Corps of Colonial Marines

This article is about the historical British Army regiments. For other uses, see Colonial Marines (disambiguation).

Corps of Colonial Marines
A British Colonial Marine in a light coloured fatigue uniform, worn for performing ordinary duties and a common sight on Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay but on the battlefield, the red coat of the service uniform would have been worn
Active	First Corps: 1808–1815 Second Corps: 18 May 1814 – 20 August 1816
Country	United Kingdom
Branch	Royal Marines
Type	Marines
Size	First Corps:Company Second Corps:Battalion
Garrison/HQ	First Corps: Guadeloupe Second Corps: Tangier Island/Cumberland Island Negro Fort Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda
Patron	Sir Alexander Cochrane
Engagements	First Corps: Napoleonic Wars Battle of Marie Galante (1808) Battle of Guadeloupe (1808) Second Corps: War of 1812 Battle of Bladensburg (1814) Burning of Washington (1814) Battle of North Point (1814) Battle of Fort Peter (1815) First Seminole War Battle of Negro Fort (1816)
Commanders
Notable commanders	Second Corps: Major George Lewis

The Corps of Colonial Marines were two different Royal Marine units raised from former black slaves for service in the Americas at the behest of Alexander Cochrane. The units were created at two separate periods: 1808-1810 during the Napoleonic Wars; and then again during the War of 1812; both units being disbanded once the military threat had passed. Apart from being created in each case by Cochrane, they had no connection with each other.

The first Corps was a small unit that served in the Caribbean from 1808 to 12 October 1810, recruited from former slaves to address the shortage of military manpower in the Caribbean. The locally recruited men were less susceptible to tropical illnesses than were troops sent from Britain. The Corps followed the practice of the British Army's West India Regiments in recruiting former slaves as soldiers. In the previous year, the Mutiny Act 1807 emancipated all slaves in the British Army and, as a result, subsequently enlisted slaves were considered free on enlistment.

The second, more substantial, Corps served from 18 May 1814 until 20 August 1816. The greater part of the Corps was stationed at St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast, with a smaller body occupying the future Negro Fort, on the Apalachicola River in remote northwest Florida. Recruits were accepted from among escaped slaves who had already gained their freedom on coming into British hands and who were unwilling to join West India Regiments. The establishment of the force sparked controversy at the time, as the arming of former slaves was a psychological as well as military threat to the slave-owning society of the United States. As a consequence, the two senior officers of the Corps in Florida, George Woodbine and Edward Nicolls, were denounced by Americans such as Hezekiah Niles in his Baltimore publication, the Weekly Register for undermining American slavery.

At the end of the War of 1812, as the British post in Florida was evacuated, the Corps' Florida detachment was paid off and disbanded. Although several men accompanied the British to Bermuda, which United States independence had elevated to an Imperial fortress colony, the majority continued to live in settlements around the fort the Corps had garrisoned. This legacy of a community of armed fugitive slaves with a substantial arsenal was unacceptable to the United States of America. After the Fort was destroyed in the Battle of Negro Fort of 1816, the former Marines joined the southward migration of Seminoles and African Americans escaping the American advance. Members of the Colonial Marine battalion who were deployed on the Atlantic coast withdrew from American territory. They continued in British service as garrison-in-residence at Bermuda until 1816, when the unit was disbanded and the ex-Marines resettled on Trinidad.

First Corps

In 1808, British forces captured the French-held island of Marie-Galante as part of the Caribbean campaign of 1803–1810. However, the governor of Guadeloupe, Jean Augustin Ernouf, ordered an attack against the island after hearing that disease had weakened the British garrison there. Black slaves in Marie-Galante agreed to assist the British in exchange for their freedom, and the French attack was repulsed. Shortly afterwards, three companies of the 1st West India Regiment arrived at Marie-Galante to reinforce the British garrison. Upon hearing of the former slaves' service, Rear-admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, the commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy's Leeward Islands Station, organised them into the first Corps of Colonial Marines in the same year.

Alexander Cochrane, responsible for raising the Corps of Colonial Marines

The unit, which was personally named by Cochrane, was paid using revenues generated from Marie-Galante, clothed from Royal Navy stores and commanded by Royal Marine officers. Its ranks were soon was enlarged with fugitive slaves from Guadeloupe. Following the British capture of Guadeloupe in 1810, Cochrane maintained the Corps, and on 12 October 1810 redistributed its men: 70 were distributed among the ships of his squadron, 20 to 30 were sent to the British battery at the Îles des Saintes and 50 were ordered to remain in the Marie-Galante garrison. The unit saw no further action as a distinct body, but were listed in ships' musters among supernumeraries for wages and victuals under the description "Colonial Marine" until mid-1815.

