by Simon Schama
Nothing could be more perfectly calculated to make Washington livid. But he was also a realist and understood, for all the rage boiling over in the South and in Congress, that he had limited options through which to enforce Article VII. It would be many years before the democratic American republic would give up attempting to restore slaves to their old owners and claims for compensation were still being argued after the War of 1812, when yet another wave of blacks sought protection and freedom in the British lines. What could he do in 1783? Should he go along with those who advised the repudiation of British debts? That would be taken as an abrogation of the treaty and even though the most infuriated, such as James Madison, argued that by their stand on the negroes the British had already made it a dead letter, Washington was not about to restart the war—not with the Royal Navy dominant once more in the western Atlantic. So Washington—who was, in any case, conflicted about the morality of his own slaveowning—became fatalistic about the loss of the blacks. When the agent hunting for escaped slaves, including two Black Pioneers from the plantation of Benjamin Harrison, was briskly told by Carleton that there was no question of their returning without their own consent, Harrison appealed directly to Washington. But the meeting at Tappan had convinced Washington, for he wrote that same day to Harrison that “the Slaves which have absconded from their Masters will never be restored to them.” He understood perfectly Harrison’s chagrin and added that indeed “several of my own are with the Enemy but I scarce ever bestowed a thought on them; they have so many doors through which they can escape from New York [so Carleton had been right about that!] that scarce any thing but an inclination to return…will restore many.”20
Not every slaveowner was quite so stoical. Thirteen Virginian owners who among them had lost three hundred slaves made a combined effort to recapture them and petitioned Congress to intervene.21 Theodorick Bland hired a special agent, Jacob Morris, to track down his own slaves, but with little luck. One whom he did find told him that the blacks in New York knew very well that many of those who had returned “have been treated with very great severity by their former masters”—usually a flogging—and that it was unlikely, therefore, that many would either let themselves be caught or come of their own accord. The expense of tracking down the slaves over weeks or even months when so many of them had, in any case, changed their names could be even more ruinous than the loss of the blacks themselves. To have any chance of locating the runaways the agents needed help from New Yorkers, but that in turn risked the draconian punishments that Carleton imposed on anyone caught colluding in illegal returns. Thomas Willis, a policeman found guilty of taking a bribe to force a black called Caesar on to a ship that took him to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and who had been shameless enough to beat the man through the streets with his hands tied, was fined the huge sum of fifty guineas and deported. Another slave, recaptured by his owner, Jacob Duryea, and tied to a boat, was liberated on the Hudson River by a black partisan named Colonel Cuffe and a party of Hessians, who themselves had many blacks in their regiment.22
None of this managed to assuage the fears felt by the black community in New York, knowing that their old persecutors were free to come to the city and track them down. For them, the end of the war meant the renewal of terror. Boston King, who had taken so many pains to escape “the Americans” and who now had a wife, Violet, and children, captured perfectly the dread that swept through the black community of New York.
About this time, peace was restored between America and Great Britain which diffused universal joy among all parties except us, who had escaped slavery and taken refuge in the English army; for a report prevailed at New-York that all the slaves, in number two thousand, were to be delivered up to their masters, altho’ some of them had been three or four years among the English. This dreadful rumour filled us with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our old masters coming from Virginia, North-Carolina and other parts and seizing upon slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them out of their beds. Many of the slaves had very cruel masters, so that the thought of returning home with them embittered life to us. For some days we lost our appetite for food, and sleep departed from our eyes. The English had compassion upon us in the day of our distress, and issued out a Proclamation importing “That all slaves should be free who had taken refuge in the British lines and claimed the sanction and privileges of the Proclamations respecting the security and protection of Negroes.” In consequence of this, each of us received a certificate from the commanding officer at New-York, which dispelled our fears and filled us with joy and gratitude.23
Those certificates, signed by Brigadier General Samuel Birch, represent a revolutionary moment in the lives of African-Americans. They affirm that the bearer, having “resorted to British Lines…has hereby his Excellency Sir Guy Carleton’s Permission to go to Nova Scotia, or wherever else He/She may think proper.” Only one of the Birch certificates survives, made out in the name of Cato Ramsey, formerly slave to a Dr John Ramsey of Norfolk, Virginia, from whom he escaped in 1776.24 Ramsey, according to the Book of Negroes “45, slim fellow,” was a fugitive who had somehow reached Lord Dunmore’s ships; survived everything the war could throw at him—smallpox, typhus, privation and wandering; and had still made it to New York and liberty. Now he was on the brink of a new life that could begin with a farewell to America.
