CHAPTER 3
Hercules, Revolution, and British Florida
As the last colony to embrace the revolutionary cause, Georgia entered the grand conflict reluctantly and under the scornful eyes of Carolinians, appalled at its seemingly spineless response to events. The province had good reason to resist the rush to war. The creation of a plantation economy over the preceding quarter-century had lifted it out of virtual bankruptcy to an unprecedented economic boom that created a deep well of loyalty to the British Empire. The colony looked as much to Jamaica, St. Kitts, and the rest of the British Caribbean as to the North American mainland. It did not seem wise to enter into an uncertain conflict when a loyal British East Florida lay on its southern border and an increasingly hostile Creek Nation was only a few miles beyond the Ogeechee River.1 As late as January 1776, the royal governor, Sir James Wright, a skillful tactician who had consistently outmaneuvered his opponents, tenaciously clung to power. Only gradually did the trappings of royal power unravel: first the militia, then the judiciary, and finally local government.2
Despite living on a barrier island, an enslaved African named Hercules was ever attuned to the rumors afloat in Savannah as the colony drifted toward war. Never an isolated figure, he found himself, circumstantial evidence suggests, an intermediary between the over one hundred people on Ossabaw Island and the larger world where new ideas were crowding in on them. As a builder and sailor of small craft, he was in and out of Savannah to deliver commodities and pick up supplies, make stops at Beaulieu, a plantation on the mainland across from Ossabaw, and carry out assignments to other plantations along the Ogeechee River. During his town visits, he conversed with fellow bondsmen at the wharf and store of John Morel, his enslaver, and was privy to news about unfolding events and Morel’s election as a member of the Council of Safety.3
Like Mahomet, Hercules was an African who survived the Middle Passage and arrived in Georgia at roughly the same time, around 1768. His point of origin was a vast area called Angola in central West Africa where hundreds of different languages and cultures came into play.4 Rather than being placed on a rice plantation as in the case with Mahomet, Hercules found himself in the middle of Ossabaw Island, eleven thousand acres of untapped upland that held valuable live oak trees for shipbuilding, room for cattle herds, and the kind of soil on which the indigo plant could grow.5
The life of Hercules offers a map for navigating the full spectrum of the landscape for Black people in revolutionary Savannah. His story is all about movement, movement between a barrier island and the mainland, around the battle lines in the Siege of Savannah in 1779, through a swampy area on the mainland in an ill-timed escape, and the final long-distance journey to British East Florida with his wife Betty and their two children. It is a story about hope, a hope qualified by the highs and lows of war—the separations, disruptions, and dashed dreams of people who thought self-emancipation a realistic possibility only to be returned to slavery all too often. His life offers a measure of the rise, fall, and the rise again of hope in a fluid situation where white authority, whether that of patriot or loyalist, was resolutely hostile, and the attitudes of the British officer corps unpredictable. Once the family arrived in St. Augustine, choices had to be made in a totally new setting. Those choices tell us much about the landscape of “freedom” beyond Georgia.
Their enslaver, Morel, had come as a boy with his family in the early days of the colony and then matured into an entrepreneur who saw enslavement from a different angle than most of his peers. Not yet forty years old in 1763, the successful merchant acquired full ownership of the barrier island to become one of the first planters in Georgia to cultivate and manufacture the rich blue indigo dye on a commercial scale. Having grown up as child in Trusteeship Georgia, he possessed a natural shrewdness about the conditions for success in this frontier colony. On his three plantations on Ossabaw, he produced indigo, raised cattle, grew provisions for the Savannah market, and had his labor force cut live oaks to build ships capable of crossing the Atlantic. Instead of acquiring slaves from the booming markets in Charles Town or from mariners sailing into Savannah, he worked out an arrangement to take over the estate of Patrick Brown, a deceased deerskin merchant in Augusta, with its fifty-nine people.6
Originally from South Carolina, the men and women among that population had spent years at the trading post of Augusta and knew how to scrape skins, stack leather pelts in warehouses, load packhorses, and row the piraguas that carried the pelts to Charles Town. Brown’s brother, a gilder in Dublin, inherited the estate on Patrick’s death and moved the African Americans to the coast to attempt a rice plantation. When that effort failed, he sold them to Morel and returned to Ireland. Morel promptly moved them to the island in hopes of creating an agricultural empire based on indigo, timbering, and garden farming.7
Rather than a predominantly male group with few children like Mahomet’s on Mulberry Grove, the community consisted of families, with as many women as there were men and as many children as there were adults. Unlike their peers from Africa who produced few children, these Carolinians created large families. Tom and Nelly boasted five sons and daughters—Tise, Abraham, Joe, Saffee, and Phebe—and were to have two more once on the island, Bacchus and Titus. Dick and Bess had six children; Carolina and Molly had four; and Sam and Venus were already parents to seven before setting foot in this new setting.8 From Morel’s point of view, the men and women who made up the Brown estate were much less likely to flee than were recently acquired Africans, understood something of the white world, and were accustomed to the give-and-take of negotiating with their “master” for the terms of work. They formed a community well on its way to developing a distinct identity at once African and American, one that promised benefits to both parties.
