To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  As in so many other areas, the loss of the American colonies in the west forced Britain to turn to the east. Britain still needed an outlet for its restless young men, and with America closed to British armies and British felons alike, new safety valves were needed. In the years after the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Irish revolutionaries and political prisoners would join the ordinary criminals in New South Wales as the penal colony became the favored outlet for Britain’s internal and imperial enemies. When traditional weavers and farm laborers destroyed new industrial machinery in the early nineteenth century, they too were exiled to Australia, once more allowing Britain to export its unrest while avoiding making martyrs in the name of order. With fewer interests across the Atlantic, British soldiers, sailors, and even surgeons were funneled into the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the growing arenas of imperial conflict. With the loss of its primary penal colony in America, Britain had been forced to innovate, pushing criminals into prisons, penitentiaries, and eventually to Oceania. The forced movement of soldiers, sailors, and convicts to the east helped to transform the world. By disrupting and displacing the long-standing judicial practices of the British Empire, the American Revolution had fundamentally altered the lives of tens of thousands, sending countless poor and downtrodden Europeans across the globe against their will. In turn, these forced migrants collided with existing populations and civilizations in Asia and Oceania, the first destabilizing waves of European conquest. Thus the inter-ethnic tensions and the resulting depopulation of native peoples far away in the South Pacific had their roots in the American Revolution. Without the American colonists’ successful struggle for independence, the peoples of eastern Australia—the Wangal, Cadigal, and the Commeraygal—might well have remained free from European encroachment, and European diseases, for a while longer. Instead, over 150,000 convicts were transported to what would become Australia between 1788 and 1840, bringing with them the British Empire and the disease, violence, and cultural annihilation that followed in its wake.56

  10

  EXILES OF REVOLUTION

  That John Randall found himself a forced settler in the South Pacific was merely the last in a calamitous series of indignities wrought by the American Revolution. He had been condemned to his present fate in the penal colony of New South Wales because he stole, but he stole because of events beyond his control. In the course of a decade he had been torn from one temporary home after another until he found himself in England bereft of hope. John Randall had been born into slavery in Connecticut in 1764, likely the property of Captain John Randall of Stonington. He was still just a teenager in 1777 when British raids along the Connecticut coast provided him with the opportunity to cast off his shackles and join the enemy of his American captors. He was too young to join the British army as a soldier, but his skills with the flute and tambour won him a place as a drummer with the 63rd Regiment of Foot and a chance to win his freedom. Without a home, when the war ended Randall followed his regiment back to England, where he was demobilized in Manchester in 1783.

  In post-war England, packed with demobbed soldiers and loyalist refugees in the tens of thousands, jobs were scarce and relief spread thin. He did his best to make do in a foreign country without friends or family, but with five regiments demobilized in Manchester alone, there was little prospect of legitimate employment. After two years of desperately struggling just to survive, in 1785 John Randall, like many others who found themselves in such dire straits, turned to crime. In April 1785, he and a partner, another black man, possibly a former slave like himself, were convicted of stealing a watch. When Randall was arrested, the jails of Manchester were already packed with the thieves and beggars that had proliferated in the post-war city. Unable to cope with the flood of felons, local officials instead sentenced them to transportation to Africa. From Manchester, Randall and his partner were thus dispatched to London, where they were shackled below deck on the prison hulk Ceres to await transportation to Africa. After several years of waiting in the fetid hulk on the Thames, when it became clear to London officials that transportation to Africa was not feasible, John Randall found himself a penal pioneer aboard the First Fleet, bound for Britain’s new penal colony in the South Pacific. He had been a pawn in the larger game of imperial competition, subject to whims of others and the tides of history. In this he was not alone.1

  John Randall was only one of many former slaves who found themselves unwanted refugees of the American War set adrift in a country they had never known. Sitting in the cramped quarters of the Ceres, Randall might well have seen many men with faces like his own in the bustling crowds of the capital. As many as a thousand former slaves had limped into London and the other ports of England in the years after the war. They had done their part for king and country, volunteering to fight against rebellious colonies and their former masters in exchange for the promise of freedom. For many the decision was an easy one. By the time the war began, Britain had become a symbol of freedom, a beacon of hope for many enslaved Americans. When the British at last bowed to the inevitable and capitulated in 1783, however, the former slaves had little choice but to follow their defeated allies into exile in Canada, the Caribbean, or Britain.

  Everywhere they went on their weary exodus, the refugees faced prejudice, hostility, poverty, and often violence. Many must have wondered what exactly their sacrifice had won them, whether British promises were more self-interested bluster than substance, whether they would ever find a place within the empire they had fought to save. But these men and women who had so daringly fought their way out of bondage had become tireless advocates for their own freedoms, never resting until the new world they had envisioned was firmly in their grasp. From slavery in America, to uncertainty and exploitation in the Caribbean, Nova Scotia, Britain, and finally Africa, the journeys of the black refugees of the American Revolution would fundamentally reshape the British Empire, take the first hesitant steps in the European scramble for empire in Africa, and pave the way for the eventual abolition of the slave trade that had smuggled generations of their people to American captivity.2

  Boston King was somewhat unusual in Britain’s black community. Unlike the established black British who had arrived as slaves or servants since the sixteenth century, or the “Black Poor” who had come more recently with the defeated British army, he had arrived in 1794 directly from Africa itself. He did not come to England as slave or servant or refugee, but rather as an enthusiastic agent of British imperialism. In England, he hoped to acquire the education and religious training he thought was necessary to continue his most cherished ambition, to bring Christianity and European civilization to his African kin. But though he came to Britain from Africa, he had not been born there. Like so many around the British Empire, Boston King’s story had been shaped by the American Revolution.

