Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  As for the officers, they at first were granted the freedom to live anywhere within fifty miles of the newly built Barracks, but that wide radius later was reduced. Naturally, they still were expected to supervise their enlisted personnel at the Barracks campsite. There, the Revolutionary War POWs were guarded by six hundred area volunteers, “young men apprehensive of being drafted into the Continental forces and eager to enlist for a year’s duty close to home.”

  Jefferson’s spirited defense of the Albemarle location had much in its favor, to be sure. Wrote Moore: “Although…[his] appraisal may have been a bit too optimistic, it is true that Virginia could house and feed these troops in the midst of war more easily than any other state; and it is equally true that as the officers and men became accustomed to their surroundings, they discovered incarceration in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains was not so wretched an existence as first supposed.” Their Barracks campsite soon boasted “a commissary store, a coffeehouse and a theater.” Further, “John Hawkins, an enterprising local citizen, built four houses of entertainment equipped with billiard tables, an undertaking inaugurated without permission from the authorities.”

  If, as Moore also reported, “the center of all this [POW-related] activity had taken on the appearance of a small town,” a town “suddenly ranked as a major concentration of population within Virginia,” why then the sharply declining population of said “town”? In barely a year, the four thousand POWs who had arrived in January of 1779 had dwindled to just three thousand, a loss of one-fourth.

  They hadn’t died; they hadn’t been released. They escaped!

  By the end of 1780, with British forces threatening to draw close, they were moved after all—by then, the POWs on hand numbered a mere two thousand, half the original roster. Moore suggests that perhaps the homegrown guard force was willing to wink at escapes, “if the prisoners seemed intent upon settling in the New World and expressed no desire to fight again under the British flag.”

  Then, too, “Some of the British certainly joined up with (nearby) Cornwallis; but the Germans, for the most part, had little heart for this foreign expedition and by the hundreds fled westward across the mountains into surrounding counties of the Shenandoah Valley to be welcomed in their native tongue by their former compatriots [Valley settlers who migrated southward from Pennsylvania]. There they took wives, raised families, and became, through the vagaries of war, American citizens.”

  When all had left the Barracks, many with heavy heart, and a silence had settled upon their former campsite, the land’s owner, John Harvie, notes historian Moore, stood to benefit from their recent presence. As he himself observed, “The prisoners by their own sweat and toil had cleared an area six miles in circumference around their little town.”

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  Additional notes: Still more Hessian prisoners were held in Staunton, Virginia, then a town of about thirty homes and located right in the Shenandoah Valley about forty miles west of Charlottesville. According to a Hessian officer’s letter to a relative, the enlisted men held there could enjoy a vegetable garden, church, wells, taverns, even a theater or “comedy house” that put on plays twice a week. Wrote the officer also: “Very good pieces are performed which, because of their satirical additions, do not always please the Americans, wherefore they are forbidden by their superiors to attend these comedies.”

  Back in the Charlottesville area, ranking German officer Riedesel and his wife “associated freely with Jefferson, his wife, and other local gentry,” reported Moore. But the Germans “complained loudly of weather conditions which frightened them, especially extreme heat and high winds,” Moore added. “The baron succumbed to sunstroke on one occasion, and the baroness expressed fear that Colle [the private home in which they were staying] might be wrecked during a storm.”

  Then, too, British officer Thomas Anburey, also a prisoner, later produced a popular, sometimes exaggerated account of his days in Albemarle. The owner of the plantation where he was housed, wrote the Englishman, began his day with a drink of rum and sugar, toured his fields for a few hours, then returned for a “breakfast” of cold meat, toast, hominy, and cider. Then came a noon drink, followed at 2 P.M. by dinner and a rest or nap for several hours. After that, more alcoholic beverages. Wrote Anburey: “During all this he is neither drunk nor sober, but in a state of stupefaction.”

  Be that as it may, the conditions under which the British and Hessian prisoners were held in Albemarle County were far better than the grim prison ships and other deplorable facilities where American prisoners were often held. So good was the situation in Albemarle, for that matter, that Anburey had to note the reluctance of many fellow prisoners to leave—especially since in their carefree days at the Barracks, they had spent personal funds improving their own living conditions.

  From Slaves to Soldiers

  WHERE WERE THE BLACKS—WHO HAD ONLY RECENTLY BEEN BROUGHT TO North America from Africa—during the American Revolution? Not only in standout individual cases, but also by the thousands they were very visible as allies for both sides, British and American. Their presence in America was very much on the white public’s mind, especially in the Southern colonies.

  In Virginia, for instance, Royal Governor Dunmore stirred up a boiling controversy and generated white resentment against his (and therefore, the Crown’s) authority by his bald attempt in 1775 to free the colony’s slaves—not from a sudden surge of benevolence, but to recruit them as soldiers against the revolutionaries. If he sought to bend Virginia to his will, however, he didn’t count on the fact that it was the slave owners who held the reins of power, not the slaves themselves. To take advantage of Dunmore’s offer, a slave would have to escape, make his way through potentially hostile countryside and reach British lines. Obviously, it was a situation fraught with all kinds of difficulties. If blessed with a family, would the slave go alone? But how could he take his family with him? And if alone, would he ever see his family again?

