Rough Crossings

by Simon Schama

  The strategy backfired, as it did throughout the South. Instead of being cowed by the threat of a British armed liberation of the blacks, the slaveholding population mobilized to resist. Innumerable whites, especially in the habitually loyal backcountry of Virginia, had been hitherto sceptical of following the more hot-headed of their Patriot leaders. But the news that British troops would liberate their blacks, then give them weapons and their blessing to use them on their masters, persuaded many into thinking that perhaps the militant Patriots were right and that the British government, in tearing up the “bonds” of civil society (as Washington had put it), might be capable of any iniquity. It is not too much, then, to say that in the summer and autumn of 1775 the revolution in the South crystallized around this one immense, terrifying issue. However intoxicating the heady rhetoric of “rights” and “liberty” emanating from Patriot orators and journalists, for the majority of farmers, merchants and townsmen in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia (the vast majority of whom owned between one and five negroes), all-out war and separation now turned from an ideological flourish to a social necessity. Theirs was a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery. Edward Rutledge, one of the leading South Carolina Patriots, was right when he described the British strategy of arming freed slaves as tending “more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.”14

  By the summer and early autumn of 1775 a full-scale panic about the imminence of a black rising, armed and sustained by the British, was under way from tidewater Virginia to Georgia. In July, Cape Fear in North Carolina lived up to its name. Sixty percent of the population on the Cape and up the Cape Fear River were slaves, but since many worked in the marine trades as sawyers, millwrights, tar-burners, carters and stevedores they enjoyed more freedom than field hands, congregated on the docks and sometimes even lodged in Wilmington. The local Committee of Safety, panicking at the rate of “elopements” from plantations, ordered street patrols to disarm and arrest any blacks found with weapons, or any who met in suspicious gatherings. After the British commander at Fort Johnston at the mouth of the Cape Fear River had started not only to encourage runaways but to promise protection to them, the rate of flight into the woods became nearly uncontrollable. Worse, word spread among the terrified whites of Wilmington and Cape Fear that “every Negro that would murder his Master and family…should [by British fiat] have his Master’s plantation.”15

  One of those Wilmington blacks who was on the verge of taking the British up on what he thought was the chance of freedom was Thomas Peters, a millwright and slave belonging to another Scottish William Campbell—this time, however, very much a Patriot and a member of the local branch of the radical Sons of Liberty. Like Patrick Henry’s slave Ralph and George Washington’s Henry, Peters could hardly have missed his own master’s opinionated table thumping and might just have taken offence at the presumption that airing such views could have no possible effect on dumb human chattels. But Peters was not dumb; very far from it. Like many who would shake off their chains and go to the British, he had a family: a wife, Sally (not that his master recognized the legality of slave marriage), and a daughter, Clairy. Even if he was not fully literate, Peters certainly understood the ambiguities of the principles that the white revolutionaries supposed him incapable of comprehending. And he would, when the time was right, act on them.

  But that time was not quite come. In the first week of July a plot was uncovered in which, on the 8th of the month, slaves were “to fall on and destroy the family where they had lived, then to proceed from House to House (burning as they went) until they arrived at the Back Country where they were to be received with open arms by a Number of Persons there appointed and armed by Government for their Protection and as a further reward they were to be settled in a free government of their own.”16 Forty blacks implicated in the aborted rising were arrested, one killed and the rest subjected to brutal floggings and ear croppings before crowds in Wilmington. Peters, and many like him, decided to wait.

  But no sooner had one rising been stamped on than another was discovered. Later that same month another conspiracy to “take the country by killing the whites” was said to have been hatched in St Bartholomew’s parish, near Charleston, More startling was the fact that this rebellion seemed to have been encouraged and blessed by black preachers, two of whom were women. Ecstatic secret religious assemblies had gathered in the woods, where devotees were told of a mysterious book, given to “the Old King” who was commanded to “Alter the World.” The old king had disregarded the book and had paid the price by descending straight to hell. But now there was a new young king, George III, who had hearkened to the Gospel “and was about to alter the World and set the Negroes Free.”17 More unnerving was the fact that the leaders of this ordained exodus were almost all slaves belonging to conspicuous Patriots, such as Francis Smith. It was Smith’s slave, George, who was hanged as the prime suspect.

