African Americans in the Revolution

The Paradox of Liberty and Slavery

The American Revolution presented an irreconcilable contradiction: a war fought in the name of liberty by a society in which approximately one-fifth of the population was enslaved. This contradiction was not lost on contemporaries. British observers noted the irony with satisfaction, and Samuel Johnson famously asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” American revolutionaries were aware of the contradiction but generally unwilling or unable to resolve it. The participation of African Americans in the war—on both sides—forced the issue into public discussion without producing a satisfactory resolution.

An estimated 5,000 African Americans served in the Continental Army and state militias during the war, and approximately 20,000 enslaved people fled to British lines in response to offers of freedom. For Black participants, the war was not primarily about abstract principles of natural rights or constitutional arguments about representation. It was about freedom—personal, immediate, and concrete. The choices they made reflected this reality, and their participation in the conflict was driven by pragmatic calculations about which side offered the best prospect for liberation.

The paradox extended to the rhetoric of the Revolution itself. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” was understood by its authors to apply primarily to white men of property. Thomas Jefferson’s original draft included a condemnation of the slave trade, but this passage was deleted at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia delegates. The revolution’s failure to address slavery directly ensured that the contradiction between American ideals and American practice would persist and intensify in the decades that followed.

Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation

The first significant British offer of freedom to enslaved Americans came on November 7, 1775, when John Murray, Earl of Dunmore and the last royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation declaring martial law and offering freedom to “all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms.” Dunmore’s motivation was military rather than humanitarian—he needed troops and sought to destabilize the Virginia gentry who led the resistance to British authority.

The proclamation provoked outrage among white Virginians, including many who had been ambivalent about independence. The prospect of armed enslaved men fighting against their masters touched the deepest fears of a slaveholding society. The proclamation was cited as evidence of British tyranny and was listed among the grievances that justified independence. Yet the proclamation also attracted approximately 800 enslaved people to Dunmore’s forces in the months that followed. These men were organized into the “Ethiopian Regiment” and saw combat at the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775, where Dunmore’s forces were defeated.

Disease—particularly smallpox—devastated Dunmore’s Black recruits, who lacked immunity and received inadequate medical care. By the time Dunmore abandoned Virginia in August 1776, only about 300 of the original recruits remained. But the precedent was established: the British would offer freedom to enslaved people who joined their cause, and thousands would take advantage of subsequent offers. Dunmore’s proclamation also had the unintended effect of pushing some slaveholders toward independence, as they calculated that British authority posed a greater threat to their property than republican government.

Black Soldiers in the Continental Army

The enlistment of African Americans in the Continental Army was initially resisted. In October 1775, Washington issued orders excluding Black soldiers from enlistment, reflecting the prejudices of Southern delegates to Congress and the fears of slaveholding officers. Free Black men who had served in the militia were discharged, and enslaved men were categorically barred. This policy was consistent with colonial laws that prohibited enslaved people from bearing arms and reflected the widespread assumption that military service was incompatible with slavery.

This policy proved unsustainable. Manpower shortages, the departure of white soldiers whose enlistments expired, and the British recruitment of enslaved people forced a gradual reversal. By early 1776, Washington had modified his position to allow the reenlistment of free Black soldiers who had previously served. Individual states, facing difficulty meeting Continental quotas, began enlisting free Black men and, in some cases, enslaved men whose masters consented.

The most significant organized effort to recruit Black soldiers was Rhode Island’s 1st Rhode Island Regiment, authorized in February 1778. The Rhode Island legislature offered freedom to enslaved men who enlisted, with compensation to their masters of up to £120 per man. Approximately 130 enslaved men joined the regiment, which served with distinction at the Battle of Rhode Island in August 1778 and in subsequent operations. Colonel Christopher Greene commanded the regiment, and contemporary accounts praised the Black soldiers’ courage and discipline. The regiment was integrated into the Rhode Island line in 1781, and its Black soldiers continued to serve until the end of the war.

Other states took different approaches. Massachusetts and New Hampshire enlisted Black soldiers without restriction, and free Black men from these states served throughout the war in integrated units. Connecticut authorized the enlistment of enslaved men with their masters’ consent, offering masters certificates for the value of the enslaved person. New York offered a land bounty to masters who enlisted enslaved men, with the promise of freedom upon discharge. Southern states were more reluctant; South Carolina and Georgia refused to enlist Black soldiers until the war’s final year, when desperate circumstances overcame resistance. The South Carolina legislature even considered a proposal to raise a force of 3,000 enslaved soldiers in 1779, but the plan was rejected by the planter elite who feared the implications of arming enslaved people.

