The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  Sailors also continued the struggle against impressment, battling the press-gangs in the streets of London in 1770 (during the war against Spain) and 1776 (during the war against the American colonies, hardly a popular cause among sailors). “Nauticus” observed the clashes between seamen and the navy in London in the early 1770s and wrote The Rights of the Sailors Vindicated, in which he compared the sailor’s life to slavery and defended the right to self-defense. He echoed the Putney Debates more than a century earlier when he imagined a sailor’s asking a magistrate, “I, who am as free-born as yourself, should devote my life and liberty for so trifling a consideration, purely that such wretches as you may enjoy your possessions in safety?” Like Sam Adams, Nauticus went beyond the rights of Englishmen, pitting the rights of private property against common rights and the “natural rights of an innocent subject.” John Wilkes also began to argue for the right to resist impressment in 1772.16

  The motley crew also helped to create an abolitionist movement in London in the mid-1760s by setting in motion the eccentric but zealous Granville Sharp, who became one of slavery’s most implacable foes. The key moment was a meeting in 1765 in a queue at a London medical clinic between the obscure, flinty clerk and musician Sharp and a teenager named Jonathan Strong, formerly a slave in Barbados, who had been pummeled by his master into a crippled, swollen, nearly blind indigent. Sharp and his brother, a surgeon, nursed Strong back to health, but two years later his former master imprisoned and then sold him. To prevent further such inhumanity, the African sailor Olaudah Equiano pushed Sharp to study the law and the writ of habeas corpus, the most powerful legacy of the “free-born Englishman,” because it prohibited imprisonment or confinement without due process of law and trial by jury, and thus might be employed against impressment and slavery alike. Sharp believed that the law should be no respecter of persons and concluded in 1769 that the “common law and custom of England . . . is always favourable to liberty and freedom of man.” Especially moved by the struggles of black sailors on the waterfront, he used habeas to defend several who struggled to resist reenslavement, often by the press-gang. Sharp won a lasting victory in his legal defense of James Somerset in 1772, when the court limited the ability of slaveowners to possess and exploit their human property in England. Habeas corpus, however, was suspended in 1777, though not without opposition. The Robin Hood Club of London debated the question, “Would not suspending the Habeas Corpus Act be a proper measure at this juncture?” The negative carried the debate by a great majority. Meanwhile, a police magistrate named John Fielding founded the “Bow Street Runners,” an urban metropolitan parallel to the notorious slave patrollers of the southern plantations. He paid close attention to the motley crew in London and monitored its westward circulation back to Caribbean insurrections.17

  Sailors and the dockside proletariat attacked slavery from another angle in 1775, when they went on strike in Liverpool, as three thousand men, women, and children assembled to protest a reduction in wages. When the authorities fired upon the crowd, killing several, the strike exploded into open insurrection. Sailors “hoisted the red flag,” dragged ships’ guns to the center of the city, and bombarded the Mercantile Exchange, leaving “scarce a whole pane of glass in the neighborhood.” They also trashed the property of several rich slave-trading merchants. One witness to the strife in Liverpool wrote, “I could not help thinking we had Boston here, and I fear this is only the beginning of our sorrows.”18 There was a literal truth to the observation that Boston, the “Metropolis of Sedition,” was casting its long shadow on English ports on the eve of the American Revolution. An anonymous eyewitness noted that multiethnic American sailors “were among the most active in the late tumults” of London in 1768. They were “wretches of a mongrel descent,” the “immediate sons of Jamaica, or African Blacks by Asiatic Mulatoes.” When such seamen chanted “No Wilkes, No King!” during the river strike of 1768, they displayed the independent revolutionary spirit that informed their actions ocean-wide. An escaped indentured servant named James Aitken, better known as Jack the Painter, took part in the Boston Tea Party, then returned to England to wage revolutionary arson in 1775 against the king’s ships and shipyards, for which crime he was captured and hanged. The mobility of sailors and other maritime veterans ensured that both the experience and the ideas of opposition carried fast. If the artisans and gentlemen of the American Sons of Liberty saw their rebellion as but “one episode in a worldwide struggle between liberty and despotism,” sailors, who had a much broader experience of both despotism and the world, saw their own struggle as part of a long Atlantic contest between slavery and freedom.19

