Writings on African American Participation in the American Revolution (1775-1781)

Yale University Press

Chapter Title: Arming Slaves in the American Revolution Chapter Author(s): PHILIP D. MORGAN and ANDREW JACKSON O’SHAUGHNESSY

Book Title: Arming Slaves Book Subtitle: From Classical Times to the Modern Age Book Editor(s): CHRISTOPHER LESLIE BROWN, PHILIP D. MORGAN Published by: Yale University Press. (2006) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq3ct.12

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180

Arming Slaves in the American Revolution

p h i l i p d . m o r g a n and

a n d r e w j a c k s o n o ’ s h a u g h n e s s y

The American Revolution occasioned major innovations in the military use of slaves throughout the Atlantic world. The role of slaves in the Revolu- tionary War in North America is well known, but the tendency to treat the thirteen mainland colonies in isolation has obscured the significance of the war for the arming of slaves.∞ Only when we incorporate the other British Atlantic colonies does the scale of the practice become fully apparent. Indeed, the war had more profound consequences for arming slaves in the British Caribbean than anywhere else in the Americas. The British evacuation of slave troops in the southern states led to the establishment of the first permanent peacetime army garrisons composed of slave soldiers, called the South Caro- lina Pioneer Corps. It became the foundation of the West India Regiments, which formed the largest slave army of any European power between 1794 and 1833.

Powerful inducements encouraged the use of slaves as soldiers. The exigen- cies of war, typically shortages of manpower, made it a useful expedient. This need was especially true in the Caribbean, where warfare was perennial, slaves composed a high proportion of the population, and mortality rates were cata- strophic among regular soldiers from Europe. Colonial officials and military commanders had long observed that black troops seemed more immune to tropical diseases than European troops. They crudely calculated that using

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The American Revolution 181

black soldiers would spare the lives of white troops and cut the considerable cost of garrisons. Furthermore, slaves were familiar with local terrain, result- ing in their frequent use as scouts. Some commanders regarded blacks not only as highly effective but as superior to white troops. They also appreciated the potential to divide and rule by selectively recruiting trusted slaves to encour- age loyalty and to provide incentives in a system otherwise dependent pri- marily on coercive authority.

Another factor recommending slaves for military service was their prior experience in Africa. Rather than see slaves as dishonored captives, some whites pragmatically valued them as ex-soldiers. At no time was this recogni- tion more explicitly stated than in 1696, when the directors of the Dutch West India Company told their representative in Curaçao to consider arming newly arrived African slaves. ‘‘Since we have been told that the Negroes shipped there [Curaçao], and in particular the Angolans, are men who have served in wars in their country, and know how to handle a gun,’’ the Dutch officials noted, ‘‘we think that we could and should seize this opportunity to supply weapons to these Negroes, each according to his own skill, and have them exercise continually in the European fashion, along with our own militia.’’ The governor of Curaçao seems not to have followed these directions, but that they were made at all is striking. African groups other than Angolans also gained a reputation for military prowess. In the Caribbean, many so-called Coromantees, Akan-speaking peoples from the Gold Coast, had military ex- perience, which may well account for the familiarity with guns and even can- non that they showed in late seventeenth-century Jamaican rebellions. In 1675 a Barbadian governor described Coromantees as ‘‘warlike.’’ A direct connec- tion can be drawn between the leaders of the Akan state of Akwamu, captured in war between 1730 and 1732, and the slave revolt of 1733 in the Danish West Indies. In short, many slaves had served in African armies prior to their enslavement, and, as ex-soldiers and veterans of African wars, they probably needed little encouragement to serve again. Some of the tactics of maroons and other rebellious slaves—small bands, skirmishing, close combat—may owe something to homeland experiences. Military service abroad was a significant theme of the African diaspora.≤

Although the reasons for using slaves as soldiers were compelling, their employment raised fundamental problems for the plantation system. The very conditions that made the arming of slaves necessary, in particular acute short- ages of white manpower, also made it a dangerous expedient in the perception of slaveowners. Apart from that pragmatic and seemingly crucial reason for not arming slaves, other rationales were at hand. The arming of slaves contra- dicted the alleged inferiority of blacks and undermined the racial myths that

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182 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

justified slavery. Since the slave was, in theory, a socially dead person, often a captive in warfare and a defeated enemy, many planters considered it anath- ema to convert slaves into warriors. Soldiers supposedly possessed the quali- ties of honor and courage, and slaves were the dishonored par excellence. Making soldiers of slaves, then, seemed a contradiction. In the harsh, exploit- ative slave societies of the New World, military slavery could never be a central institution, and slaveowner opposition to the arming of slaves was always intense in the Americas.≥

The American Revolution was, in many ways, an unpropitious moment to consider arming slaves. The size of the slave population and the proportion of slaves in the larger colonial populations were greater than at any time in the history of British America. Furthermore, planters were especially fearful of rebellion owing to the dislocation caused by the war and the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty. Some Caribbean planters blamed the spread of revolution- ary ideals from America for the major slave rebellion in Jamaica in 1776. They suspected that household slaves overheard their masters debating the merits of the revolutionary cause and toasting liberty with too much fervor. The com- batants on both sides risked alienating the support of whites in the southern and island colonies by using slaves as soldiers. The British use of slaves as soldiers caused many white colonists to become patriots in plantation societies such as Virginia. The regular British army garrisons and local militia in the Caribbean were insufficient to resist external attack, let alone a simultaneous large-scale internal slave revolt during the American Revolution.∂

Yet the American Revolution was a decisive turning point in the arming of slaves in the Americas, especially in the British Caribbean. True, the arming of slaves was never part of a deliberate or concerted policy but rather was warily adopted as an urgent measure in response to a crisis. Furthermore, important precedents, outlined in the first part of this chapter, existed from the earliest times of European expansion, culminating in the Seven Years’ War. To put the revolutionary experience in perspective requires a cursory overview of the colonial experience. Nevertheless, the American Revolution occasioned major innovations in the arming of slaves, in the functions they performed, and in the scale of their operations. These radical changes become particularly evi- dent when developments in the Caribbean and North America, places that were deeply connected but often treated separately in historiographies, are linked. Events in one region had repercussions in the other. We therefore treat the two regions in turn, but always with an eye toward the intersec- tions and connections between the two. Piers Mackesy, who wrote one of the few histories of the American War for Independence that is not exclusively centered on the North American theater, claims that ‘‘the American War had

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been largely fought and decided in the Caribbean.’’ The Caribbean is vital to the Atlantic story we wish to tell.∑

A tradition of arming slaves arose with the beginnings of settlement in the Americas, but the practice was more limited in scope and scale—indeed was often about disarming—than it was during the American Revolution. Fol- lowing the metropolitan example in denying guns to potentially dangerous groups, all colonial legislatures passed laws aimed at keeping most slaves unarmed. Acts that were on the books to deny arms to indentured servants (and other groups, such as Catholics) were easily modified and extended to slaves. The first law to forbid slaves in the British Atlantic world to bear arms was probably the 1661 Barbados law directing slaveowners to search the houses of slaves fortnightly for ‘‘clubs, wooden swords, or other mischievous weapons.’’ No doubt the act enshrined customary practice, for Richard Ligon, who lived on the island between 1647 and 1650, observed that Barbadian slaves were ‘‘not suffered to touch or handle any weapons.’’ Other island and mainland colonies followed the Barbadian example: in 1680 Virginia pro- hibited ‘‘Negroes’’ from carrying clubs, swords, guns, or other weapons of defense or offense. Both the French Code Noir of 1685 and the Spanish Code of 1680 forbade slaves to carry arms.∏

Laws categorically denied slaves access to guns, and yet in emergencies many slave societies employed slaves as soldiers. Slave soldiers were less com- mon in North America than in the Caribbean, but in frontier regions every- where, at sea, and on many an individual plantation or farm, slaves often had a surprising degree of access to firearms and weapons of many sorts. It is a gross exaggeration to say, as Michael Bellesiles has done, that slaves ‘‘did not have a single gun.’’ Perhaps precisely because whites denied guns to slaves, bondmen valued all the more their possession of such banned items. Further- more, at least some slaves’ access to guns was routine, a regular occurrence. An inherent ambiguity therefore existed in colonial society between keeping firearms out of the hands of slaves and arming them whenever it seemed necessary or useful. And some slaves plainly armed themselves, without any assistance from, or in opposition to, whites.π

At the same time that whites generally attempted to deny firearms to their slaves, they were always willing to make exceptions. The Spanish were pio- neers in this regard, launching, for example, an attack on Providence Island in 1640 with a force that included a small group of ‘‘Mulatoes and Black cre- oles.’’ The Dutch, also always lacking men, were not very far behind the Spanish in the military use of blacks. But in both cases slaves do not appear to have been greatly used as soldiers because free blacks and mulattoes were

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184 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

available and proved a far more palatable source of military personnel. By the mid-seventeenth century free blacks and mulattoes were serving in formally organized militias throughout the Spanish New World.∫

