by Taylor, Alan
Deeply embarrassed, the British commanders blamed the mercenaries and cited the alleged massacre at Craney Island as the trigger for their rage. Beckwith deemed them “a desperate Banditti, whom it is impossible to control.” Despite their shortage of troops, Beckwith and Warren shipped the mercenaries away to Halifax and then back to Europe. The commanders primarily acted to stem their rampant desertion rather than to punish them for their crimes. But the Virginians also lacked moral consistency, for they welcomed deserting mercenaries despite their atrocities at Hampton. Indeed, the Virginians preferred to blame the mess on the British commanders.50
The Republican press and politicians cast Cockburn as an arch-fiend who ravaged one and all. Describing the sack of Havre de Grace, one writer insisted, “Cockburn stood like Satan in his cloud, when he saw the blood of man from murdered Abel first crimson the earth, exulting at the damning deed, and treating the suppliant females with the rudest curses and most vile appellations—callous, insensible, hellish.” A second writer concluded “that there breathes not in any quarter of the globe a more savage monster.” A third declared, “He should be lashed naked through the world with whips of scorpions.” Some Americans renamed their chamber pots after Cockburn. In Virginia, an Irish American offered a $1,000 reward for Cockburn’s head and $500 for each of his ears. By casting the admiral as a monster, the Republicans denied that he could ever teach them lessons by discriminating in his targets.51
Cockburn felt both amused and outraged by his American reputation. In December he thanked a subordinate for sending him an American pamphlet: “The Book against me which you sent has afforded some amusement to those who have had time to read it & Sir John Warren is now going through it.” The abuse increased Cockburn’s determination to teach more lessons to the Americans. Employing the then-common British name for them as “Jonathans,” Cockburn explained, “My Ideas of managing Jonathan, is by never giving way to him, in spite of his bullying and abuse.”52
In general, the British sought to minimize civilian casualties while seeking out property for destruction. Farms and plantations and villages burned, but the Chesapeake campaign lacked the bloody massacres of civilians and prisoners that characterized the war raging in Europe. Compared to the brutality of the Napoleonic wars, particularly in Spain, the Chesapeake campaign of 1813 was remarkable for claiming the life of only one captured civilian: Mr. Kirby. The only confirmed rapes also occurred at Hampton.53
In July 1813, after plundering and wrecking Hampton for ten days, the British withdrew to their warships and reverted to sailing up and down the bay to harass weak points in both Virginia and Maryland. In late August, Warren sailed away to Halifax with half the squadron and all the soldiers to save them from desertion and malaria, which peaked in late summer. A month later, Cockburn withdrew most of the rest of the squadron to Bermuda to refit through the winter. The admirals left behind Captain Robert Barrie with a rump force: one ship of the line, two frigates, and five smaller vessels. Barrie’s little squadron guarded the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, attacking the merchant ships and privateers that tried to exit or enter. Through the cold, stormy fall and winter, Barrie and his men kept up this hard duty, capturing or destroying eighty-nine ships by February 4, 1814.54
Barrie also harassed the Virginia shores with petty raids. On September 21, he landed seventy marines and eighty armed sailors on the shore of Lynnhaven Bay, to attack an American observation post at the Pleasure House: a popular bayside tavern before the war. Most of the militiamen fled, but Barrie captured nine and then burned the compound. He dared not pursue the fleeing militia because, he explained, “we were extremely ignorant of the nature of the Country . . . interspersed by Swamps and Thickets”: a common British lament in 1813. He assured Cockburn that the fall raids were “a sad annoyance to the Militia as the weather is very severe and the Troops are all sickly.” He delighted in reports that the militiamen “complain bitterly of being kept to such hard duty in harvest time.” Cockburn congratulated Barrie for “keeping my Yankee Friends on the Fret. We ought not to allow them any Peace or Comfort.”55
Despite the miseries inflicted on the Americans, the close of the campaign left the British frustrated with their opening foray in the Chesapeake. Despite capturing many merchant ships and damaging some villages, the British had failed to inflict a crippling blow that would compel the Madison administration to call off the invasion of Canada and sue for peace. Used to victory and proud of their gentility, the British officers also felt embarrassed by their defeat at Craney Island and by the atrocities at Hampton.56
