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The Right Hand Men of the Revolution
Albemarle’s Free Black War Veterans
Albemarle County, Virginia, situated in central Virginia just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was home to a few thousand whites, a few thousand slaves, and more than one hundred free blacks during the Revolutionary War.1 It was a rural farming community producing tobacco, wheat, and corn as its cash crops. The county was home both to yeoman farmers working their own land and to plantation owners heavily dependent upon slave labor. Seventy miles west of the capital in Richmond, the county was neither part of the Virginia frontier nor central to the locus of political and economic power in the state. In many ways, it was a typically insular and tight-knit community of planters and farmers, the type of place that characterized Piedmont counties across the Upper South.
Rural counties in the Piedmont such as Albemarle that had substantial slave populations were characterized by residential integration. Small slaveholders dominated the landscape. Free blacks and nonslaveholding whites lived throughout the county, usually in areas with less productive land. Occasionally, this pattern was broken up by the appearance of a larger tobacco plantation; Jefferson’s Monticello, where over one hundred slaves lived with a white family and white overseers, lay within a short distance of both Charlottesville and free black landowners. In such a world, family and neighbors formed the core of an individual’s local and personal social networks. Local knowledge was maintained and disseminated by a social web built upon face-to-face interactions. Trust extended primarily to those who were known within these localized and highly personal social networks.
Free people of color, although part and parcel of these counties, neighborhoods, communities, and social networks, remained near the bottom of a steep social hierarchy. They were not slaves, but their often visible darker complexion, and more important, the local social coding of them as persons of color, left them in some ways trapped at the lower end of the southern social ladder. However, free blacks remained part of these communities, embedded in the web of social relations that existed in each locale, connections that crossed and confused apparent color lines. For free people of color to advance and prosper in such an environment, freedom had to have a face. They could be “known” personages, whose existence and productivity in the community had to be recognized and deemed worthy and respectable. They would need free black friends and family, as well as friendly relationships with whites whom they lived near or worked with, if they were to be successful and secure.2
At the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1776, there were at most about 150 free people of color living in the county. The extant archival record indicates that at least six free black males between 1776 and 1780 enlisted in the war effort in Albemarle County. This chapter charts their lives and argues that their experience as soldiers helped them to cement highly personal and enduring bonds with white members of Albemarle’s community. Decades later, these men continued to trade upon their service in that conflict as a credential showing their fitness for inclusion in the community. These men of color represent a small sample of the free black population, but they do not all appear to have been members of a free black social or economic elite. They are unusual or unique only in the sense that they appeared with enough frequency in public records that their lives can be pieced together by a modern researcher.
The county was a hotbed of Revolutionary activity and philosophy; Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and he served as governor of the fledgling independent state during the war. Many white men in the county served in the militia or the Continental Army. At least one hundred enlisted and fought.3 Those white men were not alone in joining in the attempt to separate from England. A number of free men of color also enlisted, including a waterman named Johnson Smith. Born in 1763, Smith enlisted as a teenager sometime after 1776 and served at least one eighteen-month tour of duty.4 Smith joined the navy and served as a seaman. After the war, he returned to Albemarle County along with other war veterans. In 1789, Smith was listed as living in St. Anne’s Parish, which covered roughly the southern half of the county. Smith, described in that year as mulatto, lived with one other tithable (a person old enough to be counted for taxation purposes), a man aged between sixteen and twenty-one, likely a family member. At that time, he owned no taxable property. He seemed destined to remain a nearly propertyless free black whose imprint upon both Albemarle and the archival record would be faint indeed.5
By 1794, Johnson Smith’s situation had changed only a little: he now owned one horse but still paid no tax. Two years later, Smith (now listed as “negro”) no longer owned the horse. He remained a poor free black war veteran, apparently with little to show for his war service. Smith managed to purchase a horse sometime in 1798, however, and continued to own one through 1805. By the next year, 1806, he owned two horses, paying property tax for the first time. By then, he clearly had a family, with three free males listed as living in his household, including sons Wilson (age fourteen) and Pitman (age six). For the next five years, Johnson Smith’s status barely changed. He continued to own one or two horses and to watch his family grow.6
County records sometimes call Johnson Smith “Johnson Scott,” suggesting that Smith may not have become sufficiently well recognized. Regardless, Smith had fathered at least four children by 1810. County records provide little in the way of detail about the woman he started a family with, let alone much about Smith himself. The 1810 census has Smith listed as the head of a household of twelve “other free persons, except Indians, not taxed”—in other words, a household of black people.7 By that time, some of Smith’s children were old enough to be listed separately as free persons on personal property tax lists, but clearly still lived in their parents’ household. Other extended family members also may have been living on the same property or even under the same roof as Johnson Smith. The family lived in the Scottsville area, the former county seat located at a bend in the James River on the southern border of the county. Perhaps Smith had put his experience in the navy to good use and was working as a waterman on the river.
