Thomas Paine knew it, too. He also denounced impressment, but he was more concerned in Common Sense to reassure American merchants about the maritime labor supply after the revolution: “In point of manning a fleet, people in general run into great errors; it is not necessary that one fourth part should be sailors. . . . A few able and social sailors will soon instruct a sufficient number of active landmen in the common work of a ship.” This had been his own experience aboard the Terrible, a privateer, during the Seven Years’ War, which led him to argue that sailors, shipbuilders, and the maritime sector as a whole constituted a viable economic basis for a new American nation. (He failed to mention that the crew of the vessel had been motley and mutinous.) The only question remaining was how to obtain independence: should it be done from above, by the legal voice of Congress, or should it be done from below, by the mob? Here Paine shared the attitudes of others of his station: he feared the motley mob (though he would think differently in the 1790s). The multitude, he explained, was reasonable in 1776, but “virtue” was not perpetual. Safeguards were necessary lest “some Massanello may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.” His greatest fear lay in a concurrence of the struggles of urban workers, African slaves, and Native Americans.51
The motley crew had helped to make the revolution, but the vanguard struck back in the 1770s and 1780s, against mobs, slaves, and sailors, in what must be considered an American Thermidor. The effort to reform the mob by removing its more militant elements began in 1766 and continued, not always successfully, through the revolution and beyond. Patriot landowners, merchants, and artisans increasingly condemned revolutionary crowds, seeking to move politics from “out of doors” into legislative chambers, in which the propertyless would have no vote and no voice. Paine, for his part, would turn against the crowd after Philadelphia’s Fort Wilson Riot of 1779. When Samuel Adams helped to draw up Massachusett’s Riot Act of 1786, designed to be used to disperse and control the insurgents of Shays’ Rebellion, he ceased to believe that the mob “embodied the fundamental rights of man against which government itself could be judged,” and detached himself from the creative democratic force that years before had given him the best idea of his life.52
The moderate patriots had, since the beginning of the movement, in 1765, sought to limit the struggle for liberty by keeping slaves out of the revolutionary coalition. The place of slaves in the movement remained ambiguous until 1775, when Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, attacked the patriot tobacco planters by offering freedom to servants and slaves willing to join His Majesty’s army to reestablish order in the colony. The news of the offered liberation ran like wildfire through slave communities, and thousands deserted the plantations, inaugurating a new, mobile slave revolt of huge proportions. Some of these slaves would be organized as Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment; those who were not permitted to bear arms would seek the protection of the British army. American leaders, infuriated by the move, tried to preserve slavery, announcing in 1775 that recruiters should take no deserter, “stroller, negro, or vagabond,” and reaffirming over the next year that neither free blacks nor slaves would be eligible for military service. Scarcity of labor would force reconsideration of this edict, however, especially later in the war. While five thousand African Americans fought for liberty, the American political and military leadership battled the British and some of its own soldiers to protect the institution of slavery.53
The sailor would be encouraged to serve in the Continental Navy, but he was not, according to James Madison, a good citizen for a republic. What little virtue he may have had was deadened by his life as a dumb drudge at sea: “Though traversing and circumnavigating the globe, he sees nothing but the same vague objects of nature, the same monotonous occurrences in ports and docks; and at home in his vessel, what new ideas can shoot from the unvaried use of the ropes and the rudder, or from the society of comrades as ignorant as himself.” Madison’s own ignorance, arrogance, or denial caused him to invert the truth, but he was right about something else: the greater the number of sailors in a republic, as he suggested, the less secure its government. Madison was joined in these attitudes by many, including the “Connecticut Wits” (David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins) who in 1787 wrote a poem entitled “The Anarchiad,” in response to Shays’ Rebellion and in memory of the cycle of revolt in the 1760s and 1770s. The poets expressed their hatred for mobs and their ideas. They sneered at “democratic dreams,” “the rights of man,” and the reduction of all “to just one level.” One of their darkest nightmares was what they called a “young DEMOCRACY from hell.” They had not forgotten the role of sailors in the revolution: in their imagined state of anarchy, the “mighty Jacktar guides the helm.” He had been “Nurs’d on the waves, in blust’ring tempests bred,/ His heart of marble, and his brain of lead.” Having sailed “in the whirlwind” as a part of his work, this hard-hearted, thick-headed man naturally “enjoys the storm” of revolution. The poets alluded to the revolutionary acts of sailors when they referred to “seas of boiling tar.”54
