Committee: Dr. Rosemarie Zagarri >Dr. Jane T. Censer >Dr. Harold D. Langley
Download 198.62 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Chapter 2: Raids, Reactions, and Diplomacy——The Chesapeake Bay, February 1813–February 1814
- Chapter 3: Invasion, Flight, and Reaction——The Chesapeake Bay, 1814–15
- Chapter 4: The Strategy Shifts——Georgia and Louisiana, Winter 1814–15
- Chapter 6: Peace Not Resolution
- Conclusion
IntroductionI will address the historiography of slave flight during the American Revolution and the War of 1812.Chapter 1: The Coastal South Anticipates War——1812I will discuss the initial reaction of the southern states to the June 18, 1812, declaration of war and the perceived impact that British incursions on coastal areas might have on them. An inadequate national defense plan (military and naval) was supplemented by state- and county-level measures. I will compare plans and legislation devised by the different state executive and legislative branches to prevent the slave population from absconding. I will discuss the response in all the coastal southern states because, although some suffered few incursions (the Carolinas), the fear of attack was real everywhere. Chapter 2: Raids, Reactions, and Diplomacy——The Chesapeake Bay, February 1813–February 1814The first and most sustained attacks were against Maryland and Virginia. This chapter will discuss their response to the raids along the coastal areas of the Chesapeake Bay from February to September 1813. This was the period of active campaigning before most of the British fleet, except for a skeleton blockading force, left to winter at Halifax and Bermuda. This chapter will also cover the quiescent military period in the Chesapeake Bay from September 1813 to February 1814 when a single Royal Navy squadron blockaded the region and conducted occasional raids. Using material from a database that I will compile, I will determine the demographics of the slaves who fled (male, female, children), their owners, and the circumstances of their departure. Some were taken by force; others left voluntarily with a raiding party or fled on boats to the ships offshore. I will try to glean the reaction of the owners, the local militia, and the slave patrols, and see what actions were taken on the county, state, and national levels. These are some of the questions that I will be asking in this and chapters three and four: How large were the farms and plantations from which the slaves fled? How many masters tried to get their slaves to return? Did the owners express both economic and paternalistic motivations? How many slaves left in family or kinship groups? How many of the males joined the British forces? How many opted to emigrate? Did nonslaveholding militia and slave patrollers resent policing duties that protected the slaveholders’ interests? Besides discussing the war-engendered change in the demography of the runaways and the evidence of class conflict among whites, I will also track the evolution of British policy toward the absconding blacks during this first campaign season. In addition to southern (black and white) and British reactions, I will also follow the diplomatic efforts made to obtain the return of the slaves. Chapter 3: Invasion, Flight, and Reaction——The Chesapeake Bay, 1814–15The British began their second marauding season off the coast of Maryland and Virginia in February 1814. The main force succeeded in harassing the residents with impunity, attacking Washington successfully, but not Baltimore, before returning in October to Halifax and Bermuda for the winter. Leaving a small squadron to safeguard the bay from October 1814 to the end of the war, the British continued to raid sporadically before the winter season closed in, receiving the escapees as enlistees or emigrants. I will continue to plot where the British raided, how many blacks fled and what was their composition. The enemy’s raids and presence in the bay continued to attract refugee slaves at a time when British abolitionists were demanding a French ban on the slave trade as a peace-treaty stipulation. I will be searching for connections between Britain’s activity in the War of 1812 and its international commitments. Chapter 4: The Strategy Shifts——Georgia and Louisiana, Winter 1814–15The British decided in the fall of 1814 to shift their naval forces concentrated in the Chesapeake Bay southward to Georgia and Louisiana, with an incursion along Georgia’s coast serving as a diversion while the main British force attacked New Orleans. This chapter will compare the reaction of slaves and masters in these lower-South states to the response in the Chesapeake Bay states, as well as discern any refinement in British policy toward the absconding slaves. Chapter 5: Peace——The Treaty of Ghent and Missions to Retrieve Refugee Slaves Anglo-American peace talks during 1814 were acrimonious, and while the status of the refugee slaves was not in the forefront, the issue was contentious but supposedly resolved to the American delegation’s satisfaction. After learning that the February 17, 1815, ratification of the Treaty of Ghent ended the war, the Royal Navy commanders off America’s coast chose, however, to interpret the treaty conservatively and refused to return the refugee blacks to their masters. I will study these negotiations to determine the role that the administration of slaveholders James Madison and James Monroe had in crafting the final article. In addition, the actions and motives of the British commanders will be explored. Finally, this chapter will cover the postwar missions that sought the return of the slaves and proof of British perfidy in re-enslaving the escapees. These private and government-sponsored delegations failed. A comprehensive investigation of these missions may confirm an early, overt proslavery stance in the private and the public sector. Chapter 6: Peace Not ResolutionThis final chapter will cover the ten-year effort by three American