In 2021 and 2022 I first came across the stories of Harry Washington and James Lafayette, two enslaved men with links to Revolutionary War heroes George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette. I found their stories compelling and put together a lengthy post comparing their respective timelines. Since then, their stories have remained with me as useful windows into African American history and I’ve kept my eyes open for further information about either man. In late 2024, I started a Great Courses series on African American History; while neither man was discussed in detail, it caused me to revisit my original post. I found that some of the original internet links no longer worked, including my main source for Harry Washington’s life. I decided it was time to write a new post on Harry Washington reflecting more recent research and bits of information I have gathered. So here we go with Take Two.
A comment about sources: my original main source on Harry was an article on a site called blackloyalist.info which I liberally cribbed from. That site evidently no longer exists and I have not tracked down its successor. I have, however, found other sources, particularly a good summary of Harry’s life on enslaved.org, adapted from a more detailed academic paper by William J. Harris which I have not yet read. That summary references a post from Henry Louis Gates about Harry. Harris’s summary also mentions a book by Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (the online Google preview of which mentions Harry in detail). Pybus also wrote an academic paper on “Washington’s Revolution (Harry, that is, not George)” that I’d like to read and a book, The Human Tradition in the Black Atlantic, 1500-2000 which discusses Harry. I’ve built this Take Two summary from online sources but I would like to get my hands and eyes on some of these more detailed academic sources. I may be able to do that at Mount Vernon’s library…someday.
Other websites/material I’ve encountered: Harry Washington, Loyalist; Remembering the Sierra Leone Migration, 230 Years Later. There’s an interesting-looking article about Harry on Medium.com but I’m leery of paying $60/year just to read it. In September 2023 I attended a virtual Smithsonian seminar on Harry Washington presented by Dr. Richard Bell and took some fairly detailed notes.
Harry’s Early Life (1740 – 1763)
Harry And George Washington (1763-1776)
Harry and the Black Pioneers (1776 – 1783)
Harry in Nova Scotia (1783 – 1792)
Harry in Sierra Leone (1792 – 1800)
Harry’s Early Life (1740 – 1763)
Scholars’ best guess is that the man who would become Harry Washington was born around 1740 in the Senegambia region of West Africa. In preceding centuries, this region saw the rise and fall of overlapping empires including the Mali (1226-1670), Songhai (1430-1591), Jolof (12th century – 1549) empires and the Kaabu federation of Mandika kingdoms (1537-1867). From the 1400s the region became a major source of the Transatlantic slave trade with the Portuguese, Dutch, French and English all playing active roles. By the 18th century, the English and French rose to dominate the trade in this region, operating out of trading forts including James Island and Goree Island. In 1758, as part of the Seven Years’ War, the English captured French forts in the Senegambia and held the region through 1763. The slave trade was nearing its peak in 1751-1775 with more than 120,000 Africans shipped to North America and more than 1.1 million to the Caribbean in those years.
We have no specific knowledge of the early life or identity of the man who became Harry Washington, only that he was around 20 years of age in 1759 or 1760 when he was most likely captured or kidnapped and sold into slavery. He was probably a strapping young man and valuable prospective slave. He was transported to the West Africa coast, sold again to (most likely) an English or American ship captain, survived the difficult Middle Passage to North America (or potentially was transshipped through the Caribbean), and arrived in the Virginia Chesapeake region. There he was purchased in 1760 by a planter, Daniel Tebbs, and given the name Harry.
Harry worked on Daniel Tebbs’ 300-acre tobacco plantation in Cople Parish, Westmoreland County, Virginia for two to three years until Tebbs’ death in 1762. George Washington may have known the Tebbs family directly as a prominent Virginia planter; he more certainly knew Daniel Tebbs’ son, William, who served as a Captain in the Virginia militia assigned to Washington in 1758, probably as part of the Forbes Expedition to capture Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian War. After the Forbes Expedition, George Washington, then 29 years old, resigned for a second time from military life and was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. In January, 1759, George married the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis and together they moved into Mount Vernon where George focused on success as a gentleman farmer, managing the combined family’s multiple plantations and more than one hundred enslaved people (Martha brought 84 enslaved people as part of her dower share from her first husband’s estate). George had lived at Mount Vernon since 1754 with his half-brother, Lawrence and then Lawrence’s widow, Anne Fairfax. George became full owner of Mount Vernon in 1761.
Harry And George Washington (1763-1776)
When Daniel Tebbs died in 1762 he bequeathed his many enslaved people to his family members. In 1763 George Washington purchased Harry from Tebbs’ estate (possibly from William Tebbs directly) along with a man named Topsom and two others: a woman named Nan who may have been Harry’s wife and young boy, Toney, who may have been Nan’s son (though likely not Harry’s unless Toney was still a baby…but he was identified as a young boy). Washington was said to be inclined to keep enslaved family units together when possible, so it’s not terribly unreasonable speculation that Washington purchased Harry, Nan and Toney as more or less a family unit.
Harry, Topsom, Nan and Toney, along with two enslaved men from his Mount Vernon estate, Jack and Caesar, were George Washington’s contribution to the Great Dismal Swamp Company. This was a speculative venture formed in 1763 with a dozen prominent Virginia planters to drain and improve the swamp land on the Virginia-North Carolina border to ready it for cultivation and resale. Each investor provided five enslaved people to do the nasty work of preparing the swamp land. George Washington was one of three hands-on managers of the operation in its early years and visited the site several times. Harry and the crew of enslaved workers labored for at least two years but without much success. Enveloped in clouds of mosquitoes, Harry and his fellow slaves worked in appalling humidity to cut a canal three feet deep and ten feet wide to drain into a lake five miles away. In order to get ready cash for the project, they also cut shingles out of the vine-entangled woods of white cedar and cypress.
