CHAPTER 2

The Journeys of Mahomet

In 1750, the dispirited Georgia Trustees reluctantly bowed to reality and approved a request to repeal the ban on slavery and terminate their troubled Trusteeship with the British Crown. Oglethorpe’s grand vision of a colony for white men and women of limited means received its final coup de grâce. The effect was electric. Carolina planters crossed the Savannah River with hundreds of enslaved Africans to stake out claims to rich tidal lands along the coast. Impatient with the independent ways of his North American colonies, George II assumed direct control of the province and placed it under the authority of the Board of Trade, a powerful committee of Parliament that effectively shaped London’s policy for the emerging empire.¹

With the coming of the royal period and the resulting economic growth, enslaved Black sailors became an even more visible presence on the water-front in Savannah, serving as a vital part of the fast-growing port town. They were to be found at work on vessels along the quays, walking around town with considerable autonomy, or perched in down-at-the-heel grog shops in the working-class neighborhood of Yamacraw. Between 30 and 40 percent of the estimated fourteen hundred “jack tars” who, in the course of a year, climbed the bluff to go into town after docking were African, a reflection of the overwhelming importance of the Caribbean to the commerce of the colony. Almost half of the vessels entering and leaving the ports of Savannah and Sunbury, a smaller entrepôt thirty-five miles to the south, came from the sugar islands of the Caribbean or the Bahamas and Bermuda, where Black sailors were necessary in a world characterized by an enormous imbalance between races.²

No other colony in British North America went so quickly from near bankruptcy to economic boom, from a society with enslaved people to a fully developed slave society, and from a frontier outpost to an integral part of the Atlantic world as did Georgia. In 1750, there were approximately twenty-five hundred white and four hundred enslaved people. By 1775, the colony had exploded to roughly twenty-two thousand whites and eighteen thousand enslaved. It was now shipping 23,500 barrels of rice per year, three hundred thousand pounds of deerskin, and 2.1 million feet of lumber; and it boasted a government under one of the most effective royal governors in North America.³ In terms of rapid growth over a short time, the province stood alone in British North America. The remarkable turnaround came at an unconscionably high cost: the abandonment of the Trustees’ grand vision and its replacement by a firm commitment to a plantation economy modelled after South Carolina’s. Thousands of people were uprooted from hundreds of communities across Africa, thrown into rude labor camps, and buried away in water and mud, all in the effort to transform marshland into hard profits for a tiny white elite.

In the process, Savannah acquired the look and feel of the towns of the Caribbean, an extension of the perverse culture of the sugar islands. Olaudah Equiano, author of one of the earliest and most influential slave narratives, captured the doubled-edged freedom and openness that a Black sailor now experienced in Savannah.⁴ The young enslaved sailor from tiny Montserrat could walk the streets and wander along roads headed out of town; command a craft going up rivers in search of lumber to assemble a cargo; visit with an enslaved friend who had his own small house; and stand at City Market selling wares he had imported, sometimes no more than oranges, sometimes packets of sugar, and occasionally English manufactured goods. The appearance was deceptive. His encounters laid bare the seamy under-side in which brutality and racism informed every aspect of life: the brutal attempt on his life by a drunken physician, his flight to Yamacraw to hide from a merchant determined to have him whipped around the streets of the town, and his escape from two white men who sought to sell him back into slavery.⁵

Nor was Florida a magnet for fugitive slaves from the English colonies as it once had been. In the early 1760s, Spain made an ill-thought decision to intervene in the global struggle between Great Britain and France and trust in the combined navies of the Bourbon powers to check the naval dominance of the English. A powerful British fleet and ten thousand soldiers landed near Havana, capital of Cuba and key to the Spanish Caribbean. In a remarkable campaign, they occupied the city after a seven-week siege. By the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Spain relinquished Florida, a two-hundred-year-old possession, as the price for recovering Havana, with its deep harbor and strategic location.⁶ Under British control, the narrow strip of coastland east of the St. Johns River witnessed rapid development as a plantation economy with the same type of enslaved labor from Africa and the same mix of commodities as Georgia and South Carolina.

However, the phenomenal expansion of the enslaved community began in slow, random fashion. By 1760, the population of people of African descent in Georgia was still less than four thousand. Most had been forcibly marched from South Carolina by planters eager for new rice lands. In no other slave society in the British Empire did the core of its enslaved labor migrate across the boundary of an adjoining province. Georgia was the only colony in North America to benefit from so significant a transfer of labor from a neighbor. The ports of the British Caribbean and Charles Town provided hundreds more, but the great flood of Africans into Georgia began in 1766 when the first slavers arrived directly from West Africa. The three dozen vessels that came over the next eight years carried an estimated 5,349 captives into the colony, while another 3,910 passed through the Charles Town markets and then to Savannah or Sunbury.⁷

Among those thousands of human beings was a man named Mahomet or Mohamedy, “a short, well-made Negroe Fellow,” a Muslim judging by his name, pitted with smallpox scars that offer a vital clue as to his identity.⁸ That piece of evidence suggests he arrived on a square-rigged vessel, the New Britannia, under the command of an Irish captain, John Deane, who appeared off Tybee in 1769 with 125 people from the Gambia River. The captain was making his second attempt to break into this new, untested slave market. When Deane anchored, word quickly reached town that the people aboard were suffering from smallpox, a highly contagious disease that eventually struck dozens of people on board. The governor ordered the captain to place his vessel at the relatively new quarantine station on Lazaretto Creek behind Tybee Island, shave their heads, and burn their clothes. The two-story tabby structure was too small to accommodate the weakened human cargo, and the misery was compounded by a shortage of food and medical support. Twenty-three Africans and several crewmen died. Mahomet bore the scars on his face as a badge of a disease that did not discriminate.⁹

