American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  But after the news of Lexington, South Carolina’s rebel leaders, most of whom were slaveholders, were suddenly confronted with a triple threat. A subsequent proclamation described these threats as “the actual Commencement of Hostilities against this Continent—the Threats of arbitrary Impositions from Abroad—and the Dread of Instigated Insurrections at Home.” If the British were capable of such atrocities as reported at Lexington and Concord, why would they hesitate to unleash a slave insurrection?20

  What gave this rumored slave revolt further credence was the work of David Margrett (sometimes “Margate”), an itinerant free black preacher who had provoked considerable uproar the previous winter. Margrett had preached to slaves around Charleston that their predicament was akin to the Jews held in bondage in Egypt and that the brewing tensions between their masters and their masters’ master in Great Britain would set them free. Margrett had been tending to a flock at an orphanage called Bethesda, near Savannah, Georgia, but given that the benefactress of Margrett’s ministries was an English countess, it was not too much of a leap to suspect the hand of Lord North’s government behind Margrett’s evangelism.

  Margrett’s recent preaching, Arthur Lee’s letter warning of a slave uprising, and the news of British aggressiveness at Lexington and Concord combined to cause white imaginations to run wild about what armed blacks might do. A party of rebels embarked for Georgia to seize Margrett and hang him for his contributions to the unrest. Whatever the rumors of insurrection, they insisted that Margrett was a key contributor. A friendly warning reached Margrett, and he escaped to England before he could be taken, but within weeks continuing fears of a slave revolt were to prove deadly for a free black named Thomas Jeremiah, who was one of Charleston’s most accomplished harbor pilots.21

  Little if anything is known of Jeremiah’s early life. He may have been born of a free mother, been granted his freedom by his owner under special circumstances, or purchased his own freedom after receiving his owner’s permission to work additional jobs. In Charleston, there were then perhaps only two hundred free blacks out of a black population approaching one hundred thousand across all of South Carolina. The first public notice of Jeremiah may have appeared in the South-Carolina Gazette in 1755, when it was reported that he had erroneously piloted the fourteen-gun sloop HMS Jamaica onto mudflats off the harbor entrance. He was still an apprentice, and Jeremiah weathered the mistake and a similar one the following year, and by 1775 he was known as “one of the best pilots in the harbor.”22

  Mastering the tides and currents, the shifting sandbars, and the labyrinthine twists and turns of the approaches to Charleston Harbor was no easy task. Those pilots who did so commanded top dollar and were held in considerable esteem—if they were white. Jeremiah nonetheless amassed substantial wealth, even if it came with little personal respect, and by some accounts, by 1775, he may have been “the richest man of African descent in British North America.” Jeremiah owned his pilot boat and fishing boats and also engaged in merchant activities. He was also a slave owner, working them on board his various vessels. There is some evidence that Jeremiah took himself quite seriously and was justifiably proud in signing himself “Thomas Jeremiah, (a Free Negro).” To the white establishment, however, he was “Jerry the pilot” or “the Negro Jerry.”23

  Whether Thomas Jeremiah was the mastermind behind a southern slave uprising or merely a prominent black freeman in the wrong place at the wrong time is still a matter of debate. There is no question that throughout South Carolina in the spring of 1775, local militias were preparing to defend themselves against a loyalist-inspired slave revolt as much as they were preparing to fight British regulars to protest their own enslavement. Charleston merchant Josiah Smith Jr. confessed to a friend that his greatest fear was “hostile attempts that may be made by our domesticks, who of late have been taught to believe they will be all sett free on the arrival of our New Governer.” Indeed, rumors were rampant that the new governor, Lord William Campbell, was soon to arrive on HMS Scorpion with fourteen thousand stands of arms to distribute to slaves and Indians.24

  For Thomas Jeremiah, the wait for Governor Campbell would ultimately prove deadly. Jeremiah was arrested and charged with fomenting insurrection on the basis of rather dubious claims made by two slaves, one of whom may have been Jeremiah’s brother-in-law. After an extended trial that at one point recessed for weeks so that the prosecution could gather more evidence, Jeremiah was judged guilty. His status as a freeman didn’t do him any good, because South Carolina’s Negro Act mandated that all blacks, once charged with crimes and offenses, were treated as if they were slaves. He was promptly hanged.

