Empire: World History - 62. When Slaves Fought for the British Empire

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

The Boston Tea Party has occurred. War has broken out on the American continent. The British need to bolster their forces to keep hold of the 13 colonies, but to whom do they turn? Their own slaves. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Maya Jasanoff to discuss the slaves who fought for the British in the America War of Independence and how they were rewarded afterwards. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. You've got that grin on because you know what you did. No, I've got grin on because I'm back to welcome onto this program. one of my best friends, which I'm very excited about.

That's lovely. I mean, that's very exciting. Somebody I also admire very much. Shall we do the build-up thing? Shall we do the build-up of drama rather than you just smashing through the drama and just getting straight to the punchline? We're building it up now. This is it. This is the escalation of excitement. Our guest is looking sort of dumbfounded.

It's okay. You'll be fine. But you are the man who says to get to the other side. Oh, I mean, why did the chicken cross the road? I mean, this is how you tell jokes. This is how you do stories. I'm actually going to go straight ahead. And before she shakes her head anymore, I'm going to introduce her.

Yeah, okay. You introduce our very, very special guests. I'm going to introduce our special guests. So, as I say, we have here today one of my very, very best friends. One of the people I'm also, I have to say, most envious of in the world. We started off together researching our first book side by side in the Indoor Office Library. And I'm sitting here doing this crappy podcast, and she's Professor of History at Harvard. crappy podcast.

Exquise me. I think a hundred million people would say otherwise, if you don't mind. Look, we are delighted to welcome. Maya Jassanoff. I mean, that was a weird introduction, Maya. You deserve more. Maya Jassanoff, a historian at Harvard, author of the absolutely superb Liberty Exiles,

the loss of America and the remaking of the British Empire. We are so thrilled to have you, Maya. Thank you very much. Forgive the weirdness. That's just how. this, what did you call it? Crappy podcast works. Crappy podcast.

I'm having t-shirts made up. Welcome, welcome. If you haven't heard the podcast, Maya, this would all be a bit shocking to you. But luckily, the listeners are used to this. It's fine. It's okay. We should also say that some of the other amazing things, Maya's done before we get on to the actual thing we're talking about,

because we have never started one of our programs without going down several rabbit holes. And Maya has won every literary prize in the book, including the Kundle Prize for History, which is something I've been longing to win and never have. And recent Vincent Brown, he also failed to get it alongside me while Meyer ran off with the crowd. And she has written, first of all, an extraordinary book called Edge of Empire about collecting, about the British in India, in Egypt, what they brought back, this whole business of loot and collecting and connoisseurship in the British Empire,

then did an extraordinary book on Conrad, which is one of my favourite. Oh, you rave about the book. Oh, I love that book. I chose it as my book of the year everywhere. And we've done lovely events together on that. And we will bring you, Meyer, on that subject scene because it takes us to the whole business of the Belgians in the Congo, which is something we're not actually going to do in this series. We're going to save it because it's so important. We're actually going to save it for a separate series about Africa in the near future.

And we'd love to get Maya back for that. Yes, Maya, you're booked in perpetuity, basically. I don't know whether you. We haven't actually heard your voice. Hello, Maya. How are you? Hi, I was just wondering when the moment would come. But of course, I'm familiar enough with my dear old friend Willie here to know that getting a word in edgewise takes a little bit of doing.

Anita, you're doing such a good job of keeping him in line that I didn't feel I needed to weigh in yet. Can I just say, I really feel seen. Thank you. Thank you. I mean a lot. I was with someone at lunch this afternoon who's complimenting your handling of me. Well, I tell you, I am contemplating getting a taser is what I'm going to do. I'm saving up for a really high-spec taser.

You want to chip in? Well, I was saying, you know, the first time that I did a conversation with Willie, and we've done many over the years now, which has always been a great pleasure. I quickly realized that the ratio of answer to question. It was so much off anyone else. And the good news was that at the time that I first interviewed him, I was relatively inexperienced at this. And so I got a very good taste quickly of what can go wrong in a conversation,

namely that the person you're interviewing can just hijack the entire thing. So I feel that I, you know, sort of jumped in at the deep end. But it's all worked out quite well in the end. You're a graduate of the college Dalrymple now. So you know what to do. you're just going to have to push in. She's a full professor of the college. It doesn't matter, William.

