1775 (64 page)

War clouds rained on that possibility. News of Lexington and Concord
reached Williamsburg on April 29, nine days after Dunmore had inflamed local opinion by having British marines remove gunpowder from the provincial magazine. As relations with the governor went from bad to worse, several of the senior Virginia militia officers who had managed the October 10 defeat of the Shawnee at Point Pleasant—Dunmore himself had been miles from the fighting—began hypothesizing a 1774 plot: Had the ever-cagey Scot kept Virginia troops divided so that the Shawnee could overwhelm the southern force? Commanded by Patriot Andrew Lewis, its ranks included a number of officers who would go on to become Revolutionary colonels and generals.
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This seems unlikely. Dunmore, like many Virginians, was caught up in north-of-the-Ohio land speculation and flush with great ambitions, which probably explained his expedition.
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On the other hand, new plans may have been afoot by February, when Major Connolly visited Williamsburg and came away with instructions for rallying the Indians to the king’s cause once he had returned to Pittsburgh.

Whatever Dunmore’s 1774 motivations, by May and June his thoughts had turned to holding Virginia for a certain-to-be-grateful King George—and doing so with the help of enslaved blacks, indentured servants, and Ohio Valley and Great Lakes tribesmen. His first written reference to raising the Indians came in a May letter to Lord Dartmouth.
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However, in May anti-Dunmore Virginians on the West Augusta (Pittsburgh) Committee of Safety, distrusting the governor, took control in support of Patriot interests. By July, the Pennsylvania and Virginia congressional delegates in Philadelphia sent off a joint letter to Pittsburgh-area residents asking them to keep territorial claims from getting in the way of patriotic collaboration.
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Dunmore, though, could still open a few back doors to invasion. One of his last official acts in June was to announce the abandonment of Forts Dunmore (Pitt), Fincastle, and Blair. In July, Major Connolly, now openly taking London’s side, disbanded the Pittsburgh garrison. In August he joined Dunmore on board HMS
Fowey
near Williamsburg. After approving Connolly’s invasion scheme, the governor authorized him to take it to Boston for approval by Gage.
¹⁸

Gage did agree, but these ambitions soon came to naught. In November Connolly was caught by militia in western Maryland before he could reach Detroit, the invasion’s proposed departure point. Meanwhile, in September and October 1775, Virginians and Pennsylvanians working with the Middle Indian Department held a series of conferences, the Fort Pitt treaty councils, in which the Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo, and Wyandot pledged their neutrality, and a great belt of wampum symbolizing the American peace proposal was given.
¹⁹
There had been a few transgressions—Indians had crossed the Ohio River during the summer and burned Fort Blair to the ground—but the so-called Treaty of Fort Pitt was signed in October, and then it was loosely renewed at a 1776 meeting held by congressional agent George Morgan. The agreement came altogether undone only in 1777 after Cornstalk, the leading Shawnee chief, was murdered by American militia.
²⁰
Absent Morgan’s accomplishment, had an Indian war flamed along the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier in late 1776 while Washington was being defeated in New York and retreating across New Jersey, the need to split the few available American forces might have doomed a wobbly Revolution.

To supervise the Southern Indian Department, Congress had named multiple commissioners. Within this region, four tribes commanded attention—Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw—just as they did in Britain’s parallel Southern Indian Department. South Carolina, permitted to name three of the five commissioners, was the hub. The key player was George Galphin, a longtime trader (married to a Creek woman) who had property and interests in both South Carolina and Georgia. War with the Cherokee looked inevitable in 1775 and proved so in 1776. However, Galphin kept a second front from developing in Georgia under Creek auspices. Kenneth Coleman, author of
The American Revolution in Georgia,
gave credit to one man: “The Creeks tended to be mainly pro-British, but there was always a Galphin party in the nation.”
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By the summer of 1775, the South had several conflict zones. Foremost was the lengthy Cherokee frontier, stretching from far southwestern Virginia to northern Georgia. The second was the controversial Watauga settlement, in what is now eastern Tennessee. The third involved the Creek frontier in Georgia. Invasive white settlements were everywhere the critical provocation, but Patriot political management coped. As we have seen in
Chapter 6
, Whig strategists in the Carolinas turned the Cherokee threat into a white rallying point in the late 1775 “Snow Campaign” and again through sweeping military victories in 1776. Farther north, Dunmore’s
machinations also went for naught. In sum, British plans for raising the tribes along the Appalachian and southern frontiers were stymied—first by Patriot negotiators like Morgan and Galphin, but also by militia hammer blows against the Cherokee.