In the Caribbean, a cockpit of imperial rivalry, with warfare endemic and deadly diseases frequent, the military use of slaves was nigh essential. The English pioneer was once again Barbados, where the recruiting and arming of slaves began in the 1660s, just when whites were leaving the island in droves. About a third of the men mobilized during alarms, such as an imminent- seeming French attack of 1707, appear to have been slaves. In 1702 Bermuda’s militia numbered 750 whites and 600 slaves, the latter armed with lances; they marched, wheeled, and advanced in formation together. In 1742 more than one thousand ‘‘Armed Negroes’’ were present on Antigua. The French islands seem to have gone further than the English ones in arming slaves, probably because the French colonists were outnumbered by the English and had little military support from the metropolis, at least before 1744.Ω

Military expeditions in the Caribbean relied on slaves primarily as auxili- aries like those sent alongside fourteen thousand soldiers from Britain and North America against Spain’s Central American and Caribbean empire in 1740–41. According to complaints, a few ‘‘old worn-out’’ blacks from Mary- land were pressed to fill the ranks of the three thousand or so North American troops raised for this expedition. But so-called baggage negroes, raised in the Caribbean, were deemed vital to the success of the expedition—although there was an issue of how many could be managed. In 1741 General Went- worth and Admiral Vernon, the leaders of the expedition, rejected an offer by the Jamaican Assembly to provide five thousand slaves for the army on Cuba because they did not believe they could control that number of slaves in hostile territory. Instead, they agreed to accept only one thousand. Most worked in an unarmed capacity as pioneers or drudges rather than as ‘‘shot negroes,’’ as they were popularly known, but at least one-third of five hundred slaves raised in Jamaica were so termed and so used. A limited precedent for arming inde- pendent ad hoc black corps for service abroad did, then, exist, early in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean.∞≠

Among the British mainland colonies, greater security and insulation from foreign attack, a much healthier environment, and a larger white population than existed in the Caribbean meant that there was much less military use of slaves. One exception to the extremely limited deployment of armed slaves on the mainland was the lower South, a region that resembled the Caribbean in being more exposed to enemy incursions and having a large slave population. South Carolina experimented with the arming of slaves during Queen Ann’s War and the Yamassee War, and in 1739 the threat posed by Spanish St.

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Augustine led South Carolina again to empower militia captains to enlist ‘‘recommended’’ slaves, since some slaves had shown ‘‘faithfulness and cour- age.’’ A year later, in an expedition aimed at conquering the St. Augustine garrison, General James Oglethorpe proposed extensive use of slaves as pio- neers, although he did arm a few slaves and put them in companies. There- after, South Carolina never again publicly armed slaves during the colonial period, although in 1747 the assembly passed a law allowing the drafting of slaves during emergencies, during the Cherokee War of 1760 a motion to arm four hundred blacks lost by only one vote in the assembly, and as late as 1770 Governor William Bull estimated that the militia could be ‘‘reinforced with a number of trusty negroes (and we have many such) not exceeding one-third of the corps they are to join.’’∞∞

If the arming of slaves occurred most significantly in emergencies and crises, routine, regular usages also took place. Armed slaves seem to have been com- mon on slaving vessels and on the African coast. Slaves and free blacks also gained knowledge of arms by serving on privateering, naval, merchant, and even pirate vessels. Individual masters always reserved the right to arm their slaves, no matter what the public policy stated, and their actions sometimes got them into trouble. In frontier regions, where defense and game hunting were important concerns, planters generally had the right to arm their slaves. Thus in Virginia, slaves on frontier plantations could use guns, but the master was supposed to procure a permit or license for the armed slave.∞≤

In short, before the American Revolution, slaves had greater access to guns than laws often suggested, although that access was always limited. One of the best insights into the surprisingly widespread availability of firearms among New World slaves is the archaeological evidence from slave sites. Almost all have produced evidence of lead shot, gunflints, and, in some cases, gun hard- ware. A rather remarkable example of the general distribution of arms among Chesapeake slaves was a discovery made in one county on the eve of the Revolution: a Committee of Inspection collected about ‘‘eighty Guns, some bayonets, swords, etc.’’ from their slaves. Nevertheless, undoubtedly only a minority of slaves ever had access to guns. Only about 1 percent of runaway slaves in either Virginia or South Carolina, and only four known colonial Georgia fugitives, had weapons. When slaves rose in revolt, generally they used clubs, staves, hoes, axes, bills, or their bare hands—much in the same way that European and American rioters and rebels wielded stones, clubs, and farm implements.∞≥

Whites always revealed great ambivalence about arming their slaves. To be sure, evidence accumulated that slaves could be trusted and fought well, as did the slaves who defended Providence Island against the Spanish in 1640–41

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186 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

and St. Christopher and Nevis against the French in 1706. In 1740, after praising his free black militiamen for warding off an English attack, the gover- nor of St. Augustine noted that ‘‘even among the slaves a particular steadiness has been noted, and a desire not to await the enemy within the [fort] but to go out to meet him.’’ Other Europeans were less sure and described slave soldiers on occasion as either cowardly or insolent. Even advocates of arming slaves expressed uncertainty. When in 1734 Governor William Mathew of Antigua proposed arming one thousand slaves, he labeled the move a ‘‘dangerous experiment.’’ Perhaps the census takers in Tobago best summarized conven- tional thinking when, in 1773, they distinguished 96 percent of slaves as ‘‘not to be trusted with arms.’’ Some whites were prepared to trust a tiny minority of slaves—one in twenty-five, in this instance—with arms. Many planters were not willing to go that far∞∂

The war that crystallized the ambivalence about arming slaves most acutely was the Seven Years’ War, or the French and Indian War. Fred Anderson has described this war as ‘‘the most important event to occur in eighteenth-century North America.’’ It was, of course, a world war—a great war for empire— in the limited sense applicable to eighteenth-century warfare. Viewed from places outside the thirteen mainland colonies, Anderson claims, ‘‘the Seven Years’ War was far more significant than the War of American Independence.’’ In North America, black enlistments were uncommon and slave enlistments rare. Only a handful of the twelve hundred provincial troops in Virginia in 1756 and 1757 were black or mulatto. Especially in the plantation regions of North America, white leaders were more concerned about a possible slave rebellion than about French and Indians on the frontier. In Virginia the pri- orities were evident in the military appropriation for 1756: more than half went to the militia, the agency for controlling slaves, and less than half to the Virginia Regiment, in charge of defending the frontier. In the same year, Charles Pinckney argued that South Carolina’s militia could not be relied on to perform any duty except keeping slaves in order.∞∑

In the Caribbean, the ambivalence about arming slaves was most acute because there the need for armed slaves was all the more imperative. The Seven Years’ War in the Caribbean was most notable for the arming of inde- pendent ad hoc black corps for service abroad. There were precedents, as in Vernon’s expeditions, but now the greater scale of the conflict necessitated a greater involvement of slaves and free blacks. Thus, slaves served under Major-General Peregrine Hopson in the conquest of French Guadeloupe in 1759 and under Major-General Robert Monckton at Martinique in 1761. The expedition against Cuba was an even more massive undertaking in which the importance attached to the black forces is captured by a remark of Com-

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modore Augustus Keppel, second in command of the naval force employed in the attack against Havana: ‘‘The more Negroes we have the better.’’ In Cuba after the war, the Spanish military enlarged its use of slaves and created a company of one hundred black slaves to work in the artillery, especially in the ammunition and storage sections. These experiments in free black corps and extensive use of slave enlistments would serve as precedents during the Ameri- can Revolution.∞∏

In summary, some colonial slaves regularly had access to guns, and many slaves, particularly in the Caribbean, frontier, and maritime settings, quite often played a secondary and subordinate role in armed warfare. To stress how much a radical departure arming slaves was from so-called civilized prac- tice, how exceptional a measure it was, does not seem fully to describe the reality of much of slave life in the New World. Arming slaves was a dangerous expedient, but one resorted to frequently.∞π

The ambivalence about arming slaves continued and was accentuated during the American Revolution. No formal British or American policy existed con- cerning the wisdom of the idea, and for the most part individual commanders and leaders acted independently, depending on local circumstances. Plans to arm slaves were regularly proposed, opposed, and discarded. Yet with no consistent planning, the force of military exigency propelled the idea forward —but more in an erratic zigzag than in any linear way. Nevertheless, by the end of the war, many schemes for making soldiers of slaves had been generated and quite a few tried. That tens of thousands of slaves served as soldiers and sailors throughout North America and the Caribbean during the Revolution- ary War was a catalytic event. Never before in this pan-Atlantic world had so many slaves served in such a concentrated period of time, and some were formed into independent black regiments, occasionally with their peers in charge—unprecedented events.

Why did the most ambitious schemes to arm slaves occur during the Ameri- can Revolutionary War rather than the Seven Years’ War? They were both global wars in which Britain faced the combined strength of France and Spain. The difference was that Britain had no foreign allies to share the burden of the war during the American Revolution. It also no longer enjoyed a friendly rapport with the mainland colonists that would allow it to obtain provisions for its army and to support the militia. The expectations of widespread inter- nal support against the patriots proved illusory, and military commanders were slow to exploit those willing to serve in provincial corps of Loyalists. The consequence of this fatal isolation was that the navy was overstretched: the British fleet was inferior to the combined fleets of France, Spain, and Holland.

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188 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

There were often fewer ships than islands in the eastern Caribbean. These islands were easy prey for the French, beginning with Dominica (1778), St. Vincent (1779), Grenada (1779), St. Kitts (1782), Montserrat (1782), and Nevis (1782). There was little choice but to deploy slaves. Furthermore, slaves necessarily became involved when the main focus of the war in the Americas switched from the North to the plantation colonies in the South and in the Caribbean after 1778.

