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.As the British retreat began,so many slaves reached their camps that the redcoats were forced to appropri-ate anything that fl oated.When naval vessels proved inadequate, Loyaliststurned to private vessels, but even those ships were insuffi cient to ferry therefugee population to British Florida.As the teeming fl otilla began to sailaway from Savannah, many Indians, refugees, and Negroes paddled towardSt.Augustine in canoes and rafts.Still other African Americans tried to reachFlorida by wading through the coastal swamps.Perhaps as many as five thou-sand blacks fl ed the state, while a similar number perished from disease orcombat during the war.Georgia s prewar black population of roughly fifteenthousand dropped by two-thirds within a decade.9The number of slaves who escaped from South Carolina during the Britishevacuation was even greater.General Nathanael Greene estimated the statelost five thousand to six thousand blacks, but the number of slaves who werecarried away by white Loyalists may exceed that fi gure.Quite possibly asmany as ten thousand Africans and African Americans quit South Carolinaduring 1782.Planters in St.John Berkeley Parish returned home to discoverthat nearly 50 percent of their prewar labor force of fourteen hundred hadfled.The Reverend Archibald Simpson, a slaveholding minister at the Inde-pendent Presbyterian Church, discovered that his estate near Stoney Creekcaptain vesey s cargo | 151 had been occupied by both armies and several hundred refugees.In the wakeof the confl ict, the county was abandoned. All was desolation, Simpsonscratched into his diary, and indeed all the way [back home] there was agloomy solitariness. Every field and plantation he passed revealed marks ofruin and devastation.Not a person was to be met with. 10As in Savannah, the desperate, chaotic evacuation of black and whiterefugees from Charleston defi ed precise accounting.The mass exodus fromCharleston and the islands that lined its harbor lasted for three weeks, andthere were so many small transport craft that British authorities despaired ofkeeping track.Most sailed for St.Augustine, though a small number scat-tered toward New York, Jamaica, and even Britain.During the four yearsfrom the British invasion of the southern colonies through the fall of 1782,South Carolina lost roughly twenty-fi ve thousand slaves nearly one-thirdof the former colony s black population to death, disease, internal fl ight,and emigration.To the extent that South Carolina s black majority had beenthe colony s laboring class, the loss of so many slaves meant that the regionfaced a critical juncture in its history.But planters along the Ashley andCooper rivers, unlike their brethren in Virginia, had never fretted about thelarge number of bondpeople in their midst.White Virginians were botheredenough by the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution to respond with theirhabitual inconsistency, but the lowcountry s planter class never doubted thatthe wisest response to the devastation of war was to rebuild their plantationempires.11Three hundred miles down the coast from Charleston, the old Spanish fortat St.Augustine became the convenient, if temporary, asylum for Loyalistsescaping the southern states.Having demanded East Florida the peninsulaand lands east of the Perdido River as spoils of war in 1763, Britain wasnow obligated to return it to Spain under the provisions then being finalizedin Paris.During the brief era of British control of East Florida, the plantationsystem along the St.Marys and St.Johns rivers expanded rapidly, with slavesworking rice and sugar fields and orange groves.During most of the Britishinterregnum, blacks had come to outnumber whites by two to one, but withthe arrival of refugees from Georgia and the Carolinas, the ratio moved closerto three to one, a proportion the Spanish quickly sought to reverse.12South Carolina had far longer experience in controlling its black majority.In the spring of 1783, just after Captain Vesey settled in Charleston, the leg-islature agreed to Andrew Pickens s request to raise a new company of rang-ers in hopes of eradicating backcountry guerrillas.Anticipating a lengthycampaign, the governor recommended purchasing additional ammunitionfor the militia units, but a year later, residents of Orangeburg continued to152 | death or liberty pepper the assembly with petitions demanding a special company of rangersto bring to justice both white and black Loyalist partisans lurking in thatNeighborhood. Since militiamen regarded black guerrillas as runaways andslave rebels, rather than as legitimate enemy combatants, they often resortedto summary execution of those captured.Francis Marion regarded the whitepartisans he sought as ex-Tories, but the black skirmishers he capturedwere not granted that status.Like Washington, who fought for liberty whilebeing served by William Lee, the Swamp Fox rode beside his manservantOscar Marion, one of the nine of his slaves (out of two hundred) who did notescape to British lines during the conflict.13It was easy to see why white Carolinians were so terrified by black maroonsettlements.Every group of successful runaways, particularly those who werearmed and living within fortified communities, presented an attractive havenfor those who sought to flee their masters estates.The impulse to be free wasever present among enslaved Carolinians; the question was where to escapeto
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