  As far as he knew, Boston King had been born into slavery around 1760 on the plantation of Richard Waring, about 28 miles outside of Charles Town, as Charleston was then known. His father had been “stolen away from Africa” as a child and survived the notorious Middle Passage before being sold into slavery in South Carolina. Through skill and determination, King’s parents had achieved relatively privileged positions within the circumscribed world of the plantation. His father acted as plantation overseer for years, and his mother, who had learned from local Native Americans how to use local plants and herbs to make medicine, cared for the sick and injured. At the age of 6, King himself had been assigned to work as a servant in his master’s house. At 9, he was charged with looking after the plantation’s cattle, and eventually traveled across America caring for his master’s race-horses. Though he was spared the rigors of the brutal labor in the fields, King’s life was far from easy, and any minor slip could result in brutal punishment. Once, when he misplaced one of the groom’s boots, he was forbidden to wear shoes all winter.3

  As war was breaking out in the north, King found himself in Charleston apprenticed to a carpenter. His master was a brutal man, and King
was frequently and savagely beaten for lost or misplaced tools and other minor infractions, leaving him unable to move for weeks on end. As word of events further north began to trickle down to South Carolina, the routine horrors of life in Charleston must have ensured that King was among the more enthusiastic listeners. News spread fast, even in the mostly illiterate world of the slave communities. In the dim light of slave cabins after the day’s back-breaking labor was done, on the streets of Charleston where skilled enslaved artisans were trained and then rented out by their masters, a palpable, if cautious, sense of hope was building as rumors swirled of a war between the American colonies and the British.

  Since he was a boy, King had heard whites throughout the colonies adopt the language of bondage and slavery in their deepening conflict with the British government. The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Act of 1767, passed in the wake of the Seven Years’ War as a means of recouping imperial expenses for a war fought on the colonists’ behalf, created an immediate backlash in America. Colonists up and down the Atlantic seaboard fumed about increases in taxation levied without their consent. In the crisis that followed, white Americans repeatedly bemoaned their “Wretched and miserable State of Slavery,” warning that Britain was preparing to “enslave her own children,” and, in the words of George Washington, sought to “make us as tame, and abject Slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” In South Carolina, Boston King may well have heard such hypocritical histrionics first-hand. In 1769, the South Carolina Gazette had joined the chorus declaiming against the Stamp Act, telling its readers that “whatever we may think of ourselves, we are as real SLAVES as those we are permitted to command.” When the hated Act was at last repealed, among the revelers who crowded around joyous bonfires on Charleston’s streets were white sailors wearing blackface to mark their status as Britain’s political slaves.4

  If King did hear such words he must have marveled at the gall it took to equate a lack of political representation with his own bruised and bloodied life as an actual slave. Such rhetoric, however, was not simply rank hypocrisy. For men who knew the cruel reality first-hand, who had themselves wielded yoke and chain and whip, the cries of political enslavement were the most potent means in their linguistic repertoire of expressing their anger and frustration. The discourse of enslavement thus served as clever Patriot propaganda, aimed not at British officials, who saw the ludicrous hyperbole for what it was, but at the colonists themselves, most of whom remained ambivalent about the coming conflict with Britain. Slavery was the worst fate such people could possibly imagine. Unlike most Britons, they had seen the horrors of slavery up close. In their eyes, if the slumbering colonial populace was to be awakened to the dangers of British imperial policy, such chilling metaphors had to be employed. The American Revolution was thus a project of fear as much as it was a project of hopeful idealism. Dire predictions of slavery and enslavement were joined by warnings of savage Indian raids, Hessian brutality, and British reprisals to terrify the broad, uncommitted middle into joining the Patriot cause. The rhetoric of slavery was not a matter of white Americans ignoring their own role as slave-holders but of using their lived reality to give weight to their warnings and gravity to their threats.

