by Taylor, Alan
Fellow runaways also bolstered the resolve of anyone who wavered. Reverend Armistead Smith claimed that one runaway would have returned to his master “had he not been overpersuaded by his Brother, Brook’s fellow [Humphrey], to the contrary. He repeatedly insinuated to him ‘how hard his Fare had been at home, only 1 peck of corn pr. Week & no time even allowed to grind it & never a mouthful of meat to eat with it, whereas on the contrary here we have a plenty of meat & Bread 3 times a day.’” In disgust, Smith concluded, “Thus these poor wretches are & will be deluded.” Hardly deluded, Humphrey knew full well that he ate better on a British warship than he had as a Virginia slave.56
In July 1814, John J. Brooke sent his trusted slave, Benjamin Mason, to a British warship to try to persuade his son and two other runaways to return. None would leave the British, for Mason discovered that they “had been treated very well & that his said Son had new clothes & a plenty to eat & drink.” Mason concluded “that the negroes who had gone to the British lived well & that the British officers had told him . . . that all the negroes who went to the British would certainly be free.” An honorable man, Mason returned home as he had promised, but after making his report to his Master, Mason ran away to join his son on the warship.57
Suppression
The escapes threatened to impoverish white families who had invested most of their net worth in black bodies. The five slaves of Rebecca Cooper—two men, two women, and a girl—comprised “almost the entire means of support left for a widow and large family of helpless children,” until the five eloped to the British. In Mathews County, after losing ten runaways to the British, Houlder Hudgins dreaded losing the rest of his slaves lest “he should be left in his old age destitute of that support which his declining years and the helpless state of his family demanded.” Cabell insisted that the runaways threatened “to reduce thousands of families to beggary & wretchedness.” By relying on the income from enslaved labor, Virginians suffered when slaves escaped to seek their own security.58
To reduce their losses, masters moved slaves away from the shores frequented by British raiders. After warships appeared near Mathews County, Reverend Smith hired away Bob and Robin to inland Richmond so “that they wd. be out of the way of the Enemy.” During the summer and fall of 1814, the shore raids intensified, so many masters began to pack up and move their furniture, livestock, and slaves into the interior. They delayed as long as possible because such moves were expensive and disruptive, and an abandoned farm would languish without labor to raise the crops: a dead loss to the owner. In Surry County in July 1814, Nicholas Faulcon dithered: “I am at a loss to know what to decide upon. To break up at this season of the year, or at any time indeed before my crop is secured, would be ruinous to us; and by waiting until it is secured, I run the risk of losing the greater part, perhaps the whole, of my moveable property,” which meant his slaves.59
To suppress runaways, county magistrates greatly increased the nocturnal slave patrols. In June 1812, before the British warships came into Chesapeake Bay, Lancaster County paid just four men to patrol during the month, and each man performed an average of just thirty hours, or about one hour per night. A year later, during the surge in escapes, the county paid thirty patrollers, and their man-hours grew from the 121 in June 1812 to 1,008 in June 1813. A month later, the patrols increased to 1,544 hours by thirty-seven men: a major commitment for a rural county during the prime months for farm labor.60
In 1813, Princess Anne County had a particularly vigilant and active volunteer company devoted to suppressing escapes by “patrolling the desert that skirts the southern boundary of Lynnhaven Bay.” In the sand dunes, “runaways and outliers” had set up hidden camps while awaiting a chance to contact and escape to a warship. A rough interrogation of one captured woman induced her to lead the volunteers to a camp of twenty refugees. Shooting first and asking questions later, the volunteers wounded and captured six runaways while the rest escaped deeper into the “Sand Hills.” But the correspondent added, “One, who was only wounded, compromised for his life by giving such information as must inevitably lead to the detection of the whole gang.”61
