MATTHEW SPOONER
The American Revolution meant more and appeared to offer more to the nearly half million black men and women who lived and labored below Mason and Dixon’s line than it did for any other group of Americans. During the first days of the Stamp Act debates, black men and women in Charleston, South Carolina, took to their city’s streets, staking the strongest claim to the revolution’s promise with chants of “Liberty!”1 In the decade before Lexington and Concord, slaves gathered on plantations to organize flight and armed resistance: those on one Virginia plantation formally elected leaders “to conduct them when the English troops should arrive.”2 Black Americans appeared before royal governors and military officers, pledging support in exchange for freedom.3 And when the full force of war moved south, dividing white southerners and disrupting the social order that buttressed slaveholder authority, slaves asserted their claim to the revolution’s principle of liberty with their voices, their arms, and their feet. By the end of the conflict in 1783, tens of thousands of slaves from the southern states had departed America’s shores to forge new lives and new communities in places as far-flung as Nova Scotia, England, and Sierra Leone.4
This collective story of black men and women seizing the opportunities presented by war to obtain their freedom abroad or within the young United States remains the dominant historical narrative of black southerners’ experience during the revolutionary era.5 For commendable reasons, historians of the wartime South focus on men and women such as Boston King and Thomas Peters who gained their freedom through trial and heroism. Historians of the early national South tend to focus on those enslaved men and women who escaped slavery through their own actions or through manumission, while historians who focus on slaves’ experience of the War of Independence similarly tend to work from a narrative of the revolution as a moment of unprecedented resistance and opportunity.6 Still others have written on the abolition of slavery in the North or have drawn a direct line from the ideology of the American Revolution to the eventual eradication of American slavery after the Civil War.7 Yet although these stories continue to frame our understanding of black southerners’ experience of the revolution, and although the revolution is most often portrayed as an emancipatory moment, however fleeting, King, Peters, and others like them account for only a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of black men and women touched by America’s struggle for independence.8
The overwhelming majority of black southerners ended the revolutionary era as slaves: many thousands moved from slavery to freedom and then back into slavery. Rather than frame the American Revolution as an event that either strengthened slavery or marked slavery’s eventual demise (it did both), this essay tells a narrative of black Americans’ revolutionary experience as something more representative and ultimately far more tragic. The chaos of the revolutionary conflict allowed enslaved men and women an unprecedented degree of movement and as a result blurred the line between slavery and freedom, with deeply important consequences for the southern societies that emerged from the period.9 Some enslaved men and women passed through this line and remained free, and many black Americans found in the revolution political, social, and economic gains. Yet the forces that allowed the creation of the American nation and lessened the demarcation between slavery and freedom led most black men and women to experience the period as a time of tremendous hardship, of suffering as much as opportunity, of fighting to maintain the gains for which they had fought in the spaces opened by the revolution.
The stories of these southerners—as inspiring, heartbreaking, and important to this nation’s development as the stories of the relative few who gained freedom—remain largely overlooked. They have been hidden by our collective tendency to see continuity instead of rupture in the practice of slaveholding during the transition from the early national period and by our desire to recover that which was good and laudable from all that was contradictory about the revolution and its ideals. Yet southerners constructed a new society from the ashes of war through the labor of men and women who ended the period enslaved, and their stories enable us to best see how the experiences of the revolution shaped the contours of southern life in the new nation. Even if black southerners’ commitments during the War of Independence lay, in historian Benjamin Quarles’s words, “not to a place, nor to a people,” their struggles to maintain the spaces opened by the blurring of the line between slavery and freedom helped to define the contours of later debates over race and belonging in the early republic.10 More than anything, black southerners’ capacity to move across space and between slavery and freedom during the war pushed the new state governments to develop more restrictive definitions of race and citizenship. And although the enslaved people discussed in this essay were far more concerned with maintaining familial connections and personal gains than with debates over identity and nationhood, their efforts and the reactions they provoked shaped the structure of postwar slavery and of the generations of men and women who fought to end it.
For all that was beautiful about the American Revolution and its ideas, the war to secure independence was often a messy and brutal affair. Particularly in the southern states, patriot leaders struggled to control a disaffected population of loyalists and slaves and to supply a war against the world’s largest army from within an export-based economy.11 Although the war was hardly pleasant in New York and Massachusetts, after the 1778 British invasion of Georgia, the pressure of maintaining control and raising men and materiel turned the situation in the South into something more savage and ultimately more revolutionary. With the American army and the bulk of British forces contained along the coast, neither could prevent the countryside from erupting into a chaotic and full-scale civil war. American general Nathanael Greene witnessed this escalation in 1781, describing “such scenes of desolation, bloodshed and deliberate murder I never was a witness to before! . . . For the want of civil government the bands of society are totally disunited, and the people . . . have become perfectly savage.”12 Each side burned plantations, sometimes repeatedly. Neighbors were known to run one another through with swords; hangings, extralegal murders, and other forms of vigilantism also became frequent.13 Tens of thousands of slaves fled their homes, while Indians and loyalist partisans transformed the southern interior into a fractured, bloody patchwork.14
These burning plantations and battling armies, the fleeing peoples and plundering partisans, and all of the ideological and material strains of the revolution in the South created fleeting spaces in which restrictions on movement and activity among slaves allowed shades of freedom to become fluid. The conflict provided some enslaved men and women with at least temporary autonomy, whether as freedpeople, as maroons, or as slaves who moved about as if free.15 Yet the liminal spaces created by the chaos and fighting could just as often prove limiting and disrupting. The war intensified the interstate slave trade that had begun with the expansion of white settlement into the southern backcountry in the 1750s; by the end of the revolutionary era, tens of thousands of slaves were forced to leave their homes in coffles headed south and west.16 And throughout the revolutionary era, black southerners’ increased movement between slavery and freedom, between plantations, and between town and country sparked a flurry of slave conspiracies, real or imagined. As a result, the capacity of enslaved and free black southerners for movement, in both a real and abstract sense, became the most clearly contested site of struggle for black and white southerners in the early republic.
