Black Redcoats: The Corps of Colonial Marines, 1814-1816

By Matthew Taylor

Tells the story of the thousands of enslaved African Americans who fled to British forces during the war in what became the largest emancipation of enslaved Americans until the abolition of slavery in the United States.

During the Anglo-American War of 1812, British forces launched hundreds of amphibious raids on the United States. The richest parts of the United States were slave-states, and thousands of enslaved African Americans fled to British forces in what was to be the largest emancipation of enslaved Americans until the abolition of slavery in the USA. From these refugees from slavery, the British built a force - the Corps of Colonial Marines. Black redcoats, they were a fusion of two great American fears, the return of the British King and an uprising by their own oppressed slaves. The Corps of Colonial Marines turned Britain's campaign on America's coasts from one of harassment to one of existential threat to the new nation. Although small in number, the Colonial Marines - fighting to liberate their own families as much as for Great Britain - exerted a massive psychological impact on the United States which paralysed American resistance with fear of a widespread slave uprising, and allowed British forces in the Chesapeake to burn down Washington DC.

As well as examining this little-remembered part of British military and African-American history, this book will also look to the post-war history of the Colonial Marines, their continued survival as a unique ethnic group in the Caribbean today, and their involvement in the largest act of armed African-American resistance to slavery. The "Battle of Negro Fort" in 1816 was the only time American forces left American territory to destroy a fugitive slave community - a community led by former Colonial Marines who, when faced with American attack, raised the British flag.

This book brings black history to the fore of the War of 1812, and gives a voice to those enslaved people who - amidst great power competition between a slave-holding Republic and a slave-holding Empire – demonstrated exceptional bravery and initiative to gain precious freedom for themselves and their descendants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: May 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781399034036

Book preview

Introduction

On a moonlit night on 25 June 1814, at the mouth of Chesconessex Creek opening on to the vast Chesapeake Bay, several rowboats glided across the water. Chesconessex Creek was an inlet on the western side of the Delmarva Peninsula, which protects the Chesapeake Bay from the storms of the Atlantic. Named for the Native Americans who had lived along its banks when Europeans first came to the region, it forms part of Accomack County, Virginia. Within these boats, crouched low, rowing in practised silence apart from hushed commands, British marines and sailors were advancing with a very personal intent.

Several days earlier John Joynes, a slave-owning plantation owner and a captain in the Virginia Militia, had come aboard the British warship HMS Albion under flag of truce. Resplendent in his militia uniform, hat topped with huge ‘skyscraper’ feathers, he had sought out Royal Navy officer Lieutenant James Scott, aide-de-camp to Rear Admiral George Cockburn, British commander in the region.

The British Empire and the United States had been at war for two years. The United States had launched an invasion of the Canadian provinces of British North America, hoping to wrestle these territories from British control and remove all British presence in North America. This invasion had been stalled and turned by fierce resistance unforeseen by American planners, but with the British Empire involved in a global war against Napoleonic France this new North American front had sorely pressed British resources.

To try to even the odds, a Royal Navy force had entered the Chesapeake Bay, whose waters lapped at the shores of the rich and profitable American slave states of Virginia and Maryland, and launched a continuous series of destructive raids on American shore communities. By burning public buildings, centres of resistance, and looting or destroying supplies and items of value, the British hoped that American troops would be diverted from Canada, and that violence on their own doorsteps would cause American civilians to sue for peace.

Lieutenant James Scott had led many of these raids, and Captain John Joynes was outraged at his conduct. In powerful language for the era, Joynes told Scott: ‘[I will] blow you to hell if you put your foot within a mile of my command … I would give you such a whipping as would cure you from rambling a-night.’¹ Despite having started the war, and plundered and burnt many Canadian towns, the Americans nonetheless regarded British raids in their own heartland as acts of infamous barbarity.

Scott could not resist this challenge; like many Britons he felt that the United States’ war against Canada was an underhanded attempt at American expansion, taking advantage of the British Empire whilst it was busily employed defending the world from Napoleonic tyranny. Eager to bruise any American’s pride, Scott had consequently gained permission to test Joynes’ outburst with a raid.