There were thousands like Cato Ramsey, men, women and children, anxiously awaiting their fate. And the evidence suggests that, unlike the brutal and chaotic exodus from Charleston, on this occasion Carleton and his officers took pains to try to make the ordeal less harrowing. A document headed “Precis relative to Negroes in America,” probably drafted by Carleton himself in the latter part of 1783, took an even more liberal view of black eligibility for departure than Boston King suggested. The cut-off date for qualifying entry to the British lines was set as late as “the day the Treaty came Forward”—November 1782 at the earliest. The same document makes clear that the Board of Inquiry appointed to adjudicate claims made by American masters on their former slaves, considered as free even those blacks who as yet had “no regular protections or certificates.” This presupposes yet another milestone in the history of black liberation in America: that in the British, they had finally found white authorities who would believe what they said when they related their life histories, irrespective of any written documentation. Of the 3,000 certificates granted in New York, 813 were honest enough to make no pretence of having answered the Proclamations, but pleaded none the less that they had escaped from rebel masters and gone to the British during the war. And this was good enough.
Even more surprising is the fact that, as the “Precis” makes irrefutably clear, by 1783 there was a “Somerset effect” (the benign misreading of the Mansfield judgement) operating on the decisions made by Carleton and his principal officers. For, in contrast to Dunmore’s purely military opportunism, the “Precis” adds that the negroes who came into the British lines were considered free, “the British Constitution not allowing of slavery but holding out freedom and protection to all who came within.” The certificates given to the departing blacks were, according to the writer of the “Precis,” unequivocally and “universally deemed equal to Emancipation.”25
Once again, Black Sam Fraunces was at the scene of the drama. For it was at his tavern that the Board of Inquiry deliberated disputed claims every Wednesday noon from April to November, when the last sailing left New York. Americans sat with their British counterparts hearing cases, even after Washington had been instructed in mid-July that they should cease participating in what Congress clearly decided was a mockery. To American displeasure, only a handful of blacks were ever returned to their masters as a result of these proceedings, sometimes even when loyalists were the claimants. Judith Jackson had fled her master near Norfolk, Virginia, as early as 1773 along with her baby daughter, and had stayed in the loyalist town until the arrival of Dunmore two years later when she got work as a laund
ress for the regiment, following the army first to South Carolina and finally to New York. Her case for a certificate (already given to her) seemed foolproof. But in 1783 a second party, a Mr Eilbeck, to whom she had been consigned after her owner left for England, showed up before the board in New York and insisted that, as a loyalist, he had the right to Jackson and her children. Stumped, the board forwarded the case to Carleton himself, who had no difficulty in deciding. Judith Jackson and her children went free.26
Anxieties did not end in the Fraunces tavern. Down on the dock a group of four inspectors, including Americans, went through a final, on-deck examination, first of the passenger list and then of the black passengers themselves, to ensure that persons matched names, and that no one was aboard who had not been recorded in the Book of Negroes. Masters had to swear on pain of “severe penalties” that nothing or no one illicit was being carried off. In theory blacks could be removed at the very last minute, but in practice this last excruciating denial seems to have happened only very rarely. Doubtless it was an ordeal, but it was the last inspection that more than two thousand blacks would ever undergo.
