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

by Taylor, Alan

  For another day the city remained on edge as rumors insisted that the British intended a renewed attack. On September 15, Moore reported, “A most laughable tragi-comedy took place nearly opposite to our door. A black-boy coming up the street with his wagon, the horses took fright & set off at full trot so that the poor fellow . . . could not stop them, until he met the advance of the first brigade opposite Mrs. Glendy’s. This threw the [militia] men (who were . . . pretty well charged with whiskey) into the utmost confusion & perhaps mistaking the black with his waggon & horses for British soldiers, as the officer commanding the Brigade called out with all his might, kill him, kill him.” In the crowded confusion on the stone bridge, the pushing and shoving troopers “precipitated Horses & men headlong” into the creek, crushing “one poor Pig! who was discovered this morning among epaulets, hats, caps, muskets & bayonets &c., &c., laying on the field of battle!” The “poor negro lad” survived but with a nasty sword wound inflicted by the militia officer. When in a panic, the militiamen associated any black man with the enemy.79

  Desperate for a victory to wipe away the disgrace of Washington, Americans made the most of their survival at Baltimore. Dr. Philip Barraud exulted, “The Charm is broken, Wellington’s veterans can be cut down like ordinary Militia—nay they can be dismayed by them and made to retire before them. The display of this truth is worth Legions to our Country and will add to our means of defence.” Americans longed to vindicate their cherished reliance on the militia amateurs.80

  Patriotism also got a boost from a stirring song written by Francis Scott Key, who had watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry. Although a Federalist lawyer who had opposed the declaration of war, Key wanted to see the British defeated, for they had plundered his family’s tomb at Chaptico and arrested his friend Dr. William Beanes. On September 17 a friend published Key’s lyrics in a handbill with the suggestion that people sing it to the tune of a British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Widely reprinted by American newspapers, the song became known as “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which Congress proclaimed as the national anthem in 1931. Today people sing only the first verse, neglecting the rest, which includes (in the third verse) Key’s dig at the British for employing Colonial Marines to liberate slaves:

  No refuge could save the hireling and slave

  From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.

  And the star-spangled banner—O! Long may it wave,

  O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  Key regarded the land of the free and the home of the brave as properly a white man’s republic. In this sentiment, he expressed the consensus of his contemporaries.81

  Nothing irritated British officers more than Americans claiming victory. Avid readers of their coverage in the American press, the British howled that, in the words of Sir Pulteney Malcolm, the Americans “published lies without end.” In the British version of the battle, they had suffered no defeat, for they had merely probed the defenses, wisely withdrawing once they found the enemy numerous and entrenched, rather than suffer the heavy casualties necessary to take the city. Tetchy Britons insisted that the defenders had done nothing but cower within their fortifications. In this highly political war, however, the spin of newspapers mattered as much as the spin of bullets. Baltimore gave the Americans something to celebrate, which they made the most of, stiffening their resolve to repel the Britons and suppress their black allies.82

  Shooting Parties

  During the fall, the British soldiers left the Chesapeake, reducing the operations once again to modest shore raids conducted by the navy. Seeking slaves and provisions, the raiders targeted both shores of the Potomac River, where resistance remained weak. Many British officers soured on the petty raiding once it lacked some larger strategic purpose, in contrast to the summer raids that had prepared for the offensive against Washington. The setback at Baltimore also deflated the British hopes for a quick and triumphant end to the war. In August, Captain Robert Rowley had thrilled in the raiding and delighted in his share of the plunder: “We are here very happy, the Captains more like brothers than anything else, our minds well employ’d by the Energetic movements of our Admiral.” By November, he felt very differently: “It is horrible here. . . . I must tell you I am heartily tired of the Chesapeake and of the mode of Warfare we are obliged to carry on.”83