By the time of the Revolution, there were others from Africa, but the addition of outsiders did not alter the demographics of the settlement. Families still dominated, with thirty-two husbands and wives, twelve single men, and three single women with children. Living with their parents were seventy-six boys and girls, an astonishing 49 percent of the total.9 New arrivals typically married into existing families. Many bore African names like Auba, Quamina, Mundingo, Larcho, Jemima, Tenah, Begora, and Dembo, but the majority were creoles born in Georgia.
The original families diligently maintained their position as the dominant group. According to an inventory in 1777, “old Charles” and his wife Rose had apparently died, but their son “young Charles” was now the driver for the main plantation, the most highly valued person on the inventory. The sisters of his wife, Diana, were married to principal figures on the plantation. Even an older couple like Joe and Nancy enjoyed a measure of importance in the community because of their daughter’s marriage to Hector, a native of Angola and the indispensable blacksmith.10 Betty, the daughter of Anthony and Kate, took as her husband Hercules, “a short thick fellow” from Angola.11 The integration of outsiders into existing families was a distinctive feature of these Carolinians. As a craftsman capable of working with boats, Hercules brought valuable skills.
The community was hardworking, and the settlements on Ossabaw— North End, Middle Place, and South End plantations—were immensely productive. The several thousand pounds of indigo produced annually fed the rapidly expanding textile mills of England with a dye that was cheaper than the indigo grown in the French Caribbean but still commanded a good price.12 Ossabaw’s economy waxed and waned with the fortunes of the Industrial Revolution in England. The enslaved men who manned the beating vats developed the feel and touch of self-taught chemists producing for commercial markets. The indigo plant was no stranger to people from the immense Guinea region. For several hundred years, it had served as the foundation for numerous textile traditions in West Africa.13
Other products too connected this seemingly isolated island to the Atlantic world. Morel created a shipyard to take advantage of the ample supply of valuable live oaks whose curved features and dense wood made them ideal for specialty parts for vessels. African and African American craftsmen constructed the Elizabeth, an eighty-four-foot vessel with a twenty-four-foot width, a fully rigged ship with three masts, designed to carry barrels of rice to European markets.14 The four hundred head of cattle that roamed freely across the landscape provided beef for the sugar islands in the Caribbean, while the provisions grown on the island made it a grocery store for Savannah.
As an artisan engaged in building watercraft as well as participating in the manufacture of indigo, Hercules was intimately bound to the Atlantic economy, and, although that did not alter his presence on an isolated island, it nevertheless brought him into the rhythms of the Atlantic world and the competitive demands that came with it.15 His life moved in time with the market for indigo in London, the market for beef in the Caribbean, the demands of the shipbuilding world, and the need for provisions in Savannah. He was part of a community of enslaved people distributed across three plantations on an island, a fourth plantation at Beaulieu on the mainland, as well as in Savannah at John Morel’s wharf, warehouses, and house.16 Approximately twenty to thirty field hands worked each unit, with those too young or feeble adding to the numbers at each location. Almost as a matter of course, many in the community were accustomed to frequent crossing of the coastal waterways—in canoes, piraguas, yawls, or small schooners. Produce was transported to market and supplies regularly purchased while field hands were shifted from plantation to plantation and from island to mainland and back again as the needs of the enterprise evolved across the agricultural seasons. Families were split as young children grew up and were moved around to meet the labor needs of the growing enterprise.17
As a frequent visitor to Savannah, Hercules was well aware of the unraveling of the royal government under James Wright and the first signs that the Revolution might actually bear fruit for enslaved people. In early 1776, the British navy stationed a small fleet off Tybee Island in search of rice for besieged troops in Boston. Black fugitives began making their way through thick marsh and across tidal creeks and rivers to that three-mile-long sandbar with little more than a lighthouse and a lazaretto station. They had good reason. The brash governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunmore, had issued a proclamation the previous November that promised liberty for all slaves of rebels in Virginia willing to join British forces and fight for the Crown. The promise became a reality with the creation of a several-hundred-strong “Ethiopian Regiment,” whose members were rumored to wear sashes emblazoned with the indelible message “Liberty to Slaves.”18 Reacting to the news, a Georgia delegate, John Houstoun, warned the president of the Continental Congress, “The negroes have a wonderful art of communicating intelligence among themselves; it will run several hundreds of miles in a week or fortnight.”19
Indeed, in the first months of the new year, several hundred bondsmen made the effort to reach Tybee where a small British fleet, looking for rice to feed the Boston garrison, was cruising. Separated from the mainland by a marsh rooted in sticky mud, Tybee was inundated twice a day by tides that rose six to eight feet, presenting myriad challenges for those seeking to make their way through the wetland. From the decks of the warship Scarborough, where he had taken refuge, Governor Wright witnessed the arrival of the fugitives and later estimated that some two to three hundred people had eventually made it to the vessels, declaring “they were come for the King.”20 Of the three individuals mentioned in a letter by a local merchant, one originated on an island across from Mahomet’s plantation, another from the docks of Savannah where he worked as a cooper, and a third from the Ogeechee River near Ossabaw.21 Despite an expedition by the Council of Safety to recover the fugitives, only twelve were secured. No massacre of freedom seekers occurred as has been suggested.22 Instead, frigates from the Royal Navy carried refugees to St. Augustine, where the governor, James Grant, placed them under the supervision of various planters and merchants eager for additional labor. Their legal status remained a murky question mark, neither free nor enslaved.23
In March 1776, vessels of the Royal Navy slipped up the Savannah River, captured more than a dozen rice boats, and escorted them down to the entrance of the river at Tybee. The mission succeeded in securing much-needed rice for the hard-pressed British army in Boston besieged by Washington’s forces. That minor engagement produced enough cannonading and smoke to allow the rebels to proudly call the Battle of the Rice Boats a signal victory. The skirmish was indeed important because it forced Georgians off the sidelines and into the serious business of reordering the onetime colony. For three uneasy years, the revolutionaries hammered out the essentials of a state government, debated how to control the many loyalists who remained behind, and fought a vigorous border war below the Altamaha River.24
As a newly formed state within the fledgling confederation of independent states, Georgia was vulnerable to attack. To the west lay the towns and settlements of the Creeks, many of which leaned toward the British. To the south lay the undiminished power of British East Florida where a military government was supported by a regiment of soldiers under the command of Col. Augustine Prévost. The vicious border war that followed left a deep scar on the landscape that lasted well beyond the war. It created an unfortunate template for the region that shaped much of its history over the next forty years. A vacuum of power invited individuals, small groups, and larger bodies to assert their influence in the absence of viable government.