  Newly arrived Governor Campbell had tried his best to save Jeremiah, but rebel Charleston was unsympathetic both to Campbell’s royal position and Jeremiah’s plight. Indeed, it appears that the rebels’ real fear may have been that Jeremiah and Charleston’s other black pilots “might prove valuable to an invading British fleet.”25

  Thomas Jeremiah’s hanging was almost surely a miscarriage of justice, just one example of how the heated and emotional tenor of the times became particularly dangerous when one was a free black. According to historian William R. Ryan, many whites claimed that Jeremiah had “overstepped his bounds, exceeded his station, and conspired against provincial authority.”26

  BY NOW, THE NORTHERN FRONTIERS of the colonies were in arms, from New York’s Adirondack Mountains all the way eastward through New Hampshire to the seaports of Massachusetts’s territory of Maine. Here, too, as in the southern colonies, there was another threat besides British regulars. It did not come from black slaves. Prince Estabrook, Peter Salem, and others had just fought and bled on the rebel side with no guarantees of emancipation. Some northern slaves indeed curried British favor, but they lacked the numbers to pose a great danger. Lurking on the northern borders was a larger and potentially much more hostile enemy.

  Relations between Native Americans and English colonists on the northern frontier had always been complex. There were certainly some Indian nations, particularly among the Iroquois Confederacy, who had historically allied themselves with the English against the French. But a great many more had long resisted British colonial expansion. It is perhaps an oversimplification to state it this way, but the very nature of the French colonial experience in North America—transitory trappers and traders moving through the country and bringing with them a mutually beneficial system of barter—tended to embrace and sustain indigenous lifestyles. The English, on the other hand, were largely settlers who came into the land, cut down trees, planted crops, and stayed. With France legally removed from Canada after 1763, British administrators were faced with the task of controlling both their historic Indian allies as well as their restless former enemies.

  Early in 1775, General Gage advised the Crown’s two principal Indian agents, Guy Johnson for the northern provinces and John Stuart for the southern provinces, to ensure that those Indian nations within their jurisdictions reserved their loyalty for the Crown and were not won over by rebellious colonists. Gage gave no outright orders that these Indians should launch attacks in the event of open conflict by rebels, but he did advise that they should make themselves “ready to move against the frontiers in case the king should desire their assistance.”27

  That same winter, when Lieutenant Colonel John Caldwell, the commanding officer at Fort Niagara, reported to Gage that Indians in the vicinity of his post appeared to be itching for a fight, Gage gave Caldwell specific instructions that if they indeed felt compelled to attack, they should be encouraged to vent their frustrations on rebel frontiersmen and not the king’s troops. If they showed such discretion, Gage told Caldwell, “they would continue to receive their supplies as in the past.”28

  By April, things were far more serious. Two days after the Lexington fight, Gage wrote Canadian governor Guy Carleton that a force of Canadians and Indians “would be of great use on the Frontiers of the Province of Massachusetts Bay Under the Command of a Judi
cious person.”29

  AFTER A FATEFUL FEW WEEKS, the answer to the Massachusetts question—“Must we stand alone?”—appeared to be that rebels throughout the thirteen colonies would stand together. But the rebels were harried on every side—by British regulars in their face, loyalist neighbors in their midst, the internal threat of a slave insurrection, and the external threat of a British-instigated Indian assault. Nowhere was this final threat more ominous than along the Canadian border, and it would encourage bold action in response.

  Chapter 18

  “In the Name of the Great Jehovah…”

  As if the Massachusetts Provincial Congress did not have enough to occupy its attention that spring around Boston, there was animated talk about acquiring Canada. This was not a new thought. Despite two centuries of exploration and settlement by France, Canada had long been the object of British dreams of colonial expansion. The European wars of the earlier eighteenth century between Great Britain and France had always involved warfare along their tenuous colonial borders from the Great Lakes to Nova Scotia.