It doesn't matter. Really? It doesn't seem to matter. But I think Maya's got the measure of you. Maya, you're here to talk about something really fascinating. We've kind of a little tiny bit touched on it in the past. And we won't jump straight into the Equiano story. But we did mention when we did a program on Olauda Equiano,

how he had been co-opted somehow into sending people who'd come back from the American War of independence who thought that they would have freedom and a life in Great Britain and were promised to the world. And he sort of believed it for a while and took part in this repatriation program, sending these men to Sierra Leone. It was such a disastrous enterprise. He regretted it so bitterly and backed out of it. Before we sort of come to that story and rejoin it, I think what we didn't do, we did a disservice in that program. We didn't talk about the background to that and why. There were so many lost black men here in Britain and why it worried so many people. So I think we need to go back to the American Revolutionary War.

Can you set the scene for us? What are the years we're talking about and what happened? Even maybe before that, my reading stuff over the last month for this series, I've become very much aware of how in the pre-revolutionary period, the Caribbean and America were one world. And the French Caribbean, which I'd always thought of as the French Caribbean, described itself as the French Americas. Before we get onto the whole business of the Revolution War, paint the picture of how this is one area where plantations are set up, where blacks are taken from Africa and transported to this entire region, which we think of now is so different.

America, the hyperpower, Caribbean, a nice place you go for a holiday, but a minor part of the economy today. That was not the case in the 18th century. So let's think about North America in the 18th century. and when I say North America, I mean North America and the Caribbean. It has a number of European powers that are interested in expanding their presence in this part of the world. And the two preeminent ones by the time we get into the middle of the 18th century are Britain and France. The French have colonies in the Caribbean, which include most prominently Sandomang, the colony that precedes modern-day Haiti. and in the north of the continent, on the continent, they have the territory of New France,

which includes the region of Quebec and present-day Canada and has a subtler colonial population of white French-speaking emigrants, as opposed to Saint-Dermanc, which is one of the most prosperous sugar colonies, if not the most, really, in the world at that time, with vast numbers of enslaved workers who have been brought over from Africa. making a vast profit for their owners? Yes. The French have a region two that links these two places, the Caribbean colonies and New France in the north,

namely the entire area of Louisiana as it is today. So the city of New Orleans at the time was a French city, and it was a place where you could sort of imagine these couple of different kinds of colonial enterprise intersecting. You had the slave plantations and the profits and the products from the plantations of Saint-Dameg coming into the port of New Orleans. You also had incredible sort of spread of plantations in and around Louisiana. But you also have this kind of settler colonial population of whites who had come to live there and put down roots and so on. So that's the nature of the French sort of band of influence.

Now, shunting a little bit to the east of that on the Atlantic coast of North. America, you have the British colonies of the North American continent. And they come in a couple of flavors, but let me focus again on my sort of north and south. So in the north, you have the colonies of New England, most notably Massachusetts, Boston. This is a city that had been sort of settled and founded in the 17th century by Puritans coming from England with a very particular set of religious and political ideas. And then to the south, you have a very central you have more of the kind of plantation economy of South Carolina, of Georgia, also, I should say, of Virginia. These are places where the primary crops are tobacco, or rice.

It's, again, being farmed and worked by enslaved labor, but owned by white planters who are themselves settler colonists. And then you have the British sugar colonies as well. So in the Caribbean, you've got Jamaica is the preeminent economic power. of the British Caribbean at this time and colonies such as Barbados, which again have these incredible ratios of enslaved labor to white planters of like, you know, 20 to 1, you know, 30 to 1, something like that, where these are not subtler colonies at all. These are, these are sort of like the factories, if you will, of the 18th century world, just, you know, enormous quantities of human labor being poured in to generate profits for a very small number of people. And in terms of