During the 1780s, such thinking came to prevail among those who made up the emerging political nation—merchants, professionals, shopkeepers, artisans, slaveowners, and yeoman farmers. Sailors and slaves, once necessary parts of the revolutionary coalition, were thus read out of the settlement at revolution’s end. Of the five workingmen killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770, John Adams had written, “The blood of the martyrs, right or wrong, proved to be the seed of the congregation.” Yet had Crispus Attucks—slave, sailor, and mob leader—survived the fire of British muskets, he would not have been allowed to join the congregation, or new nation, he had helped to create. The exclusion of people like Attucks epitomized the sudden, reactionary retreat from the universalistic revolutionary language that had been forged in the heat of the 1760s and 1770s and permanently emblazoned in the Declaration of Independence. The reaction was canonized in the U.S. Constitution, which gave the new federal government the power to suppress domestic insurrections. James Madison worried in 1787 about a “levelling spirit” and an “agrarian law.”55 The Constitution also strengthened the institution of slavery by extending the slave trade, providing for the return of fugitive slaves, and giving national political power to the plantation master class.56 Meanwhile, an intensive debate about the nature and capacity of “the negro” raged between 1787 and 1790. Many Baptists and Methodists backed away from antislavery positions and sought instead a “gospel made safe for the plantation.”57 The new American ruling class redefined “race” and “citizenship” to divide and marginalize the motley crew, legislating in the 1780s and early 1790s a unified law of slavery based on white supremacy. The actions of the motley crew, and the reactions against it, help to illuminate the clashing, ambiguous nature of the American Revolution—its militant origins, radical momentum, and conservative political conclusion.58
VECTORS OF REVOLUTION
And yet the implications of the struggles of the 1760s and 1770s could not easily be contained, by the Sons of Liberty, Jefferson, Paine, Adams, or the new American government. Soldiers who fought in the war circulated the news, experience, and ideas of the revolution. Several veterans of the French regiments deployed in North America, including Henri Christophe and André Rigaud, would later lead the next major revolution of the western Atlantic, in Haiti, beginning in 1791. Other veterans returned to France and may have led a series of revolts against feudal land tenure that accelerated revolution in Europe during the 1790s. The news carried by Hessian soldiers back to their homeland eventually propelled a new generation of settlers toward America. But it was the motley crew, the sailors and slaves who were defeated in America and subsequently dispersed, that did the most to create new resistance and to inaugurate a broader age of revolution throughout the world.59
Sailors were a vector of revolution that traveled from North America out to sea and southward to the Caribbean. The sailors of the British navy grew mutinous after 1776, inspired in part by the battles waged against press-gangs and the king’s authority in America; an estimated forty-two thousand of them deserted naval ships between 1776 and 1783. Many who went to sea in this era got a revolutionary education. Robert Wedderburn, born to a slave woman and a Scottish plantation owner in Jamaica, joined the mutinous navy in 1778 and thereafter worked as a sailor, a tailor, a writer, and a preacher of jubilee as he took part in maritime protests, slave revolts, and urban insurrections. Julius Scott has shown that sailors black, white, and brown had contact with slaves in the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch port cities of the Caribbean, exchanging information with them about slave revolts, abolition, and revolution and generating rumors that became material forces in their own right. It is not known for certain whether sailors carried the news of the American Revolution that helped to inspire slave rebels in Hanover Parish, Jamaica, in 1776, but there is no doubt that a motley crew of “fifty or sixty men of all colors,” including an “Irishman of prodigious size,” attacked British and American ships in the Caribbean in 1793, apparently in league with the new revolutionary government of Haiti.60
The slaves and free blacks who flocked to the British army during the revolution and who were then dispersed around the Atlantic after 1783 constituted a second, multidirectional vector of revolution. Twelve thousand African Americans were carried out of Savannah, Charleston, and New York by the army in 1782 and 1783, while another eight to ten thousand departed with loyalist masters. They went to Sierra Leone, London, Dublin, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, eastern Florida, the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Mosquito Shore, and Belize. Free people of color from North America caused problems throughout the Caribbean in the later 1780s, especially on Jamaica and in the Windward Islands, where they created new political openings and alignments in slave societies and helped to prepare the way for the Haitian Revolution. By 1800 Lord Balcarres, governor of Jamaica, would write of the “Pandora’s Box” that had been opened in the West Indies: “Turbulent people of all Nations engaged in illicit Trade; a most abandoned class of Negroes, up to every scene of mischief, and a general levelling spirit throughout, is the character of the lower orders in Kingston.” Here, he explained, was a refuge for revolutionaries and a site for future insurrection, a place that might “in a moment . . . be laid in ashes.”61
A third powerful vector of revolution hurtled eastward toward the abolitionist movement in England. Granville Sharp, whose work in the late 1760s and early 1770s included opposition to impressment in the American Revolution, went on to become one of the leading figures in the transatlantic antislavery movement. After Olaudah Equiano told him in 1783 about the slave ship Zong, whose captain threw 132 slaves overboard in order to save supplies and then tried to collect insurance money for the dead, Sharp publicized the mass murder effectively. He also worked to establish the free black state of Sierra Leone in 1786, and served on the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. F. O. Shyllon and Peter Fryer have conclusively demonstrated the independent existence of a black population in London whose self-organization sustained and encouraged the abolitionist Sharp and, also in the 1780s, a young scholar-activist named Thomas Clarkson.62
