The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  41. Timothy quoted in Maier, “Charleston Mob,” 181; Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981), 37, 45; Gage to Conway, 4 November 1765, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1931), 1:71; Barrington quoted in Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian London (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978), 130; Charles G. Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763–1812 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 73.

  42. Albert G. Greene, Recollections of the “Jersey” Prison-Ship from the Original Manuscripts of Captain Thomas Dring (Morrisania, N.Y., 1865).

  43. Jesse Lemisch, “Listening to the ‘Inarticulate’: William Widger’s Dream and the Loyalties of American Revolutionary Seamen in British Prisons,” Journal of Social History 3 (1969–70): 1–29; Larry G. Bowman, Captive Americans: Prisoners during the American Revolution (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), 40–67; John K. Alexander, “Forton Prison during the American Revolution: A Case Study of the British Prisoner of War Policy and the American Prisoner Response to That Policy,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 102 (1967): 369.

  44. Clarence S. Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1954), 41–57; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 125.

  45. Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore, 73; Gouverneur Morris to Mr. Penn, 20 May 1774, in Peter Force, ed., American Archives, 4th ser., 1 (Washington, D.C., 1837): 343; Maier, “Charleston Mob,” 185; Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961), 3:106; Adair and Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin, xv, 35, 51–55, 88, 107; Joseph Chalmers, Plain Truth (Philadelphia, 1776), 71.

  46. Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Harper and Row, 1946), 189; Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics, 159; Leonard quoted in Esmond S. Wright, Fabric of Freedom, 1763–1800, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 77–78.

  47. Rush quoted in Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 138; David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 223–24; D. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 333.

  48. Don M. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1944), 227, 300, 125, 287, 320, 405. See also Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), chap. 1. Recent examinations of the Declaration of Independence have been disappointingly narrow, ignoring the motley crew, the Levellers, and huge bodies of relevant literature from seventeenth-century England. See Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 51ff; Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978).

  49. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 76, 97–100; Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 48; Wroth and Zobel, eds., Legal Papers of John Adams, 3:269; C. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, 2:322.

  50. Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922), 214.

  51. Alyce Barry, “Thomas Paine, Privateersman,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 101 (1977): 459–61.

  52. Maier, “Charleston Mob,” 181, 186, 188, and idem, “Popular Uprising and Civil Authority,” 33–35; Hoerder, Crowd Action, 378–88; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press 1969), 319–28.

  53. Charles Patrick Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York: New York University Press, 1996), chap. 4; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 15–18; Frey, Water from the Rock, 77–80.

  54. James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” National Gazette, 3 March 1792, republished in The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–85), 14:244–46; David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, The Anarchiad: A New England Poem (1786–1787), ed. Luther G. Riggs (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967), 29, 56, 38, 69, 14, 15, 34.

  55. Madison’s Notes and Abraham Yates’s Notes, 26 June 1787, in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, Con.: Yale University Press, 1937), 1:423, 431.

  56. Staughton Lynd, “The Abolitionist Critique of the United States Constitution,” in his Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 155–54.

  57. James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals against Slavery, 1770–1808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 132.

  58. Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (1990): 101; Frey, Water from the Rock, 234–36. Adams quoted in Schlesinger, “Political Mobs,” 250.

  59. Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, rev. ed. (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 68–69; Forrest McDonald, “The Relation of the French Peasant Veterans of the American Revolution to the Fall of Feudalism in France, 1789–1792,” Agricultural History 25 (1951): 151–61; Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 1770–1800: A Sociobistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-Century Political Thinking, trans. Bernard A. Uhlendorf (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 228, 236.

  60. Arthur N. Gilbert, “The Nature of Mutiny in the British Navy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Daniel Masterson, ed., Naval History: The Sixth Symposium of the U.S. Naval Academy (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1987), 111–21; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776 and the American Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 61 (1976): 290–308; Julius Sherrard Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986), 19, 204, 52.

  61. Lord Balcarres to Commander-in-Chief, 31 July 1800, CO 137/104, quoted in Scott, “The Common Wind,” 33.

  62. Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp; Lascelles, Granvilie Sharp and the Freedom of Slaves in England.

  63. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London, 1808), 2:297.

  64. Diogenes Laertius, 6:63, and Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World (London, 1762); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alfred F. Young, “Common Sense and The Rights of Man in America: The Celebration and Damnation of Thomas Paine,” in K. Gavroglu, ed., Science, Mind, and Art (Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 411–39.

  Chapter Eight

  1. Morning Post, 22 February 1803. See the analysis of Despard’s speech by David Worrall in his Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 58.

