by Taylor, Alan
—THOMAS M. BAYLY, 18121
IN EARLY APRIL 1812, in Montgomery County (in the Piedmont), two magistrates, John Floyd and Henry Edmondson, interrogated Tom, a black man who confessed to murdering his master on March 23. As Tom’s interrogator, young John Floyd unwittingly prepared for his role as Virginia’s governor nineteen years later, when he would confront Nat Turner’s slave revolt. In 1812 Tom had killed his master to impress a slave woman named Celia, who longed for a slave revolt: “She said they could not rise too soon for her, as she had rather be in hell than where she was.” The magistrates asked Tom, “Have you any knowledge of other negroes . . . who are disposed to rise in order to kill their masters?” In reply, he knew of thirty or forty, allegedly “instigated to kill their masters” by a conjuror.2
Tom then broached an even more terrifying prospect: “The negroes in the neighborhood said that these British people was about to rise against this Country, and that they intended to rise sometime in next May. . . . That they said they were not made to work for the white people, but they (the white people), made to work for themselves; and that they (the negroes) would have it so.” Noting a recent deadly fire in a crowded Richmond theater, Tom added, “The negroes in the neighborhood said they were glad that the people were burnt in Richmond, and wished that all the white people had been burnt with them. That God Almighty had sent them a little Hell for the white people, and that in a little time they would get a greater.” Pressed for his source for an impending British invasion, Tom explained, “It was heard from the poor people in the neighborhood, and by hearing the newspapers read.”3
Often the reports of Virginia slave plots reveal the overreaction and ventriloquism of panicked whites, but this transcript seems far closer to the words of a slave, and Tom had, in fact, killed a master. Tom also resisted some of the leading questions posed by the magistrates such as, “Did you ever hear them say whether they intended to murder the white women and children, or not?” The indiscriminate murder of women and children was a staple of the white fantasy version of slave revolt. But Tom answered, and his interrogators noted, “I never heard them say [so].” Floyd and Edmondson concluded “that a deep and extensive plan is now in agitation against this country” because “the negroes are under an impression that it is now in their power to liberate themselves.” On May 18 the magistrates hanged Tom and compensated his owner’s widow with $450.4
Aside from Tom’s murder of his master, however, the Montgomery County slaves were guilty of talk rather than action, for they intended to await the arrival of a British invasion force. Far from relying on British agents, blacks got their news from newspapers and the conversations of poor white people. The Virginia code of silence about slavery in public forums seems especially pointless given the ease with which blacks overheard the political talk of white folk, who openly worried that the British would return in armed force to liberate Virginia’s slaves. That threat seemed more ominous to the planters because the British recently had adopted a moral crusade to restrict slavery, providing a better fit with the longing by American slaves for a liberator king.5
Empire
During the decade after 1800, the British became the global champions for suppressing the slave trade and ameliorating slavery. They linked that cause to their military struggle against Napoléon’s domination of Europe, as proof that their empire promoted freedom around the world. On February 23, 1807, Parliament abolished the overseas slave trade, effective January 1, 1808. That abolition sacrificed a powerful economic interest, for the slave trade and the plantation colonies were then booming. The prime minister, Lord Grenville, praised that abolition as “one of the most glorious acts that had ever been undertaken by any assembly of any nation in the world.” While banning the slave trade, however, Parliament did not liberate the 600,000 slaves already in the British West Indies. Indeed, to protect the British planters from foreign competitors, the imperial government pressed other nations to bar the slave trade to their colonies. By leading a global push to ban the slave trade, British diplomacy both protected the British West Indian sugar producers and claimed a high moral ground. Although the United States barred slave imports at the same time, British diplomacy and the Royal Navy did far more to enforce the ban than did the Americans.6
