by Simon Schama
By the end of the war at least fifteen thousand and perhaps as many as twenty thousand blacks were living in the three British enclaves. There were many who had a stake in their fate, and few who could be counted as disinterested guardians. Southern planters, needless to say, demanded immediate and unconditional restoration of their property, and petitioned Congress for it. Some went so far as to demand that there should be no exchange or release of British prisoners, nor any finalization of the peace, until their full complement of surviving slaves had been restored. When the commandant of Charleston, General Alexander Leslie, asked Governor Mathews of South Carolina and General Greene for permission to buy rice from plantations in the countryside around the city, it was denied, since, as Greene brutally reasoned, the hungrier they were, the quicker the British would be to depart and “the fewer Negroes they will have with them.”6 Mathews also threatened Leslie with the repudiation of debts owed to British merchants or other private citizens, unless the issue was resolved to the satisfaction of slaveowners.
Conversely, white loyalists who had been given slaves taken from confiscated rebel estates were determined to resist demands for their restitution. But they had no interest in liberating the blacks in their charge. Instead, the blacks were to be taken, still enslaved, to wherever the loyalists ended up—in East Florida, Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Caribbean or Nova Scotia. Although, in this respect, there was not much to choose between returning American owners and new British masters, all the evidence suggests that the blacks themselves, still clinging to the promises of Dunmore and Clinton and fearful of punishment on the American plantations, opted in overwhelmingly greater numbers for the British. In early August 1782 General Leslie directed all those who wished to leave to register with the army; 4,230 whites and 7,163 blacks immediately did so.7 When, in July, ships left Savannah in what was the first mass loyalist evacuation, their complements included some 4,000 blacks, including the 150 black infantrymen of the garrison. Notoriously, when vessels departed from Charleston in December 1782 blacks who had not been authorized to sail were so desperate to leave that they clung to the small boats taking refugees out of the harbour.
Many of those black emigrants were tragically misled. There is no doubt that the terrors of the slaves about what might be in store for them, should they return to their American owners, were cynically exploited by profiteers, who packed them on ships and resold them in the West Indies. But the complicity of the British authorities in this tragedy—assumed by Americans both at the time and in much historical writing since—is another question. When John Cruden, the South Carolina loyalist who had been in charge of “sequestered” rebel estates during the British occupation, discovered that slaves had been taken by “a Mr Gray” and resold in Jamaica, Tortola and East Florida, he was indignant enough to write to the respective governors and, shocked as much by the larceny as by the inhumanity, ask for them to be returned. In the spring of 1783 Cruden even went looking for them himself. From Tortola in March he wrote to George Nibbs that the infamous Gray “under pretence of bringing Negroes from Carolina to prevent them from being punished by their owners, has either sold or resold them for sale on this island…[and that] nothing can be more shocking to humanity than the deceit this man is said to be guilty of and…in express contradiction to the orders of the Commander-in-Chief…[having] brought away Negroes that are in his possession.”8 Gray and others, including one Gillespie, had apparently been trading in these shipments from other garrisons, such as Savannah and St Augustine in East Florida, and Cruden now set himself the task of preventing “unprincipled Individuals from making a property of those poor wretches” as well as bringing the criminal traders to justice. Cruden had been told the sad tale by the blacks themselves, some of whom believed they qualified under the proclamation. So while Cruden’s business (seldom fulfilled) was with getting blacks back to their American owners, he was also concerned to identify those who had genuinely earned their freedom.9
The accelerated timetable of the Southern evacuations and General Leslie’s sense of being overwhelmed by the challenge played into the hands of ruthless businessmen who were only too happy to expedite sailings. There were so many blacks to deal with—either slaves whom the loyalists said were their own, or those claiming to have won their liberty through service—that a “monstrous expence” was bound to be incurred, even if room could be found for all those wanting to leave. Directed by Carleton, a compromise solution was reached, although not wholly satisfactory to former American owners: all slaves would be returned to their American masters except those who, for whatever reason, had “rendered themselves obnoxious” to their owners, or those who had been granted their freedom by the Crown for wartime service. But this was a huge loophole. Almost any runaway from the plantations could claim, by virtue of that fact, to have become “obnoxious” and be fearful enough of what awaited them to resist being returned. Nonetheless, a joint British-American commission was to be established in Charleston to distinguish those who would be taken back to the plantations from those having a legitimate claim to be free. In the latter case, masters would be compensated by the British government for their losses.
