Committee: Dr. Rosemarie Zagarri >Dr. Jane T. Censer >Dr. Harold D. Langley

Dissertation Prospectus

August 27, 2007

Committee: Dr. Rosemarie Zagarri

Dr. Jane T. Censer

Dr. Harold D. Langley

The War Within the War of 1812:

The Role of the Slave as Property, Pawn, and Agent

Ample literature abounds on the history of the War of 1812 and of slavery during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century——but as separate entities. Most historians of that war have chosen to write traditional political, diplomatic, economic, or military studies. Indeed, many dispute that slavery was a contested issue in the period from the closing of the American slave trade in 1808 to the beginning of the Missouri controversy in 1819. Matthew Mason’s recent work, by focusing on the rhetorical battle that Americans and British waged to claim the title of liberator, convincingly situates the slavery debate during the war, thus broadening the accepted historiography.¹ Yet, no comprehensive work has investigated the triangular relationship that developed among slaves, white southerners, and the British when Great Britain’s forces blockaded and raided America’s coast during the War of 1812.

This dissertation will ascertain the repercussions in the United States and the British Empire of American slaves fleeing to their masters’ enemy. By bringing slavery to the forefront of the war in the South, I hope to reorient the historiographical frameworks of paternalism and slave resistance in a wartime setting. For white southerners, I seek to compare their reaction to the perceived and real threat of slave flight and retribution. For the British, I will determine if twenty-five years of antislavery agitation in England had humanitarian ramifications in their prosecution of the war and treatment of the black refugees. For the absconding slaves, I will study their roles as pawns and agents.

The South confronted two foes when Congress declared war on Great Britain in 1812——the British and its own slaves. The British decided from the beginning of the conflict to fight a diversionary war in the Chesapeake Bay area that would relieve pressure on the northern theater. Their strategists contemplated no territorial acquisitions in the bay. Blockading American commerce and harassing coastal ports and residences, as well as protecting British trade constituted the limited military objective. The presence of a substantial slave population challenged both antagonists to adapt their wartime policies. The British activity in the South compelled American slaveholders to meet the dual threat from an external and internal foe for a second time in thirty years, paradoxically both weakening and strengthening slavery.

On the one hand, the British menace exposed the owners’ economic and psychological vulnerability, while on the other, the response by southerners and the Madison administration to the wartime peril resulted in efforts to reinforce slavery. Immediate, county-sponsored, defensive measures were joined with state legislation to offset British depredations. Wartime and postwar (overt and covert) missions undertaken by disgruntled masters or at the behest of Secretary of State James Monroe, sought to cajole the absconders to return and demonstrate British maltreatment. By proving British perfidy during this war, Monroe in 1815 hoped to end slaves’ attempts to flee in future wars, thus ensuring the institution’s stability. What motivated slave-owners and the Madison administration to seek the return of some of the refugee slaves during and immediately after the war? Compensation would have been sufficient if they sought only economic restitution. But these white Americans were defending not just a southern labor system, but a southern way of life. This was not just a defense of an economically necessary evil, but also a proslavery defense of a positive good. Just as masters tracked down their runaways during peacetime, they also sought out absconders during the war to set an example of the futility of this form of resistance for those who stayed behind. By proving the enemy’s re-enslavement of fleeing slaves, the proslavery partisans sought to stifle future loses during this war and the next.

Historians have generally dated the earliest proslavery arguments to the 1820s.² I believe that some of the measures taken to effect the return of runaways indicates that a consistent proslavery stance existed in the South before one was articulated by elite writers. The U.S. National Archives’s Record Group 76 (Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations), largely ignored by historians, contains slave-owners’ depositions, lists of black refugees, and copies of Royal Navy log books that were used by the Anglo-American arbitration commission to determine compensation for slaves lost to the British. By mining material gleaned from this record group in conjunction with British and American after-action reports, newspaper accounts, legislation, and personal papers, I will construct a database of owners and slaves that will provide a more rounded depiction of the three actors. No previous work exists that characterizes these slave-owners (location, size of slaveholding force, numbers lost, actions taken to prevent losses, and efforts made at retrieval or compensation.) Such a study will ascertain if small and large plantations were equally subject to British depredations and if there were any distinctions in their response.

Another lacunae in the literature is an analysis of the reactions of non-slave-owners to the British incursions. There is a monolithic view of the southern response to British raids that discounts class divisions between masters and non-slave-owners.³ To address this oversimplification, I propose studying newspaper accounts, militia and slave-patrol records, and legislative debates to see if all southern whites supported the onerous defensive measures designed to secure slaves from fleeing. I hope to discern whether class fissures developed over the course of the war.

