“I’ve been in love with you, Country, since the first moment I clapped eyes on you. I want to marry you–”
The rest of his words were lost in the most delightful kiss ever enjoyed by a campfire.
* * *
Ruth woke with a squeal when I whispered my secret into her ear. I stole a few moments to wash my face and tidy my hair, while she plunged into the brush behind the woodpile. She emerged from the shadows with her hands filled with autumn leaves arranged as if they were the most beautiful roses and larkspurs.
“Got to hold some pretty when you wed,” she explained with a grin.
By the time we returned to the cook fire, Henry and Curzon were standing with the rest of our lads, some of them still yawning and rubbing the sleep from their eyes. The fire had been built up so that it blazed high and threw a warming light over all.
We married under the gaze of heaven and in a company of good people who cared about us. Henry preached a short sermon in which he talked about marriage being when two people come together as one to start their life anew. He said it made him think about thirteen colonies that were trying to become one nation. We laughed about that, but he had a point.
The stars wheeled to the west, and the first birds of morning began to call up the sun. As our friends huzzahed and bowed to me, and clapped my husband on the back, and celebrated our union with dreadful coffee and not-quite-dreadful corn bread, I watched the kind ghosts gathering in the mist at the edge of the woods.
Momma used to say that the best time to talk to ghosts was just before the sun came up. That’s when they could hear us true. That’s when they could answer us.
“We’re free, Momma,” I whispered. “We’re free and we’re strong.”
Ruth smiled at me from the other side of the fire.
“And we’re together,” I said.
I held Momma and Poppa in my heart so they could see us both and know that we were well. Then I squared my shoulders and shook out my skirts. A new day was dawning and there was work to be done.
APPENDIX
1. Are Isabel, Ruth, and Curzon based on real people? How did you develop their characters?
Isabel, Ruth, and Curzon are fictional characters, as are all of the people they directly interact with in the book. The details of their lives were built on the lives of real people who freed themselves from slavery and later wrote down their experiences. Advertisements about runaway slaves gave a lot of information about how people escaped slavery and the kinds of things they carried with them when they fled. Some African American veterans of the American Revolution later applied for pensions, and those applications offered wonderful insight into their time in the military. Pension applications of white Revolutionary War soldiers and camp women occasionally mentioned African American soldiers too.
Read more:
Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age.
David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, April 1999.
Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant Application Files, National Archives microfilm, 1974.
2. Are there any real people or incidents in the story?
Many! Yorktown was a very exciting place to be in 1781, though mayhaps not if you favored the cause of King George. General Washington was there, of course, and the Marquis de Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton, and a host of officers and aides-de-camp who went on to play significant roles in the early days of America.
These scenes from the book are all based on what really happened:
• The chaos in the South caused by the war
• The walk from South Carolina to Virginia
• The American and French armies in Williamsburg
• Baptist worship service led by enslaved preacher Gowan Pamphlet
• The Siege of Yorktown
• The men of the Rhode Island regiment and the large number of African American soldiers throughout the Continental Army
• The roles played by the women of the army
• The British surrender
• How the British treated the self-liberated people who had joined them
• The Continental Army’s role in recapturing those self-liberated people and returning them to slavery
Read more:
Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America.
Jerome A. Greene, The Guns of Independence: The Siege of Yorktown, 1781.
Richard M. Ketchum, Victory at Yorktown: The Campaign That Won the Revolution.
Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America.
Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, introduction by Gary Nash, foreword by Thad W. Tate.
Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence.
3. What happened to the people held in slavery by Washington and Jefferson who escaped and ran to the British?
Twenty-three of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves from three plantations fled to join the British. From Jefferson’s Elk Hill plantation, Joe, Jenny, Nat, Judy, and Black Sal with her three small children all escaped. Hannibal; his wife, Patty, and their six children; an old woman named Lucy; and Sam and his wife, Nancy, left the Willis Creek plantation. Robin, Barnaby, Harry, and Will all ran from Monticello. We know the details of their names from the records that Jefferson kept.
After the fall of Yorktown, Jefferson sent a man to look for his fugitive slaves. The man found six of them: Robin, Barnaby, Will, Nat, Judy, and Isabel, who was the daughter of Hannibal and Patty. Isabel was given to Jefferson’s sister in 1786, Barnaby died shortly after being returned to Jefferson, and the other four were sold. Historians believe that the rest of the escapees likely died of smallpox because Jefferson did not inoculate his slaves against the disease. But there is a chance they survived to live in freedom.
