by Ray Raphael
In the South, the risks were far greater and more difficult to assess. Enslaved people in 1775–1776 and again in 1779–1781 were under the general impression that if they could escape and offer their services to the invading British army they would be freed. They had no assurances, however, nor was it certain that the British would prevail. What if they ran to the British army but were later defeated and returned to their original owners? What if the British proved not to be liberators after all, but just one more set of white men ready to exploit black labor? Perhaps they would free some but not all of those who came to them. Perhaps families would be torn apart.
On the other hand, what would happen if enslaved people decided not to join the British? Patriot masters, fleeing the British army, might haul them away to places unknown, where they would be sold or hired out to strangers. If their masters ran and left them behind, they would have to survive on their own amid economic chaos. Even worse, how would they be treated if they were captured by the British, rather than joining them willingly? As prizes of war, they would belong to the conquerors. Very likely, they would be sold and sent to the West Indies.
Perhaps they should just run away without seeking support from either side. They could try to blend in with the small communities of free blacks in Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, or Williamsburg. But in such numbers? How would they make a living? Maybe they’d do better in the backwoods of the Dismal Swamp, but wherever they went, they would have to support themselves, and settling in one place to raise food would increase the risk of being captured.
Their fates were in the balance: they might wind up free or dead. In the fields or huddled in small groups at night, wary of informers among their peers, they pondered the alternatives, projecting the possible consequences of their actions, trying to predict the most likely outcomes. They considered various outcomes and evaluated strategies. Such decisions to make—and with such consequences!40
As it turned out, many trying to escape were captured by patriot slave patrols. Sometimes, when the British were inundated with runaways, fugitives were turned away. Thousands succumbed to diseases—primarily smallpox, to which they had no immunity. Those who reached the British and survived were often turned into laborers, servants, or soldiers. They toiled on plantations not unlike the ones they had left; they served the personal needs of British officers, who became their new masters; they joined the king’s army for indefinite terms of service—some later served in the West Indies and even the Napoleonic Wars. Many were given as slaves to white loyalists in compensation for lost property.
On the other hand, many did find freedom. At the close of the war, the British transported three thousand men, women, and children, formerly enslaved, from New York to Canada. As free persons, they were granted plots of land—the worst available, of course. Others went to London, where they faced hard times. Some managed to escape to deep woods and dank swamps, where they survived for years in their own Maroon communities. (Despite what we see in The Patriot, there are no records of white gentry putting on elaborate wedding ceremonies in these enclaves of black refugees.) Many eventually wound up in Sierra Leone, the African colony established for formerly enslaved blacks.
From the black perspective, such stories are indeed “epic,†as reflected in the title of Cassandra’s Pybus’s book Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty, which chronicles a mass black exodus from slavery that preceded the more famous Underground Railroad of the mid–nineteenth century.41 But where are they in our textbooks? We hear about James Armistead Lafayette, Peter Salem, and James Forten, so why not Boston King, David George, Thomas Peters, or other refugees whose journeys are well documented and whose stories we could relate if we chose to?42
Liberty! (the book and PBS series) features James Armistead Lafayette as one of the five key “portraits†to represent the American Revolution; the others are King George III, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abigail Adams.43 Enslaved to the Virginian William Armistead, James volunteered for the army and worked as a double agent under the Marquis de Lafayette; after the war, he petitioned the Virginia Assembly for his freedom and received it. His story, a good one, is certainly enhanced by the prestige of the officer he served, but we could paint an even broader canvas by featuring the pursuit of freedom by Harry Washington, who had worked involuntarily for a man of even greater renown, George Washington.
In 1763, George Washington helped form a company called Adventurers for Draining the Great Dismal Swamp, hoping first to cut and sell the timber and then to farm the drained area. Each partner was to contribute five enslaved workers to perform the tedious task of swamp dredging, and to this end, Washington purchased a man listed in the records as Harry, born in West Africa. In 1766, after working the mosquito-infested swamp for over two years, Harry was removed to Mount Vernon, a more livable environment. Five years later Harry escaped from his master, but after George posted a reward, the man he claimed as his property was captured and returned. Harry continued at Mount Vernon until 1776, when he and two others made their way to a British vessel in the Potomac River. By that time, his trade was listed as “hostler.â€
Taking the name of his famous former master, Harry served behind British lines during the invasion of New York just two months after he fled. Later, during the British invasion of the Carolinas, he served as a corporal in a unit called the Black Pioneers, attached to the Royal Artillery Department. At the conclusion of the war in 1783, Harry was once again stationed in New York, where he had to elude the “slave catcher†his former master sent to retrieve his escaped slaves. Also, as commander in chief of the Continental Army, General Washington tried to enforce the Treaty of Paris, which stipulated that the British return all former slaves to their masters—but to no avail. Harry safely shipped out aboard a British vessel headed to Nova Scotia.