On the waterfront in the rank, grimy sweat of high summer, on the days before embarkation, a passer-by would have observed a heaped mass of rope and canvas; a logjam of wagons and horses; the creak of masts, the crack of whips; cursing drivers, opportunist gulls, hogs and dogs; ship’s cows lowing as they were herded on board; skinny ship’s cats already prowling the decks; barrels and tuns of salt tack and biscuit, tar and rum, blocking the wharf, drunks from the grogshop lurching between them; chests piled high as a house on the decks before being lowered into the hold; the usual swarm of sailors and stevedores, and buyers and vendors, thieves and whores; much pissing and kissing; a capering fiddler; a thunderer handing out tracts to save all souls lest the deep take them. But also, amidst the mêlée, an observer would have seen the passengers, men with their hats on and their coats off, bonneted women and scatters of children, some dozing, some scampering, some slouching towards their frightening future; hundreds, on some days thousands of them, many of whom had seen better days, and some of whom had seen much, much worse.
Two different worlds were going with the Lady’s Adventure, the Grand Duchess of Russia, the Peggy, the Mars, the Hesperus, the Fishburn, the Kingston, the Stafford, the Clinton and L’Abondance. Between April and November, 27,000 loyalists embarked, uprooted, disconsolate, demoralized, stripped of power, wealth and property, or even simple farms and cottages; many of them roiling with bitterness at their betrayers in London—the fat politicians counting their gold from East India opium, salt and tea (that tea!), and the generals who got to retire to a country estate in the shires, while decent loyalists had to make shift hundreds of miles to the north, beginning again in the piny desert amidst ravening beasts, bears and wolves, or on the cobbled byways of an alien town. And these dispossessed loyalists were less than delighted to be cheek by jowl with that other class of people, dressed who knows how, scarcely more than beggars or low tavern musicians, their babies sucking at the tit; a class of people who might teach their own slaves insolent manners. Worse, the blacks had the gall to sing while they were lost in sorrow. Sing! What was there to sing about?
Everything. Rebirth. British freedom. God’s loving kindness; His all-encompassing mercy; the honest goodness of the king; the word of Sir Guy Carleton; the promises of food for a year; a piece of land for the rest of their lives. Born again. Born again, dear Lord. The wide sea-water lay before them, out beyond the harbour, trembling in the July haze, the tips of the wavelets transformed into melting bars of light. There had been so many boats, so many passages in the night, so many experiences on the water over which they were about to be conveyed to a new life. There were the pettiaugers they had taken while they lay low in the reeds of Carolina; the tenders that had taken them out to the big ships; the ins and outs of the islands and marshes of the Chesapeake; their folk dying on the sands from fever; the whaleboats that had hunted them and the whaleboats in which they themselves had hunted; the mud they had walked, hard or enveloping; the rivers they had swum across. And wherever they found themselves they had been looking always for Jordan, for Milk and Honey.
The gangway was thrown down. On to L’Abondance (master, Lieutenant Philips) in the last three days of July 1783 came every age and condition of African-American: Judith Wallis, two weeks old, at her mother Margaret’s breast; Elizabeth Thomson, carrying Betty, four months old; the septuagenarian Jane Thompson from Norfolk, Virginia, described in the Book of Negroes, understandably, as “worn out,” who came with her eleven-year-old grandchild.27 The Americans had said that the British would take only stout (meaning healthy) adult negroes, leaving the sickly and decrepit behind. But there were more than 20 “worn out” blacks among the 335 on L’Abondance, including the sixty-seven-year-old John Sharp and the prematurely worn out forty-year-old Juno Thomas from Savannah. Henry Walker, on the other hand, although sixty, was optimistically classified as a “stout man of his age.”
There were nearly as many females as males among the departing blacks: L’Abondance took on board 137 women and 29 girls, as well as 35 infants. This was remarkable since, before the war, 80 percent of all runaways had been men. But these women—Hannah Whitten, who had left William Smith in Virginia in 1778 with three children (now she had five); plain Margaret, who had got up and gone when she was sixty and who now (with his parents presumably dead) had charge of her fifteen-year-old grandson, Thomas; Nancy Moody, who had left Henry Moody of Williamsburg when she was only nine; Lydia Newton, who had been eight when she had walked off; Charlotte Hammond, “small wench,” who had left John Hammond on the Ashley River in South Carolina when she was fifteen in 1776; or her near neighbour, Venus Lagree, who had gone with her one-year-old son from Mallaby Rivers; or Judy Weedon, fourteen, “fine girl,” who seemed all alone but “free as per bill of sale”—all these women and girls were, in their several ways, heroic survivors of the worst the war could throw at them: disease, starvation, terror and siege.