Mahomet’s life serves as a measure of the type of man who chose to become a maroon twice and both times on the borders of Georgia, once before and once after the Revolution, in a memorable display of the continuity of life on the coast. The search for freedom and a new identity took him into or near Native American lands and, on a second occasion, to a remote corner of the Savannah River, passing through British East Florida. His eighteen-year career as a slave in Georgia illustrates the limited options that most faced, the opportunities and challenges that fluid borders offered, and the stubborn refusal of freedom seekers to accept defeat in the face of insuperable odds. His life speaks to the importance of Muslims along the coast and the religious imprint that they brought.

The cargo of the New Britannia joined a great wave of captives coming to Georgia from West Africa, a vast region distinct from Central and Southern Africa. The cultivation of rice made its people especially valuable for their agricultural skills while the proximity of the western coast to the Georgia Lowcountry minimized shipping costs for the horrific Middle Passage. Although Africans had been growing rice for hundreds of years in a variety of landscapes and employing a range of techniques, the great majority of people were raising millet, herding cattle, and engaging in other agricultural pursuits, trading along the rivers, or occupied as blacksmiths, leatherworkers, and other artisans.¹⁰

Among the more important West African ethnic groups were the coastal populations of the Wolof, whose centers at Jolof, Waalo, Cayor and Baol controlled the flow of commerce between the Atlantic and the interior; the Fulbe, who occupied the central and upper valleys of the Senegal River; and the Bambara in the far interior of what is now Mali. Alongside were other groups like the Sereer, Khasso, and Soninke. Yet similarities existed. The vast majority of Senegambians were cultivators, not warriors, and therefore possessed needed skills. The rivers and coasts of the area gave their peoples a strong set of commercial connections.¹¹ Mahomet, who was carried to a Wolof-speaking town on the Gambia River, was probably from the Bambara people in the interior and knew nothing or little of rice culture.¹²

An experienced slaver, Captain Deane had secured the backing of Joseph Clay, a prominent merchant in Savannah and the nephew of the acting governor, Joseph Habersham, an early pioneer whose skills as a merchant saved the virtually bankrupt colony. Habersham also bore heavy responsibility for introducing the slave trade.¹³ In his nine trips to Georgia and South Carolina, Deane transported thirteen hundred Africans captured exclusively from along the Gambia River, the source of so many of Georgia’s bonds-men.¹⁴ “The Slaves from the River Gambia are preferr’d to all others with us save the Gold Coast,” Henry Laurens, a central figure in the Carolina trade, reminded a correspondent.¹⁵ Clay echoed the sentiment: “The Windward Coast Negroes say from Gambia to the Gold Coast inclusive are most liked in this country and will afford the best prices.”¹⁶

The key to the captain’s remarkable success was a woman, Fenda Lawrence, who lived in the town of Kau-Ur, one hundred miles upstream from the Gambian coast at the point where the water lost its saltiness.¹⁷ Kau-Ur was a Wolof-speaking town whose inhabitants were principally but not exclusively Muslim and where the principal activity was rice cultivation. The town was ideally situated to connect to the Muslim commercial network that began in the western Sudan (today’s Mali) and became a slave-trading entrepôt for Muslim merchants. The English had traded for decades with the kingdom of Saalum—or Saloum—at the mouth of the Gambia and sent large canoes and boats upriver for trading in inland towns.

That trade had been facilitated by the presence of an elite group of women, known as signares, who provided valuable services to merchants, sea captains, assorted sailors, and servants.¹⁸ Often of mixed race, signares commanded capital to buy and sell provisions to the British; bought European products to trade; and provided enslaved people through their contacts in the African world. To finance their commerce, they typically sought to marry a European, and, if their husband left with no intention of returning, they were free to marry again. Fenda probably had a previous relationship with an English captain or sailor named Lawrence. She was an entrepreneur in her own right, a remarkable example of the Atlantic creole who served as an intermediary in the transatlantic slave trade, employing her linguistic skills, familiarity with the Atlantic’s cultural conventions, and access to capital to mediate between African merchants and English sea captains. Successful in her working relationship with Captain Deane, she demonstrates the extraordinary fluidity of gender roles in Senegambia for those in the upper stations of life.¹⁹

Mahomet remains a puzzle. How does one reconstruct the life of an individual about whom little is known? Yet that puzzle can be partially resolved because of his religion. He might well have been able to read. Basic literacy was widespread among Muslims in West Africa. The ability to read and write passages from the Qur’an was considered essential to any believer and imparted even to peasants and girls. Nor did most Muslims drink alcohol, a characteristic that would have set Mahomet apart from the general enslaved population. He would regularly say the shahada or statement of faith that there is no God but Allah, one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith. He would pray five times a day or, after his capture, may have prayed in secret. Most telling is his ability to maintain his name, Mohammed, which planters interpreted as Mohamet or, in one case, Mohamedy. The Georgia Sea Islands became a reservoir of African Muslim names, a testimony to the disproportionate number of enslaved people taken from Senegambia and Sierra Leone and their resistance to assimilation.²⁰

