A Disease in the Public Mind (7 page)

Later in 1775 the general began to change his mind. None of the white New Englanders objected to having blacks in their ranks. More important, a dismaying number of whites were refusing to reenlist for the coming year. On December 30, 1775, Washington revised his previous enlistment order: “As the General is informed that numbers of Free Negroes are desirous of enlisting, he gives leave to recruiting officers to entertain them.”
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Around this time, Washington invited a black slave named Phillis Wheatley to visit him in his Cambridge headquarters. Wheatley had arrived in Boston aboard a slave ship in 1761 at the age of seven. Bought by a tailor to be a personal servant for his wife, the child had soon displayed evidence of amazing intelligence. She learned to read and write almost immediately, and was soon mastering Latin. She began writing poetry at the age of fourteen, and in 1773 she published a book of poems in London.

Six months after Washington took command of the Continental army, he found a poetic tribute to him on his desk from this young African woman. In cadences that obviously reflected wide reading in the best English poetry
of the period, Phillis Wheatley asked the goddess Columbia to bless General Washington's struggle for his nation's freedom. The last stanza was a climactic plea:

Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side

Thy ev'ry action let the Goddess guide

A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine

With gold unfading, Washington! be thine.

Washington wrote a letter to “Miss Phillis” thanking her for this “polite notice” of him. He added that it was striking proof of “her great poetical talents.” He would have arranged to have the poem published, but he feared he would incur “the imputation of vanity.” Whereupon he invited the young woman to visit him, if she should ever come to Cambridge. “I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the muses.”
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It requires a moment's pause to realize the uniqueness of this exchange between a slave woman and a prominent Virginia slave owner. It took place in early 1776, at a time when few if any Virginians would have done such a thing. Some historians have suggested that it was Phillis Wheatley who changed Washington's mind about enlisting free blacks. But it is equally likely that Washington's mind had already begun to change after talking to some of the free blacks whom he had originally barred from reenlisting. Several had come to headquarters to protest their exclusion and reiterated their desire to fight for America's liberty. A group of officers had written a testimonial, urging Salem Poor's reenlistment.

The war lasted another seven often harrowing years. More and more black men joined the Continental army, as the enthusiasm of 1775 and 1776 faded and the grim reality of British determination became apparent. Washington took the lead in telling the Continental Congress that “patriotism” would not a win “a long and bloody war.” Again and again, he insisted, “We must take men as they are, not as we wish them to be.”

The general made no objection when numerous people hired blacks as substitutes to escape the draft that was imposed by state governments to fill
their annual quotas for the Continental army. By 1781, one in every seven soldiers in the American army was black.

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During these years, Washington developed a deep friendship with a young French volunteer, the Marquis de Lafayette. Thanks largely to his family's prominence in the court of the French king, Congress had appointed him a major general. The idealistic nobleman spent large amounts of his own fortune to improve the lot of the often hungry and ragged regulars at Valley Forge and elsewhere. He also displayed courage on the battlefield. When he was wounded at the Battle of the Brandywine in 1777, General Washington told an army doctor to care for him “as if he were my own son.”

Lafayette soon began talking with Washington about his detestation of slavery. The general must have been more than a little shocked when the young Frenchman exclaimed during one conversation: “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived thereby I was founding a land of slavery.” These conversations may have played a part in Washington agreeing to another large step in black participation in the Revolution.
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Blacks from New England had continued to enlist in large numbers. Of forty-four hundred free blacks in Massachusetts, five hundred volunteered. In Connecticut the number was close to three hundred. As the American army's ordeal at Valley Forge thinned its ranks, General James Varnum of Rhode Island came to Washington with a new proposal: Why not enlist an entire regiment of black soldiers?

Tiny Rhode Island was having difficulties filling the quotas for its two Continental regiments. The legislature passed a law, declaring that henceforth “every able-bodied Negro, Mulatto or Indian Man slave” would be welcome in these regiments. The state agreed to pay the slaves' owners four hundred dollars per man. Washington told the delighted Varnum that the idea had his approval. Over the next few months, between 225 and
250 blacks became members of Rhode Island's Second Continental regiment. The achievement—stark proof of how quickly blacks identified with Thomas Jefferson's declaration of universal equality—is even more remarkable when we factor in the violent objections of a great many Rhode Island whites.

The protestors tried to persuade blacks not to volunteer. They told the would-be soldiers that the whites would only use them as “breastworks” to stop enemy bullets. (Virginians had said the same thing to persuade slaves not to join Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian regiment.) These exchanges reveal that American slavery did not impose the total control that the political definition implied. Slaves frequently made up their own minds, no matter what their masters said.

Rhode Island's black regiment served in the Continental army for the rest of the war. Its soldiers fought well on a number of battlefields. In 1780, they survived a cruel ambush in Westchester County that cost them almost fifty officers and men. The regiment's success encouraged several officers to urge the creation of similar units in other New England states. But Massachusetts rejected the idea, after a brief debate.

