Like the Knowles Riot of 1747, Tacky’s Revolt revived and contributed to a tradition of revolutionary thought that stretched back to Gerrard Winstanley and the English Revolution. In 1760, after the rebellion had broken out but before it was suppressed, a writer known to us only as J. Philmore wrote a pamphlet entitled Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade. Considering himself more “a citizen in the world” than a citizen of England, Philmore insisted that “all of the human race, are, by nature, upon an equality” and that one person simply could not be the property of another. He denied the worldly superiority of Christianity and thought the slave trade to be organized murder. Philmore had probably learned of Tacky’s Revolt by way of merchant seamen, for he made it his business to frequent the docks. Much of the great deal he knew of the slave trade came “from the mouths of some sailors.”24
Philmore supported the efforts of Tacky and his fellow rebels “to deliver themselves out of the miserable slavery they are in.” His principal conclusion was clear, straightforward, and revolutionary:
so all the black men now in our plantations, who are by unjust force deprived of their liberty, and held in slavery, as they have none upon earth to appeal to, may lawfully repel that force with force, and to recover their liberty, destroy their oppressors: and not only so, but it is the duty of others, white as well as black, to assist those miserable creatures, if they can, in their attempts to deliver themselves out of slavery, and to rescue them out of the hands of their cruel tyrants.
Philmore thus supported these freeborn people engaged in revolutionary self-defense, calling for immediate emancipation, by force if necessary, and asking all good people to do the same. Even though Philmore’s ideas must have caused pacifist Quakers to shudder (Anthony Benezet drew on Philmore but carefully deleted his argument about repelling force with force), they nonetheless had broad influence. He wrote that “no legislature on earth, which is the supreme power in every civil society, can alter the nature of things, or make that to be lawful, which is contrary to the law of God, the supreme legislator and governour of the world.” His “higher law” doctrine would over the next century become central to the transatlantic struggle against slavery. His inclusive, egalitarian conception of “the human race” had been inspired by the mass actions of rebellious slaves.25
Tacky’s Revolt may have helped to generate another breakthrough in abolitionist thought, in the same seaport where Sam Adams had earlier learned to oppose impressment. When James Otis Jr. made his 1761 oration against the writs of assistance that allowed British authorities to attack the trade carried on between New England and the French West Indies, he went beyond his formal subject to “assert the rights of the Negroes.” Otis delivered his electrifying speech immediately after Tacky’s Revolt, which had been covered in a series of articles in Boston newspapers. John Adams later recalled that Otis was, that day, “a flame of fire,” a prophet with the combined powers of Isaiah and Ezekiel. He gave a “dissertation on the rights of man in a state of nature,” an antinomian account of man as “an independent sovereign, subject to no law, but the law written on his heart” or lodged in his conscience. No Quaker in Philadelphia ever “asserted the rights of negroes in stronger terms.” Otis called for immediate emancipation and advocated the use of force to accomplish it, causing the cautious Adams to tremble. When Otis published The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), he claimed that all men, “white or black,” were “by the law of nature freeborn,” thereby broadening and de-racializing the idiom of the “free-born Englishman.”26 Whether Otis had read Philmore’s pamphlet or had simply drawn similar conclusions from Tacky’s Revolt, abolitionist thought would never be the same. Otis, whose echoes of the 1640s caused some to compare him to Masaniello, “was the first who broke down the Barriers of Government to let in the Hydra of Rebellion.”27
Tacky’s Revolt initiated a new phase of slave resistance. Major plots and revolts erupted in Bermuda and Nevis (1761), Suriname (1762, 1763, 1768–1772), Jamaica (1776), British Honduras (1765, 1768, 1773), Grenada (1765), Montserrat (1768), St. Vincent (1769–1773), Tobago (1770, 1771, 1774), St. Croix and St. Thomas (1770 and after), and St. Kitts (1778). Veterans of Tacky’s Revolt took part in a rising in British Honduras (where five hundred rebels had been banished), as well as in three other revolts in Jamaica in 1765 and 1766.28
