20 20Your petitioners apprehend we have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedoms without being depriv’d of them by our fellow men as we are a freeborn people and have never forfeited this blessing by any compact or agreement whatever.
The late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their negro slaves may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great. Had they made any considerable part of their property, such a resolution could never have been agreed to.1
WITH THE END OF the French and Indian (or Seven Years’) War, Prime Minister John Stuart, the Scottish Third Earl of Bute, decided not to demobilize the army but to station ten thousand troops in America. Previously British troops had appeared in the colonies to fight the colonists’ enemies, but now they were going to be a police force.
Worse, the colonists were told to pay for it. The colonies had long endured trade regulations that gave them access to British ports but cut them off from competing markets and otherwise imposed intolerable conditions on the merchants, but they had never been “internally” taxed (as opposed to “external” taxes, such as duties). Now Parliament laid a tax on them.
Boston merchant banker John Hancock denounced the Stamp Act as “slavery.” Hancock, who never bought or sold slaves but grew up served by slaves in the house of his wealthy merchant uncle, was exaggerating. In reality, the 1765 Stamp Act was a tax—not, thought the British, a terrible one, given what had been expended to protect the colonists from the French and Indians, but a maddening one to colonists who had to pay with hard coin for the new stamped paper that would be used in any officially recorded transaction.
Contrived to make all levels of society pay, the Stamp Act was a serious miscalculation on the part of the clueless British officialdom. Nothing was more calculated to infuriate the legal class than the Stamp Act, since it mandated use of stamped paper for legal documents. It angered the poor: it required a one-shilling stamp on a deck of playing cards—a particular annoyance, since gambling required frequent replacement of the deck—and a whopping ten shillings on a pair of dice. And it was a call to arms as well for newspaper printers, who were expected to print on officially stamped and purchased paper, and who retaliated with all the ink at their disposal.
In Boston, where the first insurrections of colonists against Britain exploded, two distinct social levels were active, each of which had their own motives: the merchants, and the motley crew that made up the mob.2 We speak today of “the mob” most commonly with reference to the Sicilian-style Mafia, as transplanted to America via New Orleans in the late nineteenth century. But in the 1760s another kind of mob was already well established in Boston, though it was more loosely structured. The mob culture of Boston was a principal actor in the early days of the American Revolution.
Puritan Boston didn’t have any Catholic churches, nor did it celebrate Christmas or Easter, nor did it have a theater. As in Connecticut and Rhode Island, “stage-plays” were prohibited in Massachusetts and were not part of the public consciousness, so Bostonians had not seen Addison’s influential Cato, nor did Boston have that part of social life that centered around the theater. Boston’s theatrical urges played out differently: in the form of participatory mass actions in the street, as happened every year on November 5, or “Pope’s Day.” Known in England as Guy Fawkes Day for the radical Catholic who had tried to blow up Parliament with gunpowder in 1605, the holiday had replaced the pagan All Hallows’ Eve. In Boston, some people observed it by dressing as devils and popes for a carnival of misrule that might include attacking Catholics—a practice imported from London—should any be detected.
“Rioting in Boston was almost a ritual,” writes Hiller B. Zobel.3 Boston’s street culture meshed with its heritage of Protestant dissent, which had long expressed itself in resistance to the colonial government. An anti-impressment riot in 1747 lasted three days, during which a multiethnic, mutinous mob of sailors that grew to some three thousand participants battled press gangs, took hostages, burned boats, and physically confronted the governor—“literally a case,” write Linebaugh and Rediker, “of the people’s fighting for its liberty, for throughout the eighteenth century the crew of a ship was known as ‘the people,’ who once ashore were on their ‘liberty.’”4
By the time of the Stamp Act, the Mob—they wrote it with capitals—was a focused force that took direction and had been repurposed as a political weapon. The leader of the Mob in Boston (which divided into antagonistic North and South Boston factions) was a twenty-eight-year-old shoemaker named Ebenezer Mackintosh. Zobel writes:
During the years from 1765 to 1770 … although the rioters seemed uncontrolled and uncontrollable, they were in fact under an almost military discipline. On one notable occasion, according to the Tory Peter Oliver, Mackintosh “paraded the Town with a Mob of 2,000 Men in two Files, & passed by the Stadthouse, when the general Assembly were sitting, to display his Power: if a Whisper was heard among his Followers, the holding up of his Finger hushed it in a Moment: & when he had fully displayed his Authority, he marched his Men to the first Rendezvouz, & Order’d them to retire peacably to their several Homes; & was punctually obeyed.”5
Perhaps the figure of two thousand is an exaggeration; that number represented well over half of the town’s adult male population. But there is no doubting that in Boston more than anywhere else, the hatred of the British and of those thought to collaborate with them generalized and transcended social class. And Boston had no police force to speak of.
