“All the English must deliver their Vessels to the French”

The Turks and Caicos Islands lie north of Hispaniola. In the eighteenth century, they were sparsely inhabited, used mostly for harvesting salt.

Like many other Caribbean islands, the Turks were grabbed back and forth by the three main European Atlantic empires of that time: Spanish, French, and British.

And within the British Empire, the Bahamas and Bermuda fought over who should have jurisdiction.

On 15 May 1764, Capt. John Malcom anchored his sloop Friends off the Turks “in order to take in Salt,” according to a story printed in the 13 September Boston News-Letter.

The crew was interrupted a little more than two weeks later:

upon the 1st of June, about 9 o’Clock in the morning, a French Xebeque of 16 Guns, a Snow of 12 and a Sloop of 8 Guns anchored in the Road; a French Ship of War of 64 standing off and on, about a Mile’s distance:

Said Malcom, and other Masters of English Vessels lying there, being eight in Number, were ordered on board the Xebeque; in the mean Time about 250 Soldiers, Marines or Sailors were landed, who, as soon as they got on Shore, set all the Houses on Fire, burnt and destroyed every Thing in them.

Said Malcom, and the other Masters who were put on board the Xebeque, were told, they and all the English must deliver their Vessels to the French, who would be sent out of the Man of War to take possession of them, which he and the rest were immediately obliged to comply with, and by 2 o’Clock the same Day, all the Vessels, French and English (manned with French) got under Sail, and anchored the next Morning at Salt Quay, another Island which they had destroyed, about 24 Hours before Turk’s-Island, in the same Way;

from whence said Malcom, with the other English Prisoners, were sent to Cape François, upon the Island of Hispaniola, where said Malcom was kept Prisoner under a Guard of French Soldiers till the 10th, and then was ordered with his Men on board his own Sloop (which had been plundered of sundry Articles) in order to leave that Place immediately—

Said Malcom further informs us, that a Detachment of Soldiers had been left on Turk’s Island, with all necessary Materials to fortify said Island.

The repeated phrase “said Malcom” makes me wonder if this came from a deposition or other legal testimony the captain gave after returning to Québec.

This was the second, or perhaps even the third, time that Malcom had been held prisoner by the French in the past decade. He must have been getting tired of that.

The Friends had happened to be at “Turk’s-Island” (most likely Grand Turk) when the French came back for the first time in eleven years to reassert their claim to the archipelago. According to this Turks and Caicos history site:

They erected two “pillories” 80 feet tall that rested on large stone bases. One was on Sand Cay and the other at Saunders Pond Beach on Grand Turk. Each had the name of the French Prime Minister and displayed an iron Fleur de Lis.

A Royal Navy sloop reclaimed possession in 1766, presumably when there weren’t any French warships in the area to fight. The French returned in 1778. British Loyalists showed up in 1781. The French returned for most of 1783, fending off a brief attack by Capt. Horatio Nelson, R.N. Finally, the islands were formally assigned to Britain in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

This article appeared in the Boston News-Letter with the dateline “QUEBEC, July 36,” suggesting Richard Draper copied the text from the Quebec Gazette of that date. But I don’t have access to that newspaper since databases are defined by modern national boundaries, not old imperial ones.

It’s therefore possible that John Malcom made more news in Québec City while he was based there. I’ve found one other item reprinted in the Boston press, and it’s a doozy.

COMING UP: The first clubbing.

“Capt. Malcom of this Place, who was taken by a French Privateer”

In the late 1750s, Britain’s cold war with France once again boiled up into a hot war.

That presented dangers for merchant captains like John and Daniel Malcom, as well as opportunities.

In seeking British government assistance years later, John Malcom declared:

I have had thirteen Different Commissions in your Majesty’s Land Service in North America the two last French and Spanish warrs that is Past. I have Serv’d from a Ensign to a Colonel. I have been in all the Battles that was Fought in North America those two warrs that is Past except two and at every Place we Conquerd and Subdued our Enemys to your Majesty.

That’s quite a claim, and he didn’t provide any specifics. Were his “Commissions” in the militia, in a colonial army, as a privateer captain, or even as a contractor?

That vagueness makes it hard to figure out where John Malcom was when his surname appears in Boston newspapers. For example, the 6 Oct 1755 Boston Gazette had a supplement with news of two men missing from “Capt. Malcom’s Company” in Maj. Joseph Frye’s force after the Battle of Petitcodiac in what’s now New Brunswick. What that John Malcom, a relative, or someone with no connection?

The 23 Dec 1756 Boston News-Letter reported that a French schooner had captured a “large Sloop, belonging to Carr and Malcolm,” in Martha Brae Harbour on Jamaica. Was that ship partly owned by John Malcom? Or might that owner have been a merchant from distant Scotland?

Adding to the fog is how John’s younger brother Daniel was also a ship’s captain. The 30 May 1757 Boston Gazette reported this adventure for one of the brothers, but which one?

Thursday last came to Town Capt. Malcom of this Place, who was taken by a French Privateer and carried into Port au Prince, from whence he got to Jamaica, and informs, that just as he came away Advice was receiv’d there, that 18 Sail of French Men of War and Transports, and about 7000 Troops, was arriv’d at Port au Prince, very sickly.

I’m struck by how the Boston press referred to “Capt. Malcom of this Place” as if there were only one. Did that mean that John was serving in an army, so Daniel was the only one commanding a ship? Had one of the brothers moved out of Boston, as John would later do? Or was that just sloppy reporting?

On 4 May 1758 the Boston News-Letter reported:

The ———, Vavason, from New York, and the ———, Malcom, from Boston, for Madeira, are taken and carried into Louisbourg.

Not only was that news item short on details, but it came from London, so it was months old. But it couldn’t have been over a year old and refer to the same capture as the last article.

Fortunately, in the summer of 1758 the British Empire took Louisbourg from the French (again). After that, it’s easier to spot John Malcom.

TOMORROW: Back and forth.

John Malcom: The Early Years

Back in January I wrote about the mobbing of Customs officer John Malcom on the Sestercentennial anniversary of that event.

The standard study of that attack is “Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom,” written by Frank W. C. Hersey in 1941 and available through the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party looks at the same day through the eyes of George R. T. Hewes.