From the beginning of the conflict, the breakdown of oversight and state authority presented enslaved men and women with increased opportunities to run away, and slaves used divisions among the ruling population as opportunities for temporary or permanent freedom. The extent of disorder and infighting among southern Whigs and loyalists provided opportunity that would be unmatched until the Civil War era. By and large, most slaves who absconded during the War of Independence did so individually or en masse from neighboring plantations, a fact that suggests the pull of family ties in determining whether a given slave attempted to run to British lines. In Virginia, those planters who lost slaves tended to lose them in large groups, both at the beginning and end of the war. Slaveholders attempted to prevent escape, and the daily struggle over the movement of slaves was a highly localized and personal conflict.
Individual planters took special care to monitor their slaves, and the fact that slaves appear to have been more likely to desert larger plantations suggests the importance of planters’ steps to closely monitor their slaves: smaller slaveholders found it easier to restrict slaves’ movement and assemblage.17 In 1774, Richard Bennehan, scion of the wealthiest family in antebellum North Carolina, heard that the governor of Virginia had offered freedom to the slaves of rebels. Bennehan responded by writing to the manager of his estate, “It is said the Negroes have some thoughts of freedom. Pray make Scrub sleep in the house every night and that the overseer keep in Tom,” presumably to limit their opportunity for plotting or escape.18 Slaveholders also sought to limit the most common avenues of escape, with Georgia planter and politician Edward Telfair requesting in 1776 that his overseer provide “a guard over the row gallies . . . also, that [the] negro pilots be taken up and confined, and that some guard boat be stationed in Savannah River to prevent negroes from going down to Cockspur.” Telfair also ordered his overseer “to cause all the negro pilots belonging to him to be confined in some secure place.”19 Slaveholders understood as well the importance of kinship in facilitating or inhibiting slaves’ decision to escape, and planters such as Georgia’s Lachlan McIntosh made sure to separate slave men from women at night.20
For their part, state and local authorities worked to restrict the movement of slaves on a wider scale by increasing patrols and active militia. In particular, states devoted a significant portion of their limited resources to keeping slaves away from waterways, which provided the swiftest means of reaching British lines. State and local officials specifically instructed patrols to watch rivers and the coastline. Legislatures in Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina passed laws barring any black man from operating a boat or canoe without a white man present despite a long history of solo black pilots running cargo downriver and within harbors. Given the well-known tendency of militiamen to neglect patrol duty, by 1777 every state had also imposed heavy fines on commanders who missed patrol watch, and commanders received explicit orders and monetary incentives to apprehend slaves found out at night or “alone or in groups upon the roads of the country.”21 Following the fall of Charleston and Savannah and the scattering of state legislatures in 1779 and 1780, however, Whig leaders found their capacity to directly restrict slave movement reduced to almost nothing outside of areas controlled by the American army. By the end of the war, states could do little but encourage or tacitly allow local militia or armed bands to summarily shoot slaves found off plantation past curfew, often dismissing resulting suits from the owner of a murdered or formally executed slave, actions that in themselves encouraged the vigilantism that became widespread during the later years of the revolution.22
Despite these increased efforts by both state officials and slaveholders, the strains of controlling and containing multiple combating populations continued to open the space between slavery and freedom and allowed increasing numbers of black men and women greater self-determination and ease of movement, even if they never left their homes. Although fleeing planters and overseers generally tried to carry away what slaves they could, the haste of flight and the unwillingness of slaves to depart meant that many enslaved communities operated independently for extended periods during the war. Some planters left behind drivers or elderly slaves to tend stock or even try to raise crops.23 More often, and especially in lowcountry areas where the black population was densest and the fighting was frequent and fierce, slaves tended to themselves for weeks, months, and occasionally years. For some, this meant growing small amounts of food and remaining at home: the enslaved laborers belonging to a Georgia man named Cotter were found “living on some potatos and small amount of forage, they look half dead and are intirely in want of clotheing.”24 In other cases, small groups of slaves took advantage of the chaos of war and formed bands or communities, with varying degrees of success and organization. Dick, a man owned by Robert Carter, led “33 other slaves” to run away and hide in Virginia’s Tidewater swamps in the summer of 1781: in response, when Dick was apprehended, Carter ordered the man sold “for dear skins.”25 Although maroons often stole from nearby plantations, not hesitating to use violence when needed, they also attempted to develop self-sufficient communities, building small huts and harvesting crops on patches of dry land in swamps or on the sides of hills or mountains and sometimes sustaining themselves for years amid the disorders of war and reconstruction.26
But the forces of revolution cut both ways, especially for black southerners, and localized independence during the war came at a steep price: the same wartime conditions that allowed slaves freedom from white oversight also produced immense suffering. Black men and women were universally the last to receive a share of the South’s dwindling supply of food and other essentials. Planters turned tobacco fields to corn and potatoes to feed both white citizens and slaves, and throughout the war slaves lacked adequate clothing. Josiah Smith, a merchant who managed a rice plantation in South Carolina, complained repeatedly to his employer and to other merchants that he was unable to obtain winter clothing for his slaves for several years, “and the miserable wretches seem close to wasting away.”27 Slaves on other plantations went without new shoes for years even as their owners sought to increase output to take advantage of hefty profits to be made from supplying foodstuffs and other goods during the war.28
The same breakdown of authority that allowed autonomy and at least limited mobility for some slaves led to the forced movement of thousands of others. Roving bands of partisans and soldiers engaged in wholesale seizure of slaves and other property. In response, as states and local military forces became increasingly incapable of preventing plunder, slave flight, and marronage, slave-holders especially in the Lower South drove slaves to other areas, often hundreds of miles away. Along the way, slaves suffered from hunger and exposure and faced danger from men of both sides who plundered human property from the coffles. John Habersham, a prominent Georgia patriot leader, reported to Moravians in North Carolina that he had lost oxen and “some negroes” to a band of “Liberty men” in the backcountry town of Salisbury and several more to illness and starvation as they made their way to the relative stability of the Virginia Piedmont.29
