The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832

by Taylor, Alan

  ALSO BY ALAN TAYLOR

  The Civil War of 1812:

  American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies

  The Divided Ground:

  Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution

  Writing Early American History

  American Colonies:

  The Settling of North America

  William Cooper’s Town:

  Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic

  Liberty Men and Great Proprietors:

  The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820

  For Alessa, Chris and Gabriel

  And in memory of Emory G. Evans

  CONTENTS

  List of Ilustrations and Maps

  INTRODUCTION

  1. REVOLUTION

  2. NIGHT AND DAY

  3. BLOOD

  4. WARSHIPS

  5. INVASION

  6. LESSONS

  7. PLANTATION

  8. FLIGHT

  9. FIGHT

  10. CRISIS

  11. AGENTS

  12. FIRE BELL

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX A: Corotoman Enslaved Families, 1814

  APPENDIX B: Numbers

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  I do not wish, sir, to leave my master, but I will follow my wife and children to death.

  DICK CARTER, APRIL 22, 1814

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

  Maps

  The Chesapeake Region, 1812

  The Chesapeake Campaign, 1813

  The Chesapeake Campaign, 1814

  The North Atlantic, 1815

  Illustrations

  “Burning of the Theater in Richmond, [December 26, 1811],” colored aquatint by B. Tanner, 1812.

  “Peter Francisco’s Gallant Action with Nine of Tarleton’s Calvary,” engraving by D. Edwin, 1814.

  “View of Norfolk from Town Point,” watercolor by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1798.

  “Rippon Lodge,” watercolor by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1796.

  “But I did not want to go and I jumped out of the Window,” engraving by Jesse Torrey, 1817.

  “Virginian Luxuries,” tavern sign by unknown artist, ca. 1825.

  “An Overseer Doing His Duty, Sketched from Life near Fredericksburg,” watercolor by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1798.

  “St. George Tucker,” engraving by Charles B. J. F. de Saint-Memin, 1807.

  “Extraordinary Appearances in the Heavens and on Earth,” watercolor by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1797.

  Gilbert Hunt (1773–1863), portrait by unknown photographer.

  “A Private of the Fifth West India Regiment,” aquatint by I. J. C. Stadler, 1814.

  “Sectional Sketch of a Tellegraph on the Lever Principles,” sketch by William Tatham, 1812.

  “Governor James Barbour of Virginia.”

  “Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren, R.N.,” engraving by R. N. Stipple, 1800.

  “The Conspiracy Against Baltimore, or the War Dance at Montgomery Court House,” cartoon by unknown Maryland Republican, 1812.

  “Admiral Cockburn Burning & Plundering Havre de Grace on the 1st of June 1813; done from a Sketch taken on the spot at the time.”

  “Vice Admiral Sir Alexander F. I. Cochrane,” oil portrait by Sir William Beechey.

  “Lelia Skipwith Carter Tucker,” oil painting by unknown artist, ca. 1815.

  “Joseph Carrington Cabell,” from Alexander Brown, The Cabells and their Kin (1895).

  Caricature by Thomas McLean, 1831.

  “British Boats Landing at the Mouth of Lake Borne,” pen and ink drawing by Rear Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm, 1815.

  “Admiral Sir George Cockburn,” oil painting by John James Halls, 1817.

  “Tangier Island, with a plan of the Barracks, &c erected upon it by the 3d. Battalion of Regular & Colonial Marines,” from the papers of Vice Admiral Sir Alexander F. I. Cochrane, 1814.

  “Colonial Marines Drilling at Tangier Island in 1814,” modern painting of Gerry Embleton.

  “First View of the Battle of Patapsco Neck,” engraving by Andrew Duluc, 1814.

  “View of the Capitol of the United States after the Conflagration,” engraving by Jesse Torrey, 1817.

  “A View of the Town of St. George, Bermuda,” aquatint by I. J. C. Stadler, 1815.

