Adventures of a Black Loyalist: Scipio Handley

 

At the beginning of the American Revolution, Scipio Handley was a free black fisherman who plied his trade in Charleston Harbor. We know very little else about him. We do know he was involved in a number of events during the revolutionary era, and after the war applied for compensation to the Loyalist Claims Commission in London. The memorial he submitted to the Claims Commission provides the little we know about Handley. It is part of thousands of pages of documentation, memorials and testimony, that now survives in the UK National Archives at Kew.

After the last royal governor, Lord William Campbell, fled Charleston in September 1775, Handley used his boat to carry supplies to the Tamar and its crew. When Lady William (Sarah Izard) decided to flee to her husband’s side, Handley took her. He was taking a great risk. The Committee of Safety prohibited any boats from town going to the British ships without a pass. Handley avoided Patriot patrols by going at night when the moon was down or when it was cloudy. But one night a patrol intercepted him ferrying supplies. They arrested him. According to Henry Laurens, Arthur Middleton wanted to hang Handley, and most of the council agreed. Laurens agreed that he should be hanged if guilty, but only after a “proper” trial. Exactly what would have constituted a proper trial in the wake of the Thomas Jeremiah incident is worth pondering. We will never know. Handley escaped from captivity one night shortly before Christmas and disappeared. That same night, a Patriot force numbering around 200 and disguised as “Indian warriors” attacked a camp of runaways and Loyalists on Sullivan’s Island. The “Indians” killed about two dozen runaways and captured others, including a few Loyalists. The rest managed to escape to the British ships anchored nearby or to Morris Island on the other side of the harbor mouth. The victors destroyed the pest house on Sullivan’s Island, which the runaways had used as a shelter. It is likely that many of them had resided there once before, on their arrival from West Africa, to perform quarantine.  In the aftermath of the Patriot attack, Lord William sailed off to St. Augustine. He took some of the runaways and Loyalists with him.

Was Scipio Handley one of them? Had he fled to the island the night he escaped, just before the Patriot attack? We don’t know, but we do know that somehow, Handley made his way to Florida, along with other Blacks and Loyalists. Or so he said in his memorial. He claimed that in escaping he had to jump from a second story window, that he landed badly, and suffered a rupture. In severe pain, he made his way to the British in St. Augustine. From there, he went on to Barbados. He took up fishing again and remained there for the next three years. Whether the British offered him a position as an auxiliary during that time he did not say.  When the British captured Savannah in the last days of 1778, they recruited him to work for their army as a Black Pioneer. He learned to make munitions, a dangerous and noisome job. He was at Savannah in the autumn of 1779 when a combined Patriot and French force attacked the city with disastrous results. He claimed that the “Negroes” did everything they could to repel the attack. They knew that “the rebels” would show no mercy to them if the British had to surrender. Handley was wounded during the battle. He was carrying grapeshot to the artillery when a musket ball hit him in the leg. It took months for the wound to heal so that he could walk. He would have taken part in the British siege of Charleston the following spring, he declared, if he had not been wounded. At the time he submitted his memorial, he stated that he remained unable to walk properly and that the pain was so bad that at times he could not work. He requested compensation from the Claims Commission in the amount of £97 for the loss of his possessions, livelihood, fishing boat, seven hogs, and furniture. The total claim would be about $25,000 in today’s money. That may seem substantial but many white planters and merchants claimed thousands of pounds, literally millions today. When the commission interviewed him  he brought along a white widow from Charleston as a testimonial witness. Mrs. Eleanor Lister. She had made and sold pies for her living, which she sometimes traded for fish from Mr. Handley. Lister testified that she believed Scipio was free and that he had possessed at least some of what he claimed. When one of the commissioners asked what kind of  furniture Handley possessed she answered tellingly: “Good enough for Negroes.” She asked the commission to give him “something” because he had “risked his life to serve His Majesty.” The commission dismissed her and asked Handley why he did not return to South Carolina to recover his property. “They’d hang me if I went back,” he replied. “During the war, Governor Rutledge ordered that all slaves who helped the British be executed.” The records of the Loyalist Claims Commission record the amounts awarded to the claimants, at least some of them. It does not contain any information about what Scipio Handley received, if any. Other Black Loyalists did receive varying amounts of compensation, although not a great deal.  The commission took about six years to make its final report on the awards. It may be that by then, Scipio Handley had died. Perhaps we will never know that either.

