At first glance J. William Harris's study of the 1775 hanging of Thomas Jeremiah, the free black pilot, mariner, and slave owner, appears to be a microhistory. But in fact this detailed examination of a little-known episode provides an insightful reflection and commentary on the vexed relationships among liberty, slavery, and the British Empire in the era of the Declaration of Independence. The principal actors in Harris's story are the patriot leader Henry Laurens, who supported the hanging, and the last royal governor of South Carolina, Lord William Campbell, who opposed it. Because too little information survives to enable the author to provide a full account of either Thomas Jeremiah or his trial for attempting “to raise an insurrection” (131), the narrative focuses chiefly on the activities and motives of Charles Town's elite and relies on sources they generated.

Harris begins by sketching Charles Town and its society on the eve of Independence. Here he describes and illustrates the London-style elegance of the town's leaders, their buildings, furnishings, dress, and cultural institutions—all resting on slave labor. At the same time, Harris explains, the planters and merchants of South Carolina adopted natural rights ideology and found a way to accommodate enlightenment ideology with their brutal labor system. The contrast between Charles Town's genteel gardens and its filthy alleys was emblematic of the liberty enjoyed by the privileged few and the slavery endured by the many. In this setting, the Huguenot-descended merchant Henry Laurens rose to great wealth on the backs of slaves—thousands of whom he imported from Africa and sold. Here, too, his contemporary, Thomas Jeremiah, a free black of unknown origin, achieved unusual success as a slaveowning fisherman and pilot who Harris believes “was probably, in 1775, the richest [self-made] man of African descent in British North America” (96). But in contrast to Laurens, for whom thousands of personal and public documents survive, the only document attributed to Jeremiah is a forty-seven-word newspaper advertisement he placed in 1772.

The slaveowner who became Jeremiah's advocate was Lord William Campbell, a Scots aristocrat who arrived as governor of South Carolina in June 1775, just as Jeremiah was accused of advocating slave insurrection. As with Laurens, Campbell's surviving documents are many and, because he had married into the colony's aristocracy, his papers are interwoven with South Carolina and British sources. Consequently, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah is primarily a story of the clash between the South Carolina elite and the Empire.

What emerges is a conflict in which Jeremiah, whose local standing enabled him to win a pardon from the governor in 1771 following conviction for assaulting a white ship captain, now became a pawn in the escalating imperial crisis. Early in 1775, rumors circulated in South Carolina that the British government was preparing to thwart the colonial opposition by fomenting a slave uprising; and an itinerant black preacher was raising fear among whites. Older people still remembered the Stono Rebellion of 1739 when slave insurgents killed twenty-four whites. Jeremiah, who reportedly said he would pilot British ships into Charles Town harbor, was accused of advocating insurrection—a slave provided testimony against him. Race ruled when it came to justice. Though Jeremiah was free, he was tried as if he were a slave according to the Negro Act of 1740. Though his was a capital trial, there was no jury, and slave testimony, excluded in the trial of a white person, was conclusive. His judges were two Justices of the Peace and three additional white property owners, who expressed mercy by sentencing Jeremiah to hang rather than burn. No record of the trial survives. Harris contrasts this trial with Massachusetts justice based on the visitor Josiah Quincy's journal, but he draws no comparison with Jill Lepore's New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005).

After the conviction, Governor Campbell, whose power had evaporated by August 1775, sought a pardon for Jeremiah. But Laurens and Patriot authorities were satisfied that justice was served and executed him. Historians who have considered these events, Harris argues, have shaped them to suit their interpretive needs. Some have seen Jeremiah as an insurrectionist (Gary Nash) or anticapitalist (Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh), but Harris finds no evidence in the life of this slaveholding black man to sustain such views. Neither does Harris view Governor Campbell as an antislavery hero, noting that Jeremiah was a free man, not a slave, and “Campbell himself owned dozens of slaves, as did his wife” (164). Hewing closely to sources, Harris reveals complexity and contradiction.