The historical treatment of the slave’s perspective has also been superficial. No one has undertaken a demographic study of the slaves who fled using the wealth of information contained in Record Group 76. Anecdotal evidence exists that many of the slaves escaped in family or kinship groups. This pattern, if sustainable, differs from the typical peacetime model of single, young male runaways. While several recent works have focused on the slaves’ post-American diasporas to Canada and Trinidad, none concentrates on their lives when slaves (personalities, occupations, families, etc.) The owners’ depositions will provide some information and I will also search for collections of personal papers as well as newspaper accounts. Such demographic analysis would add to the historiography of slave culture, community, and resistance.

The British perspective is perhaps the most elusive. What motivated the British to encourage American slaves to flee during the War of 1812? The British were pragmatists whose overarching goal was to punish America for its declaration of war while England was engaged in a continental war against France. Freeing the slaves was a weapon in Britain’s arsenal, not necessarily a reflection of the nation’s pervasive humanitarianism. However, as the war evolved, so too did British policy towards slaves. Initial directives from the War Office prohibited inciting racial insurrection against whites, but left unspecified what to do with runaway slaves. Without guidance, theater commanders confronted the fleeing slaves on an ad hoc basis, while writing to Whitehall for further counsel. Throughout the war British commanders, War Office ministers, and peace treaty negotiators grappled with using absconding slaves as a military weapon and determining what their fate should be.

While pragmatism dominated British military policy-making, a heightened sense of humanitarianism pervaded Great Britain as a result of the twenty-year struggle that ended in the 1807 abolishment of the slave trade. British historians often relegate the War of 1812 to a mere sideshow next to the Napoleonic Wars; so too do they overlook that war in discussing British antislavery attitudes in the years between the end of the slave trade and abolishment of slavery in 1833. Political and altruistic arguments persuaded Parliament to ban the slave trade. Faced with a growing war weariness among the laboring and middle classes, Britain’s oligarchal government reasoned that abolishing the slave trade would inspire the public and rekindle flagging support for the long war with France.

In this same vein, I wish to explore Britain’s pragmatic and humanitarian relationship with American slaves during and after the War of 1812 and determine if a generation of reformist activity in both countries influenced Britain’s actions. The British strategy during the war drew on tactics used during the American Revolution, but was modified in light of three decades of changing social attitudes towards slavery. I seek to determine if a transatlantic connection existed between the policies adopted by British ministers and naval commanders towards blacks during the War of 1812 and British diplomatic efforts to ban the international slave trade in 1814-15. I will research the private and public correspondence of the British officials engaged in diplomacy and war planning, as well as that of the in-theater military and naval commanders; the correspondence of influential abolitionist leaders; British antislavery organizations such as the influential African Institution; parliamentary debates; and British newspapers and journals. From these sources I will seek evidence linking British treatment of absconding slaves to British diplomatic efforts during 1814-15 to internationalize its slave-trade ban with prohibitions in the Treaty of Paris with France and the Congress of Vienna with Europe.

The presence of an enslaved population in the South during the War of 1812 transformed the Anglo-American conflict into a triangular war in which the American slaves were property, pawns, and agents. This war coincided with a transition in British abolitionism from a campaign against the domestic slave trade to opposition to the European slave trade. For southern slaveholders the war demanded a defense of their peculiar institution; for the British it meant assuming the image of liberator.

Research on slavery and the War of 1812 must begin with a study of the British slave policy during the American Revolution. Some of the same issues that surfaced during that earlier conflict suffused the later war. The works of Sylvia Frey have superseded the pioneering research of Benjamin Quarles. The latter stressed blacks’ participation in the rebellion as both rebels and loyalists; extolled their heroic contributions; and optimistically found that “the colored people of America benefited from the irreversible commitment of the new nation to the principles of liberty and equality.” Frey is less sanguine about the war representing a social revolution for blacks. Her extensive research of military correspondence exposed Britain’s deep-seated racism that reflected the social milieu of the time. British commanders armed fleeing blacks with shovels and made them laborers rather than soldiers. They discarded them to their masters when they became liabilities, kept them as servants, or sold them. Frey finds that southerners joined the independence movement because they feared that the “specter of emancipation” might become reality if the British chose (which they did not) to implement freedom as policy. Frey concludes that the “revolutionary war in the South thus became a war about slavery”——a war that strengthened southerners’ desire to defend their peculiar institution.⁴ Frey’s book addresses issues of British motivation and southern response during the American Revolution that will serve as a useful model for constructing a triangular study of blacks, white Americans, and British during the War of 1812.