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Loyalist by Marriage: Sarah Izard Campbell

In Revolutionary South Carolina, people became Loyalists for various reasons. Some held office under the British government and/or had taken oaths of loyalty to it. Some felt gratitude toward the Crown for granting them land or mercantile privileges. 

Others became Loyalists because the neighbors they hated had joined the other side. For them the war was a continuation of old family feuds. Many enslaved persons supported the British government because they believed it might bring them freedom. For thousands, it did. Native Americans, mainly the Cherokee in South Carolina, sided with Britain because it tried to limit the movement of whites onto their lands.   

Sarah Izard became a Loyalist through marriage. Genealogical sources on her are conflicting. She was born in South Carolina, around 1745, the daughter of planter Ralph Izard and his wife Rebecca. Sarah's cousin Ralph Izard (1742-1804) made his name as a Patriot, Senator, and American Diplomat. * Her life took a far different trajectory. 

She was a teenager, about 18, when she met and fell in love with a Royal Navy captain who arrived in Charleston in 1762. Lord William Campbell, commander of HMS Nightingale, was the 4th son of Scotland's most powerful aristocrat, the Duke of Argyll. The British were engaged at the time in the Seven Years War, known as the French and Indian War in British North America.

Sarah and William married in April 1763. The notice in the South Carolina Gazette mentions that she was "a young lady esteemed one of the most considerable fortunes in the province." In other words, a fine catch for the 4th son of a duke. But the 4th son of a duke was also a good catch for the daughter of a provincial planter. 

By the time they married, the war was officially over, and the couple moved to Britain in 1764. She was now Lady William Campbell and Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her portrait.

[Image: Miniature watercolor of Sarah by Charles Fraser in the Collection of the Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, SC. Fraser listed it in 1834 as a copy of a painting by "Sir Joshua." The original would have been painted sometime before 1775. Sarah is pictured with one of her pet whippets. I have been unable to locate Reynolds' original.] 

Back in Britain, Lord William served a term in Parliament as MP for his family's seat in Argyllshire. In 1766, the government appointed him royal governor of Nova Scotia. He remained in the post until 1773.  

For some time, he had been lobbying for the position of royal governor of South Carolina. Sarah wanted to return to her home and family. William was suffering from an eye problem he blamed on the climate.

Family influence got him the South Carolina appointment. The couple arrived in Charleston in June 1775 to a cold welcome. Rumors had spread before their arrival that their ship was carrying thousands of guns and munitions to distribute to the "slaves" and "savages." In fact, the most dangerous weapons it carried were probably Sarah's whippets.

Opponents of the British colonial policy in South Carolina had taken over the reins of government several months before. Lord William found himself virtually powerless and eventually physically threatened. 

In September the last royal governor of South Carolina fled to a British ship in the harbor. Sarah, who also faced harassment, joined him a few weeks later. They sailed away in late December 1775. Sarah would never return to South Carolina. 

Lord William did come back, and it proved his undoing. He served on a Royal Navy ship during the British assault on Sullivan's Island in June 1776. He was wounded in the side, a festering wound that his doctors believed the cause of his death two years later. Sarah lived out her life as a widow and mother of three children in Britain, presumably supported by William's wealthy family. She died in 1784.   

*Online sources on Sarah and her family are conflicting and sometimes hilarious. Some genealogy sites say her mother was nine years old when she gave birth to Sarah! Others says Sarah was the daughter of Ralph and Alice DeLancey Izard, who were born in the same decade as she was. Some say that Ralph was her brother. To add to the confusion, Sarah had a brother named Ralph Izard, but not that Ralph Izard, the other one! 

Loyalist and Patriot: George Milligen

George Milligen was one of the staunchest supporters of the British government in South Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution. 