From the onset of the war until the end of 1778, the lands between the Altamaha and St. Johns Rivers became a no-man’s-land, where raids and counter-raids were common occurrences and a succession of American invasions of East Florida made life uncertain for every resident. In an opening bid, the newly founded state militia under Lachlan McIntosh went about “destroying every plantation between the rivers St. Johns and St. Mary,” not only to achieve military objectives but also to help themselves to cattle and slaves.25 A planter on the St. Marys, William Chapman, reported that thirty-five of the enslaved people on his plantation had been stolen or escaped, a clue that some African Americans saw a silver lining and took the opportunity to make a bid for freedom. Americans carried off thirty bondsmen from the settlement of a London merchant and several dozen more from the estate of a Swiss planter. Loyalist planters fled south. Within seven months of their arrival from the Wright estates on the St. Marys, twenty-four men, women, and children had died, as had Charles Wright, their elderly enslaver.26 Starvation, disease, and death were ever-present among all those who tried to evade the American attacks.27
The aggressive governor of British East Florida, Patrick Tonyn, launched a counteroffensive after appointing the young, charismatic Thomas Brown as commander of the newly created Florida Rangers. A resident of Augusta bitter at having the soles of his feet burned by patriots in the opening months of the war, the newly minted colonel filled the ranks of the provincial company with loyalists from Georgia and South Carolina, a sprinkling of Black fighters, and occasional Creeks and Seminoles. Within short order, the Rangers expanded their role from protecting the border to raiding cattle, seizing slaves, and burning plantations and farms across the St. Marys, reaching as far as the Altamaha River.28
Adding to the misery of African Americans in southern Georgia were the guerrilla bands loosely connected to the Florida Rangers. By far the most fearsome and effective was that of Daniel McGirt and his followers, who oscillated between sheer banditry and serving as an organized fighting force. Calling out their effectiveness, merchant Joseph Clay lamented, “We are again much infested with Tonyns Banditti Stealing our Horses & Negroes & doing us all the Mischief they can as Thieves.”29 Later in the war, a patriot newspaper denounced “a large body of infamous banditti and horse thieves that perhaps ever were collected together anywhere, under the direction of McGirt . . . a corps of Indians, with negro and white savages disguised like them [including disaffected poor people from the back settlements].”30 The interracial gang reflected the same egalitarian ethos that characterized other outlaw societies. Those enslaved that had been captured and brought to East Florida faced being sold out of hand. The “banditti” and loyalist fighters had a decidedly ambiguous relationship with Black people, incorporating a rare few into their band of brothers and profiting from the sale of the rest.
To end the raids, the State of Georgia launched two controversial invasions over the strenuous objections of the commander of the Continental troops, who rightly feared that shoddy logistics and lack of manpower would doom the enterprises. The first barely made it to Amelia Island before it fell apart due to disease and lack of supplies. In the late spring of 1778, the second reached the Alligator River in swamps inside East Florida but disintegrated in the face of harassing attacks, lack of supplies, and a hopelessly divided command.31
The one-hundred-mile strip between the Altamaha and St. Johns Rivers brought an uncertain existence. An economy based on herds of cattle and a few plantations did not survive, and the lives of fifteen hundred to two thousand Africans on both sides of the St. Marys were torn apart in the process.32 Many individuals were captured, kidnapped, or succeeded in running away to an uncertain fate. Many more died through the hardships of dislocation and starvation. “Negro huts” were destroyed; clothing and other modest possessions disappeared; families were torn apart as armies and marauding bands of guerrillas roamed across the landscape. Of the original Black population in southern Georgia, some ended up in East Florida either through capture or through the migration of loyalist planters. Others were taken northward beyond the fighting, an undetermined number died from the shock of limited food and deteriorating living conditions, and still others fled to the Seminole Indians or made their way to safer zones, perhaps Savannah or St. Augustine.
