by Taylor, Alan
That moral high ground proved slippery in 1772, when the highest court in Britain issued an antislavery ruling in the celebrated case of Somerset v. Stuart. Charles Stuart had brought a Virginia slave, James Somerset, to England. When Stuart tried to send Somerset away to Jamaica, the slave sued for his freedom with the support of an abolitionist attorney, who argued that colonial slaves became free when brought to England. The chief justice, Lord Mansfield, ruled that, indeed, slavery had no just basis in either “natural law” or the English common law, so it required a “positive law” passed by Parliament to legitimate the system in England. For want of such a law, Mansfield ruled that Stuart could not force Somerset to leave the mother country for renewed slavery in a colony. During the same year, Parliament considered but rejected a proposed statute to allow slavery in England. Although technically narrow, Mansfield’s ruling became broadly interpreted as upholding Sir William Blackstone’s celebrated legal maxim that any slave became free upon setting foot in England, deemed the great land of liberty.17
Widely reported in the American press, Mansfield’s Somerset ruling caused a sensation in the colonies. Although the ruling did not apply there, colonial masters felt shocked by the implication that their property system defied English traditions of liberty. Preferring to think of themselves as champions of liberty against British tyranny, Americans hated being cast instead as barbaric for their colonial practice of un-English slavery. Indeed, British imperialists derided their colonial critics as canting hypocrites who preached liberty while practicing slavery. Ambrose Serle declaimed, “Such men are no Enemies to absolute Rule: they only hate it in others, but ardently pursue it for themselves.” The Somerset ruling seemed especially ominous for the colonists, given Parliament’s controversial claim to hold legislative supremacy over the colonies. Virginia’s leaders feared that Parliament might eventually legislate against slavery in America.18
Some slaves sought to exploit the new loophole in the slave system. In 1773, a master advertised in the Virginia Gazette for the recapture of a runaway slave couple. The master predicted that the runaways would seek a ship for England “where they imagine they will be free (a Notion now prevalent among the Negroes greatly to the vexation and prejudice of their Masters).” As the slaves became more restive, masters asked if they could preserve their property and their lives if they remained ruled by an empire so indifferent to their interests. When confronted by any sign of slave discontent, Virginians anticipated a ripening into bloody rebellion. Their terror grew as they read news of bloody uprisings in some of the British West Indies during the fateful year of 1772.19
The Somerset ruling also coincided with another imperial veto of Virginia’s latest attempt to discourage further slave imports. That combination angered the colony’s leaders, who feared being trapped with a growing surplus of slaves newly inclined to think of themselves as properly free. The empire seemed implicitly to stir up the discontent of slaves and to prevent Virginia from restricting the threatening growth of their numbers. Denouncing the British policy as hypocritical and menacing, Jefferson indicted the king for “exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.” Jefferson blamed the British for imposing on the colonies a slave system that afflicted the slaves and endangered their masters. Virginia’s leaders interpreted the imperial taxes through the ominous prism of the Somerset ruling, the imperial vetoes, and the slave unrest in the West Indies. The traditional history of the American Revolution emphasizes the role of Massachusetts in resisting the British taxes, but Virginia proved equally important to the Patriot coalition.20
Virginians anticipated an invasion by British troops to enforce imperial control by recruiting slaves with the promise of freedom. In late 1774, James Madison, then a young Patriot, reported the discovery of a slave plot to welcome and assist British troops. “It is prudent such things should be concealed as well as suppressed,” Madison confided in a private letter, for Virginians dreaded that any publicity given to a slave plot would spread the danger by emboldening other slaves to revolt. White men felt torn between the urge to announce their peril and their need to hide it. In June 1775, Madison warned a friend to beware of British efforts to foment a slave revolt: “To say the truth that is the only part in which this Colony is vulnerable . . . we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.”21
Secret
