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

by Taylor, Alan

  Major Edward Nicolls of the Royal Marines stood out as an especially zealous abolitionist. In a long and distinguished military career, he suffered 107 wounds, attesting to his reckless courage and many combat assignments. In 1814 Cochrane sent Nicolls to West Florida to rally the Creek Indians and recruit runaways. Bold and resourceful, Nicolls raised and trained about 300 black marines while providing a haven for their women and children.60

  Committed to liberating slaves, in Spanish Florida as well as the United States, Nicolls exhorted his white marines to be patient with the new black recruits: “Remember they have been oppressed by cruel taskmasters and, under slavery, man’s best faculties are kept dormant. What a glorious prospect for British soldiers to set them free. How grateful will they be to you, how ready to mix their Blood with yours in so good a cause.” Turning to the runaways, he promised to help them save their families by smashing slavery: “never again will you have to undergo the heartrending misery of seeing the partner of your love or the children of your affection cruelly dragged from your [side], sold to a foreign oppression and carried beyond your reach for ever.” Nicolls understood that runaways sought to defend their imperiled families.61

  On a bluff beside the Apalachicola River, about fifteen miles above its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico, Nicolls’s marines erected a strong rectangular fort, 120 feet per side, with earthen walls eighteen feet thick rising fifteen feet high and topped by a thick palisade of pine logs. The fort mounted eight cannon and one howitzer. At the end of the war, Cochrane ordered the fort surrendered to the Spanish, but Nicolls and his officers refused, “having espoused the cause of the Slaves,” according to Thomas Spalding. In June 1815, Nicolls did withdraw with his white marines, and he sent 123 blacks to Trinidad as free settlers. About 450 Florida refugees, however, preferred to stay on the Apalachicola as maroons rather than retreat as marines, so Nicolls entrusted the fort and its armament to the blacks, who continued to fly the Union Jack. The British government subsequently disavowed the major’s actions as driven by an “ill-judged zeal.” Meanwhile, Georgians denounced the “Negro Fort” as a great menace, which continued to attract runaways and send out raiding parties. Spalding warned that the Negro Fort would “become a nucleus around which a dangerous Population will concenter.”62

  A View of the Town of St. George, Bermuda, an 1815 aquatint by I. J. C. Stadler. The capital of the colony of Bermuda was crowded with soldiers and sailors and the harbor filled with ships. Note the two black women in the right foreground. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

  On August 27, 1816, American gunboats ascended the river and opened fire on the Negro Fort. A cannon shot penetrated the main powder magazine, which erupted in a massive explosion, destroying the fort and killing most of the defenders. The American commander, Colonel Duncan Clinch, credited God for “chastising the blood-thirsty and murderous wretches that defended the fort.” Some survivors escaped deeper into Florida, joining the Seminole Indians, who continued to resist American expansion. Two years later, many of the maroons crossed Florida to the east coast, built large dugout canoes, and sailed to the Bahamas, a British colony where they founded a distinctive and enduring settlement.63

  Bermuda

  At the end of the war, the British evacuated the refugees from Georgia and the Chesapeake to Bermuda, where they became the responsibility of Commodore Andrew Fitzherbert Evans, who commanded the naval dockyard. Reluctant to feed and clothe those too old, too young, or too sick to work, Evans complained to Cockburn that the dockyard could employ only “young, healthy & active Men unencumbered with Women & Children or aged, diseased & infirm objects.” Evans derided even the able-bodied men, deeming “their Sloth so invincible, even when there is no Compulsion used . . . that I despair of deriving any material advantage from their exertions.”64

  Evans’s rant offended Cockburn because the black marines had earned his respect, and he knew that the British needed to provide a haven for their women and children. In reply, Cockburn directed Evans to recognize “the injury done the Enemy in taking these People from his power, the gratification of having relieved so many Fellow Creatures from Slavery, and in our having established from amongst them at little or no expense a most efficient and useful Corps now above 400 strong, which is constantly and actively employed with us here and giving daily proofs of its gallantry and grateful attachment to us.” Per Cochrane’s April 1814 proclamation, the British officers had to assist all refugees without any “discrimination whatever . . . as to the Age, Sex and Abilities of the Persons.” With “the faith of our Country” so pledged it became Evans’s duty to provide “a ready Asylum with all reasonable protection from us.”65

  During the spring and summer of 1815, the Royal Navy moved most of the refugees on to Nova Scotia, but the Colonial Marines and their families remained on Bermuda. Anticipating another war with the United States, sooner rather than later, Cochrane advised that the Colonial Marines would provide “a corps of guides and pilots ready to attend any expedition sent upon the Coast of America. . . . They are a very fine body of men; perfectly orderly and sober.” Praising them as “fine, brave, active fellows, worth all the West India Regiments united,” Cochrane considered the Colonial Marines the best force to deploy against the United States: “They were infinitely more dreaded by the Americans than the British Troops.”66

  Imperial bureaucrats, however, disliked retaining a unique unit of marines when the West Indian regiments remained undermanned. Thinking that all black men were alike, distant officials insisted that the Chesapeake and Georgia blacks should join the African-born men of the West Indian regiments.