  For slaves like King, however, the rhetoric of bondage that accompanied the Stamp Act crisis was joined by language and ideas altogether more inspiring. Alongside the shouts about British enslavement came talk of natural rights, of universal freedom, and of the brotherhood of man. Some of the men who joined this new, enlightened chorus even began to raise questions about the morality of African slavery itself. Such ideas thrilled many Americans, but none more so than those actually in fetters. Enslaved Americans absorbed and adapted such ideas and began to employ them in their own calls for freedom and independence. In Charleston, King might have seen the results first-hand. As early as 1765, black Carolinians seized upon the example of the Stamp Act protests to advocate for their own natural rights. For day after day, they marched through the streets of the city “crying out ‘Liberty’ ” until the authorities became so nervous that they put a stop to the protests.5

  When fighting broke out in Massachusetts in 1775, enslaved Americans saw in the emerging conflict a ray of hope. Given the rhetoric of the rebellious colonists, there was reason to believe that an American victory would see attacks on political slavery expanded to include slavery more broadly and reify ideas of natural rights and universal freedom. In such circumstances, they thought, emancipation surely could not be far behind. But while some held out hope that the colonies would take their enlightened ideals to their logical abolitionist conclusion, most looked to the British as the source of liberty. Over the previous decade, while white colonists were busy transforming Britain into a symbol of tyranny and political enslavement, unfree Americans were beginning to see Britain as the font of freedom. In 1772, Britain’s chief justice, Lord Mansfield, had found in favor of James Somerset, an American slave brought to England by his master. While in England, Somerset had escaped, only to be recaptured. Somerset’s owner wanted to sell him to another master in the West Indies, but the case was seized by abolitionists and became an early cause célèbre. Mansfield attempted to issue a narrow ruling setting Somerset free, but in declaring that slavery had no basis in English common law, his decision was popularly believed to have ended slavery in Britain. Slave-owning Americans saw the decision as a betrayal, yet another signal of Britain’s tyrannous intent, and began to consider separation from Britain. Enslaved Americans, unsurprisingly, saw the case as a sign that if their longed-for emancipation were to come, it would come in Britain or through British means.

  Back in Charleston, Boston King was at the center of the unfolding drama between colonies and king. However, if he were among those who held out hope that white Americans would live up to their lofty rhetoric, he was violently disabused of that notion in the summer of 1775. That August, a large crowd gathered in his city to witness the execution of Thomas Jeremiah for instigating a slave rebellion. Thomas Jeremiah was one of the fewer than 500 free men of color in the entire colony, and certainly the most successful. As a harbor pilot and fisherman he had amassed a considerable fortune that made him quite possible the wealthiest person of African descent in all of British North America. In June of 1775, however, Jeremiah was accused of attempting to supply guns to local slaves as part of a wider plot to revolt against colonial rule. Informants testified that Jeremiah was telling every slave who would listen that “a great war . . . was coming to help the poor Negroes” and that in order to aid the British he wanted to get guns “placed in the hands of Negroes to fight against the inhabitants of the province.”6

  For white South Carolinians, these stories of British allied slave insurrections confirmed their worst fears. South Carolina had the largest proportion of slaves in America, with as many as 107,000 slaves far outnumbering the white population of roughly 71,000. With this imbalance came a deep and abiding terror of slave rebellion. That nightmare had come true only thirty-five years earlier in 1739 when as many as 100 slaves from the Stono River area had marched for Spanish Florida under a banner reading “Liberty!” razing plantations along the way. In 1766 a supposed slave plot was again discovered in the midst of the Stamp Act crisis. When war broke out with Britain in 1775, it was thus dread rather than hope that percolated down to the slave-holding south with the news from Massachusetts. Throughout America, but especially in the southern colonies, many Patriots fully believed that the British administration was devising a “black plan” to foment slave rebellions as a means of suppressing American dissent. When Sir William Campbell arrived in Charleston to take up the post of Royal Governor in June 1775, he was dogged by accusations that he had been sent to organize slave insurrections. Talk in the town had it that he had brought with him 14,000 guns to arm slaves, that slaves and servants had been intentionally “deluded by some villainous persons into the notion of being all set free,” and that “His Majesty’s ministers and other servants in
stigated their slaves to rebel against their masters and cut their throats.” “Massacres and Insurrections,” one official remembered, “were words in the mouth of every child.”7

  The evidence against Jeremiah was flimsy at best, and the accusations almost certainly invented, but such was the mindset of slave-holding whites that he was nonetheless sacrificed to appease the mob. As a free man and a slave owner himself, Jeremiah was hardly likely to encourage, let alone lead, a slave rebellion. In reality, however, in a time of such heightened tensions, it was likely Jeremiah’s very success as a free man that singled him out as the embodiment of white insecurities. Henry Laurens, who was among his chief prosecutors, considered Jeremiah “a forward fellow, puffed up by prosperity, ruined by Luxury and debauchery and grown to an amazing pitch of vanity and ambition.” In the context of the opening stages of the revolution, a black man who threatened to upend the racial hierarchy was a convenient target. But the Jeremiah affair was not merely about easing the slumber of worried whites, it was also about manufacturing fear as a means of gaining converts to the colonial cause, stoking age-old anxieties about the racial unbalance to secure support. According to a local British official, Patriots needed “to have recourse to the instigated insurrection among their slaves, effectually to gain the point proposed.” The Patriot General Committee of South Carolina itself admitted that “the dread of instigated Insurrections at home” was enough “to drive an oppressed People to the use of Arms.” Fear of slave revolts was real, especially in a time of war, but these fears were intentionally ratcheted up to vilify the British and gain adherents.8