Hercules found a space that gave him a taste of the border war while enhancing his knowledge of coastal geography. English merchants in St. Augustine stood ready to buy indigo bricks, a fairly lightweight and easily transportable commodity of high value. Indigo planters like the Morels were delighted to see a black market for their crops emerge from the trauma of war and more than willing to send small watercraft to British East Florida. Prominent planters like George McIntosh, member of the revolutionary Council of Safety in Savannah, and Thomas Young, a genial loyalist with friends on both sides of the political divide, took part.33 The episodic border war invited the smuggling of commodities out of Georgia by planters anxious to evade the coastal blockade by the Royal Navy and overseers eager to milk an opportunity on their own.
According to court documents, one or more overseers on Ossabaw Island participated in the smuggling. A prosecuting attorney asked a witness after the Revolution, “Did not one Hodson the overseer at Ossabaw take a large boat and with one Ellis in a schooner carry off to Augustine some boxes of indigo, myrtle wax, and everything that was saleable?” A proficient waterman, Hercules was almost certainly a seaman on these adventures, picking up invaluable knowledge of waterways with their shifting sandbars and connecting creeks. In addition, privateers called “picaroons” raided plantations on the barrier islands for an easy chance to secure needed crops. An overseer on Ossabaw assisted their dark enterprise in return for a bribe. Hercules and his companions may well have internalized the connections with East Florida, the war serving as a vivid lesson in the coastal landscape.34
That scenario changed dramatically when, on December 28, 1778, a British army landed a few miles south of Savannah and overwhelmed the surprised, undermanned, and demoralized defenders of the town. Gen. Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief of the British armies in North America, dispatched somewhere between two thousand and three thousand British troops under Lt. Col. Archibald Campbell from New York to open a southern campaign in a bid to end the stalemate in the North. He looked to the South for fresh resources from three distinct groups: loyalists; Black people; and Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles, many of whose talwas or towns showed strong pro-British proclivities. The Revolution in Georgia was poised to become three parallel revolutions, white, black, and red.35
Already in the Upper South as well as northern states, the Revolution had turned into a momentous event that brought an enormous defection from slavery from a people thought by white southerners to be loyal, passive, and ignorant of the grand political currents sweeping British North America. Historian Gary Nash calls the moment the first mass slave rebellion in American history, the first attempt by enslaved Black people to wrest equality from a resistant white society, and the first large-scale construction of free Black life attempted until Reconstruction.36 If his argument may overstate the case, it points the way to fresh thinking about the extraordinary upheaval in Georgia where people of African descent made clear their aspirations and had a voice in the outcome.
In response to the invasion, hundreds of enslaved Georgians left their plantations and sought the protection of the British army now in control of Savannah. It was an electrifying moment. The master-slave relationship was severely tested as Campbell found on a march northward toward Augusta. On January 9, 1779, less than two weeks after landing, the colonel noted, “The Bandittis of Negroes who flock to the conquerors . . . do ten thousand times more Mischief than the whole Army put together.”37 At the end of January, a “Board of Police” in Savannah, set up to reestablish “order” in the countryside, found 925 slaves left on abandoned properties between the Savannah and Ogeechee Rivers, considerably less than their population a few weeks before.38
When Wright returned from London in July as the reappointed royal governor, he was shocked at finding “vast numbers of Negroes” (“I may venture to say some or several Thousands”) and called the leading planters and merchants to his house to address the “growing evil” of Black people “at loose” in the town.39 Seeking the protection of the British army, Black Georgians had flocked to Savannah and radically changed the tenor of life, challenging the basis for white supremacy and the stability of the social order. White Georgians were horrified at the sight of Blacks wandering the streets of Savannah, sleeping in abandoned houses, sheltering in hastily constructed shantytowns, picking up odd jobs from the British military, and displaying an independence deemed insolent and threatening.
While loyalist planters were horrified at Black assertions of independence, the British army took a pragmatic approach. Ultimately, the military had no intention of overturning the social order and jeopardizing their relations with the loyal white population, but it intended to use the extra manpower to best advantage. General Prévost, formerly commander in St. Augustine and successor to the departing Campbell, commissioned his chief engineer, Maj. James Moncrief, to form a corps of pioneers from the floating population of African Americans to begin strengthening Savannah’s fortifications. The corps set about building a series of redoubts around the perimeter and digging ditches to slow the advance of enemy troops in an expected counterattack. Eventually several hundred men and women were engaged in hauling supplies and military equipment, working in military hospitals, preparing food in kitchens, and washing laundry.
By the end of the summer, only three to four redoubts had been finished, while the wall around Savannah remained incomplete. The pace picked up when observers on Tybee spied a French fleet hovering off the coast with twenty-five ships of the line and nine frigates led by the Count d’Estaing, fresh from a stunning naval victory over the English in the Caribbean. An estimated thirty-five hundred troops landed at the Morel plantation on Beaulieu, lost valuable time slogging toward Savannah, and joined with an American army led by Gen. Benjamin Lincoln to begin a siege of the town. With a regiment of their soldiers seemingly marooned on Hilton Head, the British staff had begun to contemplate defeat.40
In this moment of crisis, an order from the royal governor called on planters to supply five hundred slaves to prepare the defenses for a last-ditch effort. Most willingly complied. A few resisted. Stubborn and headstrong, Mary Morel, John’s widow, thought that the isolation of Ossabaw would give her an exemption, ignored the order, and counted on her connections to extract a pass. The governor and his council refused to bend to her entreaties and commanded her to send thirty laborers to Savannah equipped with hoes, axes, spades, and cooking utensils or face a steep fine.41
When Hercules stepped off onto the docks in Savannah, he witnessed a stunning sight. The town’s population had exploded and now held between two and three thousand soldiers; hundreds of freedom seekers, most of whom were working to support the needs of the British army; hundreds more enslaved people taken in the Carolina Lowcountry on a raid by Prévost; and refugees from the countryside, both white and Black. On the wharves were stacked provisions, cannons, equipment, and wagons, all of which had to be lifted by cranes forty feet to the top of the bluff. Hercules and his companions encountered a mass of people on the narrow strip of land and lumber that formed the wharves: soldiers, officers, commissaries to handle supplies for the army, “wharf negroes,” freedom seekers who had found employment with the army, enslaved workers, and planters bringing their enslaved people to town to keep them out of the hands of the Americans. It was a confusing if exhilarating sight, the first time that hope took a tangible form.
