by Simon Schama
BL: British Library, London
CO: Colonial Office files
FO: Foreign Office files
JCAF: John Clarkson, “Mission to Africa”
JCAM: John Clarkson, “Mission to America”
GRO: Gloucestershire Record Office
NMM: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
NYHS: New-York Historical Society
NYPL: New York Public Library
PANB: Public Archive of New Brunswick
PANS: Public Archive of Nova Scotia
PRO: Public Record Office, London
SRO: Shropshire Record Office
BRITISH FREEDOM’S PROMISE
1 British Freedom is among the named inhabitants of Preston petitioning Lieutenant John Clarkson on 26th December 1791, as he was organizing a fleet to take the black loyalists to Sierra Leone, not to be split up from their neighbours but to be kept together in the new colony. See the MSS copy of Clarkson’s journal, vol. I, “Mission to America” (JCAM) in the NYHS Library.
2 For British Freedom’s land allotment see PANS, vol. 370, 1784. See also James W. St G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783–1870 (New York, 1976), p. 29.
3 For the look of Preston see Clarkson’s account in his journal entry for 11th October 1791: “Their situation appeared extremely bad from the poorness of the soil and from their having nothing to subsist upon but the produce of it.”
4 Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and London, 1999), p. 89
5 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1961), p. 173; Bell to Sir Guy Carleton, 7th June 1783, Carleton Papers, NYPL.
6 David Walker (ed. Herbert Aptheker), “One Continual Cry,” David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World 1829–1830 (New York, 1965), p. 106.
7 Frederick Douglass, 4th July 1852, in Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, revised edition (Amherst, Mass., 1989), p. 277.
8 Quarles, op. cit., pp. 51–52.
9 The classic account of slavery and the Revolution remains David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca, New York, 1973). More recently see the transforming work of Ira Berlin, in particular Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), especially chapter 3, pp. 129–57.
10 Ibid., p. 115; Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (trans.), The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1942–58), III, p. 106
11 Quoted in Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1782 (New York, 2001), p. 55. See also W.W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig (eds), The Papers of George Washington, 39 vols. (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1983–), Series 2, pp. 64, 66.
12 Walker, op. cit., pp. 3, 12.
13 See Gary Nash introduction to the new edition of Quarles, op. cit.; Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, New Jersey, 1991), p. 211.
14 The identity of Ralph Henry’s master (as well as Henry Washington’s), and the year of their escape are recorded in the Book of Negroes, drawn up in New York in 1783 (copy in the NYPL), edited by Graham Russell Hodges as The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution (New York and London, 1996), p. 196 (hereafter BLD). The names and dates of the escaped slaves of Harrison, Middleton, etc., are likewise to be found in it.
15 Ibid., p. 11. Abraham Marrian embarked on the ship Lady’s Adventure, bound for St John, New Brunswick, in the spring of 1783.
16 A copy of the Muster Book is preserved in the Shelburne County Genealogical Society, Nova Scotia, where Henry Washington is also listed as owning a town lot and forty acres of land at Birchtown.
17 Gary Nash introduction to new edition of Quarles, op. cit., p. xix.
18 See Gary Nash’s fine and indignant sketch, “Thomas Peters: Millwright, Soldier and Deliverer” in David Sweet and Gary B. Nash (eds.), Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), pp. 69–85.
19 PRO AO 12/99 86.
20 Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (Oxford, 1964), p. 10.
21 James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonist Asserted and Proved (Boston, New England, nd), pp. 43–44; see also T. K. Hunter, Publishing Freedom, Winning Arguments: Somerset, Natural Rights and Massachusetts Freedom Cases, 1772–1836, Ph.D. dissertation (Columbia University, 2003). I am grateful to Dr Hunter for allowing me to quote from her dissertation.
22 Virginia Gazette, 30th September 1773; ibid., 30th June 1774; Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth Century Virginia (New York, 1972) p. 131.
23 Hunter, op. cit., chapter 2, fn 6.
24 It is apparent from Anthony Benezet’s correspondence with Granville Sharp in 1772 and 1773 that Benezet assumed Franklin to be a wholehearted and active enemy of the slave trade, if not an outright abolitionist, and with good reason, given Franklin’s long record of vehement indignation against both the illegality and the immorality of the traffic. But Franklin would prove a lot less consistent than his fellow Philadelphian Benjamin Rush in this opposition, and far more cautious when it came to proposing immediate and far-reaching reform. See Sharp Papers, NYHS.
25 Benjamin Franklin, “A Conversation on Slavery” in J. A. Leo Lemay (ed.), Writings (The Library of America, 1987), pp. 646–53.
26 Ibid.; Hunter, op. cit., chapter 2, p. 25.
27 Patrick Henry’s letter was copied and sent by Anthony Benezet to Granville Sharp in London. It is preserved in the Sharp manuscript collection at the NYHS.
