Christine Hughes
Dissertation Prospectus
August 27, 2007
Committee: Dr. Rosemarie Zagarri
Dr. Jane T. Censer
Dr. Harold D. Langley
The War Within the War of 1812:
The Role of the Slave as Property, Pawn, and Agent
Statement of Problem
Ample literature abounds on the history of the War of 1812 and of slavery during the
second and third decades of the nineteenth century——but as separate entities. Most historians of
that war have chosen to write traditional political, diplomatic, economic, or military studies.
Indeed, many dispute that slavery was a contested issue in the period from the closing of the
American slave trade in 1808 to the beginning of the Missouri controversy in 1819. Matthew
Mason’s recent work, by focusing on the rhetorical battle that Americans and British waged to
claim the title of liberator, convincingly situates the slavery debate during the war, thus
broadening the accepted historiography.i Yet, no comprehensive work has investigated the
triangular relationship that developed among slaves, white southerners, and the British when
Great Britain’s forces blockaded and raided America’s coast during the War of 1812.
This dissertation will ascertain the repercussions in the United States and the British
Empire of American slaves fleeing to their masters’ enemy. By bringing slavery to the forefront
of the war in the South, I hope to reorient the historiographical frameworks of paternalism and
slave resistance in a wartime setting. For white southerners, I seek to compare their reaction to
the perceived and real threat of slave flight and retribution. For the British, I will determine if
twenty-five years of antislavery agitation in England had humanitarian ramifications in their
prosecution of the war and treatment of the black refugees. For the absconding slaves, I will
study their roles as pawns and agents.
The South confronted two foes when Congress declared war on Great Britain in 1812—
—the British and its own slaves. The British decided from the beginning of the conflict to fight a
diversionary war in the Chesapeake Bay area that would relieve pressure on the northern theater.
Their strategists contemplated no territorial acquisitions in the bay. Blockading American
commerce and harassing coastal ports and residences, as well as protecting British trade
constituted the limited military objective. The presence of a substantial slave population
challenged both antagonists to adapt their wartime policies. The British activity in the South
compelled American slaveholders to meet the dual threat from an external and internal foe for a
second time in thirty years, paradoxically both weakening and strengthening slavery.
On the one hand, the British menace exposed the owners’ economic and psychological
vulnerability, while on the other, the response by southerners and the Madison administration to
the wartime peril resulted in efforts to reinforce slavery. Immediate, county-sponsored, defensive
measures were joined with state legislation to offset British depredations. Wartime and postwar
(overt and covert) missions undertaken by disgruntled masters or at the behest of Secretary of
State James Monroe, sought to cajole the absconders to return and demonstrate British
maltreatment. By proving British perfidy during this war, Monroe in 1815 hoped to end slaves’
attempts to flee in future wars, thus ensuring the institution’s stability. What motivated slaveowners and the Madison administration to seek the return of some of the refugee slaves during
and immediately after the war? Compensation would have been sufficient if they sought only
economic restitution. But these white Americans were defending not just a southern labor
2
system, but a southern way of life. This was not just a defense of an economically necessary evil,
but also a proslavery defense of a positive good. Just as masters tracked down their runaways
during peacetime, they also sought out absconders during the war to set an example of the futility
of this form of resistance for those who stayed behind. By proving the enemy’s re-enslavement
of fleeing slaves, the proslavery partisans sought to stifle future loses during this war and the
next.
Historians have generally dated the earliest proslavery arguments to the 1820s.ii I
believe that some of the measures taken to effect the return of runaways indicates that a
consistent proslavery stance existed in the South before one was articulated by elite writers. The
U.S. National Archives’s Record Group 76 (Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and
Arbitrations), largely ignored by historians, contains slave-owners’ depositions, lists of black
refugees, and copies of Royal Navy log books that were used by the Anglo-American arbitration
commission to determine compensation for slaves lost to the British. By mining material gleaned
from this record group in conjunction with British and American after-action reports, newspaper
accounts, legislation, and personal papers, I will construct a database of owners and slaves that
will provide a more rounded depiction of the three actors. No previous work exists that
characterizes these slave-owners (location, size of slaveholding force, numbers lost, actions
taken to prevent losses, and efforts made at retrieval or compensation.) Such a study will
ascertain if small and large plantations were equally subject to British depredations and if there
were any distinctions in their response.
Another lacunae in the literature is an analysis of the reactions of non-slave-owners to the
British incursions. There is a monolithic view of the southern response to British raids that
discounts class divisions between masters and non-slave-owners.iii To address this
3
oversimplification, I propose studying newspaper accounts, militia and slave-patrol records, and
legislative debates to see if all southern whites supported the onerous defensive measures
designed to secure slaves from fleeing. I hope to discern whether class fissures developed over
the course of the war.
The historical treatment of the slave’s perspective has also been superficial. No one has
undertaken a demographic study of the slaves who fled using the wealth of information
contained in Record Group 76. Anecdotal evidence exists that many of the slaves escaped in
family or kinship groups. This pattern, if sustainable, differs from the typical peacetime model of
single, young male runaways. While several recent works have focused on the slaves’ postAmerican diasporas to Canada and Trinidad, none concentrates on their lives when slaves
(personalities, occupations, families, etc.) The owners’ depositions will provide some
information and I will also search for collections of personal papers as well as newspaper
accounts. Such demographic analysis would add to the historiography of slave culture,
community, and resistance.
The British perspective is perhaps the most elusive. What motivated the British to
encourage American slaves to flee during the War of 1812? The British were pragmatists whose
overarching goal was to punish America for its declaration of war while England was engaged in
a continental war against France. Freeing the slaves was a weapon in Britain’s arsenal, not
necessarily a reflection of the nation’s pervasive humanitarianism. However, as the war evolved,
so too did British policy towards slaves. Initial directives from the War Office prohibited inciting
racial insurrection against whites, but left unspecified what to do with runaway slaves. Without
guidance, theater commanders confronted the fleeing slaves on an ad hoc basis, while writing to
Whitehall for further counsel. Throughout the war British commanders, War Office ministers,
4
and peace treaty negotiators grappled with using absconding slaves as a military weapon and
determining what their fate should be.
While pragmatism dominated British military policy-making, a heightened sense of
humanitarianism pervaded Great Britain as a result of the twenty-year struggle that ended in the
1807 abolishment of the slave trade. British historians often relegate the War of 1812 to a mere
sideshow next to the Napoleonic Wars; so too do they overlook that war in discussing British
antislavery attitudes in the years between the end of the slave trade and abolishment of slavery in
1833. Political and altruistic arguments persuaded Parliament to ban the slave trade. Faced with a
growing war weariness among the laboring and middle classes, Britain’s oligarchal government
reasoned that abolishing the slave trade would inspire the public and rekindle flagging support
for the long war with France.
In this same vein, I wish to explore Britain’s pragmatic and humanitarian relationship
with American slaves during and after the War of 1812 and determine if a generation of
reformist activity in both countries influenced Britain’s actions. The British strategy during the
war drew on tactics used during the American Revolution, but was modified in light of three
decades of changing social attitudes towards slavery. I seek to determine if a transatlantic
connection existed between the policies adopted by British ministers and naval commanders
towards blacks during the War of 1812 and British diplomatic efforts to ban the international
slave trade in 1814-15. I will research the private and public correspondence of the British
officials engaged in diplomacy and war planning, as well as that of the in-theater military and
naval commanders; the correspondence of influential abolitionist leaders; British antislavery
organizations such as the influential African Institution; parliamentary debates; and British
newspapers and journals. From these sources I will seek evidence linking British treatment of
5
absconding slaves to British diplomatic efforts during 1814-15 to internationalize its slave-trade
ban with prohibitions in the Treaty of Paris with France and the Congress of Vienna with
Europe.