I collected some additional information about Malcom that I didn’t have time to dig through and share in January, so now I’m doubling back to his story. We can call this series “The Further Adventures of Captain John Malcom.” Though really it’s more of a prequel.

First of all, a note about nomenclature: Capt. John Malcom spelled his name without a second L, as did his brother Daniel Malcom. However, many people writing about him spelled the surname in the traditional Scottish style as “Malcolm.” Indeed, Hersey transcribed a petition signed by Malcom which a clerk then labeled as coming from “Mr. Malcolm.”

Because so many historians rendered the name as “Malcolm,” I followed that style in making a Boston 1775 tag for the man years ago. However, in these postings I’m going to use the spellings that individuals preferred.

This story starts in 1721, when Michael and Sarah Malcom arrived in Boston from Ulster, Ireland, where their ancestors had moved from Scotland in the previous century. They brought young children named William and Elizabeth.

On 20 May 1723 Sarah gave birth to a second boy, whom they called John. The family then moved to Georgetown in the district of Maine. Another baby boy, Daniel, arrived on 29 Nov 1725, followed by Allen in 1733 and Martha in 1738.

Michael Malcom invested in the Massachusetts “Land Bank or Manufactory Scheme.” In 1745 he was assessed to pay £16, on the high side of those investors.

Also in 1745, wrote Hersey, young John Malcom “served as an ensign in the Second Massachusetts Regiment, commanded by Colonel Samuel Waldo, at the siege of Louisbourg; and this same year he was captain of a vessel which carried dispatches from Louisbourg to Boston,” presaging his maritime career. However, John Malcom’s name also appears as a private enlisting in Capt. Elisha Doane’s company in August 1746.

In 1750 John Malcom married Sarah Balch at Boston’s Presbyterian Meeting-House. The Rev. John Moorhead baptized five of their children between 1751 and 1758.

Younger brother Daniel Malcom also came to Boston and married Ann Fudge, and they also had children starting in 1751. He became a prominent member of the Anglican Christ Church’s congregation. While John named one of his sons Daniel, I’ve found no evidence Daniel named any of his boys John.

Both John and Daniel went to sea, made Boston their home port, and rose to be merchant captains. By the late 1740s a captain or two named Malcom was sailing out of Boston for Cape Fear, North Carolina; Antigua; Annapolis; Philadelphia; Honduras; Bristol, England; and Youghal, Ireland. By the 1750s the Malcoms were owners or part-owners of ships. They traded all over North America, the Caribbean, and Britain—and occasionally Cadiz and Lisbon.

It wasn’t illegal to trade with Portugal, Spain, or Caribbean islands claimed by other empires, but there were higher tariffs on most goods traded that way. Ship captains usually tried every trick they could to minimize those tariffs. Many of those methods made that trade into illegal smuggling, but in that period Boston merchants generally figured that as long as they didn’t get too blatant the Customs service wouldn’t come down hard on them.

The real hazards in ocean trade were natural disasters and war.

TOMORROW: Wrecked and captured.

After Historical Collections and Remarks

As discussed yesterday, Lt. Col. Robert Donkin distributed Historical Collections and Remarks to most of his subscribers in the spring of 1778, even though Hugh Gaine printed it in 1777.

The book carried a dedication to Earl Percy (shown here), best known for leading the British relief column during the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The next year, he was promoted to general.

Percy participated in the Crown’s recapture of New York City and Newport, Rhode Island, in 1776. Gen. Henry Clinton left him in charge in the latter port.

Gen. Percy didn’t get along with Gen. Sir William Howe, his commander-in-chief. He sailed home to Britain in May 1777, ostensibly for noble family reasons but really because he didn’t want to take orders from Howe anymore. (Percy was heir to an English dukedom while Howe was merely younger brother of a viscount in the Irish peerage.)

Thus, by dedicating Historical Collections and Remarks to Percy, and then commissioning a frontispiece featuring him, Donkin took sides in a feud within the British command. However, in late 1777 Howe sent his own resignation to London, and he left America in May 1778, so Donkin’s career didn’t suffer.

The artist who engraved Percy’s portrait, James Smither, evidently accompanied the British army from Philadelphia to New York in the summer of 1778. The following 22 May, he advertised in James Rivington’s Royal Gazette:

JAMES SMITHER,
Engraver and Seal Cutter,
LATE of Philadelphia, at the Golden-Head No. 923, in Water-Street, near the Coffee-House, and next door but one to Mr. Nutter’s, where he engraves in the most elegant manner Coats of Arms, Seals, Maps, Copper Plates, and all other kind of engraving.

Meanwhile, the government of Pennsylvania declared that Smither was a Loyalist collaborating with the enemy and confiscated his property.

After the war was over a few years, however, Smither was able to quietly return to Philadelphia. In 1790 he started advertising an “Evening Drawing School,” much as he had back in 1769. He died around 1797, and his son, also named James Smither, carried on engraving until the 1820s.

As for Lt. Col. Robert Donkin himself, he continued to serve in the British army. He didn’t have the money that let Percy, Howe, and some other officers resign on principle.

In 1779 Clinton made Donkin the lieutenant colonel of the Royal Garrison Battalion. This unit was made up of “the worn out & wounded Soldiers of the British Regular Regiments in America,” Donkin later wrote. The officers were chosen for “Zeal & Experience and Constitutions broken by a long & arduous Service.” The unit was thought unfit for duty on the march or in battles but capable of serving in New York City, the Caribbean, or other secure garrisons. By 1780, Lt. Col. Donkin was commanding the bulk of those troops on Bermuda.

In 1783 the Royal Garrison Battalion was reduced. Donkin returned to Britain as a retired officer with a pension. Out of courtesy he was gradually promoted every few years, and since he lived until 1821, when he was ninety-three years old, Donkin made it all the way up to full general.

TOMORROW: More holes in Historical Collections.

Kleiser on Land’s Free Trade Argument about the Revolution

The H-Early-America list just ran Grant Kleiser’s review of Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776) by Jeremy Land, an economic history published last year in Leiden.

The review frames the book’s main inquiry as: “Was this a conflict over free trade? That is, was a major cause of the American Revolution the fact that Great Britain restricted British North Americans’ ability to conduct commerce with people outside of the British Empire? Land’s answer is a resounding yes.”

