Goodbye, Columbus

When America won its independence,
what became of the slaves who fled for theirs?
by Jill Lepore

What with the noise, the heat, and the danger of being forced back into slavery, sometimes it's good to get out of the city. Such, at least, was the assessment of Harry Washington, who, in July of 1783, made his way to the salty, sunbaked docks along New York's East River and boarded the British ship L'Abondance, bound for Nova Scotia. A clerk dutifully noted his departure in the "Book of Negroes," a handwritten ledger listing the three thousand runaway slaves and free blacks who evacuated New York with the British that summer: "Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago."

Born on the Gambia River around 1740, not far from where he would one day die, Harry Washington was sold into slavery sometime before 1763. Twelve years later, in November, 1775, he was grooming his masters horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty's troops in suppressing the American rebellion. That December, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore’s proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. "There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape," a cousin of Washington's wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, "Liberty is sweet." In August of 1776, just a month after delegates to the Continental Congress determined that in the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands that have connected them with another, Harry Washington, declared his own independence by running away to fight with Dunmore's all-black British regiment, wearing a uniform embroidered with the motto "Liberty to Slaves." Liberty may not have been as sweet as he'd hoped. For most of the war, he belonged to an unarmed company known as the Black Pioneers, who were more or less garbagemen, ordered to "Assist in Cleaning the Streets & Removing all Nuisances being thrown into the Streets." The Black Pioneers followed British troops under the command of Henry Clinton as they moved from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston, and, after the fall of Charleston, back to New York again, which is how Harry Washington came to be in the city in 1783, and keen to leave before General Washington repossessed it, and him.

No one knows how many former slaves had fled the United States by the end of the American Revolution. Not as many as wanted to, anyway. During the war, between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five) left their homes, running from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on a British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore's regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.) When the British evacuated, fifteen thousand blacks went with them, though not necessarily to someplace better.

From the moment that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, in 1781, American allies reported seeing "herds of Negroes" fleeing through Virginia's swamps of pine and cypress. A few made it to a warship that Washington, under the terms of the British surrender, had allowed to sail to New York. Some ran to the French, on the not unreasonable supposition that earning wages polishing shoes in Paris had to be better than planting tobacco in Virginia for nothing but floggings. "We gained a veritable harvest of domestics," one surprised French officer wrote. Hundreds of Cornwallis's soldiers and their families were captured by their former owners, including five of Thomas Jefferson's slaves and two women owned by George Washington. Those who escaped raced to make it behind British lines before the slave catchers caught up with them. Pregnant women had to hurry, too, but not so fast as to bring on labor, lest their newborns miss their chance for a coveted "BB" certificate: "Born Free Behind British Lines."

As runaways flocked to New York, or Charleston, or Savannah, cities from which the British disembarked, their owners followed them. Boston King, an escaped slave from South Carolina, saw American slave owners "seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds." A Hessian officer reported, "Almost five thousand persons have come into this city to take possession again of their former property." (It was at Washington's insistence that the names of those who boarded British ships were recorded in the "Book of Negroes," so that owners might later file claims for compensation.) In Charleston, after the ships were full, British soldiery patrolled the wharves to keep back the black men, women, and children who were frantic to leave the country. A small number managed to duck under the redcoats' raised bayonets, jump off the wharves, and swim out to the last longboats ferrying passengers to the British fleet, whose crowded ships included the aptly named Free Briton. Clinging to the sides of the longboats, they were not allowed on board, but neither would they let go; in the end, their fingers were chopped off.

But those who did leave America also left American history. Or, rather, they have been left out of it. Theirs is not an undocumented story (the "Book of Negroes" runs to three volumes); it's just one that has rarely been told, for a raft of interesting, if opposing, reasons. A major one is that nineteenth-century African-American abolitionists decided that they would do better by telling the story of the many blacks who fought on the patriot side during the Revolution, and had therefore earned for their race the right to freedom and full citizenship and an end to Jim Crow. "Not a few of our fathers suffered and bled" in the cause of American independence, Peter Williams, Jr., declared in a Fourth of July oration in New York in 1830. (Williams's own father, who had joined American troops in defiance of his Loyalist master, later managed to purchase his freedom and went on to help found the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.) When the Boston abolitionist William Cooper Nell published "The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution," in 1855, Harriet Beecher Stowe supplied an introduction:

The colored race have been generally
considered by their enemies, and sometimes
even by their friends, as deficient in energy
and courage. Their virtues have been supposed
to be principally negative ones. This
little collection of interesting incidents, made
by a colored man, will redeem the character
of the race from this misconception.