Second Corps

Cochrane, by now a Vice Admiral, assumed his position as Commander-in-Chief of British forces on the North Atlantic station in April 1814 and ordered the recruitment of a body of Colonial Marines as he had done six years earlier on Marie Galante. Rear Admiral George Cockburn, Cochrane's second-in-command on the Atlantic coast, implemented Cochrane's order recruiting the second Corps of Colonial Marines. It served as part of the British forces on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States during the War of 1812.

On 2 April 1814, Cochrane issued a proclamation to all persons wishing to emigrate. Any persons would be received by the British, either at a military outpost or aboard British ships; those seeking sanctuary could enter His Majesty's forces, or go "as free settlers to the British possessions in North America or the West Indies". An historical precedent was Dunmore's Proclamation of 7 November 1775, although this offered freedom only to those who bore arms with British forces.

Recruitment and Atlantic coast service

By 10 May, Tangier Island off the Virginia coast had been occupied by the British and offered an accessible location for those seeking refuge. Male refugees were given the option "to become blue Jackets, take up arms or [to] join the working party" constructing Fort Albion and its infrastructure. The Corps was embodied on 18 May 1814 and made its combat debut in the raid on Pungoteague Creek on 30 May 1814 where, in a skirmish known as the Battle of Rumley's Gut, it helped capture an American artillery battery. James Ross, captain of HMS Albion, later described their involvement as "a most excellent specimen of what they are likely to be. Their conduct was marked by great spirit and vivacity, and perfect obedience". One, a soldier named Michael Harding, was killed early in the battle but "it did not daunt or check the others, but on the contrary animated them to seek revenge". Cockburn's initial impressions were positive; he observed that the new recruits were "getting on astonishingly" and were "really fine fellows". After this, the Corps participated in the Chesapeake campaign; in subsequent correspondence, Cockburn wrote that the recruits had behaved "unexpectedly well" in several engagements and had not committed any "improper outrages".

Many contemporary white Americans, most prominently slaveholding white Southerners, claimed that fugitive slaves who escaped to the British were forced to do so; they also alleged that such slaves were resold into slavery in the British West Indies. For example, the Weekly Register claimed in October 1814 that "a shameful traffic has been carried on in the West Indies, by the sale of those persons there, by those who professed to be their deliverers." The newspaper further claimed in December 1814 that Britain had "carried away many negroes, doubtless for sale in the West Indies - But "religious" England has abolished the slave trade!" In response, British authorities investigated the American claims in 1815, and found them to be false. The historian Alan Taylor notes that such false claims stemmed from delusions of the American planter class, who for the most part genuinely believed that their slaves were content with enslavement and were shocked to see even well-treated slaves escape to the British.

Members of the Corps served alongside their shipborne Royal Marine counterparts from the Cockburn Chesapeake squadron (HM Ships Albion, Dragon, Loire, Jasseur and the schooner HMS St Lawrence), participating in a series of raids. After the British failed to destroy the American Chesapeake Bay Flotilla at the Battle of St. Jerome Creek, they conducted coastal raids on the towns of Calverton, Huntingtown, Prince Frederick, Benedict and Lower Marlborough. On 15 June 1814, a force of 30 Colonial Marines accompanied 180 Royal Marines in 12 boats in a raid on Benedict. Nine days later, on 24 June, a force of Colonial and 180 Royal Marines attacked an artillery battery at Chesconessex Creek (although this failed to prevent the escape of the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla, which left St. Leonard's Creek two days later).

The arrival on 19 July of a battalion of Royal Marines, which had left Bermuda on 30 June, enabled the squadron to mount further expeditions ashore. After a series of diversionary raids, the Marines were again landed at Benedict on 19 August accompanied by recently arrived Peninsular War army veterans. The battalion was to accompany the Colonial Marines in attacks on Bladensburg and Washington in August 1814. A company fought at the Battle of Bladensburg, and the other two companies took part in the burning of Washington. One of the firing parties was led by Second Lieutenant Lewis Agassiz (1793–1866); for his part in the battle, his family was later granted a coat of arms depicting a torch. Casualties suffered by the Colonial Marines during this action were one man killed and three wounded.

On 3 September 1814, three companies of the Colonial Marines joined with three remaining companies of Royal Marines to form the 3rd Battalion, Royal and Colonial Marines. Later that month, all three companies fought at the Battle of North Point in Maryland. A fourth company was created in December 1814, and further recruitment was begun along the Georgia coast during the first quarter of 1815. The number of enlistments allowed two more companies to be raised, with sergeants taken from companies recruited in the Chesapeake.