In 1765, George Washington reconvened the Dismal Swamp investors and resolved to import 300 Dutch laborers more “acquainted with draining, and other branches of agriculture” than enslaved people. This scheme ultimately failed, but new life was breathed into the company’s speculative hopes during the 1780s and 90s. Amid budding nationalist interest in inland navigation, Washington, Patrick Henry, and others planned for a canal through the Dismal Swamp to link the Chesapeake Bay and Albemarle Sound. By 1793, however, Washington had grown disillusioned with the Dismal Swamp Company. Though still confident in the land’s “advantages over almost any other [tract] of equal quantity in the United States,” Washington needed cash and in 1795 sold his shares to Henry Lee.
George Washington must have become acquainted with Harry and Nan because in 1765 he opted to bring the two of them (no mention of Toney or the other Dismal Swamp enslaved one way or another) to work at Mount Vernon. Nan and Harry were on list of taxable property that Washington submitted in 1766, but because children under sixteen were not listed as titheables it is not apparent whether Toney went also.
If indeed Harry and Nan were a couple, they were not permitted to work or even live together, which was not unusual on Washington’s estates. Harry was employed at the Mount Vernon house where he became a valuable ostler/horseler or groomsman looking after horses while Nan labored on one of the four outlying farms, which meant she most likely lived at that separate farm.
George Washington placed high value and pride on horses and his own horsemanship. “Unlike many wealthy horse owners, Washington often checked the conditions of his horses personally and closely supervised the slaves who maintained the horses’ stables.” Therefore, George would have likely gotten to know Harry relatively well during the years between 1765 to 1771, though there is no direct record of their interactions. George Washington had a mixed reputation as a slave holder, strict and exacting but perhaps not as harshly punitive as some of his neighbors.
Harry continued to work as a ‘house servant’ (which included stable hands) until June 1771, when he appeared in a list of the enslaved laborers deployed to work on the construction of a mill at Ferry Plantation (George Washington’s boyhood home near Fredericksburg), the most distant of the Mount Vernon farms.
Harry’s First Escape:
For Harry to be moved from skilled work that was in some measure self-directed, to grueling manual labor, may have dismayed him sufficiently to precipitate his flight on July 29, 1771. George Washington paid one pound and sixteen shilling to advertise for the recovery of his property. The investment paid off when Harry was returned within a matter of weeks, to once again be put to work back at Ferry Plantation where he stayed for two years. In 1773, he was redeployed to the house service at Mount Vernon.
The Battles of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts were fought on April 19, 1775, marking the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. In May. 1775, George Washington left Mount Vernon to attend the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and six weeks later he was in charge of the Continental Army. He would not return until the end of the war, leaving the management of the estate to his cousin, Lund Washington.
In June 1775, as tension between the colonists and the Crown intensified, the embattled royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, evacuated Williamsburg and took refuge on HMS Fowey, one of several British warships in the James River. He began to assemble a squadron to strike back at the rebellious Virginians, welcoming any fugitives slaves that were able to make their way across to his fleet. In November, he published Dunmore’s proclamation that freed any slaves willing to bear arms for the Crown. He formed them into the “Ethiopian Regiment“, the first black regiment in the service of the Crown during the revolution.
Enough joined to make up half of the force that first routed the Virginia militia at Kemp’s Landing and then, in December, suffered a devastating defeat at Great Bridge. By then, Dunmore reported to London, that nearly three hundred men of the Ethiopian Regiment were clad in uniforms embroidered with the provocative words “liberty to slaves.” Patriot writers reacted with fear and fury to the threat posed by this first systematic freeing and arming of the South’s black labor force.
Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment served in the evacuation of Norfolk in January 1776. Dunmore and his British forces remained mostly shipbound around the Chesapeake for the next six months. Two shore camps had to be abandoned after smallpox and other diseases took a heavy toll. Dunmore continued to draw fresh black recruits at the rate of six to eight each day, most of whom succumbed to the disease as soon as they arrived. By early July, disease had claimed up to 70% of the black recruits.
Harry’s Second Escape:
In late July 1776, a few weeks after George Washington inked his signature on the Declaration of independence, Harry asserted his own independence. Part of Dunmore’s fleet made a foray up the Potomac River to gather fresh water, where they were joined by a small craft from Fairfax County. Those on board offering their services to the British were “three of General Washington’s servants.” I have not tracked down primary sources for this escape nor the names of the others escaping, but the three “servants” aboard the craft from Mount Vernon likely included Harry, since he told authorities in New York in July 1783 that he had run away from General Washington seven years before.
Note there is a discrepancy with the Mount Vernon museum display on Harry Washington which has him escaping in 1781 aboard the HMS Savage. Harry’s name (noted as “valuable, horseler”) appeared on a list of 17 escaped slaves compiled by Lund Washington. A footnote in the Mount Vernon site notes that Harry claimed to have escaped in 1776 and that it’s possible Lund’s list was an inventory of all Mount Vernon slaves who escaped to the British (Dr. Bell in his Smithsonian seminar agreed with the 1776 escape date for Harry). George Washington made every effort to retrieve his “property” from the British and eventually 7 of the 17 were returned to Mount Vernon.
