African Americans in the Revolutionary War
African Americans played a significant role in the Revolutionary War, with both free and enslaved individuals participating on both the British and American sides. Their contributions included serving as soldiers, spies, and laborers. Despite facing discrimination and unequal treatment, their involvement in the war helped to lay the groundwork for the eventual abolition of slavery in the United States.
7 Key excerpts on "African Americans in the Revolutionary War"
eBook - ePubA People's History of the American Revolution
How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence
- Ray Raphael(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- The New Press(Publisher)
...In the North, some slaves were freed after serving in the military in place of their masters. Freedom was the name of the game—and the stakes were much higher for African Americans than for patriots who complained they were “slaves” to Parliament. These happenings, crucial to a comprehensive understanding of the Revolution, have been ignored in the mythic tale of our nation’s founding. It is time to break from the mold. By uncovering the stories of farmers, artisans, and laborers, we discern how plain folk helped create a revolution strong enough to evict the British Empire from the thirteen colonies. And by digging deeper still, we learn how people with no political standing—women, Native Americans, African Americans—altered the shape of a war conceived by others....
eBook - ePubRevolutionary America, 1763-1815
A Sourcebook
- Francis D. Cogliano, Kirsten E. Phimister, Francis D. Cogliano, Kirsten E. Phimister(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 6 African Americans in the Age of Revolution Introduction “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” So asked the English lexicographer Samuel Johnson at the height of the imperial crisis. Johnson directly addressed the contradiction at the heart of the American Revolution. When the American revolutionaries committed themselves to independence and republicanism premised on an assertion of equal rights, they did so despite the fact that one-fifth of the American population was enslaved and denied the legal and political rights for which the rebels fought. Some Americans argued that the right to hold human beings as property was among the rights for which they fought, as the November 1775 petition from Patriots in Halifax Virginia suggests (document 1). The Revolution and the War of Independence presented African-American slaves with opportunities to win their liberty. In many cases, particularly in the South, the British presented slaves with the best chance of attaining freedom. Early in the war Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to the slaves of rebels who fled their masters, like those in Halifax County, and supported the British war effort (document 2). This set a precedent which the British oft en followed during the war; many slaves associated the British with freedom. A Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, perhaps more than any other American, epitomized the contradiction criticized by Samuel Johnson. Documents 3a–d reflect the range of Jefferson’s thinking on the subject...
eBook - ePub- John K. Thornton(Author)
- 1999(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The war resolved itself into a series of sieges and assaults on these positions whether they were held by rebels or by government forces, interspersed with smaller actions and raids. 86 The Africans’ greatest weakness, however, would ultimately be their ethnic particularism, small scale of organization, and willingness to accept partial victories that could not be sustained. For the longer fight, and especially for taking and seizing power, it was ultimately Creoles who predominated. They did so by seeking foreign military advice and by organizing their own armies, loyal to them and following European conventions of discipline and tactics. 87 This, in turn, gave them the edge in attacking fortified camps, still the main course of operations in the Revolution. The Africans bought them the time and opportunity to do this in the first year of the Revolution, and saved them in their darkest hour, when the French forces of General Leclerc sought to reconquer the island in 1802. The drama of revolt was also probably the clearest example of a direct influence of African military ideas and organization in America. But outright revolts were fairly rare in American history; it was far more common for slaves who wished to change their lot to run away, sometimes secretly, often in small groups to someone or somewhere where they could be sheltered and establish some degree of autonomy. Indeed, many of the revolts ultimately resulted in the establishment of a runaway or rebel community in the mountains or forests, or among allied Native Americans. Since runaway communities developed slowly and were less likely to be mono-ethnic and draw from people with very similar backgrounds in Africa, the idea of direct transfer is less significant. But at the same time, runaway communities were usually created and maintained by African-born people, and their background and assumptions cannot be ignored...
eBook - ePubAmerican Stories
Living American History: v. 1: To 1877
- Jason Ripper(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...African-Americans fought in every major engagement in the north, including the battle at Monmouth Courthouse in which General Washington turned defeat into victory by spurring his horse through the crowd of retreating soldiers and admonishing them to fight back. Black soldiers were also in the Patriot ranks at Yorktown, where a German adviser, Baron von Closen, watched the Continental Army pass by and remarked, “three-quarters of the Rhode Island regiment consists of negroes, and that regiment is the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in its maneuvers.” 11 Participants in the American Revolution had a variety of opinions about “negroes.” Mary Jemison was sympathetic, and after recalling the starving time that followed General Sullivan’s attack on her village, she added, “At that time, two negroes, who had run away from their masters sometime before, were the only inhabitants of those flats. They lived in a small cabin and had planted and raised a large field of corn.” They hired her to husk, and she remembered that “I have laughed a thousand times to myself when I have thought of the good old negro, who hired me, who fearing that I should get taken or injured by the Indians, stood by me constantly when I was husking, with a loaded gun in his hand.” Jemison looked white, and the “old negro” must not have known that she was also Seneca or he would not have feared for her capture by the very same Indians she considered family. Jemison’s fond reminiscence of these African-Americans is countered by Joseph Plumb Martin’s unkind memories of black people he met while campaigning. Martin sarcastically recalled that a house where he “was quartered had a smart-looking Negro man, a great politician...
