Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation

368 Pages·2012·7.35 MB·English

by  Gerald Horne

Negro Comrades of the Crown
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Negro Comrades
of the Crown
African Americans and the
British Empire Fight the U.S.
before Emancipation
Gerald Horne
a

NEW Y ORK UNIVERS ITY P RESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2012 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horne, Gerald.
Negro comrades of the Crown : African Americans and
the British empire fight the U.S. before emancipation / Gerald Horne.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–8147–7349–9 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN 978–0–8147–9050–2 (ebook)
ISBN 978–0–8147–4463–5 (ebook)
1. Slave insurrections—United States—History—19th century.
2. African Americans—Relations with British—History—19th century.
3. Government, Resistance to—United States—History—19th century.
4. Slavery—United States—History—19th century. 5. United States—
Relations—Great Britain. 6. Great Britain—Relations—United States.
I. Title.
E449.H799 2011
306.3'620973—dc23 2011028435
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: Negroes—“British in Their Hearts?” 1
1 “Huzzah for Bermuda!” 17
2 “Base Fools!” 29
3 Can U.S. Negroes Commit Treason? 43
4 The Enslaved Torments the Slaveholder 54
5 “A Powerful Negro Army” 66
6 The British, Africans, and Indigenes versus the U.S. 78
7 Revolutionary Implications 90
8 Abolition of Private Property? 105
9 Africans Flee from “Republicanism” 120
10 London Sanctions Murder of U.S. Slaveholders? 133
11 Britain to Forge a Haiti in Texas? 148
12 Declare War on Britain to Avert Civil War in the U.S.? 164
13 Canada Invades—or Civil War in the U.S.? 179
14 A Paradise for U.S. Negroes in the British West Indies? 197
Notes 217
Index 345
About the Author 361
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Introduction: Negroes—“British in
Their Hearts?”
It was mid-summer 1816 and Africans in Florida,1 tensing for
an epochal battle near the Apalachicola River, were well-armed. Among
the hundreds gathered at what was called the “Negro Fort” were former
slaves who had been trained by the British—a nation which only recently
had fought a brutal war with the United States: the warriors also included
escaped slaves from this young republic, along with a grouping of indigenes
who too had unresolved grievances with Washington. Thanks to London,
they had the ability to inflict severe pain on approaching U.S. troops: their
weaponry included four twenty-four pound cannons, four six-pound can-
nons, one field piece, and one three-and-one-half inch brass howitzer, not
to mention 2,500 muskets, 500 carbines, 500 swords, 300 quarter casks of
rifle powder, and 162 barrels of cannon powder. Their encampment was one
of the most heavily fortified along a river route in the southern reaches of
North America. They also had flags flying over their battlement: the Union
Jack and a red flag, which signaled “no surrender.”2 They did not surrender
and they were overwhelmed, though some departed hastily and lived to fight
another day.3
These Negroes were part of what was probably the most profoundly mili-
tant and sustained resistance of the enslaved since Europeans4 had invaded
the continent hundreds of years earlier. More than this, this resistance
marked a repetitive strategy deployed by London against its former colony:
deploy the republic’s Africans to assault their homeland. Just before war
erupted in mid-1812, Sir Alexander Cochrane noted confidently that Virgin-
ia’s Negroes were “British in their hearts and might be made great use of if
war should be prosecuted with vigor.”5
Taking advantage of the war commencing in 1812, the enslaved had fled