The captain of the New Britannia sailed directly to Savannah from Fort James on the Gambia River. He hustled Mahomet and his peers onto the deck of the ship, oiled them down for appearance, and sold him there or on the adjacent wharf or in a holding pen in the industrial neighborhood of Yamacraw or possibly inside a barn at a nearby plantation. Members of the differing ethnic groups may have bonded in the filth and horrors of the lower deck to become “shipmates” but their chances of staying together were not high. Many were sold singly or in pairs.²¹

John Graham, a Scottish merchant and slave trader who stood at the beginning of a new career as a planter, purchased the Muslim. Flush with their early success, merchants like Graham became the driving force behind the transformation of the sleepy plantations along the Savannah River into highly efficient, capitalist enterprises.²² Within the space of seven years, he went from being the “master” of sixteen Africans and odd pieces of undeveloped land to concentrating 262 people on three plantations, two of them on the Savannah River.²³ At his newly acquired Mulberry Grove, he paid £4,865 to purchase eighty slaves and a valuable tract of twelve hundred acres.²⁴ At his second plantation on the river, New Settlement, Graham invested £3,800 and added another sixty people. On an inland plantation, he placed one hundred individuals, and a dozen were placed at his house in Savannah. A veritable mania for acquiring enslaved people had seized the tiny elite. “What is the matter that you have bought no Negroes for me this season,” the English politician William Knox asked a close friend of Graham concerning his plantation not far from Mulberry Grove. “No pray don’t let any of your confounded Punctillio get the better of your good sense and friendship for me in this business. Negroes I must have or I shall never forgive you.”²⁵

As a newly purchased African, Mahomet was given light work by Graham’s overseer for the first few weeks to accustom him to the routine and help his body adjust to the wet, humid climate. Given the unhealthy conditions and the high mortality rate, the merchant invested heavily in young adult males. Mahomet found himself on a plantation where there were two men for every woman and virtually no children. Out of 126 enslaved people at Mulberry Grove at the time of the Revolution, only fifteen were boys or girls.²⁶ The African population was heavily male. Of the 141 people at Mulberry Grove, there were 84 men, 42 women, and 15 children.²⁷

Once deemed “seasoned,” he was put under military-style discipline in an enterprise roughly modeled after the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Enslaved laborers waded knee-deep into swamps next to the Savannah River, cut down trees, cleared the underbrush, and built large embankments around wet fields. They divided the land into fields and subfields, dug ditches and canals, and created an elaborate irrigation system, a “huge hydraulic machine” as one planter phrased it. Women worked alongside men. Hoeing and weeding in the fields under a relentless sun in the summertime, they found their menstrual cycle disrupted, produced few children, and had difficulty keeping alive those that were born.²⁸

Was Mahomet one of 190 field hands, managed by four drivers who had the right to use the whip and did so generously? Or was he one of the seventy-two people who were in skilled or semiskilled positions, including fourteen seamstresses and washerwomen, fourteen sawyers, twelve squarers and carters, eight house carpenters, five coopers, four gardeners, three boatmen, two blacksmiths, two cooks, a tailor, a bricklayer, a coachman, and a hairdresser? The range of skilled and semiskilled positions reflected the complexity of tasks on a large rice plantation.²⁹ For field hands, death came at an early age. Death was ever-present as a consequence of so many working knee-deep in marshes. John Graham ventured to guess that he lost 3–4 percent of his slaves per year on his Savannah River plantations, but William DeBrahm, the talented military engineer and the most knowledgeable of Georgians in terms of statistics, thought 5 percent a more appropriate figure.³⁰

Uninterested in living conditions, looking only at profits, John Graham and his fellow planters allowed considerable autonomy for Africans buried in remote labor camps to piece together their own lives from the disjointed moments at their disposal. Many of the Africans lived in wattle-and-daub structures that mimicked their West African homes, planted vegetables common to their native land (like eggplant, okra, benne seed, and melons), and collected herbs and shrubs to create their own medicines.³¹ Most were implacably hostile to Christianity and continued to embrace their traditional belief systems. Obeah men and women mediated with supernatural forces and used their assumed powers to help heal the sick, avenge wrongs, and resolve disputes by ferreting out the truth. Some males practiced polygamy. Most men and women practiced an animistic religion that emphasized spirits, conjurors, and the worship of ancestors.

If Mahomet followed the practice of most Muslims, he continued to pray and obey the strictures of Islam, at least in some truncated fashion. He could have followed three of the five pillars of Islam by repeating the shahada frequently, praying in secret and writing passages from the Qur’an in the sand, and fasting, as difficult as these may have been given his working conditions. In the early nineteenth century, Sea Island Muslims in Georgia and South Carolina did not hide to pray. They did so publicly and in some cases in front of their enslavers. His religious outlook may have been influenced by the association of Islam in West Africa with the Sufi orders, emphasizing the personal dimension of the relationship between Allah and humans, many rituals and devotional practices, and meditation. Reinforcing his outlook was the large number of Muslims present in the captive population, not merely peasants and laborers but also traders, clerics (marabouts), and even members of the “nobility.”³²

In 1771, Mahomet disappeared from Graham’s Mulberry Grove at the very moment it was being converted into a ruthlessly efficient machine capable of producing eight hundred barrels of rice a year, several times what it had been producing.³³ He fit much of the profile of three-quarters of all freedom seekers in the Lowcountry: African-born, young, male, unskilled, and of recent arrival.³⁴ Most were captives who had not yet been fully incorporated into the plantation routine, were often without a job, and were reacting to the shock of being thrust into a militarized labor camp unlike anything they had experienced in Africa. They lacked the means, the requisite linguistic skills, and a sufficient familiarity with the realities of life outside their immediate environment to succeed on the outside. Often they fled their settlements in large groups, had little idea of the geography of their surroundings, and were quickly caught. While Savannah was a magnet for acculturated slaves who hoped to pass as free, “New Negroes” headed for the obscurity of swamps and forests along the coast or whatever inhospitable terrain promised cover.³⁵ Mahomet was one of the few who were successful, at least for a time, perhaps because he had been at hard labor for two or three years and had acquired needed skills and knowledge of coastal geography.

