It is thus unsurprising that Jeremiah’s trial was a sham. Despite his free status, Jeremiah was nonetheless tried in a slave court under the Negro Act of 1740, which meant that he was considered guilty until proven innocent. Sir William Campbell, South Carolina’s embattled British governor, attempted to intervene, only to have the Council of Safety declare that if he did not desist they would hang Jeremiah from the post at the governor’s mansion. There would be no reprieve. In August 1775, Thomas Jeremiah was hanged, his body then burnt in what would become a common ritual of lynching. It was a joint warning: to slaves not to imagine that the British could bring them freedom; to the British not to contemplate fomenting insurrection; and to Americans that it was time to choose a side. Writing to England, a despondent Campbell confessed that “my blood runs cold when I read on what grounds they doomed a fellow creature to death . . . the man was murdered.” “They have now dipt their hands in Blood,” he concluded with foreboding. “God almighty knows where it will end.”9
As slave and free man across South Carolina contemplated the fate of those who reached too high, and wondered about the possibility of emancipation in the coming war, the Royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, played right into hands of slave dreams and Patriot propaganda. On November 14, 1775, the beleaguered Dunmore responded to growing colonial intransigence by declaring martial law and announcing that any slave or indentured servant who joined his forces against the rebels would be granted their freedom. Dunmore had contemplated the idea of raising a slave army as early as 1772, and had threatened to do so as recently as the spring of 1775. Indeed, escaped slaves had been flocking to his army at Norfolk to offer their services before the official proclamation was ever made, convincing the governor of the viability of the plan and undermining colonial conceptions of natural slave servility. Dunmore’s official proclamation paid immediate dividends. Word of the offer of freedom spread rapidly, and from across the southern colonies slaves rushed to seize their chance at liberty.
Dunmore’s pledge became the talk of all Americans, free and unfree. White Americans were sure that the proclamation would encourage disobedience in slaves and servants, set off insurrections everywhere, and upend the racial order. In Philadelphia, the supposed heartland of liberty, a white woman reported that a black man refused to show her proper deference by giving her the right of way on a narrow street, compounding the insult by informing her that if she stayed “till Lord Dunmore and his black regiment come . . . we will see who is to take the wall.” Another white Philadelphian complained, “Hell itself could not have vomited anything more black than his [Dunmore’s] design of emancipating our slaves . . . the flame runs like wild fire through the slaves.” Robert Carter gathered his slaves at his Virginia plantation and tried to convince them that Dunmore’s Proclamation was a British ploy to sell them into slavery in the West Indies. He was sure that none of his bondsmen would flee to Dunmore, but was swiftly proved wrong when they organized a well-planned breakout with fellow slaves from neighboring plantations. Outraged at Dunmore’s Proclamation, Thomas Jefferson went so far as to add complaints about the British “exciting those very people [slaves] to rise in arms,” and purchase their liberty by murdering Americans.10
When the news of Dunmore’s Proclamation flowed through the sophisticated slave communication networks down to South Carolina, many enslaved Carolinians jumped at the chance to secure their freedom. The proclamation had been purposefully limited—he was himself a major slave-holder after all—but to enslaved Americans, already primed to believe that Britain was the font of liberty, his declaration seemed to be a more universal offer of freedom in exchange for service to the crown. Beginning as early as December 1775, a trickle, then a flood, of African Americans began to slip away to Sullivan Island in the middle of Charleston harbor, where British ships were anchored. Sullivan Island was a fitting place for these former slaves to cast off their shackles. Since 1707, the sandy, windswept island had been the unloading point and place of quarantine for thousands of men, women, and children who had survived the horrors of the Middle Passage before they were sent to the slave auctions in Charleston. Many of the hundreds now drawn to the protection of the British ships must have taken their first chain-bound steps on American soil on the sands of Sullivan Island.