There are, Kleiser says, three main claims in the introduction:

First, Land stresses that historians should consider colonial eighteenth-century Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston as a “cohesive port complex,” rather than thinking of them as serving distinct regions (p. 2). Land argues that “merchants in these three cities ... often complemented and cooperated with one another, creating intricate networks of credit, business, and trade” (p. 2).

Second, according to Land, this port complex’s robust mercantile economy was perfectly capable of operating without British sources of capital and often competed with English merchants and the English mercantilist agenda. Through rigorous quantitative methods, Land demonstrates that these three cities’ trade with the British Isles was less significant than trade with the rest of North America and the globe. Therefore, “the region was economically less oriented toward Britain than to the rest of the world,” which became “a constant source of tension between the colony and metropole” (p. 2).

Finally, Land stresses that British politicians did not pursue a policy of “salutary neglect” toward the colonies. Rather, they often tried to enforce “mercantilist” policies, particularly after the Seven Years’ War raised Britain’s sovereign debt exponentially. However, the inability of the imperial state to effectively enforce customs laws while also failing to provide adequate specie (i.e., gold and silver) made many British North Americans realize that resistance, that is, continuing to trade beyond the British Empire, was both possible and necessary.

I’m happy to agree that when viewed at some distance the three biggest ports in British North America, and indeed the others, were able to work together, despite differences, competition, and tensions. Certainly by the Revolutionary period they were doing so—that’s why there was a Revolution.

I’m also open to the argument that British imperial policy may not have been “salutary neglect” by choice, but at least sometimes by necessity as the government dealt with issues elsewhere. Land ultimately seems to go along with the traditional view that North Americans resented the stricter trade enforcement and more vigorous collection of taxes that most of the governments under George III tried. But did colonists seek “free trade” or a return to the previous form of regulation?

Land’s second point raises more questions for me. It seems to separate trade with Britain from trade everywhere else in the world, including parts of the British Empire, particularly in the Caribbean. I’d like to see the separation drawn between trade within the British Empire and trade outside of it.

Kleiser summarizes that part of Land’s argument as “the general lack of demand in Great Britain for these [North American] exports forced these traders to look outside the British Empire for profitable markets (e.g., the foreign West Indies) to acquire specie and afford highly demanded British manufactured goods.” But what about the demand outside Great Britain but inside the British Empire? That was what the New England economy fed on.

The book concludes that Boston, New York, and Philadelphia’s trade beyond the British Empire “was quite significant and more important than the direct trade with Britain and Ireland,” presumably in financial terms. But how did those commercial routes compare with trading between British colonies? Also unclear to me is whether North American trade in general would have been so safe or profitable without British imperial power—i.e., the Royal Navy—in support.

There’s no question that taxes on trade led to increasing friction and resistance in the North American port from 1765 to 1774. But that still seems several steps away from Land’s claim that “Britain’s military occupation of Boston was the first salvo in a battle for equal access to global markets.”

Kleiser chides Land for overstating British policy as barring all trade outside its empire. In fact, merchants could do business in foreign ports as long as they didn’t carry in specific “enumerated goods” (e.g., tobacco and indigo, not big crops for Boston, New York, and Philadelphia) and paid duties on what they brought back. Furthermore, British governments in the 1760s carved out exceptions to its rules, suggesting that if the resistance was all about business, folks could have struck a deal.

Kleiser concludes:

Overall, Colonial Ports offers an accessible overview of eighteenth-century commercial networks in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Nonspecialists and undergraduates will welcome its clear language, argumentation, and historical background, while specialists will gravitate to its exhaustive quantitative analysis and data tables on the contours of this trade.

For a scholarly book priced at over $100, “nonspecialists and undergraduates” might prefer to seek copies in libraries, smart economic actors as they are.

How William Browne Returned to Bermuda

William Browne was one of the last justices of the Massachusetts Superior Court under British rule.

In fact, I’m not sure he ever got to hear a full case since he arrived on the top bench just as the court-closing movement took off.

I wrote a series of posts in 2019 clearing Browne of involvement in the James Otis–John Robinson coffee house brawl of 1769, as some authors had guessed. That was another man named William Brown (actually William Burnet Brown) with ties to Salem.

Last November, the Royal Gazette newspaper in Bermuda reported some pleasantly surprising William Browne news:

A historical treasure valued at $30,000 depicting an 18th-century governor now has a place of pride at the Bermuda Historical Society after a surprise donation.

A portrait of William Browne from his days as a student at Harvard University has gone from a Pennsylvania home to the walls of the society’s headquarters on Queen Street in Hamilton. . . .

William Browne, originally from Salem, Massachusetts, was a judge whose political sympathies ran counter to the American Revolution against the British.

He ended up being forced out and his property was seized — but the British Prime Minister, Lord North, appointed him to govern Bermuda, where he served from 1782 to 1788.

Mr Bermingham said the society’s acquisition of the painting began this June with a one-line e-mail from Judi Wilson from Pennsylvania, asking if the BHS was interested in a gift of a Joseph Blackburn painting of Mr Browne.

The painting was being donated by Ms Wilson’s mother, Judith Herdeg, from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

The family had researched the figure in their painting and discovered from a lecture at the Winterthur Museum, Library and Gardens in Delaware that Bermuda lacked a portrait of the governor.

Ms Wilson told the society: “As my mother’s health has declined, she was insistent that Mr Browne should find a home where he will finally be truly appreciated and honoured for his role in his world.”

As governor, Browne welcomed Loyalist refugees and then lobbied the imperial government to make Bermuda a free port, allowing trade with the new U.S. of A. He retired from being governor in 1788, traveling to London to seek compensation for his own property losses in the war. Browne spent the last years of his life in Britain.

“Command of a vessel without arms, and with but one eye”

Aside from having several children, what did Sylvanus Lowell do after being so badly injured at the Marblehead smallpox hospital in 1773?

First he returned to the maritime business, as shown by this advertisement from the 23 Mar 1774 Essex Journal, published in Newburyport:

For NEWFOUNDLAND,
THE Schooner ROSE, JACOB LOWELL, master, now lying at Marquand’s wharf, will sail by the first of April.—For Freight or Passage apply to Robert Jenkins, or Silvanus Lowell.
Newbury Port, March 21st, 1774.

