Black Redcoats: a fascinating new book by Matthew Taylor
Burke and the War of 1812 plunged James Burke into a new theatre of war as he joined British forces defending Canada against an attempted annexation by the young United States of America. When I started writing the book, most people had never heard of the War of 1812, but Donald Trump’s announcement that he would like to see the USA annex Canada meant the war of 1812 was suddenly trending in social media.
What quickly became obvious was that very few people understood what had happened in 1812. It was not that surprising. The war was a scrappy affair. Both sides occasionally attempted bold strategic plans, but these usually came to nothing – from the first defeat of the United States when a grand three-pronged attack on Canada fizzled out as one failed invasion from Detroit, to the final defeat of the British (after the war had officially ended) with a doomed attempt to take New Orleans.
Political partisanship has further clouded the historical view. Well over 200 years later, people still view the war through politically partisan lenses. So, for example, a surprising number of people in the USA are convinced that the war was won by the USA. People on both sides of the conflict tend to downplay the role that native Americans played in the fighting (though Canadians seem to acknowledge this more than others) or how much the native tribes suffered in the aftermath of the war.
Now, with his new book, Black Redcoats, Matthew Taylor has highlighted another forgotten element of the war: the effect it had on enslaved people in the USA and the role that some of them played in aiding the British war effort.
In Burke and the War of 1812, the emphasis is clearly on the land war, but as the conflict went on, the role of the navies on both sides became increasingly important. Although the American navy was to prove its worth, the British had the ability to strike from the sea all along the eastern coast of the USA. They chose Chesapeake Bay as the focus of their efforts and established a base there. Eventually, the British had about twenty warships in the bay with some two thousand men capable of going ashore and taking the fighting to the enemy, most famously, in 1814, by marching to Washington and burning down the White House.
From early in 1813, enslaved African-Americans on the shores of Chesapeake Bay saw the British presence as an opportunity to escape to freedom. The first may have been nine men who, on 10 March, approached the guard boat of HMS Victorious and volunteered to serve in the ship’s company. Many more were to follow.
Soon, it was not only men who fled to join the British. Whole families were taken under the protection of the Royal Navy. Many of the men chose to join the British forces, but those who did not want to fight were given their freedom and evacuated to British territory in Canada or the West Indies.
The British action was driven by several motivations.
The men who chose to join them were valuable from a military point of view. They were loyal – desertion was not an option for them. They were committed to the British cause, which offered freedom to all the enslaved people in the territory under their control. They knew the geography of the area – an important factor given the guerrilla nature of many of the British raids – and they were soon to demonstrate that they were brave and able fighters.
The War of 1812 was a modern war, in that its economic element war was a strategic priority. To the farmers around Chesapeake Bay, their slaves were valuable stock and the British inflicted real economic damage by liberating them. Freeing enslaved people was also a blow to American morale as many Americans lived in fear of a slave rebellion.
Many naval officers were also motivated by sympathy for the abolitionist cause. Ironically, this was true even of some who themselves owned slaves in the West Indies. Slavery was already illegal in Britain and, whatever was happening in the West Indian plantations, British officers were uncomfortable to see slavery in a society which looked otherwise very much like that in England.
As the number of African-Americans serving the British military increased, a new military unit, the Corps of Colonial Marines, was formed in 1814 and volunteers were issued with red coats and given regular pay and rations.
The Colonial Marines proved excellent soldiers and were conspicuously active in many engagements, notably in the assault on Washington and the burning of the White House.
As the war drew to an end, the British planned an attack on New Orleans. It was probably always a step too far. Andrew Jackson had had time to construct a solid defence of the city and his troops were far from the inadequate opposition that the British had faced in 1812.
The British saw control of the coast of Georgia as important in enabling them to cut off the possibility of the Americans reinforcing New Orleans. The British task force sent to Georgia to accomplish this consisted of about 500 Royal Marines with 200 men from the 2nd West India Regiment from the Bahamas and 365 Colonial Marines. This meant that the slave state of Georgia was being threatened by a force that was majority black.
The British established a base at Cumberland Island where they were joined by many blacks fleeing from both Spanish and American slave owners. British forces were still based at Cumberland Island when news of the peace finally reached them and they were forced to withdraw. The island was held for approximately 8 weeks during which 1,700 enslaved people escaped to the British.
Meanwhile, in West Florida, the British had made allies not only of freed slaves but also of Native Americans. Thousands of Creek warriors had fled to Florida following war with the Americans and the British had organised a multiracial force of Creeks, whites, mixed race and black people to defend West Florida, then a notionally Spanish territory, against American attack.
The British formed a separate Florida Corps of Colonial Marines, based at Prospect Bluff, overlooking the Apalachicola River, about 15 miles north of present-day Apalachicola, Florida. The fort they built there was a moated, walled structure enclosing stone buildings. Bastions at the corner mounted defensive cannon. It was the largest man-made structure in Florida outside the cities of Pensacola and Saint Augustine. When the British withdrew they left at least 2,500 stands of muskets, 500 carbines, 500 swords, four 24-pounder cannon, and four 6-pounder cannon along with a fieldpiece and a howitzer. When the Colonial Marines were evacuated, as many as 450 of the men and their families decided to remain at the base, which became known as ‘Negro Fort’. It became the centre of the most well-armed Native American and free black community on the North American continent.
The continued existence of the Negro Fort, only 50 miles or so from the US border, was regarded as intolerable by the Americans and in the summer of 1816 units of the American army and navy attacked the fort. A gunboat opened the attack with a hot cannonball which, by chance, landed in the fort’s magazine. The explosion that it caused killed about 300 people.
The deaths at Negro Fort pretty much marked the end of the Colonial Marines, although individual marines seem to have continued as a thorn in American flesh, some becoming valued military advisers to Native American tribes in the region.
Matthew Taylor’s book explores an important and little known area of Anglo-American history. He looks at the possible influence of the Colonial Redcoats in history. It is, sadly, mainly a case of might-have-beens. If the British had responded to the diplomatic overtures of the Creek leader who travelled to London to plead for support; if a lucky shot hadn’t annihilated Negro Fort… Even so, the story tells us a lot about British and American attitudes to slavery and the start of the long, slow process of unravelling it.
Black Redcoats is an important book for anyone interested in the period and yet still immensely readable. I whole-heartedly recommend it.