  In August 1815 the naval and colonial officials of Bermuda received orders to transfer the Colonial Marines to the army. In polite but firm protest, the officials described the Colonial Marines as especially intelligent and able troops but sticklers for their rights. Their commander, Major Andrew Kinsman, warned, “They are particularly tenacious of promises made to them. . . . Nothing in the form of bad faith should be observed towards them.” The black marines cited British pledges that they would always remain together in a special unit under the officers who had trained and led them, to whom they felt fiercely loyal. Possessing “strong & determined prejudices,” the Colonial Marines also held “high ideas of superiority . . . over the African Negroes” of the West India Regiments.67

  Bermuda’s governor, James Cockburn, reiterated the importance of the Colonial Marines in the event of a new war with the Americans. Treating them fairly, he reasoned, was essential to “retaining our influence over a large portion of the population of the United States, where our conduct towards these Negroes is strictly watched (though for different ends) both by Whites & Blacks.” A forced transfer would bolster the American propaganda that the British had mistreated the runaways, which would then dampen the enthusiasm of American slaves for the British as potential liberators. Cockburn cherished that enthusiasm as a valuable military resource for the future. Apparently impressed by that argument, the imperial government postponed the transfer.68

  Philanthropie Moderne. By a French pro-slavery artist, this cartoon was widely reproduced in the United States. It depicts a British abolitionist and Royal Navy officer seducing brutish blacks from their duty and employing them to burn Washington, D.C. Note the farm tools smoldering in the foreground. (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

  About 450 Colonial Marines remained at Ireland Island (part of Bermuda) in June 1816, when John Patterson of Mathews County, Virginia, sailed to Bermuda on the Maid of the Isles, a schooner with a cargo of corn. Most of his sailors were enslaved: a common phenomenon in Tidewater Virginia as well as Bermuda. On arrival, Patterson recognized at least fifteen Colonial Marines as former slaves from Mathews. They included one of his own, named Hull, who had become a drummer. Two other Colonial Marines—Sci Gillett and Ned—had also escaped from Patterson and served at Ireland Island, but their former master never saw them.69

  Sci Gillett probably dre
aded reviving painful memories. In February 1813, at the age of sixteen, he had joined the band of defiant slaves who declared themselves “Englishmen” and robbed a store. Under pressure from Patterson, Sci had testified against his eight older friends, saving his own life but sending two to the gallows and six to sale and transportation. In March 1814 he had escaped from Patterson and joined the British, enlisting as a Colonial Marine. He had a tangled tale to tell, but did not want to.70

  The other marines from Mathews County did visit the Maid of the Isles to reminisce with the crew, for, as Patterson noted, they had been “raised together in the same neighbourhood.” Resplendent in “Red Coats, white Jackets & pantaloons, black gaiters & stocks, black hats with narrow brims bound with white and white feathers,” the marines made a vivid impression as they told war stories of Baltimore and Cumberland Island. The enslaved crew and free marines could see how each of their wartime choices—to stay or to go—had played out. The schooner’s captain, William Dixon, recalled that Hull came on board to offer his own peace to his former master. Hull “saluted the said Patterson . . . by presenting his hand” and declaring “that he did not elope from him in consequence [of] ill treatment, that he had always treated him well but that he preferred having his freedom.”71

  Memory

  In 1815 the British withdrew from American shores but not from American nightmares, for a dread of Britons, blacks, and Indians merged in postwar nationalism. Americans remembered the war in racial terms: as a nefarious cabal by the British with Indians and blacks to destroy the white man’s republic. In February 1815 a Maryland state senator castigated the “vindictive enemy, who has associated to himself as fit allies, savage Indians and ferocious blacks.” American orators and writers insisted that a truly civilized nation would never deploy Indians or blacks in war against white people. Some reform-minded Americans, primarily in the Northeast, did admire the British measures to suppress the slave trade and ameliorate slavery, but Anglophiles were a small minority in the United States. Most Americans regarded the British Empire as their great and enduring enemy who allied with Indians along the frontier and stirred up southern slaves.72

  American newspapers claimed that the peace treaty had come in the nick of time to spare the United States from a racial bloodbath. Lurid stories insisted that the British had prepared a massive force of West Indian black troops to invade the South during the spring of 1815 “to excite insurrection among the negroes of the United States, and to involve a civilized people in all the horrors of a St. Domingo revolution.” With the supposed motto of “beauty and booty,” the black troops would pillage and rape their way across the South. One writer concluded that anyone “whose blood does not boil with indignation and his sinews stiffen to revenge is not worthy to be an American citizen.”73

  During the spring of 1816 the American press took a grim interest in the Easter Rebellion by slaves on the British West Indian colony of Barbados. The rebels believed that their masters had blocked a parliamentary plan to emancipate them, so hundreds rallied to burn seventy plantations and their cane fields, before British troops suppressed the revolt with great bloodshed. Planted on posts, the heads of dead rebels decorated the crossroads of the island. Of course, the American press reported the usual story: that the rebels had meant to kill all the white men and take their women and children. In fact, the rebels showed remarkable restraint, killing only one white civilian, but facts rarely got in the way of shoving every black protest into the fantasy stereotype of the Saint-Domingue massacre.74