Ignoring the protests of a powerless Governor Wright, the British military began training volunteers for a Black militia to supplement their forces outnumbered by thousands of French and Americans. In a supreme irony, those soldiers faced a company of 547 free Blacks and biracial people from the French colony of Saint-Domingue who hoped that their service would enhance their status within the colony. The presence of the Chasseurs-Volontaires made the Siege of Savannah distinctive, with Black soldiers pitted against Black soldiers, although there is no evidence that they ever fired on one another or were even aware of each other’s presence. Sadly, the hopes of the Dominican regiment were not realized.42
As a first step in manning the defenses, Prévost turned to a loyalist from South Carolina, William Hanscomb, a coach maker by trade who had already raised a company of Black pioneers to help build the network of re-doubts around the town’s perimeter. Accustomed to working with skilled Black craftsmen, he showed the respect and confidence that gained their loyalty. Faced with long odds, General Prévost armed the company.43 Here was a concrete measure of hope that Black refugees could understand and embrace. John Zubly, son of the Presbyterian minister and a planter, noted, “During the siege 8, or more of my slaves were constantly in arms.”44 Minimizing the risk, the general placed his Hessian troops behind the company of Black soldiers, with loyalist units from North Carolina and South Carolina on the lefthand side and a unit from New York on the right.45
The siege, which began September 16, generated an enormous surge in the morale of Black participants, whether soldiers or pioneers, enslaved or free. At that heady moment all seemed possible. A letter submitted to the Claims Commission in London after the war offers a measure of the optimism that enveloped participants. In a memorial, Scipio Handley, a free Black soldier, described quitting Charleston when the royal governor departed in 1775 and making his way to the relative safety of Barbados. When he heard that the British had retaken Georgia, he had taken it on himself to board the first vessel for Savannah and resume his life in the Lowcountry under British rule. The arrival of the French and “rebels” on the coast thrust him into a situation he had not expected. “As [the town] was very bare of troops,” he explained, “all that was in it were Employed both White & Black, in order to Endeavour to keep them off.” The siege represented a tremendous collective effort in which every participant was working towards the same goal. Handley, recognizing that he and other people of color could have paid a heavy price, added, “If [the rebels] had succeeded in their attempt they would have had no mercy on many.”46 Officers in the American forces had been on the prowl for fugitive slaves. One reported that he had captured seven of his own slaves and hoped to find more once the town fell.47
If Hercules had been able to walk around the British lines, he would have seen how pervasive their service had become. Black soldiers not only fought as independent militia but also as an integral part of white companies. Col. Stephen De Lancey of New York recruited 18 Black men to fight alongside 228 whites. The Georgia loyalists incorporated 10 Blacks with 104 whites, and the Engineering Department, a nonfighting unit, had 41 Blacks and 39 whites. The records of payment of wages show that 235 Black people were in various fighting units, not counting those serving in the redoubts or on vessels of the Royal Navy in the Savannah River or four dozen who were simply listed as “volunteers.” Historian Alan Gilbert calculates that over 450 people of African descent were under arms, roughly 10 percent of total imperial forces.48 Archaeologists Rita and Dan Elliott are more conservative in their estimate. By their count, 620 African Americans were fed by the commissary general at the time of the siege, a mixture of soldiers and laborers hard to tease out. From several lists of payments for services, they tallied 218 “Volunteer Negroes,” 54 people of African descent employed in the “Redoubts,” 13 in the first battalion of the South Carolina Royalists, 20 in General de Wissenbach’s battalion, and 36 “Negroes” as sailors and seamen, in addition to others.49
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Hercules was one of those soldiers. Col. Thomas Brown commanded the far-ranging Florida Rangers, a cavalry unit that Col. Archibald Campbell had at first dismissed as “a mere rabble of undisciplined Freebooters” (he altered his opinion when he witnessed their fighting ability).50 Created to stop the Georgia militia from harassing the British, the Rangers evolved into an offensive force that struck farms and plantations throughout southern Georgia while incorporating Indians and people of African descent into its ranks as occasion demanded.51 During the siege, Prévost stationed Brown and the Rangers on the far right side of the British line, opposite Lachlan McGillivray’s rice plantation.52 In addition to his normal duties, Brown assumed command of a Black militia unit. In the days that followed the defeat of the Franco-American force on October 9, a British officer recalled, “There was a good deal of skirmishing on Mr. McGillivray’s plantation between some negroes and a party of rebels, and the latter were several times driven from the buildings on the plantation into the woods.” Three were wounded and one killed.53 Sometime later, a naval officer noted that “the armed negroes brought in two Rebel Dragoons and eight horses, and killed two rebels who were in a foraging party.”54
The evidence of Hercules’s presence in that militia is circumstantial but suggestive. When he escaped from Ossabaw Island with his wife and family and landed in East Florida many months later, he immediately went to the headquarters of Brown and placed his family under the protection of the colonel. The second family involved in the escape elected to travel to the Seminoles a few dozen miles west.55 Hercules and his family remained with Brown for four years. The deposition of a British deserter from Savannah toward the end of the war testified that about 150 Blacks, “armed and equipt as infantry,” served under a Colonel Brown.56 It is not clear whether he is referring to the time of the siege or the closing days of the conflict. Nor was Hercules the only Morel slave who fought in the battle. When York escaped from Ossabaw in 1781, he was wearing “an old blue coat of the Hessian uniform” issued by Hessian auxiliaries.57 The records of the Hessian troops under the command of Count Friedrich von Porbeck mention the work of African Americans as soldiers, laborers, and musicians.58
