The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832

by Taylor, Alan

  —JAMES MONROE, APRIL 7, 18151

  HEADING HOME to Yorktown in November 1813, Major Thomas Griffin stewed in frustration after visiting a British warship in a vain bid to recover five runaways. At Hampton, Griffin fell in with Patrick Williams, a mariner from New York who recently had been released from a British captivity. At Nassau in the Bahamas, Williams claimed that he saw the British sell a runaway slave carpenter from Norfolk for $1,000. The story confirmed what Virginians wanted to believe, so Griffin took Williams before a magistrate, John Tabb Smith, to make a deposition under oath. At last the Virginians claimed legal proof to their deeply held suspicion, and the newspapers rushed it into print. Securing a copy of the deposition from Griffin, Joseph C. Cabell passed it on to St. George Tucker, who eagerly forwarded it to President Madison. Keen to expose the British as fraudulent liberators Cabell and Tucker endorsed a shaky witness with a suspect story, which they conveyed to the highest level of American power.2

  Despite Williams’s obscurity, President Madison and Secretary of State Monroe eagerly embraced the deposition as proving British perfidy. On January 28, 1814, Monroe informed the American peace negotiators in Europe: “It is known that a shameful traffic has been carried on in the West Indies, by the sale of these persons there, by those who professed to be their deliverers. Of this fact, the proof which has reached this Department shall be furnished you.” Although Monroe failed to send the deposition to the commissioners, they hurled the sensational charge at their British counterparts. In Parliament, members of the opposition demanded an explanation from the government. In response, the foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, denied that the naval officers had sold any runaways. An official investigation cleared the Royal Navy of the charge to the satisfaction of the opposition in Parliament.3

  The secretary of state’s confident accusation also caught the attention of American senators who sought his evidence. The request proved embarrassing because Monroe had lost his copy of the Williams deposition. In October 1814, his undersecretary urgently wrote to St. George Tucker, seeking the original. The comedy of errors deepened as Tucker turned for help to Cabell, who sought out Griffin and Smith, but none could find the original or the elusive Williams, who had vanished. Along every step in the chain of credibility, gentlemen had invested their reputations on a copy that rested on a flimsy story from a shaky witness who had gone missing. Madison and Monroe had relied on Tucker, a federal district judge renowned for integrity, who trusted his son-in-law Cabell, a state senator. And Cabell believed what Griffin and Smith had told him about William’s story because it echoed what Virginians wrote and read in their newspapers about the slave-stealing Britons. That left Monroe in the lame position of sending to the Senate letters from Cabell, Tucker, Griffin, and Smith, conveying that they remembered such a deposition although none could produce it or the witness.4

  Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane seethed at the attack on his reputation, which a personal enemy in Britain exploited in a scandalous pamphlet, charging that the admiral had diverted 200 runaways to work as slaves on his plantation in Trinidad. Cochrane dismissed Monroe’s charge as “a story trumped up among the People on the [American] coast to prevent their Negroes [from] deserting: a thousand such having been related by the refugees coming off from the Shore.” In March 1815, Cochrane sent a warship, at great official cost, on a special mission to Norfolk with a letter demanding proof of the charge from the secretary of state.5

  In Washington, D.C., the lead British diplomat, Anthony St. John Baker, also sought to vindicate “the officers of a Nation whose exertions for the total abolition of the slave trade have been so conspicuous.” By refuting the American charge, Baker and Cochrane defended the humanitarian guise that the British Empire had assumed. Discovering the flimsiness of the American evidence, Baker reported to Cochrane, “The proof consists of the copy of an affidavit of a single obscure individual, the original of which cannot be found. This Government is extremely embarrassed by the notice which has been taken of a charge which they had lightly made without proper foundation under the feelings of animosity created by the measures which were adopted [by the Royal Navy] with respect to the Negroes.” Put on the defensive, Monroe fell back on Tucker’s reputation as “a Gentleman of distinguished respectability” as lending credibility to the incredible claims. Meanwhile, Monroe sent a special agent, William Shaler, to Williamsburg, to help search for the original, but he too came up empty.6

