White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (37 page)

Some of the runaways appear to have been lovers who, of course, faced a year or two extra service if they were ever caught in the act by their master:

RUN away . . . a Servant Man, named Nathaniel McDowell, 265

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about 30 Years of Age . . . wears his own black Hair, round Face, and rough Features . . . As it is known an Intimacy has subsisted between him and a neighbouring Woman, the Wife of Alexander Logan, who left her Husband about the same Time, and took her Child with her, a promising Boy, six Years old, with white Hair, it is thought they are gone together, and that they will go to Philadelphia. Three pounds reward. (May 1763)

RAN away . . . a servant man, named Patrick Flood: He is a pretty tall lusty fellow, of a black swarthy complexion . . . He took with him a young bay mare, with a star in her forehead, and one white foot. He went in company with one Sarah Carrol, who formerly travelled to Carolina, where they are both suspected to be gone . . . She is a tall slender woman, with a wry Look, and a swarthy Complexion. Four pistols reward. (March 1738)

FIVE PISTOLES REWARD. RAN away from the Subscriber, in Fairfax County . . . an English indented servant woman, named Elizabeth Bushup, about 23 Years of age, of a low stature, fair skin, black eyes, black hair, a scar on her breast, and loves drink . . . It is suspected she was carried away, by Capt. Tipple’s boatswain, from Potowmack River to Patuxent, where the ship lies, or that he has left her at the mouth of the river. Whoever takes up the said servant, and brings her to her master, shall have five pistoles reward, besides what the law allows, and five pistoles more if it can be proved that the said boatswain conceals her. (November 1745)

Of all the escapees, the most spectacular was surely Sarah Wilson, a servant to one of the Queen’s maids of honour. She was arrested in London in 1771 after the disappearance of some of the Queen’s jewels and she was transported to Maryland. The
London Magazine
reported that on landing she was ‘exposed to sale and purchased . . . but escaped’.

Wilson assumed the title of the Princess Susanna Carolina Matilda, 266

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non-existent sister to the Queen, and in a whirlwind tour of the eastern seaboard conned colonial American society. The
London
Magazine
told the story:

She travelled from one gentleman’s house to another under these pretensions, making astonishing impressions in many places, affecting the mode of royalty so inimitably that many had the honour to kiss her hand. To some she promised governments, to others regiments, with promotions of all kinds in the treasury, army, and the royal navy. At length, however, an advertisement appeared, and a messenger arrived from her master, who raised a loud hue and cry for her serene highness.

The game was up. She was caught in Charleston and one of history’s more colourful impostors was dragged back to the man who bought her. She was forced to serve for another two years.21

Hostility to convict servants grew as more and more were imported and crime levels increased. The
Virginia Gazette
complained in 1751:

When we see our papers filled continually with accounts of the most audacious robberies, the most cruel murders, and infinite other villainies perpetrated by convicts transported from Europe, what melancholy, what terrible reflections it must occasion! What will become of our posterity? These are some of thy favours Britain. Thou art called our Mother Country; but what good mother ever sent thieves and villains to accompany her children; to corrupt some with their infectious vices and murder the rest? What father ever endeavour’d to spread a plague in his family? . . . In what can Britain show a more sovereign contempt for us than by emptying their jails into our settlements; unless they would likewise empty their jakes [privies] on our tables!

That same year, Virginia’s attorney general was given a wage rise because of the increase in the number of criminals he was 267

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prosecuting. It was not unreasonable for him to blame British convicts for his extra workload.

In the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin, America’s most gifted populist, planted himself at the head of those demanding an end to the convict trade. Writing in his paper, the
Pennsylvania Gazette
, he famously suggested that in return for convicts, rattlesnakes should be sent to every member of the British Parliament, both peers and MPs:

Rattle-snakes seem the most suitable returns for the human serpents sent us by our mother country. In this, however, as in every other branch of trade, she will have the advantage of us. She will reap equal benefits without equal risk of the inconveniencies and dangers. For the rattlesnake gives warning before he attempts his mischief; which the convict does not.22

More attempts were made to restrict the trade. In 1754, Maryland slapped a twenty-shilling-per-head duty on convicts. But such was the British government’s enthusiasm for transportation that merchants knew they could safely defy the colony’s law.

