Historians Agree!

 American Myth

One of the first American myths is that of the Revolution, starting in 1775 and finishing with the Constitution of 1787.  It was followed by a long line of Amendments which ‘fixed’ the originalist Constitution.  And evidently, it still needs ‘fixing’ 235 years later.  Can we say antiquarian?

The Ethiopian Brigade of the British Army in North America

The Revolution was fought for freedom from the British monarchy and colonial state by a new strata of local mercantile and plantation owners.  Very clear and somewhat progressive event.  However, a few panels in the new Smithsonian African-American Museum of History (the Bird’s Nest!) in Washington D.C. put a dark spin on that story.  The 1619 Project does the same.  The panels depict enslaved people flocking to the British lines to gain their freedom.  They also depict Crispus Attacks dying to oppose the Brits, and some dark-skinned folks joining patriot forces, even though their General Washington was a slave-owner.

INSURRECTION WITHIN THE INSURRECTION

Washington was a harsh plantation owner, officer and large land speculator who after the Revolution removed native Americans from ‘his’ tracts of land over the Appalachians.  This is all well known. He initially refused to free slaves to allow them to fight on the side of the Continental Army, though urged by a man close to him.  In November 1775 Washington decreed that “neither negroes, nor boys, nor old men” could enlist in the Continental Army.  Indentured servants could supposedly join in exchange for severance of their contracts.  Not sure if this actually happened. No one mentioned women - and native Americans didn’t exist in the polity.

The 1619 Project, a patriotic and somewhat class-blind history of slavery and colorism in the U.S., pointed out that “the Earl of Dunmore warned the colonists that if they took up arms there, he would ‘declare Freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.’”  Hundreds of African-American slaves immediately fled to the British troops, and later fought against colonial troops at Hampton and Kemp’s Landing.  Dunmore then issued a proclamation asking enslaved people to join a British “Ethiopian Regiment” if they fled from patriot-owned plantations, freeing them from bondage.  Dunmore was a slaver himself, though Britain had never formally legalized slavery.  This was a smart war tactic … somewhat similar to the original Emancipation Proclamation so many years later. Dunmore however returned slaves to Loyalist planters, just not disloyal ones.

A 1772 decision by a British court to free a slave, James Somerset, who had made it to the United Kingdom, enraged Virginians. A rumor that the British Parliament was considering setting all slaves free in the colonies was relayed to slaver James Madison.  All this moved elite and plantation Virginia towards the side of the armed revolution.  Jefferson considered Dunmore’s ‘stoking of insurrection’ unpardonable.  Historians consider these events pivotal for southern plantation ‘revolutionaries’ like Jefferson, Washington and Madison.  This gave them a somewhat separate motivation from the likes of Tom Paine, John and Sam Adams, Ben Franklin and Nathanael Greene.  As seems obvious there was already a nascent Confederacy in the U.S.

The NUMBERS

So how many dark-skinned bondsmen, freedmen and fugitives really fought on both sides of this war? It seems that more would have been allied with the British.  According to the History.com and the book Liberty’s Exiles, around 20,000 lined up with the British. One of Washington’s and one of Patrick Henry’s slaves escaped to British lines.  The Ethiopian Regiment had “Liberty to the Slave” embroidered on their uniform’s sashes.  The Regiment was mostly used for labor, trades, food and medical roles in the British Army, but also combat. 

As the war progressed, another black regiment, the ‘Black Pioneers’ was formed by the British.  They participated in battles, including the siege of Charleston.  In June 1779 British General Henry Clinton issued the Phillipsburg Proclamation, which promised freedom to the enslaved as Black Loyalists.  Though if the Brits caught a slave person fighting for the Continentals, they would return him to slavery.  After the British defeat in the Revolutionary War, some 5,000 of these allies were allowed by the British to go to London, Canada, Sierra Leone, Florida and the Caribbean as freedmen.  Great Britain outlawed slavery in 1807, long before the U.S., though their various capitalists still profited from it. 

Liberty’s Exiles estimates that around 5,000 fought for the Revolution, though the parameters of that service are not clear.  In Georgia, another website claims 5,000 slaves escaped, were manumitted or freed during the war – a 3^rd of the total in that state, though not stating what side they joined.  Another website, American Battlefield Trust, based on several written histories, claims 100,000 came behind British lines – about a quarter of all slaves.  Wikipedia says 20,000 and 9,000 respectively were in the armies in various capacities.  Higher numbers for the Continentals might be taken with a grain of salt, especially from Wiki.

In New Jersey, a former slave, Colonel Tye, led an uprising of the Black Brigade that used guerrilla warfare in Monmouth County against the patriots.  The Continentals eventually recognized what was going on and recruited the First Rhode Island Regiment in 1778, probably made up of freedmen.  According to eyewitnesses and ABT, 1/5^th of the soldiers on the side of the U.S. siege of Yorktown were African-American, though their status is not clear, nor any promises their service may have elicited.  New England regiments promised freedom to the enslaved for service. Some southern patriots allowed their slaves to fight with promises of freedom, but Wikipedia points out that many times they lied.

As to native Americans, the Wyandot / Huron joined the war on the British side, but many native communities remained neutral, while others like the Cherokee and Iroquois Confederacy split.  The British had reserved the land west of the Appalachians for native Americans in 1763 and this angered the colonists, which became a grievance mentioned in the Declaration of Independence – and soon rectified by fellows like Washington!

Slavery continued in the U.S. 74 years after the 1781 siege of Yorktown. This bit of history shows that in the U.S. it is not just Bacon’s Rebellion, the Stono Rebellion, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey or John Brown that we should remember, but the first truly mass war against slavery by its victims – non-ironically in opposition to the American Revolution, started for that vague and notorious notion of ‘freedom.’

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, using these words:  “Citizen Tom Paine” (Fast); “The Civil War in the United States”(Marx & Engels); “12 Years a Slave,” “Lincoln” (Spielberg); “Struggle & Progress” (Jacobin); “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment” (Hartmann); “Loaded” (Dunbar-Ortiz); “White Trash,” “The Good Lord Bird,” “The Souls of Black Folk” & “John Brown” (both by Dubois) or “slavery.”  

The Cultural Marxist

March 19, 2022