Between Slavery and Freedom (8 page)

Maryland was the only Southern state that specifically allowed slaves to enlist. It also made free men of color as well as white men subject to the draft. Virginia took a more conservative approach, as did Delaware and North Carolina, ruling that free black men could serve, but slaves could only do so as substitutes for their masters. When it emerged after the war that some white men had sent their slaves off to the front lines and then reneged on their promise to free them, Virginia lawmakers were disgusted. They insisted that any slave who could demonstrate that he had fought in place of his master on the understanding that he would get his freedom would indeed get it. Of course, furnishing proof of a promise of freedom was no easy matter if master and slave had had merely a verbal agreement.

The situation in South Carolina and Georgia was very different indeed from that in the Upper South. In 1779, with the British achieving one victory after another in the Lower South, and gathering hordes of black recruits, the Continental Congress demanded action. Delegates had long since reversed themselves on the matter of allowing black men into the Continental Army. Now they took an even more radical stance. South Carolinians must consent to the creation of one or more black regiments. The state needed to muster at least 3,000 black men without further delay. It went without saying that South Carolina would have to draw most of those men from its slave population, and obviously the authorities would need to guarantee the black soldiers their freedom. This initiative on the part of the Continental Congress was not about the morality or immorality of slavery: it was about victory or defeat.

The members of South Carolina's planter elite threw up their hands in horror. Slaves outnumbered whites in the state, and that made them feel very vulnerable. They pointed to past episodes of racial unrest. The slaves were constantly plotting, sometimes with the help of free black relatives and friends. If the Continental Congress forced South Carolina's slave owners to emancipate and arm their slaves, there would be an orgy of violence.
Black men would go on the rampage. They would not fight the British. They would kill their masters instead. Lawmakers announced that rather than accede to the demands of Congress they would pull out of the war effort. Georgia's leaders announced that they would follow suit. Black men, enslaved and free, in the Lower South
did
serve in the Revolution, but with some notable exceptions they did so on the British side.

And after June 1779, there was even more reason for black men to do so. On June 30, royal Commander-in-Chief Sir Henry Clinton, realizing that the military use of African Americans could play a decisive role in winning the war, announced that it was official British policy to liberate any slave who made it to British lines. Seeking their freedom, thousands of slaves flocked to the loyalists, who used them in arms as well as in various noncombat posts. In several cities, including Philadelphia and New York, the British organized companies of Black Pioneers to do everything from guarding prisoners to keeping the streets clean. In the North and the South black recruits foraged, spied, drove wagons, and served as personal attendants to British officers.

In addition to participating in the land-based conflict, black men took part in many naval actions. Tough and dangerous though life in the navy might be, it was as good a means of gaining one's liberty as enlisting in the army, and the prospect of plunder appealed just as strongly to black men as it did to white men. Fugitive slaves, especially those with seafaring experience, joined the Royal Navy in search of freedom. Other fugitives, along with hundreds of black men who were legally free, joined the Continental Navy. Almost all of the newly independent states created their own navies and each faced the same problem—getting enough experienced men and boys to crew their vessels. Free blacks volunteered because they believed in the patriot cause or because they understood that sea service generally meant equal pay for equal work. The enslaved looked for captains they thought might not inquire into the legal status of any sturdy-looking man who was eager to serve. Again and again slave owners lamented that valuable “property” had run away and headed to the closest seaport. Recapturing a slave who had gone to sea was far more challenging than retaking that same individual while he was still on dry land, and if he survived he was obviously going to make sure he did not return to his “home” port.

In addition to those who served in the Continental Navy or the state navies, thousands of other seafarers, black and white, opted to become privateers. As the war progressed, merchants and ship owners followed the venerable tradition established by the British and the French in earlier conflicts. Under license from their home state or from the newly-organized United States, they refitted trading vessels as armed raiders with the goal of
plundering enemy shipping—and everyone, from the captain and the owner of the privateer down to the humblest ship's boy, got a share of the plunder. With money at stake, captains of privateers did not care about the race or the status of a crew member. Black men and boys thronged the wharves, eager to ship out, make money, and in the case of runaway slaves make good their escape.

After the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, as British commanders began preparing to evacuate their forces from the ports they still held, the ex-slaves who had escaped and joined the British feared they would be left behind. They grew even more desperate when they learned that the peace treaty that officially ended hostilities stipulated that slaves must be returned to their owners. They crowded on to British ships, pleading to go somewhere—anywhere—where they could be free. Sometimes they met with a sympathetic hearing. Realizing what was going on, George Washington raced to New York and insisted to the British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, that the terms of surrender required him to hand over all the runaways who were within British lines. Carleton refused, maintaining that the British had made a pledge of freedom to the slaves who sided with them and he intended to honor that pledge.

At least 10,000 black people, and perhaps as many as 20,000, left with the British. For some it was only a brief respite. British officers who were far less honorable than Carleton re-enslaved them. Other black loyalists were more fortunate. Hundreds headed to England and tried to build new lives for themselves there. Many more went to the West Indies where they resettled as free people, although maintaining one's liberty in the midst of a slave-holding society was fraught with difficulties. By far the largest contingent found a dubious freedom in Nova Scotia. The failure of the British authorities to provide for them as generously as they provided for white loyalists prompted the black loyalists to petition the government in London for relief, and led to a mass exodus to Britain's new West African colony of Sierra Leone. However, enough black Americans remained in Nova Scotia to establish their own communities, some of which survive to this day. Few black loyalists received pensions because the British government considered it payment enough that they were no longer slaves. A black man needed to prove that he had been free before the war to have any hope of getting a penny for his services to the king.

