NEW NARRATIVE #21: Impressment of Seamen, Class Insurgency and the Knowles Riot in Boston

[Graphic: Boston riot of 1747]

In November 1747, a large insurgency of Boston-based sailors, slaves, and other workers, of English, African and other backgrounds, arose together, seized the city, and held British naval officers hostage for three days. They were demanding the freedom of dozens of their comrades ‘press ganged’ into captivity as would-be sailors on a British warship.

‘No taxation without representation!’ was the major rallying cry we all learned about in school for the 1776 American War of Independence against Britain. I always thought it rather wimpy, something that belonged farther down among a list of outrages or other causes. First, you had to be wealthy enough to pay significant taxes, and second, any of the upper crust sent off to sit in parliament in London was not likely to have matters of the majority--the exploited, the enslaved, and the expropriated—foremost among their concerns.

But what did fire me up as a young student was the stories of the impressment of sailors and their resistance. Perhaps it was because my father was a sailor in WW2 and would tell us stories of his challenges a sea. ‘Impressment,’ moreover, was an odd word, so archaic you had to look it up, along with ‘press gang’ that went with it.

So I dug into it, and the more I learned, the more outrage I could feel. For starters, seamen of any sort in the Atlantic in these years had a hard and dangerous life. They were ‘motley crews’ made up of all nationalities and skin colors, free and escaped slaves. and Native peoples too. They were captured or ‘pressed’ into the ships in what amounted to kidnapping outside the law. Their rations were so poor as to leave them diseased before reaching a port. Captains were permitted to whip them, so long as they avoided the limit of mutiny. And they were paid little, and sometimes not at all. They had at times to wait a year for their pay, and were dead or long gone elsewhere. Once in port, they often tried to escape, and any new targets of ‘press gangs’ often resisted.

Charles Knowles was ‘Admiral’ of the British warship being repaired not far from Boston. His crew was hanging out in town or nearby, and a good number decided to seek other livelihoods as best as they could. The Admiral needed to fill out his crew, so if you were a young laborer of any sort anywhere near the docks, you were a target for kidnapping and made to be a sailor. even if you had never been to sea. The ‘press gangs,’ moreover, killed two laborers who resisted.

So this time, the young men had enough of it. They rebelled and seized several British officers as hostages of their own, demanding the release of those ‘impressed.’ The streets were in turmoil for three days, and the history books call it ‘Knowles Riot,’ after the Admiral. It would be better described as a ‘motley’ class revolt of sailors, laborers, and slaves against their British overlords and any local appeasers.

‘Town officials,’ states Wikipedia, ‘claimed that “the said Riotous Tumultuous Assembly consisted of Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negros & other Persons of mean & vile condition." Some historians believe this was an effort to deflect blame, while others treat it as fact. Hutchinson estimated the crowd's size at "several thousand," remarkable in a city with a population of just 16,000. In addition to sailors and other maritime workers, the crowd likely included most of Boston's militia, as well as some middle-class shopkeepers and merchants, women, and others whose lives were affected by impressment.’

In the end, a bargain was struck, and the hostages were freed and returned to their ship, while the ‘impressed’ Boston residents were also set free. Eleven men were arrested, three were fined and the rest were let go.

One young Bostonian, a budding journalist named Sam Adams, was quite impressed with the entire event. He wrote up an early pamphlet of his own on the matter, fearful of signing it with his own name, using ‘Amicus Patrie’ instead. Using the ideas of John Locke, he argued: "For when they are suddenly attack'd, without the least Warning, and by they know not whom; I think they are treated as in a State of Nature, and have a natural Right, to treat their Oppressors, as under such Circumstances."

What the slaves and free Blacks had to say, however, is unknown. There was no one recording it. Nor do we know the future of all these insurgents as to whether they became ‘settlers’ set against the Native people to their West. Several accounts state that a good number of them were ‘Scotch,’ which could have meant either immigrants from Scotland or the Ulster ‘Scots-Irish.’ In either case, they were likely, if they lived, to have become settlers and dispersers of Native peoples, a life with new contradictions. More to come.

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NEW NARRATIVE #20: Christian Priber, the Western Cherokee and Early Utopian Communism

{Graphic: Painting of Cherokee 'Kingdom of Paradise' town.]