  Many of those rebels now gathering around Boston who were middle-aged had received their military training in some manner or another during the French and Indian War. Some had sailed to Nova Scotia to storm Louisbourg with the dashing General Wolfe. Others had climbed with him onto the Plains of Abraham, outside Quebec. A great many more had battled in their own backyards, up and down the watery reaches of the Hudson River and Lake Champlain. Their sacrifices had helped Great Britain acquire Canada, and it was memories of those sacrifices that had further inflamed anti-British sentiments after the adversarial Quebec Act.

  “Massachusettensis… threatens you with the vengeance of Great-Britain,” John Adams warned, and added that the country would “support her claims by her fleets and armies, Canadians and Indians.”1 To many, the Canadian part of this vengeance appeared every bit as real as the Indian portion, and anyone with the slightest sense of geography knew very well the direct route from which it was likely to come.

  The Hudson River, flowing south from the Adirondacks to the gateway of New York, and Lakes George and Champlain, draining north down the Richelieu River to the Saint Lawrence, had long been a path of migration, trade, and warfare. In the 1700s, this watery corridor was to colonial America what the Mississippi River and its many tributaries would become to American expansionism a century later. Control the Hudson-to-Champlain corridor and one controlled the most direct line between New York and Quebec; an adversary who did so might also neatly sever the limb of New England from the trunk of the other colonies.

  The French had understood this well as they advanced southward from what they called Fort Carillon, at the southern end of Lake Champlain, in the summer of 1757. After the capture of Fort William Henry—made infamous by The Last of the Mohicans—the French chose to hunker down at Fort Carillon and make it a fortress, but this threat only intensified British efforts to capture it. Abercromby’s ill-fated assault of 1758 failed miserably and cost the young Lord Howe his life, but the following year, the French blew up the fort rather than surrender it. General Jeffery Amherst renamed the post Ticonderoga and set about rebuilding it.

  By the spring of 1775, absent any French threat from what was now British Canada, Fort Ticonderoga had fallen into a dismal state of disrepair. It was also severely undermanned. The prize of Ticonderoga, however, was not just its strategic location but also dozens of heavy cannons that had been dragged there two decades before by both the French and British. Many were aging relics, but given the meager resources of the yet-to-be-formed Continental Army, they would make a treasure trove of rebel artillery.

  General Thomas Gage, well versed as he was in Britain’s frontier posts, was fully cognizant of this, and, in light of rebel campaigns at Portsmouth, Salem, and Concord to seize and stockpile weapons, he ordered Fort Ticonderoga’s commander, Captain William Delaplace, to be especially on his guard. Delaplace’s predicament was not unlike that of other British commanders spread throughout the colonies. He commanded a garrison best fit for caretaking, not fighting. At his disposal was one officer, Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham, and forty-two men, half of whom were described as “old, wore out & unserviceable,” along with about two dozen women and children. In fact, of this number, Lieutenant Feltham and a reinforcement of ten men had only recently arrived from Canada. Had Ticonderoga’s garrison been at full strength, it would have boasted at least four hundred soldiers to man its cannons and defend its walls.2

  Rebel leaders throughout the northern colonies were equally well versed in the importance of Fort Ticonderoga and its present poor condition. Samuel Adams saw the post as critical to holding open the New York–Quebec corridor, through which he hoped would flow a lifeline of men and supplies from Canadians friendly to the rebel cause. “We have lately opend a correspondence with Canada,” Adams wrote Arthur Lee, “which, I dare say will be attended with great and good Effects.”3

  John Brown, a young lawyer then practicing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, delivered Adams’s entreaty to Canada—overly optimistic of support though it was—sometime in March of 1775, after a hard journey to Montreal over and around the ice-clogged waters of Lake Champlain. Brown was a delegate to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and a member of its committee of correspondence with Canada. Ultimately, he was charged with determining whether the province of Quebec would work in concert with rebels in the other colonies.4

