The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America PDF

The Counter-Revolution of 1776 Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America Gerald Horne a NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London N EW YORK U NI V ERSIT Y PR ESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2014 by New York University All rights reserved References to Inte...

The Counter-Revolution of 1776 Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America Gerald Horne a NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London N EW YORK U NI V ERSIT Y PR ESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2014 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Horne, Gerald. The counter-revolution of 1776 : slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America / Gerald Horne. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4798-9340-9 (hardback) 1. Antislavery movements—United States—History—18th century. 2. United States— History—Revolution, 1775-1783—Social aspects. 3. Slavery—United States—History— 18th century. 4. African Americans—History—To 1863. I. Title. E446.H83 2014 973.3’1—dc23 2013043412 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook 9 Abolition in London Somerset’s Case and the North American Aftermath As things turned out, June 1772 was not only on a level with July 1776 as a determinant of the future of British North America but, in a sense, was a necessary stepping-stone to the latter, better recognized date. Slaveholders had long felt uncomfortable in London, objecting to dis- approval there of their brutal floggings of their Africans and the per- ceived laggardness in retrieving runaways. As Somerset’s case dragged on, more antipathy to slavery was engendered in the British isles, fur- ther outraging colonists who had normalized this form of property as any other, like a steed or a parrot. When the abolitionist Granville Sharp bashed colonists in this regard, Benjamin Franklin struck back vigor- ously. When days after Gaspee the decision was rendered in Somerset’s case and it was reported as ending slavery, the insecurity of slaveholders increased, while the self-assertion of the enslaved had a similar uptick. Some of the enslaved took the case as a cue to flee—with some seek- ing to make it all the way to London—while Charles Carroll of Mary- land, one of the richest men in the colonies, experienced difficulty in disciplining his cocksure property almost from the time the case was rendered. Influential personalities in the metropolis were beginning to recoil at the enslaving habit of the colonists, spawning mutual rage that was not restrained when the latter began to argue that they—the set- tlers—were being treated like slaves by London.1 Lost in the furor was the judge’s limited decision freeing an enslaved African belonging to a settler, who had escaped to the metropolis. The Crown and the colonies might have been able to downplay this deci- sion, taken alone, but given the preceding real and imagined slights— non-importation agreements; reluctant mainland conscripts; the spec- ter of unleashing armed Africans against the settlers—it was not easy for an already tattered relationship to survive. Colonists refused to be >> 209 210 > 211 This case, as much as any other, demarcated the yawning gap between the colonies and the metropolis, underlining an identity in the former that was boldly different from the latter. This case, as much as any other, defined the emerging view which was to characterize the republic’s key leaders: a defense of slavery—which confronted awkwardly the Crown’s long-term interests in Cartagena, Havana, and St. Augustine.6 This case, combined with the November 1775 bombshell dropped by Lord Dunmore in Virginia when he threatened to unleash armed Africans on a brewing revolt against the Crown,7 solidified opposition to Lon- don, ushered into existence a new republic, and ossified for decades to come a caste-like status for Africans, seen widely among settlers as thinly disguised revolutionaries eager to collaborate with foes of all sort to subvert the status quo.8 Understandably, the only fitting rebuke for revolutionaries bent on abolishing private property—albeit in them- selves—was a steely counter-revolution. The reading public had plenty of opportunity to parse the details of what came to be referred to as Somerset’s case, which helped to harden the notion that London favored the enslaved over the slaveholder. This was understandable since, as the historian James Walvin sees it, this case “in effect” meant that enslavement was “outlawed” in England,9 which illuminates why so many Africans were familiar with Lord Mansfield’s opinion.10 Thus, understandably, the case was much discussed in Vir- ginia, both