Christian Priber is not a name we’re likely to come across in the standard American histories of Turtle Island after the European entrance. Save for early histories of Georgia and the hinterlands of the Carolinas now known as Tennessee, where he was a minor if fascinating character, he would be far below the radar.

Yet he fits into an important part of these narratives which aim at telling larger stories sometimes counterfactual to the dominant ‘frontier settler colonialism’ we all learned. One point my accounts imply is that just because something happened, it wasn’t always inevitable—at least not in any strict sense. History, even of the historical materialism school, often has a contingent dimension. There are forks in the road where choices are made. And sometimes there are counter-events that are contradictory but prescient in certain ways. They can be brushed aside as ‘duds’ or 'dead ends’ or praised as ‘ahead of their times.’

Christian Priber (1697-1744) is a case in point. He was a utopian communist who decided the Cherokee people were best suited to his ideas, which, among other things, included forming a wide confederacy of native peoples to resist and defend against the contending forces of European colonialism. He was not alone, and I have earlier noted a few other cases--the Fort Christina commune in New Sweden, the African autonomous zone of Fort Mose, the Albemarle Settlement of intermingled Quakers, Levelers and Native Peoples in North Carolina, and the maroon colonies in the Great Dismal Swamp. Save for the latter, all these were short-lived, even if they made waves for a while. We will discuss more of them going forward.

But let’s return to comrade Priber. He was raised in a middle-class German family well-off enough to get him through Erfurt University where he had studied law and philosophy. He had come to embrace radical notions of natural law, not unlike the radical wing of the Cromwellian 'diggers' in England. He came to oppose not only private property in the means of creating wealth, but also all hierarchical class rule based on such property. His efforts to organize around his outlook found him in deep trouble, first in Germany, and then in England as well, where he had fled. He soon requested, and received, permission to migrate to the new colony of Georgia.

Priber arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1735. Oddly, or so it seemed, he quickly took out an ad to sell all his worldly goods, and did so, save for what he needed to make a journey far inland, to the homeland of the Western Cherokee. He had apparently made a study of these people, and decided they were best suited for his ideas on an ideal social order--but not in the ways that other settler-colonial missionaries had set out on projects of ‘Christianizing savages.’ In this period, the size of the Cherokee was also nearly cut in half by smallpox.

Despite troubles and some differences, Priber liked the Cherokee pretty much as they were. So he set about to transform himself, as best as he could, into one of them. Already a master of four or five languages, he quickly learned Cherokee and worked on learning all about their ways and culture, wearing their clothes, paint and ornaments. Visiting traders found it hard to tell him apart, except when he spoke with them in their own languages. Other young Europeans of the day, down on their luck, had sometimes decided on ‘living among the Indians’ and rarely returning. But few did it with the same approach as Priber.

Over several years, Priber tried to be helpful to the Cherokee. Seeing they were often cheated by traders because they lacked appropriate standards of weights and measures, he created a set and taught them how to use them in transactions. He also taught them how to make and shape iron and even steel for themselves, and projected making gunpowder as well. He encouraged them to welcome all escaping debtors, bondservants or slaves, of any color or nationality. The Cherokee, for their part, adopted him and gave him the title ‘beloved man’ and rejected all English attempts to return him.

The Cherokee already had a communal approach to property and the produce of their farming and hunting. Women already held a degree of power in a matrilineal society where the homes and tools were largely in their collective hands, even while the males were relegated to hunting and warfare. Priber was a bit more radical on ideas of marriage and divorce, arguing his version of ‘free love’, that either men or women should form or dissolve unions at will. It likely raised an eyebrow or two even among the Cherokee, whose children were bound to their mothers and their mother’s siblings. Priber simply argued they were simply the responsibility of all in a given village.

“Women would live with the same freedom as the men; they should be free to change husbands every day; the children who would be born would belong to the republic and be cared for and instructed in all things that their genius be capable of acquiring.” (from the journal of Antoine Bonnefoy, a French trader who met Priber at Tellico, [a large Cherokee town])”

But the wider politics of the ‘Kingdom of Paradise,’ as the Priber project was called, had more impact among its adversaries. First, it was open to all Indians and to be ruled by Indians, an anti-colonial project. Second, Priber argued that the Cherokee should stop any more ceding of land to the Europeans, explaining it was all part of a larger plot to take all of the Native lands. Third, he argued for a broad alliance or confederacy of all Southern native peoples against the Europeans, playing one or another against the other if need be.

