The Slaves' Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812

THE SLAVES’ GAMBLE

THE SLAVES’ GAMBLE

CHOOSING SIDES IN THE WAR OF 1812

GENE ALLEN SMITH

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To my wife, Tracy, and son, Banning,

who always keep me grounded!

And to the memory of Mable Ann Jones,

a mother whose firm guidance kept me out of trouble.

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Black Soldiers in North America: Never of any use after they have carried arms

2 Fighting in the North 1807–13 and on the Seas: Absolutely insensible to danger

3 The Florida Patriot War of 1812: For freedom we want and will have

4 Terror in the Chesapeake, 1813–14: Negroes who were anxious to join us

5 Washington, Baltimore, and Other Targets: Our enemy at home

6 War along the Southern Coasts, 1814: That pride of distinction, which a soldier’s pursuits so naturally inspire

7 Different Places, Same Results, 1815 and After: They were in every sense of the word Free Men

Epilogue

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Northwestern Frontier during the War

Oliver Hazard Perry’s Victory on Lake Erie

Jorge Biassou

Florida Patriot War, 1812–14

Chesapeake Bay, 1813–15

Adm. Alexander F. I. Cochrane Proclamation

British Base on Tangier Island

Private of the 5th West India Regiment

George Roberts

Slaves Burning Washington

Northern Atlantic Coast, 1813–15

Southern Coasts, 1813–15

British Attack on Fort Bowyer

General Andrew Jackson’s Plea

Jordan Noble

Dartmoor Prison, England

Refugee Evacuation

Melville Island, Halifax, Canada

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No project is ever ours alone. From the time an author conceptualizes a project until he sees it in print, others help carry the burden. We talk with colleagues about our research; we engage students to undertake topics that often dovetail our own; we ask others to read research proposals, conference presentations, and journal articles; we talk with friends about the book that is almost finished; and we assure family members that we are still working on our project, and they always ask when it will be done. And throughout we think about and look for elusive resources that will provide the evidence or smoking gun to our project. Too many times, we sit alone in a library or an archive, poring through another dusty manuscript collection or staring blurry-eyed at another microfilm machine. In the end, we pursue our topics because we are fascinated by a question that we could not initially answer. My question was a simple one: why did some free blacks and slaves side with the United States during the War of 1812, and why did others join the British, the Spanish, the Native American tribes, or the maroon communities? Though a simple question, it proved to have a complicated answer.

As you read this book, you will encounter individuals who challenged me to find their stories—the people who made hard choices that affected the remainder of their lives. As you do so, you will ultimately learn why I followed this path and why they and others made the choices they did. As you unravel their stories, you will understand why they did what they did and the consequences of their choices. Had I known the answers some fifteen years ago, I might have followed a different path. Fortunately, I did not know the answer, and I have learned much from their journeys!

Because this project took some fifteen years to complete, I will forget to mention some people. If I do forget someone, please forgive me. My graduate mentor Frank L. Owsley, Jr., or Larry, shared this topic with me when I was looking for a new research topic. He graciously offered a few rough chapters that pointed me in the direction of this much-different project. I am extremely thankful for his generosity, patience, and guidance. My history department colleagues, especially Ken Stevens, Steve Woodworth, Jeff Roet, and Don Coerver, have shared their time and knowledge, and I am grateful. My graduate students over the years—Claire Phelan, Joe Stoltz, Brook Poston, Sam Negus, Andrew Jackson Forney, Gary Ohls, Ed Townes, Larry Bartlett, Brenda Fields Davis, Dan Vogel, Amber Surmiller, Amanda Milian, Chris Dennis, and David Greer—have cheerfully endured my passion with the War of 1812, and sometimes it has helped them, too. I have also profited handsomely from the friendship, professional advice, and reading done by Don Hickey, Alan Taylor, Dan Preston, Sam Watson, and Nathaniel Millett, and their own scholarship has helped improve this project in immeasurable ways. The SHEAR poker players—Jim Broussard, Richard John, Dan Preston, John Ifkovic, John Van Atta, Sam Watson, and John Belohlavek—have rejuvenated my interest in history year after year without asking when the project would be done.

Many public and private institutions have been gracious in allowing me to use their records and affording me welcomed assistance. Staffs outside the United States that were particularly helpful include the National Maritime Museum of Greenwich; the Public Records Office in Kew (now the National Archives); the British Library in London; the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham; the Royal Artillery Museum in Woolwich; the National Army Museum in London; the Royal Marines Museum in Southsea, Portsmouth; the Brymor Jones Library, University of Hull; the Southampton City Archives; the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast; the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, Northern Ireland; and the National Archives of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland, both in Edinburgh. Alan Giddings, formerly of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, shared his expertise and resources—his help was critical in locating the much-needed manuscripts of British naval officers. I wish to offer considerable thanks to the staff members at the National Archives, the Navy Department Library, and the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, all in Washington, DC.