Even before the outbreak of war, rumors that the idea of arming slaves had found favor in official political circles in England had gained currency. Thus in the fall of 1774 William Draper, who had returned to London from a tour of America, published a pamphlet arguing that the rebellion might be suppressed by proclaiming ‘‘Freedom to their Negroes.’’ Arthur Lee, who was then living in London, thought the plan to arm slaves against their masters met ‘‘with approbation from ministerial People.’’ By early 1775, similar information had reached America. Thus, in January a letter from England alleging that ‘‘the design of [the] administration [is] to pass an act (in case of rupture) declaring all slaves and servants free that would take up arms against the Americans’’ was read out in a Philadelphia coffee house. A month or so later, General Thomas Gage, then commanding troops in Massachusetts, intimated that South Carolina, with its large black population, was especially vulnerable, grimly predicting that its ‘‘rice and indigo will be brought to market by Ne- groes instead of white people.’’ In March, Edmund Burke openly questioned the wisdom of arming slaves, apparently popular in governmental circles, in the House of Commons. As early as the following month, Lord John Murray Dunmore, governor of Virginia, began publicly threatening to arm slaves. In May North Carolina patriots thought that ‘‘there is much Reason to fear . . . that the Slaves may be instigated and encouraged by our inveterate Enemies to an Insurrection.’’ In the following month, Gage contemplated arming slaves, and it took a fellow commander, Lord William Campbell, to advise him against the idea, telling him not to ‘‘fall a prey to the Negroes.’’ At about the same time North Carolina governor Josiah Martin’s statement that ‘‘nothing could justify the design falsely imputed to me of giving encouragement to the negroes, but the actual and declared rebellion of the King’s subjects’’ was interpreted as ‘‘publicly avowing the measure of arming the slaves against their masters.’’ In August a Philadelphian received a letter from London in- forming him that ‘‘the Ministry have thoughts of declaring all your negroes free, and to arm them.’’ By the fall, debates in the House of Commons openly discussed schemes to arm slaves, and merchants in London addressed a peti- tion to the king expressing ‘‘indignation and horror’’ at the reports of slaves’ being incited to insurrection.∞∫

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As an indication of the plans that were in the air, in late 1775 Captain John Dalrymple of the Twentieth Regiment proposed a diversion in the southern colonies to aid General William Howe’s operations in the North. His plan had three elements: first, an independent corps would be raised in Ireland, com- manded by Protestant officers, and sent to aid Lord Dunmore; second, Dun- more himself would recruit a large body of indentured servants and convicts in and around the Chesapeake towns of Baltimore, Annapolis, Alexandria, and Fredericksburg; and, finally, ‘‘To these, He may, & indeed should, add the bravest & most ingenious of the black Slaves whom He may find all over the Bay of Chesapeake.’’ African-born blacks, Dalrymple averred, should not be confused with ‘‘Virginia or Maryland Black[s] born in those Provinces,’’ for the latter are ‘‘full of Intelligence, Fidelity & Courage.’’∞Ω

Thus, considered in context, Lord Dunmore’s famous proclamation of No- vember 7, 1775, represented the culmination of an existing trend rather than a dramatic departure. Furthermore, it was not a particularly radical statement. It addressed indentured servants as well as slaves, as Dalrymple had suggested, and it targeted only those who were in the hands of rebels and who were willing and able to bear arms. It also had little impact, for it was issued on board ship, and slaves had somehow to traverse land and water to reach the so-called British haven. At best, about eight hundred slaves escaped to Dun- more. Nevertheless, the dramatic symbol of putting together a regiment of escaped slaves—three hundred or so—outfitted in military garb with the in- scription ‘‘Liberty to Slaves’’ emblazoned across the breast, was a revolution- ary act, although the only action Lord Dunmore’s ‘‘Ethiopian Regiment’’ saw was the inglorious rout at Great Bridge. The proclamation itself aroused a firestorm of protest. Contemporaries spoke of being ‘‘struck with horror’’ and of daggers being placed at their throats. ‘‘Hell itself could not have vomitted anything more black than this design,’’ wrote one Philadelphian. Some of these reactions may have been exaggerated in order to whip patriots into a frenzy, but the anguish was genuine enough. The furor was of such passionate intensity as to tell British governors and commanders, if they needed telling, that the issue of arming slaves was explosive and likely to call opprobrium down on the head of any advocate.≤≠

From the beginning, the Caribbean and the North American theaters were interconnected. Thus, a couple of months after Dunmore’s proclamation, Ar- chibald Campbell, lieutenant colonel of the Seventy-first regiment, serving in North America, and a veteran of three campaigns in the West Indies, suggested a more radical step than that taken by the Virginia governor. He proposed that a regiment be formed in the West Indies of fourteen hundred ‘‘stout Active Negroes’’ who would then suppress the revolt in America and, with ‘‘much

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190 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

more dreaded and . . . more fatal consequences to the Rebells than the loss of Battle,’’ encourage the desertion of slaves. According to Campbell, the capitu- lation of Guadeloupe in the Seven Years’ War owed more to the desertion of eight hundred French slaves in one morning than to three months of ‘‘all our Attacks.’’ Accordingly, he continued, ‘‘many Gentleman of Large Estates & property in the different West India Islands . . . expressed their surprise’’ that the government did not ask them to supply slaves for military service in North America. Nothing came of Campbell’s suggestion because it was too radical and it raised the specter of potential retaliation. Reports in English news- papers claimed that American emissaries were encouraging Caribbean slaves to rebel and were providing them with ammunition and guns. Indeed, Silas Deane, America’s first agent in Paris, advocated American support for an uprising of the Caribs in St. Vincent and a slave revolt in Jamaica. Such rumors were not theoretical for white West Indians: they thought the great slave rebellion that engulfed Jamaica in the summer of 1776 was directly connected to events in North America. On the British and on the American patriot side, then, arming slaves was a way of undermining the others’ war efforts— whether by employing West Indian slaves in North America or by encouraging West Indian slaves to rebel. In each case, the potential dangers outweighed the anticipated benefits.≤∞

After Dunmore’s actions, British commanders moved back and forth on the idea of arming slaves. In 1776, following his recapture of New York, General Sir William Howe offered protection to all who came within his lines. A year later, through his aide Alexander Innes, he reversed himself, ordering all ‘‘Ne- groes, Mollatoes, and other Improper Persons’’ discharged from the garrison, so as to put the provincial forces on ‘‘the most respectable footing.’’ In 1778 in a widely publicized debate in the House of Commons, Edmund Burke offered a fiery denunciation of the policy of arming slaves, conjuring up specters of murders, rapes, and barbarities of all kinds. Such reservations were cast aside the following year in the wake of the British defeat at Saratoga (1777) and the French entry into the American Revolution (1778). Sir Henry Clinton, in his Philipsburg Proclamation (1779), ignored Burke’s warning and offered free- dom to rebel-owned slaves, although he resisted the temptation to follow Dunmore in establishing slave regiments. In 1780, anxious that his proclama- tion was encouraging too many black fugitives to flee to the British lines, Clinton began to reverse the policy. In the following year, as Cornwallis’s army moved northward from Charleston to Yorktown, black foraging parties had authority to get provisions, but the British commander was sufficiently ner- vous about what they might do that he issued orders that they were not to carry firearms under any circumstances. British policy, insofar as there was

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such a thing, was an untidy sequence of advances and retreats, with no simple forward movement, with respect to the idea of arming slaves.≤≤

The actions of the slaves themselves, flocking to British lines and wishing to serve, kept the pressure on the British commanders. Murphy Stiel can stand as one radical example. Having fled slavery in North Carolina in 1776, he joined the Black Pioneers under General Samuel Birch. In August 1781 Stiel, then a sergeant in the Pioneers and living in New York City, recounted how he had repeatedly heard ‘‘a Voice like a Man’s (but saw no body),’’ telling him to inform Sir Henry Clinton, commander in chief of British forces, that Clinton and Lord Cornwallis would put an end to the rebellion, and ‘‘that the Lord would be on their Side.’’ Stiel told Clinton that he should ‘‘Send Word to Genl Washington That he must Surrender himself and his Troops to the King’s Army, and that if he did not the wrath of God would fall upon them.’’ If Washington refused, Clinton must say that he would raise ‘‘all the Blacks in America to fight against’’ the Americans. Military experience and evangeli- cal Christianity fused for Stiel to form an apocalyptic vision. What Clinton thought about such a radical proposal can only be imagined.≤≥

As the war effort became more critical on the mainland, the British increas- ingly became willing to embody separate units composed entirely of escaped slaves and thereby to follow Dunmore’s and various West Indian precedents. In 1779 the small British garrison at Savannah, under siege, formed a body of two hundred to three hundred ‘‘armed’’ blacks that took part in skirmishes outside British lines. After the siege was lifted, however, Savannah residents sought their disarming, because ostensibly they behaved with ‘‘great Inso- lence.’’ When George Galphin’s fortified plantation house, Fort Dreadnought, fell to patriot forces in 1781, the captured garrison consisted of sixty-one slaves, many of them armed, and fourteen armed boatmen. During the British occupation of Charleston in 1781–1782, cavalry units consisting entirely of fugitive slaves patrolled the countryside outside of the city. Black soldiers in South Carolina, one patriot general observed, aroused ‘‘the resentment and detestation of every American who possesses common feelings.’’ In early 1782 Dunmore, who was then in Charleston, along with John Cruden, proposed an elaborate scheme to raise ten thousand black soldiers. Cruden reasoned that the slaves who became soldiers would be ‘‘only changing one master for an- other,’’ because they would serve the king forever; also, by recruiting the ‘‘most hardy, intrepid, and determined blacks,’’ they would keep the slaves in ‘‘good order,’’ and their own military discipline would prevent ‘‘cabals, tumults, and even rebellion.’’ Dunmore added that blacks were ‘‘not only better fitted for service in this warm climate than white men, but they are also better guides, may be got on much easier terms, and are perfectly attached to our sovereign.’’