But the British officers expected greater victories in 1814 thanks to the local knowledge gained in 1813. They had mastered the bay by making maps and placing buoys, and they had learned the shores and made valuable contacts with cooperative suppliers. Scott boasted that the British achieved “a better knowledge of the navigation of the Chesapeake than the American pilots themselves; indeed the Americans were fully persuaded that some of their own countrymen had turned traitors and guided us through its intricacies”—as indeed they had. Cockburn insisted that a decisive blow could be struck in the Chesapeake region if the British could deploy more men.57
Deserters
During 1813, desertion weakened the already undermanned British force. In late March, thirty sailors stole three boats to desert to the militia at Hampton. In early August, many more bolted from a camp on Kent Island, Maryland, where a narrow and shallow strait allowed easy access to the mainland. By August 23, nineteen British deserters, including a midshipman, had reached Easton on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In late August, eighteen British sailors landed to seek some pigs in the bushes near Cape Henry beach, when seven “took to their heels and made off,” reaching the safety of an American militia guard.58
The Republicans celebrated every deserter as a triumph that proved the moral superiority of the republic over the empire. Desertion apparently revealed the prime weakness of the coercive empire: the alienation of its common sailors and soldiers, who longed “to quit their floating dungeons” to embrace the liberty of Americans. “If one hundred men are sent to shore, another hundred must be sent to watch them,” the Richmond Enquirer boasted.59
The Irish in the British service proved especially prone to desert often with the help of Irish Americans. In late April, during the British occupation of Spesutie Island, Major Wybourn discovered that four of his “best men” had deserted, persuaded by “an old Irish rascal who had been a labourer 14 years among the Yankees on this island.” Wybourn led a pursuit party, but the deserters escaped by wading across to the mainland, where “the four villains tossed their hats up, saying they were now Americans & tried to persuade” the pursuers “to join them.” To Wybourn’s relief his men “d[amne]d them for traitors & rascals & came back.”60
America enticed British deserters as the land of prosperity, liberty, cheap alcohol, and the same mother tongue. Employing “Jack,” the nickname for the common sailor, Lieutenant Scott lamented, “The captivating sounds of liberty and equality . . . have led astray many a clearer head and sounder judgment than falls to the lot of poor Jack.” The “land of freedom and plenty” allured men weary of “the regular and strict discipline absolutely necessary in a man-of-war.” Cockburn ordered his captains to minimize contact between their common sailors and American civilians “in order to avoid Corruption, Seduction, or the Seeds of Sedition being sown” among the crews. The British commanders had the unenviable task of fighting an enemy while closely guarding their own men.61
After a battle, the naval officers screened their new prisoners to cull anyone suspected of British birth or recognized as a deserter from the British service (even if he had been an impressed American). Most of those so detected were Irish by birth and Americans by choice. British captains also raided villages suspected of harboring deserters. At best, retaken deserters could expect a flogging followed by a return to hard duty on a warship. At worst, they were hanged from a ship’s yardarm as a warning to ot
hers. The Irishman Patrick Hallidan deserted from Kent Island on the night of August 15 in a stolen boat. Recaptured and convicted by a court-martial, he was hanged on August 28. Most deserters, however, got away into America.62
Already shorthanded when the campaign began, the warships suffered considerable attrition from sickness, a few combat deaths, and many desertions. In September 1812, Cockburn’s captains enumerated the crews for eight of his largest warships: they fell short of their full complement by 198 seamen and 56 marines (who were red-jacketed and musket-armed “sea-soldiers”). The desertions impaired the efficiency of the warships, and the remaining men bore a heavier workload, which increased their temptations to escape.63
The British needed able-bodied men who would resolutely fight the enemy rather than desert to him. A potential, partial solution lay in the hundreds of slaves who fled in stolen boats and canoes to seek refuge on the warships during 1813. Unlike the British sailor and marine, who anticipated a better life in the republic, the former slave would almost never desert. Cockburn sought to replace many of his white marines with black recruits: “They are stronger Men and more trust worthy for we are sure they will not desert whereas I am sorry to say we have Many Instances of our [white] Marines walking over to the Enemy.”64