Lord Dunmore knew that secret of the internal enemy. In 1772, as the colony’s royal governor, Dunmore alerted his superiors that Virginians, “with great reason, trembled” because their slaves were “ready to join the first that would encourage them to revenge themselves, by which means a conquest of this Country would inevitably be effected in a very Short time.” Initially, he balked at arming and emancipating the slaves because they were essential to Virginia’s economy, and the British wanted to retain, rather than ruin, the colony. Dunmore hoped to intimidate the planters by merely threatening to arm and emancipate. His bluster became ominous on April 21, 1775, when his troops seized the public gunpowder supply in Williamsburg for removal to a British warship. Without that gunpowder, the planters feared they would lack the firepower to suppress a slave revolt, which rumors insisted was imminent. Galvanized by the seizure, Piedmont Patriots led by Patrick Henry took up arms and marched on Williamsburg to confront the governor, who escaped their wrath by fleeing to a British warship in June. By then in Philadelphia the Continental Congress of delegates from the colonies had taken charge of a conflict that had erupted at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts in mid-April. Outraged by Dunmore’s conduct, the Virginia delegates joined the New Englanders in urging a vigorous war to oust the British troops from the colonies.22
By calling Dunmore’s bluff, the Patriot coup in Williamsburg forced him to convert his bluster into black soldiers. In early November 1775, his proclamation offered freedom to slaves and indentured servants who would help him suppress the Patriot rebellion. Rather than a blanket offer of emancipation to all, he promised freedom only to young men who would bear arms against the rebels. Instead of intimidating the Virginians into submission, however, his proclamation united almost all of the shocked whites as Patriots determined to win independence from British rule.23
By early 1776, about 800 enslaved men, and an equal number of women and children, flocked to Dunmore’s encampments and ships. If Dunmore wanted men as soldiers, he also had to receive their families, although feeding and sheltering them all strained his resources. Dunmore organized the men into a special unit, the “Ethiopian Regiment,” commanded by white officers, for he was no racial egalitarian. But American slaves sought to make him one, spreading far and wide his renown as a supposed liberator. In Pennsylvania, a master posted an advertisement seeking the return of a runaway: “As Negroes in general think that Lord Dunmore is contending for their liberty it is not improbable that said Negroe is on his march to join his Lordship’s own black regiment.”24
Slaves nurtured a wishful legend that the British king was their benevolent protector. As with peasant and enslaved peoples elsewhere, they had long believed that the monarch truly loved the lowly laborers. In Virginia in 1730, slaves insisted that the king had ordered freed all slaves who had become Christians but that their masters had defied their monarch by ignoring his order. Some restive slaves prepared to revolt, but the Virginians suppressed that plot by executing four leaders. In 1775 in South Carolina, slaves spread a similar rumor that the king “was about to alter the World and set the Negroes Free.” This tradition of the liberator king prepared southern slaves to fight for the British and against their masters during the revolution.25
In Virginia, most of the runaways came from the Tidewater counties closest to Dunmore’s ships and bases in the lower reaches of Chesapeake Bay. They es
caped from riverside farms and plantations in canoes and boats stolen from their masters. Few ran the longer, overland gauntlet from the Virginia hinterland. Fearful of armed patrols and militia detachments, the interior slaves recognized, in the words of a Virginia newspaper, “the difficulty of effecting their escape, and what they must expect to suffer if they fall into the hands of the Americans.” But that did not stop them from dreaming of freedom. On the upper Potomac River, far to the north of Dunmore’s ships, George Washington’s farm manager reported that among the slaves “there is not a man of them, but would leave us, if they believ’d they coud make their escape.”26
Unwilling to accept that the escapes indicted their conduct and the slave system, the Virginians concocted their own wishful legend: that the British lured away the slaves only to resell them in the West Indies, where most would suffer conditions far worse than in Virginia. If the British were frauds instead of liberators, the slaves should cling to their masters as protectors rather than flee from them as exploiters. In speeches to their gathered slaves, masters warned of their West Indian peril and invited a renewed commitment to their servitude in Virginia. According to Robert Carter, his slaves dutifully answered, “We all fully intend to serve you our master and we do now promise to use our whole might & force to execute your Commands.” But at least thirty of Carter’s slaves ran away during the war. And there is scant evidence for the British selling any Virginia runaways into renewed slavery elsewhere.27