The same ties of community and kinship that kept some groups of enslaved men and women on plantations also structured slaves’ resistance to forced removal. Slaveholders often went to great lengths to prevent slaves from learning that separation from their families and communities was imminent. South Carolina planter William Snow, for example, gave his overseer special instructions on securing slaves for removal in anticipation of the British arrival: “Get cousin Billy to bring Mathias over to your house on business, then secure him well in Tom’s care; then fetch Ben from cousin Stephen’s and Ruth at Daniel’s; these negroes, if they are not well secured, will get away. . . . [H]ave no mercy on these negroes or they will deceive you.” According to Snow, the slaves must not learn of the plan “until you are ready to set off, or the negroes will hide out of the way.” In particular, Snow warned, “If you say the least about Ruth, she will run off, for she is an arch bitch.”30 Even on the march, slaves continued to respond by running away or with violence. The men in charge of Virginia’s western lead mines, where numerous slaves were sent after having been seized, captured, or purchased by the state, complained on numerous occasions of slaves “going off with the British” or escaping beyond white settlements to the west.31 The movement of escaped slaves to strange lands might provide opportunity to slip into the space created by the constantly shifting population and claim a temporary form of half freedom while fighting raged. Chapman Badgett, for one, passed as free for six years after allegedly murdering his owner en route from Goochland County, Virginia, to Kentucky in 1775.32
The movement across the line between slavery and freedom that allowed Badgett and others to exist in a liminal half freedom also defined the experience of the tens of thousands of slaves who escaped from plantations and reached the British army during the war. Even before the arrival of peace in 1783, British officers had attempted to regulate slave movement and respect the property rights of the loyalist citizens streaming into areas held by the British army. The Board of Police, created to maintain order in British-occupied Charleston during the war, responded to Gen. Alexander Leslie’s request to deal with “that very great Inconvenience . . . found from Negroes leaving the services of their Masters and coming to the British Army.” Fearing that “many bad Consequences would most certainly arise unless they could be sent back to their Labour,” slaves in Charleston not claimed by a loyalist owner or British officer were forced to work on sequestered plantations without wages even though commanders remained unsure of the laborers’ ultimate status.33
Once the British evacuation of the South became imminent, slaves crowded into cities and attached themselves to officers or soldiers, with decidedly mixed results. Despite the historical literature’s emphasis on slaves who found freedom by escaping with the British, slaves within British lines were far more likely to be returned to slavery, either in America or abroad. The thousands of slaves who trailed Cornwallis on his slow march to Yorktown huddled in smallpox-infested camps outside the port and were seized by American soldiers and slaveholders after the general’s surrender.34 A few slaves attached themselves to sympathetic French soldiers who, much to Americans’ consternation, took the bondsmen to Philadelphia, where rumors of impending emancipation already abounded.35 General Washington, slaveholders, and state governors complained at length to French commanders “of Negroes being concealed at Williamsburg amongst the Troops” with expectations of receiving freedom. Some eventually found freedom or new masters in Pennsylvania, yet far more were eventually returned to slavery through either seizure by American forces or sale to French colonies in the Caribbean.36 Those slaves unable to leave with the French were detained around Williamsburg and Yorktown under a commission headed by David Ross. When proof of ownership was provided, slaves were returned to their owners—and their wrath.37 Ross and other commissioners then sold slaves for whom proof of ownership was not forthcoming at a series of auctions in York and Gloucester, Virginia, for current money, certificates, or other forms of depreciated wartime currency.38
Even so, after the evacuation of Savannah and Charleston in 1782, thousands of slaves made their way with the British army from the South to New York in hopes of cementing their claim to freedom. Yet there, too, slaves found that despite officers’ and British commanders’ promises, liberty was largely contingent on good fortune. Southern slaveholders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, hired “agents” to kidnap and forcibly return property rumored to be living within the city. In March 1783, one Hessian officer reported that “almost five thousand persons have come into this city to take possession again of their former property.”39 These agents dragged black men and women out of their beds at night and shackled them for the return south, an experience that Boston King, an escaped slave from South Carolina, recalled “filled us with dread and deprived us of sleep.”40 Other southern slaveholders sought to enlist the aid of delegates to the Continental Congress in returning slaves from Philadelphia before the departure of French troops suspected of keeping slaves or before a black southerner might find protection with a northern patron.41 Although Washington’s and Jefferson’s slaves avoided capture, numerous other men and women were not so lucky. A young girl named Dinah explained to a Virginia constable that after the death of her master in South Carolina, she fled to the British in Charleston, who then took her to New York, where she took up work as a cook with an officer. The officer then brought her back to Virginia before returning with her to New York, where agents captured her. They subsequently returned her to Virginia for sale, but she again found her way to New York and finally departed with the British.42
The thousands of slaves who embarked with the British army at New York, Savannah, and Charleston often experienced similarly fluid movement back and forth between freedom and slavery. According to Sylvia Frey, at least 85 percent of the black men and women who embarked did so as the property of officers or loyalists.43 Despite the fact that British officers on the ground secured the labor of escaped slaves with the promise of freedom, the British government and individual soldiers and officers remained committed to the preservation of slavery and to protecting the material interests of the country’s subjects. Indeed, during the evacuations of both Savannah and Charleston, British commanders went to extreme lengths to secure transport for human property whether or not a slaveholder or soldier could prove title. Still other slaves left with officers who had taken them as plunder in the field or employed them with the promise of freedom after the war.44 British officers and sailors also kidnapped enslaved people, one of whom had been lured on board a ship docked in Philadelphia “with promises of freedom in Antigua.”45
Regardless of how they came into the possession of fleeing loyalists or officers, however, escaped enslaved individuals left under the auspices of the British government, which took them throughout the Atlantic world. The overwhelming majority, however, went to British colonies in the Caribbean basin, where planters hoped to find land and privateers and officers expected to easily sell the slaves in their possession. Some twelve thousand enslaved individuals from the thirteen colonies went to East Florida, where a number of loyalists had relocated with their movable property to uncleared land granted them by the British government. There, slaves were almost immediately put to the backbreaking work of clearing swampland for cultivation near present-day Jacksonville. According to the governor of East Florida, Patrick Tonyn, many worked for up to two years “without provisions, money, cloathing or implements of agriculture, and in the most deplorable circumstances” in the unhealthy environs between the St. Johns and St. Marys Rivers.46
