by Julie Winch
CHAPTER TWO
In Liberty’s Cause
Black Freedom in Revolutionary America, 1770–1790
Black people fought for their freedom on many fronts in the era of independence. Most obviously and directly, they offered their aid on the battlefield and behind the lines to whoever would guarantee them their liberty. The tumultuous years leading up to the Revolution also witnessed an ideological battle. White colonists were fond of accusing King George III of being a heartless tyrant who treated them like “slaves.” That stirred up uneasy feelings in the hearts and minds of at least a few, who could not reconcile condemning what King George was doing to them with the fact that they were forcing black people into perpetual servitude. Slaves seized every opportunity to point out that contradiction. Ultimately, years of bloody warfare, and then the reshaping of America once the fighting was over, had a profound impact on the black population of British North America. Neither side in the conflict had intended this to be a war to liberate a single slave. White patriots were venting their anger about the actions of a faraway government they considered arbitrary and oppressive. The British were trying to regain American loyalty. However, through the challenges they mounted to their own dire situation and through their very presence, black people helped determine the course of the Revolution and make it, at least in part, their own struggle.
Africans and African Americans were involved in the Revolutionary crisis from the beginning. Black people, a few of them free but many of them enslaved or living uneasily between slavery and freedom, participated in the various mob actions following the British government’s imposition of the hated Stamp Tax in 1765. As tensions escalated, they exploited those tensions, leaving some whites apprehensive about what might happen, especially in localities where the enslaved outnumbered the white residents. For example, when a group of slaves marched through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, the town’s white Sons of Liberty were perturbed. They were unsure whether their bondsmen’s cries of “Liberty! Liberty!” were simply echoing their own protests, or whether they were demanding a more complete kind of liberty for themselves.
Hundreds of miles to the north, Boston’s Sons of Liberty called out mobs which included scores of black sailors. Some were free, others were slaves whose masters routinely sent them off to sea to make money. Black sailors were as incensed as white sailors about the activities of British press-gangs, who hauled seafaring men off the streets, regardless of the color of their skin, and forced them into the Royal Navy. Boston’s leading white radicals gave little thought to the composition of the mob. They simply saw strength in numbers when it came to intimidating Stamp Tax agents, customs collectors and other unpopular government officials. They ignored the implications of growing black political involvement.
Generally the Boston mob was nameless and faceless—an agglomeration of people eager to display their anger over the latest move on the part of the government in London and its minions in the colonies. On occasion, however, a member of the crowd assumed a prominence that the Sons of Liberty were not prepared for. The precise role of Crispus Attucks in the events of March 5, 1770 is still open to question. Perhaps he was the prime mover in the so-called Boston Massacre, as future president John Adams, counsel for the British soldiers who stood trial for murder in the aftermath of the killings, maintained. Adams depicted Attucks as determined “to be the hero of the night.”1 Others cast him in the role of innocent bystander. Whether he was a rabble-rouser or an inquisitive passer-by cut down by panicky soldiers, one thing is certain. Attucks was a free man at the time he died because he had freed himself. Of mixed African, Indian, and most likely European ancestry, Attucks had been a slave until he had escaped from his master in Framingham, Massachusetts, two decades before the Massacre and gone to sea. He had only recently returned to the port of Boston when he heard—or inspired—the din outside the Custom House and was shot down by British troops. “The first to defy, the first to die,” Attucks had a funeral worthy of a martyr for liberty.2 A vast crowd escorted through the streets of Boston the coffins of all four of the victims of the Massacre—a fifth lingered several days before succumbing to his wounds—and buried them in a common grave.
In the tension-filled period before the actual outbreak of hostilities, other black Bostonians made white people aware of their commitment to liberty. Groups of slaves in and around Boston began petitioning anyone in a position of power they thought they could influence with their arguments. They pointed out the inherent injustice of slavery. They deplored the splitting up of families. They asked for land to farm and permission to work on their own account so that they could earn the money to buy their freedom. Their mention in one petition of the Spanish practice of coartación indicates they were well aware of the opportunities black people had elsewhere in North America to purchase themselves. One group observed to the increasingly radical Massachusetts General Court that they expected “great things” from men who were such outspoken champions of liberty.3 Another group approached the hard-pressed royal governor, Thomas Gage, and asked for his help. Gage could take their petition as he chose—as a subtle promise of military support if he needed it or a philosophical statement of the inhumanity of chattel slavery. In the short term, neither the forces of the Crown nor their opponents heeded the petitions. When the war finally came, however, whites on both sides would have to respond to black aspirations for freedom, not only in New England but throughout the colonies.
The royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, was the first to take decisive action. In April 1775, a delegation of slaves visited Dunmore to volunteer their services as soldiers should the need arise. They knew from conversations they had overheard that a rebellion was imminent. They also knew that Dunmore had threatened to free all the slaves in Virginia if whites continued to defy his authority. In the spring Dunmore was not ready to do more than threaten and he sent the black men away. However, by the fall he had a war on his hands and he was eager to accept help from anyone who offered it. On November 7, 1775, Dunmore issued a proclamation to black slaves and white indentured servants of masters who were disloyal to His Majesty informing them that they could earn their freedom by enlisting in the regiment he was raising for King George. Dunmore outfitted his “Ethiopians” in uniforms identical to those his white troops wore, with one striking difference: the black soldiers sported sashes emblazoned with the words “Liberty to Slaves.” Although Dunmore had directed his offer only to able-bodied men, entire slave families fled to join him. The royal governor seized the opportunity and assigned the black women to nursing, cooking and washing duties. However, by mid-December 1775, Dunmore had lost his land base and he and his troops withdrew to a flotilla of ships in Virginia’s York River. Tragically, Dunmore’s success at recruiting proved his men’s undoing. In close quarters below decks in the winter of 1775–1776, smallpox ravaged his “Ethiopian” soldiers, killing hundreds who had come to him in search of freedom. Finally, in August 1776, with the military situation rapidly deteriorating in Virginia, Dunmore set sail for the loyalist stronghold of New York City.
Despite Dunmore’s retreat, his use of slave troops had far-reaching repercussions. It emboldened black men fighting under his command not only to demand their freedom, but also their fair share of the military bounty. One of Dunmore’s “Ethiopians,” a former slave named Titus Corlies, refashioned himself in freedom as Colonel Tye. He had survived the smallpox epidemic, come north with Dunmore, and gathered his own unofficial (and interracial) band of raiders. The British military authorities respected Tye and his company, which the patriots called “banditti.” They fought courageously, ostensibly on the side of King George, but always with their eyes on the prize—plunder. Again and again Tye led his men into battle, seizing prisoners and property. A courageous and charismatic free black leader like Colonel Tye, able to break through the lines of race and unite black and white fighting men, was a dangerous individual to have around. Equally dangerous were the sashes of the �
��Ethiopians,” which proclaimed “Liberty to Slaves,” implying that all slaves would receive their freedom upon a British victory. Concerned whites apparently noticed an alarming change in the behavior of their slaves. In Philadelphia, for instance, unsubstantiated reports circulated that slaves were refusing to yield the sidewalk to whites. When those white pedestrians snapped that they did not appreciate walking in the mud, the slaves responded that their day of reckoning was at hand. Philadelphia whites trembled about threats that never really existed, but whites elsewhere had good reason to worry as the war continued. Evidence of slave conspiracies surfaced in North Carolina and Georgia, undoubtedly inspired by the hope that the British would support them.
While the loyalist decision to use slaves in combat and noncombat positions undoubtedly raised the expectations of all African Americans, it also put considerable pressure on the patriots, who had initially opposed black military service. On July 2, 1775, when George Washington arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts to assume command of the Continental Army, he was shocked to see musket-toting black men mixing with white volunteers. Washington knew that the Continental Congress did not want any black men in the new fighting force, but he could see with his own eyes that they were there. Some were slaves who served in place of their masters or whose masters had given them permission to serve. Many were runaways who presented themselves to recruiters as free men, and those recruiters wisely did not ask questions about their status. Others were free and had chosen to enlist because they truly believed in the cause of independence or were motivated by the bounties of cash or land that different communities were offering to get recruits. A good many, like Salem Poor, Barzillai Lew, and Peter Salem, had already distinguished themselves in the early encounters with the British. The army needed them, and it did not seem right to reward them for their courage under fire by sending them away.
Nonetheless, Washington hesitated, and so did his fellow officers. Perhaps they could allow those who were free to serve. Perhaps they could permit those who had already joined up to reenlist but not accept any new black recruits. Finally, in the early weeks of 1776, Congress took the decision out of the hands of the military men by rendering what they intended would be their final ruling: there was no room in the army for black soldiers, free or enslaved. The individual colonies, most of them in the midst of declaring themselves independent states, by and large endorsed the ban on black enlistment. This was a white man’s war. If black people hoped to use it to win their freedom, they would have to think again.
However, since the British actively recruited black men, white patriots ultimately had to reconsider their own ban on black enlistment. Within a year after the Continental Congress excluded African Americans from military service, George Washington himself had become far less squeamish about allowing black troops into his army. He was confronting a grave manpower shortage, and he was prepared to cope with it as best he could. On January 2, 1777, driven by military necessity, the Continental Army issued an order allowing freemen to enlist. The recruitment of slaves to serve, however, would take another two years. In March 1779, after many months of nagging by Washington and his fellow commanders, who were contending with desertions, an ever-lengthening casualty list, and a shortage of white volunteers, the Continental Congress reversed its earlier ban and approved the use of slaves. In essence, the delegates were recognizing what was already happening. One by one, the newly independent states in the North and the Upper South were loosening their own prohibitions on the enlistment of black men.