Sending those conscripts back to their enslavers was a slow process. Following the stunning victory against a superior force, a large contingent of Black militiamen remained stationed around the walls of Savannah while individuals walked about carrying weapons and showing a confidence that whites found deeply threatening. Offering a modest tribute to their contribution in a report to General Prévost, Governor Wright quickly shifted his tone and lobbied the commanding general to disarm the soldiers, curb the various freedoms that African Americans were enjoying, and discipline the “Number of Slaves [who appear] in Arms and behave with great insolence.” Other notables trotted out “outrages” and hinted that outright rebellion was only a matter of time.59 Leading the list of protesters were the most prominent slave merchants of the colonial era who had vast sums at stake with their London factors. The December presentments of the grand jury to the chief justice echoed their sentiments:
We present as a Grievance, the great Number of Negroes, that are suffered to stroll about, both in Town and Country, many with Fire-arms, and other offensive Weapons, committing Robberies and other Enormities, to the great Terror and Annoyance of the Inhabitants thereof; and we recommend that those employed upon public Service should wear some Badge or Mark of Distinction whereby they may be known.60
A frustrated Governor Wright described for the secretary of state the wide range of freedoms that the hundreds of African Americans enjoyed in wartime Savannah:
Many Inconveniences are complained of from Negroes occupying Houses under no Control from any White Person; selling and otherwise dealing or trading without any Limitation or Check; and . . . many were skulking about in the Woods, who had no apparent Means of Subsistence but the Plunder of the adjoining Plantations; with many other Enormities, contrary to the Laws and Good Policy.61
In the aftermath of victory, official British policy in Savannah abruptly changed to one of returning self-emancipated Black people to their enslavers and enforcing the sanctity of the property rights of loyalists, whose support was critical to the army’s success. In November 1779, General Prévost complained, “The works [construction of fortifications] go on but not so briskly as I wish. Since the news of the raising the siege of Savannah, most of the planters have retaken their negroes; and I am sorry to tell your Excellency that the Governor’s negroes were the very first who went away.”62 Ultimately, Hercules found himself hustled back onto the island in the same fashion as other slaves to their original plantations. Planters like the Morels were quick to give their loyalty to the restored royal government. The months after the stunning and unexpected British victory at the Siege of Savannah saw a rapid shutting down of the avenues for escape as planters tightened their grip on the countryside.
Nevertheless, the growing civil war meant that those avenues were never completely closed off.63 On Ossabaw, the Morels lost five of their Black laborers who chose a traditional pattern of flight and sought out either family members or a former home. According to a notice in the Georgia Royal Gazette, four were “formerly the property of Jonathan Bryan,” Mary Morel’s wealthy father who had given them to her on her marriage. Abraham and Billy fled to be with their wives, servants of Mary who had been moved off the island and were now residing on a plantation not far from her father. Billy headed to Yamacraw when he learned that his wife had been living “for the few weeks past” at Mr. Cade’s house in that biracial neighborhood.64 A married couple, York and Priscilla, disappeared to seek family and friends on the Bryan estate.65 A fifth person, Joe, had been the “property” of Peter Tondee, a deceased taverner in Savannah. He refused to accept his forcible uprooting from an urban setting when sold to the Morels.66 On the mainland, Thomas Gibbons advertised for eighteen Africans who had run away from his cousin’s rice plantation during the twenty months since the British invasion.67
Mary Morel moved Betty and Hercules and their two children to a newly established labor camp on the mainland in an attempt to convert a large tract of marshy land into a rice plantation. Morel had received two thousand acres across from the island as compensation for several hundred head of cattle confiscated from her earlier in the war. From being an artisan with recognized skills, Hercules found himself and his wife in a primitive setting that required backbreaking labor clearing marsh and swamp without the benefit of the strong family community on Ossabaw. Within weeks, the family disappeared into the maritime forest. Quickly caught, they were returned to Ossabaw, where flight was more problematic.68
That experience spurred Hercules to think in larger terms. Back on the island in January 1781, he began a different set of calculations to measure out the risks and possibilities of reaching British East Florida by water. It was not a far-fetched gamble. During the years of the border war along the St. Marys River, he learned the route or routes to Florida through the smuggling of indigo bricks. In the early fall, he and Betty brought into their plot another family, Jupiter and Auba and their two children, as well as a single person, Jack. Jupiter spoke “good English” according to a notice placed by John Morel’s son and was probably creole. His wife, Auba, may have come from Africa if her name is any indication. She had a “suckling” child whose name is not known.69
The presence of Jack raises a tantalizing possibility. Both he and Hercules were from the vast area called Angola and probably had close ties with each other since the majority of people forcibly brought to Savannah originated in the regions of upper West Africa—Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast. But that is not certain. He may have come from the Kingdom of Kongo on the western coast, a strong centralized state that had developed a form of African Christianity from their contacts with the Portuguese. Or he may have had roots in the Kingdom of Ndongo, south of Kongo, where Christianity had scarcely penetrated and where the Imgangala, a marauding group allied to the Portuguese, pillaged villages in the search for captives. Or, just as likely, he could have been born into another group of people in the region.70 Whether or not Hercules and Jack shared the same broad cultural background, it is not inconceivable that they were together on a vessel that made the Middle Passage and enjoyed a tight bond based on that experience. Aged forty-five and speaking “bad English,” Jack was a singular person, the one member of the group that was not accompanied by family.