Shortly after that, Parliament closed the port of Boston to most trade from outside Massachusetts, thus making secondary ports like Newburyport more important for about a year.

But then the war began, and sailing out of any Massachusetts port put ships at risk for being seized by the Royal Navy. At the same time, the province needed military supplies, and there was money to be made in privateering.

Sylvanus Lowell, despite his injuries, went back to sea. As the Newburyport Herald copied from the Saco Democrat in 1830:

No better evidence of his enterprising spirit is watnng, than the fact of his obtaining command of a vessel without arms, and with but one eye. It is said he was enabled to do much of his own writing, by screwing a pen into the hook attached to his arm.

In February 1777, the Massachusetts board of war commissioned Lowell to sail to St. Eustatia to trade for salt and these goods:

500 Effective Fire Arms, fit for Soldiers, with Bayonets —
500 Soldiers Blankets —
50 Barrels Gun-powder —
200 ps Ravens Duck or Tent Cloth —
300 lb Twine —
25 Casks 20d Nails —
30 do 10d do
15 do 4 do
If the above Articles are not to be got, bring the proceeds in Russia Duck, Cordage from 4½ Inches downwards, Coarse Checks & Linnens —

He commanded a crew of at least nine men. The captain was back by July, when he bought a house in Newbury for his growing family.

In 1779 Lowell became captain of a privateering brig listed as the Porgee (also Porgee and Pauga), with a letter of marque from New Hampshire. Though descendants recalled it as “a large war-ship,” the American War of Independence at Sea website says it carried only four guns and eleven men.

Nonetheless, the Porgee managed to capture a ship called the Lively, as shown by a legal notice in the 17 July 1780 Boston Gazette. AWIatsea.com says the ship then received a Massachusetts letter of marque and went out under another captain.

In 1781 Capt. Lowell invested in a privateering sloop named the Betsey, and reportedly he commanded other privateers himself. According to his 1830 obituary:

About 3 days before Peace was concluded, he was captured by the British; but by the time they reached the shore, this news was received, and he was liberated and sent home.

After this, he followed the sea 7 years, as master of a vessel out of Newburyport, in the employ of Tristram Dalton.

Dalton had backed many privateers during the war, including the Betsey.

Levi Mills of Newburyport sailed under Capt. Lowell to Richmond on the “good ship Diana” one winter in the mid-1780s. According to an item about Mills’s journal published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, this tobacco-buying trip meant navigating the ice and shoals of the James River.

In 1791, as I wrote yesterday, Lowell’s second wife Elizabeth died. By the end of the year he married a third wife, also named Elizabeth. It also appears that the captain’s remaining eye started to fail around this time, eventually leaving him totally blind.

Lowell “quit the sea,” sold that Newbury house, and moved his whole blended family up to Maine, where some of his siblings had already settled. His stepdaughter Fannie later described the part of Biddeford where they made their new home as “then a wilderness.”

I’m not sure how Sylvanus Lowell supported his family after that, but reportedly the children grew up “in comfort.” In Biddeford the captain was “greatly esteemed.” Around 1825 Lowell “was visited with a severe shock of the numb palsy,” and he died on 21 July 1830, aged 86. His third wife survived him for another nine years.

Jacob Bates Finds New Pastures in Newport

On 25 Oct 1773, two and half centuries ago, the Newport Mercury reported:

Last week Mr. Bates, the famous horseman, arrived in town, from Boston, and ’tis supposed he will perform this week.

Jacob Bates may have planted this item with printer Solomon Southwick, but it’s more tentative than his usual style.

When Bates arrived in New York and then Boston, he took out long advertisements proclaiming his skills, his triumphs in Europe, and exactly when locals would have the fortunate opportunity to see him perform.

But no such advertisements appeared in the Newport newspapers, not even little ones. Was he out of money? Or did he not need to advertise in Rhode Island because there was already plenty of interest in horsemanship—as reflected in this newspaper item?

Southern New England was known for producing horses. Since the late 1600s, Rhode Island’s governors usually listed horses first on their lists of the colony’s exports. The principal market was the sugar islands in the Caribbean, where the animals provided power for planting and refining as well as transportation.

In 1715 the governor of Barbados complained about how French and Dutch colonies had come to rival his island in producing sugar “owing to the great Supplies of Horses they receive from New England.” In 1729 a British merchant claimed that New England captains had told him they didn’t have to pay fees on French islands as long as they arrived with sixty horses. Two years later, British Caribbean planters asked Parliament to forbid the sale of horses outside the empire, but the mainland traders managed to head off that legislation.

Rhode Island was also a center of horse racing. The Rev. James MacSparran wrote in America Dissected (1753) that Rhode Island’s “fine horses…are exported to all parts of English America. They are remarkable for their fleetness and swift pacing, and I have seen some of them pace a mile in little more than two minutes, a good deal less than three.” Eventually these horses would be recognized as Narragansett pacers.

Thus, in moving his equestrian exhibitions from Boston to Newport, Jacob Bates was shifting to a smaller town but perhaps finding more appreciative audiences.

Carp on Land, Colonial Ports, Global Trade…

The Economic History Association’s EH.net site has shared Benjamin L. Carp review of Jeremy Land’s Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution, 1700–1776.

Land is currently Postdoktor in the Department of Economy and Society at the University of Gothenburg and a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki. He received Ph.D. at Georgia State University in 2019.

Carp summarizes Land’s argument this way:

First, he argues that scholars should understand Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, as well as the smaller towns in their orbit, as a complex, integrated “port complex” or “port system” rather than fetishizing them as entrepôts for distinct regions (15). . . . Together they formed a “nodal center” that was independent of the British metropole (3).

Second, with that in mind Land argues that these cities’ mercantile interests developed and deployed their own resources, rather than acting as handmaidens to British sources of capital. Indeed, he argues, the metropole often stumbled as an inadequate manager of colonial economic interests. By contrast, since American merchants owned a third of the empire’s merchant marine tonnage, “colonial investment was quite capable of sustaining itself without being dependent on British capital” (51). . . .