For those southern slaves taken into the Caribbean, the commitment to maintaining slavery in Jamaica, the Bahamas, and elsewhere as well as the ever-present desire for bonded labor forced many more “freed” men and women back into slavery. Frey has calculated that some sixty-five thousand slaves were brought into the port of Kingston between 1775 and 1785 alone, and many thousands more went to the relatively unpopulated Bahamas, where loyalists hoped to purchase cheap land.47 As in Florida, loyalists who procured land in the Bahamas set the black southerners they claimed to clearing swamp and forest for cultivation of tropical crops, including cotton.48 Many more black southerners, however, were sold to established Caribbean planters and found themselves in sugar fields, where their labor reduced many to a state of near death. Simon Taylor, one of the wealthiest Jamaican planters, told his agents in 1785 to stop purchasing slaves arriving from the mainland because they “are a set of soft Angola and Mundigo Negroes who are too lazy ever to provide provisions for themselves . . . & if not given themselves up [to die] they take to dirt-eating which is inevitable death.”49 In one remarkable instance, British engineer James Moncrieff appears to have taken as many as eight hundred slaves with him on a transport from Charleston to the Mosquito Coast in present-day Guatemala. Moncrieff hoped to make a fortune harvesting mahogany there, but exposure, starvation, and Indian attacks killed all but a handful within a year.50
As in the mainland colonies, the disruptions of war precluded any easy resolution to the confusion created by competing ownership claims by officers, slaveholders, and slaves themselves. However, unless they could find support from an officer or local official, slaves’ claims to freedom were invariably trumped by other claims that they were property, including claims by complicit officials happy to diminish the number of free black persons. An aide informed Tonyn “that five out of six of the Slaves in [East Florida] are held without any title deeds, and Bills of Sale were never given with the Negroes.”51 As a result, there and elsewhere officials required only the testimony of one or more white persons to establish claim to a black person’s life and body. In other words, unless they had support, slaves who understood themselves as free could be and frequently were officially reenslaved simply on hearsay. If proper testimony could not be had, white men could and did forge bills of sale or titles to the slaves they claimed.52 In several documented cases, British officers claimed as property slaves who had served the officers during the war and who had presumably assumed that they would receive freedom when the conflict ended.53 Such was the complaint made by John Cruden, the official in charge of sequestered estates who became something of a crusader for both the freedmen and his personal pocketbook after the war. Writing from the island of Tortuga, which had become a clearinghouse for slaves after the war, Cruden reported that “many Negroes the property of the inhabitants of the Southern Provinces, have been offered for sale, and by people who have no right to dispose them.” Most often, Cruden reported, these persons were indeed officers who had served in South Carolina and enticed the black persons “onto boats at the evacuation of Charles Town” by dangling a chance at freedom.54
Finally, in the clearest illustration of the movement across space and between slavery and freedom, during and immediately after the revolution a large number of the black men and women who left the South as freedpeople or as slaves found themselves returned to the United States just a few months or years later. Sometimes they were kidnapped or plundered by the same parties of “banditti” that had stolen humans during the war. Particularly notorious in the Carolina and Georgia backcountry were William Cunningham and Daniel McGirt, who led bands of black and white men who rounded up slaves and others in Florida and sold them back into Georgia and South Carolina.55 Loyalists accused another group, led by a close associate of the incoming Spanish governor, Vincent Manuel de Zespedes, of similar actions.56
More frequently, slaves were forcibly returned to the United States through sale. By the mid-1780s, the glut of loyalists arriving with many slaves and little land drove down the price of slaves in the Caribbean to a fifth of prewar levels. Rather than try to hire out their slaves or purchase land, numerous loyalists instead decided to sell their slaves back to the mainland, where demand was rapidly increasing, and use the proceeds to relocate to England. In one case, loyalist Elias Ball, one of South Carolina’s wealthiest planters before the war, tried to set up a plantation and turn a profit by moving his 175 slaves to East Florida. After that experiment failed, taking the lives of more than thirty slaves, he sold the rest of his chattel back to his cousin (also named Elias) in South Carolina.57 In another instance, agents seized slaves from Jamaica and sold them back to the Carolinas to settle debts owed by an exiled backcountry merchant, Eli Kershaw.58 In certain cases, merchants from the mainland actively sought to use their connections to loyalists to buy back departed black men and women because, as Savannah merchant Joseph Clay explained, these slaves had already been “seasoned.”59 Another four thousand men and women left Florida with slaveholders who opted to move back to America rather than leave with the British after control of the colony transferred to the Spanish.60 And in at least one case, a slave deceived by and then sold by an American sailor in Dominica requested to be returned to his master in the United States rather than remaining in the Caribbean.61
In a few cases, black loyalists were reenslaved after several years of freedom. Mary Postell ran away from her owner in South Carolina and received a certificate of freedom from British officers during the war. At the war’s conclusion, her certificate was taken, and she was ordered into the service of a loyalist, Jesse Grey, who put Postell and her children to work harvesting a small plot in East Florida. After Postell fled and again claimed freedom, she found passage to Nova Scotia, where she lived for several years before being seized and claimed by Grey and his brother, John. The Grey brothers sold Postell for one hundred potatoes to a man named Singleton, who took her from her young daughters, Flora and Nelly, and sold her in North Carolina for a mere five pounds: her struggle for freedom and years of labor had apparently left her broken.62 About the same time, Isaac Wheeler arrived in Charleston with other black men and women from Nova Scotia, where they had probably been kidnapped after living for years as freedpeople. Officials posted notice, and planters from neighboring states claimed many of the slaves. The state then gave Wheeler the unclaimed slaves to compensate him for his “service” in returning these men and women to slavery.63
As the confusion of war settled and black people’s capacity for disruptive movement lessened, white southerners worked to resolidify the peculiar institution by reaffirming the intractability of a slave’s legal status. The experience of a revolutionary war fought in the name of liberty necessarily provoked a strong and increasingly uniform reaction among white people as well as slaves. If the revolution was, as historian John Shy wrote, “a political education by military means,” then slaves learned the deepest lesson.64 At Great Bridge, Virginia, black men armed by Governor Dunmore wore sashes emblazoned with the words “LIBERTY to SLAVES.”65 At Charleston, black southerners took up arms and fought in the Black Dragoons and other black units. In some places, black men apparently even served as officers in loyalist militias.66 Everywhere, black men and women served among British or patriot armies, and everywhere slaves and freedpeople watched and listened and remembered.
