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

by Taylor, Alan

  The well-informed Nova Scotians regretted the racial prejudice expressed by most colonists and officials. Coleman declared, “My feelings have been often hurt at the expressions of People who are ignorant of their Situations, they say Thievish Black Dogs, they deserve this or they deserve that. . . . Place the same number of White People in the Same Situation under all the disadvantages that those have had to incounter, what would have been the report of them[?]” Chamberlain urged the black settlers to “laugh at the Squibs that ignorance or ill nature and contempt has induced some silly Body to throw out against them.” Unfortunately, such silly bodies included Governor Sherbrooke, who continued to deride the refugees as lazy. No one, however, ever tested his ability to clear land to subsist a family amid the rocks of Preston.49

  Despite their hard work, the refugees soon faced the limits of their craggy and swampy lands. Usually austere, the Nova Scotia climate became menacing in 1816: the notorious year without a summer thanks to a volcanic explosion in the East Indies that cast enough dust into the upper atmosphere to deflect the sun’s warmth across the Northern Hemisphere. Unable to raise sufficient crops, the refugees needed government rations. In December, Sherbrooke’s newly arrived successor, Lord Dalhousie, reported, “I find the Negroe families that settled, in a state of starvation, their crops having totally failed.”50

  Afflicted by hunger on their little lots of poor land during an especially harsh year, the refugees soon confronted another plague: the words of Lord Dalhousie. Eager to reduce the government’s expenditures on food relief, he sought to send blacks back to their masters in the United States or deport them to Sierra Leone or Trinidad. Indeed, he blamed the refugees for their poverty and hunger: “Slaves by habit & education, no longer working under the dread of the lash, their idea of freedom is idleness, and they are therefore quite incapable of Industry.” Dalhousie also derided Admiral Cochrane’s wartime promise of freedom to American slaves as “a silly thing.” A diverse lot, British imperialists did not agree on issues of race and freedom.51

  In 1817, Dalhousie belatedly toured the black settlements, which revealed the refugees in a very different light. He conceded that “almost every man had one or more Acres cleared and ready for seed & working with an industry that astonished against difficulties of nature almost insurmountable & opposed, abused & cheated by the old Settlers near whom they had been placed.” Sadly, two years later Dalhousie revived his former canard: “the habits of their life and constitutional laziness will continue & these miserable creatures will for years be a burden upon the Government.” Here we see the power of prejudice to overcome the reality briefly revealed to Dalhousie by visiting the refugees on their little farms, surrounded by neighbors who wanted them to fail.52

  Despite their hardships, the refugees preferred freedom in Nova Scotia over a return to slavery in America. They cherished their new ability to earn their own money and their freedom from domination by an owner. Maria Fuller explained, “We are not now in the U. States, and we can do as we like here.” Another refugee preferred Nova Scotia because “what I works for here, I gets.” An elderly woman agreed, “Oh! de difference is, dat when I work here, I work for myself, and when I was working at home [in Maryland], I was working for other people.”53

  The imperial government also balked at breaking the promises of freedom made to people who had helped to fight the Americans. But Earl Bathurst would pay to ship the refugees to Trinidad, where they could join the thriving community founded after the war by former Colonial Marines and their families. Given the refugees’ poor treatment in Nova Scotia, their relocation to Trinidad had merit, but a mere ninety-five agreed to depart in a single vessel in January 1821. Most were former Georgians from Beech Hill or Hammonds Plains, while almost none left the largest Chesapeake black community at Preston. After that one shipment in 1821, no more Nova Scotia blacks accepted the government’s repeated invitations to relocate.54

  The refugees dreaded getting on any ship bound for the West Indies via the American coast. Given that Dalhousie had proposed restoring them to slavery, most did not trust any British captain taking his orders from the governor or his successor, James Kempt. In 1823 Governor Kempt explained, “These people entertain so great a fear to slavery that no persuasion can induce them to remove to any place where Slavery exists.” In 1825 he complained that “fanatical preachers” had persuaded most “that it would not be intended to send them to Trinidad, but to sell them to their former Masters in the United States.”55