Africans on the Graham plantations were frequent runaways. In the Georgia Gazette, a planter-merchant described five of these fugitives as “New Negroe Men, of the Conga country” who had been in the colony for less than five months: Somerset, six feet tall, from “the Cormantee country” on the Gold Coast; Cuffy, with a bushy beard and red eyes; Stephen, a short fellow; Stepney, “a very likely black fellow, of a middling size”; and Robin, “a stout man-boy about 16.”³⁶ In a second notice, he mentioned four of the six, suggesting that two had been recaptured. He added that he was also looking for Fortune, “a pretty tall, slim, black fellow” who had run away the preceding summer and, “after being out some months,” had been captured at a Brier Creek settlement farther north.³⁷ A subsequent notice reported three runaways, also from the Conga country, with the freshly minted names of Ben, Peter, and Tom. They carried off “a canoe with three paddles and, it is supposed would go towards the sea.” Since they spoke little English, their capture seemed certain unless they disappeared into the ocean in an attempt to return to Africa as occasionally some did.³⁸

In September 1774, John Graham placed a notice for Mahomet stating that the African had run away three years earlier and had recently been seen “at a settlement near the Indian Line on Ogeechee,” a boundary defined by treaty between the Creek Nation and the colony of Georgia. The notice said that Mahomet was marked by smallpox scars and an ear that had been partly cut off, a form of punishment in which the victim had his ear nailed to a whipping post and cut off in front of fellow slaves as an example. The possibilities are many. Perhaps he had attempted to run away on other occasions or resolutely defied the overseer at a critical moment or engaged in forms of insubordination that marked him as a subversive individual.

Mahomet had become a survivalist, a maroon staking out a place in a patch of territory near the point where Creek hunting lands began, a fluid zone where hunters, both Native and white, passed and where he may have worked at a white settlement for some kind of compensation or been part of a maroon community that traded with both white people and Natives. He would have enjoyed considerable autonomy but also run considerable risks. His options were limited.

He would have had reason to hesitate in deciding whether to advance beyond “the Indian line.” Few Africans from the rice plantations of the Low-country took the path to Creek towns to escape their fate, at least if one considers the advertisements in the Georgia Gazette between 1763 and 1775. Of the 453 notices for fugitives, 148 gave destinations. Sixteen indicated “going upriver,” “Backcountry,” or “Indian Nation” as a goal, wide-ranging categories that include Indigenous and white settlements.³⁹ Fleeing to Indian country could be a risky bet. British officials had success in making it worthwhile for Natives to turn over Black freedom seekers. Those who delivered slaves to designated officials were to receive a gun and three blankets for each captured person. Authorities not only wanted to recover “property” but also, as importantly if not more so, prevent any possibility of an alliance between disaffected Blacks and red “savages.” The expectation of being absorbed into a compatible but different culture had to be balanced against the risk of betrayal, enslavement, or death.⁴⁰

Numbering fourteen thousand people on the eve of the Revolution, the Creeks formed a loosely organized confederacy of fifty to sixty towns that stretched from the Oconee River in present-day Georgia to the Tombigbee River in Alabama. The Creeks of the Upper Towns lived on the Tall-apoosa, Coosa, and Alabama Rivers in present-day Alabama, and the Creeks of the Lower Towns lived on the lower Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers in present-day Georgia. The confederacy had come into being in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by welcoming the survivors from the collapse of older societies who spoke different languages or dialects and possessed different cultures. The dominant Muskogeans welcomed Hitchitis, Alabamas, Yuchis, Abihkas, and others in this evolving society that had become the dominant force in the interior of the South by mid-century.⁴¹

In his tour of the Southeast during the early 1770s, the naturalist William Bartram reported seeing Black slaves in many Native towns and mentioned fifteen at one site who waited on Boatswain, the headman of Apalachicola on the lower Chattahoochee, and tended his crop. A few women among the fifteen had married Creeks and gained their freedom as members of a family and clan.⁴² Slavery was no new institution. Muskogeans considered all those outside their kinship networks as outsiders who did not have a recognized place in society. As intertribal warfare declined, they looked to enslaving Black people on their own terms. For men, it typically meant tilling the fields for corn and peas, an activity that warriors considered women’s work, or herding cattle, or serving as a servant to a mico or chieftain. Yet they gained their freedom from the horrific discipline of a rice plantation, enjoying considerably more autonomy and freedom in their daily lives. For women, enslavement meant doing the most menial of tasks or, if fortunate, marrying a warrior and entering a clan, becoming an insider through a fictive kinship that tied her to all other members of the clan. In earlier times, children had the opportunity to become full members of the talwa or town, but those opportunities were shrinking as lifetime servitude became the norm.⁴³