  Captain Robert Barrie, however, did sustain his enthusiasm for shore raids, which he called “shooting parties.” During the fall, Cockburn and Cochrane sailed away for operations farther south, leaving Barrie in command of a small squadron in the Chesapeake. In his primary raid, Barrie ascended the Rappahannock River with 500 men, 150 of them Colonial Marines, in fifteen barges accompanied by eight schooners and one sloop. On December 2 they seized the village of Tappahannock. Fleeing in a panic, the local militia abandoned their arms and flag, which displayed an American eagle over the motto “Death or victory.” Preferring life and defeat, the militia hid in the forested hills, even when Barrie sought to draw them out by torching the courthouse and jail. The raiders then ransacked the village, smashing windows and furniture and looting the family tomb of Thomas Ritchie, the publisher of the Richmond Enquirer, which compounded his well-advanced case of Anglophobia.84

  On December 3 the British evacuated Tappahannock, moving slowly down the Rappahannock to attract and assist the escape of as many slaves as possible. Masters reported “that the said negroes became uncommonly sullen and obstinate and could scarcely be made to do any work after they heard the British were up the said Rappahannock River.” An overseer noted that a slave named Jack “did declare that he never would serve his master . . . again—and that he refused repeatedly to do the work of the plantation when ordered.” In short order, Jack ran off: one of the 200 to escape to Barrie’s barges.85

  On December 6 a tip from the runaways persuaded Barrie to send 360 men, including 90 Colonial Marines, to attack a militia camp at Farnham Church, an Anglican ruin about seven miles from the river. After firing once, the 100 militiamen scattered, forsaking their badly wounded captain. Walter Jones assured James Monroe, “It was but a quasi battle for not one of the Enemy were hurt (this is true, tho you will see a very different account in Print).” Lieutenant Hammond and the Colonial Marines scoured the nearby countryside, “releasing about Twenty Negroes, several of whom he found in the Woods handcuffed round the Trees.” Barrie ordered a store filled with liquor burned, but the damage to his white marines had already been done. About a dozen got “beastly Drunk” and lost in the woods, so Barrie had to leave them behind. Here was a swap all too characteristic of the Chesapeake campaign for the British: to liberate twenty slaves while losing a dozen Britons to drink and desertion.86

  Great Advantage

  During the campaign of 1814, black recruits enabled the British to intimidate the Tidewater Virginians and Marylanders. Lieutenant Scott boasted that “the inhabitants within ten miles of the shore, with the assistance of the negroes, were completely within our power.” Of the Eastern Shore, Scott remembered, “So completely were the inhabitants aware of the power lodged in our hands by means of this body” that several “young ladies on the main land” sent bouquets and letters begging the British not to deploy black troops against their neighborhood.87

  In St. Mary’s County in June, Lieutenant George C. Urmstone went ashore with a flag of truce to demand that the locals sell their livestock to the British, but Captain James Jaboe of the militia refused and threatened to hang Urmstone if he ever returned. Irritated by Jaboe’s impertinence, Urmstone returned to HMS Albion and “inquired among the runaway slaves, who knew Captain Jabo?” One of his former slaves came forward to guide Urmstone’s raiding party of Colonial Marines eight miles inland through gusting winds and torrents of rain to the captain’s house. Breaking in, Urmstone rousted a shocked Jaboe from his bed and hauled him away, shivering in his nightshirt, to captivity on the warship. Nothing pleased Urmstone’s friend, Lieutenant Scott, more than the humi
liation of a proud American: “The haughty individual, with his blustering swagger and insulting language, delivered in the full pride of regimentals topped by a towering hat and sweeping feather, could not be recognized in the ludicrous, passive figure that now met our views.”88

  Americans feared the critical assistance that the armed runaways provided to the British raiders. In southern Maryland in July, General Philip Stuart urged removing all of the slaves into the interior so “that the Enemy may not be strengthened by a species of force, by us the most to be dreaded of any within his means.” In Westmoreland County, General Hungerford rued “the great advantage the Enemy have over us in being informed by our Blacks of all our movements.” His aide, John Taylor Lomax, added that the slaves were “constantly going to the enemy—informing them of our posts & . . . acting as the best guides when required. In short the country is infested, in the persons of these blacks, with the most dangerous spies & traitors (if the name can be so applied) that can well be conceived.” In these alarmed tributes to black military prowess, the slaveholders forgot their standard line that blacks were cowards unsuited for equality with whites.89