Blood eventually drenched the frontier in 1777 and 1778, but relatively little was shed in 1775, a year of quiet achievement.

Convicts and Indentured Servants: The Threat That Never Quite Materialized

Portions of North America were long-standing human dumping grounds. During the century before the Revolution, indentured servants, along with convicts—felons transported to the colonies from Britain—constituted a slight majority of the 300,000 emigrants to America. Such data, little known, are not a staple of genealogy shelves. However, of that surprising 51 percent, indentured servants made up two thirds, convicts one third.
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In 1775, moreover, both groups still represented a significant workforce element, disproportionately numerous in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Because somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 men were involved, many of them seriously disaffected, their geographic distribution became a strategic concern to Patriots and British strategists. This was especially true in the Chesapeake, where George Washington and John Murray, Lord Dunmore, represented two important poles of sensitivity.

Virginia’s Northern Neck, the territory between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, was home to both Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation and the tobacco colony’s highest ratio of indentured servants. Washington himself owned a dozen, and he worried about their flight.
²³
Dunmore, shrewd as well as blustery, held out freedom to both indentured servants and black slaves who would run away and enlist with the British. Among the servants who did was a housepainter indentured to Washington, who was injured skirmishing with Patriot forces in September 1775 and jailed in Williamsburg.
²⁴

To call indentured servants merely “disaffected” is probably an understatement. In most American colonies, their legal status was chattel—“property.” Even their unexpired terms were property, willable to heirs. Indeed, this definition persisted during the Revolution, because most courts tried to keep a “property” label on enlisted servants, to uphold owners’ rights to reimbursement for loss of services.
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In practical terms, purchasers often treated white indentured servants and convicts more or less similarly. After all, both were “bought” for specific terms of labor. Convicts were costlier, but they also owed a longer period of labor. Records in Baltimore, for example, showed convicts were 25 to 29 percent more expensive, but their terms of servitude were typically twice the average servant’s indenture.
²⁶
The labor ranged from demanding to brutal.

The case for most indentured servants and convicts disliking their owners and being ready to run requires blunt explanation. Treatment was typically bad from the start. According to one scholar, “many experienced unrelieved horror from the time they boarded the vessel to the completion of their terms of indenture.” Often they were “sold in the same manner as horses or cows in our market or fair.” Sometimes, to find buyers, sellers drove the indentured through the country “like a parcel of sheep until they can sell them to advantage.”
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By one British official’s estimate, 50 percent of convict servants were dead inside seven years.
²⁸
According to Pennsylvania historian David Waldstreicher in
Runaway America,
“much available evidence suggests that the risks to and possibilities for profit drove masters to treat their bondsmen with a cruelty and lack of care more often associated with the slave societies of the Caribbean and early South.”
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Ironically, black slaves, selling for roughly three times as much, often got better treatment because they were a lifetime investment. With indentured servants, an employer’s optimal return lay in obtaining as much sweat and output as possible over four, five, or seven years.
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Social historian Gary Nash persuasively notes that “most depictions of early America as a garden of opportunity airbrush indentured servants out of the picture while focusing on the minority who arrived free.”
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Upon finishing their terms, the 80 to 90 percent of indentured servants who had not managed to run away nevertheless became hard to track. By one account, three quarters eventually wound up on public support; another expert concluded that most of them, four out of five, simply did not amount to much.
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Victims of a harsh environment or not, many or most would have been resentful individuals. The convict and ex-convict element had more interesting origins. Some were political. Still, between 1718 and 1769, two thirds of all Old Bailey felons went to America, and convicts may have represented as much as a quarter of British emigrants.
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Commerce, not politics, explained most of why white indentured servants and transported convicts wound up in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. We can begin with the convicts. Between 1718 and 1775, roughly
50,000 were sentenced by judges to transportation to North America from England, Scotland, and Ireland. The British government thereupon turned them over to profit-seeking private merchants. These men arranged the convicts’ shipment, usually to ports in Maryland and Virginia. Although provincial authorities in Williamsburg and Annapolis protested angrily and repeatedly, the Crown disallowed any kind of local interference. Benjamin Franklin famously suggested that in return Britain should be sent American rattlesnakes.
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In fact, willing purchasers abounded. Demand was high in the region for skilled and semiskilled white labor, even of the convict variety, and ships returning to Britain from the Chesapeake could count on a large volume of tobacco and grain exports from both colonies. The return cargo was the bigger lure. “Here they [merchants] may barter [servants] for tobacco,” one observer explained, “upon which they have an immense return of profit.”
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As for the 15,000 or so convicts arriving from Ireland, many seem to have wound up in Philadelphia. Thus the concentration in the three colonies.

