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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
What with the noise, the heat, and the danger of being forced back into slavery, sometimes it's good to get out of the city. Such, at least, was the assessment of Harry Washington, who, in July of 1783, made his way to the salty, sunbaked docks along New York's East River and boarded the British ship L'Abondance, bound for Nova Scotia. A clerk dutifully noted his departure in the "Book of Negroes," a handwritten ledger listing the three thousand runaway slaves and free blacks who evacuated New York with the British that summer: "Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago."
Born on the Gambia River around 1740, not far from where he would one day die, Harry Washington was sold into slavery sometime before 1763. Twelve years later, in November, 1775, he was grooming his master's horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty's troops in suppressing the American rebellion. That December, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore's proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. "There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape," a cousin of Washington's wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, "Liberty is sweet." In August of 1776, just a month after delegates to the Continental Congress determined that in the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands that have connected them with another, Harry Washington declared his own independence by running away to fight with Dunmore's all-black British regiment, wearing a uniform embroidered with the motto "Liberty to Slaves." Liberty may not have been as sweet as he'd hoped. For most of the war, he belonged to an unarmed company known as the Black Pioneers, who were more or less garbagemen, ordered to "Assist in Cleaning the Streets & Removing all Nuisances being thrown into the Streets." The Black Pioneers followed British troops under the command of Henry Clinton as they moved from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston, and, after the fall of Charleston, back to New York again, which is how Harry Washington came to be in the city in 1783, and keen to leave before General Washington repossessed it, and him.
No one knows how many former slaves had fled the United States by the end of the American Revolution. Not as many as wanted to, anyway. During the war, between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five) left their homes, running from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on a British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore's regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.) When the British evacuated, fifteen thousand blacks went with them, though not necessarily to someplace better.
From the moment that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, in 1781, American allies reported seeing "herds of Negroes" fleeing through Virginia's swamps of pine and cypress. A few made it to a warship that Washington, under the terms of the British surrender, had allowed to sail to New York. Some ran to the French, on the not unreasonable supposition that earning wages polishing shoes in Paris had to be better than planting tobacco in Virginia for nothing but floggings. "We gained a veritable harvest of domestics," one surprised French officer...
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