In escaping from George Washington’s Mount Vernon at the age of 36, Harry left Nan and the community of enslaved people he had known for more than a decade. For 16 years, Harry was enslaved, more than 13 of those years by George Washington. Seeking his own freedom must have been a difficult and very risky decision but the prospect of freedom for even a short time evidently outweighed the misery of continued bondage.
Harry and the Black Pioneers (1776 – 1783)
Dunmore and the British fleet left the Chesapeake for New York City in August 1776 where Dunmore disbanded the Ethiopian Regiment. Many of its members served as Black Pioneers during the occupation of New York. In New York, Harry appears to have been absorbed into the non-combat Black Pioneers. The soldiers were employed mainly in construction, street cleaning, and garbage collection roles.
Harry seems to have stayed in this role for the next three years. Again, we don’t know the specifics of his time there, but evidence suggests that he adapted well to a life of freedom, albeit limited under the rules and strictures of military service.
Harry was among the 7,000-strong force that General Henry Clinton took from New York for the invasion of South Carolina in early 1780. During the Siege of Charleston, which began on March 31, 1780 and lasted until May 8th, two specially formed companies of Black Pioneers were employed building the defensive earthworks, making grapeshot and a myriad of support services. Some were armed and engaged in actual fighting. When General Clinton returned to New York in May, he took with him some 500 Black Pioneers, but Harry stayed for two years with the remainder in Charleston.
After Charleston, organized American military activity in the South virtually collapsed. General Clinton turned over British operations in the South to Lord Cornwallis, who prepared to invade North Carolina and later Virginia. Despite battlefield successes, the British had difficulty holding southern territory inland from the ports of Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington and Norfolk.
Harry Washington was promoted to Corporal in charge of a company of Black Pioneers attached to the Royal Artillery Department in Charleston in 1781. This must have afforded Harry some level of personal satisfaction. He was a free man, working on behalf of the world’s preeminent military power, in charge of a company of other free black men. However, any sense of safety or permanence must have come to a shocking end with news of the British surrender at Yorktown in October 1781. Harry and his comrades entered an extended state of limbo, pawns in a much larger world of great power negotiations and uncertainty.
Early in 1782 news came from England that the British government had granted independence to the American colonies and opened negotiations for peace. Charleston was scheduled for evacuation in June that year. This raised the thorny issue of the British obligations to the Black Loyalists, since promises of freedom made by successive British commanders had been contingent on the British winning the war and retaining control of the colonies. No one had a contingency plan for losing the war and leaving America.
Throughout November until the final evacuation of Charleston on December 14, 1782, hundreds of runaways queued to be interviewed by the board British commander General Leslie had established to assess their status. Slave-owners, keen to retrieve their property, tried desperately to coax them away. Men and women cleared by the board were allowed to choose their destination, though the availability of transport was a key determinant as to where they went.
A corporal in the Black Pioneers such as Harry would have had had little difficulty proving his eligibility for a certificate of freedom. A fleet took the Royal Artillery Department, as well as British, German and Loyalist regiments, from Charleston to New York and that convoy must have included Harry Washington.
The blacks evacuated from Charleston joined at least 4,000 black men and women living in the British zone in New York where they made up about 10% of the workforce. Black artisans worked on rebuilding projects and in the naval yards; black teamsters hauled provisions and collected firewood; black nurses and orderlies staffed the hospitals; black laundresses and needlewomen did the washing and sewing; black pilots guided the ships safely in and out of the port; black musicians provided entertainment at social events; black jockeys rode the horses at the races; black cooks, servants and valets ensured the comfort of the elite.
Among this teeming black community were people Harry Washington knew from his days of enslavement at Mt Vernon. Eighteen people had run off from Mt Vernon to join the British in April 1781, including two of Lund Washington’s slaves. While Washington had employed a slave catcher to retrieve seven of his chattel from Yorktown and Philadelphia, others had managed to escape to New York.
At the same time that Charleston was being evacuated, a provisional peace treaty was being hammered out between the British and the Americans in Paris. The day the treaty was signed, November 29, 1782, a hastily written amendment was scribbled in the margin of Article Seven, to prohibit “carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American Inhabitants.” According to John Adams, one of the American negotiators, the clause was inserted at the insistence of Henry Laurens, who had joined the negotiating team on the very last day, when the commissioners were finalizing the business at the house of the chief British negotiator, Richard Oswald. In view of Laurens’ fleeting connection with the peace process, it was remarkable that Oswald accepted the last-minute change without dispute. Up to that point the contentious issues had been fishing rights. None of the three other American negotiators had thought it necessary to include a clause about runaways, while John Jay later admitted that he was surprised the British had agreed.
Oswald’s acquiescence to this hasty inclusion owed more to friendship and his financial entanglements in South Carolina than to diplomatic pressure. Laurens considered Oswald as “my very worthy friend.” When Laurens was captured at sea and imprisoned in the Tower of London it was Oswald who furnished the bail for his release in 1782. Before the war, Oswald owned a slave factory on Bance Island, in the mouth of the Sierra Leone River in West Africa, with Laurens acting as agent for his slave cargo in Charleston. After the war, Oswald intended to become a plantation owner in South Carolina, transferring slaves he owned in East Florida onto land owned by Laurens and which Laurens was in the process of transferring into Oswald’s name. Laurens’s close friend, John Lewis Gervais, the Carolinian who lost the largest number of enslaved people to the British, who was deeply in debt to the British negotiator for the many slaves he had purchased on credit. When Laurens wrote to Gervais to remind him of his debt, he was careful to stress how much gratitude was owed “our dear friend Mr Oswald.”