Precisely because the movement of slaves across space and between slavery and freedom had been so disruptive and so central to the conflict in the South, state governments’ and slaveholders’ primary legal response to the wartime actions of black southerners was the passage of new regulations that imposed stringent new restrictions on black southerners’ mobility. In particular, these regulations sought to fix black southerners on one side of the freedom/unfreedom divide. In 1784, for example, white Charlestonians petitioned the state legislature to deal with the “numerous slaves, some falsely claiming to be FREE, who loiter in the city and refuse to return to service.”67 In rural areas, slaveholders complained that the taste of freedom during the war had eroded slaves’ willingness to work. One Georgia planter observed that “freedom has ruined these wretches,” and North Carolina planter and Anglican minister Charles Pettigrew found that he was unable to sell his unruly slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Planters there, he explained, “were too suspitious of [slaves’] Morals, when brought from the Continent,” and after hiring out several slaves for trial, Pettigrew found himself forced to try to sell them in the United States.68
Postwar legislatures also responded to the what the South witnessed during the war and very specifically sought to bolster the divide between slavery and freedom. On the one hand, within three years of the war’s end, each state responded to confusion over the status of “slaves passing as freemen” with legislation that more clearly defined both racial categories and the permanence of slaves’ status as chattel. In June 1784, the North Carolina Assembly legally cemented the “one-drop” rule in the state, determining that “every person of descent from someone with Negro blood shall be considered a Negro . . . and from a Negro and an Indian a Mestizo.”69 The South Carolina House of Assembly similarly formed a special committee in 1785 in response to a series of petitions over the increase in freedpeople, declaring a year later that it was legal for any white person to demand proof of freedom from any unfamiliar black person. If a black person did not or could not provide proof, “it shall be lawful for the Negro to be committed to jail and sold by the Sherriff, proper notice having been posted so that rightful owners may submit claim.”70 Predictably, the greatest flurry of legislation surrounding the status of black people came from Virginia, which experienced the largest increase in free black individuals as a result of the war and the Chesapeake’s transition from tobacco farming. The state declared in 1785 that “every person of whose grandfathers or grandmothers anyone is or shall have been A Negro, shall be deemed a Negro . . . and every person with one-fourth part or more of white blood, shall be a mulatto.” The same year, the state defined enslaved people as those “who were so on the first day of this Assembly, and the descendants of the females from them.”71
At the same time, states strengthened existing laws and wartime declarations intended to stop the free movement of both free and enslaved black people. The first postwar session of the Virginia Assembly passed a law declaring that “it shall be lawful for any justice of the peace to commit” black men and women “wandering through the country . . . to the gaol of his comity . . . and to confine him, her, or them in close gaol for three months,” after which they were to be sold at auction if unclaimed.72 In 1793, with the state’s free black population increasing and complaints about slaves passing as free growing louder, the governor strengthened such provisions by signing legislation that explicitly declared that all black people without freedom papers should be presumed slaves. Any black man or woman who could not produce such papers was to be detained for six months; if unclaimed at the end of that period, he or she was to be sold into slavery. The same year, in another attempt to fix black people’s status, Virginia required all free black men to register their name, age, color, wife, children, and profession with the clerk of a local court, imposing penalties of imprisonment and possible enslavement for noncompliance. And even if, as Kirt von Daacke has recently argued, black Virginians used connections among the white community to circumvent such registration laws when possible, this sort of legislation still barred unregistered slaves from accessing courts and other forms of legal recourse on their own.73
As a means of eliminating the spaces between slavery and freedom opened by the revolution, all of the southern states passed laws strengthening white southerners’ authority to proclaim black people as enslaved or free. Georgia, for example, permitted any white man to “detain a Negro found traveling at night.”74 Although sympathetic white southerners might be willing to testify to the good character and free status of black men and women, the desire to close the barrier between slavery and freedom led to the reenslavement of numerous black people claiming to be free. Advertisements posted by constables or jail keepers immediately after the war reveal countless instances in which black men or women who claimed to be free were confined and most likely sold.75 A black man in Gloucester County, Virginia, was confined as a slave in spite of the fact that he produced a signed certificate attesting to his three-year service in the Continental Army: states’ commitment to slavery trumped even revolutionary service.76
White southerners’ efforts to contain the region’s new population of free black people were most marked in North Carolina, the only state that passed wartime legislation—tellingly called An Act to Prevent Domestic Insurrections—expressly forbidding private manumission. The 1777 act permitted any white person to detain any black person claiming to be free and permitted the eventual sale of such persons.77 Yet there as elsewhere, individuals—particularly Quakers—nevertheless attempted to free their slaves, often allowing them to work for their own wages or to live as free on land allotted them by their owners despite the legal prohibitions on such activities. But as the postwar generation solidified against the growing presence of freed slaves, their position became increasingly untenable. White North Carolinians inundated the legislature with petitions against the “scurrilous practice of allowing slaves to live as free,” and in several instances slaves who had thought themselves free were reenslaved.78 In 1791, 134 men, women, and children who had been set free by North Carolina Quakers during the war were arrested, separated, and sold.79 In another case, North Carolina authorities seized a woman, Amy, after the death of her owner, Alexander Stafford, even though Amy had been living as free in Wilmington for more than a decade. Because Stafford died intestate and considerably in debt, Amy and her three daughters were auctioned off separately to cover claims on Stafford’s estate.80