Unsurprisingly, the arrangement quickly broke down. Thousands of blacks, their names changed to avoid identification, claimed to come under the terms of the Philipsburgh Proclamation and, as one Hessian adjutant-general noted, “insist on their rights…and General Carleton protects these slaves.”10 On the 12th of November Carleton had indeed restated his intention of honouring the promise to grant freedom for service, and had ordered the army not to take such persons away against their will. The fact that so many of those wanting to make good on the promise of British freedom now had what the officers called “sweethearts,” as well as small children who could not have worked or fought their way to liberty, created another moral headache (and potential expense) for the commissioners. In the heyday of the property calculus, slavers would have had no compunction about dividing families, for they were treated as mere breeding units. Now, however, even hardened military men were sufficiently affected by the currently fashionable cult of sensibility to be averse to tearing apart mothers and children, husbands and wives.
Of course, white loyalists could use the pretext of keeping families united to justify removing the lot of them when they themselves departed. As the transport ships arrived in Charleston and began to load, suspicions became aggravated. Arguments and even fights broke out at the docks on the eve of sailings when American inspectors claimed peremptory rights of search and seizure. In one such incident three British soldiers were taken prisoner and the system broke down altogether. When 136 slaves claimed by Americans were discovered hidden on a British ship that was already under way, Governor Mathews threw a tantrum, declared the joint commission a fraud, and ordered the American inspectors to have nothing more to do with it. Since this meant that, before the last sailings in December 1782, between 6,000 and 10,000 blacks left Charleston on ships whose passenger lists were uninspected, this was tantamount to Mathews cutting off his nose to spite his face. The historian Sylvia Frey calculates that, along with those who had escaped during the war and gone elsewhere than Charleston, and those who had perished, at least 25,000 slaves disappeared from the South Carolina plantations: an entire world of bonded labour gone.
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the Atlantic, in Paris, British and American negotiators charged with drawing up a provisional treaty of peace believed, by late November 1782, that they had completed a mutually acceptable draft. John Jay, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams had good reason to be satisfied. The frontiers of the new state would be expansive, access to Newfoundland fisheries granted, restitution for war damages accepted. In return, not a great deal had been achieved for Britain other than the de facto end of the Franco-American alliance. The Americans would only, after all, pay debts incurred to British and loyalist creditors, but it would be recommended to the states that they should either return confiscated loyalist property or else reimburse ow
ners for their losses.
But it was done and, with the draft ready for signing and sealing, all concerned were on the brink of celebrating with a dinner at Benjamin Franklin’s house at Passy when, on the 30th of November, they were belatedly joined by Henry Laurens. At this eleventh hour, still evidently preoccupied by “the plunders in Carolina of negroes,” Laurens insisted on inserting an additional article, specifying that the British withdrawal was to be effected “without the destruction or carrying away of American property, Negroes &c.”