The Princess Anne volunteers nearly scored their greatest triumph on August 29, 1813, when they lured a British boat into an ambush by posting two of their men, with blackened hands and faces, on the beach, where they waved white handkerchiefs in the air. Another seventeen volunteers hid behind the dunes with their guns loaded and cocked. The fake blacks attracted a boat, rowed by six British sailors, from HMS Plantagenet. Just before reaching shore, the officer in the boat noticed that the two waving men on the beach had white ankles. He yelled out, “White men in disguise by God! Let us push off.” As his men struggled to turn about and row away, the militia opened fire, hitting two of the British, but the other four pulled away out of range and back to their ship.62
The British insisted that masters promptly hanged recaptured or returned runaways, but such summary executions seem unlikely, for slaves were too valuable to sacrifice without assurance of state compensation. During the war, Virginia compensated no masters for the execution of intercepted runaways. Some suffered gunshot wounds while resisting recapture, as in the Hampton and Princess Anne County episodes of 1813. In Lancaster County in September 1814, Timothy McNamara sued James Brent, a veteran slave patroller, for shooting his “negro man slave,” who apparently was fleeing to the British. Upon considering “the circumstances of the case,” the county court dismissed the lawsuit. After the war, McNamara received federal compensation for a slave named Adam, the probable victim of Brent’s bullet.63
The county authorities struggled with how to handle cases of intercepted runaways. In July 1814 in Westmoreland County, General John P. Hungerford pressed the Council of State for guidance: “What should be done with those slaves who have joined the enemy and are afterwards apprehended in counseling other negroes to go off? Or with those who are apprehended in attempting to go?” Embarrassed by the query, the Council punted, insisting that the county justices had to decide. Disliking any publicity about the execution of slaves, the state leaders wanted local magistrates to handle the recaptured as discreetly as possible.64
Instead of executing recaptured runaways, the captors whipped and then jailed them until the masters could reclaim their slaves. British raiders captured two county jails and liberated slaves held there “for endeavouring to escape to us.” At the end of the war, a county clerk reported that the Mathews County jail held nine runaways recently captured in a British schooner. The clerk warned their owners to pay the jailor’s fees and a reward to the militiamen promptly or the slaves would be auctioned. The jails, however, often proved flimsy and the guards negligent. In July 1813 the Northampton County militia captured and jailed a runaway named George, but he soon escaped with “many others who were in jail with him.” Stealing several canoes, they safely reached a British warship.65
Upon recovering a runaway, the master tended to sell him to a new owner far away from the coast, where escape would be more difficult, rather than permit his example and expertise to influence others. In April 1814 two runaways returned to Mathews County on a mission from Admiral Cockburn to assure slaves of the British “readiness to receive, protect, and assist them and put Arms in their Hands.” But the local militia captured the two agents in a stolen canoe. On April 19, 1814, Reverend Armistead Smith reported, “A court martial has been sitting for 4 or 5 days on the Trial of 2 Black fellows, one belonging to Capt. Blake, the other to a Mr. Hope of Hampton, as Spies from the Enemy.” In early May, Cockburn noted that his agents had been captured and prosecuted; “they managed, however, to tell so good a Tale & their Comrades kept so faithfully their Secret, that they escaped condemnation, & have only been sold for the back Settlements, and it is supposed by those who have since come off that they will . . . contrive to elude the Vigilance of those who have charge of them, & that we shall probably see them again here [before] very long.” Cockburn was too optimistic, for few if any slaves
escaped from the interior to the warships.66
Patterns
