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Jefferson's Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution
Cassandra Pybus
| IN Londonin April 1786, Thomas Jefferson found himself in the awkward position of negotiating with British merchants to whom he owed a great deal of money. On more than one occasion, Jefferson excused his incapacity to pay by claiming that General Charles Cornwallis had carried off thirty of his slaves, "the useless and barbarous injury he did me in that instance was more than would have paid your debt, principal and interest." Writing from Paris to a putative historian of the Revolution, Jefferson amplified this claim, saying Cornwallis "carried off also about 30. slaves: had this been to give them freedom be would have done right, but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the small pox and putrid fever then raging in his camp. This I knew afterwards to have been the fate of 27. of them ... I supposed the state of Virginia lost under Ld. Cornwallis's hands that year about 30,000 slaves, and that of these about 27,000 died of the small pox and camp fever." When he was Secretary of State, Jefferson took the part of his fellow Virginians to argue they should not be obliged to pay their debts because the British made the first infraction of the Paris Peace Treaty by refusing to return their runaway slaves. Virginia, the state that had incurred the greatest debt, also had incurred the greatest loss, he reasoned.1 |
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Since that time, Jefferson's estimation of thirty thousand slaves taken from Virginians in one year has been repeatedly quoted and has become a cornerstone of scholarship on the slave response to the American Revolution. Herbert Aptheker led the way with his 1940s pamphlet, extended into a full monograph in 1960, in which he highlighted the flight of enslaved people to the British as "surely one of the most dramatic, and pathetic, features of the American Revolution." Attempting to quantify this phenomenon, he wrote:
Thomas Jefferson declared that Virginia alone in the single year 1778 [sic] lost 30,000 slaves through flight; it is certain that many more Virginia slaves escaped both before and after that year. Responsible citizens of Georgia declared that their state lost from 75 to 85 per cent of its slaves (totaling about 15,000 in 1774), and South Carolinians asserted that of the 110,000 slaves in their state when the Revolution started, about 25,000 succeeded in escaping by the time it had ended ... If to all this one adds the slaves who escaped from North Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, and the northern states, particularly New Jersey and New York, it appears to be conservative to say that from 1775 until 1783, some 100,000 slaves (i.e., about one out of every six men, women and children) succeeded in escaping from slavery.2
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In 1967 Richard B. Morris may have taken his lead from Aptheker, though he furnished no citation for his remark that the numbers of runaway slaves evacuated with the British "may have at least equaled the total of white Tories who fled America." This reckoning put the number at eighty thousand or more. Benjamin Quarles was more circumspect in estimating numbers, speaking only of tens of thousands, though he has been incorrectly credited with the claim that the South lost sixty-five thousand. In a 1976 study of the black evacuees who went to Nova Scotia, Canadian historian James W. St. G. Walker gave an estimate of tens of thousands of slaves fleeing to British lines and reminded his readers that "Thomas Jefferson declared that Virginia alone lost 30,000." In a parallel study, writer Ellen Gibson Wilson frankly acknowledged that "there is no way of knowing" how many slaves were lost to the British, yet then went on to cite Morris as evidence that the number "could be as many as 80,000 to 100,000."3 |
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