On occasion, Creeks from the Lower Towns welcomed Black refugees from coastal plantations. “Alick,” a headman who moved around the edges of the plantations in St. Johns Parish, made contact with enslaved people on a regular basis. A planter referred to him as “that villain the Indian Doctor,” a medicine man with valuable roots and herbs that attracted an audience. Plantation owner Lachlan McIntosh described Ben and Glasgow as the two most valuable individuals in his possession—”good Sawyers, Squarers, Boatmen & Shingle makers as well as Field Slaves”—the kind of jacks-of-all-trades who made a plantation hum with activity. According to their “master,” Alick “conveyed” them to the Creek Nation, but McIntosh eventually managed to retrieve them, presumably paying a generous reward to Alick. Within short order, the two men sought their freedom, this time to Charles Town, where they were stopped, interrogated and held at the work-house. McIntosh told their captor to sell them “as soon as possible to save any further Expence or risque.” Both were from the Conga country; Ben spoke a little French, adding to the mystery.⁴⁴

The surprise in Mahomet’s escape, then, was his destination. He must have known that the most successful freedom seekers in the colony were those who deserted the rice plantations along the Savannah River and headed twenty or so miles north into the swamps and cypress groves farther upriver, a virtually impassable setting that made possible a community in the image of the maroon communities that existed in the Caribbean or Latin America. Since the end of the seventeenth century, Jamaican maroons had retreated to the fastness of densely covered mountains, established armed settlements at high elevations, and fought wars with the British that demonstrated their considerable skill at guerrilla warfare.⁴⁵ Here in the Georgia Lowcountry, the experience was on far smaller scale but with similar characteristics. Runaways hid in the wild, studiously avoided armed confrontation, and limited contact with other people, white or Black. Their purpose was defensive, to establish their autonomy from white society. That required the need for foolproof concealment, the exploitation of their natural environment, and occasional raids on farms and plantations for supplies.⁴⁶

Like most of the enslaved population, Mahomet was well aware of maroon activities along the river because of the raids they conducted for food supplies to supplement their diet. Local authorities were frustrated by their humiliating inability to stop them. In 1765, the House of Assembly took note that “a number of fugitive slaves” had assembled in the river swamp on the north side of the Savannah River (South Carolina) and were making raids on the plantations on the south side, committing “robberies and depredations” to gain food and supplies and to “debauch” the women, according to one planter.⁴⁷ They were joining with their counterparts from Carolina plantations in a way that suggested a major threat to the planting elite.

Perceiving a growing menace, South Carolina sent a militia unit into the swamp to eradicate the community, always a high-risk task because of the hostile landscape. In a letter written to a neighboring planter, a captain in the militia wrote of how his unit had moved through swamps often waistdeep until they encountered three Black men who fled into the understory of brush. The militia came to a scaffolding where they found two men standing on the structure, one beating a drum and the other “hoisting Colours,” possibly behaviors they learned as soldiers in Africa. The two discharged their guns and disappeared into the swamp. The soldiers at last arrived at a “town” with a square, around which were four houses, seventeen feet long and fourteen feet wide, kettles boiling rice on a fire, and an array of goods: blankets, pots, shoes, axes, “and many other tools[,] all which together with the Town they set fire to.”⁴⁸

The problem was a continuing one. In 1771, authorities learned that “a great number of fugitive Negroes had committed many Robberies and insults between [Savannah] and Ebenezer” and that the number of fugitives was said to be increasing daily.⁴⁹ The government discussed hiring Indians to apprehend the slaves and ordered Capt. Alexander Wylly, speaker of the House of Commons, to lead part of his militia company in a search. Six months later, the fugitives were still encamped in the swamps.⁵⁰ The Savannah River plantations, with their hyper development and concentration of “New Negroes,” were a place apart. In no other location in the colony were maroons as frequent or as established as on the upper part of the Savannah.

Until recent years, historians judged that marronage was a relatively rare occurrence in British North America and the United States.⁵¹ Independent communities of freedom seekers had been prevalent in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American Southwest for centuries, ranging from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states that survived for decades and longer. In Jamaica, rebels in different groups gradually merged over generations into two strong communities that burrowed down in the Windward and Leeward mountain ranges in the eastern and western parts of the island and waged two brutal wars with the British army in the eighteenth century.⁵² For the Southeast of North America, it has taken longer to recognize the marronage that existed on the margins of plantation society. Enslaved people faced too many obstacles to form large and functional maroon communities in the style of the Caribbean.

In Slavery’s Exiles, historian Sylviane Diouf makes a strong case that, even though white society had a monopoly of policing powers, a significant minority of enslaved people established themselves on the borders of plantations, able to visit family and survive on their own in the woods, with occasional raids on barns and granaries to supplement their meager food.⁵³ Their life was dangerous, restrictive, and stressful, with their movements confined to a small perimeter mostly accessible at night, but they knew how to exploit the fluid line that separated plantation and wilderness and roamed at nighttime along the many secret paths, trails, and waterways (in the words of one scholar, their “alternative territorial system”).⁵⁴ Of the 453 advertisements placed in the Georgia Gazette between 1763 and 1775, a clearer picture emerges. Of that number, 45 percent were “New Negroes,” recent arrivals from Africa, and another 30 percent were born in Africa and had been in North America for a period of time much like Mahomet. A majority (60 percent) were aged twenty-five or under. Most were males; women accounted for only 13 percent. Most were unskilled, and most ran away singly or in pairs. The reasons for running away were multiple: to visit family and friends on neighboring plantations, especially one’s spouse or children or parents; to protest an onerous work regime or brutal mistreatment; to avoid physical punishment; or more simply to gain one’s freedom as a human being with natural rights.⁵⁵

Mahomet’s forced return to Mulberry Grove raises an intriguing question. The notice of 1774 stated that he was living in a settlement near the “Indian line” without specifying whether it was an encampment of white people engaged in foraging, an outlying village of Creeks, or some other kind of community. Yet shortly thereafter he was back in bondage, wearing the shackles of slavery. Was he recaptured by agents working for Graham or, more likely, by white hunters or traders moving around a contested area and looking for the generous reward? Or did Native Americans sell him back to the authorities for an even more substantial reward paid by the government? The quasi-independence of maroons was a fragile state of being always under threat.

