The motley crew thus provided an image of revolution from below that proved terrifying to Tories and moderate patriots alike. In his famous but falsified engraving of the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere tried to make the “motley rabble” respectable by leaving black faces out of the crowd and putting into it entirely too many gentlemen. The South Carolina Council of Safety complained bitterly of the attacks of sailors—“white and black armed men”—in December 1775.43 Elite colonists reached readily for images of monstrosity, calling the mob a “Hydra,” a “many-headed monster,” a “reptile,” and a “many-headed power.” Many-headedness implied democracy, as Joseph Chalmers explained: a government that was too democratic “becomes a many-headed monster, a tyranny of many.” Against the revolutionary soldiers and sailors who fought beneath the banner of the serpent and the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” John Adams proposed Hercules as the symbol for the new nation.44
Multiracial mobs under the leadership of maritime workers thus helped to create the imperial crisis of the 1770s and simultaneously helped to create a revolutionary solution to it. The militancy of multiracial workers in Boston, Newport, New York, and Charleston led to the formation of the Sons of Liberty, the earliest intercolonial organization to coordinate anti-imperial resistance. Richard B. Morris wrote that New York’s sailors “were organized as the Sons of Neptune, apparently antedating the Sons of Liberty, for whom they may well have provided the pattern of organization.” The commotion around the Gaspee incident in 1772 set in motion a new round of organization, for in the aftermath of this bold action, another revolutionary organization, the committee of correspondence, was established throughout the colonies.”45 And if the motley crew shaped the organizational history of the American Revolution, it had, as we have seen, an even greater impact upon the intellectual history, influencing the ideas of Samuel Adams, J. Philmore, James Otis Jr., Anthony Benezet, Thomas Paine, and John Allen. Action from below taken in Boston, St. Mary’s Parish, Jamaica, and London perpetuated old ideas and generated new ones that would circulate around the Atlantic for decades to come.
One of the main ideas kept alive by multiracial seaport crowds was the antinomian notion that moral conscience stood above the civil law of the state and therefore legitimized resistance to oppression, to a corrupt minister of empire, a tyrannical slave owner, or a violent ship captain. David S. Lovejoy has convincingly shown that a leveling spirit and an antinomian disdain of laws and government lay within the rising “political enthusiasm” of the revolutionary era. Explosive mobs consistently expressed such enthusiasm, moving Benjamin Rush to name a new type of insanity: anarchia, the “excessive love of liberty.” Eventually the higher-law doctrine historically associated with antinomianism appeared in secular form in the Declaration of Independence, which was denounced in its own day as an instance of “civil antinomianism.”46
In its struggle against impressment in the 1760s and 1770s, the motley crew drew on ideas from the English Revolution, when Thomas Rainborough and the revolutionary movement of the 1640s had denounced slavery. In the second Agreement of the Free People of England (May 1649), the Levellers explained the antinomian basis of their opposition to impressment: “We the free People of England” declared to the world that Parliament had no power to press any man into war, for each person must have the right to satisfy his conscience about the justice of the war. Thus they made man and his conscience (not the citizen) the subject of declaration, life (not the nation) its object. Peter Warren was correct when he claimed that the sailors of New England were “almost Levellers.” As such, they expressed their opposition to impressment and to slavery more broadly, influenced Jefferson, Paine, and a whole generation of thinkers, and showed that the 1640s—not 1688—were precedent to the events of 1776.47
Counterrevolution
If the motley crew’s audacious actions gave motion to the multiclass movement toward independence, they also generated commotion within it—fear, ambivalence, and opposition. In New York, for example, the Sons of Liberty came into being as a reaction against the “threatened anarchy” of autonomous risings against the press and the Stamp Act in 1764 and 1765. Everywhere the Sons began to advertise themselves as the guarantors of good order, as the necessary counterpoint to the upheaval within which they themselves had been born. By 1766 the propertied opponents of British policy had declared themselves for “ordered resistance.” In the aftermath of the Boston Massacre in 1770, John Adams defended the redcoats and made an explicitly racist appeal in court, claiming that the looks of the Afro-Indian sailor Crispus Attucks “would be enough to terrify any person.” But in 1773 he wrote a letter about liberty, addressed it to Thomas Hutchinson, and signed it “Crispus Attucks.” Adams dreaded the motley crew, but he knew that they had made the revolutionary movement.48