The presence of an enslaved population in the South during the War of 1812 transformed
the Anglo-American conflict into a triangular war in which the American slaves were property,
pawns, and agents. This war coincided with a transition in British abolitionism from a campaign
against the domestic slave trade to opposition to the European slave trade. For southern
slaveholders the war demanded a defense of their peculiar institution; for the British it meant
assuming the image of liberator.
Historiography
Research on slavery and the War of 1812 must begin with a study of the British slave
policy during the American Revolution. Some of the same issues that surfaced during that earlier
conflict suffused the later war. The works of Sylvia Frey have superseded the pioneering
research of Benjamin Quarles. The latter stressed blacks’ participation in the rebellion as both
rebels and loyalists; extolled their heroic contributions; and optimistically found that “the colored
people of America benefited from the irreversible commitment of the new nation to the
principles of liberty and equality.” Frey is less sanguine about the war representing a social
revolution for blacks. Her extensive research of military correspondence exposed Britain’s deepseated racism that reflected the social milieu of the time. British commanders armed fleeing
blacks with shovels and made them laborers rather than soldiers. They discarded them to their
masters when they became liabilities, kept them as servants, or sold them. Frey finds that
southerners joined the independence movement because they feared that the “specter of
6
emancipation” might become reality if the British chose (which they did not) to implement
freedom as policy. Frey concludes that the “revolutionary war in the South thus became a war
about slavery”——a war that strengthened southerners’ desire to defend their peculiar
institution.iv Frey’s book addresses issues of British motivation and southern response during the
American Revolution that will serve as a useful model for constructing a triangular study of
blacks, white Americans, and British during the War of 1812.
The literature on slave resistance during the second war for independence encompasses
brief mentions within standard political/military accounts; regional studies devoted to the black
experience during the war; and extended treatment of specific topics within larger studies.
Traditional studies of the War of 1812 usually gloss over racial issues, and works on slavery
relegate the war to the periphery. Conventional works, such as those written in the 1960s by
Patrick C. T. White and Reginald Horsman; in the 1970s by John K. Mahon; and in the 1980s by
J. C. A. Stagg and Donald R. Hickey, emphasize the themes of national honor, sovereignty, and
the defense of neutral rights.v
The underreported story of black flight from coastal areas, as the Royal Navy’s vessels
infested American waters, first received extensive scholarly treatment in the 1970s with an
article by Frank A. Cassell. Focusing on slaves from the Chesapeake Bay area and studying both
British military records and local newspaper accounts, Cassell depicts slaves who independently
chose to flee to the enemy’s squadron rather than continue living in servitude. Other writers have
expanded on Cassell’s work in additional studies on the Chesapeake and other geographic areas.
Mary A. Bullard’s short but well-researched piece on the British occupation of Cumberland
Island, Georgia, at the end of the war uses local, British Admiralty, and official U.S. claims
commission documentation to describe the imbroglio over the peace treaty terms regarding
7
absconding slaves. Writing both articles and a book on the war in the Chesapeake, Christopher T.
George finds the British commanders opportunistic in their relations with the runaways, and the
blacks assertive in either fleeing to the enemy or enlisting in the American ranks.vi The regional
studies by Cassell, Bullard, and George are important contributions, but their focus is more
British than American (white or black).
A recent scholarly book that incorporates the military events along the Gulf with a
comprehensive study of the expansion of slavery during the early national period is Adam
Rothman’s Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005).
Rothman devotes a chapter to the “crisis” that the War of 1812 represented for the residents of
the Deep South in confronting a British foe who brought black troops to the Gulf theater and
enlisted local American slaves in pursuit of military objectives. Rothman provides a credible
account of the fear engendered by the British invasion at New Orleans with extensive use of
plantation records, but his insights into British racial policy are limited by not using British
Admiralty and War Office records. His narrative concludes that the successful outcome of the
War of 1812 in the Gulf region secured that area as “slave country.” While viewing slavery from
the slaveholder’s perspective, Rothman ably portrays the agency of those hundreds of slaves who
resisted bondage by choosing freedom with the British.vii
Historians such as Cassell, Bullard, George, and Rothman stop their explorations of slave
militancy at the water’s edge. Often with only a short postscript, they leave the stories of the fate
of these American resistors to others to fathom. Several writers have followed the 1812 diaspora.
The publication by C. B. Fergusson in 1948 of a volume of documents relating to those African
Americans who came to Nova Scotia during and after the War of 1812 reveals this important
facet of Canadian history. Writing in the 1970s, John N. Grant weaves the facts surrounding the
8
three waves of black migrations to Nova Scotia that occurred from 1775 to 1815 into an
informative article, and Robin Winks’s tome, The Blacks in Canada, traces the refugees’
resettlement and harsh experience there. The recent work by Harvey A. Whitfield revises
Winks’s interpretation, mitigating the problems encountered by the blacks in their new homeland
and emphasizes instead their successful adaptation. Another writer, John McNish Weiss, has
compiled information about the recruitment, organization, service, disbandment, and settlement
of the group of African-American runaways whom the British formed into a Corps of Colonial
Marines during the War of 1812. These men and their families migrated in 1815 and 1816 to
Trinidad where their struggle for freedom ended.viii My focus remains with the untold story of
the slaves’ pre-freedom experiences, but these studies of their post-war journeys often provide
important glimpses of their former lives.
Recognizing the historiographical need for a book-length treatment of slave flight, John
Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger intend that their Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the
Plantation (1999) will fill that gap in the literature on black resistance. Using findings derived
from computer-generated data of runaway notices in twenty newspapers from North Carolina,
South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana, as well as petitions to southern legislatures
and county courts, the authors confirm the already-established perception that the majority of
absconders were solitary males in their teens and twenties. Their work is not useful, however, for
those seeking to compare the character of peacetime with wartime runaways. Instead of
segregating the war years, the authors compiled data for two time periods——1790 to 1816 and
1838 to 1860. Their work does not categorize who fled during the War of 1812. Evidence
abounds that a significant number of women and children, normally underrepresented among
9
peacetime runaways, fled to the British during both wars with that enemy. My study will further
refine the characterization of wartime runaways.ix
Some scholars in their multi-year works on slavery have mentioned the War of 1812 and
the slaves who fled to the British. Don E. Fehrenbacher’s The Slaveholding Republic: An
Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (2001) discusses the war in a
chapter on foreign relations, thus privileging political history——national and diplomatic.
According to this author, the pro-slavery administrations of Madison and Monroe succeeded in
promoting property and treaty rights in challenging Britain’s interpretation of the clause in the
Treaty of Ghent respecting the return of the slaves. Fehrenbacher’s analysis of the negotiations
with the British is superficial and incomplete, as he neglects to address the State Department’s
post-war, secret missions to persuade the refugee slaves, whom the British transported to the
West Indies and Halifax, to return to their masters. Further research into this activist diplomacy
may offer clues about the South’s views on slavery. x Matthew Mason’s recent work on the war
de-emphasizes the military side of the conflict and focuses instead on the politics of slavery by
using contemporary literary sources. Mason argues that the transitional nature of the War of
1812 period forced southerners to face the “ideological perplexity” of standing “on a middle
ground between necessary evil and positive good.”xi I will buttress Mason’s rhetorical
framework for an emerging pro-slavery ideology with evidence of the practical ramifications of
the War of 1812 on southern culture.
Another work that addresses the slaveholders’ changing views on slavery during the first
fifteen years of the nineteenth century is Jeffrey R. Young’s Domesticating Slavery: The Master
Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837. Agreeing with Mason that this was a period in
flux, Young discerns in these years a blending of the “patriarchal authority” of the eighteenth-
10
century slaveholder with the next century’s “affectionate, paternalistic concern” for one’s slaves.
Slaveholders came to the realization by 1815 that they needed a “world view” based on
“plantation domesticity” that “provided both an answer to antislavery reformers and a refuge
from escalating fears of slave rebellion.” Young only briefly relates that slaveholders feared that
the British, their slaves’ allies, challenged the South’s labor system. This same theme of southern
defensiveness, bordering on paranoia from outside agitators (the British or American antislavery
reformers), can be found in Merton L. Dillon’s Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their
Allies 1619–1865.xii Linking concrete events, such as the slaves’ running to the British during
the War of 1812, with mainstream histories that treat the broader themes of politics and ideology
may advance our understanding of the institution of slavery.
