Cassandra Pybus Prologue From the vantage point of his farm on the mountain slopes east of Freetown in Sierra Leone, Harry Washington could see the exodus out of the town on September 26, 1800. He knew there was terrible trouble in Freetown and that the boy the company installed as governor had offered one hundred dollars for the capture of several settlers he accused of “an act of open and unprovoked rebellion.” For the last few nights the drums from the neighboring African village had become more and more insistent, suggesting that the local Koya Temne sensed unrest in Freetown and were massing for an attack on the Sierra Leone Company. The native drumming bothered Harry, but he paid no heed to the governor’s offer of a reward. The men named as rebels were like brothers to him. Since the day twenty- four years before that he had run off from the plantation of General George Washing- ton in Virginia, they had been together in a close-knit community of slave fugitives; first in New York and then in Nova Scotia, before making the tortuous trip to West Africa in 1792. He was now sixty years old, as best he could judge. Years of struggle and hardship had finally been rewarded with a flourishing farm that could support his family and free him from dependence on the company store. The last thing he needed at this time in his life was to get involved in a rebellion against the Sierra Leone Company’s rule. Still, the way it looked to him, the land tax the company demanded would reduce his children to perpetual bondage, all over again. And it was right that the black settlers should choose their own representatives to govern them. The children of Israel had left Egypt for the Promised Land; so they had abandoned America for Sierra Leone, to find the true meaning of liberty, not to be free in name only. Washington left his farm the next day and went down to the plain below, where he found that some forty rebel settlers had created a rough camp beside a fast-flowing brook that cut the road to Freetown. Spanning the turbid water was a narrow, swaying * Reprinted from Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty by Cassandra Pybus. Copyright© 2006 by Cassandra Pybus. By permission of Beacon Press, www.beacon.org 114 Callaloo 29.1 (2006) 114–130 C A L L A L O O suspension bridge made of palm trunks lashed together with vines. Their presence beside the bridge established control of communications in and out of the town. Three days later they received a visit from two settlers acting as intermediaries who carried astonishing news: a transport ship had arrived unexpectedly in Freetown, packed with British soldiers from the Twenty-fourth Regiment as well as hundreds of Maroon warriors deported from Jamaica. A letter from the governor was read to the assembled men, in which he threatened to send a large military force against them. If they would surrender, the governor promised, the punishment would not extend to the loss of life. Blood would be spilled, the letter warned, unless a response was given by ten o’clock that night. The men by the bridge were suspicious. How could they be sure that this was not a trick? They had learned to distrust the words used by white men in authority. Time and time again black settlers had been misled when the words read to them were later revealed to mean something different from what had been heard. From bitter experi- ence they knew that words on paper were all that counted with the British, not words that evaporated in the air. No one in the camp could read what had been written to them. After lengthy consultation they agreed that they must have one of their own to tell them what the letters said and to write down the words that would explain the reasons for their actions. The one man who could read and write was not with them that day; they would have to fetch him. The emissaries from Freetown were instructed to tell the governor he would have an answer in writing in the morning. Nothing would happen during the night; the weather was against it. A low mass of clouds the color of India ink cast a dark shadow over the plain, imparting an uncanny intensity to the emerald green of the elephant grass. By nightfall, jagged shards of lightning lit the sky, illuminated palm fronds whipped into the air, and the trees bowed to the ground. The rain was unrelenting for most of the night, abating just before first light. At dawn, companies of black-faced monkeys scampered back from the safety of the mountain forest, their excited gibbering adding to the cacophony of frogs and crickets drawn to the surface of the steaming, saturated ground. As the fiery ball of sun appeared in the east, so too did Captain Alexander Macaulay, advancing at a trot with a detachment of Maroons who had disembarked at the nearby bay on the previous day. The rebel settlers, sodden and scattered after the storm, were in no position to make a defense. Terrified by the pugnacious enthusiasm of the Maroons, they ran for the forest, several of them wounded, leaving two men dying where they fell. Harry Washington was among thirty men who surrendered to the governor the following day.1 As he faced a hastily convened military tribunal in Freetown on October 10, Harry Washington may not have appreciated the irony that his bid for freedom from enslavement to the leader of the rebellious forces in colonial America had led inexorably to this trial for rebellion in distant Sierra Leone. Whereas General Wash- ington triumphed against the British rule in America and was subsequently reified as the president and father of the independent United States, Harry Washington lost everything in his attempt to forge an independent and self-determining community in West Africa; he was exiled from his home, with his ultimate fate unknown. The contrast between these two rebellious men named Washington could not be greater. 115 C A L L A L O O In his lifetime George achieved near immortal status. Since his death the accumula- tion of papers and publications about him can fill libraries. Harry has been relegated to a brief footnote in one or two books. There can be no surprise here. In the massive literature on George Washington it is rare to find any of his slave property distin- guished even by a name, let alone accorded the life history of a person motivated by complex reasoning and capable of acting on his or her own volition. An unlettered African man whom George Washington acquired in a mundane business transaction could have no role to play in the foundation narrative of the American Republic. Or could he? Surely, it is not utterly incongruous to set beside the story of the revered father of America an alternative story of the African man he had purchased to dig ditches. At the heart of both narratives lies a commitment to the transforming ideals of liberty and self-determination, even though the drama of forging ideals into a tangible reality played out very differently for a paragon of the colonial elite than for his runaway slave. We must have competing narratives of liberty fought for and won in the American Revolution in order to comprehend the enormity of the impact of the Revolution, as well as the ideas it spawned, in radically reshaping America and the wider Atlantic world. Yet is it even possible to recover the story of Harry Washington from the callous indifference of history? Few fugitive slaves have left an indelible impression on the historical record, and far fewer historians have ventured into the recesses of the archive in search of them. Nevertheless, diligent excavation in the vast Revolutionary-era archival collections, both American and British, does reveal traces of Harry Washington: the name on a bill of sale, on the list of taxable property, on a British military muster, on the embarkation list of a transport ship, on a register of land titles, and in the verdict summary of a court-martial. From these insignificant scratches and tattered bits of administrative flotsam, the lineaments of a life can be reconstructed. And not only for the man known as Harry Washington. One of the most remarkable archival documents, which can be found in both American and British annals, is a compilation of the names of three thousand black men, women, and children, among them Harry Washington, who were evacuated from New York between April and November 1783, all but a few carrying certificates of freedom signed by a British general. This document, known as the Book of Negroes, provides a brief description of each person, along with the name of their former owner. It accounts for about one-third of those who left America as free black people during the British withdrawal and stands as the most substantial piece of evidence of the alliance between fugitive slaves and the British military during the Revolution.2 From the moment that hostilities commenced in 1775, enslaved men and women took to their heels, with rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free people ringing about their ears, entrusting their aspirations for liberty not to their Patriot masters, but to the king’s men.
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