28 Charles Francis Adams, Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams (New York, 1876), pp. 41–42; Wilson, op. cit., Loyal Blacks, p. 5.
29 All these petitions and articles are reproduced in Kaplan and Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 11–13.
30 Gerald W. Mullin, op. cit., p. 131; Virginia Gazette, 30th September 1773.
31 Ibid.; Virginia Gazette, 30th June 1774.32 William Henry Drayton, “Some Fugitive Thoughts on a letter signed Freeman Addressed to the Deputies assembled in the High Court of Congress in Philadelphia. By a Black Settler” (Philadelphia, 1774), cited in Hodges, op. cit., Root and Branch, p. 136.
CHAPTER I
1 Surprisingly, there is no modern biography of Granville Sharp. But Prince Hoare, The Memoirs of Granville Sharp Esq. Composed from his own Manuscripts, 2 vols. (London, 1828), is an exceptionally full account of both his beliefs and his engagement through the Strong and Somerset cases in the abolitionist cause. It can be supplemented by E.C.P. Lascelles, Granville Sharp and the Freedom of Slaves in England (Oxford, 1928), and there is an acutely perceptive characterization in David Brion Davis’s magisterial The Problem of Slavery in the Age of the American Revolution (Ithaca, New York, 1975) pp. 386–402. The detailed accounts of the Strong, Hylas, Lewis and Somerset cases are drawn from Sharp’s own MSS, letterbook and journal, including his transcripts of some of the proceedings at the King’s Bench in Sharp Papers, NYHS.
2 Hoare, op.cit., I, pp. 119 ff; II, Appendix VI, p. xix; for more on the concerts and the paintings of them by Johan Zoffany, see John Kerslake, “A Note on Zoffany’s ‘Sharp Family,’ “Burlington Magazine, 20, no. 908 (November 1978), pp. 752–54; see also the catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery exhibition “John Zoffany” (London, 1976), nos. 87–88.
3 The precise numbers of blacks in London or, indeed, Britain remains disputed. At the time of the Somerset case, it was said that there were as many as fourteen or fifteen thousand blacks in Britain, but since this figure was invoked by those warning that should a favourable judgement to Somerset be given, there would be a mass exodus of blacks from service, thrown on the city poor rates, it remains suspicious. Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain 1780–1830 (London and Portland, Oregon,
1996), especially pp. 18–37, gives a much more conservative estimate based on baptizmal records. But since by no means all London blacks were baptized, this may err somewhat at the other end.
4 Sharp Papers, NYHS.
5 Ibid.
6 Hoare, op. cit., I, pp. 49–50; p. 61; see also Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1985), p. 97; David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks (Manchester, 1987).
7 Sharp Papers, NYHS.
8 Ibid.; Hoare, op. cit., I, pp. 49–50.
CHAPTER II
1 For the Sharps’ musical itineraries see Prince Hoare, The Memoirs of Granville Sharp Esq. Composed from his own Manuscripts, 2 vols. (London, 1828), I, pp. 215–17; E.C.P. Lascelles, Granville Sharp and the Freedom of Slaves in England (Oxford, 1928), pp. 119–26; also Sharp Papers, NYHS. A second boat, the Union, built in 1775, was grander, seventy feet long and moored off Fulham Steps. Three more boats were named after the Sharp women: the Jemma, the Mary and the Catherine (a canoe!).
2 John Kerslake, “A Note on Zoffany’s ‘Sharp Family,’ “Burlington Magazine, 20, no. 908 (November 1978), pp. 752–54; see also the catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery exhibition “John Zoffany” (London, 1976), nos. 87–88.
3 Sharp Papers, NYHS, MSS notebook on the case of Thomas Lewis.
4 Sharp Papers, NYHS, ibid.
5 Lascelles, op. cit., p. 16, n. 1.
6 Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London, 1808; published in the USA, 1836, as The Cabinet of Freedom), pp. 68–79.
7 Ibid., pp. 65–72.
8 Sharp Papers, NYHS, MSS notebook on the case of Thomas Lewis.
9 For the Somerset case, see Thomas Jones Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 20, 1771–72, “The Case of James Sommerset, a Negro…,” vol. 12, George III, 1771–72; and T. K. Hunter, Publishing Freedom, Winning Arguments: Somerset, Natural Rights and Massachusetts Freedom Cases, 1772–1836, Ph.D. dissertation (Columbia University, 2003), especially chapters 1 and 5. See also Edward Fiddes, “Lord Mansfield and the Somerset Case,” Law Quarterly Review, 50 (1934), pp. 509–10; Jerome Nadelhaft, “The Somerset Case and Slavery: Myth, Reality and Repercussions,” Journal of Negro History, LI (1966), pp. 193–208; and the important James Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield and Slavery,” Journal of British Studies, 27 (January 1988), pp. 45–68; idem, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1992).