  After Lexington and Concord, Dunmore had taken refuge with his own family aboard the British ship Fowey in the York River. From there, he directed raids against Norfolk and environs. Still, his larger strategy was to raise an army of Indians, blacks, and Loyalist whites to fight alongside the few Royal Marines and other troops he had by his side. After scoring a painful victory over the rebels in early November, he issued his proclamation declaring “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s Troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to his Majesty’s Crown and dignity.”

  As he apparently failed to see, he immediately touched upon long-held white fears of slave insurrection—indeed, he seemed to be encouraging that very spectre to take form. As the radical Virginian Archibald Cary once said, the white colonists were all the more united against Dunmore because they “resent the pointing of a dagger to their throats, through the hands of their slaves.” To the relief of white Americans, few slaves took up the royal governor’s call to arms. By Dunmore’s own statement, no more than three hundred blacks responded to his call. Defeated in battle at the end of 1775 at Great Bridge, Virginia, Dunmore soon was gone from the scene.

  Even so, white fears of possible slave revolts still lingered on. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, adopted in mid-1776, at one point charged that the king “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” Three years later, Patrick Henry asserted that if the British returned to Virginia, they would offer “an asylum for our slaves.” Worse: “[The slaves] will flock to their standards, and form the flower of their army. They will rival the Hessian or Highlander, if possible, in cruelty and desolation.”

  The fact is, thousands of blacks, perhaps 100,000 by some estimates, did flee from outright slavery or from Patriot strongholds to go behind British lines and even to serve the British, North and South, before the Revolutionary War ended—but in supportive, often menial j
obs rather than as combatants. Thus, they were employed as wagoners, laborers, cooks, even as musicians. A few served as spies, passing back and forth between the lines. Or they could be scouts and guides in territory unfamiliar to the British.

  The British themselves sometimes appeared to be leery of converting former slaves into real soldiers, Lord Dunmore’s strategy notwithstanding. Lord Cornwallis, for instance, could have used considerable added manpower in his Southern campaign leading up to the debacle (for him) at Yorktown in 1781. Yet, in February of that very year, he issued orders forbidding blacks attached to his army to carry firearms. He subsequently decided they should carry identification tickets or be arrested. In other cases, though, all-black regiments fought for the British or the Patriots, just as individuals did. The British had their Black Pioneers, a company within the Guides and Pioneers, and their King of England’s Soldiers in Georgia. The American side saw a regiment of blacks from Rhode Island take to the field in an abortive attack against the British at Newport in 1778. Then, too, French Admiral Charles d’Estaing carried an all-black regiment from Haiti with him for his abortive attack on the British at Savannah, Georgia, in 1779.

  By some estimates, for that matter, by 1779, fifteen out of every one hundred Continental Army members were black. Not only were free blacks allowed to enlist, but whites drafted for army duty by their states could send slaves in their place, often with a promise of future freedom for doing so. In the South, though, many thousands of slaves “joined” the British, but not always of their own volition since many actually were seized from their American owners. Thousands were more like refugees or camp followers than trained soldiers. They wound up as orderlies, cooks, other kinds of servants, even mistresses to white soldiers.

  Still others dug and erected fortifications, as at Yorktown. And there, said onlooking German officer Jonathan Ewald: “All our black friends, who had been freed and dragged away to prevent them from working in the fields, and who had served very well in making entrenchments, were chased toward the enemy. They trembled at having to go back to their former owners.”

  Among the Americans, of course, it was a contradiction in terms to see many leaders in the fight for freedom, independence, and personal liberties continue to own slaves. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves until the day of his death. George Washington, who went to war with his mulatto manservant Billy Lee at his side, freed his slaves in his will…but not until his wife Martha passed away as well.

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  The “black Hessians” were engaged in the fighting on behalf of the Crown, in ranks of the British. No, make that the ranks of the Germans…the Hessians. In fact, the Hessians in America welcomed blacks as recruits, allowed many of them to take up arms as fellow soldiers, and apparently accepted them more or less as equals, without racial stigma.

  The numbers were not great, only 115 by one informed estimate. And it must be said that paid soldierly service with the Hessians was no panacea even for a former slave. Many of the “black Hessians” died from smallpox and other maladies, while roughly 20 percent found it desirable to desert, according to David L. Valuska in The American Revolution, 1775–1783. Deserters who returned on their own volition normally were not severely punished, but woe to the man who failed to return and later was caught! One Jacob, reports the encyclopedia account, deserted some time after enlisting in a Hessian military unit at the age of thirteen. Caught two years after disappearing, he was “sentenced to run a gauntlet of 200 men for two successive days.”

  Most of the black recruits taken in by the Hessians entered service as drummers, then became a musketeer or grenadier when they grew bigger. Perhaps Jacob was one of that younger crowd, perhaps not. In any case, not every black approaching the Hessian units could count on becoming a fighting man. According to records available in the Hessian military archives in Marburg, Germany, some of the black recruits were listed as servants, orderlies, wagoners…even “lackeys.”