Third, the British didn’t actively opt for a policy of “salutary neglect” toward the colonies (151). Imperial officials went through earnest phases of trying to enforce mercantilism, particularly after incurring debts during the Seven Years’ War, but these officials also went through phases of accommodating local merchants or leaving them alone. Ultimately, a lack of imperial capacity to enforce customs laws or provide sufficient specie forced the American cities to go outside the British Empire for circulating currency, specie, and trade routes.

Trade with the Caribbean and outside the empire was on the whole more important to American merchants than was trade with Great Britain. By referring to “trans-imperial trade networks,” Land avoids any romantic, Han Solo-esque associations we might have with smuggling and takes a clearer look at American trading networks outside the British Empire (2). While illegal trade can be difficult to document, Land finds plenty of suggestive evidence. As perhaps the best example, he draws from an earlier co-authored article to demonstrate that Lisbon records show 73% more trade with Philadelphia than the Philadelphia customs house records (Land and Dominguez, 2019, 148–49).

(That’s “Illicit Affairs: Philadelphia’s Trade with Lisbon before Independence, 1700-1775,” published in Ler Historia in 2019 and available here.)

By trading outside the empire, northern merchants had mounted a “resistance” to British mercantile policy long before the 1760s, and the customs service was essentially powerless to enforce its Navigation Acts (2). Although the British Empire ramped up its enforcement efforts after 1763, these efforts backfired. American merchants decided that “membership in the British Empire … was not worth the effort” (3).

At the end of the Revolutionary War, however, many American merchants were shocked to discover that they could no longer trade with those British Caribbean islands, or with the metropole (i.e., London and other British ports). There followed a painful adjustment as the nation tried the China trade, feelers into other empires, and finally a trade pact with Great Britain. Membership in the British Empire may not have been worth it, but independence wasn’t easy either.

“Pray Subscribe for me the Declaration of Independence”

Elbridge Gerry left Philadelphia on 16 July 1776, heading for home in Massachusetts with a pound of green tea.

His fellow Continental Congress delegate John Adams wrote that Gerry was “worn out of Health, by the Fatigues of this station.”

But Adams also wrote that he expected Gerry to enthusiastically inspect the Continental Army and fortifications while traveling through New York, and that’s just what Gerry did.

On Sunday, 21 July, while staying near the King’s Bridge that connected Manhattan to the mainland, Gerry sat down to write a long letter to Adams and his cousin, Samuel Adams.

Gerry wrote of the Continental officers:

they appear to be in high Spirits for Action and agree in Sentiments that the Men’s as firm and determined as they wish them to be, having in View since the Declaration of Independence an object that they are ready to contend for, an object that they will chearfully pursue at the Risque of Life and every valuable Enjoyment.

The area was well fortified, he judged, and the people of New Jersey and New York City enthusiastic about the Patriot cause.

He reported on Adm. Lord William Howe’s interactions with Gen. George Washington, which included rejecting a proposal for a prisoner swap of Philip Skene, Loyalist governor of Crown Point and Ticonderoga, for James Lovell, a Boston Patriot.

Gerry recommended removing Gen. Philip Schuyler from command of the Northern Department. Indeed, he suggested that Schuyler should be “sent to Boston, recalled to answer any Charges that may be brot against him.” With the collapse of the invasion of Canada, “The N England Colonies are warm for the Measure.”

After discussing how to reenlist and resupply the army, Gerry shared an idea for increasing business with the French:

Would it not be a good Measure to propose to the French Court to supply with Grain their Army in the West Indies and to impower them to employ suitable persons in the States for that purpose who shall be supplyed by Congress with Money and Ship it in their own Vessels; Whilst they are to make Returns by allowing Us a Factor in their Kingdom to purchase Arms or other military Stores to a certain Amount who is to be furnished by their Court with Money for that purpose. This would be a speedy Way of coming at Arms and Ammunition, and open a Channel for a Breach with Britain.

Finally, Gerry addressed two political matters. He asked for one of the confidential printed copies of the new draft Articles of Confederation, and he wrote:

Pray Subscribe for me the Declaration of Independence if the same is to be signed as proposed. I think We ought to have the privilege when necessarily absent of voting and signing by proxy.

After Gerry had left Philadelphia, the Congress formally approved creating the handsome handwritten Declaration that we know. If Gerry’s proposal had been adopted, some of those signatures would not have been the delegates’ actual signatures but signatures of their friends for them. Gerry was worried that after voting for independence he’d be left out.

TOMORROW: About Gerry’s signature.

Lt. Inman and the Hector

Antoine Vanner at the Dawlish Chronicles website just highlighted how Lt. Henry Inman (1762–1809) of the Royal Navy ended his Revolutionary War.

He was on shore duty in the West Indies in April 1782 and thereby missed participation in the large fleet action, The Battle of the Saintes, off Dominica. This had culminated in a crushing British victory over the French.

In the course of this engagement, the French “74” line-of-battle ship Hector was captured. Though badly damaged in the action she was commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Hector. Under the command of Captain John Bourchier (approx. 1755–1819) she was ordered to return to Britain. Henry Inman joined her as First Lieutenant.

Getting the battered HMS Hector seaworthy for the Atlantic crossing involved removal of 22 of her guns and replacement of her masts with shorter ones, presumably so as not to over-strain her hull. Her crew was significantly short-handed, some 300 men, many of whom were invalids. In normal circumstances, a ship of this size would carry a crew of 500 to 700 men and it is therefore obvious that her fighting ability was very seriously impaired. She sailed in late August…

On the evening of September 5th HMS Hector was found by two 40-gun French frigates, L’Aigle and Gloire. These fresh, undamaged vessels quickly perceived HMS Hector’s decrepitude and one placed herself on her beam, and the other on her quarter and began to pour fire into her. Poorly manoeuvrable, HMS Hector was badly placed to avoid several rakings but she returned fire sufficiently to damage both attackers. It was a very creditable performance for a ship so weakly manned and armed. Even so, had the French vessels continued the bombardment from a distance they might have sunk HMS Hector. Instead they made the mistake of attempting to board and their efforts were bloodily repulsed. The action was broken off after six hours and both French ships bore off. . . .