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He thought blacks were ‘‘as soon disciplined as any set of raw men that I know of,’’ and envisaged blacks as noncommissioned officers. A few months later, an even more desperate General Alexander Leslie thought that putting arms in the hands of blacks would ‘‘soon become indispensably necessary’’ and began doing just that. By the spring of 1782 the British reportedly had about seven hundred African Americans under arms and in uniform, including several mounted troops.≤∂

If British policy toward arming slaves meandered, though in increasingly radical directions, patriotic Americans were generally more uniform and con- sistent in their opposition to the idea. The reason, of course, was that many Americans had a direct stake in slavery. An occasional idealistic voice could be heard, even from the South. Thus in June 1775 a resident of Fredericksburg, Virginia, thought proclaiming freedom to slaves who would join in the defense of America a dangerous but ‘‘necessary Measure.’’ The incompatibility of waging a ‘‘glorious struggle’’ for liberty while holding many in slavery was one strand of this anonymous man’s argument, but warding off the promises of the British was the other. As the Continental Army took shape in the summer of 1775, opposition to arming slaves mounted. In July 1775 the adjutant general of the American army, Horatio Gates, in an action that predated Howe’s order by two years, instructed recruiting officers that they should not enlist any ‘‘stroller, negro, or vagabond.’’ And at a council of war later that year, Ameri- can generals excluded free blacks and slaves from possible reenlistment. Indi- vidual states generally followed suit. Gun ownership among blacks also be- came a ticklish issue. One Committee of Observation in New Jersey in 1776 ordered that all blacks with guns or other weapons turn them in ‘‘until the present troubles are settled.’’ When in August 1776 a former member of Con- gress from New Jersey drafted a plan for creating a battalion of slaves— arguing that ‘‘Neither the Hue of their Complexion nor the Blood of Africk have any Connection with Cowardice’’ but offering reassurance that he would always restrict ‘‘their Numbers, so as not to suffer them to bear any large Proportion to the whites’’—John Adams responded that ‘‘Your Negro Battal- lion will never do. S. Carolina would run out of their Wits at the least Hint of such a Measure.’’≤∑

Once, however, Congress began to fix troop quotas for the states, from 1777 onward, the pressure to enlist blacks mounted. Northern states with small black populations found it easier to arm slaves than did southern states. Occasional ambitious proposals surfaced, although they bore no immediate fruit. In 1777 in Philadelphia, one ‘‘Antibiastes’’ argued that a ‘‘general eman- cipation of the Slaves, enlisted in the army or the navy ought immediately to take place,’’ with compensation for their masters. Thomas Kench, an artillery

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captain who in 1778 proposed a detachment of ninety-five black soldiers (eleven of whom would have specialized roles) to be overseen by five white officers, was rebuffed by the Massachusetts Legislature. Kench thought such a separate regiment would act as an incentive for blacks ‘‘to outdo the white men.’’ Similarly, when the Rhode Island legislature debated and eventually passed a slave enlistment act, some objected to slaves’ defending the liberties of America. The First Rhode Island Regiment was, in reality, composed of not only slaves but also of free blacks, mulattoes, and Narragansett Indians. A recent study has found more than 700 black Rhode Island soldiers, of whom 142 were enslaved at the time they were enlisted; most served between 1777 and 1780. As Benjamin Quarles notes, the New England states probably fur- nished more black soldiers than any other region. Of southern states, Mary- land came closest to authorizing the arming of slaves. In 1780 the legislature seemed on the verge of passing a proposal to raise a regiment of 750 slaves. Major Edward Giles of Maryland was enthusiastic about ‘‘raising a black Regiment,’’ believing that ‘‘the Blacks will make excellent Soldiers.’’ Experi- ence proved their worthiness, he said, and opponents were ‘‘forever frighten- ing themselves with Bugbears of their own Creation.’’ But the bill did not pass. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who disliked it, offers insights into why it failed: he thought the compensation inadequate, spoke darkly of his fear of ‘‘bad consequences,’’ and described it as a ‘‘harsh and violent’’ measure, unfair and ‘‘oppressive’’ because it applied only to slaveowners with six or more slaves and took away a person’s property.≤∏ The refusal of the political leaders of the Upper South, where many did open their hearts to the idealism of the Revolu- tion, to consider the enlistment of slaves indicates the hurdles the idea faced.

The fate of the congressional recommendation of March 1779 that South Carolina and Georgia raise three thousand slaves is even more instructive. The planters of the Lower South were horrified. Christopher Gadsden’s reaction was typical: resentment and disgust ran high, he said, at this ‘‘very dangerous and impolitic Step.’’ The South Carolina Council was so irked that it considered making the state neutral and dropping out of the war effort. John Laurens, an ardent but rather solitary proponent of arming slaves in the Lower South, railed at the ‘‘howlings of a triple-headed monster in which prejudice Avarice & pusillanimity were united.’’ The younger Laurens’s dream of black troops wearing white uniforms, faced with red, because they would ‘‘form a good Contrast with the Complexion of the Soldier’’ remained simply that—nothing but a dream. Furthermore, when in December 1781 General Nathanael Greene recommended that South Carolina recruit at least two thousand slaves and form four black regiments, each with a corps of Pioneers and a corps of Artificers, he encountered a frosty response—‘‘old prejudices and the love of

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194 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

interest’’ was his indictment—even though he had ‘‘not the least doubt’’ that ‘‘they would make good Soldiers.’’ As the legislature debated Greene’s pro- posal, one South Carolinian acknowledged that he was ‘‘very much alarmed’’ on ‘‘the Subject of arming the Blacks’’ and reckoned that only about a dozen assemblymen were in favor and a hundred opposed. He hoped that its defeat would ‘‘rest for ever & a day.’’≤π

The onset of the American Revolutionary War in the Caribbean did not ini- tially occasion anything as dramatic as Dunmore’s proclamation, but it did create a demand for more black sailors, some use of free blacks to build fortifications, and a heightened sense of insecurity. The insecurity owed much to the famines that began sweeping the islands because of curtailed commerce and the movement of some British troops from islands to mainland, which in turn helps account for the Jamaican slave insurrection of 1776. Insecurity became panic with the entry of France and then Spain into the war in 1778– 1779. The West Indian islands were imperiled by foreign invasion as never before. Once Dominica capitulated in September 1778 to a French expedition- ary force, the recruitment of slaves intensified. Governor William Burt of the Leeward Islands conscripted 5 percent of the slaves of St. Kitts to build for- tifications, and, in the event of an invasion, he planned to organize slaves into armed parties to act as foragers and attack the enemy at night. Also in the fall of 1778, the British abandoned Philadelphia primarily to free five thousand troops for the invasion of St. Lucia, the gateway to French Martinique, the headquarters of the French navy. Once St. Lucia fell, slaves built all the de- fenses that the British required. Slaves were gradually being drawn into greater involvement in the Caribbean war effort.≤∫

In these early years, whites found free blacks more acceptable as soldiers than as slaves. In the fall of 1778, in response to the heightened French threat, a Jamaican creole, soon joined by others, proposed a professional regiment of free blacks and free coloreds, an extension of separate companies within the militia that had been noted for their ‘‘extraordinary alertness in Military ma- noeuvres.’’ These Jamaican whites argued that a corps of native-born mu- lattoes would be able to withstand the labor and marching that proved so arduous for Europeans. The entry of France into the war also saw Caribbean free blacks arriving in North America. In 1779 Admiral Charles d’Estaing set sail from Saint Domingue with an expeditionary force that included 545 free black and free colored volunteers. They played a minor role—seemingly doing little more than digging trenches, although one died and seven were wounded defending their handiwork—in the failed two-month siege of Savan- nah. D’Estaing did learn that his ‘‘black soldiers from Saint Domingue’’ were

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abstemious, for they ‘‘would not drink the mixture of sugar, water and fer- mented molasses which make up the nectar the Americans call grog’’; by contrast, he sadly noted, ‘‘it was wine for most of our officers and all our soldiers.’’ One company of 62 free blacks and free coloreds escorted casualties to Charleston and was the sole French troop serving during the siege of that city in the spring of 1780.≤Ω