Mackintosh’s Mob, performing some of the functions of a militia, wound up being the street enforcers of a group called the Loyal Nine, a club of mid-level merchants and businesspeople that included Benjamin Edes, printer of the Boston Gazette, as well as a ship’s captain, a jeweller, and two distillers who bought much forbidden molasses from Saint-Domingue.
Frequently present at Loyal Nine meetings, though not a member, was Harvard graduate and failed businessman Samuel Adams Jr. Possibly the most fully committed revolutionary to appear during the entire independence process, he was thirteen years older than his second cousin John Adams. When the Stamp Act crisis came to a head, Adams seems to have been one of the principal ligatures between merchants and Mob, a connection that was a significant tactical achievement of the urban American insurgents. At the height of the action, he was perhaps the most powerful man in Boston.
Adams had been affected by the experience of Boston’s 1747 impressment riots, and subsequently began a radical newspaper, the Independent Advertiser. He had come to consciousness in the midst of the fierce political struggle between the “popular” party (which dominated the Massachusetts House of Representatives) and the “court” (pro-British, aristocratic) party.
Many Americans today have the impression that the uprisings in Boston were directed solely against British occupiers, but despite his close collaboration with the crown, the Massachusetts merchant Thomas Hutchinson was as much an American as Samuel Adams. The Hutchinsons were the ruling class; they had a reputation for tight, strategic intermarriage among three clans that had literally come to be Boston’s ruling family. They dedicated themselves exclusively to commerce and officeholding. After a prolonged “bank war” between a crown-associated “silver bank” and a populist-associated “land bank” went badly for the latter, Samuel Adams’s family hated the Hutchinson clan obsessively—especially Thomas Hutchinson, who simultaneously served as governor, legislator, and supreme court justice.
The Loyal Nine were at the center of the first provocative actions of what came to be called the American Revolution, dispatching physical intimidation as a primary tactic. The presence of printer Benjamin Edes was critical: the first confrontations exploded amid a torrent of radical pamphleteering, which, amid the proliferation of printers and newspapers, was the new-media component of the American Revolution. The message Edes never stopped printing was that a standing military force was tyranny, and the very presence of troops an affront.
The Loyal Nine were absorbed into the Sons of Liberty, a self-appointed action group with chapters in all the colonies. The many merchants in their ranks intended to be on the winning side when their wealthy loyalist competitors had been hounded out of town, a process they eagerly threw themselves into. They hanged in effigy the wealthy merchant Andrew Oliver on the hot night of August 14, 1765, for collaborating with the Stamp Act. While that might seem relatively mild as compared with, say, breaking on the wheel, as was done to rebellious slaves in Louisiana, it was a terrifying experience for the victim.
On August 26, violence erupted as the Mob stormed Thomas Hutchinson’s house, using axes to break their way into the fine house, built seventy-five years previously by Hutchinson’s grandfather. Hutchinson’s family, who had been having supper, fled as the Mob destroyed the furniture, took everything of value—clothes, rings, cash—and, in Bernard Bailyn’s words, “destroyed or scattered in the mud all of Hutchinson’s books and papers, including the manuscript of volume I of his History and the collection of historical papers that he had been gathering for years as the basis for a public archive.” They did their best to pull the building down: “only the heavy brickwork construction of the walls prevented their razing the building completely, though they worked at it till daylight.”6
The violence of the Boston Mob, whom the aristocrats saw as “levellers,” astounded their bourgeois sponsors. They got away with it—not only with impunity, but with glory. In a systematic campaign of intimidation directed largely at merchants, the Mob enforced a nonimportation edict. To anyone suspected of not supporting nonimportation, they made life unbearable. The violence was strategic, implying both a command structure and a financed campaign.
They showed up at targets’ homes en masse, carrying clubs. They beat people up, and they inflicted the signature torture of the American Revolution: tarring and feathering. They stripped their victims naked in front of a crowd, covered them first with scalding hot tar (making them black) and then with goose feathers (making them Indians), and paraded them in that condition about town for perhaps three hours to be the object of ridicule and beatings before being left half dead. As a public humiliation and street theater, tarring and feathering dates back at least to the twelfth century in England, but it seems to have made its first appearance in the colonies in the hands of the self-proclaimed Patriots.