On the patriot side, some black men returned from the battlefield only to have their masters on whose behalf they had fought reclaim them as slaves. Others came back to enjoy their freedom, and in some instances with enough money to buy their loved ones out of bondage. They returned with tales to
tell, and with valuable military or naval experience. In most instances, they had fought alongside white men. Ironically, few black men who had fought in the Revolution had done so in all-black units. Not until the Korean War would the United States have such a racially integrated fighting force.

Black veterans had often traveled far from home. They had met people from many different backgrounds and they had endured all kinds of hardships—hunger, exposure to the elements, inadequate clothing, and harsh discipline, along with separation from friends and family. For the majority, whether they had been free before they enlisted or whether they had been enslaved, these were hardships with which they were already painfully familiar. The home front to which these men returned was very different from the one they had left. The war and their role in it had led to a period of profound change for themselves, their families, the entire black population, and the nation as a whole. For some black people the war and its aftermath meant freedom and the chance to achieve a measure of social and economic independence. For others it saw the betrayal of a dream.

The war for black liberty would continue long after the British surrender and long after the thirteen newly independent states had united to form a new nation. Nonetheless, the American Revolution had an important impact on slavery. Prior to the Revolution, slavery existed in all of the British colonies of North America. During and after the Revolution, many of the newly emerging states in the North took steps to end the system, either by abolishing slavery in their state constitutions or by adopting gradual abolition laws.

Vermont was the first state to outlaw slavery in its state constitution. The fact that slavery had historically played a minor role in Vermont meant there were few black people in the state. White Vermonters did not anticipate a difficult transition from slavery to freedom when they framed a constitution in 1777 that declared that “No male person ought . . . to serve any person as a servant, slave, or apprentice after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years, nor female in like manner after . . . the age of eighteen years.”
4
As for civil rights for free people of African ancestry, lawmakers left things vague, but apparently black men could and did vote in Vermont.

Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Law was the culmination of decades of antislavery agitation by black people, both enslaved and free, and by white critics of slavery. Although the Quakers had rid themselves of slave-holding, most of their neighbors had not. Pressuring Pennsylvania to live up to the principles of liberty was an uphill battle. The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African
Race, composed largely of Quakers, disintegrated during the war, although it was reborn a few years later. Black Pennsylvanians cooperated with white abolitionists, but they did not rely on their efforts alone. Slaves did everything they could to gain their own freedom, while the free helped their enslaved friends and family members and endeavored to improve their own situation.

In 1780, with the war still raging, Pennsylvania lawmakers finally approved a gradual abolition law. The law was limited in scope, and applied only to children born after the date of its passage (March 1), and then only when they reached the age of twenty-eight. Until then they were to be bound or “apprenticed” to the people who owned their mothers: they could be sold, leased, even left with real estate and farm animals in people's wills. And, given life expectancy at the time, they might well die before they ever secured their full freedom. Although Pennsylvania had taken its first wavering steps toward ending human bondage, the law said nothing about what rights free people of color would enjoy. It would be left to black women and men themselves to give true meaning to their freedom, and they would prove resolute in their determination to make sure that they and their descendants were free in more than name only.

The path to ending slavery in Massachusetts was a tortuous one. Within the white community the debate over the ownership of one human being by another had gone on for decades, although few whites were willing to do more than pay lip service to the notion of liberty for all. Black people did not leave it to a handful of well-disposed whites to act for them. They pushed the issue beyond platitudes and high-sounding but empty phrases. In 1780, the newly independent state had adopted a constitution that said that “all men are born free and equal.” Two slaves, Quock Walker and Mumbet
alias
Elizabeth Freeman, brought separate court actions in which they and their lawyers cited that “free and equal” clause and tested its deeper meaning. The attorneys for Walker and Freeman contended that unless anyone could prove that the term “all men” did not apply to black people, the constitution effectively outlawed slavery. While Walker and Freeman gained
their
freedom, it was a matter of opinion whether slavery in Massachusetts was illegal. In the 1783 Walker case Chief Justice William Cushing ruled that “the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution.”
5
However, lawmakers did not follow up on the Walker and Freeman verdicts by introducing an abolition law. Individual slaves took matters into their own hands by pressuring their owners to liberate them or by simply walking away. Some owners stubbornly insisted that the law still protected their property rights, and some black people remained in bondage
for years, but by the late 1780s it was clear that the institution of slavery was dying in Massachusetts.

New Hampshire took as long and as twisted a path to abolition as did Massachusetts, and it, too, left the question of black rights vague and ill-defined. If the Granite State did not have as many slaves as Massachusetts, it still had a substantial number, and they were assertive and articulate. In 1779, slaves in and around Portsmouth seized the initiative, possibly with help from members of the admittedly small free community of color. They approached the legislature and challenged lawmakers to live up to the ideals of independence and rights for all. They wanted to be treated like other inhabitants and have “an Opportunity of evincing to the World our Love of Freedom by . . . opposing the Efforts of Tyranny and Oppression over the Country in which we ourselves have been so long injuriously enslaved.” If New Hampshire abolished slavery—a practice that flew in the face of “Justice and Humanity”—they pledged that every black man would be happy to fight alongside his white brothers against the forces of the King of England.
6
In 1783, the state adopted a constitution that said that “all men [were] born equal and independent,” and had certain “natural rights,” which included “enjoying . . . life and liberty.”
7
That did not amount to immediate emancipation, but the enslaved claimed their freedom from owners who were not sure they could hold on to them. Within a decade slavery had faded away. What did not fade so completely were old patterns of thought on the part of white people in New Hampshire. Black people determined to enjoy the same rights as their white neighbors now that they were free faced many challenges.