1775 (66 page)

Frustrated by South Carolina’s limited success, Georgia thought to take stronger measures in March 1776. Several hundred runaways had gathered on Tybee Island, but on March 25, a Georgia raiding party found no one on Tybee but a wood and water detail from HMS
Symmetry,
several of whom were killed or captured. The runaways had already been taken away by British transports and merchant ships.
⁶⁸

For the British, the net military consequences of Dunmore’s activity in 1775 and early 1776 were negative. True, dozens of plantations near the coast were raided or thrown into disarray as slaves fled. In addition, Virginians also found it harder to reorganize their militia because poor whites were angered by special concessions to nervous slave owners. The December 1775 ordinance, which exempted overseers on plantations from service, also became controversial because planters were allowed to designate one overseer for every four slaves, a loophole for gentry families to avoid military service.
⁶⁹

Still, the larger effect of racial issues was to unite white southerners behind the Revolution. For example, before Dunmore’s waterborne raids, southerners in Congress were less interested than New Englanders in organizing an American navy. By October and November 1775, stung by Dunmore’s river and bay shore activity, they had become increasingly supportive. The British expedition to the southern colonies planned in 1775 ultimately failed everywhere.

Among the northern provinces, New Jersey was the only one where
black recruits favored the British. In New England, free blacks were not notably wooed away from their town-level militia roles or from their sore memories of British maritime policy. Most remained on the Patriot side. During the war’s later years, legislative assemblies in Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts entertained or approved proposals for black regiments.
⁷⁰
As for blacks serving on privateers or vessels of provincial and then state navies, participation was widespread even in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, another inadequately told story of the Revolution.

Historians have mounted a small debate over George Washington’s change of position on black military service during 1775. A few have gone so far as to tie his decision making during those winter months to the threat to his family and plantation that he perceived in the policies of Lord Dunmore.
⁷¹
Tapping black manpower for the Patriot side may have seemed like a wise countermove.

Slavery, Servitude, and Eighteenth-Century Political Semantics

Dr. Johnson’s much-quoted observation about the loudest yelps for liberty coming from southern slave owners was not the devastating dismissal of American hypocrisy that twenty-first-century readers might imagine. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “slavery” had become an intolerable status routinely cited by political thinkers, pamphleteers, and ordinary folk in the English-speaking world. One stanza of “Rule Britannia,” penned in 1740, proudly asserted “Britons never, ever, shall be slaves.” If slavery was a fate principally associated with blacks, that sentence would have made no sense.

Through the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth century, however, slavery was
not
the fate of one race alone. That was true even in North America circa 1775. If whites held 450,000 blacks in slavery, another 40,000 or so white indentured servants were likewise “property.” White masters sometimes treated them worse than slaves, representing as they did a lifetime investment.

According to a pair of prizewinning evaluations, several North American Indian tribes were also large-scale slave owners and slave traders: the Cherokee were prominent in the East, and the Comanche even more sweepingly in their empire on the southwestern plains. In his book
The Indian Slave Trade,
historian Alan Galley establishes a chronology: “For the most
part, slavery was not a moral issue to southern [American] peoples of the late seventeenth century. Europeans, Africans and Native Americans all understood enslavement as a legitimate fate for particular individuals or groups. All accepted that ‘others’ could or should have that status.” Then the concept of race caught hold in the mid-eighteenth century.
⁷²

Meanwhile, “the Comanche built the largest slave economy in the colonial southwest,” according to historian Pekka Hämäläinen.
⁷³
In his revisionist history, the Comanche in that part of North America represented a more potent empire than that of colonial Spain. They took Indian captives, black captives, and Hispanic captives from what is now New Mexico. In the 1770s, their raiding zones extended from western Colorado south to Laredo, Texas. By the early nineteenth century, they were taking white captives in Texas and selling black slaves from one Indian tribe to another.
⁷⁴

True, white or Hispanic slaves in Indian Country never amounted to more than a thousand or two. But in the 1770s, a much larger number of European slaves could be found in Morocco, Algiers, and several other parts of North Africa. Reports by the East India Company also mentioned small numbers held in Muslim seaports along the Indian Ocean. The white slaves held in Barbary as of 1730 numbered somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000. Any figure for 1775 would have been considerably lower, because between 1757 and 1767, the sultan of Morocco finally signed treaties with Denmark, Britain, Holland, Venice, France, and Spain.
⁷⁵
These agreements reduced the inflow of captives, although conclusive action did not come until 1816, when a British squadron under Sir Edward Pellew pounded Algiers to rubble and burned the corsair fleet.

Memories would have remained strong, though, in southern England and New England. The captive-hunting “Sallee” pirates—they hailed from Sale, near present-day Rabat, on the Moroccan coast—did more than capture vessels and passengers in European waters or en route to North America. Although towns in Spain and Portugal were the prime seventeenth-century targets, the corsairs sometimes attacked English and Irish villages, carrying off the captives to North Africa. Many voyagers to Virginia and Massachusetts were among those captured, and well into the eighteenth century, the white slaves taken to North Africa were part of a memory that, more distantly, included English and Scots—the Presbyterian minister John Knox was one—chained as galley slaves by the French and Spanish.