  2. P. C. 1/3553; The Trial of Edward Marcus Despard, Esquire, 94, 126; T. B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials (1820); Examination of John Emblin, TS 11/121/332.

  3. Chaplain’s Letters and Notes, Despard Family MSS., London.

  4. PRO, P.C. 1/3564, 14 February 1803.

  5. PRO, HO 42/70, 20 February 1803; Political Register, 26 February 1803; A. Aspinall, ed., The Later Correspondence of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 4:80.

  6. Despard Family MSS., [Elizabeth Despard], Recollections on the Despard Family (c. 1850), 22.

  7. Bodleian Library, Burdett Papers. Ms. English History, c. 296, fols. 9–11; M. W
. Patterson, Sir Francic Burdett and His Times 1770–1844, (1931), 1:68; PRO, P.C. 1/3553, Exam in at ion by Richard Ford; Valentine Lord Cloncurry, Personal Recollections (Dublin, 1847), 45. Authentic Memoirs of the Life of Col. E.M. Despard (London, 1803), 22; The Annual Register, 1803, 142–43.

  8. Joseph Farington. Farington Diary, ed. James Geig (London: Hutchinson, 1923), 2:83; Authentic Memoirs, 22.

  9. Labour in Irish History (1910), chap. 9.

  10. Rolf Loeber, “Preliminaries to the Massachusetts Bay Colony: The Irish Ventures of Emanuel Downing and John Winthrop, Sr.,” in T. Barnard, D. ó Cróinin, and K. Simms, eds., A Miracle of Learning: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning: Essays in Honor of William O’Sullivan (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1998).

  11. James Bannantine, Memoires of Edward Marcus Despard (London, 1799). Communication of Archdeacon H. H. J. Gray, St. Peter’s Rectory, Mountrath. PRO of Northern Ireland (Belfast), T. 1075/34. Genealogical notes.

  12. John Feehan, Laois: An Environmental History (Ballykilcavan, 1983), 289–91.

  13. Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (New York: Dutton, 1981), 672–75.

  14. Maurine Wall, “The Whiteboys,” in Desmond T. Williams, ed., Secret Societies in Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973), 16; James S. Donnelly, Jr., “The Whiteboy Movement, 1761–5,” Irish Historical Studies 21 (1978–9): 28.

  15. Charles Coote, Statistical Survey of Queen’s County (1801).

  16. John Feehan, The Landscape of Slieve Bloom: A Study of Its Natural and Human Heritage (Dublin: Blackwater, 1979), 116,

  17. Despard Family MSS., Jane Despard, Memoranda connected with the Despard Family recollections (1838).

  18. [Elizabeth Despard], Recollections on the Despard Family.

  19. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, eds., A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 257.

  20. Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; on Military Operations; and on the Climate of the West Indies, 2d ed. (London, 1789), 184. Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 5.

  21. R. R. Madden, A Twelvemonth’s Residence in the West Indies during the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship (London, 1835), 2:117; Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1990).

  22. Douglas Hall, ed., In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (London: Macmillan, 1989).

  23. Anonymous, “Observations on the Fortifying of Jamaica, 1783,” Add. Ms. 12, 431, fo. 8, British Library.

  24. Major General Archibald Campbell, “A Memoir Relative to the Island of Jamaica” (1782), King’s 214, British Library.

  25. [Elizabeth Despard,] Recollections on the Despard Family, 22.

  26. Douglas W. Marshall, “The British Engineers in America, 1755–1783,” Journal of the Society of Army Historical Research 51 (1973): 155.

  27. Edward K. Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1371), 126–129; J. G. Links, ed., The Stones of Florence (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), 244–45.

  28. Henry Rule, Fortification (London, 1851), 145; Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 47.

  29. Kevin Whelan, Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and 1778 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), 6.

  30. J. K. Budleigh, Trench Excavation and Support (London: Telford, 1989), 62.

  31. Thomas More Molyneux, Conjunct Operations (1759).

  32. Collections of the New-York Historical Society (1884), entries for 23 April, 27 May, 21 June.

  33. Narrative of Sir Alexander Leith, Lieut. Col. 88th Regiment, 49, Germain MSS., William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  34. Edward Davis to Kemple, 28 September, Kemple MSS., vol. 1, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  35. Peter Hulme points out that barbeque and canoe are both etymologically Caribbean words. See his Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1986), 210–11.

  36. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), chap. 11.

  37. Bell, Tangweera: Life and Adventures among Gentle Savages (1899; reprint Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1989); George Pinkard, Notes on the West Indians (1816); see also Eduard Conzemius, Ethnographical Survey of the Miskita and Sumu Indians of Honduras and Nicaragua (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932).