To discourage escapes, Virginians made examples of some captured runaways by giving them brutal public floggings, often accompanied by lopping off an ear. The authorities also hanged runaways caught bearing arms for the enemy. Their severed and rotting heads sat atop posts placed at crossroads as a warning to passing slaves. Other intercepted runaways died of disease in wretched jail cells while awaiting trial. Dunmore did not sell any runaways to the West Indies, but the vengeful Patriots did as punishment. Others they sentenced to a short life of hard labor in the mines of Fincastle County, where the prisoners dug the lead that became bullets for the Patriots to fire at Dunmore’s men.28
The masters also threatened collective punishment on slave families for the decisions of their young men. In November 1775, the Virginia Gazette published an unprecedented appeal to Virginia’s blacks, who previously had been excluded from any political decision. The essay warned them not “to provoke the fury of the Americans against their defenceless fathers and mothers, their wives, their women and children.” The author recognized that few slaves would forsake their families. Historian Cassandra Pybus notes that runaways usually fled in “a series of premeditated and well-organized escapes by interconnected family groups”—as they would do again in the next war. Where families could not get out together, only a few especially desperate young men tried to escape to the British ships.29
Patriot propaganda depicted Dunmore as promoting a bloody and indiscriminate massacre of white people by slave rebels. In fact, he wanted only to weaken the Patriots and strengthen his own force with black troops. Indeed, his superiors in London had prohibited any promotion of a slave insurrection, lest it ruin the economy of a colony that they hoped to recover. And a slave revolt in Virginia would set a very ominous precedent for the British West Indies, which were especially valuable and dependent on slavery. To keep the West Indian colonies productive and loyal, the British played a restrained game with the slaves of Virginia. While welcoming and arming runaways, the British discouraged them from killing whites except as soldiers on the field of battle.30
Dunmore’s military ineptitude soon undermined his credibility as a liberator. In December 1775, just a month after issuing his proclamation, he rushed his raw recruits into a premature battle. Attacking the Patriot militia posted south of Norfolk at Great Bridge, Dunmore’s men suffered a crushing defeat. In a panic, Dunmore fled to his ships, evacuating Norfolk. He set up a new base on Gwynn Island at the mouth of the Piankatank River, where most of his refugees succumbed to an epidemic of smallpox, for Dunmore had neglected to inoculate his recruits. Abandoning his botched campaign in August 1776, he sailed away to the British headquarters at New York City, recently captured from the Patriots. He withdrew about 500 blacks, leaving behind another 1,000 who were dead or dying. Their fate provided great fodder for Patriot propaganda, which cast the British as duplicitous seducers of foolish slaves. Many of the ailing, however, died gruesomely when the vindictive Patriots set fire to their flimsy brush huts, ostensibly to stop the spread of their smallpox.31
Despite Dunmore’s failure, Virginia slaves continued to seek freedom by fleeing to the British troops who returned to the Chesapeake in 1779–1781. Some runaways formed irregular armed gangs employed by the British to raid farms and plantations. In August 1781, a Patriot colonel on the Eastern Shore complained, “We have had most alarming times this Summer, all along shore, from a sett of Barges manned mostly by our own negroes who have run off.”32
During the spring and summer of 1781, Lord Cornwallis led a British army up the James River to occupy and plunder Richmond. Cornwallis’s army attracted 4,500 runaways, including twenty-three from Jefferson’s estates, sixteen from George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and some from St. George Tucker’s Matoax Plantation. These runaways regarded the Patriot leaders as the enemies of their freedom.33