Securing slaves evidently mattered a great deal, then, to Laurens, even though his son had been the author of the only serious American effort made during the Revolutionary War to liberate them through military service. But Colonel John Laurens was dead, killed the previous August in a gratuitous attempt to prevent the British from foraging for the rice General Greene had denied to the Charleston garrison. The British expedition on the Combahee River, near the plantation of the Laurenses’ friend Arthur Middleton, had naturally been armed. (Carleton, too, led an armed foraging expedition into Westchester on the 15th of September and took three thousand troops with him to ward off trouble.) Suddenly aware that his force of fifty men was outnumbered three to one, and faced with the choice of waiting for reinforcements or taking action, John Laurens did what he always did: he charged the guns. “Poor Laurens is fallen in a paltry skirmish,” reported General Greene, who in some sense had caused it.11 Friends who were deeply fond of John Laurens, including both Washington and Hamilton, mourned his loss, as indeed did the British themselves, who knew a gallant fool when they saw one; but no one was much astonished. His father got the heartbreaking news in mid-November in the same letter from John Adams that requested his presence at the peace negotiations in Paris. For Henry Laurens, then, the summons of duty would master the anguish of loss—the kind of dependable Calvinist wisdom that Adams himself leaned on in adversity.
But Henry Laurens was not well. After being taken from a ship bound for France by Captain (afterwards Admiral) Keppel in HMS Vestal in September 1780, he had spent fifteen months in the Tower of London until Lord Mansfield granted him bail pending a prisoner exchange for Cornwallis.12 There, in a cell about twelve feet square plus bedchamber, for which he paid rent, Laurens was subjected to periodic victimization by the petty martinet who was his warder—serenaded with pointedly satirical renditions of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” by the Yeomen of the Guard, and stingily rationed in his walks and his writing paper. He was, after a little while, allowed to have his black slave boy, George, with him, but only when others were in his cell. Although he occupied himself by annotating Gibbon’s Decline and Fall for analogies with the British Empire, Laurens’s gout became a torment and he suffered from a touch of “Thames lung.” When he eventually arrived in Paris, Adams and other old friends were shocked at his shrunken appearance and doddery gait.
None of his infirmities, however, explains quite why Henry Laurens should have wanted to include, in a treaty he had little business in drafting, an article so decidedly uncharacteristic of his dead son. Perhaps the old planter, who had built his own fortune on slave labour, had reverted to type? Perhaps the act was shadowed by bitterness towards the idealism that had driven John so very often to foolhardiness—the griever aggrieved? But then Laurens may have been influenced by one of his most frequent visitors in the Tower: the Scottish businessman and African imperial venturer Richard Oswald. In his time Oswald had been many things—merchant and munitions contractor, as well as radical in many of his views, and a decided friend to America; certainly this was why he had been appointed by the Rockingham-Shelburne government to negotiate the peace treaty with Franklin and Adams. Before leaving for Paris, Oswald had confided as much to Laurens; and it had been Oswald who, with a word in the ear of the powerful, had expedited Laurens’s release at the end of 1781, even when Washington had seemed in no hurry to exchange him for the Earl of Cornwallis (on parole in England!). Oswald certainly had a hand in suggesting to Adams and Franklin that Laurens—whose son, after all, had already been a diplomat in France securing a loan for the war (what had John Laurens not done in his short life?)—should join them in Paris. But Richard Oswald also had another life—that of a slave trader who had made a cool fortune from his domination of the slaving entrepôt of Bance Island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, where he bought captives from the Temne people. And when those human cargoes had docked at Charleston en route to being auctioned for the low country plantations of South Carolina, it was none other than Henry Laurens who took a nice 10 percent on the transactions.
Interest, as usual, overcame piety. For although Article VII forbade “the carrying off of property,” what other property could be carried off on those ships, and was more obviously valuable, than slaves? By inserting his article into the draft treaty Laurens was obliging not only his fellow Carolinans but the entire slaveholding class of the South who had made the revolution: the victors and inheritors who, with the single exception of John Adams, would dominate politics and the presidency for an entire generation.13 There was, after all, hardly one of them who had not lost slaves as runaways to the British, and many of them, especially Virginians, approached George Washington and Congress, determined to recover their human property or, at the very least, make good financially on their losses.