in the press and face to face;11 it was reported in at least thir- teen British newspapers, several widely circulated magazines, and almost two dozen newspapers in North America. Contemporary analysts felt it had implications not just for the British isles but its possessions too, and it is this perception that served to fuel anti-London sentiment, which was to detonate in 1776.12 Historian Steven N. Wise argues that this case “was even more influential in America” than in London—with one observer at that time concurring, while moaning that the case would “cheat an honest American of his slave.”13 Historian Michael Groth has a point in asserting that “in one sense, slaveholding Patriots went to war in 1775 and declared independence in 1776 to defend their rights to own slaves.”14 Actually, newspaper readers had much to ponder generally, nota- bly in the keystone colony that was Virginia, for there headlines blared about Africans being armed by London15 and Paris,16 suing for freedom in Scotland,17 and, naturally, plotting revolt in Jamaica.18 It would be 212 > 213 and contamination,” not to mention the undoing of revenue-producing colonies.21 Edward Long of Jamaica, who knew more than most how easy it was to rile up slaves, argued passionately that with this legal decision, “slave holding might perhaps be very well discontinued in every province of the North American continent,” and surely it would harm profitability. More than this, it was a “direct invitation” to the Africans in the hemisphere “to mutiny” or flee to London. They would bribe captains to flee, thereby cor- rupting the well-wrought and profoundly crucial system of transport. It would empower competitors, especially Paris, and tear the empire apart.22 A newspaper in Boston was among those that worried about the case’s implications.23 Journalists there may have learned about the enthusiastic reception for the Negro poet Phillis Wheatley in London, which astonished even her. Samuel Estwick, not known to be one of her supporters and a confidant of planters in Barbados, felt that the case would inspire slave insurrections, which was understandable since they had been spurred by much less.24 Another pro-slavery advocate said that slavery in the Americas was just a form of villenage, and this institution continued in full bloom even after the Magna Carta; besides, Georgia was a negative example of societies that barred slavery, bring- ing economic stagnation, and in any case, it did not deter other powers from pursuing enslavement.25 But in the long run, it was Wheatley— not Estwick—whose perception about London’s attitudes were more incisive, for it was in England that abolitionists pressed for her freedom. And her wariness about how this new status would be viewed in Boston was underscored when she requested that a copy of her document of liberty be safely stowed in Europe, which could allow her to escape the benighted colonies for a more enlightened home.26 Other Africans in the colonies exceeded Wheatley in actually seek- ing to escape to London, with their erstwhile masters left behind argu- ing that this London decision had spurred their wanderlust.27 One in this group was Abel, forty years old, six feet tall, literate, a violin- ist and pilot. “I have whipped him,” his “master” confessed unasham- edly: “I believe scars may be seen upon his body” as a result. He had been to England—and now wanted to return.28 This attempted flight to freedom was reflective of the anomaly of the era: settlers saw escap- ing from London as the goal, while Africans saw escaping to London as 214 > 215 governor, the Africans—in a cry that resonated even more insistently after the founding of the republic—seemed desperate enough to throw in their lot with the Crown in return for concessions: “We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!”39 Manhattan in particular had good reason to worry about the turbu- lent drift of events. For much of the 18th century, New York City held the largest percentage and the second-largest absolute number of enslaved Africans of any port town in British North America. This demographic imbalance fed shivers about the long-range ambitions of Africans. When in 1774, amid violent scenes of loyalist reprisals against rebels, two slaves murdered their masters, known supporters of the rebel cause, fright rose about a crushing maneuver by a London-African axis.40 * * * Some settlers were beginning to see the revolt against British rule not only as a thrust toward “independency,” opening even more the grow- ingly profitable trade with Hispaniola and France, but as a simple attempt at survival in the face of a perceived attempt at their liquidation pro- pelled by London and Africans alike. The planter class was explosively