Similar contradictions haunted Thomas Jefferson, who acknowledged the motley crew but feared its challenge to his own vision of America’s future. Jefferson included in the Declaration of Independence the complaint that King George III “has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.” He (and Congress) included sailors in the revolutionary coalition but tendentiously simplified their history and role within the movement, leaving out the war of classes and emphasizing only the war of nations. The passage also lacked the graceful wording and lofty tone of the rest of the Declaration. It is awkward and confused, especially in its indecision about classifying the sailor (citizen, friend, brother?). Jefferson employed “the most tremendous words,” as Carl Becker said of the draft passage concerning African slavery, but “the passage somehow leaves us cold.” There is in it “a sense of labored effort, of deliberate striving for an effect that does not come.” As it happened, Jefferson added the words about impressment as an afterthought, squeezing them into his rough draft of the Declaration. He knew that the labor market in a mercantile age was a serious problem and that commerce would depend on sailors whether America was to remain within the British Empire or not.49
Tom Paine knew it too. He also denounced impressment but was more concerned in Common Sense to reassure American merchants about the maritime labor supply after the revolution. “In point of manning a fleet, people in general run into great errors; it is not necessary that one fourth part should be sailors. . . . A few able and social sailors will soon instruct a sufficient number of active landmen in the common work of a ship.” This had been his own experience aboard the Terrible, privateer, during the Seven Years’ War, which led him to argue that sailors, shipbuilders, and the maritime sector as a whole constituted a viable economic basis for a new American nation. (He failed to mention that the crew of the vessel was motley and mutinous.) The only question remaining was how to obtain independence: should it be done from above, by the legal voice of Congress, or should it be done from below, by the mob? Here Paine shared the attitudes of others of his station: he feared the motley mob (though he would think differently in the 1790s). The multitude, he explained, was reasonable in 1776, but “virtue” was not perpetual. Safeguards were necessary lest “some Massanello may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.” His greatest fear was a combination of the struggles of urban workers, African slaves, and Native Americans.50
The motley crew had helped to make the revolution, but the vanguard struck back in the 1770s and 1780s, against sailors, slaves, and mobs, in what must be considered an American Thermidor. The effort to reform the mob by removing its more militant elements began in 1766 and continued, not always successfully, through the revolution and beyond. Patriot landowners, merchants, and artisans increasingly condemned revolutionary crowds, seeking to move politics from “out of doors” into legislative chambers, in which the propertyless would have no vote and
no voice. Paine turned against the crowd after Philadelphia’s Fort Wilson Riot of 1779. When Samuel Adams helped to draw up Massachusetts’s Riot Act of 1786 for the purpose of dispersing and controlling the insurgents of Shays’ Rebellion, he had ceased to believe that the mob “embodied the fundamental rights of man against which government itself could be judged,” and he detached himself from the creative democratic force that years ago had given him the best idea of his life.51
Since the beginning of the movement in 1765, the moderate patriots had sought to limit the struggle for liberty by keeping slaves out of the revolutionary coalition. The place of slaves in the movement remained ambiguous until 1774, when Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, attacked the patriot tobacco planters by offering freedom to servants and slaves willing to join His Majesty’s army to reestablish order in the colony. The news of the offered liberation ran like wildfire through slave communities, and thousands deserted the plantations, inaugurating a new, mobile slave revolt of huge proportions. Some of these slaves would be organized as Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment; those who were not permitted to bear arms would seek the protection of the British army. American leaders, infuriated by the move, tried to preserve slavery, announcing in 1775 that recruiters should take no deserter, “stroller, negro, or vagabond,” and reaffirming over the next year that neither free blacks nor slaves would be eligible for military service. Scarcity of labor would force reconsideration of the issue, especially later in the war. While five thousand African Americans fought for liberty, the American political and military leadership battled the British and some of their own soldiers to protect the institution of slavery.52