The literature on slave resistance during the second war for independence encompasses brief mentions within standard political/military accounts; regional studies devoted to the black experience during the war; and extended treatment of specific topics within larger studies. Traditional studies of the War of 1812 usually gloss over racial issues, and works on slavery relegate the war to the periphery. Conventional works, such as those written in the 1960s by Patrick C. T. White and Reginald Horsman; in the 1970s by John K. Mahon; and in the 1980s by J. C. A. Stagg and Donald R. Hickey, emphasize the themes of national honor, sovereignty, and the defense of neutral rights.⁵

The underreported story of black flight from coastal areas, as the Royal Navy’s vessels infested American waters, first received extensive scholarly treatment in the 1970s with an article by Frank A. Cassell. Focusing on slaves from the Chesapeake Bay area and studying both British military records and local newspaper accounts, Cassell depicts slaves who independently chose to flee to the enemy’s squadron rather than continue living in servitude. Other writers have expanded on Cassell’s work in additional studies on the Chesapeake and other geographic areas. Mary A. Bullard’s short but well-researched piece on the British occupation of Cumberland Island, Georgia, at the end of the war uses local, British Admiralty, and official U.S. claims commission documentation to describe the imbroglio over the peace treaty terms regarding absconding slaves. Writing both articles and a book on the war in the Chesapeake, Christopher T. George finds the British commanders opportunistic in their relations with the runaways, and the blacks assertive in either fleeing to the enemy or enlisting in the American ranks.⁶ The regional studies by Cassell, Bullard, and George are important contributions, but their focus is more British than American (white or black).

A recent scholarly book that incorporates the military events along the Gulf with a comprehensive study of the expansion of slavery during the early national period is Adam Rothman’s Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005). Rothman devotes a chapter to the “crisis” that the War of 1812 represented for the residents of the Deep South in confronting a British foe who brought black troops to the Gulf theater and enlisted local American slaves in pursuit of military objectives. Rothman provides a credible account of the fear engendered by the British invasion at New Orleans with extensive use of plantation records, but his insights into British racial policy are limited by not using British Admiralty and War Office records. His narrative concludes that the successful outcome of the War of 1812 in the Gulf region secured that area as “slave country.” While viewing slavery from the slaveholder’s perspective, Rothman ably portrays the agency of those hundreds of slaves who resisted bondage by choosing freedom with the British.⁷

Historians such as Cassell, Bullard, George, and Rothman stop their explorations of slave militancy at the water’s edge. Often with only a short postscript, they leave the stories of the fate of these American resistors to others to fathom. Several writers have followed the 1812 diaspora. The publication by C. B. Fergusson in 1948 of a volume of documents relating to those African Americans who came to Nova Scotia during and after the War of 1812 reveals this important facet of Canadian history. Writing in the 1970s, John N. Grant weaves the facts surrounding the three waves of black migrations to Nova Scotia that occurred from 1775 to 1815 into an informative article, and Robin Winks’s tome, The Blacks in Canada, traces the refugees’ resettlement and harsh experience there. The recent work by Harvey A. Whitfield revises Winks’s interpretation, mitigating the problems encountered by the blacks in their new homeland and emphasizes instead their successful adaptation. Another writer, John McNish Weiss, has compiled information about the recruitment, organization, service, disbandment, and settlement of the group of African-American runaways whom the British formed into a Corps of Colonial Marines during the War of 1812. These men and their families migrated in 1815 and 1816 to Trinidad where their struggle for freedom ended.⁸ My focus remains with the untold story of the slaves’ pre-freedom experiences, but these studies of their post-war journeys often provide important glimpses of their former lives.