angry about Lord Mansfield’s demarche as a result, with one among them claiming that now “slave holding might perhaps be very well discontin- ued in every province of the North American continent situated to the north of the Carolinas.” What would now befall the slave traders who had piled into this odious business with the shriveling of the Royal African Company? Echoing the democratic-sounding rhetoric emanating from the mainland, it was stated that the legal opinion thwarted Parliament and was a kind of unwarranted judicial activism. Worse, it was thought, the end result would be miscegenation, creating individuals like the “Por- tuguese and Moriscos in complexion of skin and basement of mind,” a “venomous and dangerous ulcer,” in other words. The result would be “bloodshed” and a “spirit of mutiny” and untold horrors.41 Even before June 1772, one Londoner complained that Africans “do not certainly consider themselves to be slaves in this country, nor will they put up with inequality of treatment.” The number of Africans in the isles was estimated to be fifteen thousand—but Granville Sharp, the abolitionist, thought it was higher, perhaps twenty thousand. Some 216 > 217 well, he stressed, start “making slaves of British subjects” if this dirty busi- ness were not halted. “Setting at liberty” those who were enslaved was his abolitionist demand, though his failure to detail compensation for slave- holders reified the view that those of his ilk were the dangerous radicals whose jurisdiction settlers must escape.46 In these scalding analyses of slavery, these opinion molders were simply reflecting the considered opinion among a goodly number of Africans, including the soon-to-be-renowned memoirist Olaudah Equiano.47 This fabled African arrived in London weeks after the Som- erset case was rendered, providing him with a ringside seat at the mak- ing of history.48 Equiano also spent a good deal of time in Belfast, and, not coincidentally, by the late 1760s anti-slavery sentiment there had hardened.49 Like Equiano, Ignatius Sancho wanted a harder line taken against the rebels.50 Sancho was so hostile to the rebels that he seemed to skew reality to make it fit his fond hope that they would be defeated.51 Equiano’s and Sancho’s anti-rebel sentiments were mirrored at the high- est levels, for it was Maurice Morgan, top aide to Sir Guy Carleton, who in 1772 published one of the first proposals for gradual abolition.52 It was becoming commonplace for leading intellectuals in London to find it painfully ironic that brutalizing mainland slaveholders were in the vanguard of those yelping for liberty.53 Quite typically, these aboli- tionists—most notably, the heroic James Ramsay—were often quite hos- tile to what were seen as hypocritical cries for liberty by slaveholders.54 Their anger may have come to a boil when Virginia’s eminent Richard Henry Lee compared the situation of his fellow colonists to “Egyptian bondage,” which could very well “become the fate of every inhabitant of America,” that is, every “white” inhabitant.55 Ramsay, says one scholar, “hated American rebels.”56 According to a Nigerian authority on these matters, “Englishmen who had not lived in the West Indies and Amer- ica had not been so depraved by plantation mentality” and were thus enabled to accord some degree of humanity to black “chattels”—hence Lord Mansfield’s decision and the negative reaction to it due west.57 The Somerset case both reflected and propelled this growing abolition- ist sentiment in London. Plans for abolition were being devised, as well as plans to circumscribe the slave trade. One bold Londoner envisioned a time “when the blacks of the southern colonies on the continent of Amer- ica shall be numerous enough to throw off at once the yoke of tyranny to 218 > 219 The rage of settlers notwithstanding, Lord Mansfield’s decision was not necessarily a radical break from the train of history but, more, a log- ical progression. The siege of Havana and previous battles in Cartagena had shown that in the immediate future, London would need more— not fewer—Africans in its contestation with the “Catholic powers,” and it did not require a fortune-teller to discern that arming Africans in order to keep other Africans enslaved was not a sustainable proj- ect in the long term. Moreover, the Maroon Wars in Jamaica showed that if something sufficiently severe was not done, the entire colonial project could be lost. The fecklessness of mainlanders when it came to fighting—deserting, mutinying, trading with the enemy, hinting broadly about “independency”—indicated that other options should be explored, and undercutting the source of their wealth which had boosted “independency” in the first place, that is, enslaving Africans, did