Even as insecurity heightened, opposition to the arming of slaves and free blacks was still formidable in the Caribbean, as Stephen Fuller, the agent for Jamaica, emphatically made clear when acting on behalf of the West India lobby in London. In December 1778 he rebutted the idea that ‘‘many of the Domestic Negroes by being Armed might contribute in some degree to’’ island defense, maintaining that ‘‘melancholy experience’’ had shown that ‘‘very little trust can be placed even in such of them as are considered the most con- fidential.’’ The best policy, he averred, was to keep slaves ‘‘disarmed, and to remove them from every opportunity of using firearms.’’ Arming them prom- ised ‘‘relief for the present’’ but was ‘‘pregnant with future evils’’; the ‘‘Hoe & the Pick-axe’’ were the only fit instruments for slaves. Furthermore, he argued that only nine hundred ‘‘sencible’’ free black men inhabited Jamaica, and dependence might be placed on at most five hundred. He warned that ‘‘the free negroes & mulattoes are not to be trusted in corps composed of themselves only, & the incorporating of them with the whites will not be endured.’’≥≠

Continuing threats of invasion and actual invasions largely trumped the fears of Fuller and others like him. During the invasion scare of 1779, the Barbados legislature voted to arm slaves, and many, according to William Dickson, ‘‘were armed with swords and spears.’’ The following year, Antigua armed one thousand slaves and hired the equivalent of another thousand for pioneering work. When the French invaded particular islands, the slaves often put up fierce resistance. In 1781, during the French invasion of Tobago, a corps of armed slaves served with ‘‘undaunted courage’’ against French regulars. In 1782 one observer on St. Kitts thought that ‘‘there were as many Frenchmen killed by negroes, only for coming onto the estates they belonged to, as were destroyed by all the troops we had to defend the Island.’’ These slave irregulars almost managed to ambush and capture the enemy commander-in-chief, and the French threatened to lay waste to the island if their masters did not bring them to heel. In the same year, Jamaica conscripted more than five thousand slaves during the period of martial law, and the governor began compiling lists of all slaves ‘‘who have distinguished themselves for their attachment & fidelity to their masters, for their knowledge of the country, the woods, and use of arms.’’ Nevertheless, the legislature rejected his proposal to arm trusted slaves with guns and bills as ‘‘an expedient of too dangerous a nature to adopt.’’ Still,

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196 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

Governor Campbell managed to persuade the legislature to permit the creation of two regiments of free blacks and free coloreds. Three years earlier the island had seen the temporary, ad hoc creation of a regiment of free colored people that was part of a professional force, salaried, well equipped, and under army discipline, but now the legislature agreed to fund the plan, and soon a third regiment was formed. The most novel military developments in the deploy- ment of blacks occurred in British-occupied St. Lucia, in part because of its strategic importance overlooking Martinique, but also because the military commanders did not have to consult with planters or an elected legislature. There Brigadier General Edward Mathew gathered slaves from many places and assembled the core of the first permanent black army regiment in the British West Indies.≥∞

A key reason for the novel deployment of blacks in the Caribbean was the high attrition rate of white troops. The British lost more than 5,000 troops during their brief occupation of Havana in 1762–63, exceeding their total losses in North America throughout the Seven Years’ War. During the Revolu- tionary War, 11 percent of European soldiers died aboard troop transports en route to the Caribbean. The annual mortality rate of soldiers, once in the region, was 15 percent, compared to 6 percent of those stationed in New York and 1 percent in Canada. The losses in the West Indies accounted for about 6,000 men, more than half the deaths in North America, estimated at about 10,000. Of the 1,008 men of the Seventy-ninth Regiment stationed in Kings- ton, Jamaica, in 1778, ‘‘scarcely a man remained of the original number’’ twelve months later. The high mortality rates among white troops had strate- gic consequences including the British decision to abandon San Juan (seized in an expedition conducted by Governor John Dalling against Spanish Central America in the fall of 1779) only seven months after its capture, owing to the deaths of more than three-quarters of the force, caused primarily by disease. Mutinies and desertion were also more common among troops going to the West Indies than to other regions. Punishments in the West Indies exceeded all those in other postings, an indication of the greater indiscipline present among troops in the region.≥≤

During the war and the early postwar period, whites drew attention to the healthiness of blacks. As John Hunter noted, ‘‘The Negroes afford a striking example of the power acquired by habit of resisting the causes of fevers; for, though they are not entirely exempted from them, they suffer infinitely less than Europeans.’’ He pointed in particular to ‘‘the negroes who were sent along with the troops against Fort St. Juan, of whom scarcely any died, al- though few or none of the soldiers survived the expedition.’’ Similarly, in 1783, Thomas Dancer noted that the three hundred to four hundred slaves

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brought to Jamaica by John McGillivray, a provincial colonel, from Georgia and employed on public fortifications were ‘‘in the highest state of health during the[ir] hard labour.’’ Five years later, Hunter argued that blacks were not only useful as pioneers and servants, saving white soldiers ‘‘from certain duties of fatigue,’’ but should be employed as soldiers, with black and Euro- pean troops ‘‘intermixed,’’ so as to ‘‘save the European troops from such parts of regimental duty as may be injurious to their health.’’≥≥

In the Caribbean in particular in the later years of the Revolutionary War, slaves and free blacks played a major role at sea as well as on land. The desperation of the navy for manpower brought black recruits, both slave and free, onto British warships. In 1783 the Antiguan legislature complained of the ‘‘desertion of their slaves and generally their most valuable slaves who have been taken away from English Harbour in his Majesty’s ships.’’ Seamen appar- ently blocked planters from boarding naval vessels to recover their runaways. During the Revolutionary War, John Perkins, a colored man, rose from pilot- ing the flagship of the Jamaica Squadron to commanding a schooner tender and then to being lieutenant in command of a man-of-war. He would com- mand frigates in the French Revolutionary Wars and eventually die in Kings- ton. He was the only British naval officer to spend his entire career on one station, without ever visiting England. Privateers also increasingly employed blacks. In 1779 a Dutch sloop trading between Curaçao and Hispaniola had a number of blacks on board; when captured by an English privateer, the Dutch captain declared that the blacks were all free men, willingly acting as crew. The captain of the English privateer took a number of these same black men as crew members, promising them a share of any prize money won on the way with their help.≥∂

In 1782 a United States naval vessel took a Bermudian privateer as its prize in Carolina waters. Only five members of the seventy-five-man crew were white, all officers; the sailors were all black slaves. At the ensuing vice admi- ralty court trial, the Massachusetts justices broke with precedent and offered the slaves their freedom rather than consider them forfeited chattel to be sold at auction. To a man, the Bermudian blacks declined the offer and asked instead to be sent to their island home on the next flag-of-truce; rather than embrace the freedom offered to them by the new republic, they chose to return to Bermuda and slavery. They chose to return to the island of their birth, their families, and, by comparison with most slaves and some freedmen, a profitable way of life to which they were accustomed. They did not go empty- handed. Sixty of them took passage on an American flag-of-truce ship bound for New York. Off Cape Cod, they shouted ‘‘Huzzah for Bermuda!’’ and rose up with other prisoners on board to seize the vessel. On reaching Bermuda,

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198 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

the ship was condemned as their prize. Such were the possibilities and am- biguities of arming slaves.≥∑

The American Revolutionary War considerably expanded the opportunities for New World slaves to serve with arms on land or at sea. Britain became increasingly desperate for manpower as it faced the possibility of a defeat that might entail not only the loss of America but the entire British Empire. Its very future as a global power was at stake. Britain simultaneously faced the danger of rebellion in Ireland, the threat of a foreign invasion in the summer of 1779, and domestic revolution with the Gordon Riots in London in 1780. It became more difficult to recruit at home owing to financial constraints and to the reluctance of men to enlist. Lord George Germain, the secretary of state for America, was willing to consider almost any source of manpower including unprecedented numbers of Irish Catholics, traditionally debarred from service in the British army owing to the Test Acts, and even American prisoners of war from South Carolina.≥∏ Thus, not only was the geographic scope wider, but qualitatively the arming of slaves assumed new dimensions—first the raising of ad hoc, all-black regiments, then the openness to black noncommissioned officers, and finally the embryonic emergence of permanent black garrisons. Furthermore, the scale was greater than ever before. By the end of the war, some British planners envisaged recruiting as many as ten thousand black soldiers in particular places. Overall, perhaps about thirty thousand blacks, some free but most slaves, served during the American Revolutionary War, admittedly more as pioneers, auxiliaries, and domestics than in an army ca- pacity. Still, in North America, about five thousand black Americans served in the Continental Army, another thousand or so in the navy and on privateers, and perhaps twelve thousand on land and at sea on the British side. In the Caribbean, at least twelve thousand blacks served on both land and sea.≥π

But these numbers must be put in perspective. The Revolutionary War saw a significant use of slaves as soldiers and auxiliaries, but as a proportion of the total war effort, they were always a minor component. The six thousand or so African Americans who served in the Continental Army and in the patriot forces at sea represented less than 3 percent of total patriot mobilization, including state militias, although in 1778, when it is possible to identify the black presence in individual regiments of the Continental Army, it ranged from 6 to 13 percent. About half a million Britons were under arms in the course of the conflict, representing about one in seven or eight of the 3.8 million eligible British men (this proportion was greater than in the Seven Years’ War, in which the military participation rate was about one in nine or ten, but less than in the Napoleonic Wars, when it was about one in four or