The Mob hounded Thomas Hutchinson’s nephew, the merchant Nathaniel Rogers, with more than a year’s worth of attacks on his house, physical threats, and intimidation of his family, until he left Boston. Then they had their Sons of Liberty soldiers in New York hound him out of that city.7 But New York did not mobilize like Boston had.
With its relatively homogenous population, accustomed as it was to the focus and discipline of Puritan society, Boston was unique. In New York, heterogenous and multilingual from the moment of its founding by the Dutch, coordinated movement was less likely. The Sons of Liberty tried the same tactics there, but the mobs lacked organization and merely went trashing, vandalizing the rich and on one occasion destroying a newly built theater.
The colonists’ violent reaction to the Stamp Act caught the British—and some of their factors—by surprise. In South Carolina, the radical who stirred up mob action was Christopher Gadsden, a temperamental merchant who was the most aggressive local figure in defying colonial governors. Writing under the pseudonym of Homespun Freeman, Gadsden denounced the Stamp Act as a Scottish plot.8 He went to New York in 1765 as a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress, which asserted that only colonial assemblies had the right to tax the colonies, and he returned to Charleston an ardent member of the Sons of Liberty. He was a kindred spirit and warm correspondent with Samuel Adams; their friendship was emblematic of the close ties of insurgency between New England and South Carolina. It was Gadsden who designed the “Don’t Tread On Me” rattlesnake flag for John Paul Jones to hoist over the Alfred, the first ship of the American navy, as the “special standard” of the US Navy’s first commander in chief, the former Rhode Island slave-ship captain Eseck Hopkins.9
Gadsden in 1767 invested his fortune in the seven-year project of building his 840-foot wharf, the largest in the colonies, which shipped out enormous amounts of rice.10 It is notorious in American memory as the site where Africans were taken for sale after their period of quarantine at Sullivan’s Island; perhaps more than one hundred thousand Africans were sold from Gadsden’s Wharf before the African trade was prohibited.
The anti–Stamp Act mob in Charles Town rioted for nine days. Henry Laurens, a conservative businessman who prided himself on doing things legally, was in favor of complying with the Stamp Act, and so was targeted by the mob, which came to Laurens’s house bent for, as he put it years later while confined in the Tower of London, “seizing the Stamp’d Paper just arrived in Charles Town & for awing the Officers appointed to distribute it.”11 But Laurens successfully talked the mob down, demonstrating the crowd-handling skill he subsequently deployed as president of the First Continental Congress.
Radicalism was a double-edged sword for the merchants. Many were invested in commercial alliances in England, and destabilization was not good for business. War would disrupt shipping. But being constantly at the mercy of British trade regulations seemed to them to be “slavery,” the word they invariably used. Independence would give merchants ownership of their commerce—which in some cases, needless to say, included slave trading—and would put them in charge of regulation. The Loyalists weren’t going to be the winning side, and knocking them out would remove competition.
As the “Patriots” seized power in all thirteen colonies, merchants who didn’t dance to the broadly popular tune of revolution might be labeled Tories and find themselves the object of mob action. As Henry Laurens discovered, it was a better bet to be the one leading the mob. In Chestertown, Maryland, Thomas Ringgold IV cast his lot with change. Besides being a member of the Maryland assembly, Ringgold was a founder of the local chapter of Sons of Liberty and a member of the Stamp Act Congress. He became a slave-trading revolutionary, and not the only one.
While the repeal of the Stamp Act on March 17, 1766, temporarily averted a crisis, it was accompanied by the Declaratory Act, which held
that the said colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and Parliament of Great Britain; and that the king’s Majesty … had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.12
With the Declaratory Act, London reaffirmed its right to strike down colonial law at will. “Every colony had been established by a document from the king that authorized a colonial legislature to enact laws for the colony so long as they were ‘not repugnant to the laws of England,’” write Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen. “Thus the British government retained a kind of superintending power over the colony’s behavior. This was well known in the colonies.”13 That was a problem: while the Declaratory Act aroused no popular protest in the colonies, its implications were clear to the colonial ruling class. Meanwhile, Southern slaveholders were become increasingly alarmed by the abolitionist movement that had been growing in Britain since the 1760s, fed by the increasing popularity of Methodism and Quakerism, both antislavery.