Some women, such as Cathern Van Sayl from Monmouth, New Jersey, who had come to the ship with her husband, Cornelius, and their two daughters, travelled as a family. Some, such as Violet and Boston King (he in his early twenties, she in her middle thirties) came together but childless. Many had come from different places, finding each other along the way in some army camp or in the black quarter of Savannah or Charles Town or in Negro Town in New York itself. Daniel Moore had left Wilmington, North Carolina, and met Tina from Portsmouth, Virginia, who in 1777 had given birth to their daughter Elizabeth, “a fine child…and born within the British lines.” Not all were so lucky with the health of their babies. Duskey York, from Charles Town, who had escaped in the British advance into the South in 1779, and Betsey, from the Eastern Shore of Virginia, had with them Sally, now eighteen months, and classified, ominously as “sickly.” Many more, for instance, Jane Milligan and her nine-month-old Maria, or Abby Brown and her three-year-old Dinah, another sickly child, were single mothers, just doing what they needed to keep their children safe and sound.
Though the odds were long, the mothers and fathers had something precious to take with them, something that no slave children had had before them: a piece of paper certifying that they were “Born [or Born Free] Behind British Lines”; sometimes it was a mere abbreviation, “BB”—and yet it was a birthright of liberty. Sometimes the BB babies were New Yorkers—Keziah Ford, two; Simon Roberts, six months; Mary Snowball, three months; and Violet Collett, just three weeks old. Others had got their birthright on the campaign trail—Grace Thomson, two; Betsey Lawrence, three; and four of Hannah Whitten’s five children (eight, seven, six, five and one!). But all of them were, in some fashion, the godchildren of King George and Sir Guy: a generation whose life, at least in the summer of 1783, promised something other than treatment as merchandise.
To L’Abondance, to the ark on the dock, they came from all over slave America, from Charleston and Norfolk, Savanna
h and Paramus, Hackensack and Princeton—even from relatively enlightened Boston and Philadelphia; from Swansea, Massachusetts, from Poughkeepsie, New York, and Jamaica, Long Island; from Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and Portsmouth, Virginia. There were those destined to be makers and leaders of a new world for blacks, such as Thomas Peters, the sergeant in the British Pioneers, now with his wife, Salley, and their daughter, Clara, and his fellow sergeant, Murphy Steele, who had had the headless vision in Virginia; Stephen Blucke, the commander of the Black Brigade after Colonel Tye’s death, with his wife, Margaret, and his rather grand airs; and the blind, crippled preacher Moses Wilkinson, doubtless carried on board praising, as was his wont, the wonders of the Lord’s doing.
But where were they going? Somewhere called Port Roseway, a harbour in Nova Scotia; a new Scotland, so perhaps carpeted in heather and running with deer? They would have land; they would have liberty; they would have dignity; they would have churches; they would have each other. It was, probably, cold. But they had been warm and had been slaves. And whatever it might be, this second Scotland, it could not possibly be worse than where they had come from.
Could it?
VI
IT WAS NOT as easy as you might think, throwing slaves overboard—not live ones, anyway. Of course, it was done all the time with dead negroes. The wastage rate on most passages from Africa to the Caribbean and America was 15 percent. For all the searching inspections at the forts and factories on the slave coast, all the yanking of jaws and pinching of gams, the surgeons still could not say, not for sure, who was truly a “stout negro.” What with the bloody flux and the white flux, the retchings and the fever sweats, the blacks became dehydrated and, before you knew it, were too weak to eat their horsebean pulp or to sip from the pannekin at the tub. Their eyes would turn yellow and glassy and they would tremble in a feverish shiver. Or else (and this was a worse sign) they would lie quite still in a waking swoon, their lips caked and white. White was the African colour of death. After a few days they either got well or were gone.