The actions of the city council in Charleston, which had the largest free black population of any southern city, foreshadowed the steps taken by the region’s other municipal authorities. After patriot forces retook the city in 1782, the council responded to white residents’ fears and complaints about competition from black workers by passing numerous restrictions and levying onerous fines on black tradesmen. A 1783 ordinance required all enslaved and free black tradespeople to purchase badges, a visible marker that indicated a person’s location relative to the divide between freedom and unfreedom. Wilmington, North Carolina, passed a similar ordinance, requiring free black residents to register with their counties and wear a “badge of cloth . . . to be fixed on the left shoulder, and to have thereon wrought in legible capital letters the word FREE.”81 The badges remained a mark of Charleston society through the Civil War and have now become expensive artifacts. Their cost varied depending on trade, with some, such as forty shillings hard money for butchers, seemingly prohibitively expensive.82 The city also passed ordinances at the end of the war imposing a curfew on all black residents, slave or free. Slaves who ran afoul of the badge requirement or the curfew faced heavy fines and reenslavement if they could not pay.83
Beginning in the early 1790s, a wave of insurrection scares, both real and imagined, swept across the southern states, culminating in Gabriel’s Rebellion in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. Historians have attributed this increasingly violent and outspoken resistance to the growth of urban populations of freed black people and particularly to information arriving from Saint-Domingue, where slaves and free black persons had begun a successful revolt in 1791.84 And, indeed, the Haitian Revolution left an indelible imprint on the minds of both slaves and terrified slaveholders.85 Yet the brief stories of enslaved southerners such as Chapman Badgett, Amy, and Mary provide a new context for understanding black southerners’ decision to take up arms for their freedom. As authorities closed the fissures in society and tried to contain the most radical impulses of the revolution, black people sought to maintain the spaces between slavery and freedom that had opened during the fighting. Having been touched by the revolution and heard in taverns and on farms that all men are created equal, black men and women faced an increasingly stark choice. As one slave, Glasgow, who was hanged alongside Gabriel declared, “Yes, I have a rose for my freedom, and I have never got it but, damn it, I will either die or be free.”86
1. Peter H. Wood, “‘Taking Care of Business’ in South Carolina: Republicanism and the Slave Society,” in The Southern Experience in the American Revolution, ed. Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 277.
2. James Madison quoted in Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 53.
3. Dunmore’s 1775 proclamation was inspired by the scores of slaves who had gathered in front of his mansion in Williamsburg during the months before the governor’s flight in November 1775. See John Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2007), 38.
4. For various estimates on slave desertions and deaths, see David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, ed. Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1990), 1:174; Frey, Water from the Rock, 211; Cassandra Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June 2005): 243–64.
5. Important exceptions exist, but examples of this trend include many of the best works on the period. See Frey, Water from the Rock; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon, 2006); James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
6. The titles of the most important books on this subject highlight their emphasis. See Ira Berlin, “The Revolution in Black Life,” in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred P. Young (DeKalb: University of Northern Illinois Press, 1976), 349–81; Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Frey, Water from the Rock; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom; Walker, Black Loyalists; Egerton, Death or Liberty.
7. See Zilversmit, First Emancipation.
8. Boston King, perhaps the most famous of the black loyalists, related his story in a 1798 autobiography, Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher, Written by Himself, during His Residence at Kingwood-School (excerpted in Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Vincent Carretta [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003], 351–68).
9. For the importance of movement as a point of both control and resistance, see Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
10. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1961), vii.
11. The Continental Army alone consumed more than nine hundred thousand pounds of flour and eight hundred thousand pounds of fish and meat every month in 1778. See James A. Henretta, “The War for Independence and American Economic Development,” in The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period, 1763–1790, ed. Ronald Hoffman, John J. McCusker, Russell R. Menard, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, 1988), 45–87.
12. Quoted in Frey, Water from the Rock, 133.
13. For example, after the war, neighbors lynched a loyalist named Love who had slain wounded rebels after a skirmish. See Aedanus Burke to the Governor, December 14, 1784, in Aedanus Burke Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
14. With notable exceptions, historians tend to downplay or entirely ignore the chaotic events in the southern theater. For a fuller treatment of this argument, see Matthew Spooner, “Origins of the Old South: The Reconstitution of Southern Slavery, 1776–1800” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2015); Matthew Spooner, “The Problem of Order and the Transfer of Slave Property in the Revolutionary South,” in The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Michael Zuckerman and Patrick Spero (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 231–50.
15. A 1781 petition from Virginia’s Henrico County complained to the state legislature that residents had “reason to believe that a great number of slaves which were taken by the British Army are now passing in this Country as free men” (quoted in Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 18).
16. Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1990), chap. 2; Gregory O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 267–83.