  38. Thomas Dancer, A Brief History of the Late Expedition Against Fort San Juan So Far as it Relates to the Diseases of the Troops (Kingston, 1781), 12.

  39. Collections of the New-York Historical Society (1884), entry for 21 March.

  40. See Governor Dalling’s defense of his role in his Narrative of the Late Expedition to St. Juan’s Harbour and Lake Nicaragua, 13; Germain MSS., vol. 21.

  41. Moseley, Treatise on Tropical Diseases.

  42. Silvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), chap. 4.

  43. John Marrant, A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealing with John Marrant, a Black (1785); Graham Hodges, ed., The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution (New York: Garland, 1996).

  44. C. O.700/13.

  45. Grant D. Jones, Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 21, 274; George Henderson, An Account of the British Settlement of Honduras (London, 1811), 70; Wallace R. Johnson, A History of Christianity in Belize, 1776–1838 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), 12.

  46. William Dampier, “Mr. Dampier’s Voyages to the Bay of Campeachy,” in his A Collection of Voyages, 4th ed. (London, 1729), 89; Anonymous, “A Voyage to Guinea, Antego, Bay of Campeachy, Cuba, Barbadoes, &c., 1714–1723,” Add. Ms. 39, 946, British Library; Malachy Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (London, 1755?).

  47. Robert A, Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600–1914, A Case Study in British Informal Imperialism (Rutherford, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1989), 41; F. O, Winzerling, The Beginning of British Honduras, 1506–1765 (New York: North River Press, 1946), 81; Edwin J. Layton, Thomas Chippendale: A Review of His Life and Origin (London: J. Murray, 1928).

  48. “Convention of London,” 14 July 1786, in Sir John Alder Burdon, Archives of British Honduras (London: Sifton, Piraed and Co., 1931), 1:154–57.

  49. Quoted in Narda Dobson, A History of Belize (London: Longman, 1973), 67; see also José A. Calderon Quijano, “Un incidente Militar en los establecimientos ingleses in Río Tinto (Honduras) en 1782,” Annuario de Estudios Americanos 2 (1945); 761–84; Robert White, The Case of the Agent to the Settlers on the Coast of Yucatan; and the late Settlers on the Mosquito Shore (London, 1793), 10.

  50. Henderson, An Account, 134; CO 123/5, 24 August 1787; Burdon, Archives of British Honduras, 1:161; Despard to ?, 11 January 1788, CO 123/6.

  51. Despard to Lord Sydney, 23 February 1787, CO 123/4, fo. 49; Despard to Lord Sydney, 24 August 1787, CO 137/50; Burdon, ed., Archives of British Honduras, 1:159, 161.

  52. Despard to Sydney, 24 August 1787, CO 123/5; Edward Marcus Despard, “A Narrative of the Publick Transactions in the Bay of Honduras from 1784 to 1790,” 8 March 1791, CO 123/10.

  53. Quoted in O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 38. Burdon, ed., Archives of British Honduras, 1:159; Despard to Lord Sydney, 24 August 1787, CO 137/50.

  54. Despard, “Appendix to the Narrative of Publick Transactions in the Bay of Honduras 1784–1790,” CO 123/11. Perhaps she was the Catherine Ernest included among a list of the �
��poor people of colour” from the Mosquito Shore. Her name does not recur on the list of new settlers who received the lots in Belize Town distributed by Despard several months later, a fact consistent with the hypothesis that Catherine had meanwhile become his wife. See Robert White, The Case of the Agent to the Settlers on the Coast of Yucatan.

  55. Mary Thale, ed., Selections from the Papers of the LCS 1792–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 8, 18.

  56. A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the late awful calamity in Philadelphia in the year 1793 (1794).

  57. The Proceedings at the Old Bailey, February 1790, 15 September 1802, April 1803, Dec. 1801, 17 October 1802., 4 July 1801, 15 September 1802.

  58. Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1951); and idem, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943, 1974).

  59. Worrall, Radical Culture; lain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Roger Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1803 (New York: St, Martin’s, 1988); Malcolm Chase, “The People’s Farm”: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

  60. Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); 217–14; Iowerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University, 1979).

  61. A Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames (1800), 210.

  62. Pig’s Meat, iii, 56, 212–13, and W. H. Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in the Metropolis (1800), 14, 93. See also Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1984).

  63. P.C. 1/3514 f. 100.

  64. R. R. Madden, The Life and Times of Robert Emmet (New York, 1896), 13. Thomas Spence, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State (1801). PRO, P. C. 1/3117, pt. I, fol. 87; T. S. 11/121/332. f. 37.