In the lead boat, Scott scanned the dark shores ahead, seeking out the small log-and-earth fortification armed with a single cannon that Joynes so proudly commanded. Although Scott had a good idea of the area from careful reconnaissance, as the boat drew closer to the shore in the darkness he was reliant on the local knowledge of a guide. The boat slid from the surf and the guide gave the word that they had arrived. As Scott stepped from the boat on to a shore half-lit by the Moon, he became suddenly aware that he stood beneath the ramparts of the battery itself, with American sentries on the walls just above as other British Marine- and sailor-filled boats slid ashore around him.

With a powerful flash and boom, the battery’s cannon fired mere feet from Scott’s head, sending a thankfully victimless cannonball out into the dark waters – the British may finally have been spotted, but they were already upon the Americans, not caught as sitting ducks out to sea. Scott drew his sword and led his sailors and Marines over the ramparts with a violent yell.

Inside, the American defenders were caught completely by surprise, breaking and running almost immediately as more and more British troops poured into the battery. Scott beheld with relish the vision of the proud Captain John Joynes fleeing unarmed, in his sleeping shirt and boots. The Americans fled so swiftly that Scott was able to organise only a single significant volley of musket fire from his men, forming them up within the entrance of the battery itself, firing out into the Americans as they retreated into the forest beyond their fort.

With a speed and efficiency taught by many such operations, Scott’s men set about dismantling and destroying the battery, dismounting the cannon – a ‘pretty little piece’ Scott wrote later – to take back to the fleet. Inside Joynes’ office, Scott was delighted to find the captain’s hat, coat, and sword, taking them away as trophies. As one British officer noted, this mode of warfare was more akin to Viking raids than contemporary warfare.²

The raid had been a resounding success, it had removed the threat and neutralised the weaponry of a waterway-controlling fortification and humbled local enemy forces. But what had prompted Joynes’ outburst to Scott, why had the American defenders fled so quickly from the British, and how had British forces been able to make a landing in hostile territory, at night, with such precision to launch an assault with such a terrifying effect on their foe?

The British had deployed a special weapon, a force of warriors with intimate and precise knowledge of the ground, resources, and people of the region that provided a force multiplier to British efforts that ultimately was to lead to the burning of Washington DC and could, had war continued, have led to the destruction of the United States.

These men were the Colonial Marines, former slaves who had fled their American oppressors to take up a British offer of freedom and land of their own in exchange for fighting for the British King. Trained and armed by Royal Marines, and uniformed in British redcoats, Lieutenant Scott’s attack on Chesconessex Creek was guided to its landing right at the battery by a Colonial Marine who had formerly been owned by Captain Joynes, and fifty other Colonial Marines charged over the rampart with British sailors and their Royal Marines counterparts.

Scott gifted Joynes’ coat as a trophy to a Colonial Marine sergeant who took part in the raid,³ and was to later hear through intermediaries that this ‘insult’ – allowing a black man to wear his coat – seemed to trouble Joynes more than his defeat by the men and Marines of the Royal Navy.

To the Americans, particularly in the southern states where slavery was the basis of the economy and way of life, these runaway, rebellious slaves, aided and armed by a foreign foe, conjured apocalyptic images of a country-destroying uprising by the hundreds of thousands of people kept as labouring property. The Colonial Marines were a dual nightmare made flesh – the return of the King cast off in 1776 in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, in the form of those Americans for whom the principles and promises of the American Revolution and Republic were daily brutally excluded.

This book will examine and illuminate the Colonial Marines: who they were, where they came from, and their massive effect on the British counter-attack against the coasts of the United States during the War of 1812. They represent an heretofore underappreciated and exciting tale of African-American heroism and British force of arms, in the context of the tangled relationship between American and British values of liberty in a nation and an empire, both of which benefited greatly from the exploitation of enslaved Africans.

Chapter 1

The Anglo-American War

The Anglo-American War of 1812 stands out in both British and American history as one accompanied by a particularly strange mix of half-truths, myth-making, and contextual ignorance. For Americans, where it is noted at all, the War of 1812 is largely remembered for the bombardment of Fort McHenry that gave the United States its National Anthem – a paean of resistance against overwhelming odds that is frequently mistaken as referring to events in the earlier American War of Independence. In Britain, a peculiar national martial pride often accompanies the British burning of Washington DC, with any such mention usually twinned with the apocryphal note that the US Presidential Mansion, the White House, is white so as to cover the scorch marks. How and why British forces came to march into Washington DC, or why Fort McHenry’s survival was so meaningful to Americans as to inspire ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’s’ soaring rhetoric, is seldom examined.