Milligen was born in or near Dumfries, Scotland, probably in the 1720s. After training as a surgeon he joined the British army on 1745. He came to South Carolina in 1753 with the title Surgeon to His Majesty’s Forces in South Carolina and Georgia. 

The title was grander in name than in reality. The number of British soldiers and sailors in the two provinces was usually quite small. He supplemented his government income by medicating civilians as well. Given the prevalence of malarial and other fevers, there was plenty of work for doctors in South Carolina, especially in the late summer and autumn. 

In 1759 Milligen accompanied Governor Lyttleton's disastrous punitive expedition to the Cherokee country. Lyttleton's bungled campaign precipitated the Second Cherokee War and the spread of smallpox across the province. 

In 1763, Milligen published a short but useful book about the local diseases and other aspects of colonial life: A Short Description of the Province of South-Carolina: With an Account of the Air, Weather, and Diseases of Charles-Town. The American Philosophical Society elected Milligen to membership in 1772. 

Up to this point, he seems to have been an accepted member of the Charleston community, active in civic and philanthropic affairs. By the early 1770s, however, the political situation in South Carolina was becoming increasingly polarized, as colonial conflicts with the mother country intensified. 

In January 1775, matters came to a head. Advocates of resistance to British colonial policy, who called themselves Whigs, established a provisional government. The Whigs would later call themselves "Patriots" and those who disagreed with them, "Tories." 

In practical terms, the old Tory Party had ceased to exist in Britain, and the modern one had not yet emerged. Calling someone a Tory in the 1770s was much like calling them a communist. Those who remained loyal to Britain viewed themselves as patriots. They did not generally view themselves as Tories, but Loyalists.  

The Patriot Whigs established a Provincial Assembly and elected Henry Laurens president. They also created a council of safety and other executive committees. The council and committees became a de facto government, rendering the royal administration almost powerless.   

In early June, following the news that British soldiers had opened fire against the Massachusetts militia, delegates to the Provincial Assembly voted to raise two regiments of soldiers. They also approved a document called the Association. It declared that the people of South Carolina would use force if necessary to protect their liberties. 

Whig leaders called on all white inhabitants, including royal officials, to sign the Association. Anyone who refused to sign should be considered "inimical to the Liberty of the Colonies," in other words, as enemies. An amendment requiring that they be imprisoned failed. 

Many citizens refused to sign, including those who held jobs in the royal administration. The council of safety summoned the officials and pressed them to change their minds. They remained defiant. Milligen was one of the most outspoken.

Henry Laurens, the chair of the council, asked Milligen if he agreed that the colonists "possessed the rights and liberties of Englishmen?" It seems an odd question now for a former slave trader to pose, especially to a Scot. Milligen replied without hesitation, "I support the civil and religious rights of mankind." 

It was a riposte worthy of Rousseau. Laurens then asked Milligen if he considered himself a patriot. "I do," Milligen answered. "Then why can't you stand with us?" Laurens continued. Milligen had clearly prepared his answer: 

“For me, patriotism includes support for the king, protector of the rights and liberties of his subjects. For thirty years, I’ve served His Majesty as a soldier and a surgeon, and eaten his bread. Allegiance as a subject, gratitude as a man, honor as a gentleman, and my duty to the king all forbid my joining your Association." 

Laurens dismissed him and asked him to appear before the council again on August 15. Milligen's stance made him a special target of Charleston's radical "Liberty Boys." He had once been friendly with several of their leaders, who, like him, were Freemasons and had helped raise funds for charitable projects. 

The Liberty Boys was an organization modeled on one in Massachusetts. Its members, mostly artisans and shopkeepers, acted as "enforcers" of the policies of the provisional government. They harassed suspected Loyalists (or "Tories") in the streets and even invaded their houses. 

A few days before Milligen appeared before the council of safety, on June 2, the Liberty Boys had inflicted a violent punishment on two Irishmen accused of supporting British plans for subduing the colonists by force. 

James Dealey and Laughlin Martin were accused of publicly cheering news that the British government was shipping guns to the colony to arm blacks, Indians, and Roman Catholics. 