  “Philanthropie Moderne,” cartoon by a French pro-slavery artist, 1830s.

  “Gabriel Hall,” photograph by George H. Craig, 1892.

  “Halifax, from Dartmouth Point,” acquatint by G. I. Parkyns, 1817.

  “Horrid Massacre in Virginia,” woodcut by unknown Virginian, 1831.

  “The Noble Virginians Going to Battle,” engraving by William Hillhouse, 1820.

  “George R. Roberts,” anonymous photograph, undated.

  INTRODUCTION

  Unfortunately, we have two enemies to contend with—the one open & declared; the other nurtured in our very Bosoms!

  Sly, secret & insidious: in our families, at our Elbows, listening with eager attention; and sedulously marking all that is going forward.

  —ROBERT GREENHOW, MAYOR OF RICHMOND, 18131

  One night in October 1814, on the Virginia shore of the Potomac River, several young enslaved men stole a canoe and paddled across the river to Laidloes Ferry on the Maryland shore. Abandoning the canoe, they took the larger ferry boat, for they needed a craft big enough to carry away seventeen people. Returning to the Virginia shore, the men retrieved wives and children for a dash down the river to seek a British warship as their portal to freedom. In the morning, their masters discovered that the slaves were gone and, in the words of one witness, “had taken many articles out of Mr. [Abraham] Hooe’s dwelling house in the course of the Night [and] all their own articles & effects out of their houses.” Armed white men rowed a swift boat in pursuit down the river, but in vain, for the slaves had reached the warship.2

  During the War of 1812, Royal Navy warships pushed into Chesapeake Bay and up the Potomac River to punish the United States for declaring war against the British Empire. The Royal Navy attacked the region as the home of the national capital, a heartland of economic resources, and, in the case of Virginia, a hotbed of pro-war sentiment. The naval raids created an opportunity for the enslaved to escape and become free. Hundreds enlisted in the British service as sailors and marines or served as laundresses and nurses.

  The ferry-boat escape aptly represented slave flight to the British during the War of 1812. First, this escape exposed the links of kin and friendship that constructed African American communities across several farms in a broad neighborhood, for the seventeen runaways had belonged to four different men, led by Abraham B. Hooe, who lost eleven slaves that night. Second, the runaways were especially valuable slaves: able, young, and skilled as artisans or house servants. Assessed at nearly $8,000 in total, the seventeen included two blacksmiths, two carpenters, a weaver, and two cooks. Third, most of these fugitives were young men, aged eighteen to thirty-five, with only one over that age, but the group also included two young women and three children. Indeed, the war enabled many enslaved families in the Tidewater to flee together. Fourth, this escape demonstrated careful planning and coordination as young men assembled kin and property and procured a craft big enough for all. They were far savvier than their masters had imagined.3

  Five and a half years later, the leader of the escape wrote a letter to his former master, Hooe. In October 1814, Bartlet Shanklyn had been a prized blacksmith, thirty-five years old and worth $800
: the most valuable of the runaways. In May 1820 he was thriving as a free man in Preston, a black township near Halifax in Nova Scotia, and he wanted Hooe to know it:

  Sir, I take this opportunity of writing these lines to inform you how I am situated hear. I have [a] Shop & Set of Tools of my own and am doing very well when I was with you [you] treated me very ill and for that reason i take the liberty of informing you that i am doing as well as you if not beter. When i was with you I worked very hard and you neither g[ave] me money nor any satisfaction but sin[ce] I have been hear I am able to make Gold and Silver as well as you. The night that Cokely Stoped me he was very Strong but I showed him that subtilty Was far preferable to strength and brought away others with me who thank God are all doing well. So I Remain, Bartlet Shanklyn