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five). The Hessian troops numbered about thirty thousand overall and the Loyalist troops another twenty thousand or so; therefore, the roughly twenty- four thousand slaves serving on the British side represented about 4 percent of the whole British war effort. Their numbers were impressive, however, in relation to the size of the British army (including Hessians and Provincials) specifically assigned to the West Indies or to North America, which amounted to slightly more than forty-four thousand men in July 1779, together with another seventy-five hundred in Canada.≥∫

The United States did not arm slaves on a similar scale until the Civil War, but the situation was radically different in the Caribbean, where the British evacuation of slave soldiers in the southern states led to the establishment of the first permanent peacetime army garrisons composed of slaves, the South Carolina Corps. They in turn formed the embryo of the largest European slave army in the Americas, the West India Regiments, which began with two regi- ments in 1795 and reached their full complement of twelve by 1798. Ironi- cally, during the period 1795–1808, the British government became the big- gest individual customer for African slaves, buying about one in ten of those imported into the islands to serve in its army. The successful use of slave soldiers in the American Revolution helps explain the willingness of the im- perial government to repeat the experiment on a more massive scale during the French Revolutionary Wars. Of course, France’s militarization of its black population was part of the inspiration, as was Britain’s own Indian precedent, its native, or sepoy, regiments. Yet Sir John Vaughan, who championed and implemented this scheme to recruit thousands of slaves into standard regi- ments, was present at General Monckton’s conquest of Martinique in 1761– 62, in which slaves were used as auxiliaries, and, more important, he had served as commander-in-chief in the Eastern Caribbean during the American Revolution (1779–1781). He was convinced that war in the Caribbean could be prosecuted only by ‘‘opposing Blacks to Blacks.’’≥Ω

At the end of the Revolutionary War, a diaspora of black soldiers and sailors, their military experiences seared into their minds, scattered throughout the Atlantic world. Perhaps the most unlikely destination was Brunswick, Ger- many, which in the summer of 1783 witnessed the arrival of a ‘‘negro drum- corps brought from America by General Riedesel.’’ After the British evacua- tion of Georgia, some black troops calling themselves ‘‘The King of England’s soldiers’’ decamped to the Savannah River swamps, where they waged guerilla warfare for at least another five years against their ex-masters. In 1783 slaves armed with cutlasses, clubs, and pikes left St. Augustine, Florida, with Colonel Andrew Deveaux’s band of Loyalist irregulars to wrest Nassau, Bahamas, from the Spaniards. Perhaps some of them were responsible for plundering

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200 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

whites on the island of Abaco ‘‘with Muskets and fix’d Bayonets’’ four years later. With echoes to his past, Lord Dunmore, the governor of the Bahamas, issued a proclamation of amnesty for all fugitive slaves who would surrender themselves. In 1793, in response to the French threat, a former East Florida Loyalist, Denys Rolle, argued that slaves of his in Exuma should be armed and go on patrols, since they would defend their master’s land as if it were their own. Of the black exodus to Nova Scotia about a third or more had been enrolled in British armies, and many lived in towns such as Birchtown, named after their military commanders. When in 1794 Governor Zachary Macaulay reorganized the militia in Sierra Leone, a place peopled by black Nova Scotians and London’s black poor, he allowed each company of thirty-five men to elect its own captain, lieutenant, and three sergeants. As a result, black officers sometimes commanded white troops, and, when some European officials pro- tested, Macaulay pointed to their proven military experience in the American War. The black Nova Scotians named three streets in Freetown, Sierra Leone, after generals—Tarleton, Rawdon, and Howe—with whom they had served in the Revolutionary War.∂≠

African Americans who had served on the patriot side during the Revolu- tionary War were also proud of their accomplishments. Latchom, a Virginia slave, gained his freedom for saving General John Cropper when he was stuck in a marsh and about to be bayoneted; Latchom shot Cropper’s British assail- ant and then carried the general to safety, though he weighed about two hundred pounds. Cropper purchased Latchom’s freedom. In Connecticut the Superior Court liberated Jack Arabas, who had enlisted in the army with his master’s consent, served three years, found himself reclaimed by his master, and then successfully sued for his freedom. Service at sea offered greater op- portunity for North American blacks than action on land. For this reason, no doubt, James Forten volunteered as a privateer, and when, in 1781, he was captured and offered English freedom rather than imprisonment on the prison hulk Jersey, he rejected the offer, insisting, ‘‘I have been taken prisoner for the liberties of my country, and never will prove a traitor to her interest.’’ Apply- ing for a Revolutionary War pension in 1836, Jehu Grant, at least eighty years of age, who escaped from a Tory master in Rhode Island and served ten months ‘‘in the American army of the Revolutionary War,’’ spoke of ‘‘the songs of liberty that saluted my ear, [and] thrilled through my heart.’’ Military experiences changed the lives of many individual African Americans.∂∞

The use of slave troops helped undermine the slave regime in both subtle and overt ways, as many planters had feared. The British often did not make good their promises of freedom to slaves who left their patriot masters, but they were nevertheless forced to manumit many slaves, particularly those who

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had fought on the British side, resulting in a large rise in the number of free blacks in London, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. The use of slave troops exposed the contradictions within slavery. It demonstrated that slaves were indeed capable of the courage and honor that the plantation regime sought to deny. The confidence and skills derived by the slaves is a matter of speculation, in the absence of any written accounts by veterans, but among the ‘‘trusted’’ slave soldiers from St. Domingue (Haiti) who served in the French siege of Savannah (1779) were many future heroes of the Haitian Revolution. Gran- ville Sharpe also thought that stolen and reenslaved Sierra Leonians, ‘‘hard- ened fellows by Service on board the English Man of War; & in the British Army in America,’’ played a major role in the St. Domingue slave revolt of 1791. Arming slaves, as Dr. George Pinckard, a regimental surgeon in Bar- bados, recognized, would ‘‘instruct them that they are men.’’∂≤

Notes

We wish to thank Christopher Brown, Philip Boucher, Stephen Conway, David Eltis, Jillian Galle, Ronald Hoffman, Michael Jarvis, Wim Klooster, Paul E. Kooperman, Cas- sandra Pybus, and Louis Wilson for their assistance.

1. The best studies are Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1961), and Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolu- tionary Age (Princeton, N.J., 1991).

2. WIC directors to Governor Joan Doncker, November 13, 1676, Niuewe West- Indische Compagnie 467, fol. 19, Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague (thanks to Wim Klooster for this reference); John Thornton, ‘‘The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean,’’ Journal of Caribbean History 32:1–2 (1998): 161–178; John K. Thornton, ‘‘War, the State, and Religious Norms in ‘Coromantee’ Thought: The Ideology of an African American Nation,’’ in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 181–200; Monica Shuler, ‘‘Akan Slave Rebellions in the British Caribbean,’’ Savacou 1 (1970): 8–31; Ray A. Kea, ‘‘ ‘When I die, I shall return to my own land’: An ‘Anima’ Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies, 1733–1734,’’ in John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler, eds., The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: Papers on History and Society, Ghanaian and Islamic, in Honor of Ivor Wilks (Evanston, 1996), 159–193. For other discussions of the slaves’ African military background, see other work by John K. Thornton: ‘‘African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,’’ American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1101– 1113; Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York, 1998), 280, 293–298, 306, 309; ‘‘African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,’’ Journal of Caribbean History 25 (1991): 58–80; ‘‘The African Experience of the ’20. And Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,’’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 55 (1998): 421–434; and Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London, 1999).

3. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 13–14; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 288–293, 308–314;

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202 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 73–76.

4. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), 153; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999).

5. Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 518. 6. Jerome S. Handler, ‘‘Freedmen and Slaves in the Barbados Militia,’’ Journal of

Caribbean History 19:1 (May 1984): 7–8; Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000), 72, 75, 76; William W. Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, 13 vols. (Phila- delphia, 1810–1823), 2:481; David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua with Implications for Colonial British America (Bal- timore, 1985), 139; Elsa V. Goveia, The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century (Barbados, 1970), 18, 40, 45, 46. For other laws restricting the giving of guns to slaves, see Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 1748–1775 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 68; Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 1965), 156; Peter M. Voelz, Slave and Soldier: The Military Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas (New York, 1993), 353–357.

7. Bellesiles, Arming America, 97. 8. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan

Colony (New York, 1993), 289 (for the quotation); Thornton, Africa and Africans, 279; Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 12. Also see Voelz, Slave and Soldier, 23; Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, Ill., 2000), 22, 29–60, 202–228; Herbert S. Klein, ‘‘The Colored Militia of Cuba: 1568–1868,’’ Caribbean Studies 6 (1966): 17–27; Gerret Specht to the WIC, January 21, 1767, NWIC 318, Algemeen Rijksarchief (The Hague) (thanks to Wim Klooster, for this reference); Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 237–240. For arming free blacks or coloreds, see Allan J. Keuthe, ‘‘The Status of the Free Pardo in the Disciplined Militia of New Granada,’’ Journal of Negro History 56 (1971): 105–117; Jackie R. Booker, ‘‘Needed but Unwanted: Black Militiamen in Veracruz, Mexico, 1760–1810,’’ Historian 55 (Winter 1993): 259–276; Joseph P. Sanchez, ‘‘Afri- can Freedmen and the Fuero Militar: A Historical Overview of Pardo and Moreno Mi- litiamen in the Late Spanish Empire,’’ Colonial Latin American Historical Review 3 (1994): 165–184; Ben Vinson III, ‘‘Free Colored Voices: Issues of Representation and Racial Identity in the Colonial Mexican Militia,’’ Journal of Negro History 80 (1995): 170–182; Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre- Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens, Ga., 2001), esp. 52–77, 226–265; and Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2001).

