Even the famed Abigail Adams advised her husband that she wished “most sincerely there was not a slave in the province; it always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” And if they chose to listen, colonists were given reminders by their own slaves of the contradiction they so readily accepted. In 1773 and 1774, Massachusetts slaves petitioned the colonial legislature five times, asserting that “we have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedom.” In a famous 1773 petition, four slaves who claimed to be speaking for all the slaves in Massachusetts declared that they expected “great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them.”21
The American Revolution brought unprecedented opportunities for freedom and the possibility to forever alter the institution of slavery. The rhetoric of freedom and liberty that defined the contest between the colonies and Great Britain inspired the slaves. But the message of freedom did not come exclusively from the Patriot side. In fact, in most of the 13 American colonies (it’s important to remember that on the eve of the Revolution, Britain had 26 colonies overall, plus two unofficial settlements), a slave’s best chance of securing his liberty came from Britain rather than the new United States. Struggling in the crosscurrents of many nations and conflicting appeals, most Africans Americans felt no natural allegiance to the Patriot cause—they simply wanted freedom.
HISTORIANS HAVE DONE A RATHER POOR JOB OF ASSESSING THE ROLE OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE REVOLUTION—on either side of the conflict. Until relatively recently, the subject barely appeared in histories of the conflict, and to this day we do not possess anything approaching an accurate count of how many people of African descent fought on either side of the war. Historians still rely on an estimate of the number of black Patriots formulated more than 70 years ago, asserting without any concrete evidence that about 5,000 African Americans fought for the colonists. This number is almost assuredly too low, as at the famed Battle of Bunker Hill, meticulous research has uncovered that there were more than 100 African American participants in that one engagement.22 Despite the efforts of historians stretching back to the black abolitionist William C. Nell to establish the centrality of blacks to American independence, there is no question that the majority of African Americans—most of whom were slaves—either took no part in the conflict or at the first opportunity fled to the British.23
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, Patrick Henry, George Washington, and other slaveholders from New York to South Carolina lost their property to His Majesty’s Royal Army during the war. For those slaves who remained on the farm, most owners believed that they were simply waiting for the right opportunity to flee. Richard Henry Lee, Virginia member of the Continental Congress and later a U.S. senator, lamented that all his neighbors had “lost every slave they had in the world….”24 Jefferson believed that Virginia alone lost about 30,000 slaves in one year. The number of fugitive slaves encamped, ironically, on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston Harbor (the Ellis Island of American slavery) became so threatening that Henry Laurens, the former slave trader and chairman of the city’s Committee of Safety, ordered a Patriot raid on the camp.
On December 18, 1775, 54 soldiers disguised as Indians burned the shelters of the fugitives, killed several, and seized four in a raid meant to teach blacks a lesson and embarrass the English, who at the time maintained a small presence in the city but soon left. Earlier, Laurens also had authorized the liquidation of another group of blacks on Tybee Island off the Georgia coast. Again dressed as Indians, about 70 whites slaughtered the entire group.
White Charlestonians lived in dire fear that the tens of thousands of blacks in the region would rise up against them. A few months earlier, in the summer of 1775, jurors condemned to death a free black harbor pilot named Thomas Jeremiah on a rumor that he was planning a slave insurrection with the English. Although Jeremiah was free, successful, and property-owning, and although lacking any concrete evidence against him, city officials ignored the objections of the colonial governor and hanged him, then burned his corpse in the public square. Before he died, someone overheard the condemned man warn that God would one day punish the city for “shedding his innocent blood.”25
Overwhelming evidence points to the fact that whenever British forces approached, slaves took the opportunity to flee. They did so with good reason. On November 7, 1775, while standing on a captured Patriot vessel, Royal Governor of Virginia Lord Dunmore offered freedom to those slaves who would enlist in the King’s army. By proclamation, he announced that he did “hereby further declare all indentured 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.” Although Dunmore’s “Ethiopian” Regiment proved militarily ineffective, with hundreds dying of a smallpox epidemic, symbolically, it wreaked havoc among Americans.