Nowhere did British and colonial law differ more sharply than on slavery. William Blackstone, the ranking British jurist of his day in 1765, praised liberty in terms that infuriated the Virginians: “[the] spirit of liberty is so deeply implanted in our constitution, and rooted even in our very soil, that a slave or a Negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws and so far becomes a freeman.”14
Slaveowning colonists were particularly alarmed by the 1772 Somerset decision. James Somerset was the slave name of a man who had been kidnapped from Africa at the age of nine. After landing in Virginia in 1749, he caught the eye of the young Scottish-born tobacco merchant Charles Stewart of Norfolk, whom he served for more than two decades as his “body servant,” performing whatever personal services Stewart required.
When Stewart took Somerset along to London in 1771, Somerset escaped. Stewart recaptured him with the aid of professional slave catchers, who existed in London because there were enough enslaved people there, belonging to colonists both visiting and resident, that this kind of thing happened on an ongoing basis. The displeased Stewart avenged his humiliation by having Somerset bound and put on a ship to be sold in Jamaica—a reminder that a slave could easily be removed from the most relatively privileged urban echelons to a tropical death camp.
Before the vessel could sail, however, Somerset was dramatically rescued by the abolitionist Granville Sharp, who paid for Somerset’s defense in court. The unprecedented case was a striking example of using litigation to steer social policy and was reflective of the maturity of the British justice system at the time. It put slavery on a show trial, occasioning widespread debate in the press, and it thrust the eminent, conservative jurist Lord Mansfield into the hot seat.
To the objection by Stewart’s lawyer that freeing the estimated fourteen thousand slaves held in Britain would cost their owners a catastrophic £700,000, figured at £50 a head, Mansfield replied, “£50 a head may not be a high price.” But he judged the case narrowly. He felt the issue was one for Parliament to take up, urging them to do so in his decision freeing Somerset: “The state of slavery is … so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.”15
The decision, widely reported in colonial American newspapers, effectively prohibited chattel slavery in England (Scotland had a separate body of law), and unquestionably was a great victory for the antislavery movement.16 At bottom, it established that Somerset had the rights of a person, which went directly contrary to the current of colonial law. Somerset was feted at a party in London attended by two hundred free people of color, an event also reported in colonial papers, including the South Carolina Gazette. Benjamin Franklin, who was in London in 1772 when the Somerset decision came down, wrote in full cry:
Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!17
The passage above has sometimes been cited as a proof of the non-plantation-owning Franklin’s humanitarian bent. But if we read this with a pragmatic politician’s understanding, we see less a simple cry against the immorality of slavery than that favorite trick of the political debater: changing the subject. And it was disingenuous: as Franklin well knew, Rhode Island captains had carried tens of thousands of Africans, and he himself made money from advertisements for slave sales in his newspapers, especially in South Carolina.
The British Parliament never picked up the gauntlet Lord Mansfield had thrown down. Slavery in Britain would never be made legal by affirmative law. It had been implemented in the colonies by English merchants, officials, captains, and by the colonists who had written laws to support it there, but there was never any groundswell of public opinion in its favor at home.
Stamped paper and tea are iconic in American popular history, but only recently have historians begun to consider the Somerset case much in the narrative of American independence. Somerset posed a more basic kind of threat to a slaveowner than stamped paper. It jeopardized the basis of Southerners’ wealth: property consisting of human beings.
Henry Laurens was in London when Somerset was being argued. Before the verdict was delivered, he took a sarcastic tone in a letter of May 29, 1772: “They say that supper is ready, otherwise I was going to tell a long and comical Story, of a Trial between a Mr. Stuart and his Black Man James Somerset, at King’s Bench, for Liberty.”18 Thirteen years later, he argued in a letter that “nor is it quite a decided fact that the moment a Negro sets his foot on British Ground he becomes a freeman. Lord Mansfield left this a moot point.”19 But Laurens was arguing against the tide: Mansfield’s shocking decision was strongly felt, as evidenced by the 1774 newspaper advertisement in Virginia for return of a runaway that said, “He will probably endeavor to pass for a Freeman by the name of John Christian, and attempt to get on Board some Vessel bound for Great Britain, from the Knowledge he has of the late Determination of Somerset’s Case.”20
A British crackdown on smuggled molasses and tea inevitably led to confrontation. In Providence, the wealthy slave trader and rum distiller John Brown was one of the (at the time) unidentified leaders of a group of sixty or so who on the night of June 9, 1772, with their faces blacked, boarded and blew up the British blockade ship Gaspée, wounding the vessel’s master in the struggle.* The assault on the Gaspée was tremendously popular among the people of Providence; no one would identify Brown or the other combatants, let alone testify.