9. Handler, ‘‘Freedmen and Slaves,’’ Journal of Caribbean History 19:1 (1984): 8–9, 11, 13, 17; Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 118–122; Governor Benjamin Bennett to William Popple, January 12, 1702, and Bennett to the Council of Trade and Plantations,

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The American Revolution 203

August 19, 1702, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series (London 2000), vol. 20, no. 25, and vol. 21, no. 1014; Shelby T. McCloy, The Negro in the French West Indies (Lexington, Ky., 1966), 53, 55; Clarence J. Munford, The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the French West Indies, 1625–1715, 3 vols. (Lewiston, N.Y., 1991), 3:752, 754.

10. Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742 (London, 1991), 74, 91, 130, 133, 143, 168– 169; David Syrett, ‘‘The Raising of American Troops for Service in the West Indies During the War of Austrian Succession, 1740–1,’’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 73 (2000): 20–32; Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739– 1763 (Oxford, 1936), 254. See also John R. McNeill, ‘‘The Ecological Basis of Warfare in the Caribbean, 1700–1804,’’ in Maarten Ultee, ed., Adapting to Conditions: War and Society in the Eighteenth Century (University, Ala., 1986), 26–42.

11. In general, see Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, 1:226, 251, 336, 3:251, 336, 4:119, 5:17, 6:533, 7:95; Benjamin Quarles, ‘‘The Colonial Militia and Negro Manpower,’’ Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (1959): 643–652, esp. 644–645; William M. Wiecek, ‘‘The Statutory Law of Slavery and Race in the Thirteen Mainland Colonies of British America,’’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1977), 258–280, esp. 268; Bellesiles, Arming America, 76. For the Carolinas, see Thomas Cooper and David J. McCord, eds., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 10 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1836– 41), 7:33, 347–349, 349–351, 3:108–110, 9:645–663; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 126–128; William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, 10 vols. (Raleigh, N.C., 1886–1890), 2:178, 254; John Tate Lanning, ed., The St. Augustine Expedition of 1740 (Columbia, S.C., 1954), 11–12, 17, 25, 62, 72, 73, 85, 93, 96–97, 98–99, 102, 114, 126, 129–130, 132, 148, 169, 173 (the actual number of slaves used as pioneers in this expedition is never specified); Rodney E. Baine, ‘‘General James Ogle- thorpe and the Expedition Against St. Augustine,’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly 84 (2000): 197–229 (which says little about black participation); John R. Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier: A Study of Indian Relations, War, Trade, and Land Problems in the Southern Wilderness, 1754–1775 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1944), 113–114; William Bull to Earl of Hillsborough, November 30, 1770, in K. G. Davies, ed., Docu- ments of the American Revolution, 1770–1783 (Shannon, Ireland, 1972), 2:273.

12. For the slave trade and the African coast, see K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London, 1957), 227; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), 148, 226, 228–229, 231, 233, 250; Robin Law, ‘‘Warfare on the West African Slave Coast, 1650–1850,’’ in R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, eds., War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe, N.M., 1992), 103–126, esp. 109, 115–116; E. Arnot Robertson, The Spanish Town Papers: Some Sidelights on the American War of Independence (New York, 1959), 131. For other vessels, see Hodges, Root and Branch, 6–7; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 21; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1997), 13–15; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlan- tic (Boston, 2000), 166; David J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth

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204 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

Century (Exeter, Eng., 1990), esp. 262; Carl E. Swanson, Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739–1748 (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 127; N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1986), 159– 160; Nicholas Rogers, ‘‘Archipelagic Encounters: War, Race, and Labour Along the Caribbean Frontier, 1740–1750’’ (unpublished paper). For individual masters, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 390–391; Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens, Ga., 1984), 123; Handler, ‘‘Freedmen and Slaves,’’ 15; Holton, Forced Founders, xiii–xv; B. W. Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912 (Mona, Jamaica, 1998), 101–102; Kay and Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 329–330 n. 58. For frontier regions, see Hening, Statutes at Large, 3:459; 4:131; 12:182; Quarles, ‘‘Colonial Militia,’’ Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (1959): 648; Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 117; O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore, 1977), 30, 73–77, 84; Carl J. Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier (Tucson, 1996), 348–349; Edward Rutledge Jr. to John Rut- ledge, April 8, 1788, Rutledge Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Douglas V. Armstrong, The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica (Urbana, Ill., 1990), 177.

13. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 139, 330, 390–391; Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 185; Higman, Montpelier, 216; Armstrong, Old Village, 175; Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens, 1995), 45. We are grateful to Jillian Galle of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, who, along with Fraser Neiman, is coordinating a major comparative study of slave sites in Virginia and who provided detailed information about five sites where there is evidence of much lead shot (eighty-seven pieces at one dwelling on Mulberry Row, Monticello, for instance), gunflints, gun barrel parts, gunlock parts, trigger guards, pistol barrels, and so on. For example, at the Clifts plantation, 1720–1735, forty-seven pieces of shot, one gunflint, ninety-six flint debitages, one trigger guard, one pistol barrel, and one cock were found.

14. Kupperman, Providence Island, 170 n. 72, 291, 338; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), 144, 259; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 38; Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 119; Pares, War and Trade, 253, 255; State of the Island of Tobago, June 24 to May 1, 1773, CO 101/17, folio 181, Public Record Office, London.

15. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), xv, 160; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 78–88; John Ferling, ‘‘Soldiers for Virginia: Who Served in the French and Indian War?’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 94 (1986): 307–328; Belle- siles, Arming America, 151. For other colonies’ practices, see Walter Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, 26 vols. (Winston, N.C., 1895–1914), 22:370–380; New York Historical Society, Collections 24 (1892), 61, 71, 73, 183, 287, 365, 385, 387, 399, 403, 407, 419, 421, 427, 429, 441, 443; Connecticut Historical Society, Collections 9

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The American Revolution 205

(1903), 15, 37, 38, 53, 101, 103, 123, 141, 160, 169, 170, 172, 182, 211, 215, 226; and Harold E. Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, 1990), 168, 174, 175.

16. Marshall Smelser, The Campaign for the Sugar Islands, 1759: A Study of Amphib- ious Warfare (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), 37, 52, 98 (Moore’s proposal); David Syrett, The Siege and Capture of Havana, 1762 (London, 1970), xiv, xviii, 21–22 (Egremont), 38, 94, 100, 107, 137, 195 (Keppel), 210, 259, 324; Daniel E. Walker, ‘‘Colony versus Crown: Raising Black Troops for the British Siege on Havana, 1762,’’ Journal of Carib- bean History 33:1–2 (1999): 74–83; Klein, ‘‘Colored Militia of Cuba,’’ 20.

17. Frey, Water from the Rock, 70. 18. William Draper, The Thoughts of a Traveller upon Our American Disputes (Lon-

don, 1774), 21; Arthur Lee to Richard Henry Lee, December 6, 1774, Lee Family Papers, as cited in Holton, Forced Founders, 140. See also Charles W. Carey Jr., ‘‘ ‘These Black Rascals’: The Origins of Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment,’’ Virginia Social Science Journal 31 (1996): 65–77; William Bradford to James Madison, Jan. 4, 1775, in Wil- liam T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, eds., The Papers of James Madison (Chicago, 1962), 1:132 (also see Madison to Bradford, November 1774, in ibid., 1:129– 130 and June 1775, 1:153); Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier, 171n (Gage letter, c. February 1775); Edmund Burke, Speeches and Letters on American Af- fairs (London, 1908), 102; Jon Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro- Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 88; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 21 (Dunmore), 111 (Gage and Campbell); Peter Force, ed., American Archives, 4th ser., 3:8 (Martin), 256 (Philadelphian), 1010–1011 (petition), 6:18–30 (debate). See also ibid., 2:42.

19. Captain John Dalrymple, ‘‘Project for Strengthening General Howe’s Operations in the North by a Diversion in the South without taking off the Troops,’’ 1775?, George Germain Papers, vol. 4, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan (the pro- posal is in the 1775 volume and may date to October, when Howe succeeded Gage as the British commander-in-chief). See also Frey, Water from the Rock, 68.

20. Still the best study of Dunmore’s proclamation is Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 19–32, but also see Carey, ‘‘ ‘These Black Rascals’ ’’; Holton, Forced Found- ers, 133–163; John E. Selby, Dunmore (Williamsburg, 1977), 36–44.

21. Archibald Campbell to George Germain, January 16, 1776, Germain Papers, vol. 4, Clements Library; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 151–153 (Jamaican rebellion), 152 (for newspaper and Deane); Frey, Water from the Rock, 69 (Campbell), 71 (Deane), 71–72 (Jamaican rebellion).