What the pair did not know was that the news, published in the South Carolina Gazette, was fake news. Its purpose was to anger and frighten people into supporting the resistance to the British government. It seems to have accomplished that aim, but also "outed" two treacherous "papists" who appeared ready to help the British. 

Dealey and Martin were both Roman Catholic, although their neighbors may not have known that before. The practise of their faith was not yet legal in South Carolina, and they likely kept it a secret. Most South Carolinians shared British prejudices against the "popish" religion. 

Liberty Boys assembled an illegal citizens' court to hear the "evidence" and pass judgment. They sentenced Dealey and Martin to be dressed in "An American Suit of Clothing." This was a euphemism for tarring and feathering. 

The enforcers came prepared with a barrel of hot tar and a bag of feathers. They removed the upper clothing of the guilty parties, poured hot tar over them, then dropped the feathers on the sticky tar. The procedure was humiliating, painful, and potentially dangerous. 

[Image: A Tarring and Feathering in Boston. Here, the Patriots are pouring tea into the mouth of the "transgressor."]

In early August the Charleston Liberty Boys tarred and feathered a British soldier. His accuser claimed that Sergeant Walker had refused a toast of "damnation to King George" and said he would "drink damnation to rebels instead." A hastily assembled crowd that included newly raised provincial soldiers demanded that Walker be tarred and feathered. 

After the enforcers had suitably "dressed" him, they put him in a donkey cart and dragged him around town. They pelted him with stones and filth along the way. Their route took them to the houses of several alleged Tories. At each house they forced Walker to drink damnation to the residents. 

At one house, Milligen sat on the porch with his mother-in-law. Some in the crowd charged towards him, shouting that he should join Walker in the cart. A melee ensued in which his wife, who had come out to see what the matter was, fainted. He carried her to safety and with the help of a "faithful" black servant, held off the attackers. 

The crowd dispersed soon after. They dumped the battered Walker in the harbor, where he might have drowned. A boat rowed by crew from a British ship rescued him, but he had sustained severe burns and damage to one eye. [Image: Charleston Harbor at the time of the Revolution. The Old Exchange is in center background, flanked by St. Michael's (left) and St. Philip's churches.]

Several of Milligen's friends, including one member of the council of safety, possibly Henry Laurens, urged him to flee the colony before worse happened. He agreed but refused to leave just yet. The council had summoned him for another interview. He told his friends that he felt honor bound to attend. 

Standing before the council in the State House, Milligen remained as defiant as ever. On this occasion Laurens was absent. Charles Pinckney was in the chair. The others present included Arthur Middleton, Thomas Heyward, and Thomas Bee. The first two would later be signatories to the Declaration of Independence. 

The council president, Henry Laurens. had excused himself, pleading indisposition. Perhaps he did not want to be part of what was planned for Milligen. The council asked Milligen sign an oath that he would not do anything to oppose or counteract the actions of the Provincial Congress and its committees. Milligen refused. 

Arthur Middleton asked him if he understood the possible consequences of his refusal. " I do," Milligen replied. "I have observed the justice meted out by liberty mobs," an obvious reference to the tarring and feathering incidents. Middleton protested that those were the justified actions of the people, not a mob. 

The council dismissed Milligen. As he left, Middleton advised him to "be careful of your attire" and remember to take his kilt along. It was a joke, perhaps, but also a threat and an insult. After Milligen left the council room, followed by laughter, Middleton added another joke. The "good doctor," he said, was sure to "gain a high place in Scotland after kissing some Tory behinds."

Milligen left the building and immediately jumped into a waiting carriage. It sped off to a nearby wharf, where a naval skiff waited to take him to safety aboard a British sloop in the harbor, HMS Tamar. His escape had been arranged by the Royal Governor, Lord William Campbell. Campbell himself would flee there a few weeks later. 

Milligen arrived in England around the end of September aboard a mail packet. During the trip he wrote a report on the situation in South Carolina which he delivered to the government. In it, he characterized the rebels as having used lies, threats, and violence to achieve their "wicked" ends. 

Many of the people who signed the Association, he claimed, did so under duress. They were faced with threats of economic ruin and/or physical intimidation. Others were frightened into signing by carefully spread but false rumors of British-inspired slave rebellions and Indian attacks. 