Rebalancing the historical scales with studies of Native and African Americans, women,
and the lower classes has highlighted much of the work written during the last thirty years on
early America. Investigation of all facets of slavery has proliferated during these years, but the
subfield of slave flight during wartime has not generated as much research as other forms of
resistance. Additionally, while Benjamin Quarles (1961), Sylvia R. Frey (1991), and Simon
Schama (2006) have written important tomes on African Americans during the American
Revolution, the War of 1812 still awaits a comprehensive, comparative treatment of the enemy
from without juxtaposed with the enemy from within.xiii
While these studies vary in their treatment of slavery, none fully addresses the impact
that British racial attitudes had on the institution of slavery in America. Research on British
abolitionism and American slavery is generally devoid of any transatlantic link as relates to the
War of 1812. In addition, works regarding the genesis of proslavery arguments among
southerners have neglected the example of Secretary of State James Monroe’s secret missions to
11
the West Indies and Halifax as an early case of a traditional nationalist espousing a southern
defense of slavery. This dissertation will explore how the British policy of accepting black
enlistees and emigrants, at first grudgingly and then with open arms, caused such consternation
among the southerners that it stirred the national government to adopt a proslavery stance in
seeking the slaves’ return.
Many historians have characterized the War of 1812 as the forgotten conflict because the
treaty that ended it returned the opponents to a status quo antebellum. Geographically this was
true, but the departure of over 3,600 slaves in Royal Navy ships at the close of the war was a
tangible reminder of the South’s constant vulnerability to its internal enemy. The War of 1812
was a transitional time, marked by the closing years of the early republic and the onset of the
antebellum period. Southerners found themselves in transition also, balancing between
paternalism and profits in managing their economic and social life. Viewing the War of 1812
through the prism of slavery may shed light on whether historians have overlooked the
psychological impact of Britain’s racial warfare as a factor in strengthening slavery in the South.
Did the war change the institution of slavery in the South? Did Britain’s enlistment of American
slaves as black soldiers affect northern, southern, and British views toward slavery? Further
studies of the triangular ramifications of American slaves fleeing to the enemy during the war—
—from the vantage of the slaves, slave and nonslaveholding southerners, the British naval and
military commanders on station, and the leadership in London——may provide some
answers.xiv
12
Method and Theory
My dissertation will blend social and cultural history with political, diplomatic, and
military history. It will be a multidimensional engagement of both public and private realms. By
devising a database of slaveholders and their absconding slaves, I hope to ascertain the extent of
the British threat to America’s shoreline during the War of 1812. I will research traditional
manuscript collections of leading personalities, British and American, for their views on slavery.
But I also will attempt a grassroots examination of selected counties to determine the short- and
long-term consequences of the British threat at the local level. Once I plot what areas were
affected, I will address the response by the individual slave-owners, and the local, state, and
national officials. This study will compare the responses by the earliest affected states, Virginia
and Maryland, with the later ones, Georgia and Louisiana, to see if their respective legislatures
enhanced their slave codes during and immediately after the war and whether residents with and
without slaves were united against the threat or whether class divisions surfaced. In addition, I
will follow Britain’s reaction to its role as liberator by extending the recent work on British
abolitionism by Christopher L. Brown to the War of 1812 era.xv
13
Christine Hughes
Dissertation Prospectus
August 27, 2007
APPENDIX A: Selected Bibliography
Manuscript Sources and Legislative Records
Ann Arbor, Mich.
Clements Library, University of Michigan
Robert Barrie Papers (microfilm)
Thomas Brisbane Papers
John W. Croker Papers (microfilm)
Henry Goulburn Papers (microfilm)
Melville Papers (microfilm)
Baltimore, Md.
Maryland Historical Society Library, Manuscripts Department
Memoir of General John Stricker, MS 794
War of 1812, MS 1846
Charlottesville, Va.
Alderman Library, University of Virginia
Barbour Family
14
Nicholas Wilson Cary
College Park, Md.
National Archives and Records Administration II
Record Group 59. General Records of the Department of State (microfilm)
Record Group 76. Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations
Record Group 107. Records of the Office of the Secretary of War (microfilm)
Durham, N.C.
Perkins Library, Duke University
James Barbour Papers
Wilberforce Papers
Edinburgh, Scotland
National Library of Scotland
Alexander F. I. Cochrane Papers (for any documents that the Library of Congress does
not have on microfilm)
Fredericksburg, Va.
James Monroe Law Office Museum and Memorial Library
James Monroe Letters, 1781-1830 (Lawrence Hoes Collection, microfilm)
15
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia Archives & Records Management
Record Group 1
Book of Negroes
Dispatches from Secretary of State to Lieutenant Governor
MG 15, Misc., War of 1812 Blacks
A List of Negroes in possession of the British Forces in the State of Georgia,
under the command of Rear Admiral Cockburn with the period of their being taken, and the
period of their removal from Cumberland Island, or the Waters adjacent to the same.
Kew, England
The National Archives
Admiralty (for any documents that the Library of Congress does not have on microfilm)
Foreign Office (if not at the Library of Congress)
FO 95/9/2, Robert Stewart Castlereagh, “Abstract of papers selected in 1814
regarding the slave trade.”
War Office (if not at the Library of Congress)
Journals of the House of Commons
Journals of the House of Lords
Parliamentary Papers
War Office 6, Secretary of State/Out-Letters (some selected photostats available at the
Library of Congress)
16
London, England
British Library
Bathurst Papers
Dropmore (Grenville Papers)
New Orleans, La.
The Historic New Orleans Collection
Slave Evaluation Report
James Stirling Memorandum
Jacques Philippe Villere Papers
New York, N.Y.
New York Public Library
James Barbour Papers
James Monroe Papers (microfilm)
Philadelphia, Pa.
Pennsylvania Historical Society
Gratz Collection
Richmond, Va.
Library of Virginia
Commonwealth of Virginia. Council of State Journals, 1812-14
_____. Executive Communications
17
_____. Executive Letter Book
_____. Executive Papers
County records
Savannah, Ga.
Georgia Historical Society
Forman-Bryan-Screven Papers, 1797–1901. Folder 2: letters from Dr. William Baldwin to
General Thomas M. Forman (1813–1814)
Minutes of the Council of the City of Savannah
William Jones Papers, 1809–1839. Collection 448
Virginia Historical Society
James Monroe Papers, 1788-1830
Washington, D.C.
Library of Congress
James Madison Papers (microfilm)
James Monroe Papers (microfilm)
Papers of George Cockburn. (microfilm)
Papers of Alexander F. I. Cochrane. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh (microfilm
copies at Library of Congress).
Great Britain. Admiralty (Foreign Copying Project, microfilm)
Great Britain. War Office (Foreign Copying Project). Photostats of WO 1/141-144,
“Expedition to the Southern Coasts of North America, 1814–1817
Great Britain. Foreign Office (Foreign Copying Project, photostats)
National Archives and Records Administration I
Record Group 45. Naval Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library.
(microfilm)
18
Williamsburg, Va.
Swem Library, College of William and Mary
James Monroe Papers
Newspapers
Alexandria, Va. Gazette
Alexandria, Va. Daily Advertiser, Commercial and Political
Baltimore, Md. Niles’ Register
Edinburgh, Scotland. Edinburgh Review
Fredricksburg, Va. Virginia Herald
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Acadian Recorder
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Journal
London, England. Quarterly Review
London, England. Times
Norfolk, Va. Argus
Norfolk, Va. Gazette and Public Ledger
Norfolk, Va. Norfolk Herald
Richmond, Va. Daily Compiler
Richmond, Va. Enquirer
Richmond, Va. Virginia Argus
Richmond, Va. Virginia Patriot
Washington, D.C. National Intelligencer
Published Primary Sources
Adams, John Quincy. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from
1795 to 1848. Edited by Charles Francis Adams. 12 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,
1874-77.