of profits and the amount of money they're producing for the economy, this in a sense is what the Bay Area area would be the equivalent today, the center of all the tech and so on, as the richest, most productive area on earth. Well, as you know well from your work, the other area that's incredibly productive and profitable is Bengal, right, in this period. So, you know, in the 18th century world of European empires, it is really the Caribbean and Bengal that are the places that are in contest for the British and the French above all. It's funny because in India today, Bengal is not considered a place of enormous wealth. And of course, today in the world, too, Haiti and Jamaica are two of the poorest areas of the

new world. And yet those were the absolute epicenter of profit and the economy in the 18th century. Yes. And one of the things I often want to stress to people who sort of wonder about the effects of imperialism and British imperialism in particular in the world today is to think. about precisely those two places, Jamaica and Bengal, both West and India and East, now Bangladesh, just to look at what happens in these places a longer story. And also, I think it's really interesting to geographically link some of the founding fathers

to the geography that you've just described. So Boston, you've got sort of the, if you like enlightened thinkers like John Adams and Abigail Adams, who take a quite distinct opinion, mainly driven by Abigail Adams, about, slavery and the equality of men. And in the South, Virginians, you've got people like Jefferson and you've got Washington. So these are, you know, the sons of that soil, if you like, who are slave owners as well. Jefferson, who remains a slave owner famously in fathering children. We've talked about this before in previous podcasts with slaves on his plantation. So we've got a good idea of the patchwork of what we're talking about. When we talk about the Revolutionary War, the one

name that comes to the fall always is George Washington. He becomes the giant of American history at this time. Tell us about Washington and what Washington's role was and what drove him. So one of the things I like to stress is that to understand the American Revolution, you have to understand why the New England gentry and intellectuals and Puritans and the people that you've just mentioned, Anita, John Adams, those people. Why did they find common cause? with people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who are the planters in Virginia. And the fact that they did is what makes the revolution actually work, because these are, in fact, people with quite different economic foundations and goals. George Washington is often

the first person that people think of in connection with the American Revolution, although he's not the first person that I think of, because George Washington's role is fundamentally a military one. And I think that to understand the story of the American Revolution, we need to be able to understand the economy and the ideology behind it, which is really what drove it. So if you'll forgive me, I'll come to Washington in just a second and start by saying that in the same way that you need to understand the American Revolution as a kind of union of interests between groups of people from quite different kinds of colonies. you also need to understand it as growing out of global and expanding empire, an empire in which the British in London are trying to figure out a way to keep the competing interests of the East India Company, of the sugar planters in Jamaica, and of the New England and Virginia planters and traders and so on, all aligned.

And it's very difficult to do that. And so in order to do that, what they end up doing is trying to raise taxes in one place to pay for another, to pass a duty here to help those people there and basically try to square the circle in all sorts of ways. And it's out of this that a quite remarkable set of ideological propositions gains ground in the colonies of the Atlantic seaboard in British North America that begins to push back. against the very idea that Parliament in London has the right to tax them in the first place. And it's out of that feeling that we here in America are British, but we are not being represented adequately by Parliament in London, enough to be able to vote on our own taxation, for example. That sense of the unity of cause comes into being in Virginia, Massachusetts, etc., that bind

people together. Arguably, that's a similar story in India in India at the time. You know, no taxation without representation. It wasn't immediately a quit India movement. It was, can we have a say in where our money's going? Absolutely. And, you know, if I can draw on the India analogy, I would say that in the case of the story of the Indian independence struggle, you need to understand how and why, for instance, the industrialists of Gujarat decide to join forces with the intellectuals of Bengal. There's a lot of, an analogies, you know, any independence movement has to create an idea of a thing to become independent. You mentioned this idea of taxation without representation, just to draw the links

also with India. One of the other things that's brewing in the background is that the colonists in Massachusetts are worried that the East India Company is going to be let loose on them. Would you talk about that for a second? Yeah. So one of the provocative events leading up to the American Revolution that's part of the just canonical list of things that American school children learn is the so-called Boston Tea Party. And what this is all about is interestingly, this is the version you won't get in the American textbooks. It's actually an effort at one level by American smugglers and tax dodgers to try to evade, in a sense, the new Tea Act that has been imposed on them by the governments in London. What does the Tea Act do? What does the Tea Act

to do. Well, it actually lowers the price of tea in all practical ways for American consumers, but it also closes a loophole and it says from now on, you have to get your tea from East India company merchants. You can no longer get it direct from this other supplier or bring it in on your own ships or whatever, which is what many, many people were doing, which meant that the price of tea was actually lower. I love that. But there's also, this is an immediately aftermath of the Bengal famine and reports have been appearing in British newspapers like the spectator and the gentleman's magazine of the horrors of mass famine in India generated by the East India Company and that a million, possibly five million have died in this famine.