Indeed, the common name for this war – ‘The War of 1812’ – gives some indication of the ambivalence felt about it by both its major combatants – the British Empire and United States. It does not enjoy a name like others that took place in North America, which at least give some indication of the grand ideals at stake, such as the ‘War of Independence’. No one was considered singularly responsible enough for it to be a ‘King Philip’s War’, nor is it even honoured with some indication of the combatants who fought and died in it, such as the ‘French and Indian War’. The War of 1812 is thus an interesting construction; it does not name foes, nor does it accurately depict the war’s length, nor suggest any reason for it.

It is perhaps only in Canada where the War of 1812 is remembered in near the fullness of historical context – as an imperialist war of choice by the United States. Momentarily grasped by an expansionist party in its politics, the United States imagined that American troops would be welcomed as liberators elsewhere in North America, only for this vision to be powerfully shattered by those who would be Canadians in a defining episode of Canada’s national story as a North American nation distinct from the United States. For the purposes of this work, to avoid the overuse of such a clunky and misleading construction, ‘the War of 1812’ shall be generally referred to as the Anglo-American War, as this is what the majority of combatants on both sides saw themselves as personally, and the nations for whom they fought. As this work will show, even this construction is inadequate.

The Anglo-American War was one of choice. It was launched by the United States in the hope of removing British influence from North America as near to completely as possible, removing what many expansionist Americans saw as the main supporter of Native American nations resisting the gradual expansion of the US to the north, west, and south from its east coast heartland. Native American groups particularly in the Great Lakes region were in varying degrees of alliance with the British colonial authorities of Canada, and whilst there was no explicit policy by the British Empire to fight or constrain the United States via Native Americans, the British Empire’s intercourse with them allowed the growth of an American public perception that the ‘savages’ on their border were largely British directed; this fear had existed since the very birth of the United States, being mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.⁴ In 1810, the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh (1768–1813) and Tenskwatawa the Prophet (1775–1836) had begun assembling a tribal confederacy based on a return to traditional ways of life, founding a village called Tippecanoe in the Indiana Territory – an area claimed by the United States on the basis of ‘treaties’ with Native Americans who were supposedly the owners of the land, a claim of dubious reality.

Native Americans from across the region gathered at Tippecanoe to join the political and spiritual resurgence the village represented – a strengthening of the Native Americans as a political body on an increasingly white-directed continent and a reiteration of their cultural heritage. When Tecumseh appealed to British leaders for support in feeding the growing numbers at Tippecanoe, the colonial authorities of Canada were beginning to imagine the impressive Tecumseh could become the leader of a Native American ‘buffer state’ between Canada and the United States, and so provided food and supplies. This outraged the United States, with Indiana Governor William Henry Harrison (1773–1841, he was to be ninth US President and died having been in office only thirty-one days) leading a thousand men towards Tippecanoe in November 1811. Arriving on 6 November, Tippecanoe was defended by only five hundred warriors, with Tecumseh and many others away on various efforts to parley with other Native American nations. The five hundred launched a night attack on the superior American force, and inflicted heavy casualties but were eventually routed and Tippecanoe was burnt, including the critical granary.

Despite this being an American attack and an American victory, albeit costly, the ‘War Hawks’ of the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry Clay (1777–1852), manipulated reporting of the battle into one of American deaths brought about by native savagery powered by British treachery, creating a vast public outcry. Clay was a strong advocate of war with Great Britain, and as Speaker of the House of Representatives set significant precedents for that role by overtly appointing Congressmen who shared his views to the leadership positions of various Congressional committees. This sidelining of both more moderate Democratic-Republicans and Federalists is what is recognised now as a crucial evolutionary development in how American party politics interacted with the legislature.

The outrage in the Federal bodies of government was also present at state level, particularly in frontier states. The Kentucky legislature passed a resolution blaming the British Empire for ‘inciting the savages’ and Congressman Felix Grundy (1777–1840) of Tennessee proposed for the first time in the US Congress that the United States must ‘drive the British from our continent’ so that the British Empire could no longer ‘intrig[ue] with our Indian neighbours, and setting … the ruthless savage to tomahawk our women and children’. Such incendiary talk landed well with many frontier Americans and their representatives.

