This is the second part of William Kelly's account of Black freedom seeking during the War of 1812. The first part followed people who escaped slavery in the Chesapeake to British ships and the Colonial Marines, among them Robert Colburn and David Gales.
A race against the treaty
At four o'clock on the afternoon of March 6, 1815, Captain Thomas M. Newell and Thomas Spalding arrived at Dungeness Plantation on Cumberland Island. Newell commanded sea fencibles — military units under Army officers, equipped as naval units. The pair carried a copy of the Treaty of Ghent as printed in the National Intelligencer, and they were confident it entitled them to take back every freedom seeker on the island. They demanded as much of Rear Admiral George Cockburn, who commanded British operations there. He refused outright.
They were already too late. The day before, Colburn and Gales had joined nearly 500 men, women and children, many of them Colonial Marines, in leaving the island aboard the British warship Regulus, bound first for Bermuda.
The Treaty of Ghent as printed in a newspaper of the time. Image from the National Park Service's article on Black freedom seeking during the War of 1812.
Newell and Spalding kept pressing. "It is with much regret," Spalding wrote to Cockburn, "that of the slaves which you have ordered to be restored…several of them [are] now on board the Regulus." Cockburn let them, and some local enslavers, board the Regulus under a British officer's supervision to seek "the voluntary return of their slaves." They recorded thirteen people they considered eligible for re-enslavement under the American reading of the treaty, and blamed "the means employed by the inferior officers to prevent their return" for not getting more. People, they complained, had been sent aboard British ships "as late as between the period of the 2d and the 5th of March." They concluded that they had "no alternative but to prefer this affair to our Government."
Two readings of one treaty
| Reading of the Treaty of Ghent | What it meant | |
|---|---|---|
| United States | Freedom seekers who escaped to the British must be returned — or, at least, their enslavers compensated | Britain would owe compensation for thousands of people |
| Britain | A freedom seeker could be returned against their will only if still at the place they had escaped from | Only a slim fraction of the 3,608 who escaped during the war would qualify — and nearly 500 had just left Cumberland Island |
The dispute between the two governments, mirrored in the standoff between Newell, Spalding and Cockburn, was not fully resolved until 1828.
Reunions in Bermuda
The Regulus reached Bermuda on April 29, 1815. Colburn and Gales traveled alone, but many others found their families there.
Between July 12 and July 14, 1814, twenty-five-year-old Peter Sewell escaped from Calvert County, Maryland, with sixteen others. At least four of them sailed with him on the Regulus: John Sewell (27), Nathaniel Smith (14), Hezekiah Smith (18) and Basil Butler (22). Service in the Colonial Marines had taken the men from Tangier Island in the Chesapeake to Cumberland Island, while the twelve women and children stayed on Tangier Island. On March 18, 1815 — nearly two weeks after Peter left Cumberland Island — HMS Orlando sailed from Tangier for Bermuda carrying his wife, Rachael, and their three children. On April 29, 1815, the family was together again.
Free lives around the world
Trinidad. Many refugees went on from Bermuda to Trinidad, then a British colony off Venezuela. Colburn and Gales both served in British ranks there through 1823. Colburn died in Trinidad on February 9, 1857; when Gales died is unknown. The Sewells and Smiths went to Trinidad too; neither John nor Peter Sewell appears in its records after 1823, but Nathaniel Smith lived out his life there and died on May 6, 1875. Basil Butler, who had risen from corporal to sergeant by October 1814, followed the same route and by 1823 had married a woman named Lucy.
Nova Scotia. Others sailed to Halifax. Their names are in the Halifax List, which — like the Book of Negroes compiled after the American Revolution — recorded Black refugees who landed in Nova Scotia during and after the war. They met harsh conditions, racism and little economic opportunity, but farmed the rocky, barren land they were given and petitioned the government for improvements to their communities.
The legacy
Freedom seeking during the war took careful planning, timing and patience. Many freedom seekers risked re-enslavement by fighting in British units; others served aboard ships in sanitation work or mending clothes and uniforms. Even after the treaty was ratified in February 1815, American emissaries acting for the government tried to re-enslave as many as they could. Most of those attempts failed. Thousands built free lives abroad, and their descendants in Trinidad, Bermuda, Jamaica, Halifax, Scotland and England carry that legacy today.
Sources
Based on "Black Freedom Seeking During the War of 1812: From the Chesapeake, Cumberland Island, and Beyond, Part 2," by William Kelly, M.A., National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on the Newell–Spalding–Cockburn correspondence in American State Papers: Foreign Relations, vol. 4, the Regulus supernumeraries list, and the Nova Scotia Archives.
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