And these reports are reaching Massachusetts in the intellectual circles that read these sort of British magazines exactly at the same time as all this other stuff is brewing. Yeah. And I think that the general picture, that the American intelligentsia are able to paint of the British as tyrannical, non-consultative, rapacious, et cetera, is supported by the actions of the East India Company in all sorts of ways. Now, somewhere in the midst of time, we were talking about George Washington. It happens. Don't worry, Maya, it happens. We go on a little loop, the loop, but it's important to know the background. Where does Washington suddenly become the central figure?

Okay, so I mentioned that we need to know the economic context, the ideological context. There has to be a cause that people are fighting for. But then we have an actual war. The war of independence begins in April 1775 in Massachusetts and will continue until 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia. And the person who really comes to the fore and the fighting of the war is George Washington. He is a Virginia planter by origin. He is a surveyor by training and he is a soldier by career. He actually makes his way up in the British military. In the seven years war. So Washington is interesting here because Washington is a British soldier earlier in his career. And he's involved in the big war in the middle of the 18th century that's fought between Britain and France in North America and the world, basically to settle the question of who is going to have control of the American West.

So Washington earns his stripes in the Seven Years War. He, you know, at one point he visits Barbados. He has his plantation. You know, he's doing various things, you know, in this kind of planter, surveyor, military career. When the momentum begins to build up against British imperial rule in the colonies of North America, and it is understood that in order to make this work, there has to be some kind of defense force ready to push back against the increasing militarization of British rule.

The person that the American revolutionaries, as they are, coming to be known, will focus on in a point to lead this effort is George Washington. He's an experienced commander. He's a person who attracts a huge amount of kind of loyalty and support and so on. So Washington takes control of an end. entity that is delegated by the body called the Continental Congress, the beginnings of what will eventually become Congress in America today, of the Continental Army, the military that is

mustered in order to be the response by these now breakaway from 1776, break away American colonies to the British, and he's the guy who leads the entire military effort. Yeah, as Lin-Manuel would put it, here come the general, and the general does the job. So we get a victorious General Washington, who then is the figurehead of a free America. And then these disparate figures from different parts of the ideology and the map set about making a constitution. How easy is that for them to come to agreement on what the new America should look like? Honestly, this question of how the different regions of what becomes the United States of America get along with each other and become one, is the big challenge to American history right down to this day.

We have tensions that will persist and mount and increase between the colonies, then states of the north, in which slave ownership does exist. And I want to just emphasize a lot of people don't fully acknowledge the extent to which there is slavery across the United States of America, including in New England, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But it is definitely waning each of those states ends up passing laws kind of against it, phasing it out, etc. And the plantation colonies then states of the South, which will, you know, Virginia at the helm, South Carolina, Georgia, etc., which will, of course, break up into the Civil War in the 1860s. Anyway, that's for the future. But in the moment that we're talking about, the challenge that faces the people who have won their independent, you know, following the Battle of Yorktown in 1781,

is, first of all, to hash out terms of peace with Britain, which takes two years only as recognized in 1783, and then to figure out how on earth they're going to govern themselves. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that leaps out from when they do sit down and they manage to get around a table and get some lines in writing, and it's Jefferson who's tasked with writing putting pen to paper. And it's that line, isn't it? We hold these things to be self-evident that all men are created equal. How do they say those words and they're not acknowledged that they're not going to do that? Actually, all men are not going to be equal in America. What they mean is white men?

Yeah, you know, we should separate here to the Declaration of Independence, which was penned by Jefferson and had these wonderful sweeping professions of equality from the realities of the negotiated constitution that was written up and passed in the 1780s. And these are two very different things, because the one of them is basically a manifesto and a call to arms. And the other one of them is a big compromise trying to get everything to work together. It still has some of that wonderful language, which, of course, Americans refer to to this day and has been inspirational to people around the world. But that brokered deal of the Constitution included all kinds of ways to cobble together a union out of these very, very disparate interests. So, you know, a few of the things that persist to this day.