In response to the Tea Act of 1773, which laid a threepenny duty on a vast surplus of tea that was otherwise being dumped on the American market, militants disguised with soot-blacked faces and Indian feathers on December 16 staged what later became known as the Boston Tea Party, arguably the detonating act of the American Revolution. Other anti-tea events followed in every colony, with a general boycott of tea that created a sense of revolutionary unity in the face of collective caffeine deprivation. In Annapolis, the ship Peggy Stewart was burned; the vessel’s owner, Anthony Stewart, was compelled to torch it himself, with its load of tea. Samuel Galloway, perhaps with a there-but-for-the-grace shudder at the loss to his colleague and competitor, noted in a letter of October 24, 1774, that Stewart was not allowed even to place a handbill in the newspaper. “This is Liberty with a Vengence,” Galloway wrote to Thomas Ringgold V. For his part, Ringgold insisted the whole incident was cooked up by Stewart to curry favor with London and wrote his father-in-law and merchant partner that he was “glad the people have shewn so much spirit.”21
Philadelphia, meanwhile, was riled up by the Centinel, written in various issues of the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser beginning March 24, 1768, by Francis Alison, John Dickinson, and George Bryan, which warned of a plan to install an Anglican bishopric in the colonies, something that, despite the colonies’ official status as Anglican, had never been done. Evangelicals and other religious dissenters, a major force in the independence struggle, feared that an “American Episcopate” would bring religious oppression to tolerant, multi-sected Pennsylvania. Centinel #1, which warned of the danger to religious dissenters, charged that “Enemies of America, … are exerting their utmost Endeavours to strip us of our most sacred, invaluable and inherent Rights; to reduce us to the State of Slaves; and to tax us.”22 Needless to say, this came from people who knew full well that the “State of Slaves” involved far more than taxation.
There was plenty to enrage the colonists, including the Quebec Act of 1774, which would have extended the province of Quebec down to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. But all of that aside, and allowing for the argument that the colonies had in fact largely been independent since their foundation, the slave-society colonies of the South had their own compelling reason to secede from Britain: only independence could protect slavery from the growing power of British abolitionism.
The British army came with a display of intimidating grandeur. Malcolm Bell Jr. describes the arrival in 1765 of the mostly Irish Twenty-Ninth Regiment of Foot in Halifax on the ship Thunderer: “Ten black drummers, all former slaves captured from the French on the island of Guadeloupe, gave the band a special air. In their brilliant uniforms of scarlet pantaloons, silver-buttoned yellow jackets, Hessian boots, feathered turbans, and Persian scimitars, they won the admiration of all who saw them perform.”23
Traveling with that regiment was Major Pierce Butler. An Irish Anglican, proud and even defensive throughout his life of his (somewhat questionable) aristocratic lineage, he was a third son and as such not in line to receive an inheritance in the age of primogeniture. The Americas were a fortune-hunting ground for younger sons; when Butler was eleven years old, his family purchased him a commission in the king’s army. He came to North America at the age of fourteen during the French and Indian War, then subsequently returned to service in Ireland, and was sent again to Canada in 1765 with the rank of major.
Butler traveled to Philadelphia in 1767 with other officers to determine where best to post the regiment, then traveled alone down to Charles Town, arriving December 11, 1767, and remaining there through April 1769. During that time, in September 1768, his regiment was posted to insurgent Boston, which, with about sixteen thousand residents, was far and away the most rebellious of American towns and was the only site of resistance that British politicians were concerned about. There were no barracks in Boston to quarter the troops, who were hated as occupiers by the townspeople. Minor street beefs became confrontations between civilians and military, who otherwise mingled in various ways. Some soldiers deserted; others supplemented their regimental pay by doing casual day labor in Boston’s ropeworks.
The twenty-one-year-old Major Butler (as he would be referred to throughout his life) had wider latitude. While in Charles Town, he caused a scandal by eloping with a fifteen-year-old heiress, but her stepfather intervened and thwarted the marriage, to the amusement of local society. When she married the following year, her fortune was quantified in the newspaper as “Thirty Thousand Pounds Sterling,” with an implicit mockery of Butler, who was reported in the same issue to be leaving town and who never quite lived down his reputation as a fortune hunter.