  P.S. My love to all my friends. I hope they are doing well

  As a free man, Shanklyn could, at last, make his own money. Virginia slaves were third- and fourth-generation Americans who knew the social value of a dollar as the measure of a man’s merit. Indeed, the runaway had become a better man than the master who had treated him so “very ill” by keeping him down, for Shanklyn’s prosperity did not rely on enslaving others. “Cokely” was apparently a powerful man, perhaps an overseer, who tried to restrain Shanklyn on the eve of the escape, but the clever blacksmith had outwitted the foe to lead family and friends to freedom. Slavery had taught the value and the ways of “subtilty” to the enslaved, who had to mask their knowledge and resistance. Rather than destroy the rebuking letter, Hooe showed more greed than pride by submitting it as evidence in a bid for postwar compensation from the federal government. Hooe’s choice preserved Shanklyn’s words for future readers.4

  About 3,400 slaves fled from Maryland and Virginia to British ships during the War of 1812. After the War of 1812, most of the refugees resettled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Trinidad, while a few scattered throughout the global British Empire. In their new communities, the refugees confronted discrimination, but they achieved far more autonomy and material success than they had known as slaves in the Chesapeake. In contrast to the earlier runaways of the revolution, the War of 1812 fugitives have received little attention from historians. Consequently, distortions persist, including the popular canard that the British resold the runaways into a worse slavery in the West Indies.5

  Fortunately, the experiences of the runaways are richly documented, especially in the postwar files submitted by their former masters seeking compensation. The files include depositions describing dramatic escapes, affidavits reconstituting slave families, and even a few postwar letters from runaways to relatives and former masters. By drawing on those largely untapped sources, this book examines the causes, course, and consequences of the flight by slaves to join and help the British. While focusing on the war years of 1812–1815, The Internal Enemy situates that conflict in a longer history of slavery and freedom in Virginia, the early republic’s largest and most powerful state. Rather than offer a conventional military history of the Chesapeake campaigns, which other historians have already done, this book taps the unusually rich documents generated by war to reveal the social complexities of slavery in Virginia from the American Revolution through Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831.

  The fugitives demonstrated an initiative that transformed the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake. At the start of the conflict, the British sought only a few black men to serve as pilots and guides and balked at a larger flight that included women and children. During 1813, however, six hundred runaways stole boats and canoes to press themselves on the British, straining the capacity of the naval officers to feed the fugitives as well as their own crews. The officers gradually recognized that the refugees offered solutions to two key problems: a shortage of manpower and a lack of local knowledge. By welcoming the runaways, the British could strengthen their force with men and women who had a keen understanding of local waterways and paths.

  Impressed by the numbers and zeal of the runaways, the British admirals persuaded their government to authorize a more aggressive war meant to disrupt the plantation economy. During 1814, the British shifted their strategy in favor of encouraging mass escapes, including women and children, for few enslaved men would come away without their families. The British enlisted 400 male runaways into a special battalion known as the Colonial Marines. These men became the best troops in the British force, for, unlike white men, they would not (indeed, could not) desert to enjoy freedom in the republic. Instead, the black marines had to fight to preserve their new liberty.

  After taking in the runaways, the British became adept at nocturnal raids that frustrated the defenders of Virginia and Maryland during 1814. Masters dominated slaves by day, but slaves enjoyed more freedom at night. Familiar with paths through the woods, the enslaved could defy masters to gather for worship or to steal pigs and sheep for covert barbecues. While their masters and overseers slept, slaves also roamed to seek frolics, wives, and food. In the process, they sustained their own communities, which linked several farms owned by different masters. The runaways carried their networks and nocturnal expertise to the British, enhancing their capacity to wage war in the Chesapeake.

  Strengthened by the runaways, the British could raid deeper into the countryside to procure the fresh provisions, especially livestock, desperately needed to feed the refugees and crews on board the increasingly crowded warships. The raids also allowed the black marines to plunder their former masters and retrieve family members. By bottling up trade while looting and burning farms and plantations, the attacks wrecked the Chesapeake economy. After exhausting militia resistance southeast of Washington, D.C., the British and the Colonial Marines could seize the national capital in August 1814, when they burned the White House and the Capitol.