There, in a much different land, Harry and his peers were given their own plots of minimally productive land, which they tried to work for almost a decade. Late in 1791, Harry shipped out once again, this time across the Atlantic to Sierra Leone. Leaving behind a house, two town lots, and forty acres, he and his wife Jenny sailed off with an ax, a saw, a pickax, three hoes, two muskets, and some furniture to what they believed to be the Promised Land in Africa.
But they were not exactly returning to their homeland. Sierra Leone was not the place of Harry’s origin, nor was it under the control of the black settlers. The émigrés from North America confronted disease and hardships of all kinds, including the autocratic rule of the London company that had sponsored them. In 1800 Harry and others, seeking to control their own destinies, staged a rebellion that failed. Tried and convicted by a military tribunal, Harry was exiled to a neighboring land, where he died. Yes, Harry Washington had escaped slavery to find “freedom,†but exploitation by other humans and the ravages of nature took their tolls.44
As narratives, the overlapping but very different sagas of George Washington (whom we know so well) and Harry Washington (whose life is obscure but still discernable) are full and rich, depicting two amazing quests for freedom. George grew from the revolutionary experience, not only leading his country to freedom but also, at his death, freeing the people he had once held in bondage; Harry grew as well as he fought for and explored the complex dimensions of freedom in an often hostile world. Presented together, they reveal significant historical trends and events. These sorts of multifaceted stories are worth telling. The celebration of our nation’s birth becomes deeper yet if we choose not to censor some of the intrepid struggles for freedom that the Revolution made possible.45
“British parties, . . . the most brutal of mankind, were . . . robbing, destroying, and taking life at their pleasure.â€
Drawing by Felix Octavius Carr Darley, mid-nineteenth century.
12
BRUTAL BRITISH
The enemy, once identified, is easy to vilify. The handiest way to justify intentional killing is to portray the opposition as brutal. In any war, stories abound of atrocities committed by the other side; violent acts committed by the protagonists are merely retaliations for these foul deeds. This is the basic logic of warfare, and the American Revolution was no exception.
GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS
The simple juxtaposition of good versus evil gives the movie The Patriot its raw power. At the outset of the film, Benjamin Martin, played convincingly by Mel Gibson, does not want to fight against the British. Although he was once a hero in the French and Indian War, now he is trying to raise six children (his wife is deceased) and he wants no part of politics or war. “I am a parent,†he says at a meeting of patriots. “I haven’t got the luxury of principles.â€
Martin’s political apathy does not last long. After a battle is fought in their front yard, Martin and his children and their slaves-who-are-not-really-slaves tend to the wounded, patriots and British alike. Right at this moment Colonel Tavington gallops onto the scene, leading his fearsome British Dragoons. Grinning insidiously, Tavington orders all wounded patriots to be shot on the spot. He also arrests Benjamin’s oldest son, Gabriel, for carrying messages. As Gabriel is being dragged away to be hanged, Benjamin protests that his summary execution would violate “the rules of war.†Tavington responds: “Rules of war! Would you like a lesson in the rules of war?†He then points his pistol at the rest of Martin’s children. Martin backs off, but when Gabriel’s younger brother Thomas bursts forth with a feeble and ill-advised rescue attempt, Tavington shoots Thomas in the back.
Colonel Tavington, we see, is a very bad man. Benjamin Martin is understandably very angry, and he becomes a patriot after all. The cold-blooded killing of his son Thomas must be avenged.
Shortly afterward, Tavington is called to task for these and other barbarous deeds by his superior, General Cornwallis. But after Martin outwits Cornwallis with a cunning scheme, the general abandons his preference for gentlemanly warfare and gives Tavington permission to pursue “brutal†tactics. Sanctioned brutalities become a cornerstone of official British policy.
Tavington, now operating according to orders, proceeds to commit even greater outrages. He gathers the entire population of a village into a church, seals off the door and shutters, then burns it to the ground. Every man, woman, and child—including Gabriel’s new bride—perishes in the flames. (Gabriel had earlier been rescued from the gallows by his dad and his two youngest brothers, ages about eight and ten.) A little later, Tavington uses some cunning of his own to kill Gabriel. By now, the viewer is as outraged as Benjamin Martin, who has lost two sons at the hands of the sinister British officer. Tavington and the British must be stopped! We are rooting furiously as our hero, using an American flagpole for a bayonet, faces off against his nemesis in the concluding Battle of Cowpens.
In The Patriot, we learn that the British were the bad guys, and that their Colonel Banastre Tarleton (upon whom the character of Tavington was based, according to the film’s writer, Robert Rodat) was the personification of evil. Patriots, by contrast, were the good guys. Americans did not slaughter their prisoners, and they killed no civilians—certainly not a churchful all at once.
At one point, The Patriot does show Benjamin Martin’s militiamen on the verge of hacking to death British soldiers who had just surrendered—but these excesses are immediately put to a halt by Commander Martin: “Full quarter will be given to British wounded and any who surrender,†he commands. Gabriel delivers the moral of this scene: “We are better men than that.†That’s the basic message of the film: the Americans were better men than those British bullies, like Tarleton, who didn’t think twice about hacking prisoners to death.