Broke and experiencing problems with receiving his pay, Butler returned to his regiment in Boston, at a time when the town was at a peak pitch of anticolonial furor. He was apparently present, though not in uniform, on March 5, 1770, when members of his regiment killed five people after provocation, committing what was immediately trumpeted by propagandists as the Boston Massacre, and, reported Thomas Hutchinson, brought Massachusetts to the brink of—a commonly used term at the time—“civil war.”24
Returning to Charles Town in January 1771 with only his military commission to his name—not an insubstantial holding—Butler quickly married Mary Middleton, whose deceased father, Thomas, had in the 1750s been one of the largest slave traders in Charles Town. The young heiress had received not only Middleton’s legacy, but an even larger fortune from her maternal grandmother.
It was a prosperous time for South Carolina’s businessmen, but Thomas Middleton left a legal mess behind, with much property and much debt. Butler became property manager for his wife’s portfolio, which catapulted him into the ranks of the large planters. He now owned hundreds of slaves, many of them originally kept back from general sale by Middleton, who as a slave trader had first pick and a practiced eye.
It appears that one of the first things Butler did was to put hot-iron brands on their skins. There is nothing to suggest that Butler subsequently continued this practice, but the year after his marital windfall, he advertised in the South Carolina Gazette for two runaway slaves, thanks to which advertisement we know that they wore his initials for life:
RUN AWAY
From the Subscriber’s Plantation in Prince William’s Parish,
T W O N E G R O F E L L O W S
Named MINOS, and CUDJOE; — they are both strong-made Fellows.
Minos appears to be near 40 Years old. Cudjoe about 26: — They are marked a little above the right Breast with the Letters PB …
PIERCE BUTLER.25
Despite having married into the Charles Town gentry, Butler was still an officer in His Majesty’s Army. The Crown was still giving away land to settlers counted loyal to the king, and Butler managed a substantial land grab as a Loyalist. “In the years immediately following his marriage,” writes Bell, “Pierce Butler made numerous requests for property and was awarded in excess of ten thousand acres, of which more than eight thousand was in the Carolina back country.”26 Butler, who ultimately made a considerable fortune in real-estate deals, was described approvingly in 1785 by no less a profiteer than Henry Laurens as a “great Speculator” who “loves to make money.”27 There was no question that all this land would be cleared and planted by newly arrived Africans.
Butler maintained the fiction of loyalty as long as he could, but as his regiment was preparing to ship back out to Britain, he resigned from the British army in 1773. Selling his military commission, he plowed the receipts from cashiering himself into purchasing a seventeen-hundred-acre plantation on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. With his hundreds of slaves and the excellent land he had acquired, Butler began producing rice and premium-priced long-staple cotton. His fortune was made.
He was collaborating actively with the independentists by 1775, and with the coming of the war, he became South Carolina’s adjutant general against his former army, charged with whipping a backwoods militia into shape as a military force. Keenly aware that South Carolina’s defense was obstructed by the reluctance of men to leave their homes and families unguarded against Native American attack or slave insurrection, he requested a force of five thousand troops from the North to protect the Lowcountry—from the British, officially, but also from domestic enemies.28
The Scottish naturalist Alexander Garden, who arrived in Charles Town in 1752, “had not been in South Carolina very long before he was told by both doctors and laymen of their concern that people were being poisoned by their slaves,” write Edmund and Dorothy Smith Berkeley. “It was widely believed that plant poisons were being administered in food or drink, especially in tea. When he inquired concerning what plants were suspected of being used, he found that no one had a very clear idea.”29 Dr. Garden came to the conclusion that many of the local cases of “poisoning” were actually other maladies.
It was not, however, an unfounded fear. Knowledge of poisons was the same as knowledge of medicines; both were African specialties, and there were many cases of terror by poison in the slave societies of the hemisphere, perhaps most notably the sorcerer-poisoner Makandal, counted as a foundational figure in Haitian political iconography. Regardless of whether the poisonings in Charles Town were real or imagined, they were vivid in white Charles Townians’ imaginations, as was another perceived danger: the free black and enslaved tradesmen who formed Charles Town’s artisan class had access to all sorts of potentially lethal objects. Alexander Hewatt wrote in 1779, and note the use of the word breed:
From [enslaved] labourers in the field the colonies have perhaps less danger to dread, than from the number of tradesmen and mechanics in towns, and domestic slaves. Many negroes discover great capacities, and an amazing aptness for learning trades, where dangerous tools are used, and many owners, from motives of profit and advantage, breed them to be coopers, carpenters, bricklayers, smiths, and other trades.
