Rough Crossings

Simon Schama

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061914607
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna temprana

“The most dramatic account so far of the extraordinary expeience of slaves in and after the American Revolution.... Schama's gift for plunging us into the very center of the action makes reading an exhilarating and often moving experience.”—Daily Telegraph

If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

Told in the voices of the slaves and the white abolitionists who aided them, Simon Schama vividly details the odyssey of these escaped blacks, shedding light on an extraordinary chapter in America's birth.

Part One

GREENY

I

MINCING LANE in the Ward of Cheap in 1765 was neither the worst nor the best address in the City of London. The Sisters of St Helen, known as “Minchen,” who had given the street its name, were long gone, and piety had, unsurprisingly, been replaced by profit. Solid mercantile chambers and warehouses, many of them connected to the colonial trade, lined the street. At regular intervals in the morning, carts bearing chests of sugar and tea, coming from the East and West India wharves, would rumble up the lane from Great Tower Street, carve a path through the throngs of pie vendors, ale wagons, flower girls, beggars and balladmongers, pass through broad gates and unload in the cobbled inner courtyards. In short, there was not much to detain the curious tourist other than the Clothworkers’ Hall, set back from the street and boasting a ceremonious row of Corinthian pilasters along its interior façade. It was all very middling. What was not middling, however, was the line of the woeful that trailed down the lane from a doorway at the northern, Fenchurch Street, end of the lane. These were the sickly poor: the bloodied and the bent; emaciated women and grimy, hacking drunks; small children on whom the first blisters of the pox had already erupted; and their places of domicile were assuredly not Mincing Lane. They came to the door on the lane from the empire of squalor that stretched beyond the Tower, through the Ald Gate and the Bishop’s Gate, into the rookeries of St George in the East, Shadwell and Wapping, where refuse, human and animal, brimmed in the reeking alleys, and twopenny whores lifted their skirts to sailors observed by cutpurses and yowling cats.

The door opened and out stepped an angular man looking older than his thirty years. His tall but meagre frame, hollow cheeks, lantern jaw and short curled wig gave him the air of either an underpaid clerk or an unworldly cleric; the truth is that Granville Sharp was something of both. He had taken his customary late afternoon walk to his brother William’s surgery from his own place of work at the Ordnance Office in the Tower, where he managed to fill five or six hours managing the supply of saltpetre and the conduct of unruly gentlemen cadets. Sharp’s mind, however, was usually on much more important matters: for instance, his severe differences with Dr Kennicott on the catalogue the doctor had presumed to publish, listing the Temple vessels restored to the Jews by King Cyrus in the time of the prophet Nehemiah.¹

Most evenings the Sharp brothers and sisters gathered at William’s house for rehearsals of their Sunday concerts. Their origins were plain and provincial: the children of an archdeacon of Northumberland. But since coming to London in 1750, two of Granville’s older brothers, James and William, had prospered. Deprived by their father’s limited means of the Cambridge education given to two older sons destined for the Church, James had had to make his way as an ironmonger, whilst William had applied himself to medicine. For the most part, this meant setting broken bones, trepanning skulls and dispensing remedies to the poxed, but William had flourished in his art. Now risen all the way to being one of the surgeons to the king, he flattered himself that he had not forgotten the humble, and his way of showing it was to minister, gratis, to London’s poor.

William Sharp, then, had something of a name, for how many organ-playing, horn-blowing surgeons were there, let alone physicians of such exemplary Christian benevolence, within the square mile of the City of London? On concert Sundays his rooms in Mincing Lane filled with pretty much everyone who mattered: David Garrick, James Boswell and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The attraction was the exemplary harmony exhibited by the family: James played the jointed serpent, often with parts he had transcribed from the violoncello; sister Judith played the lute and the theorbo; Eliza (before she had to go and marry Mr Prowse of Wicken Park, Northamptonshire) was mistress of the harpsichord; and Frances sang as sweetly as a trilling lark. Granville, who sometimes signed (or sealed) himself G# and was working on A Short Introduction to Musick for the use of such Children as have a Musical Ear and are Willing to be Instructed in the Great Duty of Singing Psalms, played the flute, his long, nimble fingers flying over the stops. Sometimes “to the delight and conviction of many doubters who had conceived such an accomplishment to have been impracticable,” as William Shield, the Master of His Majesty’s Band of Musicians, commented, Granville would play two flutes simultaneously.² Proud of their performances, the Sharps rehearsed together every evening with any additional musicians and singers they had recruited. But these meetings were also domestic, convivial affairs, with tea, dainties, gossip from the City and family news from Durham. In return, members of the clan living beyond the City would receive news of the doings in London from a circulated Common Letter, which took it as a point of honour to list, comprehensively, the dishes consumed at dinner as well as the items played in concert. The Sharps stayed close, always. “Whatever other engagements took place,” Eliza recalled, “it was all our party.”

