Pennsylvania: Cuff Dix, 1775-1776

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A True Rebel: The Continental Army needed Mark Bird’s iron. To oblige, Mark Bird needed to recapture the notoriously elusive master craftsman, Cuff Dix.

By 1775, colonial America was on the verge of passing England as the third largest iron producer in the world.¹ Among the colonies, Pennsylvania produced the most and arguably the best cast and wrought iron, mostly thanks to the furnaces and forges in the Schuylkill Valley.²

Wars can’t be won without iron and steel. If Valley Forge, Hopewell Furnace, and Birdsboro Forge along the Schuylkill River fell into British hands during the Revolutionary War, both the Continental Army and Navy likely would run short of the cannons, rifle barrels, and other metal munitions needed to continue the fight.³

The rebellion would also falter if those critical iron production facilities lost their most skilled and essential workers. If, for example, Birdsboro, owned by industrialist and Revolutionary War hero Mark Bird, lost its small crew of highly trained hammermen, the production of iron suitable for weaponry would grind to a halt. And, of course, Mark Bird would lose a mint.

One such master craftsman was Cuff Dix. Dix, according to Bird, was a “most excellent hammerman” in the forge at Birdsboro (also known then as “Birdsborough”).⁴

But Cuff Dix, described as exceptionally bold and clever, had no intention of working for Bird, let alone being his property.

This unusual nexus of character and circumstances at Birdsboro generated one of the most extensive and illuminating series of fugitive slave ads found in colonial newspapers of the 1770s. Cuff Dix, the archives suggest, was a valuable star in the American iron industry at a critical moment in history. Mark Bird wanted the man’s labor for free. Cuff Dix wanted freedom and to get it, mounted a rebellion that spanned at least three years, and likely many more.

What is known from advertisements placed by Bird and others: Cuff Dix escaped from his iron neck shackle at Birdsboro Forge in September of 1774. He was captured and jailed a month later, retrieved by Bird soon after, then escaped again the following May.⁵ Four months later, Bird ran another ad saying Dix was still missing while suggesting Cuff Dix had escaped several other times prior to the September 1774 ad.

Dix was again captured, jailed, retrieved, and put back to work at Birdsboro. Then, on June 16, 1776, he escaped again. This escape prompted Bird to pen an extensive advertisement - published less than two weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence - in which Bird even accused someone (likely a competing forge owner) of harboring Dix and paying him as if he was a free man.

Bird’s ad reads: “He has often run away, changed his name, denied that the subscriber was his master, and has been confined in several (jails) in this province.”

Bird continued: “He was employed the greatest part of last summer by a person near Dilworth’s town, in Chester County.” Bird hinted that he knew the person and threatened that anyone employing Dix “shall be dealt with as the Law directs, and his name not omitted in a future advertisement.”

Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, November 7, 1775

In this ad, Bird suggests that Dix may have been heading toward the coast of Virginia to join British forces. Seven months earlier, the exiled Royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had offered freedom to any person enslaved by rebels who would fight by his side. “As Negroes in general think that Lord Dunmore is contending for their liberty,” Bird wrote, “it is not improbable that (Cuff Dix) is on the march to join his Lordship’s own black regiment.”

Which may have been true. A few months later, Dix was captured many miles to the south of Birdsboro closer to the coast in Delaware.

The problem for Bird: Once again, Dix, who he described as “an active, well-made fellow” who “understands English well,” very quickly escaped from the jail.

Which prompted yet another advertisement on October 11, 1776, this time from the embarrassed jailer in Delaware offering his own reward for the apprehension of Cuff Dix.

“He is an artful fellow,” jailer Thomas Clark wrote. “The person apprehending him is desired to take particular care of him.”

Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation and other similar British offers that followed inspired thousands of enslaved people to risk their lives in search of freedom. “By mid-1776, what had been a small stream of escaping slaves now turned into a torrent,” historian Gary Nash wrote. Nash added that: “Over the next seven years, enslaved Africans mounted the greatest slave rebellion in American history.” According to historian Maya Jasanoff, an estimated 20,000 Black enslaved men joined the British during the war.

By 1778, the name Cuff Dix disappears from the record. Cuff Dix is listed on Bird’s property records for 1777, but not in 1780. It appears Bird may have given up on those who escaped him. In 1778, Bird, who was the largest slave owner in Berks County at the time,⁶ reportedly purchased eighteen enslaved people to work at Birdsboro Forge and Hopewell Furnace.

The name Cuff Dix does not appear among the thousands listed in the manifests of British ships that transported freed Blacks from American shores during and after the war.⁷ However, a manifest for a Nova Scotia-bound ship lists two passengers as having been enslaved in Pennsylvania by “Col. Bird.” One of whom, Thomas York, is named in a fugitive slave ad placed by Bird near the time of Cuff Dix’s last documented escape from Bird.

It is possible that, as he had several times before, Dix simply used a different name to finally gain lasting freedom from his enslaver.

The fate of Mark Bird is better documented. Besides being one of America’s largest producers of iron during the Revolutionary War, Bird played a critical role in supplying the Continental forces. He was commissioned as a Lieutenant Colonel at the beginning of fighting and, soon after, named Deputy Quarter Master General under General Thomas Mifflin. In that role, Col. Bird succeeded at a task deemed “impossible” by others: In the freezing late winter of 1777-78, he floated one thousand barrels of flour from his Birdsboro grist mills down the Schuylkill River to General George Washington’s starving troops at Valley Forge.⁸

For his efforts supplying the Continental forces with critical food and armaments, Bird was slated to receive nearly two hundred thousand dollars. But the debt was never paid by the struggling new government of the United States. Also, flooding in the 1780s devastated many of his holdings. Inflation and an economic depression took what was left.

In 1788, Bird relocated to North Carolina. Over the next two decades, he tried and failed to recreate the sprawling iron plantation he had created in Pennsylvania.

By 1806, he had sold his last remaining property, including the last of those he enslaved. He died penniless six years later at the home of his youngest son.

Author
Devynn Chester and Network to Freedom

Sources
¹ James M. Swank, "The manufacture of iron and steel in the United States," in: Mineral Resources of the United States, 1883 and 1884, US Geological Survey, 1885.

² Joseph Walker, Hopewell Village: A Social and Economic History on an Iron-Making Community, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974. See also: John Bezis-Selfa, Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution, Cornell University Press, 2003.

³ Joseph Walker, “Negro Labor in the Charcoal Iron Industry of Southeastern Pennsylvania,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 93, No.4, 1969, p. 466-486.

⁴ Walker, Forging America.

⁵ Billy G. Smith and Richard Wjtowicz, “The Precarious Freedom of Blacks in the Mid-Atlantic Region: Excerpts from the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1776,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 113, No.2, 1989, p. 237-264.

⁶ Walker, Forging America.

⁷ “The Book of Negroes,” from the collection of Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester. The 5,000 names in this collection of ship manifests are searchable at https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/military-heritage/loyalists/book-of-negroes/Pages/introduction.aspx.

⁸ Terry L. Linton, “Mark Bird (1738-1812): Brief Historical Sketch,” Linton Research Fund Inc., 1987.