The personal property tax list for 1812 suggests why the mother of Johnson Smith’s children had not yet appeared by name in the records. In that year, Johnson Smith is listed as “Johnson Scott and son,” free blacks with one horse and one female slave over the age of sixteen. For that one year, Smith owned an adult female slave. That slave, almost surely, was Smith’s wife, Rachel. Though no deed of manumission exists to indicate how she achieved freedom, a Rachel Smith appears as a free woman starting with county records in 1813. Extant records do not indicate whether Rachel was that slave or whether she was actually the mother of all of Johnson Smith’s children.
It was not uncommon in the Upper South, however, for slaves to be freed informally and recognized as such by locals. Since their children were considered free, Rachel Smith and her husband may have worked out a deal with Rachel’s master that ended with Johnson Smith owning his wife for a time. Rachel, if she were indeed a term slave, may have been allowed by her master to go about as if free, all the while helping her husband, Johnson Smith, pay her master for the freedom of her children and eventually for her own. This, too, was not an unusual practice in rural Virginia. By the following year, Johnson Smith no longer owned an adult slave, and Rachel Smith is listed independently and by name for the first time on the personal property tax list for St. Anne’s Parish. Court records that year clearly identified Rachel as Johnson Smith’s wife. Prior to 1812, Rachel may technically have resided at least formally on a nearby plantation.8
On February 23, 1814, the free person of color Johnson Smith and his wife, Rachel Smith, ran afoul of the law. Any security they had managed to create for themselves was suddenly in jeopardy. She was arrested and charged with stealing three pigs from the white farmer John Patterson. The court, referring to her as Rachel Scott, a woman also known as Rachel Smith, stated that the pigs Rachel was accused of stealing were valued at nine dollars. Thus, although the original charge had been only petty larceny, the court now raised it to grand larceny. The court, apparently confused about her identity, remanded her to jail. Her husband was vigilant, and he had a number of white friends. Rachel was released only hours later when her husband, Johnson, and their white neighbor Chiles Brand appeared in court and filed three hundred dollars in recognizances guaranteeing her appearance in court. She was arraigned on March 7. The next day, Johnson Smith, along with four local whites, filed another set of recognizances totaling three hundred dollars on behalf of Rachel Smith, guaranteeing her appearance at the trial.9
Rachel Smith awaited trial for three months. While she waited for her case to come to trial, Smith busied herself rounding up material and character witnesses. On May 9, the white Albemarle slave owners Samuel Shelton, Joseph Eades, David Cobbs, and William Elsom, together with the free people of color Sally Lewis and David Martin, agreed to appear as witnesses on behalf of Rachel Smith. At the June court that same year, Rachel Smith’s trial was held. Smith was found guilty of stealing pigs from her white neighbor John Patterson and sentenced to thirty lashes on her bare back at the public whipping post. Up to this point, the unfolding of events since the pig stealing back in March had largely followed a script typical of how historians describe the average free black experience in the antebellum South: economic and social marginalization, poverty, contact with a judicial system stacked against them, violent corporal punishment, and lengthy incarceration for minor infractions. For instance, Berlin’s explanation is nuanced and recognizes the ability of a minority of free blacks to succeed, but sees that development as only possible for a few lighter-skinned mulattos who owned property and had white protectors. Berlin also privileges the role of law in his account and assumes that laws serve as a good indicator of actual practice. The large number of whites who gave security or testimony for Rachel Smith, however, undermines that interpretation.10
Rachel Smith immediately filed an appeal to arrest judgment, alleging that there were procedural errors committed both in her arrest and in the filing of the case against her. Two days later, the county court heard her appeal. The court sustained her appeal, agreeing that there were procedural errors in the arrest. The original verdict was thrown out, and Rachel was discharged from her recognizance and released. Rachel was once again a free woman. But problems stemming from the pig theft would continue to plague the Smith family. Rachel, along with her husband, Johnson, and their child Pitman, would be charged anew for the same specific theft in October 1814. On the seventh of October, a summons was issued ordering the sheriff to rearrest Johnson, Rachel, and Pitman Smith. Within the week, they were arrested and committed to the county jail. The family would spend the next three weeks there.11
But their story has further twists. For starters, at the second arraignment, three white slaveholders once again pledged security for Rachel Smith. Unfortunately, no record reveals the connections these men had to Johnson Smith and his wife. The repeated pledging of a substantial sum of money (three hundred dollars), as well as the agreement to testify on behalf of poor, politically powerless, and supposedly socially ostracized free people of color, however, belies the notion that for white antebellum southerners, free blacks were “slaves without masters” whose existence threatened a social fabric predicated upon the notion that dark skin color equaled enslaved status. Johnson Smith and his wife were familiar with white men who at a minimum were their neighbors and likely had extensive contact with the free black Smiths. Perhaps the Smiths were regular hires as laborers or skilled workers on their white neighbors’ farms.