During the war, about 3,400 slaves escaped from the shores of the Cheseapeake to join the British. Almost all came from the shores of a navigable river or bay, where the slaves could see or hear a warship or where British raiders came ashore. Virtually no slaves escaped to the British from the Piedmont counties, owing to the dangerous distance to the coast along roads patrolled by armed militiamen. “By far, the greater number, if not the whole, were taken from proprietors who inhabit the Country bordering on the Bays and Rivers,” James Monroe noted. In 1822 a Virginia enumeration of the wartime runaways indicated that all came from a Tidewater county, primarily from the Northern Neck, which the British targeted for most of their raids. Among the masters who received postwar compensation, the average owner lost just 3.2 slaves, for slave ownership was highly dispersed in the Tidewater counties by 1813. Most of the runaways came from modest farms rather than great plantations, for the latter were few and far between in the Tidewater.67
There were two types of escapes: first, by a few hardy young men, and second, by larger groups that also included women and children. Two-thirds of the wartime runaways were male, usually adolescents and young men, who could best endure the physical challenges of dodging patrollers, hiding in the woods, stealing a boat, and paddling for hours. As the slaves most exposed to whipping and long-distance market sales, young men also had the most to gain by seeking the freedom offered by the British. But the wartime escapes included more females, at least a third of the fugitives, when compared to the 12 percent of prewar runaways. Few children ran away before the war, but they accounted for at least a fifth of the wartime runaways. The prewar fugitives had lacked the military assistance of a powerful ally that dominated the waterways within sight of their farms. The wartime runaways could exploit that ally to escape in larger, family groups, but only from the Tidewater.68
The distinctive nature of the wartime group escapes becomes evident when compared to the runaways advertised in the Virginia newspapers during 1813 and 1814. A separate pool of fugitives, the advertised slaves included none of the runaways who went to the British. By offering a reward, an advertiser sought to interest readers in recovering the runaway, so it was pointless to advertise for slaves assumed to have reached the enemy. Instead, the advertised runaways continued the prewar pattern of individualized and localized escapes. Most advertised fugitives fled from the interior rather than from the Tidewater counties closest to the warships. No advertised escape involved more than three people. The great majority (81 of 129, or 63 percent) of the advertised runaways were young men fleeing alone without a wife or child or friend. Women comprised only a fifth (25 of 129) of the advertised runaways, and they also usually escaped alone (15 of 25) or, occasionally, with a child or two or with a husband. Children accounted for only 4 percent (5 of 129) of the advertised runaways.69
Most of the advertised runaways were lonely people fleeing on their own, usually to seek out family members elsewhere in Virginia or Maryland. Rarely did masters expect the runaways to head north to a free state, and in only three wartime advertisements did the masters speculate that the fugitives might seek the British warships. Even in those three cases, the runaways apparently did not reach the British, for their masters received none of the postwar compensation reserved for those who lost slaves to the enemy.70
Unlike the advertised runaways from the Piedmont, the Tidewater slaves could seize a new and rare opportunity to escape together to nearby warships. The powerful bonds of marriage and kinship shaped the decisions by slaves to stay or go. Few would bolt without a good prospect of retrieving their closest kin, particularly wives and children. Despite a longing for freedom, even in the Tidewater most slaves stayed put through the war rather than leave behind spouses, parents, children, and grandparents. Where escapes as groups became possible, however, runaways could reunite families sundered or threatened by the rental or sale of relatives. In parts of the Tidewater, the British helped the slaves to reverse the threat posed to their families by the triumph of market relations in the wake of the American Revolution.
Admiral Sir George Cockburn, an oil painting by John James Halls, 1817. Made in London, the portrait depicts Cockburn with Washington, D.C., ablaze in the background, the episode from a long career in which Cockburn took the greatest pride and most wanted to memorialize in his portrait. (Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England)
9
FIGHT
Our negroes are flocking to the enemy from all quarters, which they convert into troops, vindictive and rapacious—with a most minute knowledge of every bye path. They leave us as spies upon our posts and our strength, and they return upon us as guides and soldiers and incendiaries.