Rhode Island went the furthest when it came to arming slaves, and it did so because it had no alternative. By 1778, much of the state was under British control, and lawmakers concluded that they could only meet their quota of men for the Continental Army by authorizing the state to purchase slaves from their owners and muster them into service into the First Rhode Island Regiment, later nicknamed the “Black Regiment.” The decision to compensate slaveholders and then arm the slaves after promising them their liberty was a bold move in a state where slavery was both socially and economically important. The authorities recognized that they would have to tie enlistment to emancipation. Any fighting man equipped with a gun would turn it on his oppressors, or at the very least desert to the enemy, if he knew that he had to return to slavery once the war was over.
Massachusetts lawmakers looked at Rhode Island’s Black Regiment and contemplated a similar move. Although they eventually decided not to follow Rhode Island’s lead, they did lift their earlier ban on black men serving in the military, and a good many did so. Some found their way into an all-black company known as the Bucks of America. Many, though, served in what were basically integrated units.
Maryland was the only Southern state that specifically allowed slaves to enlist. It also made free men of color as well as white men subject to the draft. Virginia took a more conservative approach, as did Delaware and North Carolina, ruling that free black men could serve, but slaves could only do so as substitutes for their masters. When it emerged after the war that some white men had sent their slaves off to the front lines and then reneged on their promise to free them, Virginia lawmakers were disgusted. They insisted that any slave who could demonstrate that he had fought in place of his master on the understanding that he would get his freedom would indeed get it. Of course, furnishing proof of a promise of freedom was no easy matter if master and slave had had merely a verbal agreement.
The situation in South Carolina and Georgia was very different indeed from that in the Upper South. In 1779, with the British achieving one victory after another in the Lower South, and gathering hordes of black recruits, the Continental Congress demanded action. Delegates had long since reversed themselves on the matter of allowing black men into the Continental Army. Now they took an even more radical stance. South Carolinians must consent to the creation of one or more black regiments. The state needed to muster at least 3,000 black men without further delay. It went without saying that South Carolina would have to draw most of those men from its slave population, and obviously the authorities would need to guarantee the black soldiers their freedom. This initiative on the part of the Continental Congress was not about the morality or immorality of slavery: it was about victory or defeat.
The members of South Carolina’s planter elite threw up their hands in horror. Slaves outnumbered whites in the state, and that made them feel very vulnerable. They pointed to past episodes of racial unrest. The slaves were constantly plotting, sometimes with the help of free black relatives and friends. If the Continental Congress forced South Carolina’s slave owners to emancipate and arm their slaves, there would be an orgy of violence. Black men would go on the rampage. They would not fight the British. They would kill their masters instead. Lawmakers announced that rather than accede to the demands of Congress they would pull out of the war effort. Georgia’s leaders announced that they would follow suit. Black men, enslaved and free, in the Lower South did serve in the Revolution, but with some notable exceptions they did so on the British side.
And after June 1779, there was even more reason for black men to do so. On June 30, royal Commander-in-Chief Sir Henry Clinton, realizing that the military use of African Americans could play a decisive role in winning the war, announced that it was official British policy to liberate any slave who made it to British lines. Seeking their freedom, thousands of slaves flocked to the loyalists, who used them in arms as well as in various noncombat posts. In several cities, including Philadelphia and New York, the British organized companies of Black Pioneers to do everything from guarding prisoners to keeping the streets clean. In the North and the South black recruits foraged, spied, drove wagons, and served as personal attendants to British officers.
In addition to participating in the land-based conflict, black men took part in many naval actions. Tough and dangerous though life in the navy might be, it was as good a means of gaining one’s liberty as enlisting in the army, and the prospect of plunder appealed just as strongly t
o black men as it did to white men. Fugitive slaves, especially those with seafaring experience, joined the Royal Navy in search of freedom. Other fugitives, along with hundreds of black men who were legally free, joined the Continental Navy. Almost all of the newly independent states created their own navies and each faced the same problem—getting enough experienced men and boys to crew their vessels. Free blacks volunteered because they believed in the patriot cause or because they understood that sea service generally meant equal pay for equal work. The enslaved looked for captains they thought might not inquire into the legal status of any sturdy-looking man who was eager to serve. Again and again slave owners lamented that valuable “property” had run away and headed to the closest seaport. Recapturing a slave who had gone to sea was far more challenging than retaking that same individual while he was still on dry land, and if he survived he was obviously going to make sure he did not return to his “home” port.