  The British commanders gloried in the intimidating power of their black recruits. In the Chesapeake region, the Colonial Marines played the part of forest fighters in a manner that resembled the Indian allies deployed by the British along the frontiers of the republic. Armed blacks and Indians haunted the overactive imaginations of the Americans, who dreaded darker-skinned peoples as ruthless savages. Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn boasted that the Virginians “expect Blacky will have no mercy on them, and they know that he understands bush fighting and the locality of the woods as well as themselves and can perhaps play at hide and seek in them even better.”6

  In 1814 at Corotoman Plantation in Lancaster County, British raiders liberated sixty-nine slaves: the largest wartime loss by any estate in the Chesapeake. Corotoman’s owners included St. George Tucker, who had played a leading role in defining freedom while preserving slavery in Virginia in the wake of the revolution. In 1796, he drafted a famous plan for the very gradual emancipation of Virginia’s slaves. When the state legislature abruptly rejected the proposal, a wounded Tucker retreated to a pro-slavery position and supported the efforts by his son-in-law, Joseph C. Cabell, to compel harder work from the Corotoman slaves and to sell the surplus. Cabell’s new regime angered the slaves, provoked stiff resistance, and culminated in their escape in April 1814.

  In Virginia, the revolution had produced a tragic contradiction by promoting greater equality for white men while weakening the security of black families. The celebrated abolition of primogeniture and entail increased the property rights of younger heirs. As Thomas Jefferson intended, the new inheritance laws promoted, through the divided transmission of property, the reduction of the largest estates in Virginia in favor of a broader middle class of white men. But the division of estates often separated enslaved wives from their husbands and both from their children. By diffusing slave ownership, the new laws also broadened public support for slavery. As a consequence, emancipation efforts faltered in Virginia during the late 1780s, and they vanished a decade later, with Tucker’s rejected plan as an epitaph.

  During the War of 1812, British warships gave hundreds of slaves a precious new opportunity to reunite their families by fleeing together. Because they longed to escape in ki
nship groups, the runaways rarely came from the distant interior. Instead, they fled from the Tidewater farms along navigable waterways and within sight and sound of the British warships. They escaped from a Virginia society that had been reshaped to their detriment by the American Revolution, so they turned to the British enemies of that revolution. After 1800, the British gained greater appeal as liberators by their efforts to suppress the oceanic slave trade, ameliorate slavery in the West Indies, and protect the new black republic of Haiti. By organizing regiments of black soldiers in the West Indies, the British also set a precedent for the Colonial Marines. Because slavery persisted in the British West Indies, the British were far from consistent liberators, but they had a better record on that score than did the Virginians. And as the enemies of the slaves’ enemies in the War of 1812, the British became their friends.7

  During the early nineteenth century, Virginians thought of blacks in two radically different ways. On the one hand, masters often felt secure with, and even protective of, particular slaves well known to them. But when thinking of all slaves collectively, the Virginians imagined a dreaded “internal enemy” who might, at any moment, rebel in a midnight massacre to butcher white men, women, and children in their beds. Virginians dwelled on lurid reports of massacres associated with the massive slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, a French West Indian colony that became the republic of Haiti in 1804. Virginians had not yet adopted the consoling myth, of the mid-nineteenth century, that their slaves were weak, happy, and docile.8

  Prior to the War of 1812, Virginians frankly acknowledged that their exploitation and domination had bred an internal enemy who longed for freedom. In a long career as a politician, John Randolph heard many celebrated orators, including Henry Clay, Patrick Henry, and, of course, himself, but he assured a friend, “The greatest orator I ever heard . . . was a woman. She was a slave. She was a mother and her rostrum was the auction block.” According to that friend, Randolph “then rose and imitated with thrilling pathos the tones with which this woman had appealed to the sympathy and justice of the bystanders, and finally the indignation with which she denounced them.” Randolph concluded, “There was eloquence! . . . I have heard no man speak like that. It was overpowering!”