So when Granville emerged from William’s surgery and pulled up short at a figure whose dreadful condition horrified even someone inured to looking at the unfortunate, his impulse, once he had heard the poor black man’s story, was to turn on his heel and straight away bring his brother out to help. It was not unusual to see blacks on London streets. There were at least five thousand and perhaps as many as seven thousand scattered over the metropolis, some living in fine town houses where, suitably got up in embroidered coats, powdered wigs and silk breeches, they served, ornamentally, as footmen or body servants to the quality.³ Some, like Dr Johnson’s Francis Barber, were minor celebrities, sketched and painted as charming “sable” curiosities. The less fortunate made a living as musicians or waiters in the taverns and brothels of Covent Garden, and went home to a bare, verminous room in neighbouring St Giles, where they were called “blackbirds.” Far more congregated in the dockland parish of St George in the East, in the filthy streets that led from Nicholas Hawksmoor’s eccentric church. Many of them were sailors, bargemen, haulers, carters and stevedores; and some for a few pence boxed barek-nuckle or played on drums and fifes to crowds in the streets and piazzas. The “blackbirds,” then, were mostly poor, and were known for flitting in and out of trouble. There would have been nothing out of the ordinary in seeing one in the queue for William Sharp’s surgery that evening in 1765. But this particular black had very little left of his face.

His name, as the Sharp brothers learned, was Jonathan Strong, and once perhaps he had been. But his master, David Lisle, a lawyer from Barbados, had been so much in the habit of thrashing him senseless on the slightest pretext that Jonathan Strong had become crippled. London was full of the spectacle of pain. Sluggish cart horses were mercilessly flogged until they dropped; vagrant beggars were whipped until their backs had become beefsteaks; felons were stoned in the public pillory and sometimes died as they sat there; servants, both male and female, were cuffed and smacked in public; schoolboys were thrashed for insolence or troublesome high spirits; men caught by the press gangs were beaten with sticks as they were hauled off to the waiting ships. But what Lisle had done to Jonathan Strong seemed savage even by the rough standards of the day. The negro’s face was reduced to crimson gore, the result of a pistol whipping so savage that after repeated, relentless blows the mouth of the gun had separated from the handle. Strong had been blinded with blood and when, finally, his master saw that there was nothing left to maim he had been thrown into the street to die. The negro had staggered to William Sharp’s surgery, where he patiently waited his turn in the line of sickness and pain that gathered along Mincing Lane. Some time later, Strong himself remembered that

I could hardly walk or see my way where I was going. When I came to him [William] and he saw me in that condition, the gentleman take charity of me and gave me some stoff to wash my eyes with and some money to get myself a little necessaries till next day. The day after I come to the gentleman and he sent me into the hospital and I was in there four months and a half. All the while I was in the hospital the gentleman find me in clothes, shoes and stockings and when I come out he paid for my lodging and a money to find myself some necessaries till he get me into a place.⁴

When Strong emerged from Bart’s Hospital William Sharp found him work with the apothecary Brown, who supplied his surgery with most of its drugs, splints and bandages. Strong was still lame from his beatings and never fully recovered his sight, yet was well enough to run errands for the apothecary, picking up and delivering medical supplies to the City surgeons and hospitals. There were times too when he served as body or household servant for the Browns. On one of those days in September 1767, two years after the Sharps had found him, he was standing footman behind Mrs Brown’s carriage when he had the misfortune to be seen by his old tormentor, David Lisle.