SAILING UP THE HUDSON on the 5th of May 1783 against adverse winds and tides for his meeting with Washington, Carleton could have been under no illusion that restoration of negroes would not be a matter for discussion and was perhaps the most pressing reason for the general’s sudden interest in a personal interview after so many months of chilly distance. This business was going to be difficult. On other matters—the speedy evacuation of British troops from Westchester, where de Lancey’s loyalist Refugee Cowboys had continued their rampages undeterred by the deliberations of a few men in Paris—he could be obliging. But as regards the blacks who had been promised their liberty, he never doubted that he was bound to honour the pledge. In April that year he had sent directives to all those under his command to execute the terms of the treaty with the utmost scrupulousness. This meant doing what had been proposed at Charleston: restoring all slaves taken from rebel estates other than those to whom the Crown had an obligation. Of the three-thousand-plus blacks in New York, the latter would constitute the vast majority. So the machinery to examine their claims to freedom had already been set in place. A Book of Negroes had been opened, recording the names and ages of all those blacks wanting to leave with the British evacuation from New York; their physical characteristics (“stout boy,” “likely wench”); and, most important, the date on which they had come to the British lines. Only those who had arrived before the end of hostilities (although that could be deemed to have occurred as late as the autumn of 1782) could take advantage of the Philipsburgh Proclamation. Those judged entitled to freedom would be issued certificates by the commandant of New York, General Samuel Birch; those judged not at liberty would be restored to their owners. All these arrangements, Carleton would patiently explain to Washington, were demonstrably in the best interests of the slaveowners themselves, since at least they would have a document of losses and thus an entitlement to compensation.
Waited on by his own black servant, Pomp (who himself had a certificate of freedom although Sir Guy dearly wished him not to leave his service), Carleton rehearsed these vexing issues as the Perseverance lay to at Dobb’s Ferry late in the afternoon. His own Major Beckwith, who had made better time in his whaleboat, and a Major Humphreys from Washington’s staff came aboard with an invitation from the American commander to dine with him on the morrow at Tappan on the west bank of the river. Carleton accepted, but must have wondered how he would be received by Washington, especially since it was known that he was now only the commander pro tem, until his replacement, Sir Charles Gray, could arrive? Would this undermine his authority? Could there be a true meeting of minds, an understanding between two officers and gentlemen? It had become a commonplace to rem
ark how alike the two men were, with their taciturn sobriety, and solid, often impassive, bearing that seemed to set them above the general run of human pettiness. But even as he thought that matters could be properly settled between the two of them, Carleton knew that the history of the past, difficult year gave as many grounds for apprehension as for reassurance.
Relations between the two men through the summer and autumn of 1782 had been, at best, frosty. This, Carleton firmly believed, had been none of his doing. He had arrived in a region where civil war still raged with unsparing violence long after the guns had been silenced in Virginia. His object—especially once it had become clear that there would be no more campaigning—was to try to minimize any further misery. He had hoped, for example, for a swift exchange of prisoners (especially since he had some five hundred, whilst the Americans held more than six thousand). But Congress, outraged at the atrocious conditions to which American prisoners had been subjected on board the notorious British hulks in New York and Brooklyn, had insisted that Britain pay arrears of charges for their keeping of its own captured soldiers before any such exchange could be finalized. It even threatened to reduce prisoners’ rations unless the matter was promptly settled. Predictably, Shelburne, who had become Prime Minister in July after Rockingham’s death, balked at being presented with a bill. Distressed about the privations endured by British prisoners, many of whom were in rags or half-naked, Carleton proposed that at least army surgeons and chaplains might be immediately released; but he had no success. He then asked for a personal meeting with Washington to try to reconcile differences, but met with no warmer response. A conference of commissioners from both sides at Tappan, New York, in September 1782 merely ended up sharpening the acrimony. Passes were applied for to take rudimentary supplies of food and clothing to British prisoners, but were denied. Why, Carleton wondered, with the kind of genteel innocence that was his hallmark, was Congress so determined to “bring the war to the last extremities of rage”?