On the North American continent the reverberations of rebellion intensified after 1765 as slaves seized the new opportunities offered by splits between imperial and colonial ruling classes. Running away increased at a rate that alarmed slaveholders everywhere, and by the mid-1770s, a rash of slave plots and revolts sent white fears soaring. Slaves organized uprisings in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1767; Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1772; and St. Andrews Parish, South Carolina, and Boston (a joint African-Irish effort) in 1774. These were followed in 1775 by revolts in Ulster County, New York; Dorchester County, Maryland; Norfolk, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; and the Tar River region of North Carolina. In the last of these, a slave named Merrick plotted with a white seafarer to make arms available and the intended revolt possible.29
Slave resistance was closely related to the development of Afro-Christianity. In St. Bartholomew parish, South Carolina, an insurrectionary plot terrified the white population in the spring of 1776. Its leaders were black preachers, including two female prophets. A minister named George claimed that England’s “Young King . . . was about to alter the world, & set the Negroes Free.” Further south, in Savannah, Georgia, Preacher David was almost hanged after he expounded upon Exodus: “God would send Deliverance to the Negroes, from the Power of their Masters, as he freed the Children of Israel from Egyptian Bondage.” Meanwhile, a new generation of evangelical leaders emerged in the 1760s and 1770s, including George Liele and David George (Baptists), as well as Moses Wilkinson and Boston King (Methodists). Liele, a slave from Virginia who founded the first Baptist church in Georgia, was evacuated by the British to Kingston, Jamaica, where he established another church.30
Revolutionary ideas circulated rapidly in the port cities. Runaway slaves and free people of color flocked to the ports in search of sanctuary and a money wage and took work as laborers and seamen. Slaves also toiled in the maritime sector, some with ship masters as owners, others hired out by the voyage. By the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves dominated Charleston’s maritime and riverine traffic, in which some 20 percent of the city’s adult male slaves labored. The independence of Charleston’s “boat negroes” had long worried the city’s rulers, especially when they took up subversive activities, as alleged against Thomas Jeremiah, a river pilot, in 1775. Jeremiah was arrested for stockpiling guns as he waited for the imperial war that would “help the poor Negroes.” “Two or three White people,” probably sailors, were also arrested, then released for lack of evidence, and finally driven from the province. Black pilots were “a rebellious lot, particularly resistant to white control.”31
The political effects of slave resistance were contradictory, fueling fear and repression (police and patrols) on one side and new opposition to slavery on the other. This was especially true for the years leading up to the American Revolution, which marked a new stage in the development of an abolitionist movement. Benezet, America’s leading Quaker abolitionist, chronicled slave uprisings around the world and tirelessly disseminated the news of them through correspondence, pamphlets, and books. His work, in tandem with resistance from below, led to new attacks on the slave trade in Massachusetts in 1767 and in Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and the Continental Congress by 1774. The first formal antislavery organization in America was established in Philadelphia in 1775.32
Two of the revolution’s most popular pamphleteers were moved by the militancy of slaves in the 1770s to attack slavery as they made larger arguments for human freedom. John Allen, a Baptist minister who had witnessed the riots, trials, hangings, and diaspora of London’s Spitalfields silk weavers through the 1760s, delivered (and then p
ublished) An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty after the burning of the revenue cutter Gaspee by sailors in 1773. In the fourth edition of his pamphlet, which was read to “large Circles of the Common People,” Allen denounced slavery, not least for the frequent and recent revolts of slaves, which “so often occasion streams of blood to be shed.” Thomas Paine, another man fair of pen and smitten with liberty, wrote against slavery immediately upon his arrival in America in 1774. He repeated in diluted form Philmore’s argument for self-liberation: “as the true owner has a right to reclaim his goods that were stolen, and sold; so the slave, who is proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold.” Paine signaled his awareness of the upswing in African American resistance by referring to slaves as “dangerous, as they are now.” The struggles of African American slaves between 1765 and 1776 increased the commotion and sense of crisis in every British colony in the years leading up to the revolution. Within the Baptist Allen and the half-Quaker Paine, they awakened an antinomian abolitionism from a previous revolutionary age.33
