[flagallery gid=4]In 1813 Charles Ball, an escaped slave and self-declared \u201cfree man of color,\u201d had a choice.\u00a0 He could row out to the British fleet moored in the Chesapeake Bay and offer his services to the King, or he could volunteer for the fledgling American navy and defend his country.\u00a0 Ball, whose dramatic bid for freedom is chronicled in The Life of Charles Ball, A Black Man, chose the latter and he was not alone.<\/p>\n
Black Sailors during the War<\/strong> When Ball enlisted, African Americans made up at least fifteen percent of U.S. naval corps.\u00a0 Although official U.S. policy at the start of the war forbade the recruitment of black sailors, a chronic shortage of manpower compelled the navy to accept any able-bodied man.\u00a0 These black sailors had a reputation for fierceness in battle.\u00a0 When Captain Oliver Hazard Perry complained about having blacks on his ship, Commodore Isaac Chauncey replied, \u201cI have nearly fifty blacks on this boat and many of them are among the best of my men.\u201d\u00a0 Perry soon had the chance to test Chauncey\u2019s recommendation.\u00a0 At the Battle of Lake Erie, where Perry\u2019s fleet thwarted the British, his black sailors performed so well that he wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, praising their courage. Life at sea was, by necessity, \u00a0an egalitarian existence.\u00a0 Living in small quarters, away from shore for months at a time, the men developed a camaraderie and mutual respect based on performance, not skin color.\u00a0 Black sailors made their mark on both official vessels and on the privateers, non-military ships sanctioned by the U.S. government to harass British merchant vessels. On some privateers more than half of the crew was black. These fast and heavily-armed raiders were frequently successful at seizing merchant ships, but just as frequently at being captured by the British.\u00a0 The sailors onboard, including the African Americans, were often sent to the infamous Dartmoor Prison, where the racial divisions they had left behind once again prevailed.<\/p>\n Fighting for Both Sides in the War<\/strong> Charles Ball, as a free man, was lucky enough to have a choice.\u00a0 Besides the Navy and privateering, there were even a few black battalions in the American army. \u00a0But for most American slaves, the options were limited to the British navy. \u00a0When the British fleet arrived in the Chesapeake Bay in March 1813, entire families of slaves made their way by canoe to the enemy ships.\u00a0 The British commanders had orders to welcome these refugee slaves, but also to take care not to encourage an outright rebellion against their white masters.\u00a0 The British did not want insurrection among blacks to spread to their own slave-holding territories in the West Indies.<\/p>\n The slave owners, naturally, were furious at the loss of what they thought of as \u201cproperty,\u201d and sent delegations to the British demanding that the slaves be returned. Even Charles Ball, a former slave, tried to convince escaped slaves to come back to U.S. soil.\u00a0 He \u201cwent amongst them\u201d he records in his memoir, \u201cAnd talked to them a long time, on the subject of returning home; but found that their heads were full of notions of liberty and happiness in some of the West India islands\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Ball would soon be fighting against some of the very black men he had tried to convince.\u00a0 As a seaman and cook, he served in the Chesapeake Flotilla under Commodore Joshua Barney.\u00a0 After Barney ordered the flotilla sunk to keep the boats our of the hands of the invading British, Ball marched to Bladensburg with Barney and\u00a0served in\u00a0one of his cannon crews.\u00a0 His memoir describes what later came to be called the Bladensburg Races:<\/p>\n \u201cI stood at my gun, until the Commodore was shot down, when he ordered us to retreat, as I was told by the officer who commanded our gun. If the militia regiments, that lay upon our right and left, could have been brought to charge the British, in close fight, as they crossed the bridge, we should have killed or taken the whole of them in a short time; but the militia ran like sheep chased by dogs.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The British Promise of Freedom<\/strong> Black soldiers and sailors were fighting valiantly on both sides of the war, but the British promise of freedom for slaves gave the British a distinct advantage in the competition for recruits. There was another advantage.\u00a0 One British admiral suggested that a “Black Force \u2026 could be managed and kept within bounds, and the Terror of a Revolution in the Southern States increased to produce a good effect in that quarter.”<\/p>\n In April 1814 Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane made the British position official: All those who may be disposed to emigrate from the United States, will, with their Families, be received on board of His Majesty’s Ships\u2026. They will have their choice of either entering into His Majesty’s Forces, or of being sent as FREE Settlers to British possessions, \u2026 where they will meet with all due encouragement.\u00a0 Cochrane then ordered Rear-Admiral George Cockburn to form the Colonial Marines, fighting units made up of refugee slaves.<\/p>\n All told, more than 4000 people were freed from slavery \u2013 the largest emancipation that took place in the U.S. until the Civil War.\u00a0 Three companies of Colonial Marines were formed, and their presence did inspire hatred and fear among the Americans.\u00a0 The corps took part in the burning of Washington, fought in the Battle of Baltimore, and skirmished against American forces all along the coast. The British comman\u00adder-in-chief said they were “infinitely more dreaded by the Americans than the British troops”.<\/p>\n At the end of the war Americans demanded the either the return of ex-slaves or monetary reparations for the loss of property.\u00a0 With few exceptions, the British refused.\u00a0 According to custom, a slave arriving on British soil was free; a British ship at war had the status of British land itself.<\/p>\n The British offered the Colonial Marines farmland in Trinidad in February 1816, nearly a year after the end of the war, when the marines refused to be transferred out of naval service into the army as soldiers in the West India Regiments.\u00a0 Their descendants live in Trinidad still, in freedom, and call themselves “the Merikans.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wned\/war-of-1812\/essays\/black-soldier-and-sailors-war\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [flagallery gid=4]In 1813 Charles Ball, an escaped slave and self-declared \u201cfree man of color,\u201d had a choice.\u00a0 He could row out to the British fleet moored in the Chesapeake Bay and offer his services to the King, or he could volunteer for the fledgling American navy and defend his country.\u00a0 Ball, whose dramatic bid for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1408,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1407"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1416,"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407\/revisions\/1416"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watereebaptistud.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}