Best not to mention those who fled to the British. Having abandoned the United States, they not only were of no use in redeeming "the character of the race"; they had failed to earn the "passport" to citizenship that Nell believed patriot service conferred.

They were also too shockingly un-free to be included in grand nineteenth-century narratives of the Revolution as a triumph for liberty. As the historian Gary Nash observes in "The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution" (Harvard; $19.95), slavery is so entirely missing from those histories that "it would appear that the British and the Americans fought for seven years as if half a million African Americans had been magically whisked off the continent." In 1891, the Harvard scholar John Fiske took notice of Dunmore's proclamation in his two-volume "American Revolution," only to dismiss it. "The relations between master and slave in Virginia were so pleasant," Fiske wrote, that Britain's "offer of freedom fell upon dull uninterested ears."

It wasn't until Benjamin Quarles's landmark "The Negro in the American Revolution," in 1961, that what Harry Washington might have had to say about that became clear: Liberty is sweet. Many fine scholars have followed in Quarles's wake, but it would be fair to say that their work has yet to challenge what most Americans think about the times that tried men's souls.

With no place in any national historical narrative, black refugees of the American Revolution have been set adrift. Perhaps, then, it is hardly surprising that they have been taken up recently not by American historians but by historians of the places they went to.

Two new histories of their travels, the most ambitious yet, have just been published, one written by an Englishman, the other by an Australian. The British historian Simon Schamas "Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution" (Ecco; $29.95) follows the exiles to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone but keeps London, and English antislavery activists, at its center. Cassandra Pybus's "Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty" (Beacon; $26.95) follows them everywhere, including to the Australian penal colony of Botany Bay. She teaches at the University of Sydney.

Schama writes like no one so much as Dickens. Here is how he introduces the founder of England's antislavery movement, leaving his brother's house on Mincing Lane, "neither the worst nor the best address in the City of London," in 1765:

The door opened and out stepped an
angular man looking older than his thirty years.
His tall but meagre frame, hollow cheeks,
lantern jaw and short curled wig gave him
the air of either an underpaid clerk or an
unworldly cleric; the truth is that Granville
Sharp was something of both.

Schamas book is divided into two parts. The first part chronicles Sharp's career. With close colleagues, including the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and the former slave Olaudah Equiano, Sharp led Britain's extraordinary campaign to put an end to what he called the "Accursed Thing": human bondage. It took years, but they succeeded. England took a dramatic step toward abolishing slavery on its soil in 1772, in a landmark case in which a man named James Somerset won his freedom. In 1807, the British Parliament outlawed the slave trade. The following year, the U.S. Congress did the same. In other words, England banned domestic slavery decades before making it illegal for British merchants and ships' captains to buy and sell slaves. The United States did the reverse, outlawing the overseas slave trade in 1808 but not declaring an end to slavery until Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863.

Schama points out that news of the Somerset case, as much as Dunmore's proclamation, is what led so many American slaves to flee to British lines during the American Revolution. They wrongly believed that the Somerset judgment's nuanced and limited ruling meant that "as soon as any slave sets his foot on English ground he becomes free." For one American refugee, the link between England and liberty was so close that he renamed himself British Freedom. Or consider "Yankee Doodle, or, The Negroes Farewell to America," a minstrel song popular in London in the seventeen-eighties:

Now farewell my Massa my Missey adieu
More blows or more stripes will me e'er
take from you...
Den Hey! for old Englan' where Liberty
reigns
Where Negroe no beaten or loaded with
chains

But, more often than not, the price of British freedom was poverty. "I am Thirty Nine Years of Age & am ready & willing to serve His Britinack Majesty," Peter Anderson told a relief commission in London. "But I am realy starvin about the Streets." At the beginning of the war, Anderson had left behind his wife and three children in Virginia to join Dunmore's regiment. He was wounded, captured, and sentenced to be hanged. After six months as a prisoner, he escaped and foraged in the woods until he found his way back to the British Army. All this he endured only to land in London, reduced to begging. The commissioners were not sympathetic. "Instead of being sufferers of the wars," they concluded, black veterans had benefitted from it. Penniless they might be, but they had "gained their liberty and therefore come with a very ill-grace to ask for the bounty of government."