22. General Howe’s Proclamations, August 23, 1776 and November 30, 1776, 30/ 55/37, ff. 254 and 334, Public Record Office, Kew, England, as cited in Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York, 1976), 29. For more on the situation in New York, see Graham Russell Hodges, ‘‘Black Revolt in New York City and the Neutral Zone: 1775–83,’’ in Paul A. Gilje and William Pencak, eds., New York in the Age of the Consti- tution, 1775–1780 (Cranbury, N.J., 1992), 20–47; Hodges, Root and Branch, 139–161. The later Clinton reference comes from the King’s American Department Orderly Book, Orderly Book Collection, Clements Library (courtesy of Christopher Brown); also see Alexander Innes to Sir Henry Clinton, November 9, 1779, in Alfred E. Jones, ed., ‘‘A

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206 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

Letter Regarding the Queen’s Rangers,’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 30 (1922): 368–372; William Cobbett and T. C. Hansard, eds., The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London, 1806–1820), 19:694n., 698, as cited in Frey, Water from the Rock, 76 (Burke), 113–114 (Clinton proclamation), 119 (Clinton’s reversal), 164 (Cornwallis directive); Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 113–114 (Clinton proclamation), 140–141 (Cornwallis direc- tive). For a letter that may have helped Clinton shift strategy, see Randall M. Miller, ed., ‘‘A Backcountry Loyalist Plan to Retake Georgia and the Carolinas, 1778,’’ South Caro- lina Historical Magazine 75 (1974): 207–214.

23. Murphy Stiel to General Henry Clinton, August 16, 1781, Clinton Papers, vol. 170, no. 27, Clements Library. See also Hodges, Root and Branch, 160 and Todd W. Braisted, ‘‘The Black Pioneers and Others: The Military Role of Black Loyalists in the American War for Independence,’’ in John W. Pulis, ed., Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World (New York, 1999), 3–37, esp. 17.

24. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 148–151; Frey, Water from the Rock, 97–98, 100–102, 137–140; Dennis M. Conrad et al., eds., The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, vols. 8 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 294; 9 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 650–651; 10 (Chapel Hill, 1998), 19; 11 (Chapel Hill, 2000), 64–66. The most interesting documents are John Cruden’s sketch Embodying Ten Thousand Black Troops in the Province of South Carolina, January 5, 1782, CO 5/175 ff. 411–413 and Dunmore to Clinton, February 2, 1782, CO 5/175 ff. 407–410, 415–417, PRO; both are reproduced in George Livermore, An Historical Research respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers (Boston, 1862), 182–189.

25. Unknown to John Adams, June 9, 1775, in Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 3:18–20; Quarles, Negro in the American Revo- lution, 15–17 (Gates, council of war, and NJ committee); Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant to Adams, August 13, 1776 and Adams to Sergeant, August 17, 1776, in Taylor et al., Adams Papers, 4:453–455, 469.

26. ‘‘Antibiastes,’’ Observations on the Slaves, and Indented Servants in the Army, and in the Navy of the United States (Philadelphia, 1777); Thomas Kench proposal, Revolu- tionary Rolls, CXCIX, no. 80, Mass. Arch., as cited in Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 54–55, and reproduced in Livermore, An Historical Research, 160–161; Paul F. Dearden, The Rhode Island Campaign of 1778: Inauspicious Dawn of Alliance (Providence, 1980), xiii; Louis Wilson, ‘‘Rhode Island’s First Rhode Island Regiment— The ‘‘Black Regiment’’ 1777–1780’’ (unpublished paper); thanks to Ronald Hoffman for providing a copy of the Charles Carroll letter of June 4, 1781, and accompanying docu- mentation, which essentially confirms Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 56– 57.

27. The best studies of this subject are Gregory D. Massey, ‘‘The Limits of Antislavery Thought in the Revolutionary Lower South: John Laurens and Henry Laurens,’’ Journal of Southern History 63 (1997): 495–530 (quotations on 512–513); Conrad et al., Nathanael Greene Papers, 10:22, 74, 228–229, 304, 472, 506–508, 11:35, 115, 307– 309, 504.

28. Richard B. Sheridan, ‘‘The Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776 and the

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The American Revolution 207

American Revolution,’’ Journal of Negro History 61 (1976): 290–309; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 175.

29. Petition of William Henry Ricketts to the Assembly of Jamaica, October 30, 1778, CO 140/60, and companion memorials of 1780 and 1782, PRO; John D. Garrigus, ‘‘Catalyst or Catastrophe? Saint-Domingue’s Free Men of Color and the Battle of Savan- nah, 1779–1782,’’ Revista/Review Interamericana 22 (Spring–Summer 1992): 109– 125; The Siege of Savannah in 1779 as Described in Two Contemporaneous Journals of French Officers in the Fleet of Count D’Estaing (Albany, N.Y., 1874), 20, 39, 40, 59; Benjamin Kennedy, ed. and trans., Muskets, Cannon Balls and Bombs: Nine Narratives of the Siege of Savannah in 1779 (Savannah, 1974), 52 (quotation); Alexander Lawrence, Storm Over Savannah: The Story of Count d’Estaing and the Siege of the Town in 1779 (Athens, 1951); George P. Clark, ‘‘The Role of the Haitian Volunteers at Savannah in 1779: An Attempt at an Objective View,’’ Phylon 41 (1980): 356–366.

30. Fuller to Germain, December 23–24, 1778, Fuller MSS 256 ff. 110, 113, 133, Nicholas M. Williams Ethnological Collection, Boston College; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 177, 181.

31. O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 178–179, 180–181 (quotation); Annual Regis- ter, 1781, 112–113, as cited in George F. Tyson Jr., ‘‘The Carolina Black Corps: Legacy of Revolution (1782–1798),’’ Revista/Review Interamericana 5 (Winter 1976): 652.

32. Paul E. Kopperman, ‘‘The British Army in North America and the West Indies, 1755/83: A Medical Perspective,’’ in Geoffrey Hudson, ed., War, Medicine and Britain, 1600–1815 (London, forthcoming); Sylvia Frey, The British Soldier in America (Austin, Tex., 1981), 37; David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Oc- cupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford, 1982), 363; John Hunter, Observa- tions on the Diseases of the Army in Jamaica, and on the Best Means of Preserving the Health of Europeans in That Climate (1788; reprint, London, 1808), 11, 37, 47, 58, 60; Andrew O’Shaughnessy, ‘‘Redcoats and Slaves in the British Caribbean,’’ in Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville, 1996), 105–127; Roger Norman Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville, 1998), 60, 104, 210, 218, 219, 229, 237.

33. Hunter, Observations on the Diseases of the Army, 20, 270–273; Thomas Dancer, M.D., The Medical Assistant, or Jamaica Practice of Physic. Designed Chiefly for the Use of Families and Plantations (St. Jago De La Vega, 1809), 180.

34. O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 179–181; Robertson, Spanish Town Papers, 137 (see also 138–140 for accounts of free blacks who were probably enslaved). See also Alan G. Jamieson, ‘‘American Privateers in the Leeward Islands, 1776–1778,’’ American Neptune 43 (1983): 20–30.

35. Michael J. Jarvis, ‘‘Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680– 1783,’’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (2002): 585–586.

36. Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Ox- ford, 2000), 189; Germain to Campbell, 7 September, 1781, CO 137/80 f. 290, PRO. Stephen Conway has mentioned to us that various offers to raise Catholics in the Ameri- can War exist; see also Arhele Margon, ‘‘A Weapon of War Yet Untried: Irish Catholics

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208 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

and the Armed Forces of the Crown, 1760–1830,’’ in T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffrey, eds., Men, Women and War (Dublin, 1993), 66–85.

37. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 73; the British figures are compiled from previously cited material, for the most part, and involve a fair amount of guesswork and extrapolation.

38. Continental army and state militia numbers are reported in Robert Middlekauf, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York, 1982), 547, and Charles Patrick Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York, 1996), 82–85. The numbers concerning British mobilization, which include army, navy, and home militia, are from Conway, British Isles, 11–44, esp. 28–29; see also his earlier ‘‘British Mobilization in the War of American Independence,’’ Bulletin of Historical Research 72:177 (1999): 58–76. The numbers of Hessians come from Rodney Atwood, The Hessians: Mercenaries from Hessen-Kassel in the American Revo- lution (Cambridge, U.K., 1980), 52, 153, 157, 233, 254–257. Numbers of Loyalists are from Paul Smith, ‘‘The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,’’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 25 (1968): 259–267. For the numbers for July 1779, see Mackesy, War for America, 524–525.

39. The standard account of the West India regiments is Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven, 1979), which can usefully be supplemented by Voelz, Slave and Soldier, 181–212, 224, Buckley, British Army in the West Indies, 117–124, 137–138, 186–201, and Bryan Dyde, The Empty Sleeve: The Story of the West India Regiments in the British Army (Antigua, 1997). Tyson, ‘‘Carolina Black Corps,’’ makes explicit the continuity between the Ameri- can Revolution and the French Revolutionary Wars.

40. ‘‘The Brunswick Contingent in America, 1776–1783,’’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 15 (1891): 224; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 174; Frey, Water from the Rock, 226–227; Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, vol. 1, From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery (Athens, 1992), 170, 187, 200, 207; Wilson, Loyal Blacks, 34–35, 81; James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (New York, 1976), 6, 22, 192; Pulis, Moving On, esp. 59–60, 123; Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962), 73, 99.

41. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 184, 198; Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, 1990), 63–64; Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York, 2002), 46; John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War of Independence (Chicago, 1977), 26–28.

42. Granville Sharp to his brother, January 14, 1792, Sharp Papers, Hardwicke Court, as cited in Wilson, Loyal Blacks, 166; Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies, 3:194–195, as quoted in Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats, 34.

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