In an recent exchange about the stellar new Canadian television series “Book of Negroes,” based on a novel, which is itself based on a set of historical documents listing former slaves, and soon to be broadcast as a miniseries on BET, an acquaintance on Facebook asked me about the men and women from Williamsburg, Virginia, whose names appear it in. This post is by way of an answer.
They don’t look like much. At first glance, one might dismissively confuse them as 18th-century merchant ledgers of some sort, listing goods and services rendered rather than people. But the fact that the pages do mark people who were once goods, but returned to being individuals again by a British government that kept a promise made in 1779 for freedom to all enslaved men and women who made it to their lines during the war against the American patriots, makes the manuscript ledgers that make up the “Book of Negroes” nothing short of remarkable.
The books were created in 1783, during the British evacuation of New York City, the last royal hold on what had become the United States of America. At the time, the city was teeming with former slaves who were fearful for their tenuous liberty and their former owners whom were keen to have them returned to a lifetime of servitude. A few slaveowners, such as Carter Braxton–a reluctant signer of the Declaration of Independence–sent agents to seek them out and attempt to return them. When Braxton’s agent, Williamsburg merchant Robert Prentis, found a few and attempted to leave New York with them, another Virginian told him not to bother. Beverly Robinson, the brother of a former speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses, was in Manhattan, too, but in another capacity–as a British officer, the commander of the largest loyalist regiment raised in the American colonies. Robinson, who had lived in the Hudson Valley for a time before the war, warned Prentis that the British high command would stand behind the Philipsburgh Proclamation, issued by Henry Clinton in June 1779. Clinton, the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, made it official British policy that no one could claim another person as his property within British lines and all former slaves were free to seek whatever occupation, choose whatever life, they wanted to. Robinson informed Prentis essentially what Charles Cornwallis had told Virginia governor Thomas Nelson in 1781: slaveowners could enter Yorktown to look for slaves and former slaves were free to leave with their former owners, but only if the former slaves chose to. Otherwise, they weren’t going anywhere they did not want to go. Prentis left New York empty-handed, and Braxton admitted that independence might have been a hasty mistake.
The books themselves were generated in 1783, after the terms of the Treaty of Paris were agreed to, granting American independence. In it, an important provision, insisted upon by the Americans in Article VII, was that “any negroes or other property of the American inhabitants” would not be taken away by the British when they left. To the Americans, that meant slaves would be returned, of course. But to the British, the key words in the treaty were “other property,” and because of Clinton’s proclamation, the former slaves were people, not property at all, and therefore not covered by the article. No matter how many times George Washington appealed to Clinton’s successor, Guy Carleton, for the return of the slaves, the answer was always the same: No. But what to do with them? Thousands had found their way to New York City, along with loyalists and what was left of the British army. So the decision was made to evacuate them, along with everyone else, to other British colonies in Canada and the Caribbean. Some went to Britain. Most went north, to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Others were less fortunate and sent south, to the Bahamas and other islands in the Caribbean.
As the books record a striking amount of information about each individual, we know that almost 1000 Virginians were among them. Clerks listed each of them as they boarded their assigned vessels to leave. Consequently, we know what they looked like, how old they were, where they had lived, whom had once owned them, and when they left. We know that some took their liberty in 1775, at the very beginning of the conflict, when then-governor Lord Dunmore issued his famous proclamation offering freedom to slaves whom would fight the patriots. A number of others went in 1779, during a major, but brief, British invasion of the Chesapeake, not long after Clinton’s proclamation was issued and became widely known. But most seem to have joined the British armies of Robinson, Cornwallis, and Benedict Arnold in 1781, when many free and enslaved Virginians thought the war lost by the patriots as much of the Old Dominion was returned to royal control. Lord Dunmore had even been ordered back across the Atlantic to resume his old post (he was on a ship headed to Virginia when Cornwallis surrendered). And we know that several, such as 20-year-old Deborah–“stout wench, thick lips, pock marked,” had belonged to George Washington.
At least 14 came from the old capital of Williamsburg, including one owned by George Wythe. Their entries from the Book of Negroes are transcribed below. Of their fates, we know almost nothing, but their names deserve to be remembered and their stories to be told. And like all good history, the sources beg more questions than reveal answers.
Williamsburg in the Book of Negroes
For more on the historical context of the Book of Negroes, I highly recommend Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. For a terrific website that offers considerable access to a number of primary sources, including the Book of Negroes, visit Black Loyalist. There are two copies of the original texts, one set in Canada and the other in Britain. It is from the latter copy that I made the above transcriptions.