Hector’s survival had been dearly bought. 46 of her crew had been killed or wounded, an especially serious concern when so many of her complement were already invalids. Captain Bourchier had been so badly wounded as to be incapacitated and effective command now passed to the twenty-year-old Henry Inman. The ship herself had been weakened yet further – the hull had sustained more injury, as had the masts, rigging and sails.

It was in this state that HMS Hector was to encounter the massive hurricane that swept through the Central Atlantic on September 17th. Battered by high seas, she lost her rudder and all her masts. Leaks were sprung and incoming water reached a level at which a major portion of the provisions and fresh water was spoiled. Survival now became a matter of continuous pumping, a labour that demanded physical exertion on an open wind and spray-lashed deck which would have been severe for a fit and healthy crew, but almost impossible for one so debilitated.

Go to the Dawlish Chronicles to read about the end of H.M.S. Hector.

“Slavery in Boston” Exhibit Now Open in Faneuil Hall

Today the city of Boston’s Department of Archaeology officially opens its new exhibit in Faneuil Hall, titled “Slavery in Boston.”

The display panels are already up, so I swung by to see them yesterday. The exhibit is in two parts, with an online component as well.

One part is on the ground floor of Faneuil Hall, among the shops selling books, souvenirs, and candy. This consists mostly of vertical panels set up around the building’s structural pillars. Some of the panels have basic introductory material, and some look at the legacy of race-based slavery in the area.

Most of the pillars, however, profile individual enslaved people, using all the sources available to show even a sense of their lives. That sees like a powerful way to communicate the experience of slavery on a one-to-one level to visitors who think they have just a minute or two to spare.

Those visitors who want to learn more (or use the restrooms) can go downstairs, where there’s a larger space and the rest of the exhibit. This area includes benches, a television monitor (now showing a video about abolitionist Lewis Hayden), and an activity table for kids.

Here the walls are lined with panels providing a more general introduction to the laws, economics, and demographics of slavery in Boston. Some of this repeats information upstairs, and sometimes it builds on that. One major message is that in the mid-1700s slavery affected all Bostonians’ daily lives and produced benefits for most free people, not just slaveowners.

At times, the presentation might even be too Boston-centered. One panel describes Charles Apthorp becoming the town’s richest merchant by trading with the Caribbean islands, Britain, and Africa. His business included buying and selling people. That panel could add that Apthorp’s ties to the slavery economy included marrying an heiress, Grizzell Eastwick, born on Jamaica.

A few of the “Slavery in Boston” panels display archeological finds related to households that included enslaved people, but most of the information behind this exhibit comes from documentary sources: legal and church records, newspapers, letters, and so on.

So why is this an Archaeology Department display? I suspect it’s because that’s the branch of local government most concerned with Boston’s past rather than its present and future.

Larson on American Inheritance in Boston, 31 May

On Wednesday, 31 May, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a talk by Edward J. Larson on his new book, American Inheritance: Liberty & Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795.

The publisher’s description of the book says:

New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? . . .

With slavery thriving in Britain’s Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement’s calls for liberty proved narrow, though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades.

Larson’s narrative delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: we witness New York’s tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeed, throughout Larson’s history it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

Larson is University Professor of History and Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. His books include The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783-1789; A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign; and Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, which received a Pulitzer Prize.

This talk will be a hybrid event. The Zoom feed will start at 6:00 P.M. while in-person attendees can enjoy a reception in the preceding half-hour. Register for either form of access here.

A Taste of Shumate’s Sugar Act

At the Journal of the American Revolution, John Gilbert McCurdy (author of Quarters) just reviewed Ken Shumate’s new book, The Sugar Act and the American Revolution.

I’m pleased to know about this study because I’ve long seen histories mention the Sugar Act of 1764 as colonial Americans’ first grievance of the decade. It prompted James Otis’s pamphlet The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, which established “no taxation without representation” as the logical foundation for colonial resistance (without using that phrase, which didn’t appear until 1768).

And yet in looking at the more widespread resistance to the Crown in the late 1760s, and reading the colonists’ own arguments, the taxes and restrictions on sugar (and molasses, and rum, and later coffee and wine) show up barely at all.

Shumate’s study offers some explanations. First, the traders of the 1760s were used to an imperial tax on molasses, which was first instituted in 1733. The main purpose of that law was to discourage trading with French, Spanish, and Dutch West Indies, so objecting to it didn’t come across as patriotic or law-abiding. It was easier to smuggle quietly.

Then in 1764 prime minister George Grenville revised the law, actually cutting the duty in the hope that more American merchants would see obeying the law as the economical alternative. Then in early 1766 the Marquess of Rockingham’s government reduced the duty still further. There was literally less to complain about. To be sure, that last revision meant the government was taxing molasses from the British islands, too, but the North Americans were so pleased with Rockingham’s repeal of the Stamp Act that they didn’t raise a fuss.

Another big factor in the colonial response, I think, was that that Sugar Act’s taxes and trade restrictions affected only a small portion of the population. Molasses traders and rum distillers were a special interest. The biggest threat to their business actually came from distillers on the British Caribbean islands producing their own rum instead of shipping all the raw material to the mainland.

In contrast, the Stamp Act affected everyone in the colonies who filed or responded to lawsuits, read newspapers, got married, and more, which meant everyone. Though rum made from molasses was popular, tea was even more popular, so Charles Townshend’s 1767 tax on that import produced more widespread, longer-lasting opposition.

As McCurdy writes:

Although strict enforcement actually increased with the 1766 revision, the Americans raised few objections to the Sugar Act. Instead, between 1768 and 1772, the law brought in nearly £165,000 from duties on molasses, sugar, madeira, and other goods. But taxing British sugars did little to stem the tide of foreign products as 97 percent of the four million gallons of molasses that came into America derived from foreign sources.

Colonial ambivalence toward the Sugar Act continued despite the Townshend duties of 1767. Although Boston merchants demanded that no British goods would be imported until all taxes were repealed — including the Sugar Act — resistance from merchants in Philadelphia and New York forced them to drop this demand. Indeed, it was not until after the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and the Coercive Acts of 1774 that Americans turned against the Sugar Act.

Looking back, writers started to treat the Sugar Act as the start of their troubles. At the time, however, colonists saw bigger things to complain about.

