Harry Washington

Harry Washington
Died 1800
Sierra Leone
Resting place Sierra Leone
Occupation Slave, soldier, politician, colonizer
Spouse(s) Jenny Washington
Military career
Allegiance United Kingdom
Rank Sergeant
Unit Black Company of Pioneers
Battles/wars American Revolutionary War

Harry Washington was a one-time West African slave of the future first president of the United States, George Washington. He escaped and served as a corporal in the Black Pioneers attached to a British artillery unit. After the war he emigrated to Nova Scotia where he married Jenny and then migrated to Sierra Leone, West Africa. In 1800 he joined a rebellion, against the British colonial authorities, in the Sierra Leone Colony, and was exiled to the Bullom Shore, where he subsequently died.

Early life

Washington was a saltwater slave (a term for American slaves born in Africa, rather than in North America), originally from West Africa, purchased from a deceased estate in 1763 to be part of George Washington's workforce in the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina.[1][2]

Washington later went to work on one of the farms in Mount Vernon, Virginia Colony.[3] Henry Washington from Mount Vernon had taken refuge in New York[4] in 1771.[1] he was living and working in the stables at Mount Vernon, caring for George Washington’s horses, when in 1776, he fled again to join royal Virginia governor Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment of freed slaves.[2]

American Revolutionary War

Moving into New York in the late 1776, Washington served, as corporal in the Black Loyalist, Black Pioneers attached to a British artillery unit,[1] a British forces under the Governor of Virginia Lord Dunmore's fleet. Washington was a Black Loyalist and one of the 3,000 Black Americans who were evacuated to Nova Scotia at the end of the American War of Independence and part of the first group of immigrants to what eventually became Sierra Leone. Once Sir Guy Carleton's officials put him on the list for evacuation in the "Register of Negroes", he stated his age as forty-three and said that he had fled Mount Vernon in 1776, much earlier than 1781 with the slaves on the Savage.[4]

Emigration to Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone

Under General Sir Guy Carleton's policy, Henry Washington took a British ship to Nova Scotia (as did two other former Mount Vernon slaves, a man and a woman).[4][5] He then spent several years, in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, Canada, (the largest free African-American city in North America), where he married Jenny, and began to plan for their future. He and his wife joined the 1,192 black colonists who migrated to Sierra Leone, West Africa (see Nova Scotian Settlers).[6] where he planned to begin a farm making use of the scientific farming techniques he learned at Mount Vernon.[4]

Rebellion in Sierra Leone

In 1800 Washington was among several hundred settlers who rose up in a brief rebellion against British rule there.[4] The precipitating issue was one familiar from the American Revolution: taxes.[4] The settlers were required by the Sierra Leone Company, which ran the colony for the British government, to pay taxes, or quitrents, for the use of their land; the land itself remained the property of the company.[4] The settlers formed a provisional government and wrote up a set of laws, which they nailed to the office door of a company administrator.[4]

Internal exile and death

The Sierra Leone Company responded by sending a corps of recently arrived black Jamaicans against the rebels. In the trials that followed the defeat of the rebellion, Henry Washington was among the rebels sentenced to banishment to Bullom Shore another location in Sierra Leone, where he became one of the two leaders of a new settlement, and where he subsequently died.[4][7] His descendants and those of other African Americans make up a portion of the Sierra Leone Creole people.

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Black Loyalist, Harry Washington, University of Sydney
  2. 1 2 BlackPast.org.
  3. ↑ Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, vol. 7, pp. 300, 314-15, 442-3, 516.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
  5. ↑ Washington is listed as leaving New York in the Book of Negroes, where he is incorrectly listed with the name Henry. He is called Harry in all other documents. ("The Book of Negroes", Black Loyalist).
  6. ↑ List of Blacks who gave their name for Sierra Leone" in National Archives of the UK, CO217/63.
  7. ↑ Cassandra Pybus, "Washington's Revolution, Harry that is not George" Journal of Atlantic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2006, 183–198.

References

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