  By proving that the Britons had sold the runaways, Monroe hoped to discredit them as liberators among American slaves:

  The exposure will produce a good effect in any future war, for if it is made to appear that the slaves have been sold in the West Indies, and their condition, under new masters, separated from their connections and friends, become worse than it was before, it will be more difficult to impose on them in any future war with whatever power it may be. These slaves . . . have been raised by our own Citizens, who take an interest in their welfare, not as property only but as persons. Much interest and sympathy are felt by the parties for each other. Their condition is, in general, as favorable as that of the Peasantry of Europe and much better than it is in some Countries.

  Monroe’s wishful thinking reveals that the war had promoted a pro-slavery defense framed to refute the British appeal as potential emancipators.7

  To substantiate his charge against the British, Monroe pursued other leads found in newspaper stories about returning American prisoners who claimed to have seen the British sell runaways as slaves. Captain Perrin Willis insisted that an unnamed Virginian had told him that the British sold American runaways in Jamaica by order of the vice admiralty court. Captain James Jaboe returned from his Halifax captivity to assert that he had heard of slave sales there. Another former captive, Thomas L. Hall, added that he had seen a Halifax newspaper advertising thirteen Chesapeake slaves for sale. Edward Ironmonger told friends that he had witnessed such sales in Bermuda, but when deposed under oath, he merely claimed to have heard of the slave sales from others. A Philadelphia newspaper story claimed that a mariner “had heard it said that American Negroes had sold at Bermuda & elsewhere at an advanced price but knew not from what authority the report proceeded.” Upon closer examination, all of these reports dissipated into vague rumors based on hearsay.8

  At the direction of Earl Bathurst, British colonial officials investigated the supposed leads and found no evidence for any of them. In Norfolk the British consul “made particular Enquiry” but could find no master who had lost a slave carpenter during the war, which undercut Williams’s claim. In Nassau the registrar of the vice admiralty court, agent for prisoners, collector of customs, and royal governor attested that no American slaves had been sold in the Bahamas during the war. The customs collector added that the few blacks who had arrived there were “enjoying that freedom which was held out to them by the officers commanding his Majesty’s Forces on the American Coast.” Jamaica’s vice admiralty court never ordered the sale of any slaves captured on American ships, but instead freed them to serve in the army or navy. After a “most minute investigation,” Governor James Cockburn of Bermuda felt “astonishment that the American government should have deemed a story as that trumped up by [Edward] Ironmonger worthy of a moment’s attention.” The governor of Nova Scotia investigated Hall’s dubious charge that a Halifax newspaper had advertised slaves for sale in a colony that no longer sustained slavery. After every printer denied it under oath, the governor concluded that “there never was a more impudent and unfounded statement made upon Oath by any Man.”9

  The negative evidence did not daunt Monroe and other true believers in a British plot to seduce and sell American slaves. As with any conspiracy theory, the believers wove a tautology where the lack of substantial evidence became their proof for a cunning cover-up: that the Britons were deft tricksters who had expertly covered their tracks. General Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina assured Monroe that despite all of the evidence to the contrary, the slaves we
re “carried to the West India Islands, where they are by fraudulent contrivances, difficult to be detected, substantially sold as Slaves.”10

  The believers operated from the premise that the British were a wicked people responsible for American slavery; incapable of liberating slaves, they must have taken them for sale as plunder. Asserting that the British “were not men who might be expected to undertake a crusade to abolish slavery,” the National Intelligencer concluded that the slaves “were first stolen or cajoled away, and then frequently, but secretly, sold into a slavery ten-fold more severe than that which they had escaped.” Insisting that “no liberal, enlightened, or honorable man” could doubt “the patriotic Monroe,” the paper next developed the ingenious argument that by publicizing the accusation in 1814, the secretary of state had compelled the British to hide or relinquish their perfidy: “May it not have prevented the sale of many of our slaves, and thus have lessened the motive for stealing them?” Knowing what they wanted to believe, the conspiracy theorists bent the Britons to fit the absence of evidence.11

  The North Atlantic, 1815, a map by Jeffrey L. Ward.