Boston King, though he was now resident in Charleston and, as an apprentice, in possession of some freedom of movement, was not among the hundreds of slaves who packed onto Sullivan’s Island in hope of British favor. There was considerable risk involved in running to the British. Many slave owners, like Robert Carter mentioned above, warned their slaves that the British offer was false, and that promises of freedom merely cloaked a ploy to sell American slaves to the notorious sugar plantations of the Caribbean. For those not fooled by this sort of claim, colonial slave-holders increased patrols and sentinels to catch runaways and force them back into bondage. Those caught fleeing to the British, or captured after enlisting in the British army, saw punishments that could be brutal in the extreme. Recaptured slaves were sold to the West Indies, condemned to work in lead mines, and even executed. One former slave who served as a guide for the British was captured and beheaded, his head left on a post as a gruesome warning to other slaves and runaways. The conditions for slaves in British camps were little better, with provisions scarce and disease rampant. When Dunmore abandoned Norfolk, he left as many as 500 dead refugees behind him, many putrefying in the sun “without a shovelful of earth upon them,” as the Virginia Gazette reported. With such serious disincentives, flight was not a decision to be made lightly, and there is considerable evidence that those who did choose to escape did so after careful planning, or when British lines were near enough to make the chances of success more certain. But despite the risks, thousands of enslaved Americans were only to ready to take their chance for freedom.11
In January 1776, before he could make up his mind to make a break for freedom and join the British forces gathered at Charleston, Sir William Campbell and his soldiers were driven out of Charleston harbor. Since early in 1775 persistent rumors had spread that Campbell was plotting to foment a massive slave rebellion to resolve the dispute with the colony. It was said that 14,000 guns had been smuggled into Charleston to arm South Carolina’s avenging slaves, and many saw the rapidly expanding refugee settlement on Sullivan’s Island as the tip of an insurrectionary iceberg. By the fall of 1775, more than 500 former slaves were living on Sullivan’s Island under British protection. As the year progressed, Charleston’s Committee of Public Safety heard testimony of refugees joining night raids on neighboring plantations and skulking about Charleston’s streets encouraging other slaves to escape and join them on Sullivan’s Island. The existence of British-protected fugitive slaves in Charleston’s midst was thus seized upon as a pretext for an assault on Sullivan’s Island: better to drive off the British instigators and retake their human property before their nefarious plot could unfold. Campbell took some of the refugees with him when he fled, but others were recaptured.12
Considering the sad plight of the slaves who had sheltered under British guns on Sullivan Island, Boston King may well have been relieved that he had not joined them. The absence of the British, however, cut off the most viable path to freedom that had perhaps ever existed for South Carolina’s slaves. For King and many others, it must have seemed as if their chance for liberty had sailed away with the British fleet. There would be another chance, however. After the disastrous defeat at Saratoga, in March of 1778 the British army, despairing of ever breaking the deadlock that had developed in the north, altered its strategy. Sir Henry Clinton, now in command of British forces, was ordered to turn his sights on the southern colonies, where it was hoped that loyalists and slaves would flock to the British banner and tip the balance of the war in their favor. The first targets were Savannah and Charleston, both vital engines of the colonial economy.
In December 1778 Savannah fell to British forces after a sharp but one-sided battle. Just 100 mile
s away in Charleston, Patriots, loyalists, and slaves all waited in nervous anticipation for the siege they were sure was on the horizon. But if he hoped that the coming fight would secure his freedom, Boston King was again disappointed. Like many white residents of Charleston, King’s master looked at the prospect of a British invasion with apprehension and fled the city, taking King with him. When Clinton’s army began its siege of Charleston on April 1, 1780, Boston King, by now a trained carpenter, was nearly 40 miles outside the city building a house for a Mr. Waters. The city fell to the British six weeks later on May 12, to the cautious rejoicing of Charleston’s enslaved population. Stuck in the countryside, it must have seemed to King that he had once more missed his chance.