The Patriots issued no such declaration and, in fact, for a time rejected the recruitment of all black soldiers, terrified by the idea that Dunmore’s proclamation would spark a bloodthirsty slave insurrection. Ironically, the ex–slave trader Henry Laurens (who was involved in the sale and purchase of the child Priscilla from Bunce Island) and his son John, an aide-de-camp to Washington, argued for a general recruitment of slaves with an offer of freedom at the close of the war, but South Carolina repudiated the idea. More important and with great portent for the future, George Washington refused to support the recruitment of slaves, although he did approve of allowing free blacks to serve. He feared dire economic consequences for his own estate from what likely would have turned into a move toward general emancipation; and when the Laurenses pressed their plans on him, Washington contemplated selling off all his slaves.26
While the Patriots offered African Americans a mixed message at best, the Crown early and warmly welcomed African Americans into their ranks. Four to five thousand black troops, the total number assumed to have fought in the Patriot cause, were with Lord Cornwallis just before the surrender at Yorktown; many of those who managed to survive the end of the war departed with the British. The same scenario occurred wherever British forces had to evacuate their troops. They withdrew about 30,000 Loyalists and African Americans just from New York, which included at least 3,000 fugitive slaves and likely many more. As many as 8,000 black people left Charleston, South Carolina, in the final evacuation, although most departed as slaves with their Loyalist owners.27
Determining with precision the number of slaves who won their freedom as a result of the war is extremely difficult. Some scholars estimate that as many as 100,000 slaves at least made an attempt to reach British lines. Whatever the number, the majority who ran away never secured their freedom, and were either returned to their owners, as was stipulated in the terms of the peace treaty with Britain, disappeared without record, or died. But it is likely that at least 10,000 former slaves managed to win their freedom as a result of the war, and the actual figure may even have surpassed 20,000, since British records reveal that about 10,000 more blacks settled in Canada after the conflict ended. In one sense, the American Revolution had turned into the largest slave insurrection in modern history.28
Life of George Washington, The Farmer, by Junius Brutus Stearns, circa 1853, Paris. Lithograph. Library of Congress.
MOUNT VERNON, GEORGE WASHINGTON’S ESTATE OVERLOOKING THE POTOMAC RIVER OUTSIDE ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA, IS AN AMERICAN ICON. But when the Revolution broke out, more than 200 slaves lived there—all owned by the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and his wife, Martha. By the time of the president’s death in 1799, George and Martha Washington owned 317 African Americans, including 98 children.29 One Mount Vernon slave was a groomsman named Harry Washington, and his story vividly illustrates the issues at stake for African Americans during the Revolution.
Harry’s first confirmed attempt to run away came in 1771, at about age 31, but he was soon captured and returned to the plantation. Was he motivated by the separation of his family or by Revolutionary ideology? We do not know. It is likely, however, that Mount Vernon slaves quickly became cognizant of the growing strife between the colonies and England—perhaps Washington even expressed his anger over Britain’s attempt to “enslave” the colonists within the hearing of some of his slaves. It is difficult to imagine that Harry and his fellow slaves did not know that their master was about to become head of the colonists’ army.31
Without a doubt, Harry also had his own ideas about freedom. Washington, who took the time to get to know many of his slaves, was anything but confident that they would remain loyal if the war came to the region. After all, his slaves had run away before, even in the 1750s, and his cousin Lunt Washington (1737–1796), who managed the estate in the general’s absence, expressed both confidence and concern over the state of bonded labor at Mount Vernon. While somewhat ambivalent about the slaves, he felt they would largely remain loyal, but thought that the white indentured servants would run away at the first opportunity. Even so, he knew that like himself, the slaves understood that “liberty is sweet.”
Lunt Washington completely misread the slaves he governed. In 1781, 17 escaped from Mount Vernon when a British warship, the Savage, appeared in the Potomac near the estate. Earlier, on July 24, 1776, a small fleet of British warships sailed up the Potomac and skirmished with some local militia very near to the general’s plantation. In the midst of the confusion, three white servants ran away and offered their services to the Crown. Harry might have taken the opportunity to join the runaways, but the British officer who received the servants made no mention of a black slave. Harry later claimed to have run away from Mount Vernon in 1776, but the exact method that he used remains uncertain. By the war’s end, at least 17 slaves—and likely many more—owned by the Washingtons and his cousin had followed Harry and fled Mount Vernon. General Washington recovered only two runaways after the surrender at Yorktown and sometime later recovered a few more in Philadelphia, totaling about six or seven. Although he had hired fugitive slave catchers to bring them all back, most got away to live free.32
Harry eventually entered a British Pioneer unit as a corporal; the troops, attached to an artillery regiment, did more fatigue work than fighting. He traveled to New York when Lord Dunmore withdrew the remnants of his Ethiopian Regiment and was then transferred to South Carolina. As the war progressed and England’s fortunes failed, Harry was evacuated back to New York in 1782, where the following year he and thousands of other freed slaves—including two others from Mount Vernon—were resettled to Nova Scotia.
But the new “freedom” offered by the Crown soured for many American fugitive slaves. The British herded the black refugees into a lonely community they named Birchtown, a windswept, uninviting parcel of land thick with rocks and scrub oak, not a promising location for a farm. But Harry tried his best, marrying a woman named Sara, converting to Methodism, and building a house on 40 acres. When the opportunity arose to resettle in the British colony of Sierra Leone, Harry took his wife and three children there. By 1800, he and many of the settlers had become disenchanted with white domination over the colony, especially their inability to own property, forcing them to live much as the sharecroppers of the post–Civil War era would in the former Confederate states. Ever the rebel, he and several other settlers joined an independence movement, but the colony’s government soon crushed the revolt. Harry’s freedom, tantalizingly offered by Great Britain, had turned to misfortune. He was exiled to Bullom Shore, an area north of the colony known for malaria, where the groomsman of George Washington died in obscurity.33
WHILE THE CROWN AT FIRST APPEARED TO OFFER AFRICAN AMERICANS A MORE PROMISING ROUTE TO FREEDOM, in reality most blacks faced a Hobson’s choice: whatever side they chose, the result was fraught with danger—disease, death, discrimination, even possible re-enslavement. Nevertheless, the British kept their word and freed the black Loyalists, resisting the demands of the victorious Patriots that their fugitive slaves be returned. Even if their subsequent lives in Nova Scotia or Sierra Leone proved to be far more difficult than they imagined, these former slaves were able to live as free men and women. Those who sided with the Patriots, at least in the North, stood a chance of enjoying an imperfect freedom in the new Republic, and so did their children.