Mobs
The trajectories of rebellion among sailors and slaves intersected in seaport mobs, the rowdy gatherings of thousands of men and women that created the revolutionary crisis in the North American colonies. Sailors and slaves fraternized in grogshops, dancing cellars, and “disorderly houses,” in Philadelphia’s Hell Town and elsewhere, despite efforts by authorities to criminalize and prevent such meetings.34 They had gathered together in Boston’s north-side and south-side mobs since the 1740s. Indeed, perhaps the single most common description of mobs in revolutionary America was “a Rabble of boys, sailors, and negroes.” Moreover, on almost every occasion when a crowd went beyond the planned objectives of the moderate leaders of the patriot movement, sailors and often slaves led the way. Motley mobs were central to protests against the Stamp Act (1765), the Quartering Acts (1765, 1774), the Townshend Revenue Act (1767), the increased power of the British customs service (1764–1774), the Tea Act (1773), and the Intolerable Acts (1774), and therefore to the revolutionary rupture itself.35
Multiracial mobs helped to win numerous victories for the revolutionary movement. In 1765, “Sailors, boys, and Negroes to the number of above Five Hundred” rioted against impressment in Newport, Rhode Island, and in 1767 a mob of “Whites & Blacks all arm’d” attacked Captain Jeremiah Morgan in a press riot in Norfolk. A mob of sailors, “sturdy boys & negroes” rose in the Liberty riot in Boston in 1768. Jesse Lemisch has noted that after 1763, “armed mobs of whites and Negroes repeatedly manhandled captains, officers, and crews, threatened their lives, and held them hostage for the men they pressed.” Authorities like Cadwallader Colden of New York knew that royal fortifications had to be “sufficient to secure against the Negroes or a mob.”36
Why did African Americans fight the press gang? Some probably considered impressment a death sentence and sought to avoid the pestilence and punishment that ravaged the men of the Royal Navy. Others joined anti-impressment mobs to preserve bonds of family or some degree of freedom they had won for themselves. Many may have been drawn to the fight by the language and principles of the struggle against impressment, for on every dock, in every port, everywhere around the Atlantic, sailors denounced impressment as slavery plain and simple. Michael Corbett and several of his brother tars fought against being forced on board a man-of-war in the port of Boston in 1769, claiming that “they preferred death to such a life as they deemed slavery.” John Allen reiterated what countless sailors had expressed in action and what Sam Adams had written years before: the people “have a right, by the law of God, of nature, and nations, to reluct at, and even to resist any military or marine force.” Allen then compared one form of enslavement to another. The press gang, he insisted, “ought ever to be held in the most hateful contempt, the same as you would a banditti of slave-makers on the coast of Africa.” Salt was the seasoning of the antislavery movement.37
The motley crew led a broad array of people into resistance against the Stamp Act, which taxed the colonists by requiring stamps for the sale and use of various commodities. Since the act affected all classes of people, all were involved in the protests, though sailors were singled out by many observers for their leadership and spirit. The refusal to use stamped paper (and to pay the tax) slowed commerce, which meant that idle sailors, turned ashore without wages, became a volatile force in every port. Royal officials everywhere would have agreed with the customs agent in New York who saw the power of “the Mob . . . daily increasing and gathering Strength, from the arrival of seamen, and none going out, and who are the people that are most dangerous on these occasions, as their whole dependence for subsistence is upon trade.” Peter Oliver observed that after the Stamp Act riots, “the Hydra was roused. Every factious Mouth vomited out curses against Great Britain, & the Press rung its changes against Slavery.”38