Between 1775 and 1782, little of Mahomet’s existence is known, but we do know a considerable amount about the fate of the enslaved population on John Graham’s three plantations—Mulberry Grove, Montieth, and New Settlement. When the Americans belatedly declared for the revolutionary cause in March 1776, John Graham fled Georgia with the royal governor and spent the next three years in London, mixing with other loyalists bitter at their fate. During those years when the new state of Georgia took its first steps, his plantations were placed under a manager who obeyed official orders to send a contingent of slaves to build defensive fortifications on the approaches to Savannah. Thirty-two people died during those years. “[This was] particularly owing to my Negroes being employed for a considerable time in erecting a fortification on a low marsh or morass in Savannah River which proved a grave to many,” Graham wrote after the war.⁵⁶

In December 1778, a British force of twenty-five hundred men made a surprise landing near Savannah and seized the town in a brilliant tactical maneuver that chased the American government out of Georgia, at least for a moment. On hearing the gladsome news, well over a thousand Black people fled their plantations to rush into Savannah in search of freedom under the protection of the British army.⁵⁷ Those of John Graham’s plantations remained in place because of close supervision and could only listen to stories of the sudden freedom that many were now enjoying in an urban setting, where customary controls had all but disappeared. In July, Graham returned from London as lieutenant governor of a restored royal government and resumed control of his plantations, still intact.

In early September 1779, a French fleet with several thousand soldiers appeared off Tybee Island. Loyalist planters like Graham hurriedly rushed their enslaved population, including Mahomet, into the protective enclave of Savannah. A combined force of French and American troops surrounded the town and began a siege in September 1779. The American forces under Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, some fifteen hundred strong, compounded the danger when they began randomly confiscating people of African descent belonging to loyalists. With the arrival of enslaved people into town, the British army recruited the more able members into a pioneer corps of laborers to build redoubts and dig ditches while an unknown number were given weapons to serve as soldiers against the enemy. Pragmatism rather than principle dominated the effort. It is probable that Mahomet worked for the army strengthening defenses or as a sometime soldier on a picket line. Although planters like Graham were alarmed at this threat to the social and economic order, their fears proved to be fleeting. After the British victory, he and other planters hustled their enslaved people back to their plantations, confident that order had been restored.⁵⁸

As civil war gripped the lands outside Savannah and rebel guerrillas began circling Savannah, Graham’s estate became a special target because of his role as lieutenant governor. A lightning raid captured twenty-one men and women and placed them on American galleys; several died under the difficult conditions aboard the vessels. Subsequently, several dozen mounted guerrillas took another nineteen people—nine men and women and ten boys and girls—a loss that cut deep into the fabric of family life.⁵⁹ An unknown number had already died of yellow fever during the Siege of Savannah in 1779.⁶⁰ Altogether 27 percent of the Black people on Graham’s estate disappeared either through death or kidnapping, an enormous blow to the community that had existed before the Revolution. This appalling number counts only those noted in extant records. It may have been a larger number. To compensate for this unfolding tragedy, the merchant-turned-planter purchased “replacement” slaves in 1781, sixteen from the estate of his deceased friend James Habersham.⁶¹ There were undoubtedly other purchases not recorded.

When the victorious army of Gen. Anthony Wayne marched into the streets of Savannah on July 11, 1782, a new kind of border crossing unfolded. Seven weeks earlier, orders had come from the commander of British forces in North America to cease resistance, setting in motion the relocation of thousands of loyalist Georgians and their enslaved people. The evacuation began in mid-July on Tybee Island, where Graham played a lead role in organizing the chaotic efforts of over three thousand people, Blacks as well as whites, to leave the state for St. Augustine and a new beginning in what they assumed would remain a British possession. Given his office, he commandeered enough shipping for 190 men, 128 women, and 147 children from five different estates along the Savannah River, by far the largest single body to arrive in East Florida. Most of the enslaved came in small groups of five or less. Only a handful numbered twenty or more. Most seemed to be in family groupings. At the very least, the number of women was almost the same as men, a noticeable difference from those from South Carolina where men greatly outnumbered women.⁶²

Ever the merchant concerned with accounts, Graham placed Mahomet and his fellow laborers on land he already owned along the Matanzas River, some two thousand acres. He set them to clearing and draining the terrain to create an indigo and rice plantation, tying their fate once again to the hard labor involved in conjuring up incredible feats of water management in the sandy soil.⁶³ Loyalists like Graham expected that East and West Florida would remain British colonies on the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic and made their plans accordingly. They were soon disabused.

