fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007 - Ethical Culture ...

or age restrictions limited the offer to adult men alone, and sowomen fled to the redcoat encampments, often taking theirchildren with them.The detailed plantation records kept by Thomas Jefferson andJohn Ball make it possible to identify the family relationshipsof runaways from their lands. Among the twenty‐three slaveswho abandoned Jefferson’s Virginia holdings were ten adultwomen and three girls. Of the five female adults who can betraced with certainty, two left with their husbands, one ofthem accompanied by children as well; another fled with threeof her four offspring; and the remaining two, one of whom wasmarried, ventured forth by themselves. The fifty‐three blackswho fled John Ball’s plantation in 1780 included eighteenwomen, among them eight mothers with children, some of thelatter still infants. Charlotte, a childless woman whose familyconnections are unknown, probably led a mass escape fromBall’s Kensington quarter. She originally left the plantation onMay 10, in company with Bessy and her three children, butshe was soon recaptured. A week later she ran away again, thistime along with (and perhaps as a guide for) what Ball termed“Ping’s gang.” This fifteen‐member group, which escaped viaBall’s flatboat, was composed of Pino, his wife, their youngestdaughter, and one of their two granddaughters; their daughter,Jewel, her husband, Dicky, and son, Little Pino; Dicky’s sister,her husband, and their daughter; and Eleanor Lawrence, herhusband, Brutus, and their two daughters. Although it is notclear whether Eleanor was related to the Pino clan, her sisterFlora had also absconded to the British, along with an infantson, two weeks previously.The impressions one receives from such fragmentary evidence—both of large numbers of female runaways and of familiesleaving together—are confirmed by an examination of recordskept at the evacuation of New York City. Each time the Britishleft an American port in the later years of the war, they carriedlarge numbers of former slaves away with them, approximatelyten thousand from Savannah and Charleston alone. Because thepreliminary peace terms accepted in November 1782 includeda clause requiring the British to return slaves to Americanowners, Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander, ordered theenumeration of all blacks who claimed the protection of thearmy. Crude biographical details were obtained from formerslaves then ˇ.within the lines in order to ascertain whetherthey should be allowed to embark with the troops for Englandand Nova Scotia. Blacks who had belonged to loyalists wereexcluded from the promise of freedom offered by the Britishduring the war, as were any who had joined the British afterNovember 1782. But Carleton believed himself obliged toensure the liberty of all the others.Of the 2,863 persons whose sex is specified on the survivingembarkation lists (119 small children were not differentiated bysex), 1,211 (or 42.3 percent) were female and 1,652 (57.7 percent)were male. The substantial proportion of female runawaysreflects the ease with which even a woman with children couldseek freedom when the British army was encamped only a fewmiles from her home. Further, the analysis of the age structureof those on the New York City lists indicates that women oftenbrought children with them into the lines. Nearly 17 percentof the refugees were nine years of age or younger, and fully 32percent were under twenty. Slightly more than a quarter of themature women were explicitly identified as being accompaniedby children, and the addition of other likely cases brings thatproportion to 40 percent. Disregarding the 96 children whohad been born free in British‐held territory, each maturewoman who joined the royal forces had an average of 1.6children at her side.An examination of familial relationships from the standpointof 605 children (503 of them nine years old or under) listed onthe embarkation rolls shows that 3 percent were accompaniedsolely by fathers, 17 percent were with both parents, 56.2percent with mothers alone, and 24.3 percent with otherrelatives, some of whom may have been parents but who are notexplicitly noted as such on the occasionally incomplete records.These families included such groups as Prince Princes, agedfifty‐three, his forty‐year‐old wife, Margaret, their twentyyear‐olddaughter, Elizabeth, and her “small child,” and theirson, Erick, who was eleven; “Jane Thompson 70 worn out wta grand child 5 y[r] old”; and Hannah Whitten, thirty, withher five children, ages eight, seven, six, five, and one. Thefive‐member Sawyer clan of Norfolk, Virginia, evidently usedthe opportunity to seek freedom with the British as a meansof reuniting. Before they all ran away in 1776, the family wasdivided among three owners: the mother and a child in onelocation, two children in another, and the father in a third. Inall, despite the preponderance among the refugees of young,single adults, 40 percent of the total, like the Sawyers and theothers just noted, appear to have been accompanied by relativesof some kind.To arrive at New York City, the blacks listed on the Britishrecords had had to survive many dangers and hardships, not theleast of which was the prevalence of epidemic diseases in theencampments to which they had fled. Yet they were not entirelysafe even in British‐occupied Manhattan. The minutes of thejoint Anglo‐American board established to adjudicate claimsunder the peace treaty reveal liberty lost on legal technicalitiesimportant to the presiding officers but of little meaning to theblacks involved. Mercy and her three children were returned toher master because, as a resident of Westchester County, NewYork, she had not lived outside the British lines and so couldnot have come within them voluntarily to earn the protectionof the freedom proclamation. Elizabeth Truant remained theproperty of a New Jerseyite because she had not joined theBritish until April 1783, after the signing of the preliminary112 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007