The sailor would be encouraged to serve in the Continental Navy, but he was not, according to James Madison, a good citizen for a republic. What little virtue he may have had was deadened by his life as a dumb drudge at sea: “Though traversing and circumnavigating the globe, he sees nothing but the same vague objects of nature, the same monotonous occurrences in ports and docks; and at home in his vessel, what new ideas can shoot from the unvaried use of the ropes and the rudder, or from the society of comrades as ignorant as himself.” Madison’s own ignorance, arrogance, or denial caused him to invert the truth, but he was right about something else: the greater the number of sailors in a republic, he suggested, the less secure the government. Madison was joined in these attitudes by many, including the “Connecticut Wits” (David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins), who in 1787 wrote a poem entitled “The Anarchiad” in response to Shays’ Rebellion and in memory of the cycle of rebellion in the 1760s and 1770s. The poets expressed their hatred for mobs and their ideas. They sneered at “democratic dreams,” “the rights of man,” and the goal of reducing all “To just one level.” One of their darkest nightmares was what they called a “young DEMOCRACY from hell.” They had not forgotten the role of sailors in the revolution. In their imagined state of anarchy, the “mighty Jacktar guides the helm.” He had been “Nurs’d on the waves, in blust’ring tempests bred, / His heart of marble, and his brain of lead.” Having sailed “in the whirlwind” as a part of his work, this hard-hearted, thick-headed man naturally “enjoys the storm” of revolution. The poets alluded to the revolutionary acts of sailors when they referred to “seas of boiling tar.”53
During the 1780s such thinking came to prevail among those who made up the emerging political nation—merchants, professionals, shopkeepers, artisans, slave owners, and yeoman farmers. Sailors and slaves, once necessary parts of the revolutionary coalition, were thus read out of the settlement at revolution’s end. Of the five workingmen killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770 John Adams had written: “the blood of the martyrs, right or wrong, proved to be the seed of the congregation.” Yet had Crispus Attucks—slave, sailor, and mob leader—survived the fire of British muskets, he would not have been allowed to join the congregation, or new nation, he had helped to create. The exclusion of people like Attucks epitomized a sudden, reactionary retreat from the universalistic revolutionary language that had been forged in the heat of the 1760s and 1770s and permanently emblazoned in the Declaration of Independence. The reaction was institutionalized in the US Constitution, which gave the new federal government the power to suppress domestic insurrections. James Madison was worried in 1787 about “a levelling spirit” and an “agrarian law.”54 The Constitution also strengthened slavery by extending the slave trade, providing for the return of fugitive slaves, and giving national political power to the plantation master class.55 Meanwhile, an intensive debate about the nature and capacity of “the negro” raged between 1787 and 1790. Many Baptists and Methodists backed away from antislavery commitments and sought instead “a gospel made safe for the plantation.”56 The new American ruling class redefined “race” and “citizenship” to divide and marginalize the motley crew, legislating in the 1780s and early 1790s a unified law of slavery based on white supremacy. The actions of the motley crew, and the reactions against them, help to illuminate the clashing, ambiguous nature of the American Revolution—its militant origins, radical momentum, and conservative political conclusion.57
Vectors of Revolution
And yet the implications of the struggles of the 1760s and 1770s could not easily be contained by the Sons of Liberty, Jefferson, Paine, Adams, or the new American government. Soldiers who fought in the war circulated the news, experience, and ideas of the revolution. Several veterans of the French regiments deployed in North America, including Henri Christophe and André Rigaud, would later lead the next major revolution of the western Atlantic, in Haiti beginning in 1791. Other veterans returned to France and may have led a series of revolts against feudal land tenure that accelerated revolution in Europe during the 1790s. The news carried by Hessian soldiers back to their homeland eventually propelled a new generation of settlers toward America. But it was the motley crew, the sailors and slaves who were defeated in America and subsequently dispersed, who did the most to create new resistance and to inaugurate a broader age of revolution throughout the world.58