The preliminary treaty, announced on January 20, 1783, shattered the inflated illusions of the loyalists and restored the two Floridas to Spain. Signed in September, the Treaty of Paris gave British residents eighteen months to sell their goods, collect their debts, and leave the province or decide to swear allegiance to the Spanish Crown and make the enormous leap from Protestantism to Catholicism.⁶⁴ Once the evacuation began in earnest, John Graham decided to shut down his indigo works and rice plantation, dispose of his extensive estate, and return to England to reenter the mercantile world. His thoughts turned to selling his labor force in the Jamaica market, where he had extensive experience as a slave trader before the Revolution. On learning that prices had weakened and a better return was to be had in Beaufort, South Carolina, his manager, Col. John Douglass, shipped over two hundred people to that nearby market.⁶⁵ At Beaufort, planters hungry for labor swarmed the auction site, eagerly bidding up the price.

Mahomet and his compatriots found themselves unceremoniously carted away to a grim, new labor camp on what had recently been the southern frontier. Godin Guerard, son of a prominent slave trader and brother to the governor, purchased a dozen or more of these victims. Appreciating the work ethic that they displayed in their first weeks of work, he willingly traveled to Florida and “purchased a considerable number of Negroes at St. Augustine.”⁶⁶ The new surroundings were reassuringly familiar. Mahomet and his peers found themselves only forty miles away from their old homes on the Savannah River in a familiar setting of marsh, tidal creeks, live oaks, and pine barrens.

On May 1, 1785, sixteen individuals originally from the Graham estate, including five women, three children, and eight men, made a break for liberty and headed towards Belleisle Island (today Abercorn Island) on the Savannah River and a maroon community drawn from people coming from communities along the river.⁶⁷ As a survivalist and long-time maroon, Mahomet probably assumed the leadership of the group. Shortly afterward, a second group of enslaved people from Florida on the Guerard estate made a run, including four men—Frank, Sechem, Dembo, and Cook—and one woman, Cook’s wife Peggy, raising the possibility of active communication between the two groups.⁶⁸

News, stories, rumors, and gossip traveled along the Savannah River with remarkable speed, carried by canoes, dugouts, piraguas, and small sailboats, each on their own business. That flow of information was not intended solely for the consumption of white people. A second track flourished that fed off whispers, hidden conversations, and all the alternative places that Black people frequented. The information that traveled up and down and across the Savannah was as much for a Black audience as it was for a white one. The escapes from the banks of the river to Belleisle Island underscore how the maroons of Belleisle remained in contact with the fugitives from Godard’s estate and how the fugitives may have communicated among themselves.

The noteworthy presence of women in a high-risk flight underscores their determination and courage. That three in the group on May 1, 1785, were children illustrates the willingness of women to engage in long-distance flight when there was a reasonable hope of escaping beyond the reach of white authority.⁶⁹ In weighing the odds, these women were making a reasonable calculation. They were headed to a well-organized, resilient maroon community that had achieved independence and autonomy through the careful shepherding of resources.

The origins of the community dated from the loyalist evacuation in 1782 when ten to twelve men and “a number of Women” hid in the fastness of Belleisle Island eighteen miles up the Savannah River, not far from John Graham’s plantations.⁷⁰ Gen. James Jackson, a prime mover in the Georgia state militia, identified its several leaders as “the very fellows that fought, & maintained their ground against the brave lancers at the siege of Savannah, & still call themselves the King of England’s soldiers.”⁷¹ Former soldiers in the Black militia of the British army may well have made their way to the more remote regions of the Savannah River as they saw their comrades in Savannah dragooned back into slavery. A Charleston paper concurred: “In this country, it is said, that some of the Negroes who formed the late camp have been in a state of rebellion since the peace; and that some of them had been employed in arms by the British in the late war.”⁷²

The leader of this encampment was a talented African American named Sharper, whose background suggests he may have indeed been a “King of England” soldier. Seized by British forces during Gen. Augustine Prévost’s raid into the Carolina Lowcountry in 1779, he was probably recruited into one of the fighting units defending the town against the French and Americans and made his way up to Belleisle after the withdrawal of British forces.⁷³ Knowledgeable in the art of fighting, he took as his nom de guerre “Captain Cudjoe,” perhaps, as historian Jane Landers suggests, in reference to the famous Captain Cudjoe, a skilled and ruthless guerrilla warrior who led the Leeward maroons of Jamaica during the 1730s. Under his aegis, discipline was enforced, and, on the occasional raid for food, no buildings were burned nor crops set on fire nor white people killed.⁷⁴

Over time, Belleisle became increasingly attractive to the surrounding population, much as other maroon communities along the river had in pre-revolutionary times. With as many as one hundred freedom seekers at its peak, the island sheltered a well-organized encampment with small houses or huts, fields of rice and corn, as many as fifteen boats or canoes ready to be deployed, and carefully constructed defensive positions.⁷⁵ Arriving in 1785, the Guerard fugitives represented a tipping point for the community, already straining to support itself as more and more runaways appeared. Sizing up the growing need for food, Captain Cudjoe initiated raids on neighboring plantations on both sides of the river for rice, corn, and other foodstuffs and an occasional cow.