The fact that we have a Senate that has two representatives for every state, no matter what the population of that state is, is something that was built into the Constitution to balance out the interests of different actors in the United States in what is by definition a kind of unrepresentative way. And down to the present now, we have a state like Wyoming whose population is negligent. compared to that of, say, California, which has exactly the same amount of representation in the U.S. Senate. Another kind of brokering that they did is they were trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to allocate representatives in the House of Representatives, which we're going to do on the basis of population? Well, you know, we're clearly not going to allow enslaved people in the United States to count as voters or citizens or anything like that. But what are we going to do about the population that we're trying to. to reckon these representatives in the House of Representatives on the basis of. And they come up with this formulation, which is notorious in American history, which is that they will count the enslaved

people as three-fifths of one person when they are doing the math to come up with how many representatives should go into the House of Representatives. And is there any awareness at the time that this is outrageous, or is it in the 18th century terms considered to be the norm? There is definitely a feeling among some that it is outrageous. That famous line of Samuel Johnson that the keenest people on liberty are the drivers of slaves. Yes, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of slaves? And it's definitely noticed. It is definitely called attention to by British abolitionists and, for that matter, American abolitionists and for that matter of French abolitionists.

People definitely notice it. But, you know, there's a bigger question here, I think. about how history is made. Is history made by revolutionary actions or is it made by compromises over time? And, you know, I think the story of abolition and abolitionism can sort of be told in both of these modes. And to some extent, what will happen in the United States over time is a kind of momentum around abolition that gets built up and ultimately wins the day. But yeah, there are definitely people who say this is not right, but in the present politics of the 1880s and 90s in the United States of America, this is the way things are going to be done. So what we have skirted over is the role of slaves in the war. I mean, slaves fought in this war of

independence. And who were they fighting for? And how did it fall? And what were they promised? So they fight on both sides of the war, but in very, very different ways. Early in the war, very early in the war, the governor of Virginia, a fellow called Lord Dunmore, is forced to evacuate the capital of Virginia, the town of Williamsburg, and make a sort of floating capital in exile, government and exile and a bunch of ships in the Chesapeake Bay. And while he's on these ships and he's got the townspeople of Williamsburg with him and he's got some of the enslaved followers and so on with them, he comes up with a very cany idea, which is to try to lure to the British side the enslaved people who are owned by patriot planters.

And he issues a proclamation, which is known as the Dunmore Proclamation, in which he says, okay, guys, if you are working on a plantation and your owner is against us, then please come and join us, and we will give you freedom. And you will fight for us, but you'll get your freedom, we'll liberate you, etc. And is this widely publicized? Do people know this? Does the word spread? It's definitely publicized in the region.

And, you know, many people run off the plantations to join Dunmore in his so-called floating town. They form a regiment which Dunmore creates, which is the first of what will be several regiments of black soldiers who come to the British on the basis of these promises. And then word of it passes sort of by word of mouth through the plantations of the South. And people throughout the war will run to the British in the places that the British are camped in order to win their freedom, basically, and get away from these owners that they don't want. The very same owners who are saying, give me liberty or give me death. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I've heard a figure of something like 20,000 slaves who run to the British and say, look, you're going to give us freedom.

But on the other side, and as you say, they're blacks on both sides. You've got John Lawrence, who's leading a black battalion as well. So there are black people fighting as well for those who want independence. What are they being promised? There are. And, you know, I don't know the terms of their deals in quite the same way. I mean, there's one picture of U.S. independence that likes to emphasize the Native American Indian allies of the Patriots. of the patriots and the black soldiers who fought for the patriots.

But I think that those narratives tend to overplay the extent of support from non-white peoples for the cause of American independence. It's there. It's mixed. It's complicated. But let's not forget that these people are in a very precarious situation. So to be quite clear, do more black people? fight on the British side than on the Patriot side.