However, to rally the wider American public to the flag in pursuit of this expansionist aim, American politicians focused not on national expansion, but on national honour. With the Napoleonic wars raging, the British Empire was in constant need of sailors for its globe-straddling Royal Navy, and the United Kingdom allowed the Royal Navy the right to impress – kidnap – men both on land and at sea as sailors for military service, especially if they were suspected of being British subjects. American citizens were particularly vulnerable to this – many British admirals denied the capacity of a British subject to declaim that status in favour of American citizenship, whatever American law may say on the matter. Many thousands of American sailors were taken from US merchant ships from 1783 (America’s independence) onward, the protests of American ambassadors easily ignored in London. However, on 22 June 1807, the Royal Navy ship HMS Leopard had attacked the US Navy ship USS Chesapeake and taken away suspected Royal Navy deserters from the Chesapeake’s crew.

An intense diplomatic incident, both the British and American governments managed to step back from the brink of war over ‘the Leopard Affair’. This insult against American sovereignty – the boarding of a military vessel – festered in some American circles, however, and in 1811, as outrage over American losses at Tippecanoe was stoked, the Leopard Affair was again brought back to the centre of American public discourse. The Leopard affair now demonstrated that not only were frontier Americans in danger of British-led attacks by Native Americans, but American people from the maritime states such as New England (largely represented by the more pacific Federalist Party) were also at risk from Royal Navy kidnapping – even sailors of the United States Navy itself, the force supposed to protect Americans at sea.

Having raised the spectre of British-led, bloody-handed savages on the frontier, and roving British kidnappers on the high seas, the Democratic-Republican War Hawks led by Clay finally looped in a further issue that, in their telling, demonstrated that the United States was not just under threat from the British Empire, but was already actively being warred against with attritional economic warfare. Both the British Empire and Napoleon’s France had, as part of their efforts to cripple the other, declared that any third-party nations engaging in trade with the other – conducting business with their enemy – would be subject to arrest and seizure. With most of Europe’s ports under the control of Napoleonic allies, and others allied to the British Empire, this effectively closed off all of Europe to American trade. The United States had attempted to pressure both nations by refusing to export anything to Europe under such conditions, effectively cutting themselves off from any international trade. This had ruinous effect on markets in Great Britain that relied on American supply – such as cotton – but equally damaged US producers, with unharvested crops and unsold produce. Ignoring the self-inflicted aspects of the refusal to export, the War Hawk added this economic depression to frontier fears and high seas kidnapping to successfully create an image of a British Empire trying with all means short of open warfare to strangle the young American Republic in its cradle.

In Clay and other War Hawks’ minds, imperial expansion was the answer to the question of how to protect the United States. The United States was not, however, a strong military power, and this rush to war was predicated largely on an optimistic scenario whereby a weak British presence in Canada would be brushed aside, American control of British North America cemented, and the British Empire signing away this loss of territory to concentrate on war against France. The entire United States Army numbered around seven thousand soldiers and whilst it could be vastly expanded by state militias in the event of an invasion, the Constitution forbade the use of militia as an aggressive military force, whilst states themselves had varied limitations on their militias’ usage – such as not allowing the force to leave their own home state. The US Navy had perhaps fifteen ocean-going vessels, with some dozens of coastal defence gunboats. In this regard, the United States’ professional military still held to the perspective on international relations of the majority of the country’s founding fathers: a limited defensive force not designed to entangle in alliances and wars beyond the US’ borders.

Pushed through by the War Hawks, in December 1811 Congress authorised an expansion of the army by 25,000 – with Clay overtly announcing this expansion was for war against Great Britain. Various Congressional attempts were made to stop this march to war, but the vote for war finally came on 4 June 1812 with a 79/49 split in Congress on rigidly partisan lines. The pacific-minded Federalists, representing broadly those with interest in peaceful international commerce and economic development versus the War Hawk-dominated Democratic-Federalists, who felt America’s future was to be guaranteed by an imperialist, ‘civilising’ expansion across the North American continent, with no comparable powers to hold it back.

Ironically, as the United States chose to go to war, the British Government cancelled the Orders-in-Council that threatened US ships trading with France and French allies, both as a conciliatory gesture and to try to draw American exports back to Britain. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822), however, remained committed to the principle of impressment to serve the manpower needs of the Royal Navy.

US Secretary of State James Monroe (1758–1831, later fifth President) laconically noted that: ‘At the moment of the declaration of war, the President … looked to its termination.’ President James Madison (1751–1836) was an unwilling passenger on the train to war with the British Empire, holding a more realistic view of the comparative weakness of the new nation. But like many Americans he felt that expansion was a desirable aim and inevitable need for the United States. He had spent part of 1812 clandestinely sponsoring an attempt to annex parts of Spanish-ruled Florida by the questionable means of having American-aligned groups incite violence and disorder to ‘encourage’ communities to request American protection. Such cutting away of territory from Florida was possible due to Spain’s weak hold over its colonies, a tenuous control whose degradation was accelerated by political chaos and war in Spain itself. The country was partially occupied by a French puppet government from 1808 until 1813 led by King Joseph Bonaparte (1768–1844), brother of Napoleon, whilst other parts of Spain were loyal to King Ferdinand VII (1784–1833), with a British Army under the Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) fighting across the Iberian Peninsula to expel French forces. The colonial possessions of Spain were left to fend for themselves, and those abutted by the United States had little with which to resist.

Taking territory from the British Empire, an Empire that had been on a war footing since 1792, with vast experienced sea and land forces was a challenge of a wholly different magnitude. Madison had seemingly hoped, perhaps self-deceptively, that the declaration of war by the United States alone would be enough to force a reset in relations with the British Empire and allow both sides to negotiate. He was swiftly confronted, as commander in chief of the United States, with the challenge of managing the impact between the Congressional War Hawks’ rhetoric and military reality. By 6 June 1812, the 25,000-man army expansion authorised six months earlier had brought in only 5,000 volunteers, pushing US regular forces to 11,750. By comparison, on 24 June 1812, Napoleon was to lead an army of 450,000 into Russia.

Former President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) summed up the optimistic rhetoric of the War Hawks by saying ‘the acquisition of Canada this year … will be a mere matter of marching’.⁵ However, all of New England (today, comprising the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) refused to take part in offensive operations, which cut off any American advance towards the port of Halifax – the largest British port in the western hemisphere and an obvious crucial strategic point. The United States Army under Major General Harry Dearborn (1751–1829), a veteran of the War of Independence, instead settled upon a three-pronged attack, with the main push towards Montreal, whilst other columns would advance up the Niagara River, and from Detroit into Upper Canada.

Crucially, however, Dearborn did not set any timetables for these operations, leaving all three prongs to prepare and launch in their own time. This vastly weakened an already small army’s striking power and ability to achieve the fast, decisive victories that would be needed to achieve the war’s optimistic aims.

Nonetheless, British North America was weakly defended. Despite the escalating rhetoric from the United States, the pressures of global war against Napoleonic France meant that Governor Sir George Prevost (1767–1816) had across all of Canada only about 5,600 regular soldiers. Like the United States, Canada had many local militias who theoretically stood ready to defend their homes – perhaps as many as 70,000 men – but like their American counterparts, their part-time nature and local defence focus meant their involvement could not be assumed. Native American groups might also come to Britain’s aid, but again could not be reliably factored into British plans. Prevost believed that any competent American attack would likely overwhelm what forces he had to work with unless significant reinforcements were sent from Europe, so focused his efforts on building up and strengthening border forts, and hoped for a negotiated solution.⁶

The American invasion of Canada, when it came, was at least initially as desultory as the planning had suggested. Michigan Governor William Hull (1753–1825) had moved with a two thousand-man force toward Fort Detroit – then a distant outpost of the United States, looking across the Detroit River at British Canada, in preparation for war, but did not find out that war had been declared until 2 July. On the same day British forces captured a schooner, the Cayuga, which was transporting Hull’s supplies to Fort Detroit, and included documents detailing Hull’s invasion plan and strength. Despite this, Hull crossed the Detroit River and occupied the French Canadian town of Sandwich on 12 July – the town was safely within artillery cover fire range from Fort Detroit. Hull then set about trying to secure the neutrality of the region’s Native Americans, very aware of the vulnerability of his 200-mile-long supply line from Fort Detroit to Urbana, Michigan, through lands almost entirely devoid of American presence.

Tecumseh revealed his hand at this point, writing to various native chiefs and Hull that he was declaring himself and his warriors for Great Britain. Hull responded with a demand that white Canadians should rise up against Britain, whilst threatening the death of any white man found fighting alongside Native Americans. American cavalry raids began roving, looting, and burning farms