More Findings about a Famous Portrait

Back in spring 2019 I reported on the new scholarly conclusion that the painting shown here, for decades said to be Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington’s chef Hercules:

• was not by Stuart,
• did not show Hercules Posey or any other eighteenth-century cook, and
• probably, given the hat, showed a man from Dominica.

I wrote then:

One detail which should have made people wonder, I think, is that this painting is at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. An odd place to find an American painting linked to an American President, wouldn’t you say?

Later that year Mount Vernon published a more detailed story on those findings by curator Jessie MacLeod, and here’s a webpage adapted from that article. It answers my question of how this painting came to a Spanish museum:

What we know of the portrait’s story begins in the early 19th century, when it was owned by English painter Sir Thomas Lawrence. Sometime before his death in 1830, Lawrence gave the painting to his childhood friend John Hulbert as a wedding gift. This history is recorded in an early 20th-century file in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Here, an image of the portrait is filed under “Gilbert Stuart—Unidentified Sitters.”

In 1946, the portrait was purchased by Daisy Fellowes, an American socialite living in Paris. She displayed it in the dining room of her luxurious hôtel particulier, which was featured in a 1977 magazine. A caption identified the work as “Painting by Gilbert Stuart (an alleged portrait of the cook of George Washington).” The painting was purchased at auction in 1983 by Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, who opened his namesake museum in 1992 (the Spanish government purchased the collection in 1993).

As for who really posed for the painting and who created it, the article states:

According to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza,…“If the Thyssen sitter is Dominican, he probably fled to England as part of the exodus of English planters just before the French claimed the island from the English in 1778.” . . .

Considering the man’s neckpiece and the cut of his coat, as well as the painting style, researchers can date the portrait to about 1780. . . .

The latest research released by the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza asserts that, with the face and hat rendered in relatively broad brushstrokes, the portrait follows the general painting style of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the first president of the Royal Academy in London.

I don’t know the art-history world well enough to know if “general painting style” means the museum is really pointing at Reynolds, at his studio or circle, or simply at artists working when his style was fashionable. But the details are fitting together better.

“Frenchmen at the Siege of Boston,” 23 Mar.

On Thursday, 23 March, I’ll speak at the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site on the topic “Frenchmen at the Siege of Boston.”

This is the site’s annual Evacuation Day lecture, presented in partnership with the Friends of the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters. It honors the successful end of the siege of Boston, which Gen. George Washington oversaw from that Cambridge mansion.

Our description of this talk says:

Histories of the French government’s support for the American Revolution usually begin with Lafayette, the secret supply chain organized by Beaumarchais, and the formal alliance in 1778.

But French gentlemen were actually at the siege of Boston in 1775—observing the armies, meeting Gen. George Washington at his headquarters, and even briefly overseeing the provincial artillery force. Washington and his generals were also trying to win over the francophone subjects of Canada.

In this talk, author J. L. Bell will explore the first secret and tentative steps toward French-American friendship in Cambridge in 1775.

I’ll share some of my research about French noblemen and merchants who visited Massachusetts in 1775. I’ll also rely on Rick Detwiller’s excellent research about two more men who went beyond visiting to participate in the siege itself. As shown above, they left their mark on the landscape, or at least on Henry Pelham’s map of Boston: a fortified site labeled “French redoubt.”

I’ll speak in the Longfellow carriage house. Seating is limited, so please reserve seats through this link. This will also be our first attempt at livestreaming a talk through the site’s YouTube page.

2023 Revolutionary War Conference in the Mohawk Valley, 9–11 June

On the weekend of 9–11 June, the Fort Plain Museum will host its annual Revolutionary War Conference in the Mohawk Valley.

This year’s session is called “Conference 250,” with several presentations looking back at events in 1773 and others looking forward to the Sestercentennial.

The lineup of speakers includes:

• James Kirby Martin in conversation with Mark Edward Lender, professor and former student discussing the Revolutionary War and its 250th anniversary
• Friederike Baer, “Hessians: The German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War”
• John “Jack” Buchanan, “The Battle of Musgrove’s Mill, 1780”
• Benjamin L. Carp, “The Boston Tea Party at 250: Reflections on the Radicalism of the Revolutionary Movement”
• Vivian E. Davis, ”Over 250 Years Ago!: The Battle of Golden Hill, January 19, 1770”
• Holly A. Mayer, “Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union”
• Steven Park, “250 Years of Remembering: The Changing Landscape of Gaspee History”
• Nina Sankovitch, “The Abiding Quest of a Forgotten Hero: How Josiah Quincy Battled Overwhelming Odds to Bring Together the Northern and Southern Colonies in 1773”
• Eric H. Schnitzer, “Picturing History: The Images of the American War for Independence”
• Sergio Villavicencio, “St. Eustatius and the American Revolution”
• Kelly Yacobucci Farquhar, “Jellas Fonda, a Letter, and the Boston Tea Party: A Look Back 250 Years Later”
• Terry McMaster, “A Revolutionary Couple on the Old New York Frontier: Col. Samuel Clyde & Catharine Wasson of Cherry Valley”
• “New York State and the 250th: Where Things Stand” presented by Devin R. Lander, New York State Historian; Phil Giltner, Director of Special Projects, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; and Lauren Roberts, Saratoga County Historian
• Norman J. Bollen, Fort Plain Museum board chairman, “The Fort Plain Museum & Historical Park’s Grand Enhancement Plan: Rebuilding the Blockhouse for the 250th”

Before the conference and under a separate registration, there will be a bus tour of “Forts and Fortified Homes of the Mohawk Valley” led by Bruce Venter, Wayne Lenig, and Norm Bollen. This is a new, in-depth tour of the historic forts, fortified homes, and other sites that formed the defensive perimeter around Fort Rensselaer (Fort Plain). Lunch will be included.

The conference will take place in the theater of Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown, New York. Based on past events, I expect an excellent selection of Revolutionary history books to be on sale.

For the full schedule as currently planned, additional information, and registration forms, visit this website.

Thompson on Hardesty, Mutiny on the Rising Sun

Last month the H-Early-America list shared Mark L. Thompson’s review of Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate by Jared Ross Hardesty.