Yes. That's very, I mean, as well as their freedom, though, aren't they also promised land? Because freedom means nothing unless you can feed yourself and you can build a house and you can have a family. Does it come with a promise of land? So over time, the promises to the enslaved men and women of patriot owners to join the British and get their freedom will be repeated over the war and will then be amplified. and I should say they will be augmented, they'll be augmented by greater terms of sort of what will follow afterwards. And so all of this really comes to a head at the end of the war. So there's this very peculiar period in the history of the American Revolution, which tends to get left out of the history books.

And that's the period between the surrender of the British at Yorktown under Lord Cornwallis in 1780. who later goes on to be governor general in India. And the actual evacuation finally of the British troops in November 1783. It's two years. And during those two years, all of the terms of independence and so on are being worked out. But also during those two years, all of these people who have remained loyal to the British or run to the British to get their freedom or, you know, being Native American allies of the British, they all have to kind of figure out what's going on.

And during that two-year period, the British begin to articulate and flesh out different promises to those loyal populations about what will happen to them next. Find out what happens to them next after this short break. Welcome back. So, Maya, just before the break, you were sort of tantalizing us with promises made, promises augmented, how many promises were kept after the war? A lot of them were kept in name. The question is how well were they kept? And the answer is not as well as the people picking them up had hoped. There's this amazing moment in the sort of latter days of the British occupation of what is now going to be recognized at the United States.

And it takes place in the area of New York City. So the person tasked with negotiating the terms of surrender on the ground is a fellow called Sir Guy Carlton. He's in charge of the British troops at this time. and the person on the American side is our man, George Washington. And in New York City have clustered during the course of the war many thousands of white loyalist civilians and also black loyalists who have been given these promises of freedom, who have in some cases been brought up to New York City as the British are pulling out of the cities in the South.

And so you have this population of many thousands on the ground to New York City, which Guy Carlton has to get out because that's part of the district. deal. But George Washington has another agenda, which is that he wants to be able to reclaim the people who he and his colleagues understand to be their property who are on the ground in New York City. And so these two guys have a meeting near New York where they're, again, hatching out the terms of, you know, who's going to march out when and who's going to march in when and so on. And Washington says to Carlton, you know, what about those slaves? We want them back. there are property. And Carlton says in a sort of oops moment, like, oh, they've already embarked,

they've already sailed off, because he, Carlton, has already made sure that they're going to get out before the Americans can snatch them back. So this is a rare example of really the British behaving quite honorably, keeping their promises looking after the slaves and George Washington, this hero of liberty, who we've watched in a million films, behaving extremely badly and being an old-fashioned evil slaver. Exactly. So it's a remarkable moment, but I want to nuance it in two ways. The first way I want to nuance it is just to remind everybody that, meanwhile, the British

still have their colonies in the Caribbean. And those colonies in the Caribbean, which are still the economic powerhouse of the British Empire, and which, by the way, keeping which is why the British Empire continues to do fine, despite having lost the United States. Because Jamaica and colonies like this are earning far more money than the land they've just lost in North America. Yes, because they don't lose them. The French are very busy trying to get them from the British during the big war that unfolds, but the British defend them. So, in fact, you have the only victory monument that the British put up after the American Revolution,

a war which Americans obviously believe that the British lost. And that monument is in Jamaica. It's in Spanish Town, Jamaica. it's called the Rodney Memorial, and it's put up to Admiral Rodney, who defended the, basically the islands, Jamaica and others, from the French fleet at the Battle of the Saints after the Battle of Yorktown and kept them in the British Empire. Is there actually a sensation at all among the British that they genuinely didn't lose this, that they saved the most important parts? Is that ever stated explicitly? Or is it a hashtag fake news? I wonder about how, you know, the era of propaganda, what do they think?

I think it's hashtag, look at the bright side. Okay, okay, okay, right. Okay. They definitely know they've lost the colonies. Anyway, okay, so back to this story about the good and the bat, right? Okay. So the British have kept Jamaica, they kept Barbados, that kept, you know, all of these other places, which are still absolutely slave economies.