In April of 1781, fourteen men and three women who were held as slaves at George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation escaped and fled to the British. Two of them were found and enslaved again after Yorktown, as were those later found in Philadelphia. A few of Washington’s slaves made it to New York and found safety with the British there. Washington worked hard to convince the British to return those people to him, but the British authorities refused. Instead, the self-liberated former slaves of George Washington traveled with other Loyalist refugees to Nova Scotia when the British left New York in 1783.
Read more:
Cassandra Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, April 2005.
Michael Kranish, Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War.
Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America.
4. How could such important Founding Fathers as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson own slaves when they worked so hard to make America free of British rule? Doesn’t that make them hypocrites?
The fact that the Founding Fathers could devote their lives to freeing America from British rule while holding people in slavery is an appalling hypocrisy. British newspapers and opinion makers enjoyed pointing this out, even though their own nation had been responsible for the kidnapping, transportation, and enslaving of millions of Africans.
Slave-owning leaders of the Revolution, like Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, Patrick Henry, George Mason, James Madison, and Henry Laurens wrote of the evils of slavery but spent their lives enjoying luxuries they could afford because of the unpaid labor of slaves. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin also bought, sold, and profited from the work of enslaved people, but they freed their slaves after their deaths. In Franklin’s case, that meant that one man, Bob, went free, because all of Franklin’s other slaves had already died. Washington’s dea
th in 1799 meant bittersweet freedom for the 123 people he freed, because many of them were related by blood or marriage to people still owned by Martha Washington. The newly freed people had to leave their loved ones behind or else risk re-enslavement.
Americans in earlier times preferred to think only about the positive contributions made by the Founding Fathers: the way they won the Revolution and set about laying the groundwork for the United States of America. Today we have a more nuanced view: we can appreciate the good and recognize the bad. It is possible to admire the Founding Fathers for their positive contributions while at the same time feeling enraged, sorrowful, or confused because of the damage they inflicted to generations of people who didn’t look like them. If they had truly had the courage of their convictions, then the world-changing language of the Declaration of Independence–“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”–would have guaranteed the equality, protection, and opportunities of all Americans since the day the nation liberated itself.
Read more:
Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution.
Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America.
5. How many slaves freed themselves during the Revolution?
This wonderfully important question does not have a simple answer.
We can only speculate about the number of families who freed themselves and blended into the fabric of society, most often on the Western border, or with Native American nations, or in Northern communities that already had a significant number of free African Americans. Self-liberated people had to be private about their escape in order to protect their families.
We have better primary source evidence for the numbers of enslaved people who joined either the Patriot or the British army. The estimates come from British and American military records and from claims for losses that were later submitted by American slaveholders.
Historians estimate that at least five thousand black men fought for the Patriots. Most of them were free. Some were enslaved and fought as a “substitute,” in place of a white person. The enslaved men who fought in the Rhode Island regiment were granted freedom by the state in exchange for their service. Some enslaved people who fought for the Patriots remained in slavery after the war.
Given that supporting the Patriots offered no guarantee of freedom, it makes perfect sense that many more people fled to the British when trying to free themselves. Estimates vary but it appears likely that tens of thousands escaped in this way. Author and historian Ray Raphael estimates that the number of people who were able to liberate themselves during the Revolution is comparable in scope to the number of people who escaped slavery through the legendary Underground Railroad before the Civil War.
Historian Gary B. Nash called the exodus to the freedom offered by the British, “the greatest slave rebellion in the history of Great Britain’s New World colonies.”
Read more:
Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence.
Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution.
Ray Raphael, Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past.
6. What happened to the fugitive slaves who joined the British and survived the war?
Those black Loyalists wound up all over the world.
Nearly ten thousand black Loyalists who had escaped slavery in British-held New York City fled the city before it was turned over to the Patriots, likely to start their lives in freedom in the North or West. An estimated 400–1000 black Loyalists emigrated to London. The African American soldiers who served under Hessian Baron von Riedesel emigrated with their company to Germany after the war. An untold number of black Loyalists were forced back into slavery, some given to white Loyalists to offset the financial losses they suffered during the war. Others were sent against their will to East Florida and the Caribbean.
The British government resettled roughly thirty thousand Loyalist refugees in Nova Scotia. Historian Alan Gilbert has calculated that approximately one third of them–ten thousand children, women, and men–were African American.