17. Compiled from Papers of the Loyalist Claims Commission, National Archives, Kew, England, AO12.
18. Richard Bennehan to James Martin, February 15, 1776, Cameron Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; also quoted in Peter H. Wood, “Liberty Is Sweet: African-American Freedom Struggles in the Years before White Independence,” in Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 179.
19. “Notice of Edward Telfair, Esq,” 1776, in The Revolutionary Records of the State of Georgia, ed. Allen D. Candler (Atlanta: Franklin-Turner, 1908–10), 1:184.
20. See Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 216 n. 43.
21. Patrick Henry, Circular Letter, 1775, in William Augustine Washington Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Levying heavy fines on patrollers is an excellent example of states increasing enforcement of existing laws as well as passing new restrictions in response to perceived wartime threats. See also William P. Palmer, ed., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts (Richmond: Goode, 1883), 3:481.
22. Georgia offered bounties of four pounds for the head of a slave who was “making resistance.” See “Journal of the Commons House of Assembly,” in Revolutionary Records, ed. Candler, 14:292–93.
23. Samuel Stiles of Georgia, for example, wrote in 1779 that he had left “Primis and Parker and old woman named Doll to look after my stock and everything” on his Ogeechee plantation. See Samuel Stiles to William Telfair, February 21, 1779, Edward Telfair Papers, Rubenstein Library.
24. Joseph Clay to Mr. Cotter[?], Joseph Clay Letterbooks, II, microfilm, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah.
25. Robert Carter to William Prescott, April 16, 1782, Robert Carter Letterbooks, Rubenstein Library.
26. Josiah Smith complained of violence and “Depredations” committed by “the Marronage Negros” around Charleston who in one February 1780 raid beat a local minister to death. See Josiah Smith to Dr. J. J. Tubby, August 22, 1780, Josiah Smith Letterbooks, Southern Historical Collection. The most extensive study of maroon activity during the revolution can be found in Hugo Prosper Leaming, “Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1979).
27. Josiah Smith to George Appleby, December 2, 1780, in Josiah Smith Letterbooks.
28. Bennehan’s plantation ledger shows shoe purchases from 1773 to 1778 and 1783 to 1786, but none for the intervening years, when fighting was fiercest. See “Slave Ledger,” Cameron Family Papers.
29. Adelaide L. Fries, ed., Records of the Moravians of North Carolina (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1930), 4:1542.
30. William Snow to Mr. Rhoades, September 1, 1781, Francis Marion Papers, Special Collections, New York Public Library, New York.
31. Palmer, Calendar of Virginia State Papers, 8:77, 79, 98, 113, 156, 183.
32. Virginia Gazette, February 3, 1781.
33. “At a Council held at the Commandants, Tuesday, June 13 1780,” in “Records of the Board of Police,” microfilm, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston. For information on sequestered estates, see Jeffrey J. Crow, “What Price Loyalism? The Case of John Cruden, Commissioner of Sequestered Estates,” North Carolina Historical Review 58, no. 3 (July 1981): 215–33.
34. For the ghastly effects of smallpox on slaves with the British, see Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
35. Governor Harrison to General Washington, July 11, 1782, in Official Letters of the Governors of Virginia, vol. 3, The Letters of Thomas Nelson and Benjamin Harrison, ed. H. R. McIlwaine (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1929), 265–66.
36. Governor Harrison to Count Rochambeau, June 26, 1782, and Governor Harrison to the Virginia Delegates in Congress, July 6, 1782, both in ibid., 257–58, 260.
37. Slaveholders in older planting areas quite often sold returned slaves westward or to the Caribbean rather than attempting to reincorporate those seen as rebellious. In 1783, for example, William Camp of Virginia sold “my wench Elsa” who had “been with the British” for “70 pounds in land” to a trader sailing to the Caribbean. See Bill of Sale, Corbin Family Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
38. “After Orders, Oct 25, 1781,” Anthony Wayne Orderly Book with Washington’s Army, Huntington Library, Pasadena, Calif. Ross put notices for the slaves in Virginia newspapers: see, for example, Virginia Gazette, January 5, 1782.
39. Quoted in Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 63.
40. Ibid., 65–67.
41. Governor Harrison to the Virginia Delegates in Congress, July 6, 1782, in Official Letters, ed. McIlwaine, 260.
42. Virginia Gazette, March 16, 1782.
43. Frey, Water from the Rock, chap. 6.
44. Overseeing the evacuation of Charleston, Alexander Leslie wrote that he apprehended “a number of Negroes the property of citizens of Persons in this Province, which were allowed as servants to the officers, . . . are now embarked on board the different transports” leaving the city (Alexander Leslie to General O’Hara, May 3, 1782, General Alexander Leslie Letterbooks, New York Public Library).
45. William Brownson and George Wald to Unknown, August 13, 1782, Telfair Papers.
46. Patrick Tonyn quoted in Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011), 97.
47. Frey, Water from the Rock, 182–83.
48. Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, A Memoir on the Origin, Cultivation, and Uses of Cotton, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time (Charleston: Miller & Browne, 1844), 198–99.
49. Quoted in Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 258–59. Dirt eating, frequently reported among newly landed slaves, seems to have resulted from severe nutritional deficiencies.
50. Greg Elliot to James Moncrieff, September 23, 1783, “Memorial of Moncrief to the Right Honourable Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury,” [1780s], James Moncrieff Papers, William Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
51. James Hume to Patrick Tonyn, July 26, 1784, in Joseph Byrne Lockey, ed., East Florida, 1783–1785: A File of Documents Assembled, and Many of Them Translated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 328–31.
52. Francis Philip Fatio to Vincent Manuel de Zespedes, August 30, 1784, in ibid., 121–23.
53. Claim of William Hunter, Papers of the Loyalist Claims Commission, National Archives, Kew, England, P/O 882; Carole Watterson Troxler, “Re-Enslavement of Black Loyalists: Mary Postell in South Carolina, East Florida, and Nova Scotia,” in Acadiensis 37, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 70–85.