  Despite their hardships, the refugees had made homes and communities, and they wanted to stick together in Nova Scotia. One puzzled official marveled, “They seem to have some attachment to the soil they have cultivated, poor and barren as it is.” In addition to deriving a basic subsistence from their small farms, the inhabitants earned cash by marketing berries, wreaths, shingles, brooms, oars, chairs, flower boxes, and baskets in Halifax. During the 1820s and 1830s, many moved into the port, working for wages on the docks, aboard ships, and as domestics in prosperous homes. Others became urban blacksmiths, chimney sweeps, glaziers, shoemakers, and carpenters.56

  Although most remained poor, they were still better off free in Nova Scotia than as slaves in America. In their new homes, they had restored the family ties that had been their prime goal in escaping from slavery. In a careful study of the refugee families, historian Harvey Amani Whitfield found that when enslaved in the United States, only 44 percent of the married couples had lived on the same farm. In stark contrast, over 90 percent of the couples lived together in Hammonds Plains and Preston in 1820. Despite their mistreatment in Nova Scotia, they could live without fear that a master’s death, debt, or whim would sell someone precious far away never to be seen again. Their poverty was hard, but slavery had been far worse.57

  Slavery had deepened rather than dampened the determination by blacks to defend their families. In 1815 Rufus Fairbanks employed black loggers outside Halifax. To save money, Fairbanks had left their wives and children behind to subsist in the poorhouse of the port. But a defiant woman declared that “she had rather go into the woods and perish with her Husband than to be left in the Poor House with her Children to be devoured by Vermin and die there.” After she arrived with her four children, another man went to the poorhouse, Fairbanks explained, “without my consent” and carried his three children back to the logging camp. Soon the other workers followed suit. And then a “Poor old Man and Woman . . . come and begged I would allow them to go with them as the women were their Daughters.” Unable to retain the workers without their families, Fairbanks reluctantly took them all in.58

  Merikens

  Despite their previous dread of the West Indies as the worst den of slavery, the most fortunate refugees settled on the island of Trinidad. Conquered by the British from the Spanish during the 1790s, Trinidad was especially large, fertile, and underdeveloped. While preserving the slave-worked plantation sector on Trinidad, the British government distrusted its expansion as a security risk. In the spring of 1815 a colonial official lamented that seven-eighths of Trinidad was “lying waste and unproductive” for want of labor. He urged the introduction of a new group “healthy & free, with habits and science ready formed and sufficiently numerous to stand unsupported and distinct from our present Population on its immediate arrival.” Some imperial officials hoped to fill that bill with some of the black refugees from America.59

  During the war the British sent a few refugees to Trinidad, but the significant arrivals began in May 1815, primarily coming from the Gulf Coast of Florida and Louisiana. By the end of 1815 at least 210 had disembarked at the capital and chief harbor, Port of Spain, where the governor, Sir Ralph Woodford, welcomed them as “mostly creoles, intelligent and apparently well disposed.” Woodford settled most of them in the densely forested lands in the Naparima region, about forty miles south of Port of Spain.60

  As a conservative imperialist, Woodford had complex views on race and slavery in Trinidad. On the one hand, he cheris
hed the rights of property and upheld the racial supremacy of white men. He regretted the abolition of the slave trade for undermining the profitability of plantations and the security of the planters, and he denounced Methodist missionaries for preaching to the slaves and allowing some to become preachers. On the other hand, the governor was also a dutiful imperial servant who obeyed the orders of his superiors, who favored Christianizing the slaves and restricting the slave trade. When reminded by Earl Bathurst of his duty, Woodford vowed “to promote the benevolent Views of His Royal Highness the Prince Regent and the Imperial Parliament towards the Slaves of this Colony.” The governor also bristled when planters lobbied for their own assembly or criticized his administration. An authoritarian, Woodford spoke up for the planters’ interests in part because he did not want them to speak directly to London. Finally, to defend the colony against foreign invasion and internal revolt, the governor relied on a garrison where two-thirds of the soldiers were black. Both a slave society and an imperial colony, Trinidad was rife with contradictions that Woodford had learned to live with.61