By the time news of a treaty with a prohibition on “carrying away any Negroes” reached New York, Harry Washington and his fellow black allies of the British were in a very vulnerable position. As one runaway later recalled recalled, the news “diffused universal joy among all parties; except us, who had escaped from slavery and taken refuge in the English army.” Unless the black allies behind the British lines had papers of emancipation, as very few did, they might expect to be returned to enslavement in perpetuity, for themselves, their children and their children’s children. Determined to maintain their freedom, they were kept on constant alert against attempts to spirit them back to slavery. According to a senior Hessian officer, Major Baurmeister, “almost five thousand persons have come into this city to take possession of their former property.” His figure may have been exaggerated, but there can be no doubt that a great many slave-owners were gaining entry into the British zone and they were not using sweet reason to reclaim their property. Without warning, runaways could find themselves knocked on the head, bound hand and foot, and kidnapped back to the place they had fled. As most of the runaways behind the British lines had experienced years of freedom they were horrified at the prospect of reenslavement. Day and night they pressed their case with the British authorities to make good the promises of freedom and remove them from the reach of their vengeful owners. They refused utterly “to be delivered in so unwarrantable a manner,” Baumeister noted in his diary, and “insist on their rights under the proclamation.”
Alarmed by what he saw as a flagrant violation of the treaty, General Washington undertook to raise the issue directly with the British commander in Chief, General Carleton. Washington also engaged his army contractor, Daniel Parker, to recover his slaves. “If by chance you should come at the knowledge of any of them,” he wrote, I will be much obliged by your securing them so I may obtain them again.” Washington’s choice of Daniel Parker was strategic. Parker had done personal errands for the general in the past; on this matter, however, he was uniquely positioned to help Washington locate his slaves since he had been appointed as one of two American commissioners to inspect embarkations to ensure no American-owned property was taken away.
General Carleton was appalled by the terms of the treaty and he took care to ensure all the runaways who had been with the British for a year or more were provided with certificates of freedom. No person who met that condition could be claimed as American property. So when Parker inspected the ships in the evacuation fleet that sailed from New York on April 27, 1783, he was unable to stop Deborah Squash, who had run away from Mount Vernon in 1781, from leaving on the ship Polly, bound for Nova Scotia. When Washington protested a violation of the treaty, Carleton told him in no uncertain terms that that the British government would never agree “to reduce themselves to the necessity of violating their faith to the Negroes into the British lines under the proclamation of his predecessors” and further that “delivering up Negroes to their former masters… would be a dishonourable violation of the public faith.”
Under Parker’s impotent gaze, Harry Washington embarked on the ship L’Abondance in July 1783, with 405 black men, women and children going to Nova Scotia. The commissioners wrote down his name as Henry and he was noted to be 43 years of age, having run off from General Washington seven years earlier.
The frustration experienced by Parker in witnessing this slave exodus boiled over in a series of letters sent to General Washington, complaining that that while thousands had been sent off, the American commissioners had been able to retrieve only seven, none of them the property of the general. The out-going transports that they were permitted to inspect contained only a fraction of those departing, they complained, because they were not allowed to inspect the Royal Navy, nor military transports, nor the many merchant vessels leaving the port. Black seamen, who made up about ten percent of the Royal Navy and its accompanying fleet of privateers, simply sailed away. Plenty of military officers took their black servants away with them without suffering any scrutiny from the commissioners.
As the pace of evacuations quickened, all available vessels were pressed into service to take refugees to Nova Scotia, Jamaica, the Bahamas and England. Parker continued the fruitless task of supervising embarkations until the end of October, when the inspections were finally abandoned. The very last evacuation fleet on November 24, 1783 took with it Daniel Payne, another of the Mount Vernon runaways. Subsequently, General Washington was to characterize the whole exercise as “little more than a farce.”
Harry Washington in Nova Scotia
Those on board L’Abondance with Harry Washington in 1783 were mostly followers of the blind preacher called “Daddy Moses” and they settled as a community in Nova Scotia at a place they called Birchtown. A total of about 3,000 Black Loyalists from the Revolutionary War were resettled to Nova Scotia, including three former Mount Vernon slaves: Harry Washington, Daniel Payne and Deborah Squash.
The muster at Birchtown (aka, The Book of Negroes) taken in July 1784 listed Harry Washington, aged forty four, described as a laborer with a wife, Jenny, aged twenty-four. No children were listed. It seems most likely Harry met Jenny in Nova Scotia but it is uncertain.
Many of the blacks settled under the leadership of Stephen Blucke, a prominent black leader of the Black Pioneers. Historian Barry Moody has referred to Blucke as “the true founder of the Afro-Nova Scotian community.” Blucke led the founding of Birchtown in 1783. The community was the largest settlement of Black Loyalists and was the largest free settlement of Africans in North America in the 18th century. The community was named after British Brigadier General Samuel Birch, an official who assisted in the evacuation of Black Loyalists from New York.
Birchtown was located near the larger town of Shelburne, with a majority white population. Racial tensions in Shelburne erupted into the 1784 Shelburne riots, when white Loyalist residents drove Black residents out of Shelburne and into Birchtown.