10 Lascelles, op. cit., p. 30.
11 Hunter, op. cit., chapter 1, p. 32.
12 Hoare, op. cit., p. 119.
13 Ibid., p. 114.
14 Folarin Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London, 1974).
15 I am grateful to Stella Tillyard for this description of the interior of Westminster Hall.
16 Exactly what Mansfield said in this summation has long been in dispute. The version that has entered historical literature gives Mansfield the credit for arguing that if the rights of a slaveowner over his slave were to be recognized, a positive sanctioning law would have to have been expressly introduced by Parliament, since there was nothing in custom or immemorial usage that recognized property in humans. This is the version that appeared in Capel Loft’s Reports, published in 1776. But as Jerome Nadelhaft first pointed out in op. cit., pp. 193–208, an alternative report in The Gentleman’s Magazine, published closer to the judgement in 1772 (and supported by Mansfield himself in 1785) gives a far more restricted version of the statement, in which the judge confined himself to the power of a master to force a slave out of the country. The version given above is from Sharp’s own amanuensis-transcribed notes of the trial in the Sharp Papers, and it seems to confirm the more conservative view of Mansfield’s judgement. That view also disposes of what would otherwise have been an uncharacteristically contradictory about-face within the same speech from his initial, obstinate endorsement of Yorke-Talbot to something like the very opposite view.
17 Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, “Black Loyalists in London after the American Revolution,” in John W. Pulis (ed.), Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World (New York and London, 1999), p. 130; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 24th June 1772.
18 Sharp Papers, NYHS; Hoare, op. cit., I, p. 137.
19 Gregory D. Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution (Columbia, South Carolina, 2000), pp. 47, 62–63; see also Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 20th January 1775, in The Papers of Henry Laurens (eds. Philip H. Hamer, David R. Chesnutt et al.), 15 vols. (Columbia, South Carolina, 1968–), vol. 10, p. 34.
20 Nadelhaft, op. cit., p. 195.
21 Quoted in James Oldham, op. cit., pp. 65–66; see also Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1985), p. 132.
CHAPTER III
1 Henry Laurens, the President of the Provincial Congress and of the Council of Safety, wrote to his son John on 20th August 1775 that “we have had the wettest Season from July to this day that I remember—it has rained every day.” The Papers of Henry Laurens (eds. Philip H. Hamer, David R. Chesnutt et al.), 15 vols. (Columbia, South Carolina, 1968–; Model Editions Partnership, 1999), p. 326.
2 PRO CO 5/396.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 18th and 23rd June 1775, Hamer et al., op. cit., vol. 10, pp. 184–85, p. 320 n.4, p. 323.
6 Ibid., Charles Matthews Coslett to Lord William Campbell, 19th August 1775.
7 Campbell to Laurens, 17th August 1775, Hamer et al., op. cit., p. 328.
8 PRO CO 5/396.
9 Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (Amherst, Mass., 1989), p. 25.
10 Sylvia R. Frey, “Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution,” Journal of Southern History, 49, no. 3 (August 1983), p. 376; William T. Hutchinson, William M. Rachal et al. (eds.), The Papers of James Madison, 13 vols. (Chicago, 1962–), I, pp. 129–30.
11 Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, New Jersey, 1991), p. 56. Much of what follows is indebted to the account given by Frey, as well as the pioneering narrative surveyed in Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1961).
12 Ibid., p. 55. See also Virginia Gazette, 4th May 1775.
13 Frey, op. cit., Water, p. 56.
14 Edward Rutledge to Ralph Izard, 8th December 1775, Correspondence of Mr Ralph Izard (New York, 1844), vol. I, p. 165; Benjamin Quarles, “Lord Dunmore as Liberator,” William and Mary Quarterly History Magazine, 15 (1958), p. 495, n. 3.
15 Gary Nash, “Thomas Peters: Millwright, Soldier and Deliverer” in David Sweet and Gary B. Nash (eds.), Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981, pp. 72–73.
16 Ibid., p. 59.
17 Ibid., p. 62.
18 Kaplan and Kaplan, op. cit., p. 25.
19 Washington to Richard Henry Lee, 26th December 1775, in R.H. Lee, Memoir of the Life of Richard Henry Lee (Philadelphia, 1825) II, p. 9; Quarles, op. cit., Negro, p. 20.
20 Graham Russell Hodges (ed.), The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution (New York and London, 1996), p. 212 (hereafter BLD). Winslow’s entry appears in the list of blacks embarking on HMS L’Abondance on one of the last loyalist sailings out of New York on 30th November 1783.
21 Frey, op. cit., “Between Slavery and Freedom,” p. 378.
22 “Diary of Colonel Landon Carter,” William and Mary Quarterly History Magazine, 20 (1912), pp. 178–79; Quarles, op. cit., Negro, p. 27.