Out of mere ostentation the colonists also keep a number of them about their families, who attend their tables, and hear their conversation, which very often turns upon their own various arts, plots, and assassinations. From such open and imprudent conversation those domestics may no doubt take dangerous hints, which, on a fair opportunity, may be applied to their owners hurt.
They have also easy access to fire arms, which gives them a double advantage for mischief. When they are of a passionate and revengeful disposition, such domestic slaves seldom want an opportunity of striking a sudden blow and avenging themselves, in case of ill usage, by killing or poisoning their owners. Such crimes have often been committed in the colonies, and punished; and there is reason to believe they have also frequently happened, when they have passed undiscovered. Prudence and self-preservation strongly dictate to the Carolineans the necessity of guarding against those dangers which arise from domestic slaves, many of whom are idle, cunning and deceitful.30 (paragraphing added)
Out on the western edge of Anglo-American expansion, concerns were different. A 1772 panic in London’s financial markets caused widespread hunger among the poor, triggering a translatlantic exodus of Scots, Irish, and so-called “Ulster Irish” or “Scotch-Irish,” who, though often referred to simply as “Irish,” were Scots from Northern Ireland. In South Carolina, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and the German immigrants of the rugged upcountry would have loved to have had the luxury of worrying about stamps and tea, let alone plantations full of slaves. Pillaging by bandits and annihilation by the natives were daily threats to them. They had no representation in the colonial legislature, nor were they under the protection of any state. Any policing they had, they did themselves by means of regulators, practicing vigilante justice.
South Carolina’s Congress was in session in June 1775 when news of the first blood of Lexington arrived. The assembled oligarchs responded immediately; from the steps of the majestic building now known as the Old Exchange, they declared South Carolina to be the first independent provisional government. Henceforth Her Majesty’s government was disregarded by Charles Town’s political class, who considered this independence from Britain to be their second revolution, the first having been against the lords proprietors in 1719. Henry Laurens signed the document that created a thirteen-man Council of Safety and three committees: a General Committee; a Secret Committee of five persons with broad, vaguely defined powers; and a Special Committee, which was an extension of the Secret Committee and which had the repression of black people as its primary mission.
According to nineteenth-century South Carolina historian Edward McCrady, the rationale for the latter appears to have come from a private letter received from London, “intimating that a plan had been laid before the Royal government for instigating the negroes to insurrection, which seems to have been believed, and to have been regarded as more alarming because it was known that some of the negroes entertained the idea that the contest was for their emancipation. To meet, therefore, whatever might arise, a Special Committee was appointed to form such plans as they should think immediately necessary to be carried into execution ‘for the security of the good people of the colony.’”31 The Secret Committee also managed to tar and feather a couple of Roman Catholics, who, it was feared, might be in league with the “Negroes.”32
Then came the edict that shocked the slaveowners, and made clear what was at stake for them.
“Hell itself could not have vomitted anything more black,” wrote a Philadelphian in a letter published in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser.33 The proclamation by Lord Dunmore, the Scottish governor of Virginia, on November 5, 1775, read in pertinent part:
I do hereby … declare all indented Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His MAJESTY’S Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty.
I … declare all … Negroes … free. These were the words of slaveowners’ nightmares. It did not apply to those enslaved by Loyalists. At least in theory, slaveholding colonists who were not taking up arms against the king had nothing to fear, because they could stay home and keep their slaves on lockdown. But those rebels who left their plantations to fight might first find their capital running away and then find themselves facing off against the very people they had brutalized, now with guns in their hands. The insurgents responded by raiding the plantations of those they demonized as “Tories,” or Loyalists, and confiscating their slaves, who were put to military support work.
Dunmore had been thinking about this for a few years. In 1772, he had written:
At present the Negroes are double the Number of white people in this Colony, which by the natural increase, and the great addition of new imported ones every year, is Sufficient to allarm not only this Colony, but all the Colonies of America … in case of War (which may probably often happen) with Spain, or indeed any other power … the people, with great reason tremble at the facility that an enemy would find in procuring such a body of men; attached by no tye to their Masters or to the Country … by which means a Conquest of this Country would inevitably be effected in a very Short time.34
By threatening to take away the Southerners’ principal source of wealth, Dunmore’s proclamation galvanized wavering elements of the white population of Virginia and South Carolina into supporting the “patriots,” or, as the British called them, the “rebels,” who defended the idea of enslaved property. The struggle against the British in the Southern colonies became profoundly identified with the struggle of the white population against emancipation of the black population. The newspapers printed rumors that Dunmore was paying the “savages” (Native Americans) in specie to attack. “We have a right to take up arms in self-defense,” read a letter to the Virginia Gazette’s printer “Mr. Purdie” in the December 8 edition, “since we have been threatened with an invasion of savages, and an insurrection of slaves, and have had our negroes and stocks piratically taken from us.”
