Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty - Softcover

Pybus, Cassandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807055158 ISBN 13: 9780807055151

Verlag: BEACON PR, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled from their masters to find freedom with the British. Having emancipated themselves--and with rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears--these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their lives.

This alternative narrative includes the stories of dozens of individuals--including Harry, one of George Washington's slaves--who left America and forged difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, this pathbreaking work will alter the way we think about the American Revolution.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cassandra Pybus holds the Australian Research Council Chair of History at the University of Tasmania. An award-winning author who has written ten books, she is a frequent Fulbright professor and international fellow at American universities.

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Epic Journeys of Freedom

Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for LibertyBy Cassandra Pybus

Beacon Press

Copyright © 2007 Cassandra Pybus
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780807055151

Chapter One

LIBERTY OR DEATH

It was early spring at Mount Vernon, the seven-thousand-acre estate of Colonel George Washington in Fairfax County, Virginia. Vestiges of winter snow lingered on the expanse of lawn that swept down to the Potomac River, while along the lovingly tended cherry walk, plump buds showed the first hint of spring blossom. The early-morning air was still raw on March 15, 1775, when the enslaved hostler at Mount Vernon prepared the colonel's horse for his trip to the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond, a three or four days' ride to the south. Like all the Mount Vernon slaves, Harry had only the tattered woolen jacket and the short breeches that he had worn since last summer to ward off the chill. Harry felt the cold keenly; he was from West Africa, where such bitter weather was unknown.

Harry probably came to Virginia in one of several shipments of slaves from the Senegambia imported into the Upper Potomac by Thomson Mason, the brother of Washington's close friend George Mason. Washington acquired Harry in 1763 from the estate of a deceased neighbor, one of a job lot of four people Washington purchased to be his contribution to an enslaved workforce of the Great Dismal Swamp Company. Washington was the prime mover and manager of this scheme, whereby twelve "adventurers" each contributed five slaves to the workforce in order to drain sixty square miles and establish a rice plantation. Nan was another of Washington's acquisitions for the Dismal Swamp, and she may have been Harry's wife, as Washington had scruples about permanently separating couples. There was also a boy, Toney, who could have been her son, as he was additional to the five adult slaves that Washington was required to contribute. By 1766, both Harry and Nan were taken from the Great Dismal Swamp to work at Mount Vernon. If they were a couple, they were not permitted to live together at Mount Vernon; Harry was employed around the Mansion House, while Nan labored on one of the outlying farms at Muddy Hole.

In the spring of 1775, Washington was leaving his handsome estate to attend the Second Virginia Convention as the elected representative for Fairfax County. Despite the beguiling promise of incipient cherry blossom, these were uncertain, turbulent times in Virginia. The threat of war with Britain loomed, a prospect Washington dreaded. He was already the elected commander of a number of independent militias raised across northern Virginia, and he knew that if war came he would be the one to lead the American forces into a conflict bloodier than he had ever before witnessed. By the time Washington left Richmond to return home, a fortnight later, black frost had burned the blossom from all his fruit trees and his prospect for continuing with rustic pleasures at Mount Vernon was equally blighted. With a heavy heart he wrote his brother, "It is my full intention to devote my life and fortune to the cause we are engaged in, if need be."

The Second Virginia Convention chose to meet in the small town of Richmond rather than the colonial capital of Williamsburg in order to avoid the wrath of the royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore. They selected the Henrico County church on a hill above the village because the recent addition of a north wing to the pleasant wooden building made it the largest in the town. Even so, the church could barely contain all the 127 delegates who converged on Richmond from all over the colony on March 20. For the townsfolk of Richmond to have the colonial elite debating matters of great urgency in their church was cause for much excitement. Word must have spread like wildfire about Patrick Henry's electrifying performance on March 23, when he urged that the reluctant delegates must prepare to resist the British.

With his face flushed with passionate intensity, Henry laid out the choice Virginians faced between freedom and enslavement. "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" he demanded, his voice rising to a crescendo. "Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me ..."-he allowed an exaggerated pause while he held an ivory letter opener poised above his heart-"give me liberty or give me death!" With this emotive allusion to Addison's play Cato, which had a profound influence on so many of the Virginia gentry, Henry invited his fellow delegates transform their provincial lives into a theater of heroic resistance and republican virtue. Washington, too, was a devotee of Cato and he shared Henry's assessment of the stark choices facing the colonists, even though he remained silent in the debate that followed Henry's thunderbolt. In his more prosaic style, he had said much the same thing six months earlier when he wrote to his friend Bryan Fairfax, "The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heap'd upon us; till custom and use, will make us as tame, and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway."

Henry's rhetorical flourish gave a heroic gloss to sentiments reverberating through the colony for more than a year. The cries of "liberty" heard at rowdy gatherings at the county courthouse, and in the ardent talk swirling about the streets of every town, were discreetly absorbed by enslaved people who mingled unobtrusively in the excitable crowd. Passionate chatter about liberty and despotism, which animated the dining tables and drawing rooms of Virginian plantations, was not lost on the footmen and cooks, the valets and maids, who were as much a fixture of the plantation house as the furniture. At Mount Vernon, Harry may well have listened with more than idle interest to the colonel's views about the tyranny of the British masters and the inviolable concept of liberty. He had briefly managed to achieve the condition of liberty when he ran away on July 29, 1771, after being transferred from the Mansion House to work on the construction of a mill nearly three miles away, near the newly acquired Ferry Farm. He was soon caught, in response to advertisements Washington had placed, and returned to Ferry Farm. After a year, he was again put to work at Mansion House in 1773. Though he made no further attempt to abscond, Harry had not abandoned the idea of liberty that now so animated his master.

Even if Washington had been canny enough to send his slaves out of earshot, it would not have been possible to quarantine the ideas that he discussed with his friends and neighbors. Snatches of talk overheard were almost instantaneously channeled from plantation to plantation through the complex networks of the enslaved community. In the Tidewater region, dominated by long-established plantations with a large slave workforce, the slave quarters would house twenty or more people who were related, and they were likely to have other siblings, spouses, uncles, aunts, and cousins living within the neighborhood. These people had intricate means of communication, barely understood by the master. Under the cover of darkness, they would congregate together for songs and storytelling, and the word would spread. On Sunday, they would come together from all over the county to sell the produce raised in their family plots and to trade information. "The Negroes have a wonderfull art of communicating...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BEACON PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807055158
• ISBN 13: 9780807055151
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 281
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar