Mentor Beauchamp (b. circa 1778 - d. ?)
MSA SC 5496-014968
War of 1812 Escaped Slave, Somerset County, Maryland, 1814
Biography:
On October 15, 1814, thirty-six-year-old Mentor Beauchamp, also called Manto, escaped from Isaac Beachamp's farm to British forces at Tangier Sound.1 Three of his father's slaves, Elijah Beauchamp, Stephen Beauchamp, and Jack Teagle, escaped on the same day.2 Mentor served in the Sixth Company of the Colonial Marines, comprised of black American soldiers. He left Tangier Island, the Colonial Marines' base, to travel south with the British on December 10, 1814. He participated in the invasion of Cumberland Island, Georgia, with a squadron under the command of Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn.3
After the War of 1812, Mentor Beauchamp settled in the Company Villages
in Trinidad, where the British had promised sixteen acres of land to each
soldier's family. He lived in the same village as Elijah and Stephen Beauchamp,
but the British recorded him as "gone" by 1823.4
1. Claim of Isaac Beachamp, Case 706, Case Files, compiled ca. 1827 - ca. 1828, documenting the period ca. 1814 - ca. 1828, *ARC Identifier 1174160 / MLR Number PI 177 190,* National Archives, College Park.
2. Claim of Samuel Beauchamp, Case 784.
3. Claim of Isaac Beachamp.
3.
Mary R. Bullard,
Cumberland Island: A History (Athens, Georgia:
University of Georgia Press, 2005) 118.
3.
Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in
British North America, 1815-1860 (Lebanon, NH: University Press of
England, 2006) 35.
4. John McNish Weiss, The
Merikens: Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad: 1815-1816 (London,
UK: McNish & Weiss, 2002) 43.
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