  SLAVES

  A new wave of opposition to slavery was inaugurated in Jamaica in 1760 by Tacky’s Revolt, which was, according to sugar planter and historian Edward Long, “more formidable than any [uprising] hitherto known in the West Indies.” The revolt began, significantly, on Easter, in Saint Mary’s Parish, and spread like cane-fire to involve thousands island-wide. The rebels were motivated not by Christianity (Jamaican Baptism and Methodism lay in the future, and the Moravian mission, established in 1754, was tiny) but rather by the mysterious Akan religion, which, continuing despite its prohibition since 1696, stressed spirit possession, access to supernatural powers, and a lively presence of the dead. Practitioners, or obeah men, conferred immortal powers upon the freedom fighters, who shaved their heads to signify their solidarity.20 Their idea was to seize the forts and arms and destroy the mills. One of the leaders, Aponga (aka Wager), had been a sailor aboard H.M.S. Wager and may have witnessed the battles between the press-gang and the mob of sailors in Boston in 1745. In Kingston, a female slave, Cubah, was dubbed “the Queen.” The main leader, Tacky (whose name meant “chief” in Akan), was said to catch bullets in his hand and hurl them back at the slavemasters. The rebellion raged for several months, until a military force, which included the Scott’s Hall Maroons, was organized by land and sea against the rebels. Tacky was captured and decapitated, his head exhibited on a pole in Spanish Town. After his head was recaptured by night, Edward Long admitted that “such exercises in frightfulness proved of doubtful value.” Guerrilla fighting continued for a year. The carnage was among the greatest yet witnessed in a slave revolt: sixty whites killed; three to four hundred slaves killed in military action or dead of suicide once their cause became hopeless; and a hundred slaves executed. Accompanying the terror was legislation and policing, tighter control over meetings, registration of free blacks, permanent fortification in each parish, and the death penalty for those who practiced obeah.21

  Order was reestablished on Jamaica, but apparently with little help from the merchant seamen who found themselves there when the revolt broke out and were quickly herded into the local militias to help put down the uprising. Thomas Thistlewood explained that as the sailors wandered from one plantation to another, the grog and silver spoons of the terrified sugar planters seemed to disappear. Edward Long claimed that in the middle of the revolt, a captured leader of the slave rebels told a Jewish militia guard, “As for the sailors, you see they do not oppose us, they care not who is in possession of the country, Black or White, it is the same to them.” The rebel was convinced that after the revolution, the sailors would “bring us things from t’other side the sea, and be glad to take our goods in payment.”22

  Like the Knowles Riot in Boston in 1747, Tacky’s Revolt revived and contributed to a tradition of revolutionary thought that stretched back to Winstanley and the English Revolution. In 1760, after the rebellion had broken out but before it was suppressed, a writer known to us only as J. Philmore wrote a pamphlet entitled Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade. Considering himself more a “citizen in the world” than a citizen of England, Philmore insisted that “all of the human race, are, by nature, upon an equality,” and that one person simply could not be the property of another. He denied the worldly superiority of Christianity and judged the slave trade to be organized murder. Philmore had probably learned of
Tacky’s Revolt byway of merchant seamen, for he made it his business to frequent the docks. Much of the great deal he knew of the slave trade came “from the mouths of some sailors.”23