seem to be an appropriate rejoinder. Then there was the growth of abolitionist sentiment in London and Scotland, which seemed to be gaining in strength with every passing day and was driven in no small measure by the riotous obstreperousness of Africans themselves. In any case, as early as 1748, Virginians had reason to argue that just because a mainland slave was in London did not mean manumission ipso facto.62 In 1749, Dudley Crofts, a Caribbean slaveholder, had asked if the status of his slave property was altered as a result of his being in England. Lord Mansfield’s ruling was two decades away—but the fact that the question had to be asked then was indicative of changing times.63 About a decade after Crofts’s inquiry, a verbal war had erupted in London between the pro-slavery lobby and its growing list of detrac- tors; in a sense this was a reflection of the reality that as the slave trade surged in the prelude to 1776, more Africans were turning up in the isles, further stoking debate.64 The legal status of slavery in London was contested long before 1776—as suggested by the clandestine sneaking of Equiano into town in 1762, underscoring the reality that the “master” did not feel he had an unquestioned right to sell his “property.”65 * * * Given the venom directed at Lord Dunmore subsequently, the momen- tous year of 1775 had begun ironically with public addresses of praise 220 > 221 my own Negroes and receive all others that will come to me whom I shall declare free,” unless colonists halted their unrest.72 Like Somerset, this was a direct threat to exalted private property, a threat not only to “nationalize” this wealth but to deploy it in armed assaults. It is difficult to imagine words better designed to ignite revolt among a class of set- tlers who had grown affluent on the basis of tyrannical bigotry. Lord Dunmore, on the other hand, was focused on those who he thought would have been satisfied to cut his own throat. This was part and parcel of the “threats” against him, Dunmore said, complaining of the “dangerous measures pursued” by his detractors. “If not treason- able,” he thundered, it was minimally “one of the highest insults” imag- inable. Speaking in May 1775, he knew then that his opponents were “apprehensive of insurrections amongst their Slaves (some Reports hav- ing prevailed to this effect).” Seeking to “soothe them,” he purred that he had made gunpowder less accessible not because of his opponents’ behavior but to keep the Africans from seizing it. Not being dupes, the enraged settlers were not buying this notion and, instead, their “fury” then became “uncontrollable.”73 In June 1775, Lord Dunmore refused assent to a bill for paying mili- tia with a duty on slaves, a maneuver subject to various interpretations,74 not all of which left him in a positive light among settlers. His Excellency should have considered events in South Carolina, where the debts of a number of “gentlemen” escalated when they felt compelled to pay “Negro merchants” for slaves, while stiffing “dry goods merchants.” This not only hindered overall economic growth; it signaled the peril involved in being perceived as tampering with the interests of powerful human traffick- ers—for example, taxing their commodities as London had done. Even discussing taxes to be imposed by a growingly unpopular leader—not least taxes on enslaved Africans—was bound to excite passion.75 Typically, as November 1775 approached, rumors of slave conspira- cies poured into Williamsburg, and by July 1775 word had reached there about events in neighboring North Carolina and the allegation that Gov- ernor Martin was plotting in league with Africans.76 As these unnerving events were unwinding, Virginia periodicals were bulging with similarly disturbing reports about Africans joining London’s navy in Newport, site of the heralded Gaspee controversy, while other Africans were join- ing the redcoats in Boston.77 Concomitantly, there was a widespread 222 > 223 Settlers from what became the Palmetto State knew that a military attack upon their ranks was often accompanied by an insurrection of the enslaved, eager to take advantage of the resultant flux. Josiah Quincy arrived there just before the epochal battle at Lexington and remarked pointedly on the “great fears of insurrection” that were abundant.85 In May 1775—as highly motivated delegates assembled at the Continental Congress—one of Charleston’s leading figures received word from Arthur Lee, then in London, to the effect that the Crown was planning not only to deploy indigenous allies against the colonists but, as well, to encourage “an insurrection amongst the slaves.” Similar fears arose in Georgia, all of which served to forge in the crucible of independence the entirely under- standable