by Terese Svoboda
The Slavs inspired the word “slave.” Abductions in Eastern Europe began in the ninth century AD conducted by Spanish Muslims, and the area is still plagued by human trafficking (especially children), with a million more victims per year than in the Americas. [1] My surname means freedom in Ukrainian, Russian and Czech. My ancestors flaunted their liberty at a time when many others were being enslaved – or were they once enslaved and took on this patronymic after they escaped slavery, or were they freed? Many Blacks in the US took on the name Freedman or Freeman after the Civil War.[2]
Few know that Blacks were freed twice before the end of the American Revolution. Eighty-seven years prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, in November, 1775, during the year before the Declaration of Independence, Dunmore’s Proclamation ordered the slaves freed in Virginia. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, was cornered by colonists on a ship in the Norfolk harbor with only 300 soldiers at the time. His proclamation did not stem from any moral or religious objections to slavery. As governor of Virginia, he had withheld his signature from a bill against the slave trade. He simply wanted help – to use Blacks to protect the Loyalists.
Only months before, Dunmore had been quite popular with all Virginians, Loyalists and patriots, as victor of the Battle of Point Pleasant. Marching alongside a thousand of his ragtag backwoodsmen, he routed the area’s Native Americans, opening up a huge area of West Virginia and Ohio for settlement and speculation. Although treaties had been in place for some time, Dunmore ignored them.[3] George Washington, head engineer of the frontier fort construction on the West Virginia/Ohio border, had purchased quite a bit of its acreage, and like the other developers in the area, wanted the Native Americans gone. No freedom for them. Forced to abandon hundreds of acres of corn and semi-permanent homes, the Native Americans were not counted as “brave and free people” that the Virginians declared themselves to be in their many Resolves published in response to Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation a year later.
“I have once fought for the Virginians and by God, I will let them see that I can fight against them,” wrote Lord Dunmore. He had been testing his views on slavery since April 1775, and those, along with increased British taxation, undermined his constituency’s faith in his rule. By the time he announced his proclamation in November, he was desperate to merely hold onto his position. The proclamation established martial law and offered freedom to any of the patriots’ slaves and indentured servants who would leave their owners, join the British army, and reduce Williamsburg to ashes.
Loyalists, even though Dunmore’s Proclamation did not apply to them, worried that their slaves would get ideas about freedom that would be counter to the success of their plantations under the King. All the slave-owning colonists patrolled both the land and the water for escaping slaves, and limited gatherings of enslaved people. The owners also tried to convince the enslaved that collaborating with the British would be a self-destructive move. After all, Lord Dunmore held enslaved Black people himself. A month after the proclamation went into effect, the owners made their own declaration: all enslaved fugitives would forgo punishment if they returned to their captors within ten days. If not, they faced execution. Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who was working on his draft of the Declaration of Independence for next year’s Second Continental Congress, complained that Dunmore was “prompting our negroes to rise in arms against us.” The owner of some three hundred slaves, George Washington, in his letters in the winter of ’75-76, wrote that they had to contain Dunmore, or the matter would snowball. [4]
Within a month 300 black men had signed up with Dunmore’s “Royal Ethiopian Regiment,” their uniforms featuring the words “Liberty to Slaves,” and soon their ranks grew to 800 men. What the enslaved were offered was the exchange of their lives on the plantation for possible death on the battlefield, and whether enlistment would yield actual freedom after military subjugation was still a gamble. Although soldiers were badly treated, they were not slaves but as conscripts endured conditions not much better. When commanded to obey, they often risked death, but if they refused to obey, they could be shot for insubordination. Just as the Virginians feared, Dunmore’s Proclamation served as inspiration and hope, and eventually thousands fled slavery.
Five years later, another proclamation made in New York encouraged freedom without the price tag of fighting. On June 30, 1779, Sir Henry Clinton, British commander-in-chief of the North American forces, issued the Philipsburg Proclamation. He granted freedom to all slaves in the rebel states whether or not they fought for the British, promising “to every NEGROE Who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full Security to follow within these Lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper.” [5] Six months later, after the British troops captured Charleston, even more thousands of enslaved African Americans left their place of slavery and joined the British troops. Among the victorious was George Washington’s slave Harry who had joined Dunmore’s battalion a few years earlier. Washington hired a slave catcher to attempt to retrieve Harry and eighteen other slaves who fled his plantation. Unmoved by his fellow patriots’ legislation of freedom for all, Washington even sent out another slave catcher after the war was over. Harry, like another of Wshington’s slaves, Georgia Squash, hid in the British zone of New York, and escaped to Nova Scotia, with about three thousand other free Blacks.[6] Squash was very lucky. The day after her sailing to Canada, Washington wrote to the commissioner of embarkation in New York to ask him to privately imprison any slaves of his discovered leaving. Harry found it impossible to thrive on the rocky frigid coasts of Nova Scotia, and relocated to Sierra Leone. When he protested against British taxation there, he was banished from the country and never heard from again.