Promoting slave escapes also seemed the perfect turnabout to punish the Americans for enticing Britons to desert. Codrington explained, “For surely if the Americans whilst at Peace with us encouraged the desertion of our Seamen & paraded them in triumph before our officers who were treated with the grossest insults, it is not unbecoming us to receive deserters from them when in open hostility against us, let their colour be what it may, using those deserters as soldiers or sailors according to the example they themselves set us. I hope, indeed, we shall punish them severely in this way.” British desertion helped to persuade the officers to embrace blacks as essential allies in the Chesapeake war.65
Fugitives
Americans dreaded that the British would promote a slave revolt to massacre white families, but the imperial government had, in fact, ruled that out. The imperial leaders heeded anxious West Indian planters, who bitterly opposed, as a terrifying precedent, any British promotion of a slave revolt in America. Britons also feared that Americans would exploit any slave-committed atrocities for propaganda that might make trouble in Parliament.66
On March 20, 1813, the British secretary of state, Earl Bathurst, codified the official policy in orders to Sir Sidney Beckwith: “You will on no account give encouragement to any disposition which may be manifested by the Negroes to rise against their Masters. The Humanity which ever influences His Royal Highness must make Him anxious to protest against a system of warfare which must be attended by the atrocities inseparable from commotions of such a description.” Bathurst did, however, authorize the Chesapeake commanders to recruit a few guides, enlist them “in any of the Black Corps,” and take them away as free men at the completion of their service. Bathurst emphasized, “You must distinctly understand that you are in no case to take slaves away as slaves, but as free persons whom the public become bound to maintain.” The Chesapeake commanders were supposed to minimize contracting “engagements of this nature, which it may be difficult for you to fulfill.” Leery of costs and complications, Bathurst wanted only a few black men useful as guides and no women and children.67
During 1813 the British naval officers first encountered Tidewater slaves as watermen paddling dugout canoes and small boats for fishing, crabbing, oyster-raking, and transporting goods. Their masters employed them to catch fish and crabs to feed the rest of their slaves. The oysters and better fish could also be marketed for cash in the seaports. Many Chesapeake slaves also worked as sailors on the sloops and schooners that carried cargoes up and down the bay.68
The watermen connected the naval officers to the enslaved communities on shore. On June 25, 1813, a white man saw a slave named Anthony fishing in the James River when a British boat came up and took him on board. Two weeks later, three young men escaped from Anthony’s neighborhood in a stolen dugout known as a “periauger”; two of them shared Anthony’s owner. Evidently Anthony had spread the word that the British would welcome young, male runaways who could help them. In late August on the Eastern Shore, Sam “was fishing on that day & must have seen the British fleet which came down the Bay on that day.” During the following night, “many negroes were missing from the said neighbourhood at the same time as well as canoes & boats.” The runaways included Sam.69
In addition to watermen, “outliers” made early contact with the British. Every Tidewater county had defiant malcontents who had escaped to hide out in makeshift camps in a forest or swamp. The appearance of British warships in the bay invited the outliers to flee to the warships. In March 1813 they included the three James City County runaways—Anthony, Tassy, and Kit—who mistook an American privateer for a British warship.70
Three other outliers, Joshua, Arnold, and Will, came from Northampton County, on the Eastern Shore. In July 1813 they also mistook an American privateer for a British warship. Severely flogged by the crew, they were dumped on the shore, where they resumed hiding out in the woods. Peggy Collins, a free black woman, secretly fed them. She later remembered that Arnold “seemed from the marks on his back to have been dreadfully beaten & that he begged her to ask his master to let him come home, that she did so & his master consented that he should come home & he would not whip him.” Joshua, Arnold, and Will returned to their masters, but neither the whipping nor the apparent pardons remade them into docile slaves. In May 1814 they organized a bigger and better escape, leading away thirteen other slaves, including Joshua’s wife and two children. In a stolen canoe, they paddled away on a night that “was clear & calm” so they “could hear distinctly . . . the drum & fife & fiddle from the shipping then lying opposite in the bay.” They deployed a clever ruse to distract the leading master, for Peggy Collins recalled that they “had a great dance the night they went away & said [if] they would dance & be merry, Master wouldn’t think they were going to the British.”71