idea that Africans were hostile to formation of the republic.86 On 29 May 1775, a local periodical reported a purported plan in Lon- don to ship “seventy eight thousand guns and bayonets” to the colonies for use by Africans, indigenes, “Roman Catholics,” and “Canadians” in order to subdue settlers. When the royal governor arrived in Charles- ton on 19 June 1775, he was told that it was believed universally that the ship that brought him had on board thousands of arms for Africans to effectuate an insurrection.87 Influenced by events in South Carolina, similar fears arose in Geor- gia, since by 1775 nearly half of the population was African.88 Thus, in May 1775, Georgia’s governor received news of a skirmish in Boston with alarm, as the report was accompanied by the news that redcoats were on their way to South Carolina and that slaves were being liber- ated, with the entire region in an uproar of ferment. Colonists were turning en masse against him, and he could envision no other result except an anti-colonial rebellion.89 Setting aside the veracity of these swirling rumors and allegations, they certainly suggest that an anxiety-ridden state of mind was descending on many settlers as 1776 approached. Frazzled nerves led to hasty decisions, at times wrongheaded, and often violent retribution visited upon those who were seen as a source of insecurity: Africans, for example. Even before the Dunmore proclamation, colonists were up in arms in light of alleged attempts by the Crown to incite the Africans against them.90 Of course, the Africans hardly needed external assistance to rebel, as events in Norfolk months earlier suggested.91 Nevertheless, when two hundred Africans instantaneously flocked to the Union Jack 224 > 225 preacher in Maryland warned that Lord Dunmore was “tampering with” the settlers’ “Negroes,... all for the glorious purpose of entic- ing them to cut their masters’ throats while they are asleep. Gracious God!”100 Somehow, a revolt against London was morphing into a revolt against Africans, in a repetitive pattern that was to stain the resultant republic for decades to come. * * * There were other, more personal motivations that led to this momentous month. The rowdy rebels had detained Lord Dunmore’s spouse, causing her to flee to London by August 1775, while he was hiding out on a ship offshore.101 Virtually as much as any individual, Lord Dunmore—along with Africans in Antigua and Jamaica who chased settlers to the main- land—could well be considered a Founding Father of the republic. So much loyalist recruiting was occurring among Africans as a result of his edict—to the fury of rebels—that a Connecticut slaveholder advertised that his “Negro Wench” was “now pregnant and bids fair to make more recruits for Lord Dunmore.”102 On the eve of 1776, there were about six- teen thousand persons of African descent in New England, who were thought to be potential foes of the anti-London revolt. That slavery was firmly entrenched in this region in 1776 made these fears understand- able.103 Further south in Philadelphia, a headquarters of anti-London feelings, the anger toward Lord Dunmore had attained hyperbolically stratospheric heights,104 adding highly inflammable fuel to the fires of rebellion: that such rhetoric was echoed in Maryland was indicative of the trepidation induced by his notorious edict.105 On the east bank of the Atlantic, the feeling was that Lord Dun- more was seen as a “nobleman of a firm and resolute disposition” who was treated with “respect” initially by Virginians—before he became “engaged in a violent altercation” with them over the “whole mili- tia law,” which could be seen as a pre-emptive measure on his part to weaken those who were opposed to London’s rule, then to bludgeon them with armed Africans. This supporter of His Excellency knew that the province had a “prodigious multitude of Negro slaves,” which by his counting “amounted to twice the number of the white inhabitants.” This imbalance, it was thought, left the latter fearful and desperately desiring 226 > 227 even more skewed than this, for according to one source by 1776, in the three low-county districts of Georgetown, Charles Town (including the city), and Beaufort, there were fifty-three slaves to three settlers.111 Reputedly a leading redcoat played upon this sensitive factor, remind- ing these settlers of their vulnerability, asserting that if their rebelling continued, “it may happen that your rice and indigo will be brought to market by Negroes instead of white people.” That is, they could be ousted from their high perches and in a reversal of fortune become sub- ject to the diktat of those whom they were accustomed to ruling. That was in March 1775. In May, South Carolina dispatched energized