To survive, Harry probably hired himself out to his white neighbours in nearby Shelburne, as most of the black settlers were forced to do. These labor agreements were highly exploitative, with the free blacks regarded as cheap labor by the white loyalist settlers. Sometimes the black workers were never paid at all. Nova Scotia proved hard for both white and black settlers, forced to create a new life in inhospitable weather and faced with innumerable delays in the allocation of the promised land grants. When the grants were made, the lots allocated to the black settlers tended to be smaller than expected and on poor, rocky soil.
In many cases, black refugees were still waiting for their land allocation three years after their arrival and were in a pitiful state. Harry perhaps did better than some, eventually acquiring a 40-acre farm, two lots in town and a house. I like to think Harry and Jenny found at least some moments of solace and satisfaction with their farm, house and community in Nova Scotia, though no doubt life was hard, especially through the winters. After surviving more than seven winters, continued disappointment with promised land allotments, and little improvement in relationships with white neighbors, many of the Black Nova Scotians had enough.
Thomas Peters, who had been a sergeant of the Black Pioneers during the war, was deputized to voyage to England in 1791 in order to put the grievances of his constituency in Nova Scotia to the British Government. In his petition (prepared with the help of English abolitionist Granville Sharp), Peters requested that His Majesty’s black subjects in Nova Scotia be resettled, or, should they chose to remain in Nova Scotia, they be given due allotment of the land they had been promised. In response to Peters’s acutely embarrassing accusations of bad faith, William Pitt’s government undertook to pay the necessary expenses to transport as many black settlers as wished to leave Nova Scotia. It was decided in London that Peters and the Naval Officer John Clarkson, the brother of English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, would assist in recruiting blacks to settle in Sierra Leone.
The Sierra Leone Company, delighted with the prospect of new settlers in their colony on the west coast of Africa, offered free grants of land “subject to certain charges and obligations” to any who wanted to emigrate. New settlers were promised twenty acres for every man, ten for every woman and five for every child.
Harry Washington was among the hundreds who attended a meeting in Birchtown, at the church of Daddy Moses, to hear Clarkson promote the move to Sierra Leone. They especially warmed to his assurance that in Sierra Leone, unlike Nova Scotia where they were barred from voting or serving on juries, there would be no discrimination between white and black settlers.
Harry Washington was among a large group from Birchtown who decided to go, even though it meant abandoning his freehold land grants. In the list of settlers relocating from Birchtown, Harry was described a farmer, born in Africa and aged fifty (although he was probably fifty-three) traveling with his wife Jenny. He took with him an axe, saw and pickaxe, plus three hoes, as well as two muskets and several items of furniture. He left behind two town lots, a house and forty acres.
Harry in Sierra Leone
As a consequence of Clarkson’s assurances, about half of the black refugees in Nova Scotia opted to leave in January, 1792; nearly 1,200 black settlers were relocated at a cost of 15,500 pounds to the British government. The directors of the Sierra Leone Company were so pleased with the response from Nova Scotia that they shelved plans to encourage white settlers to emigrate from England. Company director William Wilberforce told Clarkson that he should call the new black settlers Africans, believing that this was “a more respectable way of speaking of them”, but this was emphatically not how they conceived of themselves. In their eyes they were free British subjects, no less than Clarkson. They had, Clarkson ruefully conceded, “strange notions …as to their civil rights.”
By August 1792, these strange notions were causing grief to Clarkson, who had been appointed the first governor of Sierra Leone. Since Clarkson had arrived in Sierra Leone, turbulent discontent had brought the governor to the end of his tether, with “fainting fits and hysteric weeping frequently,” yet he maintained a steely determination that he, and only he, would be in charge. He put the blame for the discontent on Thomas Peters, who had died, profoundly disillusioned, in June that year. Yet everywhere Clarkson cared to look was evidence of deep dissatisfaction. As the settlers told him, finding themselves in Sierra Leone with no land, despite all the promises, “makes us very uneasy in our mind that we might be liable to the same cruel treatment as we have before experienced.”
On the very day Peters died, Clarkson received a petition from the congregation of Daddy Moses (which included Harry), written with such eccentric spelling it betrayed the authors as barely literate. They said they willingly agreed to be governed by the laws of England, but “we do not consent to gave it into your honer hands with out haven aney of our own culler in it” and reminded Clarkson he had promised them that “whoever came to Saraleon wold be free… and all should be equel,” so it followed that they had “a wright to chuse men that we think proper for to act for us in a reasnenble manner.”
By late July, the settlers were in a fever pitch of indignation, because the survey for the farm lots they had been promised had not yet begun. They had only the huts they had built on small town lots carved out of the jungle in Freetown, and the only basis for their subsistence was two days a week work for the company, paid in credit at the company store. Their habit of trusting Clarkson was all that protected the company’s handful of haughty, idle and incompetent white employees from their collective wrath. Without Clarkson, the company secretary confided in his journal, “I should scarce think it safe to stay among them.”
Already, Clarkson had been forced to persuade the settlers to accept only one-fifth of the land they had been promised, and a bitter grievance had been reignited when he indicated that the company directors would not allow the settlers to take land along the Sierra Leone River. Access to the water was an absolute necessity. There were no carts or horses in Sierra Leone; communication and transport were all by means of water. The settlers reacted with fury to the suggestion pointing out this same trick was played on them in Nova Scotia, where white men had occupied the entire waterfront, built wharves along it, and then charged money for access. They had not crossed the ocean to suffer the same discrimination all over again, they said.