  Up and down the Atlantic tidewater, from Chesapeake Bay to the estuaries of the Potomac and the Rappahannock and down to the sea islands of Georgia, word had spread that a godly deliverance was about to be brought by the soldiers of the king. Gleanings of those rumours, together with a sudden but unmistakable acceleration in the rate of runaways, was enough to put fury and trepidation in equal measure into the hearts of the masters. Patrols were mounted on roads and waterways. Slave cabins were searched without notice, and gatherings of more than four negroes outside of work hours deemed a criminal conspiracy. On the 24th of September 1775 John Adams met two rattled planters from Georgia who “gave a melancholy account of the State of Georgia and South Carolina. They say if one thousand regular troops should land in Georgia, and their commander be provided with arms and clothes enough and proclaim freedom to all the negroes who would join his camp, twenty thousand negroes would join it from the two Provinces in a fortnight.”18 Later in the year Washington, who had already heard from Virginia friends and neighbours of their evaporating labour force, was just as apprehensive about the potential threat posed by a combined force of liberated blacks and redcoats. “If that man is not crushed before spring,” he wrote of Dunmore, “he will become the most formidable enemy America has; his strength will increase as a snowball by rolling; and faster, if some expedient cannot be hit upon, to convince the slaves and servants [for white indentured servants had gone missing from Washington’s own estate at Mount Vernon as well] of the impotency of his designs.”19

  This was the most richly undeserved backhanded compliment that John Murray, 4th Earl Dunmore, ever received. For although he was vilified, almost apocalyptically, in the Patriot press and in Congress as “our devil Dunmore,” a Machiavel in wig and plaid, he was in reality no more than the standard issue Scots-Hanoverian imperialist, handicapped by a rigid sense of duty, a political tin ear and, as events would show, a fatally imperfect grasp of military tactics. And whilst Dunmore was ready to exploit Southern white nightmares of being engulfed by the much greater numbers of blacks, he was certainly no social revolutionary. Whatever damage would be done to the property of wicked rebels would be repaired and restored after the war, Dunmore supposed, along with their right allegiance. There was never any question in his mind, after all, of freeing the slaves of loyalists.

  Dunmore was in his late thirties when he took up residence in the Governor’s House at Williamsburg in 1772: just another Scottish minor aristocrat, anxious (like William Murray, Lord Mansfield) to dispel the faint suspicion of Jacobitism that still vaguely tainted the family name, notwithstanding the fact that there were as many ferociously Hanoverian Murrays as there were obstinate followers of the Stuarts. Dunmore was, then, even in the tam-o’-shanter and clan plaid in which he chose to be painted, the personification of British union, the most loyal servant imaginable of George III and his ministers. But he had arrived in America at an intemperate time. By 1774 the punishment meted out to Boston in the wake of
the Tea Party, especially the closing of its port, was regarded, even by those who deplored the destruction of property, as so vindictive that it inspired, especially in Virginia, an outpouring of sympathy and a determination to link the colonies in common cause. The proposal to establish a Committee of Correspondence to co-ordinate protests against the “Intolerable Acts” inflicted on Boston provoked Dunmore into dissolving the Virginia assembly, the House of Burgesses. He repeated this dissolution when the House voted for a day of fasting and prayer on the 7th of June 1774 in solidarity with Boston. Shut out of their assembly, the delegates merely repaired to the Raleigh Tavern, where they proceeded to beat the drums of fraternal indignation and plan the colony’s participation in a boycott of British goods.