del- egates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.112 Unwittingly (per- haps), London had helped to construct a “Black Scare” that propelled settlers toward secession, with untoward and unhappy consequences for the Africans left behind when the Crown was defeated. From Philadelphia, William Bradford informed James Madison about a recent “Negro conspiracy” in Charleston and worried that Vir- ginia would witness the same. Bradford’s panic was exacerbated when he considered that Africans thought that the conflict between settlers and London was all about their enslavement—which was not altogether wrong. As for the condemned Thomas Jeremiah, Bradford recited to Madison the chilling words of leading rebel and slave trader Henry Laurens, who thought it to be true that the accused was “guilty of a design & attempt to encourage our Negroes to Rebellion & joining the King’s Troops if any had been sent there.”113 The point was not neces- sarily if Laurens was accurate in his sentiment—the point was the state of mind of rebels who were coming to believe that a London-African combine was mounting against them, leaving secession—a Unilateral Declaration of Independence—as the only way out. Already the other prong of revolt—settlers’ growing economic strength fettered by London—was asserting itself in that the decision had been taken by the rebels that no commodities should be exported from the mainland to the British isles or British Caribbean.114 This was further transforming the political economy, as one slaveholder in 1775 mandated that no “clothing” for his property should be imported from the isles: instead, “ten Black Females” were “to be employed in spinning solely.”115 Still, by making his plantation more dependent upon often seditious slaves, this “master” was opting for a sour alternative—which 228 > 229 however, was the unavoidable reality that Somerset had set aloft the notion that London was moving toward abolition—and the settlers not so much. Slave pilots, for example, so useful in navigating the numer- ous inlets in North Carolina, were among the first to ally with London in its dispute with the settlers.122 Janet Schaw was passing through North Carolina then and noted that an edict of the Crown on 12 June 1775 had offered a pardon to all rebel- ling settlers who sought conciliation—but somehow, this was not what they heard. Instead, she recalled, they were told London “was ordering the Tories to murder the Whigs and promising every Negro that would mur- der his Master and family that he should have his Master’s plantation”— and, she said, somehow the Africans believed this to be true, which meant that a heavy “price” would be paid. She was stunned to ascertain that “an insurrection was hourly expected. There had been a great number of them,” meaning Africans, “discovered in the adjoining woods the night before, most of them with arms.” This had forged a remarkably high level of solidarity among settlers—and terror against Africans. She was told that this Negro-phobic “artifice” was a wily “trick intended in the first place to inflame the minds of the populace and in the next place to get those who had not before taken up arms to do it now and form an associa- tion for the safety of the town,” even though by this juncture she found it likely that “the Negroes will revolt.”123 Whatever the case, a signal factor in instigating presumed loyal subjects to become fire-breathing radicals was the very idea that London was stirring a dreaded “servile revolt.”124 Convincing settlers that Africans would rise and murder them all was a charge that did not seem far-fetched in light of Manhattan 1712, Antigua 1736, Stono 1739, Manhattan 1741, Jamaican Maroons, and all the rest. That London seemed to be moving toward abolition in 1772, which had been preceded by arming Africans to fight in the Caribbean, gave ballast to the claims made against Governor Martin. Settlers in North Carolina already were rattled when an enslaved African named Sanders was found guilty of having shot a colonist; the defendant, though worth a considerable eighty pounds, was accorded a wrenching verdict: “burn the said Negro alive.”125 Such alarms were con- sistent with what James Madison thought he knew, for it was in January 1775 that he was informed of a plan by London to emulate Martin and Dunmore by arming the enslaved to squash his revolt.126 A few months 230 > 231 Thus, in early November 1775, Lord Dunmore landed at Norfolk with dozens of grenadiers and a band of loyalists and Africans; there they con- fronted successfully rebel militia. Quickly he issued his edict—and it was downhill from there. By December, a declaration of war by the rebels was promulgated. The animosity Dunmore engendered was captured by