When no uprisings occurred, some people had begun to question the rumors. The rebel leaders responded by arresting several blacks in late June and claiming they had found evidence that a revolt was planned. An illegal tribunal condemned one of them to death, a free black named Thomas Jeremiah. He was hanged and his body burned on August 18. Milligen wrote that the rebels had sacrificed Jeremiah to achieve their goal of frightening the public. 

After returning to Britain, Milligen settled in Dumfries, Scotland, his place of birth. His mother was the last of her family line. In her memory he added her maiden name, Johnston, to his own, becoming Milligen-Johnston. He died in Dumfries in 1799. 

Further Reading: 

George Milligen, A Short Description of the Province of South-Carolina, With an Account of the Air, Water, and Diseases at Charles-Town. [1763]

The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. See Volumes dealing with the 1770s.

John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution 2 vols., Charleston, 1821. 

The Charleston Tar-and-Feathers Incident of 1775 | Charleston County Public Library (ccpl.org) This thoroughly researched article provides a detailed and insightful analysis of the tarring and feathering incident involving James Dealey and Laughlin Martin.

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011, 2014. 

Report by George Milligen, Surgeon to the Garrison for His Majesty's Forces in South Carolina, dated 15 September, 1775. National Archives, Kew CO_5_396_037.pdf

South Carolina's Last Royal Governor: Lord William Campbell

The last royal governor of South Carolina, Lord William Campbell, arrived in Charleston (Charlestown) in June 1775. It was an inauspicious time. The previous royal governor, Charles Montagu, had been greeted with the ringing of church bells, large cheering crowds, saluting cannonades, and a sumptuous dinner at Dillon’s Tavern. Now there were no crowds and no cheers. No welcoming dinner, either. 

The waterfront was eerily quiet as his ship, HMS Scorpion, glided up to the wharf near The Exchange. A detachment of blue-coated soldiers stood ready to escort Lord William, whether as dignitary or prisoner was not clear. None of the leading gentlemen of the town had come out to welcome him.

Lord William had been to Charleston before, during the French and Indian War. In 1762 the Royal Navy assigned him to serve there as captain of a Royal Navy frigate, HMS Nightingale. 

On that occasion the citizens had treated him as a hero. He fell in love with and married the daughter of a wealthy local family, Sarah Izard. Their wedding in 1763 was a great event. After all, he was a son of the Duke of Argyll, the most powerful man in Scotland. [Image:  Sarah Izard Campbell, by Charles Fraser, said to be a copy of painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds] 

After the wedding, the couple returned to Britain. Lord William served in Parliament, then as royal governor of Nova Scotia. In that position he had earned a reputation for fair and honest governance. 

A couple of months before he arrived, in April 1775, the simmering conflict between the colonies and the mother country had boiled over into open rebellion in Massachusetts. Other colonies, including South Carolina, had established provisional governments, and begun to prepare for war.

Lord William had another disadvantage as royal governor. He was a Scot. Soon after George III had come to the British throne in 1760, his political opponents concocted a story that liberty hating Scots were conspiring to gain control of the government, and intent on reducing English liberty. English Whigs accused the king’s former tutor, Lord Bute, of being the chief plotter. 

Initially a favorite of the young king, Bute had become Prime Minister in 1762. In order to pay the enormous expenses of the recent war with France, he proposed to levy new taxes in Britain and its colonies. The attacks on Bute caught on in America, and lasted for years after Bute lost all influence over government policy. 

In 1772, another Scot, Lord Mansfield, gave the conspiracy theory more life. As Chief Justice of the King’s Bench Court in London, he ruled that slavery had no basis in English law. The Somerset ruling sent shock waves through the American colonies.

The shock was especially severe true in the southern colonies, heavily dependent as they were on enslaved African labor for their wealth. Southern planters feared that Parliament could extend the Mansfield ruling to the empire. The solution they embraced was to deny Parliament’s power to legislate for the colonies, which led to rebellion.

The Scottish conspiracy theory was bogus, but the Crown had appointed many Scots to colonial offices after the accession of George III, posts that some colonial leaders, like William Henry Drayton, had sought. 