Many thousands, how many we do not yet know, fought—and many died—at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill and Saratoga, Cowpens and Yorktown, and virtually every other major battle of the war. They helped to build a new country and only wanted what every other American expected: a stake in it and the opportunity to fulfill whatever destiny their talents and luck would provide. Jefferson’s inspiring words that “all men are created equal” represented a profound challenge to a slave society, ultimately opening a window of hope for some enslaved African Americans.
One such opening for a slave occurred in 1781 in rural Sheffield, Massachusetts, situated in the far western part of the state near the New York and Connecticut borders. The patriarchal-looking and hot-tempered Colonel John Ashley, a wealthy landowner, merchant, justice of the peace, legislator, and head of the local militia, dominated the region. He even had served as a judge on the County Court of Common Pleas before the Revolution and expected the appropriate deference. He married into a slave-owning family across the border in Columbia County, New York, and came into possession of a few slaves, including one named Mum Bett, born about 1744, and her younger sister Lizzie.
Ashley’s wife, Annetje Hogeboom, shared her husband’s disposition and in a rage against young Lizzie swung a fire shovel at her, but instead hit Mum Bett, who had raised her arm to protect her sister. The scar, which she “bore until the day of her death,” launched a legal process that ultimately led to her freedom and helped extinguish slavery in the commonwealth of Massachusetts.34
Outraged that her owner felt empowered to beat her “property,” Mum Bett left the Ashleys and walked a considerable distance to Stockbridge, where she met with the famed Federalist attorney Theodore Sedgwick, a friend of Ashley’s, to lodge a complaint against her owners for the assault and to win her freedom. Very likely, she had heard of the rights the colonists had won as a result of the Revolution. Moreover, given the political roles during the Revolution of her owner and that of Sedgwick, whom Mum Bett may have met as early as 1773, she probably possessed an understanding that the state’s new constitution of 1780 (John Adams’s handiwork) guaranteed the freedom and equality of the state’s citizens:
Article I. All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”35
Mum Bett, or Elizabeth Freeman, by Susan Anne Sedgwick, 1811. Watercolor miniature on ivory. Massachusetts Historical Society, Bridgeman Art Library.
Despite his friendship with Ashley, and despite the fact that he had once owned a slave himself, Sedgwick and the famed Connecticut lawyer Tapping Reeve took on Mum Bett’s case, planning to base it on the idea that Art
icle I of the constitution had effectively ended slavery in the commonwealth. This novel strategy made sense as other legal challenges, especially the Quok Walker series of cases, involved similar issues, developed simultaneously, and in one way or another were inspired by the ideology of the American Revolution that African Americans insisted was their rightful heritage, too. As historian Douglas Egerton has observed, these freedom cases that sprang up in the wake of independence showed that blacks “expected the Revolution to offer not merely new opportunities for freedom but also full participation in the new political order.”36
These court cases are full of ironies and contradictions. First, as we have mentioned, Sedgwick had been a slave owner and subsequently accepted another case in Rhode Island, but instead served as the attorney for a slave owner. Second, while he hired Mum Bett as a domestic after the close of the case—and she became a virtual family member, even buried in the family plot—Sedgwick never became an antislavery advocate. Third, Tapping Reeve ran an influential law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, where among his many students was John C. Calhoun, who would become one of the United States senators from South Carolina and arguably one of the South’s most articulate defenders of the institution of slavery.
The related Quok Walker cases had begun in the spring of 1781, when Walker left the employ of one Nathaniel Jennison, believing that he had an agreement to be freed when he turned 21. But when he abandoned the Jennison farm to work for John and Seth Caldwell, he was about 28 years old. Ironically, the Caldwell brothers were likely the sons of Walker’s original owner. Why Walker waited so long to establish his freedom remains a mystery. Jennison found Walker at the Caldwells—whom he later successfully sued for theft of his property’s labor—and beat him. Walker, like Mum Bett, had charged his “owner” with assault and asserted his freedom. He also convinced two of the state’s best lawyers, Levi Lincoln and Caleb Strong, to take his assault case and win his freedom by challenging the legitimacy of slavery in the commonwealth based on the state constitution. In a final irony, the mercurial Ashley, despite his refusal to accept freedom for Mum Bett and another slave named Zach Mullen, whom he also assaulted for running away, in the end left Mullen and two other slaves a legacy in his will.37
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