At the very same time that they are facilitating the, exodus of free black loyalists from New York City. They have also expedited the export of large numbers, thousands of enslaved blacks by white loyalist owners to the plantations of the Caribbean. So they're divvying them up. I mean, they're basically divvying them up, but they're the same sort of human beings. Now, the promises again that were made by the British, I mean, among those promises, did they not say, look, we are going to grant you the same amount of land as any white soldier in places like Nova Scotia or New Brunswick. Aren't these the places that they say, you know what, you are loyal, we'll give you a plot of land in these places? Right.

So this is the second way we need to kind of be a little more nuanced about this picture. So the British do evacuate the black loyalists. Okay, check. They do promise them land and supplies. Check. But now we can catalog the butts. They promised them less land and less supplies and worse land. And they don't always follow through. So what ends up happening is that as with many policy matters, it's really left to the individuals on the ground to make sure that the ideals come into practice. And on the ground, what you have in Nova Scotia, in what becomes New Brunswick, which is where a lot of those free blacks from New York end up getting sent is a bunch of colonial whites who are used to a highly racially stratified society in which they are totally accustomed to seeing blacks either as enslaved or in rare cases free, but very, very

subordinated. And their interests on the ground are not in like helping out these people first. Their interests are, you know, for themselves to try to get the best possible deal they can, and the blacks are really shunted to one side. Before we talk about the blacks, which is what's going to occupy the rest of this program, just for two minutes, give us a very brief description of the sort of stories about the exiled whites that you paint in your book, Liberty's exile, because people I think in America as well, not just here, are totally ignorant about this extraordinary diaspora of the American colonists who fought on the British side in the American Revolution. Where do they go?

There's an amazing exodus of some 60,000 white individuals from what becomes the United States across the British Empire. They sail on British ships. It's a high figure. 60,000 is a lot of people. Yeah, it's about one in 40 members of the population. And I should say they bring with them about 30,000 slaves. So there's a lot. I mean, it's sort of, I'd put the number somewhere.

The total number is somewhere. somewhere between 60 and 100,000, depending on, you know, how you count people. And where do they, where do they go? So where they go? So they go basically everywhere in the world that the British are or are expanding. So some of them, of course, go to Britain itself. The people who go to Britain itself tend to be the best connected and the wealthiest, because it's expensive to live in London then as now. They go in the largest numbers to the provinces of Nova Scotia and, again, what becomes New Brunswick, which is actually. split off from Nova Scotia, partly to accommodate this large number of settlers coming in.

So modern Canada today? Yes, parts of Canada today. They go to the Bahamas, a region not technically in the Caribbean, but obviously in that region, which the British had not really managed to kind of settle in a very robust way before the war and use the loyalists as a way to kind of get that settlement going. They go in some numbers to Jamaica, particularly the ones who have large numbers of slaves. And then small numbers of them scatter to, again, everywhere that the British are active. You and I have both worked on David O'Loney and William Lennonair Scardner, who are born in the United States and die on the banks of the Ganges in Camp Bay.

Absolutely. And, you know, there's the best example of this for my money is the notorious turncoat in a American history, Benedict Arnold, who starts out his career as an American general of great success, ends up shifting sides to the British, ends up himself going off in disgrace to Britain. But what does Benedict Arnold do? He does what any canny person on the make of that time will do, which is that he tries to angle for his sons the best possible jobs he can. Where are those to be found? They're to be found in the East India company. And two of Benedict Arnold's sons end up in India with Indian companions or wives having mixed-race families in India.

Should be said, both William Lennes Gardner and David Dr. Loney also have Indian children and Indian wives. And in the case of Gardner, a princess of Cambay in relation of the mogul house. So it's an extraordinary, again, forgotten chapter until you unearthed all this wonderful stuff in your book. And in the case of Gardner, whose descendants are still living in the juggier that he had in Kaisgunj, and who maintain his tomb and salons. I went to have lunch with him once, and he went out, he said he haven't had lunch yet, I said, no. He said, went outside and he shot a parrot.