Parliament’s ban demonstrated the powerful growth of antislavery sentiment within Great Britain. During the 1780s and 1790s, English Quakers, Methodists, and evangelical Anglicans had built a mass movement to abolish the slave trade. Seeking to moderate the brutal slavery in the West Indies, the reformers reasoned that, if deprived of new slaves, the planters would have to stop driving their current slaves to early graves. The activists then hoped that ameliorating the conditions for the slaves eventually would lead to their emancipation. Infused with middle-class values as well as Christian zeal, they insisted on the right of every individual to realize his potential by reaping the rewards of his own labor. By appealing to the Christian consciences of common people, the antislavery activists secured thousands of signers to petitions addressed to Parliament.7
The political mobilization stunned the West Indian planters, who insisted that abolition would ruin the sugar production that generated so much profit for merchants and revenue for the empire. The trade’s defenders attacked the antislavery activists as dangerous radicals in secret cahoots with the French revolutionaries. During the 1790s the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue also put the activists on the defensive as planters insisted that any antislavery discussion provoked bloodshed in the West Indies.8
Antislavery gained more political traction as British nationalism after 1800, when Napoléon seized power in France and sought to restore slavery and the slave trade in his empire. Activists toned down their moral and religious appeals in favor of a military security argument: that abolishing of the slave trade would strengthen the British Empire at the expense of the French. The abolitionists insisted that Saint-Domingue had demonstrated the vulnerability of all West Indian colonies to revolt so long as they remained slave societies. Consequently, the empire would inevitably lose the British West Indies if those colonies continued to fill with restive Africans. In Parliament, Henry Brougham asked, “When fire is raging to windward, is it the proper time for stirring up everything that is combustible in your warehouse, and throwing into them new loads of material still more prone to explosion?” So recast, antislavery served imperial power as well as moral principle, ennobling Britain’s dual struggle to expand her global empire of commerce and defeat Napoléon.9
Imperial officials deployed antislavery measures to tighten their control over the West Indian colonists, who opposed the slave trade ban and other measures to ameliorate slavery. The planters already rued the empire’s decision in 1795 to establish eight regiments of black troops to defend the islands. Stretched thin fighting the French in Europe, the British could not afford to send more white troops to die of tropical diseases in the West Indies. Turning to slave soldiers, the British promised equal treatment, uniforms, and pay with white troops. In 1807 the imperial government offered freedom to those who performed honorably through their full term of service. But the equality remained incomplete, for only white men could serve as officers in the West Indian regiments.10
The West Indian planters did not want their slaves to see black men bearing arms. One planter complained, “Compared to slavery, the restrictions of military discipline are an exquisite freedom; and the negro who has once tasted it cannot be expected to return quietly to the yoke, and again expose his back to the whip.” Soldiering would ruin slaves and perhaps slavery. The West Indian planters also recognized that the black troops strengthened the empire at the expense of the colonial legislators. Because the West Indian legislators blocked the enlistment of local slaves, the empire bought Africans to serve in the black regiments: not exactly what the abolitionists had in mind. After the British abolition of the slave trade, the army stopped buying slaves but impressed into service the black men found on board slave ships intercepte
d by the Royal Navy.11
The black troops quickly proved their worth to the empire. In addition to suffering far fewer losses to disease, they rarely deserted, for they had everything to lose by slipping away into a slave society. Their discipline and courage also impressed their officers, who clamored for more black, and fewer white, troops to defend the West Indies. By 1803 the approximately 8,000 black troops comprised most of the “British” force in the West Indies.12
Ultimately, Britain’s black troops had a contradictory impact on slave society in the West Indies. On the one hand, they saved that society from French-inspired slave revolts, preserving the British West Indies as plantation colonies. On the other hand, by treating black soldiers as the equals to white soldiers, the imperial government weakened the racial justification for slavery.