Although the Corps suffered some combat losses during its Chesapeake campaign actions in 1814, its greatest losses arose from disease due to poor conditions on Tangier Island. An outbreak of dysentery in the winter of 1814 killed the surgeon and 69 men from the battalion. The strength of the corps is mentioned as having risen to about 200 men whilst on Tangier Island in the autumn. The Corps' last tour during the War of 1812 was in Georgia from December to March 1815. Admiral George Cockburn seized the southern U.S coast to disrupt trade, communication, and transportation of troops to the Gulf of Mexico, where Admiral Cochrane's forces planned to take the southwestern territories of the U.S. Part of the Corps joined the successful British attack on Fort Point Peter. The corps occupied Camden County and Cumberland Island, aiding the emigration of an estimated 1,485 slaves from southeast Georgia.

Recruitment and Gulf coast service

In addition to British outposts on the Atlantic coast at Tangier Island (Virginia) and Cumberland Island (Georgia), there was a similar outpost on the Gulf coast at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River in Spanish East Florida which attracted Redstick Creek Indians and Black Seminoles. George Woodbine and a detachment of Royal Marines were landed from HMS Orpheus in May 1814 with gifts, two thousand muskets and blankets for the Indians. A fort was constructed, and Cochrane sent Edward Nicolls to oversee the operations at Prospect Bluff.

Nicolls left Bermuda with 112 Royal Marines, 3 field pieces, 300 uniforms and 1,000 muskets for recruits to his corps. On 26 August 1814 Nicolls issued his first "order of the day" for his "battalion". It remains uncertain how many men Nicolls had under his command at that time, since muster and pay records have not been found. More escaped slaves were recruited in Pensacola (to the chagrin of the Spanish), but they were forced to return to Prospect Bluff in November after the American capture of Pensacola.

Post-war developments

The war ended in February 1815, and the three European companies of the 3rd Battalion, Royal and Colonial Marines were sent back to Britain. With their departure, the battalion was reformed as the 3rd Battalion, Colonial Marines, consisting of six companies of Colonial Marines and a staff company of Royal Marines from Canada. The 3rd Battalion performed garrison duty at the Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda before being sent to Trinidad onboard the troopship Lord Eldon in 20 August 1816. Following their arrival the battalion was disbanded, and its veterans, under the supervision of their former non-commissioned officers, formed a community of subsistence farmers with their families, becoming known as the Merikins. Each household was given a plot of 16-acre (6.5 ha) by the colonial government, and their ownership was formally recognised in 1847. The Merikins maintain their distinctive identity and continue to commemorate their roots in an annual celebration.

In March 1815, two American commissioners, Thomas Newell and Thomas Spalding, visited the British outpost on Cumberland Island, whose garrison was under Cockburn's command. The two men negotiated with Cockburn in an attempt to have the fugitive slaves who had escaped to the British be returned to their American enslavers. The negotiations were frustrated by Cockburn's refusal to hand over British military personnel to the Americans knowing that they would then be re-enslaved. However, Paul Harris Nicolas, a contemporary Royal Marines officer and historian, wrote in 1845 that in order to maintain the peace a few Georgian slaves who had fled to the British and joined the Colonial Marines were returned to the commissioners. Though Nicolas noted only a few were handed over, he condemned the decision to do so as a stain on Britain's national honour and argued that monetary compensation should have been given to the commissioners instead.

In January 1815, Florida governor Mateo González Manrique requested Cochrane return fugitive Floridian slaves to the Spanish. Rear-admiral Pulteney Malcolm, Cochrane's subordinate, informed Manrique that Captain Robert Cavendish Spencer had been ordered conduct a enquiry into property losses suffered by Spanish subjects in Florida. Malcolm further stated that in cases where formerly slaves could not be persuaded to return to their enslavers, Britain would compensate the latter. The Spanish official Vicente Sebastián Pintado arrived at Prospect Bluff on 7 April, where he met Spencer. Spencer informed Pintado that he would not return fugitive Floridian slaves by force, and in the latter's presence discharged the Colonial Marines there, informing them that they could no longer by transported to British-held territory. Pintado estimated that there were 250 fugitives at Prospect Bluff, though he only managed to persuade 10 female fugitives to voluntarily return.

The detachment in Florida, which had grown to about 400 men, was paid off and disbanded when the British post was evacuated at the end of the war. A small number of men went to Bermuda with the British as part of a refugee group, rejoining the main body of Colonial Marines. Others from the Florida unit remained in settlements around the Fort which had become a symbol of slave insurrection. Southern plantation owners considered the presence of a group of armed fugitive slaves, even in a remote and sparsely populated area of Spanish Florida, an unacceptable danger; this led, under the leadership of General Andrew Jackson, to the Battle of Negro Fort in July 1816 and the beginning of the First Seminole War. For their involvement in the conflict, two former auxiliary officers of the corps were executed in 1818 in what became known as the Arbuthnot and Ambrister incident. It is believed that former Colonial Marine refugees were among a group that escaped to the Bahamas in 1822 and founded, on the west coast of the island of Andros, Nicholls Town [sic], a community that retains its identity to the present day.