In September 1781, Washington marched his Patriot army south from New York to join a French fleet in trapping Cornwallis and his army at Yorktown. Running short on food, Cornwallis abandoned hundreds of refugees, many of them afflicted with disease and hunger. A Patriot officer saw “numbers in that condition starving and helpless, begging of us as we passed them for God’s sake to kill them, as they were in great pain and misery.” Tucker reported, “An immense number of Negroes have died in the most miserable Manner in York[town].” After the war, a British traveler visited the banks of the Elizabeth River, where he reported that “many Waggon loads of the bones of Men, women, and Children, stripped of the flesh by Vultures and Hawks which abound here, covered the sand for a most considerable length.”34
In October 1781, Cornwallis surrendered his army to Washington. That military disaster led the British government to negotiate a peace treaty that recognized American independence in early 1783. During the war, 6,000 Virginia slaves had fled to the British, but only about a third obtained their freedom by evacuation to the British colony of Nova Scotia. Another third died during the war, primarily of disease. The final third reverted to their masters after Cornwallis abandoned them. The British generals had fallen far short of the supposed promise made by the idealized king.35
Jefferson recovered six of his twenty-three runaways. One soon died, and Jefferson sold the others to punish their disloyalty and intimidate his other slaves. His friend James Madison proved less vindictive, freeing Billy, a recaptured runaway deemed “too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion for fellow slaves in Virg[ini]a.” Unlike Jefferson, Madison could not “think of punishing him by transportation merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, & worthy the pursuit, of every human being.” But most planters, including Tucker, followed Jefferson’s lead in keeping or selling, rather than liberating, any recovered slaves.36
In 1783, the last British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, withdrew the troops and refugees, including 2,000 Virginia runaways, from New York to Nova Scotia. Feeling honor-bound by promises made to the fugitives, Carleton defied the peace treaty, which prohibited the British from taking former slaves away from America. Southern politicians howled in protest and demanded compensation, but the British government refused.37
Although painful to the affected planters, the losses proved negligible to Virginia as a whole. Largely confined to the Tidewater, the escapes had little impact on the larger Piedmont, where slave numbers continued to swell from births. At the end of the war Virginia had 236,000 slaves, up from the 210,000 at the start. Although briefly shaken, the slave system survived
the war as important as ever.38
Virginia’s leading Patriots owned large plantations, but they did not belong to the oldest, richest, and most prestigious families who had dominated Virginia during the colonial era: the Blands, Byrds, Carters, Harrisons, Randolphs, and Robinsons. Save for the prestigious Lee family, the leading Patriots held relatively recent fortunes by Virginia’s conservative standards. Jefferson, Washington, Madison, George Mason, and Patrick Henry owed their wealth to their own commercial exertions and favorable marriages or to inheritance from their fathers rather than their grandfathers. Most of the newer elite lived in the developing Piedmont, while the older elite had dominated the stagnating Tidewater. Whereas the old elite planters were slow and reluctant Patriots, the Piedmont leaders aggressively pushed the revolution as an opportunity to advance themselves and their region. The new leaders proved more comfortable and adept at appealing for votes from common citizens, for the revolution could not be won without mobilizing farmers and artisans to fight the British and guard the slaves.39
The Patriot leaders persuaded common white men that the revolution would enhance their opportunities and status. A new republican ideology invested sovereignty in the people (provided they owned some property) rather than in a distant king. Downplaying the inequality of property, the Patriots promised a new equality of legal and political rights. Gentlemen would continue to govern Virginia but only by winning the consent of common voters. The revolution also enhanced opportunities for ambitious commoners by increasing the number of leadership positions as militia officers, county committeemen, and legislators. In addition, the Patriot leaders mollified the many Baptists and Methodists by disestablishing the elitist Anglican Church favored by the colonial regime. Thereby the revolutionaries elevated the evangelical churches to an equal standing. Above all, the Patriots exploited the popular backlash against Dunmore’s proclamation, for many small farmers owned or rented a slave or two. Most common men shared an interest in preserving the slave system.40