How does parrot taste? What does parrot taste like? I just had the dove. Oh, okay, right. Probably wise, poor parrot. Just again, now moving back to those slaves who've been promised the land, because otherwise we're never going to get to Sierra Leone, which is, you know, the meat in the matter,

the parrot in the sandwich, were. But you know, you've got these men who are promised land equal to whites. I take it from what you're saying about promises that were kept and not kept before the break, that these promises were not necessarily kept or were some people, did they get what they wanted, or did they get rubbish land, smaller land? What did they actually end up getting and could they do anything about it? All of the above. So they got less land, worse land, land that came with strings attached. So you had all of these cases of, you know, the black loyalists being hired, for example, to do labor, but it turned out that the wages that they were being given were complete, you know, peanuts,

and they couldn't really make due. And so then they had to borrow. And so then they end up in different kinds of debt bondage. You end up with, you know, white families who will take in the child of a black family, who they're basically using as a servant or a slave. And then they'll say to the parents, oh, but I've been keeping this person, you know, for a year, you need to pay me back for their room and board, you know, things like that. It's really kind of horrible. And, you know, these are people who are not used to living in the climate of Canada. Sure, it's cool. Farming or working in these conditions. And, you know, you read these kind of harrowing reports from the first year or two of the loyalist settlements in the Canadian Maritime.

And it's pretty bad for everyone. I don't want to say it's great, you know, for a lot of the whites who are trying to set up a farm and have lost everything and so on. But the black loyalists, there's a town called Birchtown, for instance, where they settle. And they don't even have enough supplies to build themselves shelter. And so what they end up doing is digging into the ground to make these dugouts to get through that first winter. And they erect kind of shanty like roofs of logs and trees to kind of cover them in the dugouts. But this is what they're living through. You know, it's a really bad situation.

Do they have any recourse? Yeah. I mean, does anyone listen? Because they have been promised. There have been declarations made. And, you know, the British love the rule of law. I mean, they are famous for loving the rule of law. So how do they handle that?

Yeah. So there is an administration and they do take complaints. They take a lot of them from blacks and whites. And what the black community has as its most important in this regard for, of organization are congregations and churches. So a lot of the black loyalists had formed congregations during the war Baptist and Methodist especially around black preachers. And those preachers will end up being really important community leaders and ultimately the conduits to British authorities in channeling the grievances of their community to the authorities. So there's a number

of these figures who are quite important. And then there's also the military veterans. They're all military veterans, I should say, or most of them are. But some of the figures from that military apparatus end up also becoming kind of conduits because they have themselves formed relationships to British officers during the war that give them a certain kind of access. Now, this is going to be a tease because we're coming to the end of this episode. But I want people to come back for the second episode of this because it's fascinating. One of those men that fits your bill exactly is a man called Thomas Peters. ex-slave. He has fought. He's with the black pioneers. He has fought. He has proved himself to be

loyal. Tell us a little bit. Give us a little tease and taste of Thomas Peters because he's going to be such an important figure in the story of Sierra Leone, which, you know, we didn't really get too tall in this episode, but that's okay, because that's how this runs. Everything that we've done has been fascinating. Who is Thomas Peters. Thomas Peters is a Yoruba from present-day Nigeria. He comes to the colonies as an enslaved person. He ends up joining the Black Pioneers, one of the regiments, which is formed by the British, and fighting during the war.

Out of interest with black officers or under white officers? The actual commissioned officers are white, but the soldiery are black. Peters is a sergeant. He's known as Sergeant Peters. He evacuates to Nova Scotia New Brunswick at the end of the war. And there he ends up becoming, you know, significant leader of the community. He had a relationship to some extent with General Clinton, who was one of the British generals,

who was sort of most involved in rallying and summoning black loyalist support. And ultimately, Thomas Peters is so fed up with the deafness with which British officers and officials on the ground in Canada respond to black loyalist complaints that he organizes a trip to England directly to try to appeal to the British authorities himself on the ground in London. And they together come up with a rather remarkable plan. To hear the plan, join us for the next episode. Anita, before we end, we should say that we are coming to the end of this series and we will, as before, for be recording a special episode, which will answer everyone's questions. So if you have a question about this series, or indeed about previous ones, but particularly about the slavery series,

that you want an answer for, send them into EmpirePod UK at gmail.com. So join us again on Thursday for the second half of this remarkable story about the founding of the first colony for freed slaves in Sierra Leone. Till then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. Goodbye from me, William Duremberg.