George Washington at Mount Vernon. Encyclopedia Virginia
The Slave Who Fled From George Washington to Join the British
Among the slaves who fled their rebel masters in response to Lord Dunmore’s promise of freedom was Harry Washington. In 1776, he ran away from Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia plantation. He successfully evaded pursuit, and made it to safety behind British lines, where he enlisted in the Ethiopian Regiment. Harry was born in the Gambia River region in West Africa, circa 1740. He was enslaved and transported across the Atlantic, and survived the horrific Middle Passage to disembark in Virginia around 1760, where he was bought by a plantation owner.
After his master’s death in 1763, Harry was purchased by George Washington, who put him to work draining swamps in southeast Virginia. After years of toil in horrible conditions, enveloped by heat, humidity, and clouds of mosquitoes, Harry was taken to Washington’s plantation, Mount Vernon, and tasked with the care of horses. In 1771, he was demoted from his skilled tasks to grueling manual labor, prompting him to flee. However, he was recaptured a few weeks later, and restored to slavery.
Ships bearing Black Loyalists who had fled slavery to fight for the British depart for Sierra Leone. Government of Nova Scotia
Harry Washington Eventually Returned to Africa
When Virginia’s governor offered slaves their freedom if they fought for the British, Mount Vernon’s manager assembled the plantation’s slaves. He urged them to trust the benevolence of slavery’s paternalism over the precarious dangers of freedom. Harry preferred the dangers of freedom over the benevolence of slavery. At risk of savage penalties if caught, he fled, along with two other slaves. Harry evaded the slave patrols and pursuit, and made it to British lines, where he enlisted in the Ethiopian Regiment. He survived the epidemic diseases that wracked the unit, as well as combat in Virginia. In 1776, the British position in Virginia became hopeless, so the state was evacuated and the Ethiopian Regiment was disbanded.
Harry then sailed to New York, where he joined the Black Pioneers, and served in a company attached to a British artillery unit. He rose to the rank of corporal, and accompanied Henry Clinton’s British army in its invasion of South Carolina. There, Corporal Harry Washington was placed in charge of a pioneer unit attached to the Royal Artillery Department in Charleston in 1781. After the war, he was evacuated to Nova Scotia. He later joined the first group of colonial black migrants who were returned to Africa, and settled in Sierra Leone. In 1800, he joined a brief rebellion against British rule, that was swiftly crushed. Harry was arrested, convicted of sedition, and sentenced to internal banishment. He died of illness soon thereafter.
The only known portrait of Robert Townsend, code name Samuel Culper Jr. Nassau County Historical Society
George Washington’s Skills as a Spymaster Helped Win Him the War
George Washington’s most important spy, Robert Townsend (1753 – 1838) was probably America’s greatest spy, ever. With the alias “Samuel Culper, Jr.” and codename “723”, he became the key player in the Culper Ring. His espionage had a greater impact than that of any other single clandestine operative from the country’s birth to the present. For somebody whose actions played such a great role, Townsend is remarkably little known. He does not get anywhere near the recognition that his historical contributions warrant. That was how he wanted it, however. Townsend never sought acclaim. Indeed, he insisted that his real identity be kept secret even from George Washington. After the conflict, the few who knew his identity – whose numbers by then included Washington – respected his wish to remain anonymous.
Washington personally spelled out Townsend’s tasks in a letter with detailed instructions that directed him to work out of New York City and: “… collect all the useful information he can – to do this he should mix as much as possible among the officers and refugees, visit the coffee houses, and all public places. He is to pay particular attention to the movements by land and water in and about the city especially“. He added that Townsend should send him thorough reports. Washington wanted the number of troops in New York and its environs, their units, and any information about British defensive fortifications. He also wanted to find out as much as possible about the security measures in place to protect transports, the state of supplies and provisions, and the morale of the military and civilians.
George Washington Was Very Hands-On When it Came to Spy Work
George Washington’s instructions to Robert Townsend ended with: “There can be scarcely any need of recommending the greatest caution and secrecy in a business so critical and dangerous. The following seem to be the best general rules: To entrust none but the persons fixed upon to transmit the business. To deliver the dispatches to none upon our side but those who shall be pitched upon for the purpose of receiving them and to transmit them and any intelligence that may be obtained to no one but the Commander-in-Chief“. Washington could not have known just how well Townsend would perform. Nor could he have predicted just how well positioned Townsend was to come across some of the war’s most sensitive information. Townsend used invisible ink to write his reports on seemingly blank reams of paper that were delivered to Culper Ring spy Abraham Woodhull in Setauket, NY.
Woodhull delivered the intelligence to Caleb Brewster, who delivered it to their handler Benjamin Tallmadge, who in turn delivered it to Washington. The general read the reports after he developed the invisible ink with a chemical agent, and often responded to Townsend with invisible ink messages of his own. To help fulfill his tasks, Townsend got a gig as a columnist for a Loyalist newspaper, and visited coffeehouses to hobnob with British officers. Many of them opened up to the spy, in the hope that they would thus see their name in print. That was how Townsend learned of a British plot to flood America with counterfeit dollars to wreck the economy. His warnings enabled the Continental Congress to avert disaster in the nick of time with a recall and replacement of all bills in circulation.
