In March 1777, Jane Coggeshall freed herself from slavery by running away. At the time of her escape, British military forces occupied Newport and had placed the port city under their military control. Though details about Jane’s early life are not known, her flight from bondage—an act typically shrouded in secrecy—paradoxically brings her life into archival view. Accompanied by two other enslaved persons, Violet Pease and William Carpenter, the trio stole a rowboat and paddled twelve miles across Narragansett Bay to reach the patriot encampment located at Point Judith.
After passing into patriot territory, the three fugitives were escorted by armed guards to appear before the wartime Rhode Island General Assembly. In exchange for classified information concerning the activities of British troops stationed in nearby Newport, the Assembly declared Jane, Violet, and William free. They were given a pass “to go to any part of the country to procure a livelihood.” Jane, Violet, and William brokered their own freedom.
In the years after her escape, Jane Coggeshall lived and labored in the shadows of slavery. She moved from town to town to secure day labor as a domestic servant. In 1783, she learned that the descendants of her former enslaver, Captain Daniel Coggeshall, were attempting to re-enslave her. According to Jane’s testimony, the Coggeshall family “…employed kidnappers to steal & carry her away by force.”1
Jane petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly to solidify her free status, as she vowed that she “would much sooner embrace death” than be re-enslaved. In October 1785, the Rhode Island General Assembly heard Jane’s petition. In it, Jane and her legal representatives invoked the well-known case of Quaco Honeyman, an enslaved man who also had escaped from Newport in the summer of 1777 and whose communication of military intelligence to the Continental Forces allegedly led to the capture of British General Richard Prescott during the war.2 In 1782, Quaco Honeyman successfully petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly for his freedom, and Jane requested (successfully) that she be given equal consideration under the law:
Whereas, Jane Coggeshall, of Providence, a negro woman preferred a petition and represented unto this Assembly, that she was a slave to Captain Daniel Coggeshall, of Newport; that in March, A.D. 1777, the enemy being then in possession of Rhode Island, she, together with others, at every risk, effected their escape to Point Judith; that they were carried before the General Assembly, then sitting in South Kingstown, who did thereupon give them their liberty, together with a pass to go to any part of the country to procure a livelihood; that she hath lived at Woodstock and at Providence ever since; that during the whole time she hath maintained herself decently and with reputation, and can appeal to the families wherein she hath lived with respect to her industry, sobriety of manners, and fidelity.
Throughout the colonial and revolutionary eras, enslaved Rhode Islanders delivered themselves from slavery.3 Runaway advertisements, published routinely throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, afford a rich source of insights into the lives and experiences of enslaved people.
- “Petition of Jane Coggeshall to the Rhode Island General Assembly for Declaration of [Her] Freedom,” October 1785, RI State Archives. ↩︎
- “Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection,” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at Yale University website, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/October%2029%20Inside%20the%20Vault.pdf, accessed July 1, 2021. ↩︎
- Historian John Wood Sweet and genealogist Maureen Alice Taylor published two comprehensive volumes of runaway slave advertisements published in Rhode Island newspapers in the mid-1990s and early-2000s. Sweet and Taylor’s two volumes are still arguably the most reliable source for understanding the lives and fugitive experiences of Rhode Island runaways. See John Wood Sweet and Maureen Alice Taylor, Runaways, Deserters, and Notorious Villains from Rhode Island Newspapers: Additional Notices from the Providence Gazette, 1762-1800, As Well As Advertisements From All Other Rhode Island Newspapers From 1732-1800 (Rockland, ME: Picton Press, 1994), and Taylor and Sweet, Runaways, Deserters, and Notorious Villains from Rhode Island Newspapers Volume 2: Additional Notices from the Providence Gazette, 1762-1800 As Well As Advertisements From All Other Rhode Island Newspapers From 1762-1800 (Rockland, ME: Picton Press, 2001). ↩︎