After the American war, Clarkson began to gather evidence about the slave trade. Especially interested in the effects of the trade on sailors, he wanted to talk to the men who had sailed on the slave ships and to inspect those ships’ crew lists in order to gauge mortality. To accomplish this, the young Cambridge scholar disguised himself as a sailor and walked the docks. But how would he get men who were terrified of the slave trade, and terrified to talk about it, to speak to a stranger? He found John Dean, a free black sailor and his first informant, in a boardinghouse kept by one Donovan, an Irishman. Dean, like thousands of others, had entered the slave trade through the rough netherworld of proletarian recruitment—the squalid sailor’s tavern where, in Liverpool, Bristol, or London, slaving crews were often assembled between midnight and two in the morning. Dean had a personal tale to tell: “For a trifling circumstance for which he was in no-wise to blame, the captain fastened him with his belly to the deck, and that, in this situation, he had poured hot pitch upon his back, and made incisions in it with hot tongs.” Dean and countless other sailors like him provided the personal knowledge and information that gave the middle-class antislavery movement its ballast.63
The relationship of sailors to the abolitionist movement, on the one hand, and to the ambiguities between the condition of slavery and sailoring, on the other, are nowhere better personified than in the life of that eminence grise of the abolitionists, the Igbo slave and sailor Olaudah Equiano. Enslaved in West Africa, he was hardly aboard the slave ship before he saw a white sailor flogged to death. In later years he would see a sailor hanged from a yardarm, a soldier hung by his heels, a man on the gallows at Tyburn; he himself was twice suspended, though not by his neck. Terror, he understood immediately, was the fate of both sailors and slaves. Aboard the Aetna man-of-war, he learned to read and write, to shave, to dress hair. A messmate, the Irishman Daniel Quin, taught him to read the Bible and to think of nothing “but being free.” At the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, when the Aetna was anchored in the river Thames, his master, worried that Equiano’s recent promotion to able-bodied seaman would make it harder to maintain him in slavery, forced him into a barge at the point of his sword. The Igbo sailor plucked up his courage: “I told him I was free, and he could not by law serve me so.” Sold to Captain Doran of the West Indiaman Charming Sally, Equiano explained, “I told him my master could not sell me to him, nor to anyone else. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘did not your master buy you?’ I confessed he did. But I have served him, said I, many years, and he has taken all my wages and prize money, for I only got one sixpence during the war; besides this have been baptized; and by the laws of the land no man has a right to sell me.” Confronted with these economic, religious, and legal arguments, Doran told him, Equiano reported, that “I talked too much English.” Meanwhile, Equiano’s shipmates promised to do what they could, which, apart from getting him some oranges, was nothing.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1790). Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
Equiano now entered the sugar economy of the West Indies. “I now knew what it was to work hard; I was made to help to unload and load the ship.” His own situation began to improve, but he witnessed the intense sufferings of others—the rapes, whippings, brandings, mutilations, cuts, burnings, chains, muzzles, and thumbscrews. He wondered of the rulers of England, “Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection?” He then quoted the speech of Beelzebub in Paradise Lost, written by John Milton and published exactly one hundred years earlier. Much of Equiano’s evolving conception of freedom, and hence part of his own self-definition, were derived from other sailors—from his keen sense of the rights of the accused to his belief in the jury system, from his reference to his “fellow creatures” to his study of the Bible, from his quotations from Milton to his detestation of those “infernal invaders of human rights,” the slavers, impressers, and trepanners.
Equiano was in Charleston during the demonstrations of joy that followed the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766. It is easy to imagine his participating in them, and equally easy to understand why he might not want to admit it to his British readers. Many of the sailors in that demonstration went in blackface. Some years later Equiano himself had occasion to put on whiteface in an episode that was by his own account a turning point, the source of a suicidal and spiritual crisis. In 1774 he helped to recruit a black sea-cook, John Annis, onto a ship bound for Turkey. Annis, formerly a slave to one Kirkpatrick of St. Kitt’s, was soon impressed by his former master and a gang of bullies on the Thames. Equiano rushed to obtain a habeas corpus but
before handing it over, whitened his face to escape suspicion. He then contacted Granville Sharp, but his attorney ran off with the money, and Annis was carried to St. Kitt’s, where he was staked to the ground, cut, and flogged to death. Equiano took Annis’s death as a personal defeat; it plunged him into the depths of despair. Yet slowly he began to discover the rich spiritual resources of proletarian London in the 1770s—the love-feasts of a silk weaver, the evening singing of hymns. A prison reformer, a Dissenter, pointed out to him that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” An antinomian (“an old sea-faring man”) referred him to the Isaiah of William Blake: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together.” He was guided to the Book of James and its “So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.” The Scripture of Isaiah, James, John, and Acts—the prophetic, the social gospel, and the persecuted—began to provide him with convincement. He went back to sea and continued to study. He identified with the condemned criminal, the needy, the poor; he moved from personal redemption to liberation theology. He wrote his own verses of despair, imprisonment, and enslavement, concluding with an allusion to the Gospel of Mark, “The stone which the builders rejected has become the main cornerstone.” He thus answered Jefferson and Paine and their fears of the motley crew. But whether the disenfranchised, the enslaved, the imprisoned, the sailor—in short, the many-headed hydra—could become a “cornerstone” would be a story for the 1790s.
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