the Virginian John Norton, who denounced the “cruelty” and “wicked” acts of the Crown’s forces: “after pillaging the plantations on the rivers for some months past, taking Negroes, burning houses,” and “like depredations,” Lord Dunmore capped it all off by issuing a “damned, infernal, diabolical proclamation declaring freedom to all our slaves who will join him.”136 With a “few Scotch excepted,” boasted Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, Dunmore had “united every man in the Colony.” Indeed, if London had “searched the world” for the man best suited to wreck its cause “and pro- cure union and success” for the rebels, it “could not have found a more complete Agent.”137 He was not far wrong. (Intriguingly, one writer also thought that those few who backed Governor Martin in North Carolina also included “Highlanders” of Scotland, a “brave and hardy race.”)138 Lee could afford to brag because as of early October 1775, the rebels had received by land from Baltimore and other sites substantial amounts of gunpowder which had been purchased in the Caribbean.139 Lee was not wrong in his implication that Dunmore was no outlier or loose cannon but was operating well within the bounds of leadership thinking set down in London. A proposal emerged in Parliament as early as January 1775 calling for the abolition of slavery and thus “humbling the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern colonies.”140 It was also in November 1775 that a remarkable debate erupted in Parliament as to whether “all the slaves in America should have the trial by jury.” A for- mal motion was introduced on this terribly fraught matter, accompanied by a proviso to “annul all laws” on the mainland to the contrary. Amidst pained remarks about a “civil war” under way, the “vice” of slavery was denounced, and though instant abolition was not yet on the agenda, clearly designated way stations along the way were. This jury measure then was seen as “an auspicious beginning” to that end, which was to “extirpate slavery from the face of the earth.” Tossing down the gauntlet before mainlanders, it was announced brazenly, “let the only contention henceforward between Great Britain and America be, which shall exceed the other in zeal for establishing the fundamental rights of liberty to all 232 > 233 Thus, one leading slaveholder had a point in arguing that “late Acts of Parliament” were “tending to create a might[y] difference between His Majesty’s subjects” on the mainland and London, leaving settlers with the choice of seeking to “continue” as “free-men” or to “become Slaves.”144 The slave trope emerged too in May 1775 at the Continental Congress in Phila- delphia, which embattled South Carolinians attended, along with John Hancock and other leaders. London’s alleged attempt to “convert” colonists “from freemen to slaves” was decried heartily. The Gaspee was alluded to in referring to “hardy” efforts to “seize Americans and carry them to Great Britain, to be tried for offenses committed in the Colonies”—yet the over- arching fright was the “horrors of domestic insurrection.”145 Subsequently, John Adams mused about the “melancholy account” he heard from Georgians and Carolinians, particularly their apprehen- sion that a redcoat offensive would mean that “20,000 Negroes would join” them, since the “Negroes have a wonderful Art of communicating Intelligence among themselves.” The saving grace for the rebels was that many allies of the Crown too were slaveholders and were reluctant to unsheathe the weapon of abolition.146 Florida, then under British rule, did not join wholly the 1776 revolt and provides an indicator of why the Dunmore edict and the specter of arming Africans was taken so seriously. Because of the Spanish heri- tage, it became simpler for the governor to create four militia compa- nies composed of Africans. During the post-1776 conflict, Africans played a significant role in Florida’s defense and in launching offensive raids against Georgia.147 June 1772 and November 1775 were powerfully important landmarks on the road to 4 July 1776. Compelling loyal subjects to revolt against the Crown required a pervasively profound threat to the colonists’ status quo—and the rapidly changing status of the African was tanta- mount to such a threat. The dilemma for Africans who sensed that free- dom and an enhanced life were more likely to come from the metropo- lis, as opposed to the rebels who had devised a model of development based on their mass enslavement, was that if their understandable alli- ance with London did not pan out as conflict with the rebels sharpened, they would be bereft, surrounded by a sea of hostile U.S. patriots eager to pulverize those who, in their mind, had engaged in the darkest of betrayals.