Shortly after the conquest of Charleston, however, King was given permission to visit his parents, who lived some 12 miles from Mr. Waters’ house. He borrowed a horse from Waters to make the journey, but one of Waters’ white servants commandeered it, leaving King in a tenuous bind. He knew he would be held responsible for the absence of the horse, and fully “expected the severest punishment” from its owner, a man who “knew not how to show mercy.” He chose instead to take the chance to flee. Four years earlier, when faced with similar violence, King had opted not to escape to the British on nearby Sullivan’s Island, even though many other slaves had already done so. The British had since returned to South Carolina, but they were now miles away, seemingly beyond reach. Nonetheless, much had changed in the years since King last contemplated flight.
Back then, in 1776, Lord Dunmore, the man who made the proclamation that offered freedom to those who joined the British, was leagues away in Virginia, and the stories about the refugee camps that filtered down to South Carolina painted a bleak picture of the conditions and fate of those who had answered Dunmore’s call. In 1776, British officials in South Carolina had made no such promises, and conditions on Sullivan’s Island were hardly better than those that prevailed in Virginia. But now, in 1780, Charleston was governed by Sir Henry Clinton who, in preparation for his southern offensive, had issued his own proclamation at Philipsburg in June of 1779 offering freedom to any slave who deserted to the British. After the fall of Savannah, black refugees had joined the British in droves, setting a potent precedent for South Carolina’s bondsmen.
In the years since 1776, the stories and articles that detailed the tragedy of the refugees had also been supplanted by tales altogether more heroic. Instead of cowering behind British lines, easy prey for disease and reprisals, by 1780 former slaves had joined regiments like Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, the Black Pioneers, and Watts’ Blacks to take the fight to their former captors. The Black Pioneers had served with courage and distinction in New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, and even joined the fight against Francis Marion’s guerrillas in the Carolina Low Country. In New Jersey, a former slave named Colonel Tye had cast off his shackles, joined the British, and blazed a path across the colony, ambushing Patriot militias and raiding plantations. For a young man like Boston King, after a lifetime of bondage, such tales of black action, of former slaves fighting back, must have been exhilarating. They certainly made the prospect of joining the British even more appealing. And now, these very black heroes were among the British conquerors of Savannah and Charleston. Facing a choice between the whip of enslavement and the clenched fist of the fight for freedom, Boston King was one of many enslaved South Carolinians to “go to Charles-Town and throw myself into the hand of the British.” He was “grieved” to leave behind his friends and family still in slavery, but the British welcomed him warmly, and after twenty years a slave, for the first time Boston King “began to feel the happiness of liberty, of which I knew nothing before.”13
Nothing could have prepared Boston King for the sight of New York. When he arrived in December 1782 the city was already packed to the gills with loyalists and refugees. The city had been a British stronghold since September 1776, and a refuge for loyalists and escaped slaves since the days of Dunmore’s Proclamation. Others had arrived more recently, thousands limping into the city with the defeated British forces just evacuated from Yorktown, Savannah, and Charleston. There were now more than 3,000 black refugees crowded into the city, most packed into tents and makeshift shelters in the fire-blackened ruins between Broadway and the Hudson River that had been set alight by Patriot terrorists shortly after the city’s capture by the British in 1776. Prior to the war, most escapees were predominantly male, but New York’s refugee camp housed an unprecedented mix of men, women, and children, whole families who had risked everything in the dash for freedom.