In consequence, for Englishmen or American colonials in the 1750s and 1760s to routinely use “slavery” as an invidious political image does not
suggest hypocrisy, even for someone owning a slave or indentured servant. The political usage was well established. Still, new perceptions were in the air. The burgeoning mid-eighteenth-century slave trade had intensified race emphasis in the American South to match that in the Caribbean. Quakers in North America were freeing their slaves, and emancipation was gaining momentum in Britain. The French had ended galley slavery earlier in the century, and the sultan of Morocco thought it wise to stop seizing European slaves.

By 1775, plantation-owning Americans who bemoaned “slavery” could be mocked by British commentators, but Britons were about to stumble over a kindred reassessment. Britain’s practice of manning armies with mercenaries—a military version of indentured servitude—was about to make His Majesty’s government a butt of criticism among philosophes and other European standard-bearers of the Enlightenment.

P
artly through inability to enlist or conscript a largely unmilitary population of seven million in England and Wales, the British government had too small an army to reconquer over 2 million rebellious English-speaking colonials 3,000 miles away. The 1688 revolution against the excesses of seventeenth-century Stuart kings had left England a people and culture distrustful of standing armies. Thus, the British Empire of the eighteenth century, rich through trade, reshaped itself to minimize any such need, becoming what one historian aptly called Europe’s first fiscal-military state.
¹
Instead of conscripting unwilling Englishmen, the king and Parliament used British lucre and global financial prowess to hire foreign troops as needed.

This alternative worked satisfactorily for wars fought on the European continent. Britain’s peacetime army remained small enough—36,000 in 1774—that embroilment in a Continental war obliged the Crown to greatly expand or even to double its military manpower by contracting for German or Russian troops.
²
In one instance, in 1755 George II had procured 55,000 Russian soldiers to fight for him in Germany, but relations between Russia and Prussia blocked the arrangement’s implementation.
³

The usual British practice was to hire mercenaries from princely states in the Protestant north of Germany—Hesse-Cassel, Brunswick, Waldeck, Anspach-Bayreuth, and others. Kings George I and George II were bound to these rulers through Hanoverian politics and a web of British treaties, subsidies, and royal marriages. These continental embroilments, though, were an annoyance and a provocation to many in Parliament. Public opinion bridled at any hint of German troops being employed in Britain. They had been brought over only twice—first in 1745, when Hessian mercenaries were imported to help put down that year’s Scottish rising, and again in 1756, when Hessian and Hanoverian soldiers were hired to help defend England against a threatened French invasion.
⁴
That kind of employment was acceptable. In neither case had the German troops been used against Englishmen.

That was about to change. In the autumn of 1774, General Gage, confined in Boston, had already anticipated Britain’s use of Hessians and Hanoverians in North America. Lord North and the Cabinet, surprisingly, never seem to have pondered the psychological bridges certain to be burned by employing German or Russian mercenaries to subjugate English speakers in New England or New Jersey. Lecky’s pronouncement, in the epigraph above, was to the point. The opposition in Parliament, perceiving a distasteful innovation, blistered the government as the engagement of mercenaries—
Soldatenhandel
—moved from planning in 1775 to actual treaties in early 1776.

1775: Divided British Opinions on America

During much of the twentieth century, British historians took the view that English opinion in 1775 had strongly supported coercion in America. That misreading was the mirror image of American insistence that the colonists overwhelmingly favored a revolution, with dissenting Loyalists few and far between. In reality, important divisions existed on both sides of the Atlantic, as documentation since the 1970s has shown.
⁵

Earlier British interpretation often erred through preoccupation with a
smaller “political nation.” Only this elite counted—broadly, the 100,000 or so Britons who voted for Parliament or in municipalities, but especially its core: some 10,000 to 15,000 nobles and gentry, members of Parliament, government officeholders, military officers, Church of England clergy, and substantial lawyers, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers. Clerks, shop keepers, and artisans did not count.

Public opinion, then, was not a great concern. The popular Methodist preacher John Wesley, a war supporter, could aver to Lord Dartmouth in the autumn of 1775 that “the people in general, all over the nation, are so far from being well-satisfied that they are far more deeply dissatisfied than they appear to have been before the Great Rebellion [the 1640s]…and nineteen out of twenty to whom I speak in defense of the King seem never to have heard a word spoken for him before.”
⁶
Ironically, the Marquess of Rockingham, a leading American sympathizer, was finding the opposite: that “the generality of the people of England are now led away by the representations and arts of the ministry, the court and their abettors; so that the violent measures towards America are freely adopted and countenanced by a majority of individuals of all ranks, professions or occupations in this country.”
⁷
No Gallup poll or its ilk would exist for another 150 years.

In recent decades, though, it has become clear that significant divisions on coercing or conciliating North America existed even within the “political nation,” as well as among the 200,000 to 300,000 persons just outside. This broader group would have included, for example, men not eligible to vote for Parliament but able to participate in associations and to sign petitions in many municipalities and boroughs. Likewise for lower-middle- and middle-class Britons in industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham that still lacked representation in Parliament.