  Woodford dreaded the revolutionary ferment in the Spanish colonies along the nearby shores of South America. Early and often (but in vain), he tried to dissuade his government from its policy of neutrality, which, in fact, favored the revolutionaries at the expense of the Spanish royalists. The British government hoped for increased commerce with the independent new republics, but Woodford feared that the revolutions would lead to “Ruin and Desolation and the eventual Dominion of the Sambos.” He gasped when a leading revolutionary, Simon Bolivar, recruited soldiers among the slaves by promising them freedom. And Woodford became apoplectic when Bolivar welcomed naval support from the black republic of Haiti. The governor worried that either his colony’s slaves would escape to South America to enlist with Bolivar or they would import his revolution into Trinidad. In the spring of 1816, Woodford’s alarm grew upon learning of the Easter Revolt by the slaves on the nearby British West Indian island of Barbados. Woodford noted “an Attempt to fire a Liquor Store” in Port of Spain “and the Rapidity with which the News of the Insurrection was spread by the Negroes” of Trinidad despite his efforts to suppress that information.62

  In sum, the American refugees landed in a colony roiled by news of the slave unrest in Barbados and agitated by the revolutions in South America. At such a tense moment, the advent of hundreds of former slaves from America, most with military training, proved controversial. The planters feared that the newcomers would share their military expertise with slaves, but the governor expected them to bolster the colony’s defenses against internal as well as external threats.63

  The biggest surge of refugees to Trinidad came in August 1816, when the former Colonial Marines arrived from Bermuda: 404 men along with 83 women and 87 children. Unlike the previous American black refugees to Trinidad, most of the Colonial Marines came from the Chesapeake, with about a quarter hailing from the Sea Islands of Georgia. In August 1815 the imperial government had proposed transferring the Colonial Marines to a West Indian army regiment. Protests by the marines, their officers, and Bermuda’s governor stalled the transfer, but the government became insistent in November 1815. After several days of discussion, the Colonial Marines embraced an alternative offered by the government: discharge from the service and settlement on their own farms in Trinidad.64

  During the summer of 1816, their commanding major, Andrew Kinsman, accompanied the former Colonial Marines to Port of Spain and on to the Naparima region, where Woodford sought to satisfy “the strong disposition manifested by these People to keep together & form a separate Community.” He also calculated that Naparima’s coast and river would enable the settlers to subsist by catching fish and sea turtles. To supplement the wild bounty, the government provided each man with a weekly ration of four pounds of salted fish and six pounds of flour or plantains and yams. The government delivered hammers, nails, and saws to enable them to construct houses, as well as machetes, hatchets, axes, and hoes to facilitate clearing and cultivating their lands. To maintain order and cohesion, each of the Colonial Marine companies received a distinct village, where the former sergeants and corporals governed as constables. And Woodford appointed a white magistrate, Robert Mitchell, to supervise the constables. Proud of their distinctive origins in America, the black settlers called themselves “the Merikens.”65

  Initially granted sixteen acres, each former marine got more and better land than did the black refugees in Nova Scotia, and a Meriken received additional acreage once he demonstrated an ability to cultivate more. For eight months the settlers relied on government rations, but thereafter they subsisted on their own crops of potatoes, yams, cassava, rice, maize, pumpkins, and plantains. They also kept chickens and pigs and became renowned hunters. In November, just three months after their first settlement, Woodford reported, “They are far advanced in their Plantations and they are reported to behave well in general.” Unlike the governors of Nova Scotia, Woodford consistently praised his black settlers as industrious, “orderly and peaceable.”66

  Woodford, Mitchell, and Kinsman expected gratitude and loyalty to the government from the settlers. In his parting address, Kinsman exhorted his former men “cheerfully [to] take up Arms against any Enemy who may attempt to disturb the peace of the Colony.” He added, “They must not receive any [enslaved] Negroes in their Houses, or Plantations, and must apprehend all Runaways.” To keep their land, the newcomers had to defend the slave society around them.67