In deference to the settlers’ fears of further injustice at the hands of self-interested white people, Clarkson hastily rescinded the company instructions concerning the waterfront. He also agreed that the settlers could elect their representatives to act as peacekeepers—a tithingman for every ten families and a hundredor for every hundred. He decided to withhold the information that the company directors demanded payment of a quit rent of two shillings an acre on the settlers’ land grants, rationalizing in his journal that the company “must give way to the general spirit of my promises.” It was a high-risk strategy for a servant of the company who was due to go on extended leave in December 1792. Clarkson never came back to Sierra Leone. He was dismissed by the company in May 1783 and was replaced as governor by William Dawes.
Dawes was in turn succeeded in 1796 by twenty-seven year old Zachary Macaulay, who had acted in the position on and off for two years prior to that. By 1796, the settlers were sending anguished appeals to Clarkson to come back as the governor and rescue them from the authoritarian regime of Governor Macaulay, who now obliged them to pay a huge quit rent. Blithely, the Sierra Leone Company determined to impose a tax that was a hundred times higher than Nova Scotia, where the colonial government had been forced to abandon the quit rent because settlers, black and white, refused to pay two shillings for every 100 acres. When Governor Macaulay cut the amount in half, requiring only one shilling an acre, he naively believed that he was being generous to the settlers and fully expected them to be grateful to him.
For more than a dozen years between Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, the defining issue for Harry Washington and his fellow black settlers had been to live as free people and not to submit to the indignities and deprivations that had marked their lives as slaves. Owning land—not renting it or working it for somebody else—was critical in their self-definition, as was regulating their own community. It was equally important that men should be responsible for the maintenance of their families and that the women and children should not labor as they had in slavery.
For a time after their arrival, Harry had been prepared to endure the indignity of working for credit to redeem goods at the company store rather than monetary wages—even though this was a condition of labor the settlers believed akin to bondage—because he was waiting for the land allocation that would give him the capacity to be independent and self-sustaining. By 1796, Harry was one of thirty settlers who created farms out of “scrappy” five-acre mountain lots (far less than the 20 prime acres they were each promised) and these were producing trade crops such as coffee, pepper and ginger, as well as the African staple crop of rice with interspersed plantings of cassava and yams. The self-reliance he had achieved was now threatened by the quit rent which was many times what he and his fellow black settlers had successfully resisted paying in Nova Scotia.
On January 5, 1797, the settlers met to discuss how to get rid of the quit rent, determined never to submit to a condition that reduced them to perpetual tenancy. “Who could say that now they were not slaves?” one of them asked. The governor was not about to tolerate any dissent on the issue, warning that “the smallest degree of clamour and tumult” would see them deprived of every service provided by the company. It would be “an unequal war,” to send petitions to England, he warned them. Macauley’s reputation in England was high, whereas the settlers were already branded as turbulent, discontented and ungrateful. Instead of working themselves into a lather of distrust, Macauley said, the settlers needed to understand that the white men in Sierra Leone were “their natural advisors,” whose energy was entirely harnessed to promoting the settlers’ happiness.
On August 5, 1797, the elected representatives wrote to the governor to remind him that they had abandoned land in Nova Scotia in the expectation that they would receive land on the same conditions in Sierra Leone, and that they were never told that the land belonged to the company for which they must pay quit rent. “Sir if we had been told that, we never could come here,” they wrote; “we are astonished why the company could not tell us after three years we was to pay a shilling per acre … if the lands is not ours without paying a shilling per acre, the lands will never be ours.” Rather than pay, they said, the settlers would apply to the Koya Temne (the local Temne kindgdom) for more land that they could hold without such conditions.
About two weeks later, the governor called a public meeting of heads of households for which he had prepared a long address. Even though Macaulay knew that very few of the settlers could read, he had printed 100 copies so the community would be able to measure the full weight of his disdain. His address lasted for over an hour, delivered with all the assurance of an orator. He denied that the black settlers had left freehold land in Nova Scotia and insisted that they had always known about the quit rent. The problem with ignorant people, he concluded, was that they were susceptible to “every prating, malicious, designing talebearer” who wished to misrepresent the good intentions of the company. “You have often been made to see the folly of acting thus,” he told his stunned audience, “yet you still return like the sow to flounder in the same dirty puddle.”
Macaulay suspected that the settlers “cherished hopes of … throw’g off the jurisdiction of the company servants, and constituting one of their own number a kind of dictator, who assisted by a council, should rule them after the manner of the Natives around us.” With the company servants vastly outnumbered by the settlers, Macaulay began to fear insurrection. He put in place a private signal to rally the few whites and the thirty or so obedient settlers to his fortified house in case of trouble. He was sure that he would have to hang two or three troublemakers, despite having no legal capacity to enact a capital punishment, and was prepared “to risk holding up my hand at the Old Bailey” in order to protect the company’s interest.
At this stage, however, the settlers had not abandoned their cherished belief in themselves as dutiful subjects of the King, living in a British colony. Three of the elected Tithingmen presented a petition on January 16, 1798, addressed to the captain as the King’s representative on the West African coast. The petition explained how the black settlers had been given land by the British government as a consequence of “our good behavior in the last war.” The King heard their complaints about living a cold country and made the offer to “remove us to Sierra Leone where we may be comfortable.” Things had not turned out in accordance with the terms of His Majesty’s offer and they were now “shamefully called upon to pay a quit rent of a shilling an acre for the land we hold.” Did they remain the King’s subjects? If so, they sought to apply to the Crown “to see ourselves righted in all the wrongs which are done to us.” Without hesitation, the captain turned the petition over to Macaulay, who decided to ignore it, although he did advise his employers that it was prudent not to collect the quit rent, at least in the short term.
