On June 1, 1812, President James Madison asked Congress to declare war on Great Britain, citing American maritime rights, trade and rising tensions with Indigenous nations in North America. Congress narrowly agreed two weeks later, and the War of 1812 began.
With much of its army tied down fighting Napoleon in Europe, Britain at first committed what forces it could spare to the waterways along the border with British Canada. For the first half of the war, most of the fighting took place more than 300 miles north of the Chesapeake Bay.
The war comes to the Chesapeake
As the Napoleonic Wars wound down, Britain sent more ships and soldiers to America. By spring 1814, large British warships carrying dozens of guns had entered the Chesapeake with smaller craft in tow. They moved up its rivers and sent barges into the smaller inlets, burning and plundering as they went. The war was no longer distant: it had arrived in the fields, barns, tobacco warehouses and homes of the people who lived around the Bay.
For the region’s enslaved people — and for enslaved people across North America — an enemy fleet so close at hand was a chance at freedom. Most who succeeded got away during British raids on the properties where they were held, or paddled canoes out to British ships at anchor. Knowing the chance might not last or come again, 3,608 people escaped slavery and boarded British ships during the war.
Tangier Island
In April 1814 the British began building a fort and barracks on Tangier Island, in the middle of the Bay. They chose it for two reasons: on a clear day its central position gave a view in every direction, and, as Rear Admiral George Cockburn put it, the island was “surrounded by the districts from which the negroes always come.” It quickly became a destination for people fleeing slavery.
A month after the base was set up, twenty-one-year-old Robert Colburn escaped from his enslaver in Somerset County, Maryland. Within a week two more men held in Somerset County — David Gales and a man recorded only as Nathaniel — also reached Tangier Island. How they escaped is not known. The records do show that Colburn and Gales enlisted almost at once in the Colonial Marines, an all-Black British unit made up mostly of newly freed men, which fought in key battles of the war. The two probably took part in British raids, destroying enslavers’ property and freeing dozens of enslaved people. Gales was made a corporal on Christmas Day, 1814.
Peace signed, war still raging
On December 24, 1814, after months of negotiation, the United States and Britain signed a peace treaty at Ghent, in present-day Belgium. But the war could not end until both governments ratified the treaty, and with no fast way to send word across the Atlantic, the fighting in North America went on for weeks.
By then Britain had shifted its attention from the war-worn Chesapeake to the Gulf of Mexico, massing forces off Jamaica for an attack on New Orleans. To draw American attention away, Cockburn was ordered to seize Cumberland Island, a small coastal outpost near the border of Georgia and Florida. On January 10, 1815 — two days after the Battle of New Orleans — British forces landed on the island’s north shore. Robert Colburn, David Gales and about 1,500 other Black and white troops marched inland and took the island. Cockburn made his headquarters at Dungeness Plantation, while the troops built fortifications, barracks and a wharf.
The war ends — and a new struggle begins
Madison signed the treaty as soon as it reached him and sent it to the Senate, which ratified it unanimously on February 16, 1815. The next day Secretary of State James Monroe delivered the ratification to the British minister in Washington, and the War of 1812 was over.
Between the British landing and the ratification, more Black refugees kept arriving at Cumberland Island, joining those who had come with the first British ships and those who had been enslaved on the island when the British came. Once the treaty took effect, British forces began to evacuate, taking Black refugees aboard their ships. For the United States, attention turned to recovering what white enslavers counted as lost property — including the freedom seekers still on Cumberland Island.
The story continues in Part 2.
Sources
Based on "Black Freedom during the War of 1812: From the Chesapeake, Cumberland Island, and Beyond, Part 1," by William F. Kelly, National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx’s own words. Its sources include Cockburn’s 1814 correspondence published in The Naval War of 1812, and Mary Ricketson Bullard, Black Liberation on Cumberland Island in 1815 (1983).
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
1
0
0
0
Comments