And what Lisle noticed was not the ruin of a creature that he had discarded in the gutter, but a disconcertingly trim and inexplicably repaired Jonathan Strong. Anger—with himself for throwing away an investment; with Strong for surviving; with whomever it was who had robbed him (for so he already thought of the matter) of his property—welled up in him, competing with an equally sudden surge of cupidity. Perhaps something could be done to redeem his loss. It was, after all, 1767. Four years before, peace had been signed with France, and the Caribbean was the engine of fortune. The market for slaves to work the West Indian sugar plantations, especially on the boom island of Jamaica, had never been hungrier, even for the likes of broken-down Strong. Among the city’s black population were many who had originally been brought to London by American or West Indian masters—most of whom, if they were rich enough, kept up seasonal establishments in the capital of the empire—and who, as body servants, footmen or musicians, lived in a state of relative liberty. Some, such as Dr Johnson’s Francis Barber or Lord Montagu’s Ignatius Sancho, were given freedom after years of loyal service. Others had taken it by escaping into Cheapside or Wapping, where they could work for wages that would protect them against an enforced return to America or the West Indies. The pursuit of these runaways was the work of slavecatchers who prowled the coffee-houses and inns, eager to collect the many rewards posted in London and American newspapers. Once caught, such blacks were imprisoned, resold (for there were regular sales and auctions in London) and bundled off to waiting ships at Gravesend, destined for Jamaica, Havana, Santa Cruz or Charleston.

This is what Lisle planned for Jonathan Strong. Even before he caught up with Strong, Lisle had already traded him to a Jamaican planter, James Kerr. In a fit of uncharacteristic candour, Lisle may have admitted that Strong was perhaps not in prime condition, and accepted £30 for him in a seller’s market in which “stout Negroes” fetched, on average, at least £50. Or perhaps Lisle was himself needy for funds, since he also accepted Kerr’s condition that the money would not be handed over before the black in question was safely aboard a ship.

It remained, of course, for Lisle to secure his property. Keeping out of sight, he had followed Strong to a public house. Two days after first seeing him in the street attending on Mrs Brown, Lisle hired two Lord Mayor’s officers to accost him in the pub, informing him only that a certain gentleman wished to speak with him. Either over-complaisant from his two years of liberty, or perhaps easily intimidated, Jonathan Strong went with the men, only to be startled by the appearance of his old persecutor. All pretence at politeness dropped, Strong was manhandled to the prison of Poultry Compter in Giltspur Street in Cheap, where, among felons and vagrants picked up by the sheriff’s men, he could be detained before being conveyed as a recovered chattel to the ship. But this was not the end of the story. Two years of being treated like a human being had given Jonathan Strong a modest degree of fighting self-respect and, more decisively, a modest degree of education. The fate of blacks in Britain—and America—hung on this one puny but improbable fact: that lame, half-blind Jonathan Strong could read and write. He sent out a series of notes, first to Brown, the apothecary, signalling his predicament. Brown promptly dispatched a servant who, however, was refused admission or any kind of communication with Jonathan Strong.

When Brown himself arrived at Poultry Compter he was so browbeaten by Lisle, ranting that he had been robbed of his goods and waving a bill of sale, that the apothecary retreated lest he be arrested himself for theft as Lisle threatened. In extremis, Jonathan Strong sent a second note, this one to his old saviour, Granville Sharp. But Sharp’s head was full of more pressing matters—a scheme to introduce the Anglican Church into the kingdom of Prussia, for example; the preparation of his Short Introduction to Musick…; a second brief treatise called “On the Pronunciation of the English Tongue”—and the significance of the name Strong momentarily escaped him. It was not long, though, before it came back with guilty urgency. It was Sharp’s turn now to send a messenger to the prison, and when no reply was received by return he went to see Strong for himself. There, in the ante-rooms and bare cells of Poultry Compter, with the creak of bare wood and iron performing sporadically gloomy music, he recalled everything. For the first time in his life, in matters that were not ecclesiastical nor military nor musical, Granville Sharp acted, insisting more from instinct than authority, that since the black had committed no offence he could not possibly be legally detained. He had enough of the air of a learned gentleman to persuade the officers that, should they make the mistake of releasing Strong to a third party before his case had been heard by the Lord Mayor, they would risk their own incrimination.