Indentured servants were distributed somewhat more widely. Even so, about 70 percent departing from England in the early 1770s went to Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. According to historian Bernard Bailyn, “Both demand and supply seemed to rise constantly, especially after 1765 and particularly in Maryland, where there was a building boom in the early 1770s.”
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A combined head count can be ventured. As of 1775, the North American colonies may have had some 15,000 convicts, former convicts, and runaway convicts. Of these, the two Chesapeake colonies and Pennsylvania probably held 12,000. Present or former indentured servants were more numerous—40,000 or so—and Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland likely accounted for 25,000 to 30,000. A combined three-colony total of 35,000 to 40,000 males and females seems plausible.
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Two thirds to three quarters of the combined head count—25,000 or more—would have been males of military age, which is the nubbin. Unusually large numbers of indentured servants seem to have emigrated from Britain between late 1773 and early 1776. Probably because of the hard times in Britain in 1773 and 1774, young men from all over, unable to find work, gravitated to London, with many eventually signing indentures. According to Bailyn, “One well-informed merchant guessed that 6,000 were sold in Baltimore alone in 1773–1774; according to another, there were more servant arrivals in Philadelphia than in any one year since the founding of the
colony…No one in fact knew precisely how many servants were arriving, being sold, and being absorbed into the colonial communities.”
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It is easy to imagine many of the men arriving in 1774 or 1775 being caught up in a vocational vortex: first, escape from an employer; then military enlistment, followed by desertion or capture; reenlistment in the other side’s army; and so on. Sheer opportunism would have been common.

In 1775, Virginia’s Third Convention had forbidden the military to recruit servants without a master’s permission. However, by mid-1777, General Washington believed that Virginia Continental regiments were full of convict servants
sold
to recruiters.
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When recruitment was difficult, servants and deserters provided an easy solution. In Maryland, one colonel later explained to Patriot Governor Johnson that “so general a desertion prevails among the servants enlisted into our Army that I have ordered my officers to forbear enlisting any more of them, seeing that it was only recruiting for the enemy not for us.”
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The British, too, had problems with desertions from the Volunteers of Ireland, and the Philadelphia-raised Roman Catholic Volunteers were disbanded after a few years.

By 1774 and 1775, more and more of the demand for servants in the middle colonies lay outside the cities, “in the innumerable country villages of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia,” and especially in burgeoning industries: iron, with its blast furnaces, forges, and slitting mills; and construction, with its carpenters, masons, bricklayers, and millwrights.
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Politically, both of these booming vocations were Patriot dominated—iron working, as we saw in
Chapter 4
; and construction, which thrived not just on residential building but on the westward land emphasis of the Patriot gentry. George Washington, for one, bought indentured servants to work on his Ohio River properties. Britain’s huge transatlantic slave trade might be in the hands of Liverpool Tories, but North American “Soul Drivers”—the men who managed and implemented the trade in white indentured servants—were in many cases prominent Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania Whigs and Patriots. Thus their concern about being targeted.