King’s path to New York had been equally harrowing. Almost as soon as he arrived in Charleston a free man, King was laid low by the smallpox that ravaged the crowded quarters of the city, especially among the refugees. The British command feared that illness would spread to the army, so sick refugees were hauled a mile or more away from the British camp where they were largely left without adequate food or water to recover or die on their own. King was lucky enough to receive aid from a fellow volunteer, and rejoined the army at Camden, where Lord Cornwallis, in command of British forces in the south after Clinton returned to New York, was camped following the Battle of Camden. King, like most refugees, did not join an infantry unit, but instead served as a laborer, messenger, guide, and servant to a British officer by the name of Captain Grey. The work often involved foraging for supplies in hostile territory and delivering communications across a confused, faction-ridden landscape. Twice, he faced the very real prospect of capture, re-enslavement, or execution, once by Patriot forces while delivering a message for the commanding officer at Nelson’s Ferry, and once when the deserting captain of a loyalist militia unit attempted to re-enslave him. King encountered the loyalist captain while alone catching fish for Captain Grey. The loyalist asked him “how will you like me to be your master?” Not about to surrender his newly won liberty so easily, King responded with “sharp words” about his status as a free man. But the captain responded with words of bone-chilling familiarity, calmly warning King that “if you do not behave well, I will put you in irons, and given you a dozen stripes every morning.” King was able to escape back to the British army, but for the refugees who joined the British side, the threat of capture and re-enslavement was constant.14
King’s luck continued to hold. While he dodged Patriot pickets and loyalist renegades, the majority of Cornwallis’s army, now trailing the plague-stricken corpses of thousands of ill soldiers and refugees in its wake, made its way to Virginia, where they were trapped at Yorktown. Those refugees well enough to work were employed digging ditches and raising earthworks for the coming siege. But the British were surrounded, low on supplies, and riddled with disease. As days of bombardment passed without relief, soldiers and refugees sickened and died in droves, until Cornwallis was left with only 3,500 active men to face the besieging Franco-American force of 16,000. With no other option left, on October 19, 1781 Cornwallis at last surrendered. Of the nearly 5,000 former slaves who had followed Cornwallis to Yorktown, only a few managed to escape with life and liberty intact. As many as 3,000 had already succumbed to the typhoid and smallpox that raged in the camp, and the American forces set sentinels to capture many of those who attempted to slip away after the surrender. Some managed to flee to the French, and some succeeded in boarding British ships bound for New York, but as many as half of the surviving refugees were captured and re-enslaved by the Americans. Their gamble for freedom had failed.
Boston King escaped the horrors of Yorktown, but he too was forced to contemplate the prospect of re-enslavement. King was in Charleston when Cornwallis capitulated, and it soon became clear that the city would be evacuated and turned over to the Americans. Slave owners and their agents swarmed into Charleston from across the south, looking to cajole, or even steal, their former slaves back to their plantations. As General Leslie, the British commander of Charleston, negotiated their retreat, South Carolina’s governor, John Mathews, gave an official
imprimatur to these attempts and demanded that all runaway slaves be left behind when the British quit the city. So desperate were the Americans to re-enslave the refugees that the governor even threatened to default on South Carolina’s debt to British merchants if their former slaves were not returned. Given the amount owed by South Carolina’s merchants, this was a serious threat, but for General Leslie the promise made to the refugees was a point of honor that could not be breached. “Those who have voluntarily come in under the faith of our protection,” he reasoned, “cannot in justice be abandoned to the merciless resentment of their former masters.” And so in December 1782, Boston King was among the 8,000 former and current slaves who boarded British ships for exile in New York, Florida, or the Caribbean.15
King was one of the fortunate few—perhaps 500 in total—to be sent to New York from Charleston. Most of the south’s black refugees, almost all still the property of loyalists, had been transported to east Florida and eventually to Jamaica and the Bahamas, where they faced conditions of unspeakable harshness on the sugar plantations of the British Caribbean. The population of the Bahamas increased by 7,000 in the three years after the war, with most of the newcomers arriving as the property of white loyalists. Despite the disruption of the slave trade from Africa, Jamaica’s enslaved population also grew rapidly, with the addition of perhaps as many as 80,000 slaves by 1785. Established planters and white loyalist refugees alike were eager to make up for lost time and lost profits, and the Caribbean sugar industry rapidly began to recover from the lean years of the war. There were some attempts to protect black loyalists with claims to free status—as Governor of the Bahamas since 1787, Lord Dunmore established a “Negro Court” to adjudicate such claims—but by and large most black refugees in the Caribbean were doomed to re-enslavement.16
To Begin the World Over Again Page 47