After the Smiths spent three weeks in jail, the court acquitted Johnson Smith, his wife, Rachel, and their son Pitman and ordered their immediate release. Beyond evidence of following proper court procedure, the court records are silent about the reasons for the acquittal, but they hint at the possibility that free blacks could experience a judicial system at least locally that was not categorically prejudiced against them. The legal system was not necessarily a tool used to control a supposedly anomalous group—free people of color. The role of whites in this story suggests that interracial contact in the rural South entailed far more than solely violence and domination by whites in support of a brutally racist slave regime.12
Johnson Smith and his wife, Rachel, had a very busy year in 1814. After being freed from the county jail, they returned to life in Albemarle and continued to work to get the rest of their family out of slavery. Smith’s 1814 personal property tax record, taken in December of that year, finds him again as the head of a household with two sons and two slaves aged twelve to sixteen. Perhaps those two slaves were the Smiths’ children. Also listed separately as free black heads of household are Barnett, Bustard, and Wilson Smith, Johnson Smith’s children who had reached adulthood. Whether Johnson Smith relied upon his service in the American Revolutionary effort remains unclear.13 After 1814, however, the Smith family disappears from the public record. Perhaps they left the area for economic or familial reasons. Regardless, their experience in Albemarle demonstrates the positive potential for free people of color participating in a rural southern interracial community.
Other free black war veterans lived lives in Albemarle that differed vastly from those of the Smiths. Future Albemarle resident Shadrach Battles was a young man in the 1740s, living in Louisa County.14 Though he was officially listed in public records throughout his life as a mulatto person of color, white Albemarle residents later described him as “half Indian and half mulatto.” By 1752, he had moved from Louisa County and headed south and west to the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in what was then south-central Albemarle County. Battles crossed several counties on this journey to the rural tobacco lands in the James River basin, between Lynchburg and Charlottesville. Once he was there, his father, after whom Shadrach Battles was named, purchased 191 acres of land on the south branches of the Hardware River.15
For the next fourteen years, Shadrach Battles lived a quiet life on a farm in the heart of tobacco plantation country on the southern border of Albemarle, taking over his family’s farm.16 For reasons unknown, in 1775 the elder Shadrach Battles sold the family farm to the white farmer John Duncan for fifteen pounds and apparently moved south to the new Amherst County. Two years later, Shadrach Jr. was an itinerant laborer and carpenter with no fixed address, at the time working in Amherst. It was 1777, and the Revolutionary War had begun. Shadrach Battles Jr. enlisted that year and served two eighteen-month tours of duty. The Albemarle resident Clough Shelton was second in command when Battles joined the regiment and later became the leader of the outfit. Battles traveled far and wide in his military service, fighting at the battles of Brandywine, Monmouth, and Germantown and even at the siege of the fort at Savannah, Georgia. Decades later, white Staunton resident Archibald Stuart wrote to the Albemarle court, stating that Battles “was the right hand man of Clough Shelton at the storming of Stony Point” on the Hudson River in July 1779.17
In 1780, Shadrach Battles’s second tour of duty came to an end. He was discharged in Augusta, Georgia. He made his way back to Virginia and first returned to his birth county of Louisa. There he quickly settled in, marrying Dolly Moss that same year. Within four years, the couple had relocated to Albemarle County. Upon settling down in the Charlottesville area, Battles quickly found himself in trouble. In November 1784, Robert Murray initiated a suit against Battles for trespass, assault, and battery. Shadrach Battles failed to appear before the magistrates and was thus ordered to pay Murray’s court costs and to enter into a bond guaranteeing his good behavior for one year.18
Two years later, Shadrach Battles appeared at the courthouse in connection with the marriage of two free mulattos, Jonathan Tyree and Usly Goings. Battles granted surety to the court that there were no legal impediments to the marriage. From 1786 to 1792, Battles remained a landless laborer with a modest but not negligible amount of personal property—a few horses and a small herd of cattle. In 1793, Battles again ran into trouble in Albemarle. In August of that y...