The arrival of French forces in Newport, Rhode Island, 1780. Wikimedia
The Spies Who Saved the American Revolution
Another great success resulted from the unwelcome, but as it turned out fortuitous, quartering of British officers in the Townsend family home in Oyster Bay. One of Robert Townsend’s sisters overheard an officer, John Andre – Benjamin Tallmadge’s British counterpart in charge of intelligence – mention the defection of a prominent American hero. She passed that on to her brother, and from there it worked its way through the Culper Ring to Tallmadge. It eventually contributed to the discovery that Patriot hero General Benedict Arnold was a traitor. It came in the nick of the time, in the late stages of a plot to betray the important American fortifications at West Point to the British. Andre was arrested in civilian clothes with incriminating documents and hanged as a spy, while Arnold fled to the British.
Townsend also discovered that the British knew that the French, who had joined the war on America’s side, were about to send a fleet to land soldiers in Rhode Island. The powerful British Royal Navy planned to intercept and capture or sink the French at the sea before they disembarked their troops. Armed with Townsend’s report, George Washington fed the British false information about a nonexistent plan to attack New York City. As a result, the British stayed put in New York and prepared to defend it against an attack that never came, while the French safely landed their forces in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1780. That link up between French and American armies ultimately doomed the British. The allied Franco-American forces won the war in 1781, when they trapped a British army in Yorktown, Virginia, and forced its surrender.
The British surrender at Yorktown. Library of Congress
Washington Wanted His Runaway Slaves Returned at War’s End
In October, 1781, America’s War of Independence reached its climax in Virginia. An allied Franco-American force trapped, besieged, and forced the surrender of General Charles Cornwallis’ British army at Yorktown. It was the war’s final major pitched battle. The British, exhausted by years of fruitless fighting and high costs in blood and treasure, threw in the towel. Defeat at Yorktown led to the fall of the pro war government in London, and its replacement with one that sued for peace.
From the perspective of the escaped slaves who had fought for Britain, that was calamitous news. The side that had offered them freedom had lost, and their former masters had prevailed. Thousands of slaves-turned-freedom-fighters were bottled up with the British in enclaves such as Charleston and New York, unsure whether the Crown would honor its promises to them. They had good reason to worry: American negotiators, strongly urged by slave owners like George Washington, added a last minute clause to the 1783 Treaty of Paris. It forbade the British from “carrying away” American property. That “property” included the escaped slaves who had fought for the British.
George Washington enters New York City after the British evacuation. Heritage Auctions
Washington Was Furious When the British Refused to Hand Over Escaped Slaves
After the war ended in 1783, the fate of the escaped slaves became a bone of contention between the Patriots and British military commanders. Per the terms of the treaty, the British were bound to deliver their black comrades in arms to their former masters. However, the British on the ground refused to do so. In addition to honor and basic decency, the contest over the fate of the escaped slaves offered the British an opportunity to demonstrate moral superiority over the victorious Patriots. As the British commander in South Carolina put it: “those who have voluntarily come in under the faith of our protection, cannot in justice be abandoned to the merciless resentment of their former masters“.
The British commander in chief concurred, and directed that: “such that have been promised their freedom, to have it“. That enraged George Washington, and it was touch and go for a while whether hostilities would erupt anew over the issue. The British in New York finally resolved the issue, to the ire of the slave owners, by issuing thousands of “Certificates of Freedom” to the escaped slaves. The documents entitled their bearers to decamp to British colonies such as Nova Scotia “or wherever else He/ She may think proper.” In South Carolina, the British also honored their commitment to the slaves who had fought for them, and took them with them when they evacuated the state.
To hear some sources, George Washington wasn’t done even after he shuffled off the mortal coil. His home, Mount Vernon, has been the site of numerous ghost stories. The best ones involve the ghost of the great man himself. One such is attributed to members of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, America’s first national historic preservation organization, and the country’s first women’s patriotic society. The MVLA raised money to purchase a dilapidated Mount Vernon in the nineteenth century, in order to restore and preserve it for posterity. In the early years, when members were in the area, they slept in the mansion, sometimes in the four poster bed in which Washington died.
Many who slept in Washington’s bed were adamant that they felt the presence of his ghost, often described as “a strange and brooding spectre“. On one occasion, as two MVLA members shared Washington’s bed one night, they saw a figure as their bedside candle went out with a noise. Alarmed, one of them told her friend: “You are on the side of the bed where Washington died!” Her friend replied: “No, I’m not. He died on your side!” That killed their sleep that night. Both got up, dressed, and sat around wide awake until sunrise, terrified by every squeak. As an 1890 newspaper article put it: “They all agree that Washington visits his chamber in the still watches of the night“.
Newspaper illustration about an encounter with George Washington’s ghost. Mount Vernon
The Ghost of George Washington?
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Josiah Quincy III (1772 – 1864) was one of Massachusetts’ more prominent figures. He served in the US House of Representatives from 1805 to 1813, as mayor of Boston from 1823 to 1828, and as President of Harvard University from 1829 to 1845. In 1806, he visited Mount Vernon, inherited by George Washington’s nephew Bushrod Washington. Quincy stayed overnight, and Bushrod hosted him in George Washington’s bedroom – the one which the great man had died. By then, rumors already abounded of spooky encounters with Washington’s ghost in that bedroom. Quincy, who like most Americans of his generations revered George Washington, was not afraid.
Quincy actually hoped “that he might be found worthy to behold the glorified spirit of him who was so revered by his countrymen“. As his son Josiah Quincy Jr. recounted decades later, his father was not disappointed. At some point that night, he reported that he did, indeed, meet the ghost of George Washington. Frustratingly, however, Quincy Jr. gave no details, other than inform readers that his father’s “assurance in this matter was perfect“. We are thus left to wonder what might have passed between the Massachusetts bigwig and the spooky ghost of America’s first president.
_________________
Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