  But separating the Merikens from the slaves proved harder than expected. Although relatively underdeveloped, Naparima had about 400 free whites who owned 3,300 slaves, some of whom soon discovered that they had relatives among the newcomers (apparently those from Georgia). This discovery deeply alarmed the local planters, who suspected that the former marines would help the slaves to escape or fight for their freedom. In a protest petition to the governor, the planters dreaded “the intercourse, particularly by night, between the American Negroes and the slaves of your Petitioners.” Contact with free and propertied blacks would promote “impatience and discontent in the Minds of their Slaves,” ultimately ripening into revolt. The planters wanted the Company Towns broken up and the settlers dispersed as wage laborers throughout the slave districts. In effect the planters sought to impose the Nova Scotia plan on the newcomers.68

  Unlike the Nova Scotians, however, the Trinidad planters lacked an elected assembly to press their views, and Woodford brooked no opposition to his government. By defending the Company Towns, Woodford sustained the former marines as a military reserve should either the island’s planters or their slaves become troublesome. Woodford insisted that the Merikens provided “additional Security from having thereby doubled the number of free Men in a District where, as the Petitioners Complain, the slaves so dangerously preponderate.” For Woodford, class trumped race, for he expected free black farmers to defend the colony against a slave revolt. The governor also charged the protesting planters with racial hypocrisy, for some were free people of color: “Many of the present Petitioners were Slaves a few years ago, and now possess some of the finest Estates in the Island.” Race and class did not break along identical fault lines in the social complexity of Trinidad.69

  A strong group identity, hard work, good land, experienced leaders, a warm climate, and a supportive government promoted the success of the Company Towns. In 1817, Woodford visited and praised the settlers’ progress in felling trees, planting gardens, and building homes. By May 1818 the Merikens had cleared 1,200 acres and planted most of them. Seven years later they raised 2,000 barrels of corn and 400 barrels of rice. In 1825, Woodford reported that their houses were “much more spacious, comfortable, and cleaner than the houses of slaves.” But the Merikens had one big problem: a shortage of women. The British government helped by sending to Naparima some African women taken from intercepted slave ships.70

  Among the diverse peoples of Trinidad, the Merikens sustained an enduring and distinctive
identity. Mid-nineteenth-century missionaries described the people as “self-reliant and sensitive of control,” “independent of the outer world,” and “unwilling to submit.” Proud of their freedom, the Merikens felt superior to the enslaved and indentured peoples elsewhere on Trinidad. Their culture synthesized the Christianity of the Chesapeake with the more African beliefs borne by the refugees from the Georgia Sea Islands. Primarily Baptists, the Merikens became noted for their loud, ecstatic, and physical worship, rich in jumps, shakes, shouts, and spiritual songs. Expressed in biblical analogy, their “Memory Spirituals” recalled overcoming slavery through migration and resettlement. In one they sang of their relocation across the sea to a better country known as “Ninevah land”:

  We’re gwine, w’ere gwine to Ninevah land

  Praise ye the Lord

  Captain sailing to Ninevah land

  Praise ye the Lord

  Ninevah land is a beautiful land

  Praise ye the Lord

  Ninevah land will soon overflow

  Praise ye the Lord.

  Through courage and hard work, and with the help of a paternalistic colonial regime, the Merikens had found their Ninevah land in Trinidad after enduring a long captivity in America.71

  Letters

  Sometimes a runaway fled from slavery in the Chesapeake to experience the wider world. Shortly before escaping from Yorktown, a slave named Tom declared “most positively that he would go when and where he pleased.” In 1814 William “Rolla” Ross escaped from Anne Arundel County (Maryland). When his master visited HMS Menelaus, Ross refused to return home, “expressing a desire at the same time to travel.” And travel he would, later writing to his mother “that he had shipped himself on board of one of his Majesty’s Ships and was on the India Station.” From the deck of a British ship he saw far more of the world than he ever had when working a hoe on his master’s fields.72