  During 1814, black guides, sailors, and marines sapped the resistance in southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck. For over a year, Admiral Cockburn had longed to attack Washington, D.C., but he dared not try until August 1814. The recent reinforcements from Europe helped, but their numbers were disappointing: too few to risk on a deep strike into the interior unless Cockburn felt assured of little resistance. His infectious confidence in the attack derived from the domination he had secured over the Patuxent and Potomac Valleys by aggressive raids during the spring and summer, and that success depended on the local knowledge and combat performance of his black guides and marines. No mere by-product of the British operations in the Chesapeake, the runaways transformed that offensive by becoming essential to its success.

  View of the Capitol of the United States after the Conflagration, an engraving by Jesse Torrey, 1817. Note the trader with a coffle of chained slaves in the right foreground. Torrey regarded the destruction of the Capitol as a divine judgment against the nation for allowing the domestic slave trade. From Torrey’s Portraiture of Domestic Slavery (1817). (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

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  CRISIS

  Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come; and whether brought on by the generous energy of our own minds; or by the bloody process of St. Domingo, excited and conducted by the power of our present enemy, if once stationed permanently within our Country, and offering asylum & arms to the oppressed, is a leaf of our history not yet turned over.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, AUGUST 25, 18141

  DURING 1814 miseries of war grew for the Virginians. A shifting, mobile threat, the amphibious raids drew out thousands of militiamen. A Virginian said of the mobile enemy, “10,000 of his troops can employ 100,000 of our militia; and the cost and the waste are heavier upon us in nearly the same proportion.” Virginia farms sprouted weeds instead of crops as militia service called away farmers during the critical weeks for planting in the spring and harvesting in the summer. “To suffer or beg must be the lot of many if they are taken from home 2 or 3 months in the summer,” explained Lieutenant Colonel Basset Burwell.2

  Virginia failed adequately to equip, provision, or pay the militiamen. In the Northern Neck, General Alexander Parker denounced the hardships of the militia as “shockingly disgraceful” to the state. For want of medical supplies, Parker felt that in any skirmish “my wounded will be more unfortunate than the dead,” as their misery would “be protracted through all the pangs of want and suffering.” And most of the Tidewater people were too poor to provide any surplus food to the troops. Thomas Jefferson Randolph lamented serving in “a wretched country. . . . We have nothing in abundance, but ticks and musketoes. . . . We very often see large establishments apparently the abode of wealthy persons, [but] upon approaching them we find them occupied by squalid, indigent wretches who cannot give a meal of any kind to two persons.”3

  At Norfolk the militia encampments were especially large, chaotic, and filthy. In October 1814 a militiaman, James Bendall, wrote home to his wife: “My Bed is mity hard on one thick plank,” and he often had to stand guard for twenty-four hours “and neaver Eate in the time.” Bendall could scrounge enough firewood to cook his food only three days a week. Debilitated by disease, he concluded, “I am porer than Ever you see me in your life.”4

  The militiamen suffered from the malaria borne by mosquitoes and the dysentery and typhus that bred in the filth of military camps. A Norfolk doctor reported that the exhausted victims of dysentery became confined to dirty straw beds with “eyes sunk, cheeks hollowed” and tormented by a fiery thirst. Lacking fresh fruit and vegetables, some soldiers suffered from scurvy, which yellowed their teeth and rotted their gums. “Instead of a force . . . in the garrison, it may be, with more truth said, that we have an army in the Hospital,” lamented Thomas Newton of Norfolk.5

