My own studies of what I term the Great Escape - the four thousand African
Americans who took their freedom during the War of 1812 by way of the Royal
Navy - have led me through a sequence of changes in my understanding of this
aspect of slavery. Quite apart from national and international matters in
that war, I have developed an interest in not only the major individuals
involved, the politicians and the officers of the armed services on all
sides, but also the private individuals, the main subjects of the study, the
slaves themselves (though the refugees included some free people as well).

I started with a view of slavery conditions that was made up of the usual
layman's generalisations, but once I went into cases, including affidavits
of slaveholders and their neighbours in the compensation claims, and tried
to establish the contemporary context, including the latest research I could
lay my hands on, I began to form a new view. To put it somewhat too simply,
I suspect that at that place and at that time the worst fear of the slave
was not of harsh treatment, though I suppose capricious punishment was
always to be found, nor of atrocious living or working conditions, but of
the family being split up in the burgeoning domestic slave trade. My
understanding is that despite the intentions of some slaveholders, it was
commercially beneficial to sell down South the most able of men and women
and the most promising of children, specifically selling them away from
their families.

I have gathered the impression, perhaps dominantly from Morgan's Slave
Counterpoint, which admittedly deals with urban Richmond rather than the
Chesapeake littoral, that the refugees saw themselves as Americans (or
Virginians) and wanted their American (or Virginian) freedoms, and if they
could not have them in America they would leave that country and find them
elsewhere if the opportunity presented itself. A proportion of the refugees
took up arms with the British against their ex-masters, and later formed a
community in Trinidad which still celebrates its American origins. One, who
became a senior sergeant in the Corps of Colonial Marines (and, I guess,
spokesman for the members of the corps and later in Trinidad), was heard to
say on the night before his escape, and 'most determinedly' in the
neighbour's affidavit, that he would go when and where he pleased - fine
words for a slave and not indicating a mood of submissiveness. They seemed
completely undeterred by their masters' warnings that the British would sell
them back into slavery in the Caribbean, possibly on account of an old and
widespread belief that the British would some day come to liberate them.

Modern historians' accounts of slaves' experience of growing provisions in
their own gardens for sale in the market or to their masters tallies with
the settlers' success as free farmers in Trinidad, where they were praised
by a succession of governors as models of hardworking independence - one
going so far as to say they made 'good English settlers'. This was a
contrast to the attitude of the governor of Nova Scotia, who thought his
refugees could not manage on their own because of the pernicious effects of
slavery, but in reality their problems arose from being given minute
apportionments of stony ground, that were widely regarded as insufficient
for any new settler, White or Black, formely slave or free - the Trinidad
settlers each had sixteen acres of the richest land in the country.

I apologise for the length of this incomplete picture of one researcher's
attempt to picture the lives of his subjects, and in the context of this
list I have to observe that I know that conditions (and historical context)
varied from Virginia to Maryland, and from Eastern Shore to the western, and
between the Northern Neck and the Norfolk area. I have learned enough to see
that in fact there is too little known, and by the nature of things too
little recorded. Charles Ball's seems to be the one significant narrative
covering my period and earlier, and he suffered both from harshness and the
splitting up of family; but in reading his account of the short time he
spent on a British warship, assisting a slaveholders' representative in
attempts to have the refugees restored, and his wry comment that he "went
amongst them, and talked to them a long time, on the subject of returning
home; but found that their heads were full of notions of liberty . . . " I
remember that one should always look to the intended audience when reading
such texts, and consider to what extent Ball was providing grist for the
abolitionists' mill.

If this might seem like benevolent revisionism, I would point readers to
Edward Ball's 'Slaves in the family', where he gives an account of an
opposite process, in which the family's fond tradition of kind treatment of
their former slaves in contrast to the reputations of other slaveholders was
disproved by punishment records in the daily plantation journals.

John Weiss
Independent Scholar, London
History links at http://homepage.virgin.net/john.weiss/mcnish-weiss.html

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