Not everyone who evacuated with the British sailed to England. Like thousands of white Loyalists, black Loyalists were relocated to Britain's northern colonies: mostly to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario. Some fifteen hundred settled in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, making it the largest free black community in North America. It was also a disaster. By the time Harry Washington arrived there, in August of 1783, there was nothing to eat, it was too late to plant, and the topsoil was too thin for anything much to grow. In 1789, the settlers were still starving. Boston King reported, "Many of the poor people were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life. When they had parted with all their clothes, even to their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streets, thro' hunger. Some killed and ate their dogs and cats."

Meanwhile, in London, Granville Sharp and his colleagues on the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor began making plans to send England's beleaguered blacks to Africa. This seems now, as it did to many people then, a preposterous plan, as if the slave trade could somehow be undone by this reverse voyage, settling freed slaves just a stone's throw from British slave-trading forts. While the emigrants waited on board ships in Portsmouth Harbor, the African-bornwriter and former slave Quobna Ottobah Cugoano warned that they "had better swim to shore, if they can, to preserve their lives and liberties in Britain, than to hazard themselves at sea... and the peril of settling at Sierra Leone." But sail they did. In May of 1787, nearly four hundred reached Sierra Leone, where they settled at a place they named Granville Town, and elected as their governor a runaway slave and Revolutionary War veteran from Philadelphia named Richard Weaver. Within five months, plagued by disease and famine, a hundred and twenty-two of the settlers were dead. And, just as Cugoano had predicted, some were kidnapped and sold into slavery all over again. In 1790, a local ruler burned Granville Town to the ground.

That was not to be the end of it. In the second part of "Rough Crossings," Schama turns to the journey of John Clarkson ("the 'other' Clarkson—second born, perfectly affable, sweet-tempered Johnny"), chosen by Sharp and the elder Clarkson to head a second attempt to settle Sierra Leone, this time with the "poor blacks" who had settled in Nova Scotia. In January, 1792, nearly twelve hundred black men, women, and children found berths on fifteen ships in Halifax Harbor. Among them were British Freedom and Harry Washington. Before the convoy left the harbor, Clarkson rowed from ship to ship, handing to each family a certificate "indicating the plot of land 'free of expence' they were to be given upon arrival in Africa.'"

The colony's new capital, on the Sierra Leone peninsula, was called the Province of Freedom; it did not live up to its name. There was death: along with dozens of others, Boston King's wife, Violet, died of "putrid fever" within weeks of arrival. There was intrigue: in 1792, Clarkson took what he thought would be a brief trip to England, but the colony's directors, dissatisfied with his failure to turn a profit from plantation crops, never sent him back. And there was avarice: despite the promise of free land, Clarkson's successors demanded exorbitant rents. "We wance did call it Free Town," some weary settlers wrote to Clarkson in 1795, "but since your absence we have a reason to call it a town of slavery."

By 1799, Sierra Leone's settlers had grown so discontented, so revolutionary in their rejection of the colony's tyrannical government, that they were, in the words of one London abolitionist, "as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris." The next year, a group of rebels declared independence. They were crushed. Tried by a military tribunal, they were banished from Freetown to the other side of the Sierra Leone River. In their exile, they elected Harry Washington as their leader, just months after George Washington died at Mount Vernon, having freed his slaves in his will.

Cassandra Pybus wants to rescue Harry Washington from the "callous indifference of history," to call attention to what he shared with the first President of the United States: "a commitment to the transforming ideals of liberty and self-determination." Schama is more interested in one of Harry Washington's fellow-rebels. "Rough Crossings" begins by imagining British Freedom "scratching a living from the stingy soil" of Nova Scotia and ends with his exile outside the Province of Freedom:

We can picture him surviving... on a few acres, or more likely finding a way to do business with the local chiefs. And if he did indeed cling to that name, he could only do so by not crossing the river to Freetown. For he must have understood that he had had his day. Over there, no one had much use for British freedom any more. Over there was something different. Over there was the British Empire.

But picturing British Freedom is about all that we can do; apart from his name, we know almost nothing about him. (Because Freedom renamed himself, he can't be traced in records like the "Book of Negroes.") "British Freedom's name said something important: that he was no longer negotiable property," Schama writes. Names count — they mattered to the parents who named their BB-certified daughter Patience Freeman — but sometimes names aren't enough. Among Schama's many enviable talents as a historian and as a stylist is his ability to turn a name into a meditation on liberty and empire. But the asymmetry, borne of the asymmetry of the evidence, is not without consequences: the black expatriates in "Rough Crossings" have names and ages and imagined motives, while the lantern-jawed architect of their freedom, Granville Sharp, is rendered in all his Dickensian detail. Sharp is focused; the settlers are a bit of a blur.

Pybus uses a different lens. She pays scant attention to the likes of Granville Sharp. Instead, she trails the fugitives relentlessly, including the unlucky few who, convicted of petty crimes in London, were shipped thirteen thousand miles away, to Botany Bay, a place whose staggering deprivations made it worse than London, worse than Birchtown, worse than Granville Town, worse than the Province of Freedom. Here's a hint: in 1790, the punishment for stealing food was increased from a thousand to two thousand lashes.

What Pybus offers is a collective biography, made possible through her pains-taking—breathtaking-examination of tax lists, muster rolls, property deeds, court dockets, parish records, and unwieldy uncatalogued manuscripts like the papers of General Henry Clinton. It allows her to rattle off details like this: in Botany Bay in 1788, "John Randall, the black ex-soldier from Connecticut convicted of stealing a watch chain in Manchester, was married to Esther Howard, a white London oyster seller, convicted at the Old Bailey of stealing a watch." In case it escaped your notice, that's months of eye-straining archival research on three continents in just thirty-four words. (She later, and still more casually, throws out that Randall eventually found work as a kangaroo-hunter, that by 1792 he had received a land grant of sixty acres; and that, widowed twice, he married three times and had nine children before his death, in 1822.) Men like Randall, Pybus argues, "carried to the far comers of the globe the animating principles of the revolution that had so emphatically excluded them."

Maybe. But, at journey s end, it's hard to know what to make of the travails of British Freedom or Harry Washington or John Randall To follow them is, still, to leave American history behind. The story of the British abolition movement has been elegantly told by Adam Hochschild, in "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves" (Houghton Mifflin; $26.95). It is also at the heart of an excellent new biography by Vincent Carretta, "Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man" (University of Georgia Press; $29.95). These, like Schama's and Pybus's, are rich and wonderful books. All the same, with their praise of prophets and rebels and self-made men on a global quest for liberty, some readers might conclude that English abolitionists and American runaways ought to serve as honorary Founding Fathers, as though the likes of Washington and Jefferson will no longer do. (Damn those slave-owning sons of liberty!)

In the midst of this, it's easy to forget that many eighteenth-century Americans considered the British hypocritical about slavery. After the Somerset decision, Benjamin Franklin complained:

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!

Moreover, it was far easier for Britain, where there were few slaves to begin with, to free its slaves than it was for the American colonies, where there was considerable support for ending the slave trade, something many patriots had come to see as having been imposed on them by a tyrannical king, to Britain's profit and not their own. In Thomas Jefferson's mind, promising freedom to the very people whom British slave traders had enslaved constituted George III's last, and most unforgivable, act of treachery. In a breathless paragraph at the end of his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson blamed the King for the slave trade ("He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery); for his vetoes of the colonists' efforts to abolish it ("Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce"); and for Dunmore's proclamation ("He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them").

It was the Declaration's last, longest, and angriest grievance. The other delegates could not abide it: they struck it out almost entirely. To some, it went too far; to others, it didn't go far enough. And, as everyone knew, it was they, and not the British, who were by now most vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. (As Samuel Johnson had wryly inquired in 1775, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?") Best, then, to leave slavery out altogether.

Historians have hardly known what to make of Jefferson's rant. Nash deems it "patendy false." Schama calls it a "tour de force of disingenuousness." But at least part of what Jefferson meant was that it was the Revolution itself that derailed the American antislavery movement. In the seventeen-sixties and early seventeen-seventies, the colonists were arguably more ardent opponents of slavery than the British were. In 1764, the patriot James Otis, Jr., declared that nothing could be said "in favor of a trade that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant." Not long after the Boston Massacre, in 1770, John Hancock's uncle preached a sermon urging the provincial legislature of Massachusetts to support the abolition of slavery, warning, "When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!" In April, 1775, just five days before a shot was heard round the world, Philadelphians founded the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.

By no means did everyone in the colonies oppose the slave trade, and even fewer could imagine emancipation. Still, if the patriots hadn't needed to forge a union to protect their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they might have come to some agreement on ending slavery. But uniting the colonies in their opposition to the King and Parliament meant, by 1776, putting slavery to one side. It meant editing the Declaration of Independence. It also meant that Harry Washington, and John Randall, and British Freedom, and thousands more, decided to leave. They did not fare well.