African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

“High notions of their liberty”: Women of Color and the American Revolution in Lowcountry Georgia and South Carolina, 1765–1783

Betty Wood “Highnotionsoftheirliberty” Women of Color and the American Revolution in Lowcountry Georgia and South Carolina, 1765–1783 lthough paling into insignificance when compared to that of New England and Virginia, in recent years a substantial historiography has built up that deals with many different facets of the American Revolution in lowcountry Georgia and South Carolina. Building upon the pioneering work of Benjamin Quarles, Sylvia Frey, Philip Morgan, and Robert Olwell among others have supplemented a previous scholarship that focused on those of European ancestry by drawing our attention to those who composed the majority of the lowcountry ’s population on the eve of the War of American Independence: people of West and West Central African ancestry.1 However, this rich vein of historical research is marked by a glaring gender imbalance, in that thus far virtually no attention has been paid to African and African American women, be they enslaved or legally free. True, they make an appearance in the work of the scholars mentioned above, but as yet there is not a single book, and only a handful of essays, devoted entirely to them.2 Due to universal constraints upon literacy and, in the present context, particularly upon the ability to write, we lack the firsthand voices of the enslaved and legally free people of the eighteenth-century lowcountry. A “high notions of their liberty”  49 However, they have left a great many historical footprints in various literary sources, ranging from newspapers and letters to army records, which enable us to accurately re-create their daily lives, their hopes, and their fears, as between the mid-1760s and 1775 the imperial crisis escalated into all-out war. The year 1765 was decisive for lowcountry Georgia and South Carolina , as indeed it was for all of Britain’s mainland and Caribbean colonies. Everywhere, news of the Stamp Act that the British House of Commons had passed caused an uproar. In Charleston and Savannah, the self-styled Patriots began to mobilize and plot their strategy to secure the overthrow of the hated Stamp Act.3 Somewhat ironically given their heavy dependence upon racial slavery, they bitterly complained about their own enslavement by a tyrannical British ministry. Their rhetoric of English rights and liberties would not be lost upon the lowcountry’s enslaved Africans and African Americans. In Georgia, however, and a sure sign that enslaved people would not be the beneficiaries of the Patriots’ clamor for liberty and equality, the mid-1760s saw the opening of the transatlantic slave trade to Savannah.4 All that women like the young, Guinea-born Sally—who probably arrived on one of the first slave ships to dock in Savannah—could look forward to was a life of unremitting toil in Georgia’s unhealthy rice swamps.5 Exactly the same was true of many other enslaved women, who had spent longer or who had been born in the lowcountry: women like Hannah and her mother Dinah, who labored on one of the Lining family’s South Carolina plantations,6 and Betty, who worked in Charleston as a domestic servant for James Laurens and his family.7 Phillis George, a legally free woman of color, who together with her husband David would migrate from Virginia to Georgia, might well have fretted about the security of her family’s right to continuing freedom should the Georgia Patriots ever succeed in displacing the British.8 For these women, indeed for all women of color in the lowcountry, whatever their legal status, their personal freedom, with all that it might entail, was a most precious commodity, a commodity that they both yearned and struggled for on a daily basis. By the early 1770s, as the imperial crisis deepened, it began to appear to enslaved women and men that in the not-too-distant future, freedom from bondage might well be within their reach. Their hopes stemmed partly from two longstanding beliefs: first, that an external liberator, or liberators , would come to their assistance, and second, the growing conviction of 50  betty wood many enslaved people that, sooner or later, the Christian God would grant them secular as well as spiritual freedom and, at the same time, punish those who had held them, and who continued to hold them, in bondage. In the lowcountry, particularly following the settlement of Georgia in 1733, Spain offered freedom to any enslaved people who managed to make their way to St...