Many departments of archives and history on the state level also offered invaluable assistance: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, and Ohio, in particular. I am also in the debt of those staff members at the university libraries at Wisconsin, Indiana, Louisiana State, Florida, Texas Christian, Virginia, and the University of New Orleans. The Houghton Library at Harvard, the Howard Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane, the Louisiana State Museum, the Virginia Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and the Detroit Public Library deserve special thanks. The Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California; the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond; and the Naval History and Heritage Command provided fellowship support that permitted me valuable time to work at their facilities, and I am truly grateful for their generosity. The Ohio Historical Society, the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana, The Historic New Orleans Collection, the Maryland Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the British National Army Museum in London, and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh have graciously allowed me to use illustrative materials. Cartographic illustrator Tracy Ellen Smith produced the outstanding maps.

Former dean Mary L. Volcansek of AddRan College has steadfastly encouraged my scholarship, rewarded me for my accomplishments, and also offered a much-needed sabbatical. My colleagues—Lacie, Renee, Tiffany, and Gloria—at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History have constantly prodded me in ways that expand my understanding of the past; my former boss Charlie Walter understood my need for time to write books and exhibits. Warren Reiss, Linda Healy, Randy Lackovic, and the staff at the Darling Marine Center of the University of Maine have given me cool weather and the quiet time needed to finish the last assignments of this book.

I would also like to thank senior editor Luba Ostashevsky and her staff at Palgrave Macmillan who willingly took a chance on a War of 1812 book. Though the bicentennial is not as big as the one that celebrated the Declaration of Independence, this book does share another freedom story. Finally, my agent Mike Hamilburg has showed persistence and dogged determination finding a home for this project, and that is what an author needs.

My wife Tracy and our son Banning are part of every project that I undertake, and for that reason I dedicate this book to them. Banning has heard of the War of 1812 his entire life—in fact, he may know more about the war than any other elementary student—and though this book ends one chapter in our lives, its ending also permits a new chapter to begin. This new chapter will undoubtedly have a War of 1812 focus, too.

INTRODUCTION

On a bright sunny Monday morning, June 22, 1807, the frigate U.S.S. Chesapeake, under the command of Capt. James Barron, departed Hampton Roads, Virginia, on a shakedown cruise for the Mediterranean. The decks stood cluttered with supplies, civilian baggage, casks, cables, and ropes, while the ship’s guns had been secured for heavy weather. Gun implements had been stored below decks, and the passages to the ship’s magazine were blocked with all types of items. The vessel resembled a floating store ship rather than a warship as she passed the Virginia Capes. During the early afternoon, Capt. Salusbury Price Humphreys of the H.M.S. Leopard hailed the U.S. frigate and demanded that Barron surrender four seamen who had allegedly deserted from the British fleet. After a lengthy discussion, Barron politely but firmly refused, unwilling even to muster his men so identification could take place. Within ten minutes the frigate began maneuvering alongside Chesapeake with gun ports open. Then suddenly, without warning, the Leopard fired a shot across the Chesapeake’s bow, a signal for the American ship to halt. When Barron disregarded Humphreys’s signal, the British ship then fired a devastating broadside directly into the Chesapeake. Wooden splinters flew in every direction as smoke and screams of pain enveloped the American ship. A few minutes later, a second broadside belched from the Leopard, causing further damage. Amid the chaos, American sailors tried to load, ready, and fire their cannon, yet to no avail. Before Barron’s sailors could surrender and haul down the American flag, a third British broadside ripped through the Chesapeake, inflicting even more damage.¹

For fifteen minutes Barron had screamed orders to defend the ship, but none of the American shots struck the British vessel. Seeing no other choice, Barron ultimately ordered his colors struck and then offered his ship to Humphreys as a prize of war. While Captain Humphreys refused to accept the ship as a prize, within fifteen minutes British officers had boarded the Chesapeake, requested the ship’s log book and muster roll, and assembled the American crew on deck. Examining each man, the British identified four sailors—Jenkins Ratford, William Ware, Daniel Martin, and John Strachan—as deserters and took them forcibly back to the Leopard. Afterward, the British ship quietly slipped away for its anchorage at Lynnhaven Bay, while the Chesapeake, with twenty-two holes in its hull, limped back to Norfolk with three dead and eighteen wounded; a fourth man died days later.²