Sailors were a vector of revolution that traveled from North America out to sea and southward to the Caribbean. The sailors of the British navy grew mutinous after 1776, inspired in part by the battles against the press gangs and the king’s authority in America. An estimated 42,000 deserted naval ships between 1776 and 1783. Many who went to sea got a revolutionary education. Robert Wedderburn, born to a slave woman and a Scottish plantation owner in Jamaica, joined the mutinous navy in 1778, and thereafter worked as a sailor, a tailor, a writer, and a preacher of jubilee as he took part in maritime protests, slave revolts, and urban insurrection. Julius Scott has shown that sailors black, white, and brown connected with slaves in the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch port cities of the Caribbean, exchanging information about slave revolts, abolition, and revolution, generating rumors that became material forces in their own right. It is not known for certain if sailors carried the news of the American Revolution that helped to inspire slave rebels in Hanover Parish, Jamaica, in 1776. It is known that a motley crew, “fifty or sixty men of all colors,” including an “Irishman of prodigious size,” attacked British and American ships in the Caribbean in 1793, apparently in league with the new revolutionary government of Haiti.59
The slaves and free blacks who flocked to the British army during the revolution and who were then dispersed around the Atlantic after 1783 constituted a second, multidirectional vector of revolution. Twelve thousand African Americans were transported out of Savannah, Charleston, and New York with the army in 1782 and 1783, while another eight to ten thousand departed with loyalist masters. They went to Sierra Leone, London, Dublin, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, East Florida, the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Mosquito Shore, and Belize. Free people of color from North America caused problems throughout the Caribbean in the later 1780s, especially in Jamaica and the Windward Islands, where they created new political openings and alignments in slave societies and helped to prepare the way for the Haitia
n Revolution. By 1800 Lord Balcarres, governor of Jamaica, wrote of the “Pandora’s Box” that had been opened in the West Indies: “Turbulent people of all Nations engaged in illicit Trade; a most abandoned class of Negroes, up to every scene of mischief, and a general levelling spirit throughout, is the character of the lower orders in Kingston.” Here, he explained, was a refuge for revolutionaries and a site for future insurrection, a place that might “in a moment . . . be laid in ashes.”60
A third powerful vector of revolution hurtled eastward toward the abolitionist movement in England. Sailors and slaves, some of them sailors who had been slaves, proved to be strategic links to the abolition movement’s most important leaders, Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. During the 1780s the African sailor Olaudah Equiano mobilized Sharp on the case of the Zong, wherein captain Luke Collingwood threw 132 living Africans overboard in an effort to collect insurance money. Soon thereafter dissident sailors such as John Dean and others in Liverpool and Bristol educated Clarkson about the nature of the slave trade.61
A fourth and final vector pointed toward Africa. The African Americans in diaspora after 1783 would originate modern pan-Africanism by settling, with the help of Equiano and Sharp, in Sierra Leone. Their dispersal after the American Revolution, eastward across the Atlantic, was similar to the dispersal of radicals after the English Revolution, a century and a half earlier, westward across the Atlantic. Both movements had posed challenges to slavery but were defeated. The earlier defeat permitted the consolidation of the plantation and the slave trade, while the latter defeat allowed the slave system to expand and gather new strength. Yet the long-term consequences of the second defeat would be a victory, the ultimate undoing of the slave trade and plantation system. The theory and practice of antinomian democracy, which had been generalized around the Atlantic in the seventeenth-century diaspora, would be revived and deepened in the eighteenth. What went out in whiteface came back in blackface, to end the pause in the discussion of democratic ideas in England and to give new life to worldwide revolutionary movements. What goes around comes around, by the circular winds and currents of the Atlantic.
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