Another colonial leader, Christopher Gadsden, threatened to use "imported Scotchmen" as a foundation for the wharf he was building in Charleston. Gadsden resented having to compete with newly arrived Scottish merchants.  

Soon after landing in Charleston, Lord William learned that he was virtually powerless. Most local leaders refused to cooperate with him or treat him as anything but suspicious. Some of the more extreme  Carolina “Whigs” (later “Patriots”) had even considered preventing him from landing in the first place.

Charleston was awash with rumors of Indian attacks and slave rebellions allegedly fomented by the British government. Colonel John Stuart, the British Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the Southern Region, had already been forced to flee to Florida, pursued by a liberty mob and false charges that he was organizing Native American risings in the backcountry. 

Shortly after Lord William arrived, local authorities arrested several blacks on suspicion of plotting a slave rebellion. They charged one of them, Thomas Jeremiah, and tried him in a slave court, although he was a free man. The court found him guilty on flimsy evidence and sentenced him to be hanged and burned.

Lord William intervened, calling the trial a farce. He tried to have Jeremiah pardoned but discovered his complete lack of authority. Worse, “Liberty Boy” rioters accused him of being involved in the plot. They threatened him and attacked other royal officials, some of whom left the colony.

Convinced of the danger, he fled his residence at 34 Meeting Street in the dead of a September night. He took refuge on HMS Tamar, a British naval sloop stationed in the harbor. His wife Sarah joined him there later after being harassed herself. [Image: 34 Meeting Street, Charleston, where Lord William Campbell lived during his brief governorship]

 

 

Lord William remained close to the city for a couple of months, commanding a flotilla of three small naval vessels. In November they fought an inconclusive engagement with a rebel ship commanded by William Henry Drayton near Hog Island.

Meanwhile, Lord William landed some of his men on Sullivan’s Island at the entrance to the harbor. Enslaved black runaways soon joined them and together, they conducted raids on plantations in Christ Church Parish (now Mt. Pleasant) to secure food and supplies.

Just before Christmas 1775, Patriot leaders decided to end this threat before the island became the center of a slave rebellion. They sent a force of two hundred Whig Rangers to clear the enemy off the island. Disguised as "Indians," they attacked shortly before dawn. They achieved complete surprise, killed dozens of runaways and captured others, including a few whites. Some of those in the camp escaped to the British ships or to Morris Island across the harbor.

After the attack, Lord William sailed off to the British stronghold at St. Augustine in Florida. From there he returned to Britain. In reports, he referred to the execution of Jeremiah as a “judicial murder” and called those responsible “barbarians.”

Lord William was not yet through with South Carolina. In June 1776, he was present when a British fleet attacked the rebels hastily built palmetto log fort on Sullivan’s Island. The Battle of Sullivan’s Island ended in disaster for the British, and for Lord William. He was wounded in the leg by a flying splinter of wood. The wound never healed properly, and he died, probably of infection, in 1778. He was 48. [Image: The Battle of Sullivan's Island, by John Blake White]

Lord Williams' wife Sarah remained in England, where she died in 1784, aged 39. Her brother, Ralph Izard, became a prominent Patriot. 

[The portrait of Lord William Campbell in his naval uniform is by Thomas Gainsborough]

e is wearing his naval uniform]

Further Reading: 

J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty (Yale University Press, 2009)

William R. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution 2 vols., (Charleston, 1821) 

The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. Volumes dealing with the 1760s and 1770s.)

Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies & Sparked the American Revolution (Naperville, Illinois: Source Books, 2005)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lynching of Thomas Jeremiah

In the spring of 1775, as South Carolina moved towards rebellion against British rule, frantic rumors swirled through the colony and its capital, Charleston. (Image: View of Charlestown in 1768, by Pierre Charles Canot, LOC)

Hysterical Carolinians accused the British government of plotting a rebellion of enslaved Africans against their masters. The hypocrisy of slaveholders demanding freedom from "royal tyranny" was palpable, but is often overlooked even today. 