An earlier generation of historians viewed the maroons as revolutionaries with “a collective consciousness for large scale revolt” who launched a series of guerrilla attacks and carried on “the armed struggle for freedom.”⁷⁶ Historian Alan Gilbert describes them as the last breath of the “second revolution,” the battle for emancipation and equality.⁷⁷ Sharply questioning this bold narrative, historian Sylviane Diouf points out that if the maroons started raiding nearby plantations in Georgia and South Carolina, their actions were linked to the need for food, not to a more general struggle against slavery.⁷⁸ Diouf has the better of the argument. The reasons why the maroons began raiding nearby plantations had more to do with their taking in too many fugitives too rapidly, relative to what their modest economy could sustain, not because of an armed struggle for freedom.⁷⁹ After repeated maroon raids to steal provisions, the state ordered a militia company under Gen. James Jackson, a Revolutionary War hero, into the swampy terrain of the river islands in search of the maroons. The soldiers located the settlement, but the first two parties of soldiers were beaten back in an inconclusive exchange of gunfire. Jackson promptly led a third attempt, found and burned numerous houses, and destroyed four acres of rice. Following classic maroon tactics, the inhabitants had already fled and regrouped at a swamp in South Carolina, where they continued to raid plantations on both sides of the Savannah River, carrying off substantial quantities of rice to compensate for their losses.⁸⁰ In early 1787, Sharper and his followers returned to Belleisle Island at a more remote site on Bear Creek and constructed a sizable encampment, with twenty-one houses and land cleared for rice and potatoes. Around this settlement, they built a four-foot high wall out of logs and cane, created a narrow entrance, and posted a sentry along a creek to give alarm, creating a veritable war camp.⁸¹

A quarrel between Sharper and his chief lieutenant, Lewis, though hastily patched up, weakened the group and led to a fateful decision that proved the community’s undoing at precisely the moment when the South Carolina militia had joined the hunt. Sharper had wisely dictated limited contact with the outside world and enforced his rule ruthlessly. Lewis violated that edict at great cost. He brought into the hidden village a white man who may have been a Pietist from the German community of Ebenezer eager to trade. Captain Cudjoe ordered the unwelcomed visitor executed. The military discipline he imposed was unforgiving.

Despite this repudiation, Lewis made an even more crucial mistake. He allowed himself to be persuaded by Mahomet and others among the Florida fugitives to go back to the Guerard plantation and liberate members of their community still held there. That decision suggested the frequency and depth of the communication between the maroons and people on the estate. Two large canoes set out toward dusk one evening. On the circuitous way through tidal creeks and swamp, white patrollers ambushed the canoes, killed two of the men, and wounded others. The rapid retreat of the maroons to Bear Creek gave away the general location of the community.⁸²

Rather than slip away as they had on other occasions, Sharper, Lewis, and their lieutenants chose to lie in wait for the expected attack, confident in their defensive fortifications and determined not to be forced away from their food supplies.⁸³ The denouement stretched over eight days. In a series of firefights, at least ten maroons were killed, probably more. Several women and children were taken prisoner, among them Fatima and Hannah, who, when asked who they belonged to, replied “John Graham,” not “Guerard.”⁸⁴ Captured, Lewis was tried, interrogated, and condemned to be hung, “After Which his head to be Cut of and Stuck upon a pole to be sett up on the Island of Marsh opposite the Glebe land in Savannah River.” From his testimony comes the wealth of information about the community that supplies so much of the historical narrative.⁸⁵

Many others, however, made good their escape, seven of whom were thought to be headed “on their way to the Indian nation,” possibly the Creeks but more likely the Seminoles. Not long afterward, a man named Sharper and his wife Nancy asked for sanctuary in St. Augustine. Historian Jane Landers speculates that it may be one and the same Sharper.⁸⁶ The fate of Mahomet was captured in a petition of Godin Guerard to the Carolina legislature that prayed “to be paid for sundry negroes killed in arms against the State.”⁸⁷ Survivors may have regrouped in small bands or family units, others may have left the area altogether, and some may have made it to Florida.⁸⁸

Mahomet demonstrated unwavering bravery and determination against the monopoly of power arrayed against him that lasted throughout his twenty years of servitude. As a Muslim uprooted from his faith community, thrown into a mostly male enclave with few women and children, he resisted the crushing of his soul at every step of the way. At Mulberry Grove, where men outnumbered women by a considerable margin and the mortality rate in the rice fields was high, his alienation seemed total. His years as a maroon in a remote part of the colony may have forced him to generate his own resources but provided an environment that enabled him to enjoy autonomy, self-sufficiency, and freedom of movement that only isolation can provide. The drama of recapture and the punishment that followed opened another long chapter. The Revolution brought a fresh set of trials. If Mahomet failed to flee the plantation during those years, his final years of life carried him to East Florida, then South Carolina, and once again to the margins of Georgia, where he demonstrated exceptional courage and sangfroid as a maroon.

Mahomet’s experience during the Revolution leaves a puzzle. Why did this man who escaped under difficult circumstances in peacetime not succeed in slipping away during the seven years of revolutionary warfare when hundreds of others did so? Perhaps he did. That part of his life remains a mystery. For a high percentage of Africans, the Revolution in Georgia prompted unprecedented movement across the landscape of the Lowcountry, giving them a new sense of the geography of the Southeast. For the enslaved, the Revolution generated radically different choices in terms of how individuals interpreted the meaning of emancipation and equality and where they chose to go. The extraordinary upheaval that gave birth to the United States marks the beginning of a sustained forty-year-effort by Black Georgians to gain freedom and redemption in Spanish Florida and in Seminole and Creek towns. The irony of Mahomet’s life lies in how the postrevolutionary period became the moment of final liberation through his death in battle. The story suggests the underlying continuity that ties together the history of the Georgia coast from the mid-eighteenth century to the second decade of the nineteenth.