An industrious calm settled on Sierra Leone once the demand for the quit rent was withdrawn and by early in 1798 there was palpable joy that the abrasive governor was due to leave the colony. Just as Macaulay was counting the weeks to his departure, an edict arrived from the directors that the quit rent must be paid. The directors’ concession to settler concerns was that the revenue would be used for development within Sierra Leone. A more perceptive man than Macaulay would have recognized that the settlers were entirely consistent in their opposition to the quit rent and that their reasons had nothing to do with how the revenue was spent. He could hardly have failed to notice that their “mutinous spirit” had melted away as soon as the quit rent was abandoned, indicating that the quit rent alone was the cause of rebelliousness.
Macaulay was single-minded in his devotion to the company and took account of none of these things. He duly informed the settlers that new titles had been drawn up incorporating the quit rent conditions, for which they must apply by December 15. About a dozen families accepted the grants and the rest refused, even though the refusal meant their children were barred from the free company school. A new grant register excluded the names of all those who refused their grants and listed their allotments under the designation of unallocated land. Among those whose land was reallocated in this fashion were some of the colony’s most successful farmers, including Harry Washington.
Macaulay’s action drove nearly every settler into the rebellious coalition, including previous supporters of the company. Watching these events with mounting anxiety was the man who was to replace Macaulay as governor, a twenty-three-year-old stripling named Thomas Ludlam. “From that period”, Ludlam wrote in his later report, “the colony had no peace.”
Early in 1799, another issue of contention was added to the explosive situation in Freetown. For years resentment had been accumulating about the interpretation of the law by the white men who acted as judges and a perceived white bias in the administration of the law. “We do not think our selves dun jestises in the colenny not by no meains,” the black representatives wrote to the governor, insisting that they be permitted to appoint one judge and two justices of the peace from among the settlers. Macaulay pointed out that none of them was sufficiently versed in English law to be a judge. Conceding they were “unlaint people”, the settlers argued they could become versed in the law with the help of the white men who currently sat as judges. Macaulay was unmoved, although he did allow them to put their case to the directors in London, confident of the directors’ negative response. For all his iron will, Macaulay grew more and more uneasy during the weeks leading to his departure, admitting in private letters that he slept with loaded muskets in his bedroom.
Macaulay left Sierra Leone for good in April 1799. As soon as he was gone, the settlers took matters into their own hands. Without waiting to hear back from the company directors, they selected a judge and two justices of the peace. The elected Hundredors and Tithingmen then formed into a bicameral parliament of sorts, passing resolutions about the day-to-day management of Freetown and Granville Town, quite independent of the company. In September this defacto government resolved that the proprietors of the colony were all those people who had come to Sierra Leone with Clarkson, together with the original settlers from Granville Town, since it was to these people that the Koya Temne had given the land. In making their bid of independence, the settlers were not to know that Macaulay had been appointed the permanent secretary of the Sierra Leone Company and in that capacity had applied to the British parliament for a royal charter to give the company formal jurisdiction over Sierra Leone.
What the company was asking for was incontestable control, including full judicial power to repress dissent. As the company directors explained in a subsequent report, “the unwarranted pretensions of the disaffected settlers, their narrow misguided views; their excessive jealousy of Europeans; the crude notions they had formed of their own rights; and the impetuosity of their tempers” would inevitably lead to “most ruinous effect” unless the company had the legal capacity to “repress the turbulence and assumption of the colonists.” So it did not matter what the elected Hundredors and Tithingmen in Freetown decided. Once the royal charter was granted, there would be no more elections in Sierra Leone.
At the same time as asking for a royal charter, the directors were negotiating to take into Sierra Leone some 500 Maroon warriors from Jamaica. These were the descendants of runaway slaves who had intermarried with the Caribs, long before Jamaica became a British colony, and who lived in self-regulated communities in the mountains. They had not been defeated in the Maroon war of 1795 but had surrendered in response to a treaty offer from the British commander that was subsequently repudiated by the colonial government and they were deported to Nova Scotia. Utterly miserable in frigid Nova Scotia, the Maroon chiefs had petitioned the British government to move them to a more appropriate place. Desperate to find a solution, the British government seized the offer from the Sierra Leone Company. To sweeten the deal, the parliament allowed a substantial sum of money to the company to fortify Government House in Freetown and to garrison a detachment of soldiers in the colony.
Ludlam knew about these developments when he formally assumed the governorship of Sierra Leone in November 1799. He decided it would be wise to withhold this information and first tackle the greatest source of perceived injustice by removing any restrictions on children attending the schools. His masterstroke was to abandon the quit rent. The son of a mathematician, Ludlam had done the sums to show that the quit rent required the settlers to pay the full value of the land every twenty years. He felt they were right to regard it as unacceptable. No money had ever been collected by the end of 1799, and he argued the case that it never could be collected.
1800: The new governor’s conciliatory gestures may have worked, had not he felt duty-bound to inform the settlers that their judicial appointments would not be permitted. On May 20, Ludlam called a meeting to explain why he was obliged to reject these appointments. For a judge to apply for the appropriate penalties, he must be versed in English law and able to read, he explained. In any case, he added ominously, under the royal charter being drawn up in England, all such decisions would be the King’s prerogative and if the settlers did not accept the decision they would be tried for treason. Here was the first intimation that the company was about to get far greater power over the settlers’ lives than it currently managed to exercise. The governor failed to mention that a detachment of soldiers was to be stationed in Freetown to protect the company and uphold the charter. Nor did he reveal that over 500 new settlers, of a notoriously aggressive nature, were to arrive in the colony within months.
