Scipio Handley’s Great Escape

Scipio Handley worked as a fisherman in Charleston, South Carolina. Most mornings, he joined the “mosquito fleet,” as the city’s small fishing craft were known, as they sailed out to cast their lines on the shoals that lay off the entrance to the harbor. In the evening, the fishermen returned to sell their catch at the fish market on the waterfront. The sight of the little fishing boats and the calls of fish mongers were a familiar part of Charleston’s routine. The cast of the 1930s opera Porgy and Bess includes a fisherman, and “Porgy,” as any Charleston resident knows, is the name of a type of local fish. As this suggests, Scipio Handley, like the great majority of the city’s fishermen, both during the days of slavery and afterward, was of African descent.

Handley, however, lived a century and a half before Porgy and Bess was written, back when Charleston was called Charles Town and South Carolina was still a part of the British Empire. Even then, the city’s Black fishermen were known for their independence, or, in the opinion of Whites, “impudence.” In 1770, city officials noted that the fish market, “where the business is principally carried on by Negroes, was apt to be riotous and disorderly.” Although they complained about the cost of fish and the demeanor of the fishermen, Charles Town residents, White or Black, grudgingly accepted the “disorder” at the fish market as the price they had to pay if they wanted fresh fish for dinner.

Handley was unusual in being born a free man in a city where more than nine in ten Black people (including most fishermen) were enslaved. Racial slavery was a fact of life and death in Charles Town on the eve of the American Revolution. Not only did the enslaved comprise half of the city’s fourteen thousand inhabitants, but Charles Town was the largest entrepôt for the African slave trade in the mainland British colonies. In slave ships that lay anchored off Sullivan’s Island, across the Cooper River from the city waterfront, newly arrived Africans underwent quarantine before being brought to the city wharves to be sold to the highest bidder. There were other reminders to Charles Town’s enslaved residents of what might befall those who resisted or were deemed disobedient or recalcitrant: the auction block, where a person could be separated from their loved ones at the drop of a gavel; the pillories near the marketplace or the workhouse where they might be whipped or have their ears cropped; or, for those judged most rebellious, the gallows, and, even after death, the gibbet.

In January 1775, the wealthy White enslavers who led the colony’s political resistance to the British Parliament met to endorse the Continental Congress’s call for a boycott of British imports until the acts punishing Massachusetts for the “Boston Tea Party” were repealed. In the past, this peaceful mode of protest had proven effective. But the military preparations and resolve evident in both Britain and New England made a violent clash seem likely to occur before cooler heads, or the complaints of British merchants, had time to prevail. Charles Town’s residents spent the first few months of the year anxiously awaiting word of repeal from London or war from Boston.

The city’s Black inhabitants were also closely anticipating the outcome of the dispute. Many believed that their own fate was at stake. The issue of slavery was drawn into the debate between England and her American colonies. In 1772, Lord Mansfield, the English Chief Justice, decreed that slavery had no legal basis in England (in contrast to the colonies where there were statutory slave codes). When news of the verdict reached America, a few enslaved colonists tried to stow away on English ships in the hope of gaining freedom on the other side of the Atlantic. Others took Mansfield’s decision as an indicator that Britain wanted to end slavery throughout the empire. As one nervous Charles Town resident reported, the city’s enslaved inhabitants “entertained ideas that the present contest was for obliging us to give them liberty.” More pragmatically, people held in bondage could see that conflict between their enslavers and their king could work to their advantage. South Carolina Whites worried about this possibility too. A rumor spread through the city that, in the event of war, the British planned to “grant freedom to such slaves as should desert their masters and join the king’s troops.”

In early May, White residents’ fears and Black residents’ hopes seemed realized when news reached the city that fighting between Britain and her American colonies had begun several weeks earlier outside of Boston. To preempt any designs that the enslaved or British officials may have entertained of acting in concert, the city militia was called out to patrol the streets and stand guard every night. Charles Town’s Black fishermen were watched with particular intensity. Because of their familiarity with the local channels and shoals, they often guided large sailing ships into the harbor. If and when Royal Navy warships appeared off the coast, they would need the help of local pilots to avoid running aground.

In June, Thomas Jeremiah, a prominent “free Negro” fisherman (with racist condescension, Charles Town Whites called him “Jerry”), was accused of gathering arms and recruiting enslaved workers in preparation for “the war that is coming.” Witnesses at the trial testified that Jeremiah had told them that “the war was come to help the poor negroes.” Although he firmly denied the charges, Jeremiah was found guilty and sentenced to death. In his last words upon the gallows in mid-August, he continued to proclaim his innocence. Reviewing the affair, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Thomas Jeremiah was made a scapegoat for White anxieties and that his death was meant to serve as a warning to the city’s Black population. Efforts made by South Carolina’s royal governor, Lord William Campbell, to intercede on Jeremiah’s behalf, provoked a storm. Campbell wrote that he was told “if I granted the man a pardon, they would hang him at my door.” For this and other reasons, the governor soon left the city for the safety of a Royal Navy warship that lay at anchor in the harbor.

Scipio Handley was in Charles Town through all of this. As a fellow fisherman, he would have known Thomas Jeremiah. If he did not witness Jeremiah’s death, he undoubtedly heard about it. He also would have learned of the governor’s waterborne exile. Nonetheless, despite the certainty of death if caught, Handley took his boat out to the governor’s ship and offered to carry messages between the governor and the king’s supporters in the city. A few weeks later, while acting as a clandestine courier, Handley was seen by a quayside militia patrol. The militiamen fired on his boat, wounding one of his crewmen. Handley was captured and told that “he was to be put to death for acting against the Congress.” He spent six weeks in jail awaiting execution. But before the sentence could be carried out, a friend managed to smuggle a file to him which he used to unlock his shackles. Then, after leaping from a two-story window, he escaped to Governor Campbell’s ship.

When the governor sailed out of the harbor in January 1776, Handley went with him. In the course of the Revolutionary War, Handley traveled to Florida, Barbados, and Georgia. In 1779, he helped defend Savannah against a Franco-American attack and “received a musket ball in his right leg.” Although doctors at first thought they would have to amputate, the wound eventually healed (although not completely). When the British evacuated Savannah, as part of the negotiations ending the war, Handley was taken with them. Eventually, he reached England.

In January 1784, “Scipio Handley, a black,” appeared in London before the commission created by Parliament to compensate American loyalist refugees for their lost property. (It is in this record that Handley’s narrative of his life is preserved.) Handley’s description of his pre-war life and property was corroborated by fellow refugee Eleanor Lister (Lestor), a White widow who had kept a dram shop selling liquor to sailors on the Charles Town waterfront. The inventory that Handley presented to the commission of what he left behind in Charles Town included his fishing boat, furniture, two trunks of clothes and linen, ten hogs, and some cash. In all, it was worth less than a hundred pounds. This was a modest estate, especially when compared to the tens of thousands of pounds that other loyalists claimed to have lost, but as Handley noted, it constituted “what little property he had,” and its loss left him “in this city without money or friends.” For his service to king and country, and in compensation for his sacrifice, the commission awarded Handley the grand total of twenty pounds. After he filed his claim, Scipio Handley, free Black fisherman, loyalist, refugee, and remarkable adventurer, disappears from the historical record.

Robert Olwell is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Cornell University Press, 1998) and the co-editor, with Alan Tully, of Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006; revised paperback edition, 2015).