Here’s a taste:

…Hardesty draws on this Dutch and Atlantic research but offers something new: a microhistorical account of a single smuggling venture and the wide cast of characters who were involved in and touched by it. If most contraband trade was a prosaic affair that attracted little notice, this ill-starred voyage from Barbados to Suriname in 1743 proved in several respects to be quite the opposite, as it led to murder trials, official investigations, gory printed accounts, and transcontinental legal wrangling.

Working from the long paper trail that followed in the Rising Sun’s bloody wake, Hardesty and a team of researchers in New England and the Netherlands (in particular, Ramona Negrón, a doctoral candidate in history at Leiden University) have been able to trace out the story in many directions through extensive archival research. The result is a detailed account that weaves together multiple historical threads into a well-constructed narrative.

Although the book calls itself a tragedy, it borrows its form (and appearance) from true crime with a splash of gothic horror. The dust jacket is printed in muddy black and brown tones with blood-red accents (while the cloth cover beneath is bright red with golden print along the spine). True to form, the introduction begins with an apparently placid but foreboding scene—the Rising Sun’s boatswain steering the ship on a calm June night—but by the third page the captain, supercargo, and clerk have been stabbed about twenty times, chopped with an axe, sliced with a cutlass, and, in the case of the captain, thrown overboard, “scream[ing] as he plunged into the dark abyss”. . . .

The epilogue, meanwhile, offers a fascinating account of the origins of the book, which began as an earnest effort to learn more about the namesake of “Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop,” a tourist attraction and heritage site associated with the Old North Church along the Freedom Trail in Boston. In a strange turn of events, the research for the book (sponsored in part by the candy company Mars Wrigley Confectionary) actually led to the shutting down of the chocolate shop. . . . Today the eighteenth-century Clough House that once marketed historic chocolate is home to a colonial-style print shop and an artisanal gift store. Captain Jackson’s lurid past has been well scrubbed away.

I think that last sentence could easily be read as suggesting Old North “scrubbed away…Jackson’s lurid past.” The bloody story of this voyage was scrubbed away centuries ago; Boston historians didn’t know about it.

Hardesty and his team, with the support of Old North, have brought that “lurid past” back into the light. To be sure, knowing more about Edward Jackson means his name is no longer attached to a church shop selling candy to tourists and school groups, but that seems like a Good Thing.

Thompson’s full review can be downloaded here.

Revere House‘s Fall Lowell Lecture Series

The Paul Revere House’s annual Fall Lowell Lecture Series starts tonight, with the talks available for free both in-person and online.

The theme for this year’s series is “Beyond the 13: The American Revolutionary Era Outside the Emerging United States,” and the speakers will focus on “areas that have not traditionally received much attention in explorations of the American Revolutionary period.” Here’s the lineup:

Tuesday, 27 September, 6:30–7:45 P.M.
“‘To Begin the World over Again’: Revolutionary Rights”
Janet Polasky, Presidential Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, explores how American claims to Revolutionary rights have reverberated throughout the Atlantic world and influenced our understanding of liberty and equality from the eighteenth century to the present.

Tuesday, 11 October, 6:30–7:45 P.M.
“The Other Fourth of July: The American War of Independence in the Southern Caribbean”
Tessa Murphy, Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University, considers what the American Revolution meant to British colonial subjects in some lesser-studied parts of the Americas. Indigenous, enslaved, and free people all seized the opportunity to ally with Great Britain’s chief rival, France, and many used this moment of disruption to seek freedom, sovereignty, or autonomy.

Tuesday, 25 October, 6:30–7:45 P.M.
“Slavery and Smallpox Inoculation”
Elise A. Mitchell, Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University, looks at the rich African Atlantic history of smallpox inoculation. Her lecture contextualizes the more familiar history of Onesimus and Cotton Mather in early eighteenth-century Boston within the broader history of Africans performing inoculations in West Africa, Jamaica, and Saint Domingue (Haiti) in the Revolutionary Era.

All these talks will be held in the Commons of Sargent Hall, Suffolk University, at 120 Tremont Street. They will also be streamed and recorded for later viewing via GBH’s Forum Network.

The Paul Revere House also has special offerings each Saturday—music, crafts demonstrations, first-person interpreters, and so on. Check its website for details.

McBurney on Dark Voyage, 20 and 22 Sept.

Christian McBurney will speak about his new book Dark Voyage: American Privateer's War on Britain's African Slave Trade at two venues this week, both accessible for online viewers.

This book is a microhistory following an American privateer that sailed to the coast of Africa to attack British shipping there—which meant disrupting the British slave trade. The publisher’s copy says:

Based on a little-known contemporary primary source, The Journal of the Good Ship Marlborough, the story of this remarkable voyage is told here for the first time and will have a major impact on our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and the American Revolution. The voyage of the Marlborough was the brainchild of John Brown, a prominent Rhode Island merchant—and an investor in two slave trading voyages himself. The motivation was not altruistic. The officers and crew of the Marlborough wanted to advance the cause of independence from Britain through harming Britain’s economy, but they also desired to enrich themselves by selling the plunder they captured—including enslaved Africans.

The work of the Marlborough and other American privateers was so disruptive that it led to an unintended consequence: virtually halting the British slave trade. British slave merchants, alarmed at losing money from their ships being captured, invested in many fewer slave voyages. As a result tens of thousands of Africans were not forced onto slave ships, transported to the New World, and consigned to a lifetime of slavery or an early death.

That wartime effect sounds good, but we should also remember that after independence the new U.S. of A. greatly increased the import of humans from Africa, even as some states barred the trade or limited slavery itself. I presume the trade to the British Caribbean also went up after the Treaty of Paris, at least until the next round of wars with the French.

Christian McBurney is author of six books on the American Revolutionary war, including Kidnapping the Enemy, George Washington’s Nemesis, Spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island, and The Rhode Island Campaign. He manages the online journal Small State, Big History, devoted to the history of Rhode Island. And yet he also finds time to practice law in Washington, D.C.

History Author Talks will host an interview with McBurney about Dark Voyage on Tuesday, September 20, at 7:00 P.M. Register for that conversation here.

McBurney will also speak about his new book at the American Revolution Institute in Washington on Tuesday, September 22, starting at 6:30 P.M. That talk will also be streamed on the web for people who can’t attend in person. Register for the feed here.