A Disease in the Public Mind (8 page)

Hamilton dismissed the idea that slaves lacked the intelligence to be good soldiers. “The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience.” He blamed white reluctance to part with “property of so valuable a kind” for the readiness to believe the “impracticability” of emancipation. “Their natural faculties are probably as good as ours,” he insisted. Hamilton had grown up in the West Indies, surrounded by blacks, and was speaking from years of personal observations. He assured President Jay that freeing the black recruits would “secure their fidelity [and] animate their courage.” It would also have “a good influence” on those who remained slaves.
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On March 29, 1779, Congress voted to urge South Carolina and Georgia to raise “three thousand able-bodied Negroes” who would be commanded by Colonel Laurens and other white officers. Congress would pay one thousand dollars to the owner of each slave who met the “able-bodied” requirement. All blacks who served for the duration of the war would be freed, and receive a fifty dollar bonus.

Several members of Congress were stunned by the audacity of this resolution. “If the plan were carried into effect,” delegate William Whipple of
New Hampshire said, “it will . . . lay the foundation for the abolition of slavery in America.” Based partly on those words, some historians have called the resolution “a first emancipation proclamation.”
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Colonel Laurens rushed to Charleston with the proposal and arrived to find that the British army in Georgia was marching into South Carolina. He told Governor John Rutledge about Congress's resolution, arguing that the invasion made the black brigade even more important. The governor and his privy council rejected the idea without even a polite discussion.

The southern American army retreated behind breastworks around Charleston and the British called on them to surrender. Terrified that the enemy would free the state's slaves, Governor Rutledge offered to give up the city without a fight if the British agreed to accept South Carolina's neutrality for the rest of the war. Rutledge asked Colonel Laurens to carry this message to the British.
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Laurens refused to do any such thing and told the governor that he considered the offer a disgrace. When two other men delivered the message, the British general said it was beyond his authority to make such an agreement and reiterated his demand for surrender. With no other alternative, the South Carolinians dared him to attack. The British retreated to Georgia.

John Laurens resubmitted his proposal, this time in writing. Governor Rutledge and his councilors turned it down without even a hint of politeness. One angry councilor wrote to Congressman Samuel Adams, “We are much disgusted . . . at Congress recommending us to arm our slaves. It was received with great resentment as a very impolitic and dangerous step.”

Laurens, who had been slightly wounded in the fighting that preceded the British retreat, persuaded Benjamin Lincoln, the Massachusetts general whom Washington had sent to defend Charleston, to urge recruiting the blacks. Once more the governor turned the idea down. Laurens won election to the state legislature and introduced the proposal there. It was overwhelmingly rejected. Henry Laurens wrote to his son, urging him to forget his “black air castle.”
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A few months later, almost half the British army in America arrived by ship from New York and besieged Charleston. In the spring of 1780 the king's men forced General Lincoln and his army to surrender. John Laurens became a prisoner of war. The legislature disbanded and Governor Rutledge fled the state. Rebels under leaders such as Francis Marion, “the Swamp Fox,” continued to resist royal rule, and South Carolina was engulfed by a savage guerilla war, during which thousands of slaves fled to British protection.

By 1781, the War for Independence seemed on the brink of collapse in the South and the North was not in much better shape. General Washington had persuaded the British to exchange Laurens for a captured British officer, and he had rejoined the commander in chief's staff. Washington sent him to Paris to plead for an emergency loan of twenty-five million livres—about two hundred million modern dollars. The bilingual Laurens got almost half the money, plus tons of desperately needed uniforms and weapons from the French, although they were on the brink of national bankruptcy.
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Buoyed by this aid, a revived Continental Army combined with a French expeditionary force and a French fleet to trap the British southern field army in the tobacco port of Yorktown, Virginia. Colonels Laurens and Hamilton led a climactic assault that captured two key redoubts, forcing the British to surrender.

The war was by no means over. The British still had twenty-five thousand men on American soil. Well-armed garrisons occupied New York, Savannah, and Charleston, and from these enclaves launched savage attacks on the independence men. Colonel Laurens decided that his black brigade was the answer to this problem, and again persuaded General Washington to let him try to make it a reality.

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A new southern commander, General Nathanael Greene, had driven the British from the interior of South Carolina, but his army was too weak to assault fortified Charleston. Greene was from Rhode Island, and he warmly backed Laurens's idea. John Rutledge, still South Carolina's governor, told
Laurens he would let the next legislature, scheduled to be chosen in December 1781, make the decision. Laurens promptly declared himself a candidate and was easily reelected.

Colonel Laurens introduced his proposal for the black regiments with a new clause that he hoped would take his opponents by surprise. Governor Rutledge was urging confiscation of the lands and slaves of hundreds of loyalists who had joined the British in the previous two years of guerilla conflict. Why not raise the black regiments from the thousands of slaves the state was about to seize from these loyalists?

For a while it looked as if the colonel were mustering strong support from other South Carolinians inside and outside the legislature. Governor Rutledge described the debate as a “hard battle” which at times made him “very much alarmed.” Colonel Laurens's proposal was put to a vote. A pleased Governor Rutledge was soon reporting: “About 12 or 15 were for it & about 100 against it—I now hope it will rest for ever & a day.”
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In a bitter letter to General Washington, Laurens attributed his defeat to “the howlings of a triple-headed monster in which prejudice, avarice & pusillanimity were united.” Washington's reply attempted to console the young idealist with the observations of an older man who had discarded any and all illusions about human nature. In many ways, it is one of the most important letters Washington ever wrote. It cast a piercing light on the later years of the American Revolution—and the future years of the American nation.