Against the odds, Jonathan Strong got his hearing. Sir Robert Kite, like most lord mayors of the 1760s and 1770s, could not possibly have held that office without the favour of the patrician merchants of the sugar interest. Yet whilst he would have not recognized himself in any way as a particular friend to blacks, the mayor was bound by an ingrained respect for due process. And the City of London was still a small enough community for the mayor to know all about the brothers Sharp. James, after all, sat in the City’s assembly, the Common Council. So when Granville came to see Sir Robert and recited the facts of the case he received a fair and even sympathetic reception. A hearing was ordered, which was convened on the 18th of September at the Mansion House and attended by the Sharps, Laird, the captain of the ship in which Strong was to be conveyed, and Macbean, the lawyer for the new owner, James Kerr. As the arguments between Sharp and Macbean turned furious, Strong, who was not at all convinced of a happy outcome, became distraught, weeping and shaking with fear. After listening to both sides Sir Robert Kite made up his mind, saying, as Sharp reported in his casebook, that “the lad had not stolen anything and was not guilty of any offence and was therefore at liberty to go away.”⁵ Evidently Captain Laird was not listening, since after the mayor had withdrawn he grabbed Strong, claiming him physically as the property of Mr Kerr. The action was so brutally sudden and so disconcerting that for a moment it threatened to succeed—even Granville Sharp was dumbfounded into inaction. But the City coroner, Thomas Beech, still present in the room, stepped quickly towards Sharp and whispered urgently to him, “Charge him!” Novice at the law though he was, Sharp responded: “Sir!” he shouted at Captain Laird in the clear voice that was to characterize the new Granville Sharp. “I charge you with assault.”⁶

For the moment it was enough. The slaver captain paused and Strong, still weeping, shook off Laird’s grip. A few days later later Lisle, by no means reconciled to the decision, issued a writ against Granville Sharp and his older brother James for theft of his slave. But the law seemed less friendly to Lisle’s interest than he had assumed. On an afternoon when he knew the Sharps to be at Mincing Lane he arrived at the house, was announced and admitted, whereupon he issued a personal challenge to Granville for “Gentlemanlike satisfaction because I had procured the liberty of his slave Jonathan Strong. I told him that as he had studied law so many years he should want no satisfaction that the law should give him.”⁷

The words hit their mark. Strong’s body may have still carried the marks of his beatings by Lisle, but, more crushingly, Lisle the lawyer had been beaten by the law. However, Greeny Sharp, as he was known to his brothers and sisters, was no longer so green in the ways of the courts as to dispense with the services of lawyers in case Lisle and Kerr should press their suit. Through the connections of his older brothers he retained the City recorder, Sir James Eyre, to advise him. Granville’s boldness in rescuing Jonathan Strong from the clutches of Lisle had been coloured by the instinctive certainty that neither Christian propriety nor the majesty of English Common Law could possibly countenance the reduction of a person to a property. Imagine his shock and despondency, then, when Sir James brought him the opinion of the former Lord Chancellor Yorke and Solicitor-General Talbot in 1729, which judged otherwise: that persons brought to England from places where they had been slaves remained in that state of bondage, notwithstanding their baptism. When Yorke confirmed the opinion in 1749, it became the guiding rule by which owners seeking the recovery of their human property were usually upheld in their claims. Although there was now a new Lord Chancellor, the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield, before whom most of these cases were heard, was known to accept Yorke-Talbot. Sharp was advised that his fancy that Common Law could not accommodate slaveholding in England was merely sentimental.

This was the view not just of Sharp’s lawyer, but of many others whose opinion he sought in 1767 and 1768, virtually all of whom wrote off his chances of successfully defending himself against the impending lawsuit for theft. But for all the weight of their authority, Sharp remained unconvinced. Neither God nor English antiquity (which for him amounted to much the same) could possibly permit such abomination in His Chosen Land. So he resolved to make himself his own authority on the legal history of slaves in Britain: “Thus forsaken by my professional defenders I was compelled through the want of a regular legal assistance to make a hopeless attempt at self-defence, though I was totally un-acquainted either with the practice of the law or the foundations of it, having never opened a law book (except the Bible) in my life until this time.”⁸ A page was turned, and for the lives of blacks in Britain and across the broad ocean nothing would be the same.

There had not been much to suggest that of the fourteen children of Archdeacon Thomas Sharp it would be Granville who would become famous as the apostle of freedom. True, he had been remarkable for his prodigious powers of concentration. As a child, he had sat in an apple tree to read the entirety of Shakespeare. But financial assistance from the family came in direct proportion to one’s seniority in it. Even had Granville been brilliant (which he wasn’t), the fact of his being born twelfth precluded much in the way of archdecanal help. After acquiring rudimentary learning at Durham Grammar School and a little more from a tutor, he had been apprenticed, at the age of fifteen, to a Quaker linen draper in London; then, after the Quaker’s passing, to a Presbyterian and finally to a Roman Catholic, all in the same line of trade. This parade of sects passing before the young and insatiably curious Greeny gave him a compressed but valuable course in comparative theology, which he turned to good use when a Jewish fellow apprentice, seeing that Sharp had no Hebrew, was bold enough to ridicule his pretensions to biblical exegesis. Stung, Granville immediately set about mastering the anc...