  Judicious Americans eventually recognized that the British had freed, rather than sold, the runaways. In 1814 as a negotiator at Ghent, John Quincy Adams had pressed the charge of slave sales, from a conviction that Monroe held the proof. Two years later, as the minister to Great Britain, Adams had to disabuse Monroe of his fantasy, which relied on the discredited depositions of Hall and Williams. Adams wondered “how declarations, so utterly destitute of foundation should have been given.” The last word should belong to Joseph C. Cabell, who had done so much in 1813 to promote the Williams deposition. Fourteen years later, Cabell conceded, “It is but candid, however, to admit that the statement of Williams was never sustained by other evidence and is [in] no way countenanced by the evidence since disclosed on the subject. We have since heard of the negroes at various points—at Halifax, Bermuda, Trinidad—and, wherever heard from, they were free.”12

  Returns

  Deft at defending illusion against reality, masters still insisted that predatory Britons had seduced slaves away from their true patrons and protectors. If not sold into a worse slavery in the West Indies, the refugees were “wretches” marooned “on the barren Beach of Tangier” or exiled to frigid Nova Scotia: a Virginian’s notion of hell. “It is said they are badly treated at Bermuda and dying very fast,” Roswell King declared. Surely, the repentant runaways had discovered their mistake and, if provided with the means, would return home to beg forgiveness from their masters.13

  James Spilman of Virginia put that theory to the test by visiting Bermuda on a mercantile voyage in the spring of 1815. Spilman believed that the runaways were “generally disposed to return, but are subject to the continual persuasion & intimidation urged by the whites of every description.” But he could persuade only four men to return to slavery in Virginia. Anthony Champ, Isaac Smith, John Hall, and Joseph Webster came from the Rappahannock Valley, and all had escaped at the end of the war during Captain Barrie’s “shooting party” of December 1814. By the following spring, they evidently felt the pull of family left behind. In Essex and Lancaster Counties, they became proverbial as the only runaways to come home again. They later became star witnesses for masters seeking compensation for other slaves lost to the British during the war.14

  Five other runaways can be documented as returning to slavery in Virginia after the war: Lewis Jackson, Simon Willis, James Steward, Raleigh W. Downman’s Nassau, and Thomas McClanahan’s Sam. Nassau, Jackson, and Willis also had fled from the Rappahannock in December 1814. In July 1815, Nassau’s master in Lancaster County reported that the runaway had “Returned, having escaped from Bermuda.” Jackson fled homeward from a British watering party at St. George’s Island, in the Potomac, in March 1815. Simon Willis had a longer odyssey after enlisting in the Royal Navy as a ship’s carpenter on HMS Devastation. Sent to the coast of Georgia in January 1815, Willis deserted from a shore party and made his way overland back to Essex County. McClanahan’s Sam apparently left with the raiders under duress and promptly returned at the end of the war, finding passage from Havana on a merchant ship to Philadelphia, and then walked back to his master in Northumberland County.15

  On September 20, 1814, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, James Steward had escaped with three other men by rowing away in a stolen boat to a warship. A young “mulatto” with “small eyes” but “remarkably large feet,” he enlisted in the Royal Navy as a sailor. At the end of the war, he fought in the British assault on Fort Bowyer, Alabama, where his best friend died. Perhaps in shock at his loss, Steward deserted and tried to pass as a free black named Tom. Attempting that dodge in Alabama showed far more imagination than realism, for that territory had virtually no free blacks, and the whites meant to keep it that way. The fort’s commander, Colonel Gilbert C. Russell, owned a nearby plantation and decided that “Tom” had best work as his slave pending the discovery of his true identity and owner. Russell described Tom in a newspaper ad eventually reprinted in Baltimore, where Frederick Grammar recognized the fugitive as his slave. Grammar wrote to seek Steward’s return, but Russell replied, “Tom has married one of my virgins and expresses much anxiety to remain where he is.” To strengthen his bargaining position, the colonel also noted that, otherwise Tom “might take to the woods and our County affords no jails to hold him.” Ultimately, Russell paid $550 so that Tom could remain his married slave in Alabama.16