When venturing out to win the Creeks to this project, Priber was captured by a small group of them, who sold him to the English, and he ended up in a Georgia jail. But even there, he was undeterred, turning his cell into an evening salon for intellectual discussions with any and all of his more literate captors. By all accounts, they were rather stunned and spellbound by both his ideas and his acting as free even while under lock and key. Eventually, he fell ill and died there. The exact circumstances remain unknown, but his ‘Paradise’, save for a few principles, such as Cherokee welcoming of outlaw rebels, was soon lost as well. More to come.

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New Narrative #19: Jemmy, the Stono Rebellion, and Fort Mose in La Florida

[Graphic: Portrayal of the Stono Revolt]

Jemmy was an enslaved worker in 1739 colonial South Carolina. As best as we know, he was born in the Kingdom of Kongo, or what is now called Angola. Influenced by Portugal traders, Kongo’s royalty spread the Portuguese language among its peoples. In the 1400s, it also adopted Catholicism and had an independent relationship with the Vatican. Kongo was a developing feudal order, with many skilled workers and artisans, and a warrior caste. It also had a class of slaves and engaged in the slave trade. Plantation owners around Charleston had a preference for slaves from ‘Angola’, since they were adept at growing rice and had other skills as well.

Jemmy, then, was a Catholic, spoke Portuguese, and was reportedly literate and a skilled fighter. He worked on a plantation near the Stono River, some 150 miles from the colony’s southern border. Across that line was the new colony of Georgia, designed for British prisoners, where slavery was illegal at the time. Another 100 miles or so was the border of Spain’s ‘La Florida,’ considered a backwater without gold or silver, looked on as an extension of Cuba. Florida was where beef cattle were raised and exported to Havana. Saint Augustine was the major fortress town, not far from the Georgia border.

Of interest to Jemmy and a few other Portuguese-speaking slaves he knew near Stono, was the Spanish then held a different policy on slavery than the British. In Florida, if you converted to Catholicism and agreed to join the militia, you would be emancipated and no longer be a slave. The appeal was natural.

‘La Florida’ had been a haven for escaped slaves and retreating Native Peoples for several decades. The Spanish encouraged them, not only to fend off the British, but to strengthen their hold on the indigenous peoples it held in debt peonage on several ‘mission’ plantations. It even gave Africans their own settlement, called Fort Mose (pronounced Mo-SAY). It served as a small autonomous zone and end terminal for an early ‘underground railroad’ running to the south.

We don’t know if Jemmy and his comrades were specifically familiar with Mose, only the attraction of getting to Spanish territory. The fall of 1739, when their masters were still recovering from bouts of malaria, seemed a good time for a rupture. So on Sept 9, his initial team of 20 or so rebelled, killed their masters, set the plantations aflame, and headed south. Their size grew as they marched, growing to around 100. They carried a banner that proclaimed ‘Liberty!’ They burned six plantations and killed about 30 whites in all before they were stopped. According to Wikipedia:

“While on horseback, South Carolina's Lieutenant Governor William Bull and five of his friends came across the group; they quickly went off to warn other slaveholders. Rallying a militia of planters and minor slaveholders, the colonists traveled to confront Jemmy and his followers. The next day, the well-armed and mounted militia, numbering 19–99 men, caught up with the group of 76 slaves at the Edisto River. In the ensuing confrontation, 23 whites and 47 slaves were killed. While the slaves lost, they killed proportionately more whites than was the case in later rebellions. The colonists mounted the severed heads of the rebels on stakes along major roadways to serve as a warning for other slaves who might consider revolt.”

Jemmy was also named ‘Cato’ by his master, and thus the Stono Revolt was sometimes called ‘Cato’s Rebellion.’ There were many more before it, but it was the largest in this period. The enslaver’s immediately enacted harsher rules—the enslaved were forbidden to learn to read or write, or gather among themselves.

It also changed some other practices. Those buying slaves more often sought them from the Caribbean, where they were supposedly ‘seasoned’ first. Or better yet, they were homegrown slaves, who had never known other conditions in life, even those in the Kingdom of Kongo. In the end, Jemmy’s descendants would come to rule for six years or so in South Carolina, during Reconstruction. But that’s far ahead in our stories. More to come.