Other freed slaves faced similar disenfranchisement. Among the freed Blacks who settled in Caribbean colonies, like Jamaica and the Bahamas, some ended up back in slavery there, with similar fates in Canada. After Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, he returned many ex-slaves to their owners. The Treaty of Paris two years later provided that all property including slaves would be returned to their rebel masters[7]. The British commanders refused to carry this out, even though slavery was legal in Britain, and offered compensation instead. Not that there is any evidence that these sums were paid.[8] Estimates of the number of freed Blacks who sailed off to London vary widely – between 400 and 15,000. Although some claim that as many as 100,000 slaves, a fourth of the total number in the thirteen states, escaped to the British lines,[9] the majority of the slaves did not attempt to escape. Obstacles presented by the sick, disabled or elderly slaves, or those suffering terrible anguish in leaving behind families scattered across several plantations prevented them. The slaves also had to be situated on farms close to the British lines or have the means to reach them. Although the British were happy to encourage such escape, they had no means to support the formerly enslaved. Historians estimate that nearly 50 percent of the enslaved people who escaped to British lines died of cold, starvation and disease before the end of the war.[10]
As for Dunmore, after the American Revolution, he was appointed governor of the Bahamas, where thousands of Blacks had been transported, most of them enslaved. Despite his effort to pose as the “Great Liberator,” his court re-enslaved 29 of the 30 Freed blacks claimed to be runaways by Bahamians. Blacks built a village in Nassau behind Government House, and another near Fort Charlotte, to provide asylum to these runaways where “no white person dares make his appearance…but at risk of his life.” [11] Quite a change from the enthusiasm to Dunmore’s earlier proclamation that had black mothers in Virginia naming their children after him.
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was similar to the Philipsburg Proclamation in that it declared that “that all persons held as slaves” were freed without the requirement of enlistment. That exemption sparked the Draft Riots in New York City, leaving at least a hundred dead. Working class immigrants were angry that the Blacks weren’t required to fight and feared that they would take their jobs while they were serving. Less than a year later, a thousand Blacks volunteered to fight in the war, and marched through the devastated city to a ship that took them to battle, bravely risking execution or re-enslavement by the Confederates.[12]
Why has America, the supposed land of the free and home of the brave, had to repeatedly make these proclamations in the name of freedom? Even now, with private prisons forcing the incarcerated and immigrants to work for nothing, and sex slavery on the rise, not to mention being one state short of ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment making women equal to men, maybe it’s time to issue yet another declaration of independence.[13]
***
Terese Svoboda’s new fiction is the novel Roxy and Coco, and the Juniper Prize winning collection, The Lost Swim.
***
With thanks to Kathleen Hulser, public historian.
[1] https://etactics.com/blog/where-does-human-trafficking-occur-the-most#Regions
[2]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/many-african-american-last-names-hold-weight-black-history-rcna17267
[3] Fort Gower Resolves. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/fort-gower-resolves They still thought of themselves as subjects of “Majesty King George III, whilst his Majesty delights to reign over a brave and free People.”
[4] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2i1621.html paraphrased.
[5]https://web.archive.org/web/20071024151754/http://museum.gov.ns.ca/blackloyalists/who.htmhttps://www.ouramericanrevolution.org/index.cfm/page/view/p0422#:~:text=Furthermore%2C%20he%20promised%20%22to%20every,claim%20that%20he%20or%20she
[6] Brooks, Joanna (2002). Face Zion Forward: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798. UPNE. pp. 6.
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipsburg_Proclamation
[8] https://wams.nyhistory.org/settler-colonialism-and-revolution/the-american-revolution/deborah-squash/
[9]https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lord-dunmores-proclamation-1775
[10] https://wams.nyhistory.org/settler-colonialism-and-revolution/the-american-revolution/deborah-squash/
[11] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h47.html
[12]https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html&title=The+New+York+City+Draft+Riots+of+1863&desc=
[13]https://www.statista.com/topics/4238/human-trafficking/#:~:text=Despite%20increased%20international%20attention%20and,the%20world%20continues%20to%20grow.