Sotterley, 1814: When 48 Enslaved People Fled to British Warships

Below the manor house at Sotterley, a plantation in southern Maryland, a long field slopes down to the river. Partway down stands a one-room cabin with a steep roof — the plantation's last standing slave quarters.

From inside, the people enslaved there had two views laden with meaning: through the door, the manor house commanding the top of the hill; through the window, the river — a road to freedom.

The summer of 1814

That contrast was never sharper than in 1814. Over a few months, 48 men, women and children escaped slavery at Sotterley by making for the river and the refuge offered by British warships. The War of 1812, the United States' second war with Britain, made it possible.

• In April 1814, British Admiral Cochrane proclaimed that anyone who escaped to a British warship would receive freedom and land in a British colony.
• In the Chesapeake, river access was everything. According to historian Alan Taylor of the University of California, Davis, escapes came from properties along the rivers, not the interior, and clustered where British ships spent the most time: Virginia's Northern Neck, the southern shore of the Potomac and southern Maryland's counties.
• The official count, based on American damage claims, is 2,400 people; Taylor's research in British records suggests the real number may reach or top 3,000.
• The largest escape was from the vast Corotoman plantation on Virginia's Rappahannock River. The second largest was at Sotterley.

What happened at Sotterley

The details are only now emerging, through the Maryland State Archives' Flight to Freedom Project, and Sotterley — now a public historic site — is working the findings into its programs.

• According to Sotterley's education director, Jeanne Pirtle, the British raided Sotterley on June 14, after a skirmish on St. Leonard's Creek, confronted the owner, and left with about four enslaved adult men.
• By fall, 44 more had followed — skilled and household workers, men, women and children.
• Some left as families. Grace Munroe, a cook, left with her husband Lewis and their four or five children; by 1815 they had a parcel of land in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Families, not just young men

Before that summer, those who tried to escape were mostly young men traveling alone; people with spouses and children were reluctant to go. The British offer of freedom to everyone changed that, and many families left together or were reunited along the way. As Taylor observes, war generates records that briefly light up slave family life in ways otherwise hidden — ties that might never have been documented without the War of 1812.

One example: along the Virginia shore of the Potomac, a few enslaved men stole a canoe, crossed to Maryland, stole a ferry boat, and went back for 17 others, including women and children, before heading downriver to a British ship. For Taylor, that is the telling difference: young men still led the way, but during the war they came back for others.

Why the British helped

The escapes crippled many farms and plantations, and former slaves served the British as guides and pilots, helping them raid farther inland and overcome resistance before the attack on Washington.

But it wasn't purely strategy. British naval officers were at first told to discourage escapes; then, in 1813, several hundred enslaved people pressed them for help. Unable to turn them away, Taylor says, the British only afterward realized that taking them in served their military interest too.

An episode from 1815, just after the war officially ended, shows the mixed motives. A British party confronted a planter in St. Mary's County, Maryland, bringing a former slave whose wife and children were still there — mainly, in Taylor's reading, to help him. Over the planter's protest that the war was over, they took the family. When the American complained, the ship's captain refused to return them, writing to his commander that they would be treated cruelly — and he and others aboard were prepared to pay for them from their own pockets.

After the escape

• Most were taken to the British base on Tangier Island. Men were offered — not required — enlistment in the Corps of Colonial Marines, and many young Black men embraced the chance at respect, a uniform, weapons training and the fight against their former enslavers.
• The British settled former slaves on land in Nova Scotia and Trinidad.
• Nova Scotia was hard: poor farmland near Halifax, where work centered on the port. Many stayed poor, though one man wrote to his former master to boast of his success. Offered a return to Maryland and Virginia in the 1820s, they refused — they would rather be poor in Nova Scotia than enslaved.
• In Trinidad, they got better land and settled in groups, each company of former marines founding its own village. Their descendants, the Merikans, are proud of their heritage.

The cost to the Chesapeake

The loss of so much enslaved labor did lasting damage to the region's economy. Besides some large plantations, most farms in southern Maryland and Virginia relied on five or six enslaved people; the escape of a few could bring down a whole operation, especially when nearly every farmer was in debt and paid it by trading enslaved people or their labor.

Sotterley, one of the larger plantations, held 64 enslaved people before the escapes and 16 after. The loss deepened its financial troubles, and the Plater family sold Sotterley in 1826, after five generations.

Sources

Based on "Exploring History at Historic Sotterley," Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, National Park Service, an abridged version of an article first published in Bay Journeys; rewritten in hubnx's own words.