  The Richmond Enquirer and National Intelligencer cast the Barbados revolt as the just deserts for Britons who had attacked slavery in America during the recent war. By playing with deadly fire in America, they had been burned in the West Indies: “It was they who would have taught our slaves to rebel, to desert, and to massacre their masters; it was they who wove them into regiments, landed them upon our shores and taught them to lure away their fellows. The British nation ought to have recollected, that the day of visitation might come upon them, when the dagger which they pointed at our throats, might be aimed at their own.” The very real (but carefully limited) British use of black troops during the war became multiplied to monstrous proportions in the American imagination. By treating blacks as British dupes and pawns, the writer also erased their initiative in escaping and fighting slavery.75

  Americans regarded the British as the manipulating hand behind every resistance by darker-skinned peoples—Mexicans, Indians, and maroons—to the south in Florida and to the west in Texas. In 1816 such fears led to the American raid into west Florida to destroy the Negro Fort. Two years later, Andrew Jackson led a larger invasion to burn the towns of black maroons and Seminole Indians. To cap his victory, Jackson executed a British trader, Alexander Arbuthnot, and a former Royal Marine officer, Robert Ambrister. Holding abolitionist principles, Ambrister had returned on his own to Florida to help train and lead the Indians and runaways in resisting the Americans. But Jackson treated Arbuthnot and Ambrister as British covert agents and traitors to the white race. Although the new American president, James Monroe, and most of his cabinet regretted the invasion and executions, Jackson won even greater popularity in a nation that especially hated the British for aiding Indians and slaves. Fortunately for the republic, the British government did nothing but protest the executions, balking at a renewed war because chastened by their military debacle at New Orleans in 1815.76

  American leaders justified expansion and white supremacy as defensive measures needed to protect freedom from a British plot to deploy savages and maroons against the republic. That dread helped to push American expansion southward and westward across the continent to consolidate an ever larger, and presumably more secure, republican union. While the confidence of Manifest Destiny was one side of the nationalism coin, a pervasive and defensive racial anxiety lay on the underside.77

  American nationalists reacted against British writers who sympathized with slaves as victims of the republic’s hypocrisy. The cultural critic Sydney Smith outraged Americans by puncturing their superior pretensions to liberty: “under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?” The southern animus against the British grew during the 1830s, when the empire compelled the West Indian colonists to emancipate their slaves. Southerners feared that the precedent would inspire slave revolts and abolition within the United States. In response to British gibes and West Indian emancipation, southerners again accused the British of cynically promoting slave discontent to threaten the republic. Anglophobes also cited the empire’s exploitation of Ireland and India to discredit the British guise of humanitarianism.78

  British leaders further alarmed Americans by announcing that slavery rendered the southern states especially vulnerable to attack and subversion. In every war scare with the United States, the British threatened once again to raid the coast and rally the slaves with a promise of freedom. During a diplomatic crisis in 1830, the British government appointed Sir George Cockburn to command the North American station: a not very subtle reminder to the Americans of their risk. In 1841 a Royal Navy veteran of the Chesapeake campaign boasted of Britain’s abolition of slavery in the West Indies “whilst, to the United States of America, it will ever prove the source of weakness and disunion, and may ultimately prove their ruin.” In 1855 Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary, warned the Americans that “a British Force landed in the southern part of the Union, proclaiming freedom to the Blacks, would shake many of the stars from their banner.” Taking these threats seriously, the United States expended great sums and ingenuity constructing massive new coastal forts, particularly to defend southern ports and, above all, to secure Norfolk and the mouth of the Chesapeake.79

  Slaves overheard their masters denounce the British as a menace to the republic through their black proxies and abolitionist pawns. That alarm confirmed the slaves’ devotion to the legend of the king who would return
to free them. In South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey plot of 1822, a leader insisted “that the English were to come & help them—that the Americans could do nothing against the English & that the English would carry them off to St. Domingo.” In 1829 the radical black abolitionist David Walker promoted slave revolt in America and declared that the British “have been for many years, and are now our greatest earthly friends and benefactors.” American talk unwittingly had confirmed to listening blacks that the British offered their best chance to win freedom for all. Then, in the endless feedback of rhetorical dread, Americans regarded the Anglophilia of slaves as a special menace to the republic of white men.80

  Gabriel Hall. Enslaved in Maryland, Gabriel Hall escaped to the British during the war. He arrived in Halifax in 1815 and prospered as a farmer. Taken in 1892, when he was ninety-two years old, this is the only known photograph of a black refugee from the war. (George H. Craig photograph, courtesy of the Nova Scotia Archives)

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  AGENTS

  [The British] have professed to afford [the runaways] an asylum as freemen. They are admitted of course to be voluntary Agents, and as such must have a right to go where they think fit.