Dunmore was obliged to flee, retreating offshore to a flotilla of more than a hundred vessels, where he remained while the enslaved flocked by the hundreds to seek the protection of the Union Jack. Dunmore needed them; reinforcements from Britain were not forthcoming, since for reasons inexplicable to him they were sent to North Carolina instead. Almost immediately, he formed what became known derisively as Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. Their first skirmish was the Battle of Kemp’s Landing, ten days after Dunmore’s Proclamation, in which, as a correspondent for Purdie’s Virginia Gazette wrote, “23 members of the Scabby race went as volunteers, with 200 regulars.”35 The British won the battle, with the result that Colonel Joseph Hutchings of the colonial militia was taken prisoner by one of his former slaves.
On December 14, the Pennsylvania Evening Post reported that: “Late last night, a gentlewoman, going along Second street, was insulted by a negro, near Christ church; and upon her reprimanding him for his rude behaviour, the fellow replied, “Stay you d----d white bitch, till lord Dunmore and his black regiment come, and then we will see who is to take the wall.”
So it was that the rebels, patriots, insurgents, continentals, call them what you will, were at war with the British and those suspected of being loyal to them, most especially the “Negroes.” An article in the March 22, 1776, issue of Purdie’s Virginia Gazette demonstrates Dunmore’s effectiveness at getting under the colonists’ skins. Laden with racist scorn, the article not only notes the presence in Virginia of the balafon (a marimba-type mallet instrument known across a wide region of Africa), called in Virginia barrafoo, but implies that it was something familiar to the readership:*
We hear that lord Dunmore’s Royal Regiment of Black Fusileers is already recruited, with runaway and stolen negroes, to the formidable number of 80 effective men, who, after doing the drudgery of the day (such as acting as scullions, &C. on board the fleet) are ordered upon deck to perform the military exercise; and, to comply with their native warlike genius, instead of the drowsy drum and fife, will be gratified with the use of the sprightly and enlivening barrafoo, an instrument peculiarly adapted to the martial tune of “Hungry Niger, parch’d Corn!” and which from henceforward is to be styled, by way of eminence, the BLACKBIRD MARCH.
The British used armed, emancipated former slaves who knew the terrain. The most prized defectors were pilots and navigators, masters of the marshy nooks and crannies in which they had been born and raised. Others were former African soldiers. In all cases, they were highly motivated in going to war against the masters they had escaped, who might kill them, torture them, or sell them away if they were recaptured. On the other side, in South Carolina and Georgia the independentists confiscated slaves from Loyalists and put them to work as military laborers. Patriot soldiers in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia were paid with slaves; according to Malcolm Bell Jr., in Georgia slaves were given “to public officials as salary, and were exchanged for provisions for use by military units.”36
After a battle on December 29, 1778, the British took Savannah and held it until 1782, despite a thirty-two-day siege of the city that ended with a failed assault by French and American forces on October 18, 1779. Men of color had been serving as French soldiers on foreign missions since the beginning of French Antillean slavery, and the bloody siege of Savannah is rembered for the participation of the 750-man Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, a free-black volunteer corps that provided about a third of the expedition’s manpower, and in which, it is popularly believed (it may be true), future Haitian leader Henri Christophe served as a drummer boy.37
One sometimes reads that black soldiers fought on both sides in the War of Independence. That’s technically correct, but misleading. Some did fight in Northern pro-independence regiments, but in the South, where most black people were, they ran away and joined the British if they could. Both sides used mercenaries and foreign troops: in 1780, there were more Americans fighting for the British than for the Continental Army, including a number of formerly enslaved African Americans.
In the War of Independence, as in every other conflict involving slave societies, the constant potential for slave insurrection was taken into account in every military calculation. In the plantation societies, more than anywhere else, the war between Britain and the colonists was a revolutionary war—at least on the part of the formerly enslaved black soldiers, who were fighting with the British against the slaveowning Patriots for their liberty.
*Brown, along with his abolitionist brother Moses, was later a cofounder of Brown University. See Rappleye.
*The indentured servant John Harrower described a “barrafou” in 1775: “The body of it is an oblong box with the mouth up & stands on four sticks put in bottom & cross the [top?] is laid 11 lose sticks upon [which?] [the player] beats.” Harrower, 89.