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New Narrative #18: Where Are We So Far?

[Graphic Mound-builder village of Native people in Florida.]

This series has provoked a bit of interest, as well as a few questions. What are you trying to do? Where are you going with this?

These are good questions, and for some, I don't have good answers, at least not yet. I'm exploring, on a journey of sorts, to see what we can learn, about ourselves and all else concerned on 'Turtle Island', or North America. Here's what I think we can say so far:

1. North America was never a pure 'wilderness', a land without people, as least in the time frames we're using, since 12,000 BCE or so, but more pointedly since the 1400s CE

2. It was the home of many peoples at various levels of civilization, from hunter-gatherer, agricultural (some quite advanced), and feudal with great cities, libraries, and centers of art and science. It was never 'a land without people' in need of a new people to make it their land from 'virgin soil'.

3. The many peoples who lived here were never in full harmony. There were tribal rivalries, armed conflicts, and alliances of all sorts, and often fluid. In the larger empires, there was class struggle, and anti-empire popular resistance. With the arrival of the 'Great Canoe' peoples from Europe, they were brought into these rivalries and alliances--and the Europeans contended within themselves--Protestant vs Catholic, English vs Spanish vs French vs Dutch vs Swedes--all leaving their marks on how all the peoples of the continent changed and evolved.

4. The Europeans came here mainly to get rich, and also to gain land and power if it helped them get rich. If religion was a concern, it was secondary to that main purpose. There were three main ways to get rich.

5. First, outright theft and looting of existing treasures. Countless gold, silver, and other bejeweled artifacts were taken from palaces and places of worship, and sent back to the 'mother country.'

6. Second was extractivism via trade, especially in furs but also from mining for gold and silver. The latter required both enslavement and, in some cases, the creation of wage labor among the native peoples. It soon meant the expropriation of large numbers of African captives brought to work as slaves, and the development of cash crops of tobacco, sugar, rum, indigo, rice, and cotton. We can call this a period of 'war capitalism' since it was the expansion of mercantilism at the point of a gun, the edge of a sword, or a barrage of cannon, on land and on the sea.

7. Third was settler colonialism, where the aim was not simply to extract wealth with plunder and expropriated slave labor, native or African. Here the aim was to import land-hungry Europeans, largely as indentured servants or unwanted disruptive minorities. These included Puritan theocrats against the established Anglican church or the extreme 'leveler' and 'digger' wings (often Quakers) of the Cromwellian Revolution, or Irish and Scots Irish troublemakers when jails were overcrowded. If they managed to thrive in the New World, they could be taxed and become a market for goods, rather than filling a London poorhouse. Naturally, this meant class struggle within the settlements of European peoples, and well as rivalry among them.

8. There was conflict and encounter with Native Peoples. It took three main forms. One was to establish a moveable 'frontier,' at first only 100 miles or so inland from the Atlantic, and to push the Native People on the other side of it as 'spawn of the devil' in their 'wilderness.' The endpoint was violent expulsion and extermination, growing into ethnic removal and genocide. The second was to negotiate land sales and other types of trade, in a fluid 'peaceful coexistence.' (This was mainly the Quakers, the Moravians, and the French to a degree). Native peoples often found themselves severely weakened by disease and stealing of their people for enslavement, and succumbed to some of these 'treaties' involving their 'hunting ground' lands. And third was a small but still notable number of Europeans and Africans who decided to join the Native tribes and share their way of life, which they often found much better than the misery they faced otherwise.

The history we learn in our schools ignores much if not all of this. The anti-CRT people would like it to stay that way, or rewritten to move back to an even 'whiter' version.

What you can see most often depends on where you're standing. And our official history stands mainly in the shoes of successful settlers and enslavers (the latter called 'planters' in the textbooks), and land stealers (called 'surveyors' in the same books) and celebrates their constant 'manifest destiny' expansion from sea to shining sea.

So these contrarian narratives will continue for a while, and I'll do my best to put us in the shoes of the Native peoples, the enslaved, and the exploited of all hues of skin, both Native and European. We will try rescuing a greater number of stories from the well-designed obscurity some would like to maintain. We'll see where it goes. More to come.

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