The First American Army (43 page)

The black freedmen enlisted under their legal names, but most of the slaves enlisted under their actual first name but owner’s last name. Some, such as William Griffith, were enlisted as simply “William Negro.”
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Congress, the army, and state and county governments entered several financial schemes in addition to freedom to procure black troops. Any black freedman who entered the service was given a bounty, just like white recruits. The owner of a slave who left bondage to fight in the Revolution was paid a bounty by either the state or Congress for his loss, usually $100 and sometimes equal to the market value of the slave. Some states, such as New York, even added five hundred acres of farmland as an inducement for owners.

A common practice to recruit as many troops as possible involved the substitution system used by states. Under it, a man drafted by his militia company could pay another to serve in his place. This was sometimes used by many wealthy merchants or southern planters to avoid service. One powerful new inducement to recruit black slaves was to let an owner use his slave as his substitute without paying him.
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Some of the slaves who fought in the war never received their freedom, including Peter Bartlett, the slave of well-known congressional delegate and signer of the Declaration of Independence Josiah Bartlett. In fact, some owners were so eager to keep their slaves that they sued each other to retain their services. Peter Blanchard was owned by William Frost, of New Hampshire, who hired him out as a seaman on the
Minerva,
a ship owned by Daniel and Samuel Sherburne and captained by Blanchard’s former master. Frost wound up filing suit against all three in order to get his money and his slave back when the
Minerva
returned after a five-month cruise. Some slaves were sold by their owners to other men while they served in the army and had to go to court to win their promised freedom at the end of the war.
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One surprise was the high number of runaways who were living free and decided to enlist in the army to fight for their country, even though their enlistment records might be checked by the owners who were looking for them. Another was the continued relationships between the nowfree slave soldiers and former owners. Some masters and slaves had always maintained close attachments and during the war this relationship continued. A few slaves kept up a friendly correspondence with their former owners, sometimes to urge them to lobby their states for higher wages for the troops but often just to continue the relationship. One slave who did so was Cato Baker, who kept up correspondence with his former master, Otis Baker. He ended his letters, “I remain your most humble servant until death.”
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Many blacks in the service were killed, wounded, and taken as prisoners of war. Some, such as Scipio Gray, were captured on the high seas, brought to England, and incarcerated in the notorious Old Mill Prison in Plymouth.
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Congress asked some states to make an effort to recruit blacks. The only states that refused to do so were Georgia and South Carolina, where legislators feared that armed black soldiers would foster a slave insurrection. Washington had sent John Laurens, twenty-two, one of his aides and the son of South Carolina’s Henry Laurens, to convince the states’ legislatures to authorize the recruiting of slaves. Washington hoped to raise three thousand slave troops in the two states; in return, their owners would be compensated at the rate of $1,000 per man. Laurens had written his to father that his mission home to South Carolina not only gave him the chances to raise troops, but to aid “those who are unjustly deprived of the rights of mankind.”
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Colonel Laurens also believed, oddly, that slavery was a beneficial background for soldiering. Referring to slaves, he wrote, “Habits of subordination, patience under fatigue, sufferings and privation of every kind are soldierly qualifications.”
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The charismatic Laurens was quite unpopular back home though, since his opposition to slavery was common knowledge. The British also let it be known that any slave they captured would be sold into slavery somewhere else, hardly an inducement to owners to relinquish their slaves. Laurens and his father were both disappointed when his mission failed.
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The young Laurens wrote that his efforts were “drowned by the howlings of a triple-headed monster, in which prejudice, avarice, and pusillanimity were united.”
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Almost all of the black soldiers served as privates, although some did move up in the ranks to corporals and sergeants. None became officers. Many blacks held menial jobs, such as waiters to generals, but white soldiers held those posts also. Some very young blacks were also held back from battle and placed in fife and drum corps, but so were whites.

Despite George Washington’s acceptance of blacks and a desire to keep them in the army, the African American troops received no leniency when it came to punishment. They were given lashes for transgressions like every other soldier. Some, like the black soldier from Virginia who was convicted with three other men of robbing inhabitants of Westchester County, New York, were even hanged.
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All of the black volunteers did not serve in the army. When Esek Hopkins took over as the U.S. naval commander in chief in charge of the first four American ships, he brought three of his slaves with him to serve as seamen on two ships under his leadership, the
Cabot
and
Andrea Doria
. They were the first of several hundred slaves that worked on U.S. ships. Several blacks sailed with the legendary John Paul Jones on his first warship, the
Ranger
. One black freedman wanted to fight the British on a privateer so desperately that he took out an ad in a local newspaper imploring any sea captain who read it to hire him.
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The slaves who earned their freedom in the navy had an easier time of integrating themselves into the service than their counterparts in the army. The American army was brand new, but American shipping had thrived for one hundred fifty years and black seamen, especially young black cabin boys, had been common. The African American sailors fell into three categories. Some were brought along by their owners, who were sea captains. Some were black freedmen who were experienced sailors on merchant ships before the war. The others were ordinary slaves who were trained to be sailors.

Blacks also enlisted as seamen on ships that sailed in the state navies. These navies offered freedom for shorter terms of enlistment, sometimes just one year, and provided their black sailors the same cut of any booty seized from British ships on the high seas as white seamen. The state navies also operated out of local seaports, such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Newport, so that the sailors had more opportunities to visit relatives. On both the state and federal ships blacks, like whites, had chances for advancement from their original jobs as cabin boys and ammunition carriers; some were made gun captains of crews that fired the cannon.