Experienced in shipbuilding as well as navigating the waters, Hercules was at work on a twenty-foot yawl on which pitch had recently been applied to seal the wood. The craft was still unfinished. With a set of four oars and a tiny sail, the yawl was a type of craft typically used in and around ports to go from shore to vessel or between vessels. Clothing and food were prepared; the flow and ebb of tides was considered; and the planners questioned whether to stay behind the islands and the relative safety they offered or to venture into the Atlantic. Nine people—five adults, three children, and an infant—crowded into a boat that depended as much on rowing as on one small piece of sailcloth in contending with waves and wind.71
Whether Hercules and company could pass unobserved on the waters to Florida was another question. In time of peace, a variety of vessels were seen moving up and down the coast, carrying rice, deerskins, indigo, provisions, and trade goods. Many were periaguas, dugout constructions made from a single log, the workhorse of coastal traffic whose construction Native Americans had perfected. Periaguas, often made from cypress, could move up tidal creeks with ease with little risk of grounding but those using them typically avoided the open ocean.72 Two-masted schooners and single-masted sloops carried the heavier loads and were common sights. After the war, galleys made their appearance in raids along coastal Georgia, primarily from British territory. It would have been unusual to see a yawl, designed for use within a port, making its way down the coast. Hercules and the eight passengers probably stayed behind the barrier islands to keep out of sight as well as for protection from waves, winds, and ocean currents. One point stood in their favor. Africans in a modest-sized boat captained by one of their number were a common sight.
The small watercraft travelled the 135 miles from Savannah to St. Augustine successfully, a tribute not only to Hercules but also to the five other adults in the vessel. Nine people stepped off into a small town, characterized by typically Spanish architecture, that had blossomed into a war camp teeming with military activity, white refugees, and enslaved Black people, as well as Seminoles and Creeks who came for gifts and to coordinate actions against the rebels in the Carolina and Georgia backcountry.
How many Africans made it to British East Florida during the Revolution? Lord Hawke, a notable investor and knowledgeable about conditions, calculated for the British government that fifteen hundred African Americans entered the colony from the beginning to the end of the war.73 An undetermined number of Black people were fugitives. The largest group consisted of the two hundred to three hundred freedom seekers from Tybee Island who had been carried to St. Augustine by the Royal Navy in 1776 and placed under the “protection” of merchants, planters, and others in the colony. They enjoyed a precarious status that allowed them a certain autonomy, with many working odd jobs around the waterfront and the marketplace. A second set came from farms and plantations in southern Georgia, especially those on the St. Marys River, who were forced to escape from the horrors of the border war.74 Others used the confusion of war and of the demobilization to make their bolt for freedom. The commissioner of sequestered estates in South Carolina cited information that “many negroes, the property of gentlemen of Carolina . . . have made their escape to this province.”75
Slaveholders led the largest number of Black Georgians and Carolinians who entered East Florida. Some were fleeing the region. Loyalist planters left South Carolina with large contingents of enslaved Africans. Charles Bissett transported 100 people over the waters, and George Bell carried 120.76 Both sought to replicate the plantation economy of their colony. In Georgia, planters above the Altamaha River were less successful. A series of laws made the departure of enslaved populations illegal. Robert Baillie of Liberty County wrote his Scottish mother that “most of the Gentlemen from Savannah” went to Providence in the Bahamas, leaving behind their families and enslaved people. “As I had no way to support myself there,” he explained, “I determined to push with part of my slaves to this province but as my Intentions were suspected I was so closely watched that I could make no Preparations or procure Boats to remove my family.”77 He managed a flight in a small watercraft with a few of his captives, leaving his wife, family, and the greater part of the workforce behind.