en masse. When Washington itself was torched by the redcoats in August
1814, one stricken Euro-American reported angrily that the Negroes had
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“risen and committed murders and outrages on whites”6 in neighboring Vir-
ginia. He demanded the dispatching of militia to suppress this uprising, but
these forces were already stretched to the point of snapping. According to the
state’s governor, slave-owners were nervous, since even before this conflict
had erupted, they associated—correctly, as it turned out—the British inva-
sion with a “probable insurrection of their slaves who take a deep interest in
a rupture between England and this country.”7 On the verge of the burning of
the nation’s capital, the U.S. authorities’ unease had reached fever pitch: “Our
Negroes are flocking to the enemy from all quarters,” it was said in August
1814, which the redcoats then “convert[ed] into troops, vindictive and rapa-
cious.” An even greater fear was that the “example” of the formerly enslaved,
now “armed . . . must have a strong effect upon those blacks which have not
as yet been able to escape”; this “ruffian system of warfare,” it was said, “will
light up one universal conflagration throughout these counties.”8
The gloom in Washington was mirrored by the glee among the British. As
his compatriots approached Washington, Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane
of the Royal Navy observed of the (formerly) enslaved that as a result of “their
hatred to the citizens I have already a small corps in arms,” which would now
“rapidly increase.” The “Blacks are all good horsemen,” he noted, “and thou-
sands will join upon their master’s horses.” They were “as good [as] Cossacks
as any in the Russian Army,” he averred, “and I believe more terrific [ter-
rifying] to the Americans than any troops that could be brought forward.”9
His comrade, Rear Admiral George Cockburn, responded that “undisguised
alarm” at London’s “intentions respecting the Blacks” was descending upon
the enemy, since they “expect [the Negroes] will have no mercy on them and
they know that he understands bush fighting.”10
As it turned out, the hearty men of the U.S. rallied and in New Orleans
in 1815 rebuffed their mortal foes—with the timely aid of men of color in
arms, who bested the redcoats, about 10 percent of whom were of African
descent11—but this was not the last time that the Crown had used or acqui-
esced in the potent example of Negroes with deadly weapons: it was thought
that the most determined fighters against the U.S. were those who had a rea-
sonable fear of enslavement.12 Indeed, for much of the antebellum era, Lon-
don deployed U.S. Negroes in its frequent confrontations with Washington.
Early in the century, for example, the Crown placed armed Negro troops
along the Canadian border with the republic, assuming that they would be
fierce fighters in case of an invasion from the south, since in case of defeat,

they could simply be re-enslaved.13 In 1819, Canada established an African
Canadian military colony north of Lake Simcoe. The settlers were battle-
2 | Introduction: Negroes—“British in Their Hearts?”
tested veterans of the War of 1812 and their homes formed the first line of
defense against the expansionism of the U.S.14 A central reason why Canada
remains an independent nation and was not annexed by the U.S. was the vig-
ilance of the Negro soldier. Moreover, the flight of Negroes to Canada built
the Empire at U.S. expense.15
The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” has long been commonplace in
diplomacy—and this was no less true of Thornton Blackburn, an escaped
slave from Kentucky who found himself in Detroit in 1833.16 He had been
detained and his master was hastening to retrieve him, when a sizeable
crowd of angry Negroes surrounded the jail armed with sticks, knives, pis-
tols, swords, and the like, with the aim of derailing his re-enslavement. A
loaded pistol was placed directly at the breast of his jailer, then a tossed stone
struck the sheriff in the face, as a heavy club struck his cranium: Blackburn
was rescued amidst threats of placing the city to the torch and fled imme-
diately across the river to Canada. In a legal opinion that outraged the U.S.,
since it treated “chattel” as a person, Canada allowed Blackburn to reside in
freedom.17
A few years after Blackburn’s rescue, this pattern of Negro aggression was
repeated. This time the site was Florida, now under the U.S. flag, but as at the
Negro Fort, again Negroes and indigenes were on the warpath and the “Dade
Massacre” was executed in one of the most stunning defeats ever absorbed
by the new nation.18 “Forty or fifty Negroes on horseback,” it was reported
breathlessly, “galloped up and alighted, tied their beasts and commenced
with horrid shouts and yells the butchery of the wounded, together with an
indiscriminate plunder . . . splitting open the heads of all who showed the
least signs of life, with their axes and knives.”19
The “Dade Massacre” left a deep imprint on the consciousness of Euro-
Americans in a manner that rivaled what befell George Custer a few decades
later. For it was in 1857 in Oregon that the influential George H. Williams
argued passionately against the prospect of allowing Negro slavery in his
new homeland. Why? “Eastward dwell numerous Indian tribes,” he warned,
“to whose welcome embrace a slave might fly and be safe,” and few had for-
gotten that “Major Dade’s command of 112 (except four) was slaughtered in
the Florida war” with the “Negroes outstripping the Indians in ferocity and
brutal treatment of the dead.”20
A few years after the Florida slaughter, Washington again had reason to be
outraged, as the now familiar duo of the Negro and the British Empire struck

again. On 7 November 1841 at 9 P.M. as a vessel, the Creole, filled with 135
slaves, made its way from Virginia to New Orleans, suddenly in the waters
Introduction: Negroes—“British in Their Hearts?” | 3