  Two hitherto fairly distinct political and social cultures—the patrician clans of the tidewater tobacco plantations, the Carters, Byrds and Lees, and the more independently minded and politically assertive farmer-gentry of the Piedmont hills, such as Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason and James Madison—were coming together in resistance to the clumsy intimidation of the British Crown. The Piedmonters had been particularly displeased by what they took to be Dunmore’s feeble prosecution and abrupt termination of a backcountry war against the Shawnee tribe; another egregious instance, they supposed of the Crown’s suffocating determination to confine their territorial expansion.

  On the 20th of April 1775, just two days after Lexington and Concord, Dunmore succeeded where General Gage in Boston had failed. But the coup achieved by his pre-emptive seizure of munitions at Williamsburg was short-lived, triggering a furious counter-reaction not just there but throughout Virginia. Much of the rage that Dunmore’s action provoked was coloured by anxieties about the kind of people—not to mention their race—likely to get their hands on the powder. Nor did that fear go away when Dunmore agreed to pay some £350 for the gunpowder, thus providing the Virginians with money for its replacement while saving some face.

  On the 8th of June, acutely conscious that he could call on just three hundred or so loyalist volunteers, soldiers and sailors, Dunmore followed his powder kegs to the safety of HMS Fowey and proceeded to stall any business sent to him by the House of Burgesses unless it was presented in person on the ship. In response, the House declared His Lordship to have abdicated executive authority; this was reinvested (as in Charleston) in a Committee of Safety, which then proceeded to levy taxes and arm a militia. It was, indeed—as Patrick Henry, ever the self-fulfilling, as well as the self-appointed, prophet, pronounced it—already a war.

  Dunmore lost no time before waging it. From his floating headquarters aboard the Fowey he sent out raiding parties in tenders and cutters, small vessels normally used to ferry provisions to the warships. Along the Rappahannock, Piankatank and Elizabeth rivers, and on the eastern shore farms owned by Patriots, especially those absent and serving in the militia, were burned and their livestock and slaves seized. But the tenders also picked up scores of blacks who, it is clear from the increasingly distressed letters sent by planters and from runaway advertisements in the Virginia Gazette, were already making their way, in a small but steady and growing stream, to wherever they thought the Union Jack or the White Ensign might fly.

  Over the next year, and despite all the setbacks suffered by the British cause in Virginia, the slaves of the Chesapeake and tidewater Virginia came in droves. Sometimes they came from much further off: Cato Winslow, for instance, made it all the way from New York to join Dunmore’s regiment.20 Sometimes they came en masse: eighty-seven alone arrived from John Willoughby’s plantation in Norfolk County, comprising its entire labour force. The escapees included Abby Brown (then twenty-three), William Patrick, Zilpah Cevils, just eight, and her sister Hannah, three. The long odyssey of Mary Perth, then thirty-six, who would reach New York and certified freedom, who would survive the snows and poverty of Nova Scotia and end up as the dowager queen of river trade in Sierra Leone, began with her flight in late 1775 from Willoughby’s plantation to the waiting ships of the Earl of Dunmore.21 Most often the escaped slaves travelled by night in small groups of four or eight—family or friends, mothers and children—lying in the flat-bottomed, two-masted boats known as piragua or, in the corrupt tidewater English, as “pettiaugers” or “pettingers,” which were used to navigate the tidal creeks and rushy inlets. Lying low in the water, they were perfect for concealment, and the slaves of the southern Chesapeake and Potomac, who for years had fished there and carried provisions to and from the plantations, knew exactly how to navigate them through the tributary basin. It was particularly painful for plantation owners who had entrusted these kinds of men—not only river pilots and ferrymen, but the most skilled of their hands, sawyers and coopers, carters and smiths—with a degree of generous freedom only to be “repaid” with their stealing off with the boats. Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall was especially indignant that no fewer than eleven of his best slaves—his son’s personal slave, Moses, as well as Postillion, “Mullatto,” Panticove, Joe, Billy, John, Peter, Tom, Manuel and Lancaster Sam—had all run off to Lord Dunmore, taking his son’s gun, bullets and powder in the newly trimmed pettiauger. To add insult to injury, they had also taken silver buckles, shorts, waistcoats and breeches.22 Others, such as James Jackson, who escaped from Robert Tucker’s plantation in Norfolk, may not have taken boats, but used their knowledge of the rivers to find a way to Dunmore’s ships, and readily served the British as pilots on raids and expeditions through the waterways.23