African Institution (London, England). [Fifth-Tenth] Report[s] of the Directors of the African
Institution, Read at the General Meeting, Held on the [various dates, 1811-16]. London:
Ellerton and Henderson, 1811-1816.
American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United
States. Class 1, Foreign Relations. 6 vols.; Class V. Military Affairs. 7 vols.; Class VI,
Naval Affairs. 4 vols.; Class IX. Claims. 1 vol. Washington, D.C., 1832–61.
Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles
Ball, a Black Man. 1836. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.
19
[Barrett, Robert J., R.N.]. “Naval Recollections of the Late American War. I.” United Service
Journal 149 (April 1841): 455-67.
Carter, Clarence, ed. Territorial Papers of the United States. 26 vols. Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1934.
[Castlereagh, Viscount]. Correspondence, Despatches, and other Papers, of Viscount
Castlereagh. Edited by Charles W. Vane. Military and Diplomatic, 3d ser., 4 vols.
London: John Murray, 1853.
Catterall, Helen Tunnicliff, and James J. Hayden, eds. Judicial Cases Concerning American
Slavery and the Negro. 5 vols. 1926-37. Reprint, Buffalo, New York: W.S. Hein, 1968.
[Chamier, Frederick, R.N.] The Life of a Sailor by a Captain in the Navy. 2 vols. New York: J. &
J. Harper, 1833.
[Codrington, Edward]. Memoir of the Life of Admiral Sir Edward Codrington. Edited by his
daughter Lady Bourchier. London: Longmans, Green, 1873.
Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. ed. Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents, 17891829. 3 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978.
Documents Furnished by the British Government Under The Third Article of the Convention of
St. Petersburg, And Bayly’s List of Slaves And Of Public And Private Property Remaining
On Tangier Island And On Board H.B.M. Ships of War, After The Ratification Of The
Treaty of Ghent. Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1827.
Egerton, Hugh Edward, ed. The Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American
Loyalists 1783 to 1785 Being the Notes of Mr. Daniel Parker Coke, M.P., One of the
Commissioners During That Period. 1915. Reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1971.
Faust, Drew Gilpen, ed. The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South,
1830-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
Georgia. A Compilation of the Laws of the State of Georgia, Passed by the Legislature since the
Year 1810 to the Year 1819, Inclusive.... Compiled by Lucius Q.C. Lamar. Augusta: T.S.
Hannon, 1821.
Great Britain. Parliament. The [Hansard’s] Parliamentary Debates. London: T.C. Hansard, 182029.
Historical Manuscripts Commission. Report on the Manuscripts of Earl Bathurst Preserved at
Cirencester Park. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1923.
Latour, Arsène Lacarrière. Historical Memoir of the War in West Florida and Louisiana in 181415. Edited with an introduction by Gene A. Smith. Gainesville, Fl.: Historic New Orleans
Collection and University Press of Florida, 1999.
Lovell, William Stanhope. Personal Narrative of Events, From 1799 to 1815, with Anecdotes. 2d
ed. London: William Allen & Co., 1879. (There is also a revised edition, From Trafalgar
to the Chesapeake: Adventures of an Officer in Nelson’s Navy. Annapolis, Md.: Naval
Institute Press, 2003.
Madison, James. The Papers of James Madison. Edited by William T. Hutchinson, William M.E.
Rachal, Charles F. Hobson, and Robert A. Rutland. 17 vols to date. Chicago and
Charlottesville: University of Chicago and University of Virginia Presses, 1962Madison, James. The Writings of James Madison. Edited by Gaillard Hunt. 9 vols. New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900-10.
Manning, William R. Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Canadian Relations,
1784-1860. 4 vols. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
1940-45.
20
Monroe, James. The Papers of James Monroe: A Documentary History of the Presidential Tours
of James Monroe, 1817, 1818, 1819. Vol. 2. Edited by Daniel Preston and Marlena C.
DeLong. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.
_____. The Papers of James Monroe: Selected Correspondence and Papers, 1776–1794. Vol. 1.
Edited by Daniel Preston and Marlena C. DeLong. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
2006.
_____. The Writings of James Monroe. Edited by Stanislaus Murray Hamilton. 7 vols. New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898-1903.
Napier, Lt. Gen. Sir William. Life and Opinions of General Sir James Napier, G.C.B., 4 vols.
London: John Murray, 1857.
Rowland, Dunbar, ed. Official Letter Books of W.C.C. Claiborne, 1801-1816. 6 vols. Jackson,
Miss., 1917.
Schmidt, Fredrika Teute, and Barbara Ripel Wilhelm. “Early Proslavery Petitions in Virginia.”
William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd ser., 30 (January 1973): 133-46.
Schweninger, Loren, ed. The Southern Debate over Slavery: Volume 1: Petitions to Southern
Legislatures, 1787-1864. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Scribner, Robert L. and Brent Tarter, eds. Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence.
Vol. VI: The Time for Decision, 1776. Charlottesville: Published for the Virginia
Independence Bicentennial Commission by the University Press of Virginia, 1981.
Steward, Austin. Twenty-two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman. 1857. Reprint, edited by
Jane H. and William H. Pease. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969.
Virginia. Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts...Preserved in the Capitol, at
Richmond. 11 vols. 1875-93. 1835. Reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint Corp., 1968. (Vol.
10, January 1, 1808-December 31, 1835)
_____. Journals of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1798-1832.
Richmond, 1799-1833.
_____. Statutes at Large, from October Session 1792, to December Session 1806, Inclusive. 3
vols. Edited by Samuel Shepherd. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1970.
U.S. Congress. Annals of Congress: Debates and Proceedings. 1st Cong., March 3, 1789, to 18th
Cong., 1st. sess., May 27, 1824. 42 vols. Washington, D.C., 1834-56. (microfilm)
[Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of]. Supplementary Despatches, Correspondence, and
Memoranda of Field Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington, K.G. Edited by his son, the
Duke of Wellington, G.G. Vols. 8 and 9. London: John Murray, 1861.
Wilmer, James J. Narrative Respecting the Conduct of the British from Their First Landing on
Spesutia Island Till Their Progress to Havre de Grace...By a citizen of Havre de Grace.
Baltimore: Printed by P. Mauro, 1813.
Secondary Sources
Ackerson, Wayne. The African Institution (1807–1827) and the Antislavery Movement in Great
Britain. Studies in British History, Volume 77. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press,
2005.
Adams, Alice Dana. The Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery in America, 1808-1831. Radcliffe
College, 1908. Reprint, Williamstown, Mass.: Corner House Publishers, 1973.
21
Altoff, Gerard T. Amongst My Best Men: African-Americans and the War of 1812. Put-in-Bay,
Ohio: The Perry Group, 1996.
Ammon, Harry. James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity. New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, 1971.
Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810. Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975.
Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. 1943. Reprint, Millwood, N.Y.: International
Publishers, 1977.
Aptheker, Herbert, ed. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. 1951.
Reprint, New York: Citadel Press, 1951.
Barney, Mary, ed. A Biographical Memoir of the Late Joshua Barney from Autobiographical
Notes and Journals in Possession of His Family and Other Authentic Sources. Boston,
Mass.: Gray and Bowen, 1832.
Bartlett, C. J. Castlereagh. London: Macmillan, 1966.
Bartlett, C. J. “Gentlemen versus Democrats: Cultural Prejudice and Maritime Risk in the War of
1812,” Northern Mariner 8 (October 1998): 1-16.
Beitzell, Edwin Warfield. The Jesuit Missions of St. Mary’s County, Maryland. 2d ed. Abell,
Md.: published by the author, 1976.
Bell, Malcolm, Jr. Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family. Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Bemis, Samuel Flagg. Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy. New York:
Macmillan, 1923.