Recognizing the historiographical need for a book-length treatment of slave flight, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger intend that their Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (1999) will fill that gap in the literature on black resistance. Using findings derived from computer-generated data of runaway notices in twenty newspapers from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana, as well as petitions to southern legislatures and county courts, the authors confirm the already-established perception that the majority of absconders were solitary males in their teens and twenties. Their work is not useful, however, for those seeking to compare the character of peacetime with wartime runaways. Instead of segregating the war years, the authors compiled data for two time periods——1790 to 1816 and 1838 to 1860. Their work does not categorize who fled during the War of 1812. Evidence abounds that a significant number of women and children, normally underrepresented among peacetime runaways, fled to the British during both wars with that enemy. My study will further refine the characterization of wartime runaways.⁹

Some scholars in their multi-year works on slavery have mentioned the War of 1812 and the slaves who fled to the British. Don E. Fehrenbacher’s The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (2001) discusses the war in a chapter on foreign relations, thus privileging political history——national and diplomatic. According to this author, the pro-slavery administrations of Madison and Monroe succeeded in promoting property and treaty rights in challenging Britain’s interpretation of the clause in the Treaty of Ghent respecting the return of the slaves. Fehrenbacher’s analysis of the negotiations with the British is superficial and incomplete, as he neglects to address the State Department’s post-war, secret missions to persuade the refugee slaves, whom the British transported to the West Indies and Halifax, to return to their masters. Further research into this activist diplomacy may offer clues about the South’s views on slavery.¹⁰ Matthew Mason’s recent work on the war de-emphasizes the military side of the conflict and focuses instead on the politics of slavery by using contemporary literary sources. Mason argues that the transitional nature of the War of 1812 period forced southerners to face the “ideological perplexity” of standing “on a middle ground between necessary evil and positive good.”¹¹ I will buttress Mason’s rhetorical framework for an emerging pro-slavery ideology with evidence of the practical ramifications of the War of 1812 on southern culture.

Another work that addresses the slaveholders’ changing views on slavery during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century is Jeffrey R. Young’s Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837. Agreeing with Mason that this was a period in flux, Young discerns in these years a blending of the “patriarchal authority” of the eighteenth-century slaveholder with the next century’s “affectionate, paternalistic concern” for one’s slaves. Slaveholders came to the realization by 1815 that they needed a “world view” based on “plantation domesticity” that “provided both an answer to antislavery reformers and a refuge from escalating fears of slave rebellion.” Young only briefly relates that slaveholders feared that the British, their slaves’ allies, challenged the South’s labor system. This same theme of southern defensiveness, bordering on paranoia from outside agitators (the British or American antislavery reformers), can be found in Merton L. Dillon’s Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies 1619–1865.¹² Linking concrete events, such as the slaves’ running to the British during the War of 1812, with mainstream histories that treat the broader themes of politics and ideology may advance our understanding of the institution of slavery.

Rebalancing the historical scales with studies of Native and African Americans, women, and the lower classes has highlighted much of the work written during the last thirty years on early America. Investigation of all facets of slavery has proliferated during these years, but the subfield of slave flight during wartime has not generated as much research as other forms of resistance. Additionally, while Benjamin Quarles (1961), Sylvia R. Frey (1991), and Simon Schama (2006) have written important tomes on African Americans during the American Revolution, the War of 1812 still awaits a comprehensive, comparative treatment of the enemy from without juxtaposed with the enemy from within.¹³

While these studies vary in their treatment of slavery, none fully addresses the impact that British racial attitudes had on the institution of slavery in America. Research on British abolitionism and American slavery is generally devoid of any transatlantic link as relates to the War of 1812. In addition, works regarding the genesis of proslavery arguments among southerners have neglected the example of Secretary of State James Monroe’s secret missions to the West Indies and Halifax as an early case of a traditional nationalist espousing a southern defense of slavery. This dissertation will explore how the British policy of accepting black enlistees and emigrants, at first grudgingly and then with open arms, caused such consternation among the southerners that it stirred the national government to adopt a proslavery stance in seeking the slaves’ return.

Many historians have characterized the War of 1812 as the forgotten conflict because the treaty that ended it returned the opponents to a status quo antebellum. Geographically this was true, but the departure of over 3,600 slaves in Royal Navy ships at the close of the war was a tangible reminder of the South’s constant vulnerability to its internal enemy. The War of 1812 was a transitional time, marked by the closing years of the early republic and the onset of the antebellum period. Southerners found themselves in transition also, balancing between paternalism and profits in managing their economic and social life. Viewing the War of 1812 through the prism of slavery may shed light on whether historians have overlooked the psychological impact of Britain’s racial warfare as a factor in strengthening slavery in the South. Did the war change the institution of slavery in the South? Did Britain’s enlistment of American slaves as black soldiers affect northern, southern, and British views toward slavery? Further studies of the triangular ramifications of American slaves fleeing to the enemy during the war——from the vantage of the slaves, slave and nonslaveholding southerners, the British naval and military commanders on station, and the leadership in London——may provide some answers.¹⁴