—GENERAL JOHN P. HUNGERFORD, AUGUST 5, 18141
LIEUTENANT JAMES SCOTT and Captain John G. Joynes were ambitious young officers at military odds. Devoted to the empire, Scott became Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn’s protégé on his flagship HMS Albion, while Joynes was a planter in the Accomack County militia on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Where Scott meant to rise through the ranks of a hierarchical and professional military service, Joynes was a fiery Republican who defied the dominant Federalists of his county in both elections and the militia. Scott and Joynes developed a fierce rivalry during the British raids on the exposed farms and militia batteries of Accomack County. Visiting HMS Albion, under a flag of truce, Joynes confronted Scott to denounce his nocturnal raiding: “tarnation seize me in the bramble-bush of damnation if I don’t blow you to hell if you put your foot within a mile of my command. . . . I would give you such a whipping as would cure you from rambling a-night, like a particular G[o]d d[amne]d tom-cat.”2
Fired up by the challenge, Scott secured Cockburn’s permission to attack Joynes’s battery at Chesconessex Creek in a raid guided by one of his former slaves and conducted by other runaways who had become Colonial Marines in the British service. At dawn on June 25, 1814, the raiders captured the battery as Joynes fled, leaving behind his cherished sword, feathered hat, and uniform coat. Scott kept the sword but gave the clothing to “a serjeant of the Black Marines.” In an angry letter to Scott, Joynes denounced “the dishonor I had put upon him by making over his military attire, cocked-hat, sky-scraper feathers and all, and allowing them to be worn by a ‘G[o]d d[amne]d black nigger.’” Serving as guides and marines, the runaways enabled the British to wage a war intended to embarrass as well as to defeat the Virginians.3
As they recruited more runaways, the British had to increase their shore raids to obtain more livestock and provisions to feed the fugitives. Thanks to the local expertise of the former slaves, those raids could push deeper into the forested countryside. Black guides and fighters steered the raiding parties around militia ambushes to find hidden herds and secluded farms. The runaways naturally led the raids to the places they knew best: their former neighborhoods, where they could retrieve kin and plunder their former masters.4
By aggressively recruiting runaways, the British could escalate their war in the Chesapeake during the campaign of 1814. The naval officers sought to punish their foes for deploying torpedoes and snipers and for looting and burning villages in Canada, where the British commander called for revenge on the American coast. Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane agreed: “Their Sea Port Towns laid in Ashes & the Country wasted will be some sort of retaliation for their savage Conduct in Canada.”5
In 1814 the British also felt invincible thanks to their great victories in Europe over Napoléon’s collapsing empire. During the spring and summer, that triumph freed up dozens of British warships and thousands of troops to cross the Atlantic to fight the Americans. Bitter over the American declaration of war in 1812, when the British had faced Napoléon at his peak, they sought payback in 1814 at his nadir. Lord Eglinton declared, “The only thing now is those cursed Americans. I hope a sufficient force will be sent to crush them at once, to attack their strongholds, arsenals,
shipping, and naval yards, and destroy them.” Sir John Beresford insisted, “The Power of the Southern States ought if possible to be broken down, & they richly deserve it.” He reasoned that an invasion of the South “might be rendered infinitely more formidable by the emancipation of the Slaves, & purposes of humanity might be answered by it, for they are cruelly oppressed.”6
Tangier
In April 1814, to accommodate the refugees, Cockburn occupied and fortified Tangier Island, within Chesapeake Bay and a dozen miles from Virginia’s Eastern Shore. He recommended the island as “surrounded by the districts from which the negroes always come.” Although low, marshy, and sandy, Tangier offered an adequate anchorage for big ships and fresh water from newly dug wells. On the southern end of the island, where sea breezes kept the mosquitoes at bay, the British built Fort Albion, bristling with cannon and featuring a hospital, church, and barracks for troops and cabins for refugees. They also laid out large gardens and grazed livestock on the broad meadows. Owing to the might of the British squadron, the Virginians could do nothing to oust the dangerous new base in their midst. “However deplorable, . . . we have nothing to do but acquiesce,” lamented Governor Barbour.7
Tangier Island, with a plan of the Barracks, &c erected upon it by the 3d. Battalion of Regular & Colonial Marines, 1814. From the papers of Vice Admiral Sir Alexander F. I. Cochrane. (Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh)