  Not all the Virginian escapees of 1775 and 1776 were adult males and “stout negroes,” of course. Hannah Jackson was thirty-two when she left the plantation of Thomas Newton with her little boy, Bob, then just five. Chloe Walker, property of James MacKay Walker, was twenty-three when she departed together with her six-year-old son Samuel and a bundled-up baby, Lydia. Sukey Smith and Hannah Blair were both only eighteen when they left, respectively, Major Smith at Gloucester and Jacob Hancock on the East Shore. Patty Mosely was a mere girl of eleven when she too disappeared from Edward Mosely’s plantation in Princess Ann County. Brothers and sisters sometimes made their escape together: Samuel and Mary Tomkin, for instance, left Richard Tomkin at Little York. And some, too, managed the journey to British safety despite literally crippling handicaps. Moses Wilkinson, who would be preacher and prophet to the flock of black loyalists in three countries, was twenty-nine when he ceased, through his own hobbling exodus, to be the property of Miles Wilkinson of Nansemond—despite the fact that he was both blind and lame.

  At least eight hundred male slaves of serving age reached Dunmore in the second half of 1775 and early 1776. But even that conservative figure takes no account of the many women and children who went with their men, so the total figure of escapees to the British is likely to be at least two or three times that number. The historian Allan Kulikoff gives an estimate of three thousand to five thousand adult blacks for the entire period of the war, a figure that again needs multiplying for a hypothetical total.24 If, as seems to be the case, Jefferson’s figure of thirty thousand Virginian escaped slaves is dependable for the duration of the war, the number finding their way to the British is best seen as a resolute but extremely significant minority. Tens of thousands of the remainder must simply have taken advantage of the chaos and low-intensity warfare to disappear into the swampland.

  So, without exactly seeking the part, John Murray, this pink-cheeked time-server who had never thought himself much of a soldier, and who alternately fumbled and blustered his way through a sorry, unwinnable predicament, had become the patriarch of a great black exodus. He was now and for ever “Lord Dunmore,” no longer just an obliging and forgettable nonentity on the benches of the upper house of Parliament, but, depending on your skin colour and your politics, either the Belial of the foulest and most iniquitous scheme ever unleashed on defenceless Americans, or the revered saviour of the suffering and the enslaved. Wags and hacks in Charleston and Williamsburg, themselves wandering between derision and paranoia, comp
osed satirical verses vilifying him and the “speckled regiment” whose general he had stooped to be. Politicians in Philadelphia, pontificating about the dawning of an American future, fixed on him as the epitome of swaggering despotism and tigerish cruelty who would get his come-uppance from the battalions of the free. A man who would unleash the Africk hordes on so many decent Patriots could only be a perverted, inhuman monster! And all the while blacks in the tidewater, or on the rice rivers of South Carolina, or in the upland Piedmont of Virginia, when they knew a belly was swelling with the future thought they might (and in some cases did) name the child “Dunmore.”

  But Dunmore was not the man they imagined. He was, sad to report, a bit of a trembler:

  LORD DUNMORE TO THE EARL OF DARTMOUTH, 6TH DECEMBER 1775

  I have often prayed to be instructed…for many months past, but not one line have I had the honour of receiving from your lordship since yours of the 30th of May. God only knows what I have suffered since my first embarking from my anxiety of mind, not knowing how to act in innumerable instances that occur every day, being one moment diffident of my own judgement (and not having one living soul to advise with) and then on the other hand fearing, if I remained a tame spectator and permitted the rebels to proceed without interruption, that they would by persuasion, threats and every other art in their power, delude many of His Majesty’s well-disposed subjects to their party.25