One scene does equivocate. Back in the French and Indian War, Benjamin Martin had proved himself a hero at “Fort Wilderness.†Throughout the film, men praise him for this—but nobody will say what he did. One night at camp, Gabriel asks his father to tell him what happened at Fort Wilderness. Reticent at first, Benjamin finally responds. French and Cherokee raiders had killed some settlers, including women and children. To avenge this slaughter, Martin and company tracked down the offenders and butchered them. “We took our time,†he says softly but deliberately. “We cut them apart, slowly, piece by piece. I can see their faces. I can still hear their screams.†He then proceeds with a graphic description of how they mutilated the bodies. “We were . . . heroes,†he concludes sardonically.
“And men bought you drinks,†Gabriel adds.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t ask God’s forgiveness for what I did.â€
Such an admission, coming from the hero of the story, produces a stunning effect. Everything else that happened or will happen in the film takes on an added dimension, for this man is real. But Martin’s atrocities were all committed in the past, out on the frontier. He had been fighting for the British at that point—but during the Revolutionary War, at the birth of our nation, no such atrocities could be tolerated. American patriots were simply too good to engage in barbarous behavior. The British thereby serve as scapegoats for the horrors of war.
A simple but deft twist of costuming confirms this thesis. The dreaded Green Dragoons—mostly American Tories commanded by Briton Banastre Tarleton—wore green jackets with white pants, shirts, and collars; only their sashes and helmet plumes were red. The “special feature†added to the DVD version of the film shows a brief image of this uniform, but in the film itself, green is traded in for a more familiar red. “There were many different kinds of uniforms in the British army,†says costume designer Deborah Scott. “We basically settled for one very strong look.†Strong and recognizable: the Redcoats. All the men commanded by Colonel Tavington are unquestionably British. All the evil deeds are performed by foreigners, not Americans.
This is the way most Americans today have heard the story of the Revolutionary War: the opposition wore no green, only red. In the telling of the war that has evolved over time, the men who fought on the other side were the Redcoats, British antagonists familiar to us all.
THE FIRST CIVIL WAR
The Patriot draws on the interpretation of the war put forth at the time by American patriots. On May 29, 1780, in the Waxhaws district of North Carolina, soldiers under the command of Banastre Tarleton killed American prisoners rather than granting them quarter. For the remainder of the war, the Waxhaws incident provided a rallying cry for angry patriots as they prepared to terminate the lives of other human beings: “Tarleton’s Quarter!†they would yell furiously as they stormed into battle. (Sometimes, the cry was “Remember Buford!â€â€”referring to Abraham Buford, the American commander at Waxhaws.) For patriots toward the end of the Revolutionary War, as for the fictional Benjamin Martin, the enemy’s butchery provided reason enough to fight against the British.
This story, proof positive of the enemy’s cruelty, has endured for over two centuries. But there has been one important alteration. At the time, the patriots’ greatest fury was directed at their local adversaries, the Tories. Now, the adversaries have exchanged green uniforms for red. They must be seen as foreigners, not “us.â€
In fact, it was Americans who did the slaughtering at Waxhaws—maybe not patriots, but our countrymen nonetheless. There, Banastre Tarleton led a force of 40 British Regulars and 230 American Tories, primarily from New York. “The British Legion, Americans all, began butchering their vanquished countrymen,†writes military historian Jo
hn Buchanan.1 This was no isolated event. British officers, on their part, often tried to restrain their American recruits, sometimes to no avail. “For God’s sake no irregularities,†pleaded British general Henry Clinton, trying in vain to curtail the excesses of Tories who fought under him.2
The Revolution in the South was a bloody civil war—even more internecine than the Civil War of the nineteenth century, for no geographic boundaries separated the combatants. (Even when patriots fought the Redcoats, they viewed them as “Regulars,†not foreigners, as we do today.) In South Carolina alone, local historian Edward McCrady tabulated 103 different battles in which Americans fought Americans, with nary a Brit in sight.3 At King’s Mountain, one of the great victories for the patriots, over one thousand American loyalists fought under a single British officer.
The impact of this first civil war was devastating. “The whole Country is in Danger of being laid waste by the Whigs and Tories who pursue each other with as much relentless Fury as Beasts of Prey,†wrote the American general Nathanael Greene.4 In some regions all civil society came to a halt. Whenever a band of partisans raged through, inhabitants had to “lay out†in the woods, abandoning their homes to the ravages of soldiers—whatever side they happened to be on. On July 20, 1781, the American major William Pierce wrote to St. George Tucker:
Such scenes of desolation, bloodshed and deliberate murder I never was a witness to before! Wherever you turn the weeping widow and fatherless child pour out their melancholy tales to wound the feeling of humanity. The two opposite principles of whiggism and toryism have set the people of this country to cutting each other’s throats, and scarce a day passes but some poor deluded tory is put to death at his door.5
Partisans on both sides believed they were fighting for their homeland. Many, like the fictional Benjamin Martin, had lost relatives who were to be avenged. Fighting was localized and personalized—and thereby more impassioned. These were not professional soldiers just doing their jobs, but men with scores to settle.