  What explains the nine runaways who apparently preferred slavery in the Chesapeake over freedom with the British? All were young men who evidently escaped without other close kin. Fleeing during the last five months of the war, they had less time to adjust to their new circumstances. One of them, Sam, had been taken by force. The others had found their freedom circumscribed by the demands and hardships of military service. These nine were exceptions that proved the rule, for almost all of the 3,400 Chesapeake runaways preferred British freedom over American slavery.17

  Special Agents

  During the spring of 1815, Monroe sent three special agents—Thomas Spalding, Eli Magruder, and Augustine Neale—to visit Bermuda and Halifax to seek the repatriation of the runaways. If the British would not compel the refugees to return, the agents were supposed to persuade them to come home to slavery. Monroe sought to exploit the British pose as liberators: “They have professed to afford them an asylum as freemen. They are admitted of course to be voluntary Agents, and as such must have a right to go where they think fit.” Monroe felt no contradiction in persuading “voluntary Agents” to renounce their freedom, for he believed them incapable of liberty and longing for the protection of their old masters.18

  A rich and erudite planter from the Sea Islands of Georgia, Spalding had visited Cumberland Island in early March in a failed bid to dissuade Rear Admiral Cockburn from removing the runaways. Reaching Bermuda on May 19, Spalding requested their forcible repatriation by Governor James Cockburn, but the admiral’s brother was not about to compel the refugees to return as slaves to America. Spalding reported that the governor “instantly lost his temper,” declaring “that he would rather Bermuda, and every man, woman, and child in it, were sunk under the sea, than surrender one slave that had sought protection under the flag of England.” By protecting the refugees, the governor defended the honor of his brother and their empire.19

  Governor Cockburn did let Spalding speak to the former slaves, but none agreed to return to slavery in Georgia. Unwilling to believe blacks capable of free choice, Spalding blamed meddling by British officials: “Every means are employed to instill into the minds of the Slaves by the officers of the Colonial Regiment, and those that direct their labours at Ireland [Island], the most deadly hatred to their ancient masters, as well as to the U. States generally.” The British kept the runaways “as important means to be employed against [the United States] in the event of another war, as well from their knowledge of the country as from the stimulus which that hatred will give
to their actions.” In fact, the refugees had their own reasons to stay, for Spalding noted that dockyard workers were “paid high wages.” They also remembered their hardships as slaves in Dixie, the land of cotton where old times were not forgotten. James Spilman reported that they bristled upon learning that Spalding “came from Georgia and to which country the Negroes have a great aversion.”20

  Spalding also worked at cross purposes with a second special agent, Eli Magruder, who had arrived on May 6 with a chartered merchant ship from New York. A former merchant from Barbados, Magruder could better perform as an agent under cover. Rather too proud of his new authority, Magruder expected to dictate to Spalding, but Georgia planters did not take well to the orders of others, so Spalding sailed home in a huff at the end of the month. Magruder then consulted the best Bermudian lawyer, Francis Forbes, on whether the runaways could be reclaimed as property through the courts. Unfortunately that best lawyer was the Crown’s attorney general, so the consultation blew Magruder’s cover to no good end, for Forbes insisted that British law forbade the departure of any black without the governor’s license.21

  The third special agent, Augustine Neale, sailed to Halifax instead of Bermuda. Monroe entrusted Neale’s instructions to Walter Jones, who worried that young Virginia gentlemen made lousy covert agents. High strung and obsessed with honor, they had short fuses and scant capacity for keeping secrets. Anticipating that Neale would erupt upon hearing some Briton slur the American character, Jones warned, “I know that with most young men, especially our Virginians, irritability of passion is apt to be confounded with firmness of Spirit.” To succeed in his mission for the public, Neale had to set aside his “individual Character for a time.” Taking the advice to heart, Neale became the most discreet of the three government agents, but Spalding and Magruder had set that bar pretty low.22