My July 2023 presidential address, “Everything Must Go,” (published in the Summer 2026 issue of the JER) is an attempt to think about the possibilities inherent in a moment of chaos and upheaval. As the British army left Boston in March 1776, never to return, their departure created an enormous mess. The chaos was certainly material as well as political; the objects and items that both civilians and military tried to cram onto those ships offer fascinating glimpses into the world of eighteenth-century refugees. But the chaos was intensely personal as well. I became deeply curious about the four people who had been enslaved in Boston and, although they departed with the British army, were never enslaved again.

This project, however, started with a very different story than the Siege of Boston. I had become interested in the evacuation of Boston because I had fallen into a historical rabbit hole in pursuit of a person profoundly unlike those four people. The object of my curiosity was a wealthy young woman who hardly needed the chaos of an evacuation to throw her life into upheaval–this eighteen-year-old (like so many young people) seemed more than capable of making her own messes.

At the end of The Boston Massacre: A Family History (New York, 2020), I quoted a 1777 letter from Lucy Flucker Knox to her sister Hannah, in which she lamented the split that the war had made in her family. When Lucy married Henry Knox in 1774, her sister Hannah had married a British officer named James Urquhart, who was stationed in Boston at the same time. After Hannah left Boston with the evacuating British troops, the two sisters never saw each other again. It seemed like the perfect vignette to close my book about the beginning of the American Revolution: two siblings torn apart by their decisions to commit to men from opposing armies.

But it turned out that Hannah was not particularly committed to James Urquhart after all. I came across some hints that she and Urquhart divorced in 1787, and when I finally got hold of the Scottish divorce record, I learned why. As it happened, Urquhart returned to England in January of 1776, leaving a pregnant Hannah behind. She, her sister, and her mother sailed to Halifax with the rest of the fleet in March, where they stayed for a couple of years. There, Hannah began an affair with a British marine named Stephen Kemp, and in 1778, they sailed together to London, where they continued their affair in the close-knit American expat neighborhood of Knightsbridge. The former Massachusetts royal treasurer, Harrison Gray (who at the evacuation had left the men he enslaved back in Boston to stay with their wives), was both horrified and fascinated by their remarkably public affair. He remembered having “seen Captain Kemp kiss Mrs. Urquhart and otherwise behave as a man and wife newly married or a couple who were about to be married might do in company to show their fondness.”[1] Harrison Gray offered a whole new look at loyalist life in London.

Hannah Flucker Urquhart created a compelling and spicy drama to which I cannot do justice here (my investigations into her life continue). As I dug into Hannah’s story, I began to wonder about that trip to Halifax where she met her Marine officer. The records claim that she embarked on a ship from Boston as part of a household of six, including her mother, her sister Sally, and her infant son. The Fluckers had been enslavers in Boston; had they forced any of the people they held in bondage to come to Canada?

It was as I combed through the records of the various Halifax-bound transports that I found the story of the Elizabeth. While it was not an unknown tale, its fame was primarily tied to the exploits of Captain John Manley, the wonderfully named commodore of Washington’s first fleet. Primed as I was by Hannah’s drama to look for stories of both love and slavery, the presence of two Black couples on the captured ship immediately caught my eye. As a historian I don’t tend to incline towards sentimentalism, but I did wonder what kinds of opportunities for love people found in the upheavals of war.

By 1787, the connection between James Urquhart and Hannah Flucker was irrevocably severed, as was, in fact, the relationship between the state of Massachusetts and the legal category of slavery. It did not surprise me that wealthy Hannah Flucker’s charmed life brought her safely to Halifax, while Adam, Scipio, Belinda, and Brada found themselves in a New Hampshire jail awaiting resale into slavery. That seemed to be how luck worked for all of these people in 1776. But none of them was content with the hand that fate had dealt them. Hannah clearly was not willing to give up her new love. Likewise, the records reveal–just as certainly, if less lasciviously–that Adam and Scipio too were determined to make the most of the opportunities that they saw. And in so doing, they forced at least one state to reconsider the place of slavery in the American Revolution. I offer “Everything Must Go,” then, in celebration of both resilience and research. Sometimes, those rabbit holes really are worth falling into.

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Endnotes

[1] “Decreet Divorce, Major James Urquart vs. Hannah Flucker, in Register of Consistorial Decrees, 28 January 1787–26 September 1800,” p. 24, CC8/5/22, National Records of Scotland.