The issue burst into flame again in the 1760s, this time ignited by fear of epidemics. Outbreaks of yellow fever, smallpox, typhoid and other infectious diseases were an increasingly worrying feature of the packed migrant ships coming into Boston, Baltimore and other ports along the eastern seaboard. In the 1740s, a quarantine post was established at Fisher Island outside Philadelphia. But when Virginians and Marylanders wanted the right to quarantine ships, including convict ships, merchants pressurised the Crown to stamp on the idea.

The disease most feared was endemic to English prisons, a truly fearful strain of typhoid known as ‘gaol fever’. Sir Francis Bacon described it as the ‘most pernicious infection, next to the plague’.

The symptoms were a sudden headache, followed by chills and stomach pains that could drag on for about three weeks or kill within hours. On one notorious day in the spring of 1750, gaol fever hit the Royal Courts of Justice in the heart of London and 268

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reportedly killed more than fifty people within a day, including four judges, the Lord Mayor of London, four counsel, the under-sheriff and forty jurors.

Numerous outbreaks and suspected outbreaks occurred in America following convict shipments. They culminated in July 1767, when the fever infected a plantation outside Baltimore, reportedly killing thirty African-American slaves as well as the owner of the plantation. A newly arrived convict was the presumed carrier and the
Maryland Gazette
set a panic rolling with a vivid report on ‘the fury of this malignant ravaging pestilence’ that was spread by ‘a casual visit, it seems, from one of the Felons, sometime since imported in a Convict ship’. The Chesapeake was gripped by rumours of other outbreaks. As one of the Tidewater grandees put it, ‘A bare suspicion of that terrible disorder is enough to make a whole county tremble.’23

The Maryland Assembly demanded quarantine controls and Governor Horatio Sharpe urged London to allow restrictions.

‘That scores of people have been destroyed here by the jail fever first communicated by servants from on board crowded infectious Ships is notorious,’ he wrote. But London was not interested in allowing anything to impede the westward flow of convicts.

Proposed restrictions were watered down and then vetoed by London. A bitter statement from Maryland’s assemblymen followed, blaming the Crown and greedy convict contractors who had lobbied against restrictions. The statement condemned the contractors for esteeming ‘the health of the inhabitants light in the scale against a grain of their profit’ and for lobbying in England

‘against a country, from which they have extracted so much wealth, and at the expense of so many lives’.

Benjamin Franklin now returned to the attack. He penned an article for the
London Chronicle
, labelling transportation as ‘the most cruel insult offered by one people to another’. It was, he wrote, ‘an unexpected barbarity in your Government to empty your gaols into our settlements and we resent it as the highest of insults’. None of this made any difference. The convict trade was now so profitable, with convicts fetching such good prices, that in 1772 the British government decided to end the subsidy.

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The following year, approaching 1,000 convicts were sold. It took war and independence to end the trade. The British government stopped shipments when the first serious fighting of the American War of Independence broke out at Arlington and Concorde in April 1775.

The business of acquiring new convict servants went on until the very last minute and so did the pursuit of the runaways. On 21

April, two days after the war began, planters posted notices in the
Virginia Gazette
offering rewards for ten runaways. Two of the escapees were ‘Negro slaves’. The other eight were white servants.

Among the servants sought were a twenty-year-old joiner from Bristol, Thomas Pearce, and the rather older William Webster, a Scots brick maker. The man pursuing them at this hour of national need was the Virginia planter and soldier George Washington.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE LAST HURRAH

With the surrender of the British Army at Yorktown in 1781, the colonial era was over and so, one might have imagined, was America’s role as a dump for Britain’s convicts. American ports had turned away British convict ships at the start of the war. It was surely inconceivable that the new nation, the United States of America, proudly independent, would ever allow a single British convict in again.