Late in the war, Connecticut recruited a single company of black soldiers using the Rhode Island policy of paying owners to free their slaves. But the idea remained controversial. Rhode Island whites eventually forced the legislature to repeal the 1778 law, claiming it disturbed relationships between masters and slaves.
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In 1781, Thomas Jefferson responded to a French diplomat who had sent queries to leading men in all the states, asking them to give him a better understanding of their history, traditions, and geography. Jefferson's response, which he completed in 1783, became
Notes on the State of Virginia
, the only book he ever wrote. It contained superb descriptions of Virginia's western scenery and thorough discussions of the state's agriculture and politics. It also included trenchant comments on slavery, which were to become influential in contradictory ways.

Jefferson insisted he was writing as a scientist, trying to report objectively on everything he had seen and studied in Virginia. But in his comments on slavery, it was apparent that his feelings were deeply involved. He began by saying he thought that the Revolution had improved the condition of slaves in Virginia. Masters had grown less harsh and slaves had found pride and hope in the participation of free blacks and slave volunteers in the war's great events. But slavery remained a cruel and destructive enterprise, which undermined the morals of both masters and victims.

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise in the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and the most degrading submission on the other.” Jefferson declared the effect of slavery on the white man was as ruinous as it was on the Negro. “The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals in such circumstances. Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal. With the morals of the people, their industry is also destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labor for himself that can make another labor for him.”

Ultimately, Jefferson feared that slavery might undermine the whole American enterprise. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, the conviction in the minds of the people that their liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but by his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

Jefferson spelled out the fearful future he dreaded: “Considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” He was saying a revolt among the slaves was all too possible, with the outcome quite possibly in their favor.

Jefferson went on to give an estimate of the black race's abilities “as a subject of natural history.” He emphasized he was only speaking from his observations of black slaves, and he admitted in advance it was a subject of “great tenderness.” He did not want to “degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their creator may perhaps have given them.”

Alas, with baffling obtuseness, Jefferson proceeded to do the very thing he deplored. “I advance it as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both mind and body . . . This unfortunate difference in color and perhaps in faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

Jefferson doubted that the freed blacks could live peacefully in the same country with their former masters. “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, will divide us into parties and produce convulsions, and probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.” Ultimately, Jefferson concluded, freed blacks would have to be resettled in a foreign country to avoid inevitable bloodshed.

Another obstacle to white–black relations, Jefferson continued, was the Negroes' “immoveable veil of black” which tended to “eternal monotony” from an aesthetic point of view. Blacks had “several engaging if somewhat childlike qualities,” but they had little ability for reflection or forethought. In reason they were “much inferior” to the whites and in imagination “dull, tasteless and anomalous.” While sexually more ardent than whites, their affections were “neither tender nor lasting.”

When he penned these lines, Jefferson thought he was writing for only a single individual, or a group of individuals in the French government. After he became American ambassador to France in 1784, he showed
Notes on Virginia
to several friends in Paris, and they persuaded him to publish the book in a limited edition of one hundred copies. From there it was an all-too-predictable step to an edition published in London in1787. Authors had no copyright protection in the eighteenth century. American editions soon followed and
Notes
became one of the most quoted and debated books ever written. For many whites, especially in the South, Jefferson's words elevated their already negative opinion of blacks to the level of confirmed truth.
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CHAPTER 3

The First Emancipation Proclamation

Rhode Island's black regiment inspired a much more difficult challenge—recruiting black soldiers in the American South. The attempt became interwoven with the tragic personal story of one of the American Revolution's most appealing (and most forgotten) younger leaders, Colonel John Laurens.

Almost theatrically handsome, the twenty-seven-year-old Laurens had a rare combination of gifts that made him one of General Washington's favorite aides. He repeatedly proved himself a fearless soldier, and he mingled his courage with a passionate idealism. For him, the Revolution was a crusade to transform the world. He wanted to see Thomas Jefferson's opening words in the Declaration of Independence become a reality shared by all Americans. Even before Congress signed the Declaration, Laurens told a friend: “I think we Americans, at least in the Southern colonies, cannot contend with
a good grace
for liberty until we have enfranchised our slaves.”
¹

In 1778, during the winter at Valley Forge, Laurens had been present when General James Varnum persuaded Washington to agree to raise a black Rhode Island regiment. The young colonel decided the idea could
and should be applied to his home state of South Carolina. He discussed the idea with General Washington and with his father, Henry Laurens, who was president of the Continental Congress at the time. Ironically, the senior Laurens was also the wealthiest slave trader in South Carolina. Both men told the young colonel that they agreed with him in principle, but they doubted that any southern legislator would approve arming slaves. The fear of an insurrection haunted too many people, especially in South Carolina, where blacks outnumbered whites in many counties.

John Laurens temporarily shelved his plan. But he revived it when the British shifted the war to the South in 1779 and conquered Georgia. He persuaded his father to back him; Washington, although dubious, also gave him permission to make the attempt.
²
Laurens's fellow aide and closest friend, Colonel Alexander Hamilton, wrote a letter to John Jay, the new president of Congress, urging him to press for a resolution supporting the plan.