  Brown found a general reluctance among Canadians—be they French-speaking inhabitants of long standing or more recent British arrivals—to get involved with family feuds south of their border. That was disconcerting, but more alarming to his colleagues was that Brown also reported that British troops in Quebec had been ordered “to hold themselves in readiness for Boston, on the shortest notice.” This was evidence of precisely the sort of attack down the Hudson-Champlain corridor that many feared. (It was also the strategy that the British would clumsily employ in 1777 at Saratoga and again in 1814 at Plattsburgh.)

  But Brown’s arduous journey north, during which he reported “almost inconceivable hardships,” had given him time to pause at Fort Ticonderoga in the role of an innocent wayfaring stranger, and he reported to Samuel Adams the obvious. “One thing I must mention,” wrote Brown, “to be kept as a profound Secret [is that] the Fort at Ticonderoga must be seized as soon as possible, should hostilities be committed by the King’s Troops. The people on New-Hampshire Grants have engaged to do this business, and in my opinion they are the most proper persons for this job. This will effectually curb this Province [Quebec], and all the troops that may be sent here.”5 In other words, seize Ticonderoga and block any British effort to strike from Canada and capture New York or sever New England from the rest of the colonies.

  Brown made it sound as if the mission to capture Ticonderoga were already arranged, and indeed it may have been with “the people on New-Hampshire Grants,” but his letter of March 29, 1775, from Montreal probably did not reach Adams and the Provincial Congress until after the hostilities at Lexington and Concord and after another effort to capture the fort had been set in motion. This meant that two polar opposites were about to converge on the shores of Lake Champlain and—although they were on the same side—almost come to blows with each other. Their names were Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen.

  SUBSEQUENT CONDEMNATION AND LEGEND HAVE frequently obscured the men Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen were in the spring of 1775. Benedict Arnold was somewhat of a city slicker, an ambitious wheeler-dealer always eager to rush to the forefront. Rough-and-tumble Ethan Allen just naturally assumed that the forefront was wherever he happened to be. At a certain level, both were connivers. About the only other thing the two men had in common was that both had aspired to attend Yale but had been forced by family circumstances to forgo higher education.

  Benedict Arnold was thirty-four that spring, and while late of New Haven he had been born in Norwich, Connecticut. When little more than a lad, Arnold had marched to Ticonderog
a during the French and Indian War before taking turns as an apothecary, bookseller, horse trader, and shipowner. He was, as he would prove on Lake Champlain, an experienced sailor. He was also an avid reader of military history and, like so many others with a similar interest, immediately presumed himself a military tactician of some standing. A short while before, a good amount of Arnold’s passion had been directed to New Haven’s rebel network; he had served as captain of a company of its militia. Physically small in stature, he made himself noticed with his manner and dress.

  A big bear of a man, Ethan Allen was three years older than Arnold and also a Connecticut native. Allen’s French and Indian War experience lay with a company of Connecticut militia that had hurried to the aid of Fort William Henry but turned around after receiving word of the fort’s capture. The country southeast of Lake Champlain held Allen’s interest, however, and after working with his brothers in an iron foundry, he joined a group of settlers in the area who received land grants that later came to be called the New Hampshire Grants. Allen took an active role in early settlements, fending off competing claims to the area from New York and organizing a local militia. To his admirers, Allen and the men who congregated around him to do the dirty work of settling that rowdy frontier were the Green Mountain Boys. Others less impressed by their antics and crude methods—particularly New Yorkers competing for land in the grants—were more apt to call them the Bennington rioters.

  Benedict Arnold could be smooth as silk, but there was a quality about him that made one uneasy. He was apt to undermine his opponents behind their backs. With Ethan Allen there was no question what was coming. He was the essence of in-your-face bluster and bravado. Yet there was also a quality about Arnold’s and Allen’s determined confidence that made men follow them with unquestioned loyalty and equal enthusiasm.