The very idea of slave rebellion aroused panic: the enslaved constituted the majority of South Carolina's population, the only American colony where this was the case.   

In June, the Charleston authorities arrested several slaves and a free black, Thomas Jeremiah. At the time, Jeremiah was one of only about five hundred free blacks in the colony. He was also one of the most prominent. Many people called him "Jerry." 

Jeremiah had a successful fishing business and also earned money as a harbor pilot, guiding ships through the treacherous sandbars at its entrance. His net worth of over £1000, more than $200,000 in today's money, meant he was a wealthy man. 

On the basis of the testimony of two slaves he had allegedly tried to recruit, the authorities charged Jeremiah with plotting a slave uprising to benefit the British. He was tried under the Negro Act of 1740, which the colonial assembly had passed after a slave revolt in 1739, the Stono Rebellion.

Under the Negro Act the accused were tried in special slave courts, which denied the accused the judicial rights of the regular courts. There was no jury, only a tribunal of five white men that functioned as prosecution, judge, and jury. In contrast to traditional English courts, the defendant was considered guilty until proven innocent. Lacking defense counsel, the accused was unlikely to prevail. 

The evidence against Jeremiah was exceedingly flimsy. The testimony of the two slaves was highly suspect, probably extracted under threat. One of them, Jemmy, was Jeremiah's brother in law. Jemmy later retracted his testimony before Anglican minister  Robert Smith, future Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina.   

By then the court had found Jeremiah guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging and burning. As an act of "humanity" the court allowed that he could be hanged until death before being burnt.

The royal governor, Lord William Campbell, judged the proceedings a farce. He tried to get Jeremiah pardoned, but found that he no longer had any authority in the colony. Campbell's life was threatened because he had tried to help Jeremiah. He fled South Carolina a few weeks later, effectively ending British rule. By then, the court's sentence had had been carried out. (Image: Lord William Campbell, by Thomas Gainsborough)

On August 18, 1775,  Jeremiah was brought to the place of execution, a green across from the Sugar House, the house of correction for "unruly slaves." In front of a large crowd of whites and blacks, he was hanged and his dead body was burned to ashes. 

Jeremiah seems an unlikely person to have led a slave rebellion. He owned several slaves himself. His rise to wealth and prominence may have been his undoing. It was a living reproach to the white elite's claims that Africans were fit for nothing but slave labor. He had once been put in the stocks for allegedly insulting a white ship captain. 

His work as a ship pilot also told against him. Fearful whites pointed out that no one knew the harbor as well as he, and worried that he would guide British navy vessels into it. Jeremiah had served the city as a volunteer fireman, but even that hurt his cause. People said he knew so much about putting out fires that he was likely setting them. Among his accusers was a member of the tribunal that tried Jeremiah, the city's fire master, Daniel Cannon.  

One of the people Governor Campbell had appealed to on Jeremiah's behalf was Henry Laurens, then serving as President of the Provincial Congress. Laurens was also one of the richest men in South Carolina. He had made a vast fortune in the slave trade. With the profits, he bought several plantations and hundreds of slaves. (Image: Henry Laurens, painted by John Singleton Copley while Laurens was imprisoned in the Tower of London)

Laurens refused Campbell's appeal, claiming he was helpless to stop Jeremiah's execution. That may have been true at that point, but Laurens' private correspondence shows that he disliked Jeremiah. Laurens wrote that Jerry "is a forward fellow, puffed up by prosperity, ruined by luxury and debauchery and grown to an amazing pitch of vanity and ambition." In more colloquial terms, he was "uppity" and needed to be taught a lesson. 

Laurens denied that as a free man, Jeremiah should be accorded the rights of one and tried by a jury. English law was designed for whites. As an African, Laurens argued, Jerry had no claim to its benefits. The only option was to try him as a slave.

Reflecting on Jeremiah's fate, Campbell described the event as a "judicial murder" and his executioners as "barbarians." After nearly 250 years of similar events, it is difficult to disagree. Thomas Jeremiah may have been given a "trial" but the whole proceeding was in effect, a lynching.

Further Reading: 

J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty (Yale University Press, 2009)

William R. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2010)