  Philmore supported the efforts of Tacky and his fellow rebels “to deliver themselves out of the miserable slavery they are in.” His principal conclusion was clear, straightforward, and revolutionary: “So all the black men now in our plantations, who are by unjust force deprived of their liberty, and held in slavery, as they have none upon earth to appeal to, may lawfully repel that force with force, and to recover their liberty, destroy their oppressors: and not only so, but it is the duty of others, white as well as black, to assist those miserable creatures, if they can, in their attempts to deliver themselves out of slavery, and to rescue them out of the hands of their cruel tyrants.” Philmore thus supported these free-born people engaged in revolutionary self-defense, calling for immediate emancipation, by force if necessary, and asking all good men and women to do the same. Even though Philmore’s ideas must have caused pacifist Quakers to shudder (Anthony Benezet drew on his writing but carefully deleted his argument about repelling force with force), they nonetheless had broad influence. He wrote that “no legislature on earth, which is the supreme power in every civil society, can alter the nature of things, or make that to be lawful, which is contrary to the law of God, the supreme legislator and governour of the world.” His “higher law” doctrine would over the next century become central to the transatlantic struggle against slavery. His inclusive, egalitarian conception of “the human race” was inspired by the mass actions of rebellious slaves.24

  Tacky’s Revolt may also have helped to generate another breakthrough in abolitionist thought, in the same seaport where Sam Adams had earlier learned to oppose impressment. When, in 1761, James Otis, Jr., made his oration against the writs of assistance that allowed British authorities to attack the trade carried on between New England and the French West Indies, he went beyond his formal subject to “assert the rights of the Negroes.” Otis delivered his electrifying speech immediately after Tacky’s Revolt, which had been covered in a series of articles in Boston newspapers. John Adams would later recall that Otis was, that day, “a flame of fire,” a prophet with the combined powers of Isaiah and Ezekiel. He gave a “dissertation on the rights of man in a state of nature,” an antinomian account of man as “an independent sovereign, subject to no law, but the law written on his heart” or lodged in his conscience. No Quaker in Philadelphia ever “asserted the rights of negroes in stronger terms.” Otis called for immediate emancipation and advocated the use of force to accomplish it, causing the cautious Adams to tremble. When Otis published The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), he claimed that all men, “white or black,” were “by the law of nature free-born,” thereby broadening and deracializing the idiom of the “free-born Englishman.”25 Whether Otis had actually read Philmore’s pamphlet or simply drawn similar conclusions from Tacky’s Revolt, abolitionist thought would never be the same. Otis, whose echoes of the 1640s caused some to compare him to Masaniello, “was the first who broke down the Barriers of Government to let in the Hydra of Rebellion.”26

  Tacky’s Revolt initiated a new phase of slave resistance. Major plots and revolts subsequently erupted in Bermuda and Nevis (1761), Suriname (1762, 1763, 1768–72), Jamaica (1765, 1766, 1776), British Honduras (1765, 1768, 1773), Grenada (1765), Montserrat (1768), St. Vincent (1769–73), Tobago (1770, 1771, 1774), St. Croix and St. Thomas (1770 and after), and St. Kitts (1778). Veterans of Tacky’s Revolt took part in a rising in British Honduras (to which five hundred rebels had been banished) as well as three other revolts on Jamaica in 1765 and 1766.27

  On the North American continent, the reverberations of rebellion intensified after 1765, as slaves seized the new opportunities offered by splits between the imperial and colonial ruling classes. Runaways increased at a rate that alarmed slaveholders everywhere, and by the mid-1770s a rash of slave plots and revolts had sent white fears soaring. Slaves organized uprisings in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1767; Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1772; Saint Andrew’s Parish, South Carolina, and, in a joint African-Irish effort, Boston in 1774; and Ulster County, New York, Dorchester County, Maryland, Norfolk, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, and the Tar River region of North Carolina in 1775. In the last of these, a slave named Merrick plotted with a white seafarer to make arms available and the intended revolt possible.28

  A Negro hung alive by the Ribs to a Gallows, c. 1773, by William Blake. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition.