The Chesapeake-Leopard Affair represents one of the most dramatic and demeaning episodes in the early history of the United States. It is one of the events that caused the second war between the two countries, and the issue remained unsettled until the mid-nineteenth century. Yet unacknowledged in this affair is that three of the four sailors—Daniel Martin, John Strachan, and William Ware—were black men. Additionally, all three claimed to be Americans. Martin and Ware even maintained that they had protection papers—identification documents that verified nationality—and Strachan swore he left his papers aboard the British ship he had previously fled. Jenkins Ratford, the lone white, did not claim to be a U.S. citizen, and as a result British officials sentenced him to death for desertion, mutiny, and contempt, carrying out the execution on August 31, 1807. Despite their status, all four of these men had believed themselves safe from harm aboard the American frigate.³

Most Americans responded to the affair with demands for war. It violated American honor and sovereignty. Federalists and Republicans alike discarded their ideological differences, publicly deploring the British atrocity and demanding that justice be served. Town meetings across the country condemned the act of aggression and drew up petitions urging retaliation. Citizens of Charleston and Norfolk even wore black crepe bands to honor those killed in action. Americans everywhere toasted their sailors, condemned the British, and strongly embraced a renewed patriotism. And while race did not figure into the national dialogue of the Chesapeake Affair, it nonetheless remains central to the episode and to the history of the subsequent War of 1812 between the two countries.⁴

Black sailors and soldiers saw the War of 1812 with Britain as a means to advance their own agenda. For free blacks, the war provided them the chance to enhance their individual and collective status within society. Slaves believed it would provide an avenue to freedom, as had happened during previous wars. Moreover, the multinational aspects of the war—fought across the North American continent and on the seas, among Britons, Americans, Spaniards, and Native Americans—created many opportunities for blacks as they tried to achieve their goals. In the end, the war provided an unparalleled chance for slaves and free blacks to join the side that promised freedom or advancement, and they ultimately played the competing powers against one another in the attempt to secure this promise.

All sides tried to mobilize the free black and slave populations in the hopes of defeating the other. While the overwhelming majority of American blacks were slaves, several thousand of them, along with a handful of free blacks, joined the U.S. Navy and Army. Other slaves joined with the Spanish and the British military. Regardless of which side they supported, slaves and free blacks hoped to better their material conditions or to fight for causes they believed would empower them in the future. Many runaway slaves and some free blacks joined borderland mulatto and Indian communities outside U.S. authority in the attempt to maintain their freedom against aggressive American frontiersmen and southern slaveholders. Yet winning their freedom remained a difficult task.

This book examines African American combatants during the War of 1812 as a way to understand the evolution of American racial relations during the early nineteenth century. In many instances black participants—slaves and freemen—chose sides, and these choices ultimately defined their future. The War of 1812 represented a major dividing line in the history of American race relations, one that is often obscured by the Civil War. By the early nineteenth century it appeared that while the number of slaves increased, slavery as an institution was fragile; northern states had abolished slavery or instituted provisions for gradual emancipation. Even some southern states had loosened the bonds of slavery, providing for individual cases of emancipation.

The War of 1812 halted all progress. Many slaves used the presence of British troops and the militia’s absence as an opportunity to flee to British freedom, convincing southern slaveowners of the need to tighten their bonds of control. Then, when fleeing slaves returned as British soldiers, carrying weapons and leading redcoats into the heart of American slave communities, it proved conclusively that slaves could not be trusted and that arming slaves did not offer a military solution for white manpower problems.

Ultimately, black participation in the war shaped the history of the United States in the nineteenth century. It bolstered the southern plantation system. It changed the United States’ policy on militia enrollment. When African American participation finally again became an issue of contention during the American Civil War, blacks enlisted in segregated companies commanded by white officers just as had been the case during the War of 1812. Finally, the war opened new lands across the Gulf South that permitted the growth and expansion of the plantation agricultural system, and the cotton-producing Deep South was born. Yet black participation also had another Atlantic World dimension in that it represented the greatest nineteenth-century diaspora of blacks from the United States. And as they relocated to the British colonies of Bermuda, Canada, or Trinidad, they took their American identity with them while consciously modifying it to suit their destination.

A MAJOR CHALLENGE OF THIS PROJECT has been to provide a face or an identity to an often nameless and unidentified group. In too many instances the participants remain but vague references without description. Even so, this project tries to reconstruct some individual participation as a way to provide a name and a face that illustrates the larger collective struggle encountered by African Americans during this tumultuous period. Hopefully readers will acknowledge and understand the individual contribution as told in the stories of Peter Denison, Prince Witten, Charles Ball, Ned Simmons, Jordan B. Noble, and George Roberts, and also realize how their efforts contributed to collective black action during this conflict. All of these men wanted freedom, and the different choices they made to secure it reveal much about the times in which they lived.

