In the summer of 1782, nearly nine months after Patriot victory at the Battle of Yorktown during the US War for Independence, Virginia’s social order had not been restored. Over a thousand Black Virginians escaped with the British during the American Revolution, and the remaining population of Black Virginians did not stop using the military conflict to their advantage in their own parallel anti-slavery war. For the planter class of Virginia’s Eastern Shore who feared a Black-British alliance, their nemesis had not yet died.Enslaved people in and around the Eastern Shore town of Onancock resided geographically separate from the center of slaving power in the Chesapeake in the Lower Tidewater, and they took advantage of this slight cleavage by attempting to conspire with marauding Tories. These fears forced local militia leader Colonel George Corbin to plead to his superior officer for help authorizing Virginia’s Governor to sanction militia members to remain in their station. The threat of internal and external forces waging war against them had not yet dissipated despite the new nation’s independence from Britain. Instead, Col. Corbin begged for the continued use of militia by vividly describing the opponent Eastern Shore whites faced.
Corbin stated that whites in Onancock faced “bloody plots” instigated by enslaved people and white British loyalists. Plots “against the Chief inhabitants of the Country” resulted in “the plunderings of families, surprised in the night, women and children turned out of their houses, which were then burned.”1 Instead of indiscriminately waging their campaign, enslaved conspirators and their white loyalist counterparts chose their potential victims with cunning and precision. Like escaping from bondage, waging revolution often did not happen through unthinking decisions. Instead, “a conspiracy of the tories, British and negroes, who prepared themselves with ropes as instruments of death and had marked their devoted victims.” They likely tried keeping their larger plot a secret, but the motley crew’s plan did not remain a secret forever.
A few nights before their action, “a party of them [white tories] went out to induce the negroes to join” them in a plot to massacre local whites. The white conspirators met with “the master of one of his Slaves engaged in the plot” and the master confronted the enslaved man.2 Despite foiling the plot, the enslaver would not live to tell about it. In a confrontation with a loyalist, the loyalist shot the enslaver and attempted to get away.