Some black pilots operated small craft for the state navies in the southern states, especially Virginia and Maryland. These men were slaves on plantations located on the bays and rivers of the region and had piloted their masters’ small boats for years. They knew all of the depths, shallows, currents, and the tides and were, according to Thomas Anderson, the Virginia commissioner of provisions, “accustomed to the navigation of the river.” They were also reliable. “[They are] as fine fellows that ever crossed the sea,” one planter, Stephen Seward, said of his slaves in the Maryland state navy.
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The state navies were large; Virginia’s had seventy vessels. There were some frigates and schooners, but most consisted of “galley ships.” These were seventy feet long, relatively narrow, nearly flat bottom boats with two masts and small sails, like a schooner. The difference was that these galley ships, named after the old Roman galleys, were powered by fiftyman rowing crews. The men, sitting in benches on the main deck, used long wooden oars to propel the vessels swiftly up and down Virginia’s rivers and coastline. The flat bottom enabled the pilot to navigate just about any waterway, regardless of its depth.
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Each ship usually carried one or two slaves as seamen, but some carried as many as ten. Many had black pilots, especially the galley ships. They all won praise for their work during the war. The son of a Virginia commodore who fought with slaves said of one that he was “distinguished for his zeal and daring.”
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The slaves in the state navies not only fought for America’s independence alone; their families did again and again. A black sailor named John De Baptist, of Spotsylvania, Virginia, fought in the U.S. Navy in the Revolution, his son served in it during the war of 1812, and his grandson did the same in the Civil War.

In addition to the men on ships, hundreds of other slaves or black freedmen worked for the navy as laborers on shore. Most repaired ships and some worked with white laborers in building small craft. One integrated work crew was hired on an annual basis to do maintenance at Charleston harbor. Other black freedmen and slaves worked on the privateers sanctioned by the government.

The black men in the navy in the southern states were treated differently from those in the army. Soldiers earned freedom directly, but sailors did not. Some were given freedom for their service. Most were hired out from their owners for service that could range from one day to a year. Some states bought slaves outright from owners and made them the “slaves” of the state navies. Hard-working black sailors were rewarded in many ways, however. Many saw naval work preferable to laboring in the heat on plantations. Some loved the sea. All hoped that victory over the British would bring an end to slavery. Although many slaves were returned to their owners after the war, or were sold to others by the states if their masters were Loyalists, still others were awarded their freedom for meritorious service to the state navy.

The black pilots engaged the enemy. The
Liberty
, with its heavily black crew, was involved in twenty sea battles. A slave named William Graves was killed in one engagement while at the wheel of his vessel. Another, Minny, was killed while leading a group of men in boarding a British ship during a hot firefight on the waters of the Chesapeake.

Most of the slaves who worked for the Revolution were common laborers. The army needed large groups of workers to build fortifications, toil in mines, ironworks, and shipyards to help manufacture cannon, ammunition, boats, leather goods, clothing, wagons, and lead musket balls. Some were trained as firemen in case their towns were set ablaze in a bombardment. George Washington never had as many soldiers as he needed and could not deploy hundreds of them to work in those capacities.

The slaves who had fled to the British for protection and freedom often lost it if the British army was defeated in a battle. Southern states saw all slaves as contraband, like cargo on ships seized on the high seas, and the property of the victor. Slaves captured from the British were sometimes given away to newly commissioned officers in the American army, along with parcels of land, as their bonus for joining the service.

The slaves who avoided recapture by American forces may have fared worse under the “protection” of the British army. At the end of the Revolution, the British were protecting nearly twenty thousand slaves. They refused to give them back to the Americans, despite Congress’ demands for their return to their masters in the United States. The English brought all of them with them as they evacuated between 1781 and 1783. Almost all of the slaves were turned over to slavers in the West Indies, where they spent the rest of their lives.
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T
he all-black First Rhode Island, trained by Jeremiah Greenman, was not a project to show the world that black slaves could fight as well as whites or that they desired freedom from George III as much as their owners. There was nothing altruistic about it, either. The state legislature simply could not find enough white soldiers to fill the quota insisted upon by Congress and turned to slaves. There were several reasons for that: Rhode Island was a small state with just fifty-two thousand residents (compared to neighboring Massachusetts with 268,000 and Connecticut with 206,000), many of its troops had died at Valley Forge, and its capital, Newport, was occupied by the British.

And so Rhode Island created a black regiment, offering freedom as an inducement. They did so reluctantly because, members of the legislature said, the enlistment of an all-black regiment created two problems. First, the state would have to pay the owners a bounty for the freedom of their slaves (they were eventually reimbursed by Congress). Second, Rhode Island officials would have to explain to America why it needed slaves, who had no freedom, to defend freedom.

The measure passed handily and Governor Nicholas Cooke informed Congress of the vote immediately. Shortly after that, Cooke received a letter from George Washington urging the governor “to give the officers employed in this business all the assistance in your power.”
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That was not difficult. Rhode Island had several hundred male slaves who worked in the shipping industry or for merchants or farmers in and around Providence. Several, such as Barzillar Streeter, had already fought for the state militia. They were eager to reenlist.
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