In 1797 the black regiments helped the British to conquer the Spanish colony of Trinidad, an island at the southeastern end of the West Indies. Relatively large and fertile, Trinidad was economically underdeveloped but promising as a plantation colony for raising sugarcane. British planters longed for the opportunity to cultivate the island with imported slaves, but they faced parliamentary opposition from abolitionists, who balked at boosting the slave trade to meet the voracious, new demand for labor in Trinidad. Warning of a foreign invasion and internal revolt there, James Stephen insisted that developing a slave colony was “scarcely less irrational than it would be to build a town near the crater of Vesuvius.” A member of Parliament, Stephen had lived in the West Indies, where he came to hate slavery as an immoral menace to British rule. The abolitionists also found tacit support from planters in the older British colonies who disliked the prospect of competition from new plantations on Trinidad.13
Responsive to the old planters and new activists, the Privy Council and prime minister barred any further importation of slaves into Trinidad after 1805. In early 1812, Stephen also secured a Privy Council order imposing, for the first time in a Crown colony, a systematic registration of the slaves in Trinidad. Abolitionists reasoned that a registry (with an annual reporting of deaths and mutilations) would compel the planters to treat their slaves better, but the planters resented any interference in the management of their plantations, so they did their best to frustrate the registry.14
A Private of the 5th West India Regiment, 1814. Aquatint by I. J. C. Stadler after Charles Hamilton Smith.(Courtesy of the Council of the National Army Museum, London).
While allowing the old plantations with slaves to persist on the island, the British officials sought to develop a new farming sector with free black settlers. By West Indian standards, Trinidad already had an unusually large proportion of “free coloureds”: 20 percent of the population in 1810. The antislavery imperialists sought to prove that the West Indies could thrive with free peasants, rather than slaves, producing cacao and sugar. The reformers also argued that free blacks would defend the colony from invasion—in contrast to slaves, who would welcome invaders as liberators. The British foreign minister, George Canning, declared, “We have our choice, whether to make Trinidad a new sugar growing, negro driving colony, productive indeed, but weak, and exposed, and inviting attack in proportion—or to create there a place of military strength, a fortress for the defence of our other colonies, and to lay the foundation of a new system of colonization for future military purposes.”15
By promoting the growth of a free black society, antislavery activists hoped to encourage eventual abolition throughout the West Indies. Stephen predicted that, if endowed with “free, strong and faithful hands to defend it, . . . Trinidad may become at once an example, and a protection; a farm of experiment, and a fortress to the rest of our Sugar Colonies.” But he warned against “the fatal error of giving to it, in its infancy, a Legislative Assembly.” To defend the reform policies, the Crown appointed a governor and a council but allowed no elected legislature for Trinidad. Imperialists recognized that white legislators would defend slavery and suppress free blacks. The colony’s free blacks agreed, petitioning the Crown against granting an elected assembly to Trinidad. Imperial consolidation went hand in hand with initiatives to protect blacks from white planters. Excluded from the American Revolution by their geopolitical situation, the white West Indians could only seethe as the empire tightened its power over them in the name of protecting blacks. Virginians felt blessed to have escaped that imperial power through revolution, but their slaves had new reasons to look to the British as potential liberators.16
During the global war against France, the British aggressively redefined their empire in benevolent and humanitarian terms. Imperialists posed as the protectors and benefactors of darker-skinned peoples deemed capable of becoming free and Christian under the tutelage of their British superiors. The new breed of imperialists cast local planter elites as selfish exploiters of slaves and as obstacles to Christian uplift and the consolidating power of the empire.17
However sincerely held, the new principles served the imperial drive to dominate and exploit foreign peoples as supposed inferiors. And colonial practices often contradicted the lofty principles espoused in Parliament and the imperial cabinet. In Trinidad in 1801–1802, the governor, General Thomas Picton, favored developing the island as a traditional sugar colony worked by imported slaves. He also used torture to elicit confessions from slaves and free people of color. But the government sacked and prosecuted Picton, replacing him with a governor who clung more closely to the imperial script by protecting free blacks while denying a legislature to the white planters.18