54. John Cruden to C. Nisbet, March 25, 1783, Guy Carleton Papers, New York Public Library.
55. Both Cunningham and Girt eventually were exiled to New Providence along with slaves whom they had presumably taken during or immediately after the war. See Vincente Manuel de Zespedes to Bernando de Galvez, August 9, 1784, in East Florida, ed. Lockey, 243.
56. Memorial of John Fox, July 25, 1785, in ibid., 667–68.
57. William Henry Siebert, ed., Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785: The Most Important Documents Pertaining Thereto Edited with an Accompanying Narrative (Deland: Florida State Historical Society, 1929), 126–27.
58. William Cumine to John Chesnut, September 12, 1784, John Chesnut Papers, South Carolina Historical Society.
59. Joseph Clay to Edward Telfair, December 6, 1784, Joseph Clay Letterbooks.
60. Lockey, introduction to East Florida, 10.
61. On January 6, 1778, Charles Winstone wrote to James Irvin, “I take the Liberty of informing you, that on Sunday last the 4th inst I was lucky enough to secure for you a Negro Man named Sharpe, who tells me he is your property—he was on board of a French Packet Boat bound for Martinique to Guadaloupe, under the care of an American Sailor, who I suspect intended to dispose of him at the last mentioned island. The fellow informs me, he was taken in your Shallop returning to Granada, after he had been at St Vincent, by an American Privateer and carried into St Lucia, that he was afterwards carried to Martinique, and from thence was going to Guadaloupe. That he was under the care of the American Sailor, who pretended to have purchased him from one Munro the Captain of the Privateer. Sharpe Himself made the discovery in consequence of which it came to my knowledge, and as the King’s Solicitor General of this Island I thought it my Duty to interfere” (Charles Winstone Letterbook, Clements Library).
62. Troxler, “Reenslavement of Black Loyalists.” Troxler’s short but excellent article covers new and important ground and deserves wider attention.
63. Letters Concerning the Negroes from Nova Scotia, 1785–86, General State Assembly Records, Legislative Papers, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh. Wheeler’s acquisition of the slaves is mentioned in Richard Caswell to “Dear Sir,” July 10, 1786, Letters Concerning the Negroes from Nova Scotia, 1785–1786, General State Assembly Records, Legislative Papers, North Carolina State Archives.
64. John Shy, “The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” in Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 121–56.
65. Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 38.
66. After the war, the widow of a loyalist petitioned against the confiscation of her property by saying that her husband “accepted the Command of the Goosecreek Company [of loyalist militia] Chiefly to prevent its being given to a black man” (Petition of Mary Brown on Behalf of Archibald Brown, February 15, 1783, in The State Records of South Carolina: Journals of the House of Representatives, 1783–1784, ed. Theodora J. Thompson and Rosa S. Lumpkin [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press for the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1977], 144–45).
67. Memorial of the Inhabitants of Charleston, August 4, 1784, in Petitions to the General Assembly, Legislative Papers 1782–1866, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia.
68. Charles Pettigrew to Mary Pettigrew, March 11, 1785, Pettigrew Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection.
69. Walter Clark, ed., Colonial and State Records of North Carolina (Goldsboro, N.C.: Nash, 1899), 17:284.
70. Lark Emerson Adams, ed., Journal of the House of Representatives, 1785–1786 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1979), 327.
71. Acts of the Virginia Assembly, chaps. 77–78, in Jane Purcell Guild, The Black Laws of Virginia (1936; Berwyn, Md.: Heritage, 2012), 62, 84.
72. An Act to Strengthen an Act for the Regulation of Slaves, 1783, in William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 (Richmond, Va.: Cochran, 1823), 9:23–25.
73. Kirt von Daacke, Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 19–23. See also Gerald Mullin’s aged but still valuable Flight or Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), especially chaps 6–8.
74. Candler, Revolutionary Records, 3:421.
75. See, for example, Charleston Evening Gazette, October 14, 1783; Georgia Gazette, February 2, 1784; Virginia Gazette, December 12, 1783.
76. Virginia Gazette, January 13, 1784.
77. “An Act to Prevent Domestic Insurrection, and for Other Purposes,” in Colonial and State Records, ed. Clark, 9:288–89.
78. Petition of the Citizens of Wilmington, April 23, 1786, in General State Assembly Records, Legislative Papers, North Carolina State Archives.
79. See “A List of Emancipated Blacks, Taken Up and Sold by Order of the County Courts of Pasquotank, Perquimons and Chowan, in Consequence of Several Acts of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, since the Passing of the First Act in the Year 1777, to the Present Time,” in James Iredell, Laws of the State of North-Carolina (Edenton, N.C.: Hodge & Wills, 1791), 637–38.
80. “Petition of Joseph White, Administrator of All and Singular the Goods of Alexander Stafford, Late of the County of Perquimany,” in General State Assembly Records, Legislative Papers, North Carolina State Archives.
81. Jeffrey J. Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802,” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 1 (January 1980): 93.
82. City ordinances published in Charleston Evening Gazette, July 28, 1786. See also Harlan Greene, Harry S. Hutchins Jr., and Brian E. Hutchins, Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina, 1783–1865 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008).
83. H. M. Henry, Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina (Emory, Va.: n.p., 1914), 47.
84. For the influence of urban connections and of the Haitian Revolution on Gabriel’s Rebellion, see Douglas Egerton’s excellent book, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). See also James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
85. For broad analyses of America’s reaction to the Haitian Revolution, see Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); James Alexander Dun, “Dangerous Intelligence: Slavery, Saint Domingue, and the Haitian Revolution in the Early American Republic” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2011).
86. Glasgow quoted in Peter J. Albert, “The Protean Institution: The Geography, Economy, and Ideology of Slavery in Postrevolutionary Virginia,” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1976), 217.