The Landscape of the Revolutionary War

In 1775, the Landscape of Slavery in the low country began to spin out of control in the wake of the Revolutionary War.

For the past one hundred years, local power and authority had commonly been depicted as descending from the king through his governors and justices down to the dominion that each master wielded over his slaves.

Masters who refused to obey their own superiors envisioned their slaves doing likewise.

Many slave owners attempted to censor all information related to the war out of fear of rebellion or worse slaves escaping to British forces.

The British actively encouraged slaves to take advantage of their presence in Charleston Harbor and the Savannah River to escape.

The British occupation of the Low Country and the chaos that the army left behind impacted not only the slaves that escaped but those that remained on the rice plantations. On many rice plantations, masters had fled in advance of the British leaving the slaves on their own.

This allowed the slaves the freedom to reshape the social order of the plantations. These moments of freedom were short lived.

Once the British marched on, order was restored through the reappearance of the master and the slave patrols.

But surviving accounts from Low Country plantations suggest that the authority over all slave society was seriously eroded. Many slaves simply went on strike refusing to work in the rice fields.

By 1781, many rice planters did not even attempt to cultivate their rice field, preferring to wait until order was restored. On December 14th , 1782 the last British troops, loyalists, and refugees departed the Low Country.

British records suggest the evacuation fleet took with it over 5,000 thousand blacks. Most of these slaves were owned by British loyalists who were relocating to Jamaica or British Florida. The total number of slaves lost during the British occupation as the result of disease or privation is estimated at 25,000.

Many slaves were taken by the British as spoils of war ending up in continued slavery on another shore in circumstances far more difficult then those they left behind.

With end of the Revolutionary War, the Negro Act of 1740, was reenacted and made perpetual in 1783. A shift occurred in the way rice planters viewed their relations with slaves.

After the Revolution, masters no long saw themselves as monarchs and their plantations as little kingdoms. Rice planters became masters of their plantation households and slaves their children.

The Low Country's patriarchy was replaced by paternalism, which while not as violent was more controlling. Slavery became ever more firmly entrenched in the Low Country leaving the slaves with no where to turn except to each other.