_____. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy. New York: A.A.
Knopf, 1949.
_____. John Quincy Adams and the Union. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1956.
Bender, Thomas, ed. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in
Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.
_____. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.
Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
_____. “The Revolution in Black Life.” In The American Revolution: Explorations in the History
of American Radicalism, edited by Alfred F. Young, 349–82. DeKalb: Northern Illinois
Press, 1976.
_____ and Ronald Hoffman, eds. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983.
_____. Slaves without Masters: the Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1974.
Berquist, Harold E., Jr. “Henry Middleton and the Arbitrament of the Anglo-American Slave
Controversy by Tsar Alexander I.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 82 (1981): 20–
31.
Bigelow, John. Breaches of Anglo-American Treaties: A Study in History and Diplomacy. New
York: Sturgis & Walton, 1917.
Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London: Verso, 1988.
Blassingame, James W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. 1972.
Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
22
Bogger, Tommy L. Free Blacks in Norfolk Virginia 1790-1860: the Darker Side of Freedom.
Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
Boles, John B. America: the Middle Period: Essays in Honor of Bernard Mayo. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1973.
Brant, Irving. James Madison. 6 vols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941-61.
Brown, Christopher L. “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of
the American Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66 (April 1999): 273306.
Brown, Christopher L. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Brown, Gordon S. Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and
Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, for
the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996.
Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. “National Identity and African-American Colonization, 1773-1817.”
Historian 58 (Autumn 1995):15-28.
Bruce, William Napier. Life of General Sir Charles Napier. London: John Murray, 1885.
Buckley, Roger Norman. Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795-1815.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.
Bullard, Mary A. Black Liberation on Cumberland Island in 1815. DeLeon Springs, Fl., 1983.
Butler, Stuart Lee. A Guide to Virginia Militia Units in the War of 1812. Athens, Ga.: Iberian
Publishing Company, 1988.
Butler, William F. Sir Charles Napier. London: Macmillan and Co., 1890.
Carpenter, Jesse T. The South as a Conscious Minority, 1789-1861: A Study in Political Thought.
New York: New York University Press, 1986.
Cassell, Frank A. “Slaves of the Chesapeake Bay Area and the War of 1812.” Journal of Negro
History 57 (April 1972): 144-55.
Clark, Christopher. Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War.
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006.
Clifford, Mary Louise. From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists After the American
Revolution. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999.
Coles, Harry L. The War of 1812. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1992.
Combs, Jerald A. The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1970.
Cookson, J.E. The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793-1815. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Coulter, E. Merton. Thomas Spalding of Sapelo. University, La: Louisiana State University
Press, 1940.
Coupland, R. Wilberforce: A Narrative. 1923. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press,
1968.
Covington, James W. “The Negro Fort.” Gulf Coast Historical Review 5 (1990): 78-91.
Cramer, Clayton E. Black Demographic Data, 1790-1860: A Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1997.
23
Crow, Jeffrey J. “Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802.”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37 (January 1980): 79–102.
Cusick, James G. The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of
Spanish East Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Dain, Bruce. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic.
Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Davis, David Brion. Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2003.
_____. In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.
_____. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1975; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Dillon, Merton L. Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies 1619-1865. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
Drescher, Seymour. “The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in
Historical Interpretation.” History and Theory 32 (October 1993): 311-29.
_____. Captialism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective. New
York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
_____. The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
_____. From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery.
New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French
Caribbean, 1787-1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for The
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2004.
_____. “‘Troubled Water’: Rebellion and Republicanism in the Revolutionary French
Caribbean.” In The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, edited
by James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf. Charlottesville and London:
University of Virginia Press, 2002.
Dudley, Wade G. Splintering the Wooden Wall: The British Blockade of the United States, 18121815. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003.
Duffy, Michael. “World-Wide War and British Expansion, 1793-1815.” In The Oxford History of
the British Empire, Vol. II, The Eighteenth Century, edited by P.J. Marshall, 184-95. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998-1999.
Eardley-Wilmot, John. Historical View of the Commission For Enquiring into the Losses,
Services, and Claims of the American Loyalists, At the Close of the War Between Great
Britain and her Colonies, in 1783. With a new introduction and preface by George Athan
Billias. Boston: Gregg Press, 1972.
Egerton, Douglas R. “Black Independence Struggles and the Tale of Two Revolutions: A
Review Essay.” Journal of Southern History. 64 (February 1998): 95-116.
_____. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800-1802. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
_____. “‘Its Origins Are Not a Little Curious’: A New Look at the American Colonization
Society.” Journal of the Early Republic 5 (Winter 1985): 463-80.
“Eighteenth Century Slaves as Advertised by their Masters.” Journal of Negro History 1 (April
1916): 163–216.
24
Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. 1959.
Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Elting, John R. Amateurs to Arms! A Military History of the War of 1812. New York: Da Capo
Press, 1995.
Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
Ericson, David F. The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in
Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Estes, Todd. The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American
Political Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006.
Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States
Government’s Relations to Slavery. Completed and edited by Ward M. McAfee. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Fergusson, C. B. A Documentary Study of the Establishment of the Negroes in Nova Scotia
between the War of 1812 and the Winning of Responsible Government. Halifax: Public
Archives of Nova Scotia, 1948.
Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the
Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Fields, Barbara Jeanne. “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left
Review 181 (May/June 1990): 95–118.
Fladeland, Betty. “Abolitionist Pressures on the Concert of Europe, 1814-1822.” Journal of
Modern History 38 (December 1966): 355-73.
_____. Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1972.
Fogel, Robert William. The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective. Baton Rouge, La.:
Louisiana State University Press, 2003.
Footner, Hulbert. Sailor of Fortune: The Life and Adventures of Commodore Barney, U.S.N.
1940. Reprint, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1998.
Fox, Early L. The American Colonization Society, 1817-1840. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1919.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Eugene D. Genovese. The Mind of the Master Class: History and
Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005.
Franklin, John Hope, and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Frey, Sylvia R. “Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution.”
Journal of Southern History 49 (August 1983): 375–98.
_____. “The British and the Black: A New Perspective.” The Historian 38 (February 1976): 22538.
_____. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1991.
Geggus, David P., ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Genovese, Eugene D. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making
of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.
25
_____. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. 1972. Reprint, New York: Vintage
Books, 1976.
_____. The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1969.
George, Christopher T. “Harford County in the War of 1812.” Harford Historical Bulletin 76
(Spring 1998): 1-61.
_____. “Mirage of Freedom: African Americans in the War of 1812.” Maryland Historical
Magazine 91 (Winter 1996): 426-50.
_____. Terror on the Chesapeake: The War of 1812 on the Bay. Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane
Books, 2000.
Gould, Eliga H. and Peter S. Onuf, eds. Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the
Atlantic World. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Grant, John N. “Black Immigrants into Nova Scotia, 1776–1815.” Journal of Negro History 58
(July 1973): 253–70.
Greenberg, Kenneth S. Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery.
Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Grant, John N. “Black Immigrants into Nova Scotia, 1776–1815.” Journal of Negro History 58
(July 1973): 253–70.
Greene, Lorenzo J. “The New England Negro as Seen in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves
1732–1801.” Journal of Negro History 29 (April 1944): 125–46.
Gutman, Herbert. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1976.
Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Hall, Christopher D. British Strategy in the Napoleonic War 1803-1815. Manchester, England:
Manchester University Press, 1992.
Hickey, Donald R. “Historiographical Essay: The War of 1812: Still a Forgotten Conflict?”
Journal of Military History 65 (July 2001): 741-69.
_____. The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Hitsman, J. Mackay. The Incredible War of 1812: A Military History. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1965.
Hodges, Graham Russell, Susan H. Cook, and Alan E. Brown, eds. The Black Loyalist
Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1996.
Hodges, Graham Russell, and Alan Edward Brown, eds. “Pretends to Be Free”: Runaway Slave
Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey. New York:
Garland, 1994.
Hodges, Graham Russell. Slavery, Freedom & Culture among Early American Workers.
