BOSTON’S AFRICAN MEETING HOUSE (THE OLDEST STANDING BLACK CHURCH IN THE USA) And yet — in fact you need only draw a single thread at any point you choose out of the fabric of life and the run will make a pathway across the whole, and down that wider pathway each of the other threads will become successively visible, one by one. — Heimito von Doderer, DIE DÂIMONEN HDT WHAT? INDEX AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL 1783 November: The British vessel Peggy sailed out of Staten Island, New York for Nova Scotia, with many former American slaves, freed in recognition of their labor services to the British army and in fulfilment of manumission promises made, aboard. AMERICAN REVOLUTION GOODBYE, COLUMBUS by Jill Lepore (The New Yorker, issue of 2006-05-08) When America won its independence, what became of the slaves who fled for theirs? What with the noise, the heat, and the danger of being forced back into slavery, sometimes it’s good to get out of the city. Such, at least, was the assessment of Harry Washington, who, in July of 1783, made his way to the salty, sunbaked docks along New York’s East River and boarded the British ship L’Abondance, bound for Nova Scotia. A clerk dutifully noted his departure in the “Book of Negroes,” a handwritten ledger listing the three thousand runaway slaves and free blacks who evacuated New York with the British that summer: “Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago.” Born on the Gambia River around 1740, not far from where he would one day die, Harry Washington was sold into slavery sometime before 1763. Twelve years later, in November, 1775, he was grooming his master’s horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty’s troops in suppressing the American rebellion. That December, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore’s proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. “There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,” a cousin of Washington’s wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, “Liberty is sweet.” In August of 1776, just a month after delegates to the Continental Congress determined that in the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands that have connected them with another, Harry Washington declared his own independence by running away to fight with Dunmore’s all-black British regiment, wearing a uniform embroidered with the motto “Liberty to Slaves.” Liberty may not have been as sweet as he’d hoped. For most of the war, he belonged to an unarmed company known as the Black Pioneers, who were more or less garbagemen, ordered to “Assist in Cleaning the Streets & Removing all Nuisances being thrown into the Streets.” The Black Pioneers followed British troops under the command of Henry Clinton as they moved from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston, and, after the fall of Charleston, back to New York again, which is how Harry Washington came to HDT WHAT? INDEX AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL be in the city in 1783, and keen to leave before General Washington repossessed it, and him. No one knows how many former slaves had fled the United States by the end of the American Revolution. Not as many as wanted to, anyway. During the war, between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five) left their homes, running from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on a British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore’s regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.) When the British evacuated, fifteen thousand blacks went with them, though not necessarily to someplace better. From the moment that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, in 1781, American allies reported seeing “herds of Negroes” fleeing through Virginia’s swamps of pine and cypress. A few made it to a warship that Washington, under the terms of the British surrender, had allowed to sail to New York. Some ran to the French, on the not unreasonable supposition that earning wages polishing shoes in Paris had to be better than planting tobacco in Virginia for nothing but floggings. “We gained a veritable harvest of domestics,” one surprised French officer wrote. Hundreds of Cornwallis’s soldiers and their families were captured by their former owners, including five of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves and two women owned by George Washington. Those who escaped raced to make it behind British lines before the slave catchers caught up with them. Pregnant women had to hurry, too, but not so fast as to bring on labor, lest their newborns miss their chance for a coveted “BB” certificate: “Born Free Behind British Lines.” As runaways flocked to New York, or Charleston, or Savannah, cities from which the British disembarked, their owners followed them. Boston King, an escaped slave from South Carolina, saw American slave owners “seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” A Hessian officer reported, “Almost five thousand persons have come into this city to take possession again of their former property.” (It was at Washington’s insistence that the names of those who boarded British ships were recorded in the “Book of Negroes,” so that owners might later file claims for compensation.) In Charleston, after the ships were full, British soldiers patrolled the wharves to keep back the black men, women, and children who were frantic to leave the country. A small number managed to duck under the redcoats’ raised bayonets, jump off the wharves, and swim out to the last longboats ferrying passengers to the British fleet, whose crowded ships included the aptly named Free Briton. Clinging to the sides of the longboats, they were not allowed on board, but neither would they let go; in the end, their fingers were chopped off. But those who did leave America also left American history. Or, rather, they have been left out of it. Theirs is not an undocumented story (the “Book of Negroes” runs to three volumes); it’s just one that has rarely been told, for a raft of interesting, if opposing, reasons. A major one is that nineteenth-century African-American abolitionists decided that they would do better by telling the story of the many blacks who HDT WHAT? INDEX AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL fought on the patriot side during the Revolution, and had therefore earned for their race the right to freedom and full citizenship and an end to Jim Crow. “Not a few of our fathers suffered and bled” in the cause of American independence, Peter Williams, Jr., declared in a Fourth of July oration in New York in 1830. (Williams’s own father, who had joined American troops in defiance of his Loyalist master, later managed to purchase his freedom and went on to help found the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.) When the Boston abolitionist William Cooper Nell published “The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution,” in 1855, Harriet Beecher Stowe supplied an introduction: The colored race have been generally considered by their enemies, and sometimes even by their friends, as deficient in energy and courage. Their virtues have been supposed to be principally negative ones. This little collection of interesting incidents, made by a colored man, will redeem the character of the race from this misconception. Best not to mention those who fled to the British. Having abandoned the United States, they not only were of no use in redeeming “the character of the race”; they had failed to earn the “passport” to citizenship that Nell believed patriot service conferred. They were also too shockingly unfree to be included in grand nineteenth-century narratives of the Revolution as a triumph for liberty. As the historian Gary Nash observes in “The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution” (Harvard; $19.95), slavery is so entirely missing from those histories that “it would appear that the British and the Americans fought for seven years as if half a million African Americans had been magically whisked off the continent.” In 1891, the Harvard scholar John Fiske took notice of Dunmore’s proclamation in his two-volume “American Revolution,” only to dismiss it. “The relations between master and slave in Virginia were so pleasant,” Fiske wrote, that Britain’s “offer of freedom fell upon dull uninterested ears.” It wasn’t until Benjamin Quarles’s landmark “The Negro in the American Revolution,” in 1961, that what Harry Washington might have had to say about that became clear: Liberty is sweet. Many fine scholars have followed in Quarles’s wake, but it would be fair to say that their work has yet to challenge what most Americans think about the times that tried men’s souls. With no place in any national historical narrative, black refugees of the American Revolution have been set adrift. Perhaps, then, it is hardly surprising that they have been taken up recently not by American historians but by historians of the places they went to. Two new histories of their travels, the most ambitious yet, have just been published, one written by an Englishman, the other by an Australian.