Boston’s mob took angry action against the property of stamp distributor Andrew Oliver on August 14, 1765, then twelve days later turned an even fiercer wrath against the house and refined belongings of Thomas Hutchinson, who cried out at the mob, “You are so many Masaniellos!” Others who detested the crowd later singled out its leader, Ebenezer MacIntosh, as the incarnation of the shoeless fisherman of Naples. Sailors soon carried the news and experience of the tumults in Boston to Newport, where loyalists Thomas Moffat and Martin Howard Jr. suffered the same fate as Hutchinson on August 28. In Newport, where the mercantile economy depended upon the labor of sailors and dockworkers, the resistance to the Stamp Act was led by John Webber, probably a sailor and according to one report “a deserted convict.” A band of sailors known as the “Sons of Neptune” then led three thousand rioters in an attack on New York’s Fort George, the fortress of royal authority. They followed the example of the insurrection of 1741 when they tried to burn it to the ground. In Wilmington, North Carolina, a “furious Mobb of Sailors &c.” forced the stamp distributor to resign. Sailors also led mass actions against the Stamp Act in Antigua, St. Kitts, and Nevis, where they “behaved like young Lions.” Mob action continued in resistance to the Townshend Revenue Act and the renewed power of the British customs service in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Seamen drew on maritime custom to add a weapon to the arsenal of justice, the tarring and feathering used to intimidate British officials. The clunk of the brush in the tar bucket echoed behind Thomas Gage’s observation in 1769 that “the Officers of the Crown grow more timid, and more fearfull of doing their Duty every Day.”39
The burning of the customs schooner Gaspee in Newport in 1772 proved to be another decisive moment for the revolutionary movement. “Lawless seamen” had long taken direct action against customs men, in Newport and elsewhere. After the Gaspee ran aground, sixty to seventy men swarmed out of three longboats to board the ship, capture the despised Lieutenant William Dudingston, take him and his crew ashore, and set the vessel afire. These men were charged with “high treason, viz.: levying war against the King,” which the sailors’ burning of the king’s vessels had long signified. Merchants, farmers, and artisans may have been involved in the Gaspee affair, but sailors were clearly the leaders, as concluded by Daniel Horsmanden, who had presided over the trials of the rebels in New York in 1741 and now headed the King’s commission to investigate the Gaspee incident. The act, he wrote, was “committed by a number of bold, daring, rash enterprising sailors.” Horsmanden did not know if someone else had organized them or if these men of the sea had simply “banded themselves together.”40
Seamen also led both the Golden Hill and Nassau Street riots of New York City and the King Street Riot, remembered as the Boston Massacre. In both ports sailors and other maritime workers resented the British soldiers who labored for less than customary wages along the waterfront; in New York they also resented the soldiers’ attacks on their fifty-eight-foot liberty pole (a ship’s mast). Rioting and street fighting ensued. Thomas Hutchinson and John Adams believed that the events in New York and Boston were related, perhaps by common p
articipants. Adams, who defended Captain Thomas Preston and his soldiers in trial, called the mob that assembled on King Street on “the Fatal Fifth of March” nothing but “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues, and out landish Jack Tarrs.” Their leader was Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave of African American and Native American descent whose home was the small free black community of Providence in the Bahama Islands. Seamen also took part in the direct actions of the several Tea Parties, after which Thomas Lamb in New York exclaimed, “We are in a perfect Jubilee!”41
By the summer of 1775 seamen and slaves had helped to generate an enthusiasm described by Peter Timothy: “In regard to War & Peace, I can only tell you that the Plebeians are still for War—but the noblesse [are] perfectly pacific.” Ten years of insurrectionary direct action had brought the colonies to the brink of revolution. As early as the Stamp Act protests of 1765 General Thomas Gage had recognized the menace of mob action: “This Insurrection is composed of great numbers of Sailors headed by Captains of Privateers” and those from the surrounding area, the whole amounting to “some thousands.” Late in 1776 Lord Barrington of the British army claimed that colonial governments in North America “were overturned by insurrections last summer, because there was not a sufficient force to defend them.” Sailors, laborers, slaves, and other poor workingmen provided much of the spark, volatility, momentum, and sustained militancy for the attack on British policy after 1765. During the revolutionary war, they took part in mobs that harassed Tories and blunted their political effectiveness.42
Outlaws of the Atlantic Page 12