Armonk, New York and London, England: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.
Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American
Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Horsman, Reginald. The War of 1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.
Hunt, Alfred N. Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the
Caribbean. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
Isaac, Rhys. Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia
Plantation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
26
James, William. The Naval History of Great Britain: during the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars. 6 vols. 1847. Reprint with new introduction by Andrew Lambert,
London: Conway Maritime, 2002.
Jenkins, Brian. Henry Goulburn, 1784-1856. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996.
Johnson, Michael P. “Runaway Slaves and the Slave Communities in South Carolina, 1799 to
1830.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 38 (July 1981): 418-41.
Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. 1968.
Reprint, New York: Norton, 1977.
Kernell, Samuel, ed. James Madison: The Theory and Practice of Republican Government.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Kersh, Rogan. Dreams of a More Perfect Union. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Kielstra, Paul. The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-48. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake,
1680-1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Lee, Jean B. The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1994.
Lemon, Sarah McCulloh. Frustrated Patriots: North Carolina and the War of 1812. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1973.
Lathem, Edward Connery, comp. Chronological Tables of American Newspapers 1690-1820.
Worchester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1972.
Lewis, James E., Jr. The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States
and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783-1829. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998.
_____. John Quincy Adams: Policymaker for the Union. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources
Books, 2001.
Lindsay, Arnett G. “Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Great Britain Bearing
on the Return of Negro Slaves, 1783-1828.” Journal of Negro History 5 (October 1920):
391-419.
Littlefield, Daniel C. “John Jay, the Revolutionary Generation, and Slavery.” New York History
81 (January 2000): 91-132.
Lockley, Timothy James. Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Lossing, Benson J. Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812. New York: Harper & Brothers,
1869.
Lowance, Mason I., Jr., ed. A House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America,
1776-1865. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Lowery, Charles D. James Barbour, A Jeffersonian Republican. University, Ala.: University of
Alabama Press, 1984.
Mahon, John K. “British Strategy and Southern Indians: War of 1812.” Florida Historical
Quarterly 44 (? 1966): 285-302.
Mahon, John K. The War of 1812. 1972. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972.
Mallick, Sallie A. and F. Edward Wright. Frederick County Militia in the War of 1812.
Westminster, Md.: Family Line Publications, 1992.
27
Marine, William M. The British Invasion of Maryland 1812-1813. Baltimore, Md.: Society of the
War of 1812 in Maryland, 1913.
Mason, Matthew E. “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States,
and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 59
(July 2002): 665-96.
_____. “The Rain Between the Storms: The Politics and Ideology of Slavery in the United
States, 1808-1821.” PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2002.
_____. Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2006.
Matthewson, Tim. A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the
Early Republic. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003.
McColley, Robert. Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1964.
McCoy, Drew R. Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and
the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
McDonnell, Michael A. “Class War? Class Struggles during the American Revolution in
Virginia.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd, ser., 63 (April 2006): 305-44.
_____. The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
McGraw, Marie T. “The American Colonization Society in Virginia 1816-1832: A Case
Study in Southern Liberalism.” PhD Diss., George Washington University, 1980.
28
Meanders, Daniel, comp. Advertisements for Runaway Slaves in Virginia, 1801-1820. New
York: Garland, 1997.
_____. “South Carolina Fugitives as Viewed Through Local Newspapers with Emphasis on
Runaway Notices 1732–1801.” Journal of Negro History 60 (April 1975): 288–319.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.
Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and
Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press,
1998.
Morriss, Roger. Cockburn and the British Navy in Transition: Admiral Sir George Cockburn
1772-1853. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
Mullin, Gerald W. Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Nash, Gary B. Race and Revolution. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1990.
_____. “Thomas Peters: Millwright and Deliverer.” In Struggle and Survival in Colonial
America, edited by David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash, 69–86. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1981.
Naval Chronicle. Edited by Nicholas Tracy. Vol. 5: 1811-1815. London: Stackpole Books, 1999.
Nelson, Bernard H. “The Slave Trade as a Factor in British Foreign Policy 1815-1862.” Journal
of Negro History 27 (April 1942): 192-209.
Nelson, Kenneth Ross. “Socio-Economic Effects of the War of 1812 on Britain.” PhD diss.,
University of Georgia, 1972.
Newman, Richard S. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the
Early Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Norton, Mary Beth. “The Fate of Some Black Loyalists of the American Revolution.” Journal of
Negro History 58 (October 1973): 402–26.
Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: A.A. Knopf,
1982.
Okihiro, Gary Y., ed. In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
Oldfield, J. R. Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion
Against the Slave Trade 1787-1807. Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 1995.
Owsley, Frank Lawrence, Jr. The Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands: The Creek War and the
Battle of New Orleans 1812-1815. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1981.
29
Pack, James. The Man Who Burned the White House: Admiral Sir George Cockburn 1772-1853.
Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1987.
Palmer, T.H., ed. The Historical Register of the United States, Part II for 1814. Washington,
D.C.: T.H. Palmer, 1816.
Papenfuse, Edward C., Gregory A. Stiverson, Susan A. Collins, and Lois Green Carr, eds.,
Maryland: A New Guide to the Old Line State. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976.
Parish, Peter J. Slavery: History and Historians. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Parker, Freddie L. Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in North Carolina 1775–1840. New
York: Garland, 1993.
_____, ed. Stealing a Little Freedom: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in North Carolina,
1791–1840. New York: Garland, 1994.
Parsons, Stanley B., William W. Beach and Dan Hermann. United States Congressional Districts
1788-1841. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.
Patrick, Rembert W. Florida Fiasco: Rampant Rebels on the Georgia-Florida Border 18101815. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1954.
Perkins, Bradford. Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States 1812-1823. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1964.
Pestana, Carla Gardina and Sharon V. Salinger, eds. Inequality in Early America. Hanover,N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1999.
Pitcavage, Mark. “An Equitable Burden: The Decline of the State Militias, 1783-1858.” PhD
diss., Ohio State University, 1995.
Plunkett, Michael. Afro-American Sources in Virginia: A Guide to Manuscripts. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1990.
Porter, Albert O. County Government in Virginia: A Legislative History, 1607-1904. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1947.
Preston, Daniel. A Comprehensive Catalogue of the Correspondence and Papers of James
Monroe. 2 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Pybus, Cassandra. Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and
Their Global Quest for Liberty. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
_____. “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American
Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 62 (April 2005): 243–64.
Quarles, Benjamin. “Lord Dunmore as Liberator.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 15
(October 1958): 494-507.
_____. The Negro in the American Revolution. 1961. Reprinted with a foreword by Thad W.
Tate and introduction by Gary B. Nash. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early
American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina
Press, 1996.
Resch, John and Walter Sargent, eds. War & Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization
and Home Fronts. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007.
Richards, Leonard L. The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.
Riddell, William R. “Interesting Notes on Great Britain and Canada with Respect to the Negro:
Jay’s Treaty and the Negro.” Journal of Negro History 13 (April 1928): 185–98.
Robinson, Donald L. Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
30
Robson, David W. “‘An Important Question Answered’: William Graham’s Defense of Slavery
in Post-Revolutionary Virginia.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37 (October
1980): 644-52.
Rodger, N.A.M. The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815. New York:
W.W. Norton, 2004.
_____. “The Idea of Naval Strategy in Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In
The Development of British Naval Thinking: Essays in Memory of Bryan McLaren Ranft.
London: Routledge, 2006.
Rommel-Ruiz, W. Bryan. “Atlantic Revolutions: Slavery and Freedom in Newport, Rhode
Island and Halifax, Nova Scotia in the Era of the American Revolution.” PhD. diss.,
University of Michigan, 1999.
Rose, Willie Lee. Edited by William W. Freehling. Slavery and Freedom. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982.
Rothman, Adam. “The Expansion of Slavery in the Deep South, 1790-1820.” PhD diss.,
Columbia University, 2000.