However, in the summer of 1783, as British and American envoys were meeting in the Palace of Versailles to put the final touches to the peace treaty ending the war, an extraordinary plot was hatched in London. The men involved planned to smuggle convicts into the United States by disguising them as ordinary migrants. They persuaded themselves that if the Americans found out they might even come to welcome the trade again.

The plotters weren’t irresponsible freebooters or impetuous young bloods. They were headed by the joint leader of Britain’s coalition government, Lord North, who had presided over many of the misjudgements that led to the end of British rule in America.

Other ministers in the coalition were behind him. And when the King, George III, was brought in on the plot, he gave it his full, indeed his delighted, support.

This desperate venture was triggered by fears of the crime wave expected after the mass demobilisation of troops when the peace 271

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was signed. It was recognised that the gaols would not be able to cope. As we have seen, after every major war a prison crisis loomed when ex-soldiers, ‘sixpence a day heroes’, returned home and spread crime across the country. This time the crisis developed even while the war was raging. During the six years of conflict, the safety valve – transportation to America – had been jammed shut.

Well before the war ended, prison overcrowding became acute.

The prisons had to accommodate almost 1,000 extra inmates a year who would formerly have been transported. Everywhere, prisons began to burst at the seams. In five years, Newgate’s population doubled.

The wretched inadequacy of Britain’s prisons was laid bare by the penal reformer John Howard. He shook England with his monumental study of the prison system. He had inspected several hundred gaols and presented a picture of disease, corruption and cruelty in cramped and fetid buildings. There were prisoners in windowless cells taking turns to breathe at tiny ventilation holes; prisoners in medieval dungeons where food was dropped through grates in the ceiling; prisoners knee-deep in water; prisoners chained on their backs to the floor; and sick prisoners left unattended to die. Howard reported that ‘vast numbers’ of convicts perished from smallpox, cholera and gaol fever. He was especially concerned about this form of typhoid and estimated that more convicts died from it each year than the total numbers executed. The most shocking part of it was that the infection was endemic in Britain’s prisons, and Britain’s alone. Howard’s researches had taken him to gaols in most corners of western Europe (only the Bastille wouldn’t allow him in) and in none had he found gaol fever. Contrasting the prisons of Europe and England, Howard declared that he was ‘put to the blush for my native country’.1

The Crown’s solution to the new crisis was the prison ship. The 1776 Hulks Act authorised felons to be lodged in ‘hulks’, or prison ships, on the Thames. This was a strictly short-term expedient: the act’s provisions lasted just two years. In government circles, there was no doubt that the Yankee rebels would soon be crushed and the convicts would be on their way again. But the hulks were to be a feature of British life for eighty years.

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The county’s leading convict contractor, Duncan Campbell, secured the contract for the first hulks. Campbell was a merchant with extensive sugar interests in Jamaica who had handled all convict transportations from London and the Home Counties for the previous six years. The first of the hulks was the
Justitia
, which Campbell had employed shipping convicts to America and his sugar back on the return voyage. He anchored the ship in the Thames at Galleons Reach, Woolwich, and demasted her. Her landward portholes were blocked and her lower deck was converted to house 130 chained convicts. The Hulks Act laid down that they should be put to ‘severe labour’, so Campbell put his convicts to work extracting sand and gravel from the river bed and extending the foreshore around what became the Woolwich Arsenal.

As soon as war began, hulks also became Britain’s chosen solution to the problem of housing prisoners of war in America. Decommissioned ships moored in the British navy base in New York’s Wallabout Bay held thousands of American, French and Spanish prisoners. Some 11,500 men are said to have perished in and around the base as a result of deliberate cruelty, ill-treatment and outright murder. Today, they are commemorated in the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument, standing 149 feet high in Fort Greene Park.