The Revolutionary War had a major impact on slavery—and on the slaves. Wartime disruption undermined normal plantation discipline, and division within the master class offered slaves unprecedented opportunities that they were not slow in grasping. The Revolution posed the biggest challenge the slave regime would face until the outbreak of the Civil War some eighty-five years later; indeed, it appeared for a while as if the very survival of slavery in the new nation was threatened.
The British wasted little time in reaching out to the slaves as potential allies against the American rebels. On November 7, 1775, Virginia’s Governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves who would bear arms against the rebellion. Throughout the South, the offer raised understandable panic among slaveholders already fearful for the loyalty of their slaves; “if the Virginians are wise,” noted Washington, “that archtraitor. . . Dunmore should be instantly crushed.” Similar concern was evident farther south; three months earlier, Patriots in Charleston had hanged and burned a free black harbor pilot suspected of helping slaves flee to British ships.
As this incident suggests, despite varying responses Americans were unable to come up with a satisfactory way of blunting the British appeal to their slaves. Virginia planter Robert Carter III warned his people that a British victory would result in their being sold into a far more oppressive slavery in the West Indies.
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Dunmore’s proclamation unleashed massive flight among slaves in the upper South. On June 25, 1776, nine of Landon Carter’s slaves, whom he denounced as “accursed villains,” ran away at night, “to be sure,” the planter guessed, “to L[or]d. Dunmore”; later he heard a rumor that minutemen shot and killed three of the fugitives. In part because the British governor lacked a land base after December 1775, only a relatively small number of slaves—the usual estimate is eight hundred—reached his forces, and most of these died from disease (especially smallpox); when Dunmore’s fleet left the Potomac on August 6, 1776, it carried with it some three hundred fugitive slaves. But these represented only a small fraction of the slaves who had fled, and slaves continued throughout the war to seize any opportunity to run away.
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When British forces evacuated Savannah and Charleston at the end of the war, some ten thousand blacks accompanied them. An uncertain future awaited them (and the thousands more removed from New York City): some died, some gained their freedom, and others wound up as slaves elsewhere (usually in the British West Indies).
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