_____. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. Cambridge,
Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Rugemer, Edward B. “The Southern Response to British Abolitionism: The Maturation of
Proslavery Apologetics.” Journal of Southern History 70 (May 2004): 221-48.
Russell, Greg. John Quincy Adams and the Public Virtues of Diplomacy. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1995.
Russell, Marion J. “American Slave Discontent in Records of the High Courts.” Journal of
Negro History 31 (October 1946): 411-34.
Rutland, Robert Allen. The Presidency of James Madison. Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1990.
Salmon, Emily J and Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. The Hornbook of Virginia History: a ReadyReference Guide to the Old Dominion’s People, Places, and Past. Richmond: Library of
Virginia, 1994.
Schama, Simon. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. New York:
Harper Collins, 2006.
Scharf, J. Thomas. Chronicles of Baltimore. Baltimore, Md.: Turnbull Brothers, 1874.
———. History of Baltimore City and County from the Earliest Period to the Present: Including
Biographical Sketches of Their Representative Men. 1881. Reprinted in 2 vols.,
Baltimore, Md.: Regional Publishing Co., 1971.
Scherr, Arthur. “Governor James Monroe and the Southampton Slave Resistance of 1799.” The
Historian 61 (Spring 1999): 557-78.
Schwarz, Philip J. Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
Sheads, Scott. The Rockets’ Red Glare: The Maritime Defense of Baltimore in 1814. Centreville,
Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1986.
Sheppard, Eva. ”The Question of Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to the Slavery
Debate of 1832.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2000.
31
Sherwood, Marika. After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807. London and New
York: I. B. Tauris, 2007.
Shomette, Donald G. Flotilla: Battle for the Patuxent. Solomons, Md.: Calvert Marine Museum
Press, 1981.
Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia,
1730-1810. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
_____. ”Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and Resistance to Slavery,
1790-1800. Journal of Southern History 63 (August 1997): 531-52.
Silverman, Kenneth. Timothy Dwight. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969.
Smith, Billy G., and Richard Wojtowicz, eds. Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for
Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728–1790. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Smith, Billy G. “Runaway Slaves in the Mid-Atlantic Region during the Revolutionary Era.” In
The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a
Social Movement, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, 199–230.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.
Smith, T. Watson. “The Slave in Canada.” Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society,
for the Years 1896-98. Vol. 10. Halifax: Nova Scotia Printing Company, 1899.
Spray, W.A. “The Settlement of the Black Refugees in New Brunswick, 1815–1836.”
Acadiensis 6 (Spring 1977): 64–79.
Stagg, John C. Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American
Republic, 1783-1830. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York:
Vintage Books, 1956.
_____. “Rebels and Sambos: The Search for the Negro’s Personality in Slavery.” Journal of
Southern History 37 (August 1971): 367-92.
Staudenraus, P.J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York Columbia
University Press, 1961.
Surrency, Erwin C. “The American Criminal Code: The Georgia Code of 1816.” Georgia
Historical Quarterly 64 (1979): 420-34.
Takagi, Midori. “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction:” Slavery in Richmond, Virginia,
1782-1865. Charlottesville/London: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Thompson, Neville. Earl Bathurst and the British Empire. Barnsley, South Yorkshire, Leo
Cooper, 1999.
Tise, Larry E. Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Turley, David. The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860. London: Routledge, 1991.
Voelz, Peter. Slave and Soldier: The Military Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas. NY:
Garland, 1993.
Waldstreicher, David. “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence
in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
ser., 56 (April 1999): 243–72.
32
Walker, James W. St. G. The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia
and Sierra Leone 1783-1870. New York: African Publishing Company, 1976.
_____. “Blacks as American Loyalists: The Slaves’ War for Independence.” Historical
Reflections 2, no. 1 (1975): 51–67.
Walvin, James. England, Slaves and Freedom, 1776-1838. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of
Mississippi, 1986.
_____. Questioning Slavery. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
_____, ed. Slavery and British Society, 1776-1846. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1982.
Watson, Alan. Slave Law in the Americas. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press,
1989.
Wehje, Myron F. “Opposition in Virginia to the War of 1812.” Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography. 78 (January 1970): 65-86.
Weiss, John McNish. “The Corps of Colonial Marines 1814–16: A Summary.” Immigrants and
Minorities 15 (1996): 80-90.
_____. Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad 1815-16. London: McNish & Weiss, 1995.
_____. The Merikens: Free Black Settlers in Trinidad 1815-16. 2nd ed. London: McNish &
Weiss, 2002.
_____. On Stony Ground: American Origins of the Black Refugees of the War of 1812 Settled in
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. London: McNish & Weis, 2006.
White, Ashli. “The Limits of Fear: The Saint Dominguan Challenge to Slave Trade Abolition in
the United States.” Early American Studies 2 (Fall 2004): 362-97.
White, Patrick C. T. A Nation on Trial: America and the War of 1812. New York: John Wiley,
1965.
Whitfield, Harvey A. “Black American Refugees in Nova Scotia, 1813-1840.” PhD diss.,
Dalhousie University, 2003.
_____. Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860.
Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006.
Whithorne, Joseph A. The Battle for Baltimore 1814. Baltimore, Md.: Nautical & Aviation
Publishing Company of America, 1997.
Whitman, T. Stephen. Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to
Human Bondage, 1775–1865. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2007.
_____. The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National
Maryland. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
Wilberforce, Robert Issac and Samuel Wilberforce. The Life of William Wilberforce. 5 vols.
1838. Reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972.
Williams, Eric E. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
Williams, Edwin L. “Negro Slavery in Florida.” Florida Historical Quarterly 28 (October 1949):
93-110.
Wills, Garry. James Madison. New York: Times Books, 2002.
Wilson, Ellen Gibson. John Clarkson and the African Adventure. London: Macmillan Press,
1980.
_____. The Loyal Blacks. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976.
Windley, Lathan A. “A Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from 1730
through 1787.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1974.
33
_____. A Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from 1730 through 1787.
New York: Garland, 1995.
_____., ed. Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790. 4
vols. Vol. 1, Virginia and North Carolina; Vol. 2, Maryland; Vol. 3, South Carolina; Vol.
4, Georgia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.
Winks, Robin. Blacks in Canada: a History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971.
Williams, Edwin L. “Negro Slavery in Florida.” Florida Historical Quarterly 28 (October 1949):
93-110.
Wolf, Eva Sheppard. Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia From the
Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2006.
Wood, Peter H. “‘The Dream Deferred’: Black Freedom Struggles on the Eve of White
Independence.” In In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American
History, edited by Gary Y. Okihiro, 166–87. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1986.
Young, Jeffrey Robert. Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South
Carolina, 1670-1837. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Ziskind, David. Emancipation Acts: Quintessential Labor Laws. Los Angeles: published by the
author, 1993.
34
APPENDIX B: Chapter Outline
Introduction
I will address the historiography of slave flight during the American Revolution and the
War of 1812.
Chapter 1: The Coastal South Anticipates War——1812
I will discuss the initial reaction of the southern states to the June 18, 1812, declaration of
war and the perceived impact that British incursions on coastal areas might have on them. An
inadequate national defense plan (military and naval) was supplemented by state- and countylevel measures. I will compare plans and legislation devised by the different state executive and
legislative branches to prevent the slave population from absconding. I will discuss the response
in all the coastal southern states because, although some suffered few incursions (the Carolinas),
the fear of attack was real everywhere.