Ludlam hoped that his hint about the royal charter would induce “perplexity and doubt” among the dissident settlers. Quite the opposite was the case. The settlers decided that they must move immediately if they were to secure their democratic independence. On September 3, nearly all the heads of black households in Freetown attended a meeting to formulate a new code of laws to regulate trading practices, animal husbandry and farming procedure, as well as domestic and social behavior. The governor’s authority was deemed to extend no further than the company’s business. The “paper of laws” required every black settler be bound by the law or leave Freetown.
Two weeks later Ludlam was so troubled by stories of “meetings of a most seditious and dangerous nature,” that he called to his house all the company employees, about thirty loyal settlers and all the African seamen from the company ships, “for the purpose of forming a strong guard and assisting the civil power in the execution of its warrants.” That night, the new code of laws was displayed, drawing curious crowds the following day. A witness later reported that “people being on farms, hearing of this news, gathered themselves together to hear and understand” at one of the settlers’ houses. The frightened young governor overreacted. He sent a group of loyal black settlers he had armed and deputized as marshals to arrest several men on charges of treason. The marshals burst into the house just as the meeting was breaking up.
In the melee that followed, three men were arrested, while about forty men escaped out of the town and set up camp by the bridge on the road to Granville Town, where they were joined by Harry Washington, whose farm was nearby. The next day rewards were posted the supposed ringleader who were charged with for “treasonable and rebellious practices.” Subsequently the Sierra Leone Company subsequently tried to portray these men as dangerous hotheads who wished to annihilate the company employees and loyal settlers. Significantly, they were were all middle-aged — Harry Washington was sixty — and they were largely without arms. They had some guns, but no ammunition, which was almost all stored at Government House. Apparently, on September 28 or 29 they stole a gun and some powder from the governor’s farm, as well as powder and shot from the farm of another company servant. This was hardly evidence of preparation for an armed coup; they were as likely to have wanted the arms for hunting game for food.
On September 30 a large British transport ship, the Asia, arrived in Freetown harbor carrying over 500 Maroons and forty-seven soldiers of the 24th Regiment. The next day the Maroon chiefs called on the governor to discuss the allocation of land they were promised and were surprised to find all the company employees huddled together under armed guard. Ludlam pointed out to them that “the rebellion then raging in the heart of the colony” would put their promised land grants in jeopardy. According to his account, the Maroon chiefs made “a unanimous and hearty offer” to put an end to the rebellion. What they actually said, according to the white agent who accompanied them, was that they “like King George and white man well — if them settlers don’t like King George nor his government — only let the Maroons see them.” After months at sea they were desperate for some physical activity so were pleased to be invited to “stretch their legs a little,” as one of the company’s directors, later joked, and hunt the rebels down.
Significantly, the Maroons refused to sign the land grant agreement when it was presented to them. Having once been betrayed by the breach of a treaty they had been persuaded to sign, they had determined never to sign any agreement again. Ludlam was in no position to argue. He thought it was “prudent not to insist,” as to do so might “sour their minds and indispose them to render those services which we so much wanted.” They were never told that this so-called rebellion was a dispute over settlers’ rights between the company and people resettled from Nova Scotia, as they were. When the Maroons were subsequently confronted with the quit rent, they opposed it with just as much vigor.
Within a week, Ludlam had thirty-one men in his custody, but he still had not received the charter of justice that would allow him to try them on criminal charges. Keen to avoid the expense of holding the prisoners, his expedient solution was to establish a military tribunal made up of an officer from Asia and two from the 24th Regiment. The court martial was in session from October 10 and each of the prisoners was tried for “open and unprovoked rebellion.” Six men were banished for life to the British garrison at the slave fort of Goree, a sure sentence of death.
Harry Washington and twenty-three others were banished across the Sierra Leone River to the Bullom Shore. The personal tragedy and appalling loss in human resources that resulted from these dubious and draconian decisions was of no consequence to the directors of the company. They believed that Sierra Leone was much better off without these men and “the crude notions they had formed of their own rights.”
The runaway slaves from America had made “the worst possible subjects,” William Wilberforce concluded in disgust, “as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.” They had, of course, been trained and educated in the American Revolution and the radical notions about their rights as free men and women were forged in the tortuous negotiations to secure their freedom and to make it a tangible reality in their lives. George Washington was prepared to risk his all for such ideals. It should be no surprise that a man he purchased to dig his ditches as property might feel the same.
Harry Washington was among the rebels sentenced to banishment to Bullom Shore, another location in Sierra Leone. He became one of the two leaders of a new settlement but died there of disease, age 60. It is not known if his wife Jenny outlived him, if she too was banished to Bullom Shore or stayed in the Sierra Leone colony, nor is it known if they had any children.
Harry spent his first 20 years in Africa, the next 16 enslaved mostly to George Washington in Virginia, 7 years as a Black Loyalist in New York and South Carolina, 8 years as a free farmer in Nova Scotia with his wife, and 8 more years farming in Sierra Leone. We can’t know his own assessment of his life. Certainly it was eventful, hard, and with more than its share of disappointments. I like to think there were at least some moments of satisfaction and solace as he found his way to freedom amid the turmoil. His life provides a fascinating window into multiple important 18th century events and characters, with resonance centuries later. His is a life to be celebrated and studied, as much as many of his more famous contemporaries.
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