Black Loyalists

The British offered freedom more consistently and on a larger scale than the Americans. Sir Henry Clinton’s Philipsburg Proclamation of June 1779 expanded on Dunmore’s earlier offer, declaring that any enslaved person who fled to British lines would be granted freedom and protection. This proclamation applied regardless of whether the person’s master was a Patriot or a Loyalist—a significant expansion that alarmed Loyalist slaveholders as well as Patriots.

An estimated 20,000 enslaved people fled to British lines during the war, though not all received freedom. Some were returned to Loyalist masters, and others were treated as military property rather than free persons. But thousands of Black Loyalists served the British cause as soldiers, laborers, pilots, and spies. The Black Pioneers, a company organized in 1776, served throughout the war in various capacities, including construction, foraging, and occasional combat. Colonel Tye, an enslaved man from New Jersey who escaped to British lines, became one of the war’s most effective partisan leaders, conducting raids in New Jersey that terrorized Patriot communities and demonstrated the military capabilities of Black soldiers.

The British evacuation of American ports at the war’s end created a crisis for Black Loyalists. The Treaty of Paris required the British to return “negroes and other property” to American claimants, and Southern slaveholders demanded the return of escaped enslaved people. British commanders, particularly Sir Guy Carleton in New York, resisted these demands, arguing that those who had been promised freedom could not be surrendered. Approximately 3,000 Black Loyalists were evacuated from New York in 1783, their names recorded in the “Book of Negroes,” and transported to Nova Scotia, where they faced difficult conditions and broken promises of land. Some later relocated to Sierra Leone, establishing a community of freed Black settlers in West Africa.

The Experience of Black Soldiers

Black soldiers in the Continental Army served under conditions that reflected the racial attitudes of the period. They were generally integrated into existing regiments rather than segregated into separate units (the 1st Rhode Island Regiment was an exception), and they performed the same duties as white soldiers. However, they were disproportionately assigned to labor details and were rarely promoted to noncommissioned officer ranks.

Pay and bounty provisions applied equally to Black and white soldiers in theory, but in practice, Black soldiers sometimes received less. The promise of land bounties was frequently unfulfilled for Black veterans, who faced discrimination in the postwar distribution of public lands. Some Black veterans successfully petitioned for pensions and land grants, but the process was more difficult for them than for white veterans, and many lacked the resources or connections to navigate the bureaucratic requirements.

Despite these inequities, military service provided Black veterans with a claim to citizenship and respect that they leveraged in the postwar period. Black veterans petitioned for pensions, participated in veterans’ organizations, and invoked their service in appeals for equal treatment. These claims were not always successful, but they established a tradition of Black military service that would continue through subsequent American wars and would be invoked in the struggle for civil rights.

The Revolution’s Impact on Slavery

The Revolution produced modest but significant changes in the institution of slavery in the Northern states. Vermont abolished slavery in its 1777 constitution. Pennsylvania enacted a gradual abolition law in 1780, the first such legislation in the Western Hemisphere. Massachusetts’s courts effectively abolished slavery through judicial decisions in the early 1780s, most notably in the case of Commonwealth v. Jennison (1783), which held that slavery was incompatible with the state constitution’s declaration of rights. Connecticut and Rhode Island followed with gradual abolition laws in 1784; New York enacted its gradual emancipation act in 1799, and New Jersey in 1804.

These changes were driven by multiple factors: the ideological contradiction between revolutionary principles and slavery, the declining economic importance of slavery in the North, the participation of Black soldiers in the war, and the activism of enslaved people themselves, who filed freedom suits and petitioned legislatures. But abolition in the North was gradual and often incomplete—New Jersey did not fully abolish slavery until the Civil War—and the institution became more deeply entrenched in the South, where the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made slavery more profitable than ever.

The Revolution’s failure to resolve the slavery question left a festering wound at the center of the new republic, one that the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and ultimately the Civil War would each attempt and fail to close. The participation of African Americans in the Revolutionary War did not end slavery, but it established a precedent of Black military service and a rhetoric of freedom that subsequent generations would invoke in the struggle for equality. The revolution’s legacy regarding slavery remains one of its most contested and consequential dimensions.

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