Was Gen. Schuyler’s Wagon Master One of His Enslaved Workers?

As quoted yesterday, on 29 Dec 1775 Col. Henry Knox wrote that Gen. Philip Schuyler “sent out his Waggon Master & other people to all parts of the Country” to hire teams of horses for transporting heavy ordnance to Springfield.

Back in 2016 Ian Mumpton at the Schuyler Mansion wrote:

It is unclear who the “Waggon Master” refers to, but as mentioned in a previous article, many of the men enslaved by the Schuyler family were skilled at driving carts and sleds. As there is no surviving record of Schuyler hiring a wagon master, it is likely that this person was one of the enslaved servants, possibly Lisbon or a man named Lewis who, five months later, was lent to Benjamin Franklin as a driver for a trip from the Schuyler’s home to New York City.

That previous article, also posted by Mumpton, analyzed a 1771 document which mentioned enslaved workers and said:

Lisbon and Dick are both mentioned in other Schuyler documents as carters or wagoners, conveying goods and people for the Schuyler family. Lisbon in particular is mentioned in at least four other sources, always in regards to his driving goods back and forth between Albany and Saratoga. These men’s ability to drive carts and sleds was a large part of their value to the Schuylers, as this was a specialized skill-set that involved being able to work with draft animals, manage tack and harness, and maintain the carts and sleds in their charge.

A comment noted another wagon driver named Anthony, Tony, or Tone.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Gen. Schuyler assigned some of his enslaved wagon drivers to the operation moving cannon toward Boston (and collected the same pay he was offering to other farmers for himself).

However, I’m not convinced that one of those men could have been Schuyler’s “Waggon Master.” That was an official designation within the Continental Army’s quartermaster department. On 9 August, Gen. George Washington appointed John Goddard of Brookline “Waggon Master General to the Army of the Twelve United Colonies.” (That count included Georgia but not Delaware, still officially a subset of Pennsylvania.)

In the fall of 1775 Schuyler had overseen preparations for Gen. Richard Montgomery’s invasion of Canada, an operation that probably required a convoy of wagons and thus an official to oversee them.

And that’s a crucial aspect of the job of wagon master. It required more than driving a wagon—indeed, the wagon master might not do any actual driving at all. The job involved making deals on behalf of the Continental Army with a large number of independent contractors and then overseeing a force of teamsters. The word “master” was even in the name. Did any enslaved man, however skilled, have the legal standing and social authority to do that job in 1775?

TOMORROW: Glimpses of Schuyler’s wagon master in spring 1776.