  Slave resistance was closely related to the development of Afro-Christianity. In Saint Bartholomew Parish, South Carolina, an insurrectionary plot terrified the white population in the spring of 1776. Its leaders were black preachers, including two female prophets. A minister named George claimed that England’s “Young King . . . was about to alter the world, & set the Negroes Free.” Further south, in Savannah, Georgia, Preacher David was almost hanged after he expounded upon Exodus: “God would send Deliverance to the Negroes, from the Power of their Masters, as he freed the Children of Israel from Egyptian Bondage.” Meanwhile, a new generation of evangelical leaders emerged in the 1760s and 1770s, including George Liele and David George (Baptists) and Moses Wilkinson and Boston King (Methodists). Liele, a slave from Virginia who founded the first Baptist church in Georgia, was evacuated by the British to Kingston, Jamaica, where he established another church.29

  As we have noted, revolutionary ideas circulated rapidly in the port cities. Runaway slaves and free people of color flocked to the ports in search of sanctuary and a money wage and took work as laborers and seamen. Slaves also toiled in the maritime sector, some with ships’ masters as owners, others hired out by the voyage. By the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves dominated Charleston’s maritime and riverine traffic, in which some 20 percent of the city’s adult male slaves labored. The independence of these “Boat negroes” had long worried the city’s rulers, especially when subversive activities were involved, as was alleged against Thomas Jeremiah, a river pilot, in 1775. Jeremiah was arrested for stockpiling guns as he waited for the imperial war that would “help the poor Negroes.” “Two or three White people,” probably sailors, were also held, then released for lack of evidence, and finally driven from the province. Black pilots were a “rebellious lot, particularly resistant to white control.”30

  The political effects of slave resistance were contradictory, fueling fear and repression (police and patrols) on one side and new opposition to slavery on the other. This was especially true in the years leading up to the American Revolution, which marked a new stage in the development of an abolitionist movement. Benezet, America’s leading Quaker abolitionist, chronicled slave uprisings around the world and tirelessly disseminated news of them through correspondence, pamphlets, and books. His work, in tandem with resistance from below, led to new attacks on the slave trade in Massachusetts in 1767 and in Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and the Continental Congress by 1774. The first formal antislavery organization in America was established in Philadelphia in 1775.31

  Two of the revolution’s most popular pamphleteers were moved by the militancy of slaves in the 1770s to attack slavery as they expanded the arguments for human freedom. John Allen, a Baptist minister who had witnessed the riots, trials, hangings, and diaspora of London’s Spital-fields silk weavers through the 1760s, delivered (and then published) “An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty” after the burning of the revenue cutter Gaspee by sailors in 1773. In the fourth edition of his pamphlet, which was read to “large Circles of the Common People,” Allen denounced slavery, not least for having caused the frequent and recent revolts of slaves, which “so often occasion streams of blood to be shed.” Thomas Paine, another man fair of pen and smitten with liberty, wrote against slavery immediately upon his arrival in America in 1774. He repeated in diluted form Philmore’s argument for self-liberation: “As the true owner has
a right to reclaim his goods that were stolen, and sold; so the slave, who is proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold.” Paine signaled his awareness of the upswing in African American resistance by referring to slaves as “dangerous, as they are now.” The struggles of African American slaves between 1765 and 1776 increased the commotion and the sense of crisis felt in every British colony in the years leading up to the revolution. Within the Baptist Allen and the half-Quaker Paine, they awakened an antinomian abolitionism from a previous revolutionary age.32

  MOBS

  The trajectories of rebellion among sailors and slaves intersected in seaport mobs, those rowdy gatherings of thousands of men and women that created the crisis in the North American colonies. Like the New York conspirators of 1741, sailors and slaves fraternized in grogshops, dancing cellars, and “disorderly houses,” in Philadelphia’s Hell Town and elsewhere, despite efforts by authorities to criminalize and prevent such meetings.33 They had been gathering together in Boston’s northside and southside mobs since the 1740s. Indeed, perhaps the single most common description of the mob in revolutionary America was as a “Rabble of boys, sailors, and negroes.” Moreover, on almost every occasion when a crowd went beyond the planned objectives of the moderate leaders of the patriot movement, sailors and often slaves led the way. Motley mobs were central to protests against the Stamp Act (1765), the Quartering Acts (1765, 1774), the Townshend Revenue Act (1767), the increased power of the British customs service (1764–74), the Tea Act (1773), and the Intolerable Acts (1774). As multiethnic mobs helped to revive old ideas and to generate new ones, they were denounced as a many-headed hydra.34