administrations to obtain compensation for lost slaves from a British government progressively under pressure to emancipate the blacks held in captivity throughout its empire. I hope to show that the issue of the status of the refugee slave during the War of 1812 influenced the British abolitionist movement and southern views on slavery. ConclusionI will discuss my findings and how they contribute to the historiography of slavery and abolitionism. APPENDIX C: Proposed Schedule Sept. 2007-March 2008 research at D.C., Md., Va. repositories; research RG 76 at NARA II for database demographic material; draft an introduction April-July 2008 continue research at D.C., Md., Va. repositories and RG 76 at NARA; trip to England (National Archives and the British Library) and Scotland (National Library of Scotland); draft chap. 1 August-Oct. 2008 research at D.C., Md., Va. repositories Nov. 2008-Jan. 2009 research at D.C., Md., Va. repositories; draft chap. 2 Feb.-April 2009 trip to N.Y. and Penn.; draft chap. 3 May-July 2009 trip to Ga. and La.; draft chap. 4 August-Oct. 2009 trip to Canada; draft chap. 5 Nov. 2009-Jan. 2010 research in RG59 and 76 at NARA II; trip to England; draft chap. 6 Feb.-Aug. 2010 write conclusion and edit/rewrite other chapters. Sept. 2010 dissertation defense 1 Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 2 For a discussion of the crusade to defend slavery see, Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 189-91; Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). Tise barely mentions the War of 1812, except to note that that war “was neither socially nor politically a very trying time for southerners.” (287) 3 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 165. 4 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 200; Sylvia R. Frey, “The British and the Black: A New Perspective,” The Historian 38 (February 1976): 225-38; and Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 226. 5 Patrick C. T. White, A Nation On Trial: America and the War of 1812 (New York: John Wiley, 1965); Reginald Horsman, The War of 1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969); John K. Mahon, The War of 1812 (1972; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), see 313-15 for a brief outline of British motives and policies toward the slaves; J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic 1783–1830 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 6 Frank A. Cassell, “Slaves of the Chesapeake Bay Area and the War of 1812,” Journal of Negro History 57 (April 1972): 144–55; Mary A. Bullard, Black Liberation on Cumberland Island in 1815 (DeLeon Springs, Fla.: privately printed, 1983); Christopher T. George, “Mirage of Freedom: African Americans in the War of 1812,” Maryland Historical Magazine 91 (Winter 1996): 426–50 and Terror on the Chesapeake: The War of 1812 on the Bay (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 2000). 7 Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2005). 8 C. B. Fergusson, A Documentary Study of the Establishment of the Negroes in Nova Scotia between the War of 1812 and the Winning of Responsible Government (Halifax: Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1948); John N. Grant, “Black Immigrants into Nova Scotia, 1776–1815,” Journal of Negro History 58 (July 1973): 253–70; Robin Winks, Blacks in Canada: A History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971; Harvey A. Whitfield, “Black American Refugees in Nova Scotia, 1813–1840” (PhD diss., Dalhousie University, 2003) and Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860 (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006); John McNish Weiss, Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad 1815-16 (London: McNish & Weiss, 1995); John McNish Weiss, The Merikens: Free Black Settlers in Trinidad 1815-16, 2nd ed. (London: McNish & Weiss, 2002). 9 John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiii-xv, 295. 10 Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 11 Matthew E. Mason, “The Rain Between the Storms: The Politics and Ideology of Slavery in the United States, 1808–1821,” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2002), 374. For a published work treating these themes, see Matthew E. Mason, “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (July 2002): 665–96. 12 Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837, (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 7 (first and second quotations), 124 (third and fourth quotations), 128 (fifth quotation); Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies 1619-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 75. Merton spoke in generalities about the “opportunities” that war created for slaves but did not address the southern efforts to secure the return of their slaves after the war. 13 Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution; Frey, Water from the Rock; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). 14 For a good narrative but not an analytical study of blacks in the War of 1812, see Gerard T. Altoff, Amongst My Best Men: African-Americans and the War of 1812. Put-in-Bay, Ohio: The Perry Group, 1996. 15 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 15 Directory: courses courses -> Algorithms for Register Allocation Andrew Pardoe courses -> Ieor 4600 Mixed-Integer Rounding Inequalities courses -> San José State University Social Science/Psychology Psych 175, Management Psychology, Section 1, Spring 2014 courses -> Kennan's Telegram (Excerpt) courses -> The university of british columbia courses -> A hurricane track density function and empirical orthogonal function approach to predicting seasonal hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin Elinor Keith April 17, 2007 Abstract courses -> Cover page need figure & title by Proposed Table of Contents courses -> Objectives courses -> Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog Download 198.62 Kb. Share with your friends:
|