  During the fall of 1814 a third of the soldiers at Norfolk were too sick to perform duty, and many died. An officer recalled, “What was much more to be dreaded . . . than the sword, was the climate which doomed to eternity in numbers Incredable the hale and blooming youth of our country.” Dr. Philip Barraud blamed their deaths on “the Effects of the Militia System—bad Discipline, bad Cloathing, bad Tents, bad Cooking, and all the bad consequence of bad officers.” Burials became so common that the commander ordered them conducted quietly at night “in order to avoid depressing the spirits of the survivors.” One militia general, Charles Fenton Mercer, estimated that 3,000 men perished of disease at Norfolk during the war. While the British killed few Virginians in combat, the Royal Navy forced them to mass in Norfolk, where mosquitoes and filth did the job.6

  When discharged from service, the sick, weary, and unpaid men often struggled to travel homeward to a distant county. Lacking public funds, the new governor of Virginia (chosen in December to replace the termed-out James Barbour), Wilson Cary Nicholas, could only pity the poor militiamen “turned adrift at Norfolk 600 miles from home after a six months tour with only three dollars of the public money.” Many did not make it. Another state official lamented, “Worn down with fatigue & disease, destitute of money or friends, neglected by the public, some have sunk down in death on the street in Richmond unassisted & unheeded.” On January 3, 1815, the Richmond Enquirer reported, “The roads are strung from Norfolk to the Upper Country with diseased & dying militia.”7

  The returning militiamen spread their diseases to neighbors in the countryside. At Richmond, John Campbell reported, “The whole Country around us here has been diseased by our poor, ragged, dirty militia armies.” From the Northern Neck in November, an inhabitant reported an epidemic of “a putrid sore-throat, which . . . has baffled the skill of physicians, and terminated fatally in less than twenty four hours,” rendering the district “now more than ever exposed to successful ravages of the enemy.” The victims suffocated from a swollen windpipe. In King George County, the disease wiped out a family of ten (save one little boy), and the alarmed neighbors sought to contain their risk by setting “fire to the house and burn them up; which was done.” The practice of burning the houses and bodies of victims spread throughout the Northern Neck.8

  The sick and discharged men returned to farms ravaged by neglect, a volatile climate, and crop pests. The wheat languished after the hard winter of 1813–1814, followed by a spring infestation of the Hessian fly and a fungus known as “the rust.” In late July, Edward Ross reported that an ominous earthquake shook the region “with a report like 10 thousand Cannons.” On July 28–29, severe thunderstorms swamped low grounds and battered crops with rain, hail, and gale-force winds. The swollen rivers and streams carried away crops, fences, livestock, and mills. Managing a plantation beside the James River, Ross noted that the raging waters were “sweaping away everything with an indescribable force & velocity. . . . T
obacco Houses, Canoes, Carts, Oxen, Horses and Negroes are floating down the River, coming from above, without we are able to save any thing.” Writing to her husband away in a militia camp, Sarah Kemp observed, “We have had very high waters, higher than it has ever been since we have lived here.” Their forge, iron house, dam, and fences were all gone. “Thus you see our prospects are gloomy in the extreme,” another woman assured her brother in the militia. When it rained at the wrong time, misery poured in rural Virginia. And then a drought settled in for the rest of the summer, scorching the corn and tobacco plants that had survived the flood.9

  Discharged without full pay, the militiamen struggled to meet heavy new war taxes levied by both the state and the federal government. “The same man whose crop was ruined by his absence . . . is not able to pay his taxes. He has no money and nothing to sell,” noted Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. And the British blockade prevented the export of crops to market while driving up the cost of imports, including the salt needed to sustain livestock. Thomas Jefferson asked, “How can a people who cannot get 50 cents a bushel for their wheat, while they pay 12 D[ollars] a bushel for their salt, pay five times the amount of taxes they ever paid before?” John Randolph declared that “the searching miseries of war penetrate even into the hovel of the shivering negro, whose tattered blanket and short allowance of salt” attested to the economic distress of his master.10