See also

• Merikins
• West India Regiment

Notes

Footnotes

References

Works cited

• Agassiz, Arthur Rodolph Nunn (1907). A Short History of the Agassiz Family. Shanghai: Oriental Press. OCLC 222962662.
• American State Papers: Foreign Relations 1815–1822. Vol. 4. Washington: Gales & Seaton. 1834. OCLC 70183718.
• Boyd, Mark F. (1937). "Events at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River, 1808-1818". Florida Historical Quarterly. 16 (2): 55–96. Retrieved 3 June 2022.
• Buckley, Roger Norman (1998). The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0-8130-1604-7.
• Bullard, Mary R. (1983). Black Liberation on Cumberland Island in 1815. M.R. Bullard.
• Crawford, Michael J.; Hughes, Christine F., eds. (2002). The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, Vol. 3. Washington: Naval Historical Center (GPO). ISBN 978-0-16-051224-7.
• Ellis, Alfred Burdon (1885). The History of the First West India Regiment. London: Chapman & Hall. ISBN 1-153-82315-2. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
• Gleig, George Robert (1827). The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans, 1814–1815. London: J. Murray. ISBN 0-665-45385-X. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
• "Documents Relating to Colonel Edward Nicholls and Captain George Woodbine in Pensacola, 1814". Florida Historical Quarterly. The Greenslade Papers: 51–54. July 1931.
• Heidler, David Stephen; Heidler, Jeanne T., eds. (2004) [1997]. Encyclopedia of the War of 1812. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 1-59114-362-4.
• Hughes, Christine F.; Brodine, Charles E., eds. (2023). The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, Vol. 4. Washington: Naval Historical Center (GPO). ISBN 978-1-943604-36-4.
• James, William (1818). A Full and Correct Account of the Military Occurrences of the Late War Between Great Britain and the United States of America. Volume II. London.
• Lambert, Andrew (2012). The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-27319-5.
• Landers, Jane (1 February 2010). Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-03591-1.
• Latimer, Jon (2007). 1812: War with America. Cambridge: Belknap Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02584-4.
• Latour, Arsène Lacarrière (1999) [1816]. Historical Memoir of the War in West Florida and Louisiana in 1814–15, with an Atlas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. OCLC 40119875.
• Mahon, John K. (1991). The War of 1812. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80429-8.
• Malcomson, Thomas (October 2012). "Freedom by Reaching the Wooden World: American Slaves and the British Navy during the War of 1812" (PDF). Northern Mariner. 22 (4). The Canadian Nautical Research Society: 361–392. doi:10.25071/2561-5467.294. Retrieved 19 December 2024.
• Millett, Nathaniel (2013). The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0-81-304454-5 – via Florida Scholarship online within Oxford University Press.
• Morriss, Roger (1997). Cockburn and the British Navy in Transition: Admiral Sir George Cockburn, 1772–1853. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 1-57003-253-X.
• Nicolas, Paul Harris (1845). Historical Record of the Royal Marine Forces, Volume 2 [1805–1842]. London: Thomas & William Boone. OCLC 758539027.
• Owsley, Frank L.; Smith, Gene A. (1997). Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800–1821. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 0-8173-0880-6.
• Rodríguez, Junius P., ed. (2007). Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Vol. 1. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0313332711.
• Sugden, John (January 1982). "The Southern Indians in the War of 1812: The Closing Phase". Florida Historical Quarterly. 60 (3): 300. JSTOR 30146793.
• Sutherland, Jonathan (2004). African Americans at War: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-57607-746-7.
• Taylor, Alan (2014). The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-3933-4973-3.
• Tucker, Spencer, ed. (2012). The Encyclopedia of the War of 1812: A Political, Social, and Military History. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-85109-956-6.
• Whitfield, Harvey Amani (2006). Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860. Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New Hampshire. ISBN 1-58465-606-9.

Further reading

• Barrie, Robert, vol. 2, pp. 720–735 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |part= ignored (help) OCLC 8717325
• Taylor, Matthew (2024). Black Redcoats: The Corps of Colonial Marines. Barnsley, Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Books. ISBN 978-1-39-903401-2.
• Weiss, John McNish (April 1996). "The Corps of Colonial Marines 1814–16: A Summary". Immigrants and Minorities, 15/1. Note: this early article is amended by the book 'The Merikens' and by the author's web article [1]. ISSN 0261-9288. Archived from the original on 8 February 2018. Retrieved 1 March 2009.
• Weiss, John McNish (2002). The Merikens: Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad 1815–16. London: privately published by McNish & Weiss. ISBN 978-0-9526460-5-1.

External links

• A History of the Colonial Marines
• Essay and video on Colonial Marines Archived 7 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine
• Biography of William Peterson, a Private in the Corps of Colonial Marines via Flee! Stories of Flight from Maryland In Black and White and its 1812 link
• Corps of Colonial Marines pay & muster list in 1814
• Marine casualties of the War of 1812