eBook - ePubThe War for Independence and the Transformation of American Society
War and Society in the United States, 1775-83
- Harry M. Ward(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER TWELVE African Americans The war altered the lives of many bondsmen. Runaways, seeking freedom, fled to British hnes, and slaves in the war zones of the South were treated as contraband. More than 50,000 slaves (one-tenth of the black population) found refuge with the British or were carried off by British military forces. Thomas Jefferson, with some exaggeration, estimated that 30,000 Virginia slaves went off to the British in 1781 alone. Twenty thousand (one-fourth of the state’s black population) did the same in South Carolina, 1779–81; more than 5,000 slaves departed with the British evacuation of Savannah, Georgia; and several thousand slaves from New York City and the surrounding area and from northern New Jersey sought British protection. 1 While black family life stabihzed in the non-war zones, upon the conclusion of the war the huge western migration abetted the domestic slave trade, and migrating planters often divested themselves of some of their slaves or left them behind, causing separation of members of slave families. From 1780 to 1810, 75,000 slaves from Virginia and Maryland went to Kentucky or elsewhere on the southwest frontier, and 15,000 slaves in Georgia and South Carohna moved into the backcountry of these states or into the territories that became Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. 2 The American Revolution, as a war of liberation, challenged the rationale for the justification of slaveholding. If, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, all men are imbued by natural right with a claim to freedom, then slaves should be emancipated...
eBook - ePubWater from the Rock
Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age
- Sylvia R. Frey(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
...But the British path toward the military employment of slaves was smoothed by the decision of Americans to accept volunteered slaves for military service. Until the late seventeenth century blacks served in colonial militias, but only in a limited capacity and usually in noncombative roles. 124 Fear of mutiny and the widely held belief that mustering slaves among freeholders was inappropriate, eventually led to their exclusion during peacetime in the mature plantation colonies of the upper South. 125 In periods of war the scarcity of manpower forced most colonies to accept slaves and free blacks for military service in exchange for the promise of freedom. Blacks fought in mixed companies in all of the colonial wars. In the lower South, frontier warfare allowed blacks to play a major role, often as combat troops. Black soldiers fought in the Tuscarora War of 1711–1712 and played an active part in the Yamasee War of 1715. 126 As late as 1755 a shortage of white manpower and imperial rivalries along the vulnerable southern frontier forced the Georgia assembly to authorize the recruitment of blacks into the militia. 127 At the outbreak of the American Revolution several colonies, all of them in the North, accepted blacks in militia units. Blacks were with the patriot forces at Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill. Several served with Connecticut units during the Boston campaign. 128 At the time of the Lexington engagement, however, rumors that slaves were mobilizing to massacre the citizens left defenseless when the militia marched off to fight caused such panic among white citizens that the Massachusetts Committee of Safety decided in May to prohibit the enlistment of slaves in any of the colony’s armies. 129 Five days after he was appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, the Virginia slaveholder, issued orders against enlisting blacks, although those already in the army were allowed to remain...
eBook - ePub- Lt. Col. (Ret.) Michael Lee Lanning(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Citadel Press(Publisher)
...Appendix A Important Dates in African American Participation in the Revolutionary War 1619 August English colonists purchase first slaves in North America at Jamestown. 1638 December 12 Ship Desire delivers first slaves to New England in Boston. 1639 January 16 Virginia General Assembly bars arming of slaves. 1640 July 9 Virginia colonial court rules on differences between white and Black indentured servants. 1688 February 18 Society of Friends in Pennsylvania publish the “Germantown Protest.” 1712 April 7 Slave revolt in New York City 1739 September 9 Slave revolt in South Carolina 1741 February 28 Slave revolt in New York City 1770 March 5 Boston Massacre June 28 Quaker Anthony Benezet opens first nonsegregated school in Philadelphia. 1772 June 22 Mansfield Decision abolishes slavery in England. 1773 December 16 Boston Tea Party 1774 September 5 First Continental Congress convenes in Philadelphia. October 2 Continental Congress votes to discontinue slave trade after December. 1. November 2 Slave revolt in St. Andrew’s Parish, Georgia. 1775 March 8 Thomas Paine publishes African Slavery in America. April 14 First American Abolition Society elects officers. April 18 Paul Revere and William Dawes set off on their midnight ride. April 19 Battles of Lexington and Concord. May 1 Americans capture Fort Ticonderoga. May 10 Second Continental Congress convenes in Philadelphia. June 15 Second Continental Congress appoints George Washington commander in chief of the army. June 17 Battle of Bunker Hill. July 3 Prince Hall establishes the first Black Mason Lodge in Boston. July 9 Continental army orders recruiters not to enlist any “stroller negro, or vagabond.” October 13 Congress authorizes the formation of the Continental navy. November 7 The earl of Dunmore issues proclamation offering freedom to slaves who desert their rebel owners to join the British. November 10 Continental Marines founded...