The empire’s contradictions naturally led Americans to denounce the British as dangerous hypocrites who built their global power on hollow pieties. Citing British massacres in Ireland and India and their military assistance to Native Americans, one Virginian denounced “those half-Indian, scalping assassins, those degenerate, ferocious Disgraces to civilization, the British, the enemies of virtue, liberty and America.” American masters regarded their West Indian counterparts as the victims of an imperialism rendered more insidious by its new moralism. Virginians feared the arrival of that imperialism on their own shores, as warships pushing into Chesapeake Bay with black troops on board. In turn, however, the alarmed talk of Virginians alerted listening slaves that they might become free by escaping to those ships.19
Sailors
On June 22, 1807, a British frigate, HMS Leopard, intercepted an American frigate, USS Chesapeake, in the Atlantic about eight miles beyond the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The British captain, Salusbury Humphreys, demanded permission to board the Chesapeake to seek deserters from the Royal Navy. The American captain, James Barron, refused, so the Leopard unleashed three devastating broadsides at close range, crippling the Chesapeake, killing three sailors, and wounding another sixteen. The ill-prepared American crew could discharge only one cannon before Barron surrendered. The victorious Humphreys sent across a search party, which returned to the Leopard with four sailors deemed deserters. The victors then released the ravaged Chesapeake to return to Norfolk for repairs. As a warning to other sailors, the British hanged one of the deserters and cast the other three into prison in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Royal Navy’s primary naval base in North America.20
Captain Humphreys acted on orders from his admiral, Sir George Cranfield Berkeley, who meant to stem the American practice of harboring deserters from the Royal Navy. The admiral also enforced the British insistence that no man born anywhere within the empire could ever renounce his duties as a subject. Allegiance began at birth and ended only in death. No matter where a “natural-born subject” emigrated, he remained obligated to serve the king in time of war. The imperial government asserted that no legal process of naturalization could remake a British subject into an American citizen.21
British officers routinely stopped and inspected the merchant ships of their own and other nations to impress seamen into service in the Royal Navy. A relatively small homeland surrounded by the sea, Britain required thousands of sailors and marines to work a powerful
fleet meant to keep European enemies away. The navy also protected the trade routes of a vast, overseas empire, which funneled a lion’s share of the world’s colonial commerce into British ports. During the long, hard war against the French Revolution and, later, Napoléon’s empire, the Royal Navy had grown to a mammoth scale that demanded over 100,000 seamen.22
Many British sailors evaded naval service by seeking berths in the booming American merchant marine. Because the United States remained neutral in the global war, American merchants picked up trade on routes too dangerous for French shipping. By evading the British blockade of France and her colonies, the American neutral trade benefited Napoléon at the expense of the British Empire. The profits of this trade induced the Americans to build more ships, doubling the tonnage of their merchant marine between 1792 and 1807. Lacking enough American-born sailors, the merchants paid premium wages to attract the sailors of other nations, and Britain offered veteran seamen keen to serve under another flag. American shippers paid $15 per month for able sailors, compared to just $7 in the British navy. That discrepancy pushed sailors away from Britain and pulled them onto American vessels. By 1807, at least two-fifths of the 50,000 sailors working American merchant ships were British by birth, and the Royal Navy wanted them back.23
Crisis loomed as the empire and the republic competed for a limited pool of sailors in a world at war. The British insisted that they retrieved only their own subjects from American merchant ships, but Royal Navy captains defined American citizens narrowly and British subjects broadly. Often a naval captain simply took the best sailors who spoke English, which included hundreds of Americans as well as thousands of Britons.24
Led by Jefferson and Madison, the governing Republicans asserted America’s right to create citizens by naturalization. They also insisted that the American flag vested every merchant ship with national sovereignty, rendering their crews properly immune to foreign impressment. American diplomats conceded only the wartime right of a belligerent to stop and search ships for munitions bound to an enemy’s port, so they protested when the British extended those searches to reclaim supposed subjects.25