Conditions in Nova Scotia were desperately harsh. There was not enough land for all the refugees. What was available was generally rocky and unsuitable for farming. The black Loyalists faced violent, devastating racism. They were not given as much land as white Loyalists, and the land they were given was the worst in the settlement. Some were forced to work in order to get what white settlers were given for free.
Thomas Peters became a leader of the black refugees. Kidnapped from what is now known as Nigeria around 1760, when he was in his early twenties, Peters (his birth name is unknown, but he is believed to have been of the Egba group of the Yoruba people) was eventually taken to Wilmington, North Carolina. Peters and his family fled to the British. Peters rose to the rank of sergeant in the Black Pioneers, the most famous black Loyalist militia unit.
After the end of the war, Peters and his family joined the Loyalists who resettled in Canada. Angered by the unequal treatment that blacks received there, Peters tried negotiating with local officials but got nowhere with them. He traveled to London in 1790 to meet with British leaders. The British offered to resettle the black Loyalists again, this time in the African nation of Sierra Leone. Under Peters’s dedicated leadership, twelve hundred black Loyalists who had spent eight dreadful years in Nova Scotia sailed to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1792.
Among those who sailed with Peters was a man named Henry Washington. Henry was born in West Africa, near the Gambia River. Sadly, there is no evidence of his birth name. He was kidnapped in his twenties and eventually sold to George Washington before the Revolution started. In Virginia, Henry dug canals in the Great Dismal Swamp and worked with horses at Mount Vernon. He escaped in 1771 but was recaptured and returned to the plantation. Five years later, Henry escaped again. This time, he made it to the British. When the British evacuated New York, Henry and his wife, Jenney, went with them and settled in Birchtown, Nova Scotia. The couple joined Thomas Peters in the journey to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they lived out the rest of their days.
Read more:
Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence.
Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty.
Gary B. Nash, “Thomas Peters: Millwright and Deliverer,” The American Revolution, website created by PBS, Humanities & Social Sciences Online, National Endowment for the Humanities, Michigan State University, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, http://revolution.h-net.msu.edu/essays/nash.html
Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, introduction by Gary Nash, foreword by Thad W. Tate.
Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence.
Gregory J. W. Urwin, “When Freedom Wore a Red Coat: How Cornwallis’ 1781 Campaign Threatened the Revolution in Virginia,” Army History, Summer 2008.
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution.
7. Did the Revolution change the way anyone thought about slavery?
It changed the opinion of some white Americans. Revolutionary rhetoric–the language used to talk about the fight for independence–made them examine the morality of slavery and decide that was wrong.
This change in attitude led states in the North to pass laws that eventually outlawed slavery there. With the exception of Massachusetts, the Northern states banned slavery very slowly. Slave owners were given the chance to keep
making money from their slaves for a generation, or to sell them out of state for a quick profit. A few slave owners manumitted their slaves, freeing them legally. Manumission was not legal in all areas.
In 1760, there were 350,000 black children, women, and men held in slavery in the American Colonies. By the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775, there were approximately 500,000 enslaved people, a full 20 percent of the country’s population.
By 1790, there were almost 700,000 enslaved people in the United States. This was despite the fact that tens of thousands had liberated themselves during the Revolution, the state of Massachusetts had outlawed slavery, and manumissions were on the rise. This sharp rise in population was the result of a dramatic increase in the number of African people who were kidnapped, enslaved, and transported to the United States. The population of enslaved Americans continued to rise until 1865, when slavery was finally abolished, freeing nearly four million people. At that point there were 27 million white Americans and nearly 500,000 black African Americans who were already living in freedom.
Read more:
Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America.
Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution.
8. When were the people held in slavery in the original thirteen states freed?
Connecticut–At the beginning of the American Revolution, 6,464 people were held in slavery in Connecticut, more than any other state in New England. The state passed a gradual emancipation act in 1784 and amended it in 1797. Slavery was finally outlawed in 1848.
Massachusetts–In 1783, the Massachusetts state supreme court ruled that the state constitution, passed in 1780, prohibited slavery in the state because it declared that, “all men are born free and equal.”
New Hampshire–The language of the 1783 state constitution closely mirrored that of Massachusetts, but there was some confusion about if it applied to the people held in slavery the day the constitution was adopted or if it only applied to children born after that day. The 1790 census showed 158 enslaved people, and the number dwindled after that. In 1857 the state passed a law that fully prohibited slavery.