The spirit of freedom which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed every thing to the attainment of its object has long since subsided and every selfish passion has taken its place. It is not the public but the private interest which influences the generality of mankind nor can the Americans any longer boast of an exception.
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Laurens's friend Hamilton was equally disappointed by the colonel's defeat. In his letters he had revealed how much he admired his South Carolina brother-in-arms. “You know the low opinion I entertain of mankind,” he
wrote, revealing the psychic wounds he had suffered from his parents' broken marriage and his penniless West Indian youth. “You s[hould] not have taken advantage of my sensibility to st[eal] into my affections without my consent.”

In mid-August 1782, Hamilton excitedly informed Laurens that the governor of New York had appointed him to Congress. The embryo politician begged Laurens to join him. “Quit your sword, my friend, put on the toga, come to Congress . . . We have fought side by side to make America free. Let us hand in hand struggle to make her happy.”
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Laurens remained committed to his dream of black battalions. General Greene offered him command of the army's light infantry. The colonel would be responsible for repelling British forays into the countryside. Hoping some local military glory would give him the prestige he needed to win support for his plan, the glum idealist accepted the offer.

Laurens was soon telling Greene that “the present is an idle insipid time.” The general grew worried about the colonel's gloomy state of mind. The light infantry scored a few minor victories against enemy detachments who ventured beyond Charleston's fortifications. But they were not the sort of triumphs that won much attention. Greene decided to put Laurens in charge of intelligence, and he soon had a network of effective spies inside British-held Charleston.

In late August, General Greene told Laurens of a plan to ambush some three hundred British regulars who were foraging on the rice plantations along the Combahee River in the South Carolina low country. The light infantry was going to hit the British at daybreak, drive them into their boats, and then bombard them with a howitzer from a bluff at the river's mouth as they straggled back to Charleston. It had all the attributes of a sensational victory. Laurens volunteered to join the expedition and asked to command the fifty men assigned to defend the howitzer, which the British were likely to attack by land.

At dawn, the Americans surged across the river to assail the redcoats—and found nothing but stripped houses and cold campfires. Loyalist spies
had warned them of the attack. The foragers had boarded their ships not long after midnight and headed down the river toward the sea.

The chagrinned attackers realized that the enemy knew about the plan to bombard them from the bluff. They would probably order some men ashore to make sure the howitzer was not in position to do them any damage. The Americans sent a horseman pounding down the road to warn Laurens, and followed him with 150 light infantrymen and dragoons.

When Laurens arrived at the neck of land leading to the bluff, 150 British infantrymen were deployed in the underbrush along the road. They started shooting the moment the Americans appeared, dragging their howitzer. Laurens fell back and considered his options. He did not know reinforcements were on the road; the news would probably have made no difference to this deeply depressed soldier, who still hoped fresh military glory would help him sell his proposal to free and arm the slaves.

Laurens ordered a bayonet charge and put himself at the head of his fifty-man column. The 150 British opened fire at point-blank range. There was a huge crash and a billow of musket smoke into the dawn sky. When the acrid fog cleared, Colonel John Laurens was lying on his back with a bullet in his heart. A badly wounded captain and several enlisted men lay near him. The rest of the Americans fled, abandoning their howitzer.

The reinforcements arrived not long after the disaster. An assault cost them a dozen men; they decided the enemy position was too strong and allowed the British to withdraw to their ships, taking the howitzer with them. The Americans retreated to a nearby plantation and reported to General Greene that Colonel John Laurens's body would be buried there “with every mark of distinction due to his rank and merit.”
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Americans of all ranks recognized that they had suffered a fateful wound. “Our country has lost its most promising character,” John Adams wrote to Henry Laurens. George Washington reported the news to Lafayette, a sharer in Laurens's dream of abolishing slavery. “Poor Laurens is no more,” he wrote. “He fell in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina.” Alexander Hamilton was by far the most grief-stricken. “I feel the deepest affliction . . . at
the loss of our dear and [inesti]mable friend Laurens,” he wrote to General Greene. “His career of virtue is at an end. How strangely are human affairs conducted. . . . The world will feel the loss of a man who has left few like him behind, and America of a citizen whose heart realized that patriotism of which others only talk.”
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They were also mourning the death of the first emancipation proclamation.

CHAPTER 4

One Head Turning into Thirteen

For a long time, historians praised the founding generation for their stance on slavery. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison all spoke out against it in various ways. Even men like John Rutledge made no attempt to defend the institution. They called it a necessary evil, temporarily needed for their prosperity. The founders were credited with making large strides toward slavery's eventual extinction.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a new generation of historians, influenced by the civil rights movement, took a very different point of view. They noted ruefully that the Revolution had ended in the creation of a slaveholding republic. Few American slave owners, including the principal founders, applied the Declaration of Independence to their own slaves—or anyone else's. Thomas Jefferson took a particularly bad beating for his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his numerous statements condemning slavery, while he ran up overwhelming debts living like a lord in his hilltop mansion, leaving him financially incapable of freeing his bondsmen. When it
came to slavery, these disenchanted scholars proclaimed, the founders were all talk and no action.