Chapter 2: Raids, Reactions, and Diplomacy——The Chesapeake Bay, February 1813–
February 1814
The first and most sustained attacks were against Maryland and Virginia. This chapter
will discuss their response to the raids along the coastal areas of the Chesapeake Bay from
February to September 1813. This was the period of active campaigning before most of the
British fleet, except for a skeleton blockading force, left to winter at Halifax and Bermuda. This
chapter will also cover the quiescent military period in the Chesapeake Bay from September
1813 to February 1814 when a single Royal Navy squadron blockaded the region and conducted
occasional raids. Using material from a database that I will compile, I will determine the
demographics of the slaves who fled (male, female, children), their owners, and the
circumstances of their departure. Some were taken by force; others left voluntarily with a raiding
party or fled on boats to the ships offshore. I will try to glean the reaction of the owners, the local
35
militia, and the slave patrols, and see what actions were taken on the county, state, and national
levels. These are some of the questions that I will be asking in this and chapters three and four:
How large were the farms and plantations from which the slaves fled? How many masters tried
to get their slaves to return? Did the owners express both economic and paternalistic
motivations? How many slaves left in family or kinship groups? How many of the males joined
the British forces? How many opted to emigrate? Did nonslaveholding militia and slave
patrollers resent policing duties that protected the slaveholders’ interests?
Besides discussing the war-engendered change in the demography of the runaways and
the evidence of class conflict among whites, I will also track the evolution of British policy
toward the absconding blacks during this first campaign season. In addition to southern (black
and white) and British reactions, I will also follow the diplomatic efforts made to obtain the
return of the slaves.
Chapter 3: Invasion, Flight, and Reaction——The Chesapeake Bay, 1814–15
The British began their second marauding season off the coast of Maryland and Virginia
in February 1814. The main force succeeded in harassing the residents with impunity, attacking
Washington successfully, but not Baltimore, before returning in October to Halifax and Bermuda
for the winter. Leaving a small squadron to safeguard the bay from October 1814 to the end of
the war, the British continued to raid sporadically before the winter season closed in, receiving
the escapees as enlistees or emigrants. I will continue to plot where the British raided, how many
blacks fled and what was their composition. The enemy’s raids and presence in the bay
continued to attract refugee slaves at a time when British abolitionists were demanding a French
ban on the slave trade as a peace-treaty stipulation. I will be searching for connections between
Britain’s activity in the War of 1812 and its international commitments.
36
Chapter 4: The Strategy Shifts——Georgia and Louisiana, Winter 1814–15
The British decided in the fall of 1814 to shift their naval forces concentrated in the
Chesapeake Bay southward to Georgia and Louisiana, with an incursion along Georgia’s coast
serving as a diversion while the main British force attacked New Orleans. This chapter will
compare the reaction of slaves and masters in these lower-South states to the response in the
Chesapeake Bay states, as well as discern any refinement in British policy toward the absconding
slaves.
Chapter 5: Peace——The Treaty of Ghent and Missions to Retrieve Refugee Slaves
Anglo-American peace talks during 1814 were acrimonious, and while the status of the
refugee slaves was not in the forefront, the issue was contentious but supposedly resolved to the
American delegation’s satisfaction. After learning that the February 17, 1815, ratification of the
Treaty of Ghent ended the war, the Royal Navy commanders off America’s coast chose,
however, to interpret the treaty conservatively and refused to return the refugee blacks to their
masters. I will study these negotiations to determine the role that the administration of
slaveholders James Madison and James Monroe had in crafting the final article. In addition, the
actions and motives of the British commanders will be explored. Finally, this chapter will cover
the postwar missions that sought the return of the slaves and proof of British perfidy in reenslaving the escapees. These private and government-sponsored delegations failed. A
comprehensive investigation of these missions may confirm an early, overt proslavery stance in
the private and the public sector.
Chapter 6: Peace Not Resolution
This final chapter will cover the ten-year effort by three American administrations to
obtain compensation for lost slaves from a British government progressively under pressure to
emancipate the blacks held in captivity throughout its empire. I hope to show that the issue of the
37
status of the refugee slave during the War of 1812 influenced the British abolitionist movement
and southern views on slavery.
Conclusion
I will discuss my findings and how they contribute to the historiography of slavery and
abolitionism.
38
APPENDIX C: Proposed Schedule
Sept. 2007-March 2008
research at D.C., Md., Va. repositories; research RG 76 at NARA II
for database demographic material; draft an introduction
April-July 2008
continue research at D.C., Md., Va. repositories and RG 76 at
NARA; trip to England (National Archives and the British Library)
and Scotland (National Library of Scotland); draft chap. 1
August-Oct. 2008
research at D.C., Md., Va. repositories
Nov. 2008-Jan. 2009
research at D.C., Md., Va. repositories; draft chap. 2
Feb.-April 2009
trip to N.Y. and Penn.; draft chap. 3
May-July 2009
trip to Ga. and La.; draft chap. 4
August-Oct. 2009
trip to Canada; draft chap. 5
Nov. 2009-Jan. 2010
research in RG59 and 76 at NARA II; trip to England; draft chap. 6
Feb.-Aug. 2010
write conclusion and edit/rewrite other chapters.
Sept. 2010
dissertation defense
i
Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
ii For a discussion of the crusade to defend slavery see, Peter Kolchin,
American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 189-91; Drew
Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the
Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1981); Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in
America, 1701-1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). Tise barely
39
mentions the War of 1812, except to note that that war “was neither socially
nor politically a very trying time for southerners.” (287)
iii Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the
Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 165.
iv Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961; reprint,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 200; Sylvia R. Frey,
“The British and the Black: A New Perspective,” The Historian 38 (February
1976): 225-38; and Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a
Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 226.
v Patrick C. T. White, A Nation On Trial: America and the War of 1812 (New
York: John Wiley, 1965); Reginald Horsman, The War of 1812 (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1969); John K. Mahon, The War of 1812 (1972; reprint, New York: Da
Capo Press, 1991), see 313-15 for a brief outline of British motives and
policies toward the slaves; J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics,
Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic 1783–1830 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983); Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A
Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
vi Frank A. Cassell, “Slaves of the Chesapeake Bay Area and the War of 1812,”
Journal of Negro History 57 (April 1972): 144–55; Mary A. Bullard, Black
Liberation on Cumberland Island in 1815 (DeLeon Springs, Fla.: privately
printed, 1983); Christopher T. George, “Mirage of Freedom: African Americans
in the War of 1812,” Maryland Historical Magazine 91 (Winter 1996): 426–50
and Terror on the Chesapeake: The War of 1812 on the Bay (Shippensburg, Pa.:
White Mane Books, 2000).
vii Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep
South (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2005).
viii C. B. Fergusson, A Documentary Study of the Establishment of the Negroes
in Nova Scotia between the War of 1812 and the Winning of Responsible
Government (Halifax: Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1948); John N. Grant,
“Black Immigrants into Nova Scotia, 1776–1815,” Journal of Negro History 58
(July 1973): 253–70; Robin Winks, Blacks in Canada: A History (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971; Harvey A. Whitfield, “Black American
Refugees in Nova Scotia, 1813–1840” (PhD diss., Dalhousie University, 2003)
and Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 18151860 (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006); John McNish Weiss, Free
Black American Settlers in Trinidad 1815-16 (London: McNish & Weiss, 1995);
John McNish Weiss, The Merikens: Free Black Settlers in Trinidad 1815-16, 2nd
ed. (London: McNish & Weiss, 2002).
ix John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the
Plantation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiii-xv,
295.
x Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United
States Government’s Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001).
xi Matthew E. Mason, “The Rain Between the Storms: The Politics and Ideology
of Slavery in the United States, 1808–1821,” (PhD diss., University of
Maryland, 2002), 374. For a published work treating these themes, see Matthew
E. Mason, “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the
United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (July 2002): 665–96.
xii Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia
and South Carolina, 1670-1837, (Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 1999), 7 (first and second quotations), 124 (third and fourth
quotations), 128 (fifth quotation); Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked:
Southern Slaves and Their Allies 1619-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
40
University Press, 1990), 75. Merton spoke in generalities about the
“opportunities” that war created for slaves but did not address the southern
efforts to secure the return of their slaves after the war.
xiii Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution; Frey, Water from the Rock;
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American
Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).
xiv For a good narrative but not an analytical study of blacks in the War of
1812, see Gerard T. Altoff, Amongst My Best Men: African-Americans and the
War of 1812. Put-in-Bay, Ohio: The Perry Group, 1996.
15 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British
Abolitionism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
41