The great unknown is how many Africans were carried into British East Florida by the raiding parties that ranged across Georgia throughout the war, both before and after the invasion of December 1778. During the border conflict, Col. Thomas Brown and his Rangers were reputed to have brought back two hundred bondsmen from one assault on plantations along the Altamaha River. A guerrilla fighter loosely attached to Brown, Daniel McGirt, and his companions established an active pipeline via which slaves seized in raids in the Georgia and South Carolina backcountry were sold to slave-hungry refugees in St. Augustine.78 And those raids did not cease with the British seizure of Savannah. An investigating commission set up by the royal governor found that civilian gangs, especially McGirt’s, “had committed very great waste and destruction” and that “a considerable number of negroes were from time to time clandestinely shipped or carried off ” to East Florida, where they were “converted to their own personal use and benefit.”79 In a subsequent report, Governor Wright affirmed that McGirt’s interracial gang was “robbing, murdering, distressing, and breaking up the Settlements” in South Carolina.80 In a later report, the governor complained, “McGirt & his Gang of Villains . . . were always a Pest to this Province.”81 Throughout the war, the sale of slaves in St. Augustine was brisk. The population was ballooning as refugees streamed in, the army was a constant consumer of goods, and a booming wartime economy dominated.
For those who reached East Florida and possessed sufficient autonomy, there was a range of choices to be made, whether to seek odd jobs with the military, work along the waterfront, look for a protector, remain a “vagrant,” or head toward Seminole encampments. Without hesitation, Hercules placed himself and his family under the protection of one of the most powerful and capable British officers in the province, Thomas Brown, commander of the King’s Rangers, the provincial regiment present during the Siege of Savannah.82 Hercules and Betty arrived in October 1781 and were still “in [Brown’s] possession” four years later, in the same ambivalent position as the refugees from Tybee Island. That connection with the Black militia opposite the McGillivray rice plantation seems to have been real.
Named superintendent of the Creek and Cherokee Nations by London, Brown functioned as an influential mediator between the Creeks, Spanish, and British in the difficult transition of Florida from the control of one empire to another. The colonel pressured the Creeks to make an alliance with the Spanish, developed a strong relationship with the newly arrived governor, Vicente Manuel de Céspedes (Zéspedes), and helped convince Céspedes to give a monopoly of the Creek trade to a British trading firm, Panton, Leslie & Company. Brown proved instrumental in laying the foundation for the diplomatic revolution that replaced British influence with Spanish in the Southeast but left breathing room for the British government to intervene in later years.83
Jupiter, Auba, and Jack took another path, one that Hercules could have taken. They chose to flee to the Seminoles to ensure their autonomy, even at the expense of entering a vastly different cultural world. Freedom, the two families learned, depended on one’s perspective. Hope came in different forms. The five people, including an infant and a young boy, joined those in St. Augustine who slipped away in the confusion to cross the St. Johns River and make their way to the Alachua Seminoles and a life in one of the Black villages next to the settlements of Seminole chiefs.84 As the war loosened the ties that bound slaves to their plantations, others bolted to head west only a few dozen miles for a life that offered relative autonomy under Native protection.85 The fact that the Indians still considered them technically slaves paled compared to the gains they made in obtaining considerably more control over their lives. Most Black people made good their escape. No better demonstration of the weakness of the colony could be found than the inability of either British or Spanish governments to challenge a Native people on whom they depended in so many indirect ways. St. Augustine still functioned as a military outpost with little authority beyond the St. Johns River into the vast interior of Florida.86
In July 1782, the British army departed from Savannah, accompanied by loyalists and their enslaved people. The first weeks of July saw hectic negotiations, a truce established, and an agreement reached between generals Anthony Wayne and Alured Clarke for the evacuation of loyalists and their enslaved people in the coming weeks. Starting in late July, thousands of Black and white loyalists gathered on Tybee Island. For those enslaved people waiting for transport on Cockspur and Tybee Islands, it was a disorienting and disheartening experience.
For three years, Black Georgians had been exposed to a life of disruption, transition, and turmoil. Many had made it into Savannah in 1779 and experienced a precious moment of liberty as a pioneer or fighter for the British army but had then been rudely returned to slavery, sometimes under the same enslaver but frequently under a new one. Others had seen members of their family or community torn from their ranks never to be seen again. Strangers had been introduced into their communities as planters struggled to replace losses of people. In the closing days of the conflict, many had been forced to relocate to new plantation sites as the American army closed in on Savannah and raids made staying in the Lowcountry untenable. If family life was disrupted beyond measure, there was hope for a new and more secure life in British East Florida. According to the various “returns of refugees and Negroes” recorded by the commissary for refugees, about thirty-seven hundred enslaved people from Georgia, along with a few freemen, made it to that province over the next ten months, along with seventeen hundred white loyalists.87
Beneath that troubled narrative lies another one that is typically overlooked. At the very moment when newly formed slave communities were beginning to coalesce, the Revolutionary War tore those communities apart and thrust their members into a succession of disjointed movements across the length and breadth of Georgia and beyond, movements caused by the border war with British East Florida, movements from plantation to town after the British conquest and sometimes back again, movements caused by the horrors of civil war in which both sides treated slaves as pawns to be sold and traded, movements into and sometimes out of British East Florida, movements into Creek and occasionally Seminole lands, and movements of those carried to Tidewater Virginia or upcountry South Carolina by their enslavers. In the process, the war became a painful but important education for many in the geography of the Lowcountry and of its paths and waterways, a lesson in the contours of the Southeast and in the connections to the world beyond. Few Africans remained in one place along the coast. The Black experience during the Revolution effectively laid the groundwork for the waves of fugitives who would flee coastal Georgia in the decades to come.