Prince (Unnamed Sea Island Freedman)

The man identified here only as Prince was one of thousands of enslaved people from the Sea Island plantations of Beaufort District, South Carolina, who saw in the British military the possibility of a freedom their enslavers' Revolution did not promise them. The Sea Islands were among the wealthiest plantation districts in North America, their fertile soils producing indigo and long-staple cotton through the forced labor of an enslaved majority that vastly outnumbered the white planter class. For these men and women, the coming of war created a different kind of calculation than it did for the colonists debating liberty in assembly halls.

When Sir Henry Clinton issued the Philipsburg Proclamation in June 1779, promising freedom to any enslaved person who escaped from a rebel owner and reached British lines, thousands from the Beaufort region responded. They fled by boat across the tidal creeks and marshes of the Sea Islands, carrying children and what possessions they could manage, and made their way to British positions along the coast. Some served the British military as laborers, pilots, guides, or soldiers; others sought simply to live outside the system of bondage that had defined every hour of their existence. British occupation of Beaufort and Port Royal gave many of these refugees a temporary sanctuary, though the promise of lasting freedom proved difficult to fulfill.

The fate of most of the people who escaped to British lines during the Revolution remained unrecorded by a documentary apparatus that was not designed to preserve their stories. Some were recaptured when the British withdrew; others died of disease in the overcrowded camps that formed around British positions; a small number were evacuated to Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, or Sierra Leone when the war ended. Prince stands in this history as a name attached to a category of historical actors whose individual lives were as real and as consequential as those of any founder, but whose names and stories were largely denied the dignity of preservation. Their choices shaped the war's social landscape in ways that scholars are still working to fully understand.