In early 1813, the British attracted runaways primarily from the Virginia shores near the mouth of the bay, where the warships initially concentrated: from Princess Anne County to the west and Northampton County on the Eastern Shore. The commander of the Northampton County militia, Lieutenant Colonel Kendall Addison, offered to pay ransom if Warren would restore the runaways to their masters. Warren pointedly replied that the fugitives had become free by taking protection under the British flag on his ships. “At liberty to follow their own inclination,” they could not be sent back for any ransom. By flocking to the warships, the runaways pressured Admiral Warren into making decisions that fudged his restraining orders from Earl Bathurst.72
More runaways came forward on foot when British raiders landed to attack the Maryland villages. In early May, eighteen runaways followed a British foraging party back to HMS Sceptre. Reluctantly taking them on board, Cockburn sought further orders from Warren, who again directed their retention as free people. In late May, Warren reported to the Admiralty that his warships had received about seventy refugees “to whom it was impossible to refuse an asylum.” He added, “The Black population of these Countries evince, upon every occasion, the Strongest predilection for the cause of Great Britain, and a most ardent desire to join any Troops or Seamen acting in the Country, and from information which has reached me, the White Inhabitants have suffered great Alarm from the discovery of Parties of the Negroes having formed themselves into Bodies and especially with Arms in the Night.” In such reports Warren urged a new British policy of encouraging and arming runaways as the best means to intimidate their masters.73
The number of escapes surged during the summer and fall as word spread that the British officers welcomed runaways. In July, Lieutenant Colonel Addison reported to the governor, “The Negroes are frequently going off to them. Already we have lost from this County about one hundred & twenty Negro Slaves. Thus situated, sir,
you can readily conceive our apprehensions.”74
In early November, Captain Barrie’s warships visited the Potomac, attracting many runaways in stolen boats. On Virginia’s Potomac shore, Major John Turberville reported that 100 slaves had fled “owing principally to the neglect of those whose duty it was in securing the boats, canoes, &c.” Walter Jones worried, “The Spirit of defection among the negroes has greatly increased. . . . No doubt remains on our minds that concert and disaffection among the negroes is daily increasing and that we are wholly at the mercy of the Enemy.” Jones feared that “clandestine Elopement” soon would ripen into “open Insurrection.”75
As growing numbers reached the British warships, the officers struggled to feed, clothe, and shelter them. In early September, Warren observed,
It is with great Difficulty that larger numbers have been prevented [from] joining us; 150 have come down in a body near the shore of the Potowmac just after we had left it. I could not refuse those which have got on board the ships in Canoes—men, women & children—amounting to about 300 as they would certainly have been sacrificed if they had been given up to their masters & destroyed our Influence among them, for at present every Slave in the Southern States would join us if they could get away.
In reports sent to London, Warren walked a fine line, insisting that he did nothing to attract the runaways but could not turn them away, although entire families came, including the women and children that Bathurst did not want.76
Captain Barrie also recognized the military potential of “the poor devils (the negroes) that were continually coming along side in canoes.” On November 14, 1813, he added, “The Slaves continue to come off by every opportunity, and I have now upwards of 120 men, women and children on board . . . and, if their assertions be true, there is no doubt but the Blacks of Virginia & Maryland would cheerfully take up Arms & join us against the Americans.” Although many masters had come under flags of truce to speak to their slaves, “not a single black would return to his former owner.” By the end of 1813, at least 600 Chesapeake slaves had escaped to the British, who sent many on to the naval base at Bermuda.77