  Whatever their assignment, says the Valuska account, “African Americans were willingly recruited into the Hessian service. The motivations for black enlistments were quite simply freedom and security.” In some cases, the black Hessians went back to Germany with their comrades-in-arms after the war was over. “There are records of black soldiers in Hesse being baptized or married,” writes Valuska. Further, “Old manuscripts and paintings provided documentation of blacks serving in the guard battalions of Hesse-Kassel. Church diaries of the garrison congregations contain entries of the births and deaths of black soldiers and their dependents.”

  By 1830, though, the records in Hesse-Kassel contain no more mention of the American blacks or their descendants—in less than one hundred years, it appeared, they had been completely assimilated by the surrounding German community.

  Long before, ironically enough, the body of a black Hessian who died in Germany was the subject of an anatomical dissection at the Collegium Carolinium in Kassel—“reportedly the first autopsy in Europe of a black cadaver,” says Valuska. Great was the surprise of the German scientists when they found his internal organs were “exactly like those of the white[s].”

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  Additional notes: Disappointment often was the ultimate outcome for many other former slaves who temporarily found freedom and employment with the British during the Revolution. About three thousand who had found sanctuary in British-held New York were allowed to migrate to Nova Scotia with other Loyalists. All of them, white or black, expected to receive outright grants of land as reward for their loyalty. With a total of thirty thousand or so Loyalists descending upon officials in Nova Scotia, however, the land grant bureaucracy was simply overwhelmed. Only about half the blacks entitled to grants actually received them, and even then, the land parcels were ten to fifty acres in size, instead of the one hundred promised earlier.

  Years later, two thousand or so blacks from Nova Scotia and adjoining New Brunswick joined in a migration of London-based free blacks to Sierre Leone, Africa. Here, too, however, the promises of land grants rarely became a reality, thanks in large part to infighting among the inexperienced organizers. Even more heartbreaking, disease and other hardships took such a toll that only about one thousand of them were left alive after their first rainy season in Sierre Leone. Thirty years later, not one of the surviving Loyalist settlers was a full-time farmer, as originally envisioned. Instead, just about all were traders or craftsmen.

  Back in post-Revolutionary America, of course, the practice of slavery persisted, largely in the South, and would continue until the Civil War came along nearly a century later. South Carolina’s Patriot leader Henry Laurens had seen to it that the peace treaty of 1783 between Great Britain and the newly formed United States would forbid the British from taking away blacks who were the “property” of slave-owning Americans. Some blacks, of course, retained their freedom anyway, some were sold to a bleak life of slavery in the West Indies, and others became slaves in America again.

  Lord Cornwallis, defeated at Yorktown in 1781, left four thousand former slaves milling around on their own in Virginia. More fortunate were the three thousand or so former slaves who found their way into British-held New York. They owed their subsequent safe conduct to Nova Scotia (and its often harsh uncertainties, true) to British General Sir Guy Carleton, who decided on his own that the new peace treaty could not apply to blacks who had been in his British-held territory for more than a year. After such a long period, they simply weren’t anybody’s property, he decided.

  Two thousand, or two-thirds, of the blacks granted his certificates of freedom came from the four Southern states of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina.

  Incidental Intelligence

  WHEN “GENTLEMAN JOHNNY” BURGOYNE SET SAIL FOR HIS INVASION OF UPPER New York from Canada in June of 1777, he graced the waters of Lake Champlain with a flotilla of boats and barges a mile long. Rarely one to do without the luxuries befitting a favorite of the king, he carried with him many comforts of home, along with an artillery
and baggage train that would require 1,500 horses to haul once he and his 8,000-plus men reached land and began their tedious overland journey toward Albany and the vital Hudson Valley corridor. It would require thirty carts to lug Burgoyne’s personal baggage upon that same rough terrain that lay ahead.

  Nor was Burgoyne singular in looking to personal comfort. His second in command, the German Baron Riedesel, thoughtfully brought along his wife, their three young daughters, and two maids.

  Seizing carelessly garrisoned Fort Ticonderoga with ease, Burgoyne continued his ponderous way as far as Skenesborough without major incident or trouble. “Here in the yellow fieldstone house of Tory Philip Skene,” reported George F. Scheer and Hugh Rankin in their book Rebels & Redcoats, “Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne lived up to his name, dining choicely, grumbling genially over the paucity of good madeira and port, and radiating charm for his new mistress, the wife of one of his commissaries.”

  Just twenty-three miles away, beckoning as his next stop, was Fort Edward on the Hudson. As events turned out, Fort Edward might as well have been many leagues away, so long did it take Burgoyne’s army to complete that short leg of his Hudson Valley campaign. He could have returned to Ticonderoga for a shorter, easier overland route, but he chose instead to follow Wood Creek for seven or so miles, then to slog through swamps, bogs, forests, broken-down bridges, and the like marking an unusually primitive wagon trail to Fort Edward.