CHAPTER 1

BLACK SOLDIERS IN NORTH AMERICA

Never of any use after they have carried arms

In his study of Indian-white relations from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, historian Richard White keenly described a middle ground where the white man and red man created a common world, adapted to changing lifestyles, and learned to accommodate cultural differences. His middle ground, located around the Great Lakes region, described the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. It is the place where many of the North American subjects and allies of empire lived. Although White’s book depicted only the relationship between Indians and whites, the basic thesis also applies to the world of African Americans during the same period because they too often occupied a middle ground between whites and Indians, between English and Spanish, and between the status of citizen and slave.¹

Europeans, mainly the English and Spanish, brought African Americans to the New World in bondage, forcing them to perform the arduous and demanding tasks that whites felt were beneath them. Because of this expectation, from the beginning, Europeans constructed a two-tiered social system based on race. Whites were expected to fulfill their obligations as subjects of their respective empire, while blacks spent their days toiling for their white masters. Spaniards and English alike were expected to use all available resources to expand their respective nation’s empire in the New World, and settling slaves became one means of strengthening their hold over indigenous lands. Yet solidifying imperial claims by utilizing a system of slavery was only part of the process and did not take into consideration external factors such as the vastness and danger of the land itself, disease, and hostile Native Americans. These extenuating circumstances strained white resources, ultimately forcing Europeans to compromise on what they expected from both citizens and slaves.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century most of the European imperial boundaries in the New World had been defined, and this created an intense competition for any remaining land. Spain had consolidated its control over Central and South America and the Caribbean. France had expanded its holdings down the St. Lawrence and Mississippi River basins. Meanwhile Britain had secured a foothold along the Atlantic coast of North America. Each European power had carved out western empires, but their claims often overlapped and were sometimes tenuous at best. This resulted in a series of wars (1689–1763) fought in Europe as well as North America, which had a devastating effect on the colonies: they depleted the white manpower supply and ultimately forced colonial leaders to turn to free blacks and slaves to supplement their military forces. For more than a century this necessity afforded blacks who were willing to take up arms more opportunities, even though prejudice and old values prevented them from securing any degree of equality.

The many conflicts prior to the War of 1812 reveal the conditions under which the British, Americans, Spanish, and Native American/maroon (fugitive runaway blacks who settled away from whites) communities relied on blacks as combatants. By the beginning of the nineteenth century black soldiers had clearly demonstrated their value in the military, serving in a variety of offensive, defensive, and supporting roles. They had also won a variety of concessions—depending on for whom they fought—showing that military service offered an avenue for converting those hard-earned concessions to freedom. It was no surprise that these same groups turned to African Americans and that they willfully served during the War of 1812; black soldiers had proven themselves to be effective troops, and their desire to improve their well-being materially provided strong motivation for taking up arms.

LEST OUR SLAVES WHEN ARM’D MIGHT BECOME OUR MASTERS: BRITISH COLONIAL AMERICA AND EARLY UNITED STATES

The use of African Americans as soldiers in the United States evolved over a long period of time. Even so, the shortage of white soldiers in the North American colonies combined with a Native American and foreign threat compelled colonials to use any fighting men, black or white, in their struggle for survival in a hostile, untamed land. Not surprisingly, life or death was determined by a combination of persistence and luck, not by skin color.

The ever-present threat of warfare against Native Americans became a common life-shaping feature of colonial existence during the seventeenth century, which ultimately forced each colony to devise a means of defending itself. For example, Virginia, which initially had a limited white population, expanding boundaries, and problems with Indians, armed blacks until their Native American difficulties abated during the late 1630s. By that time Virginia’s white population had grown by an estimated five thousand, creating a mistaken belief that the Indians had been overwhelmed by force of numbers and thereafter would not offer further resistance. Such confidence in January 1639 prompted the colonial assembly to declare that all persons except Negroes had to secure arms and ammunition for defending the colony.

This legislation soon became problematic. During the spring of 1644 the aging Powhatan chief Opechancanough attacked the Virginia settlements, slaughtering more than three hundred. The Virginia assembly, despite the renewed violence, excluded blacks from military service, and by doing so the colonial government drew a distinction between the servants of the colony and the slaves, who were obligated to masters who served the colony. That presumption was further confirmed at the beginning of the eighteenth century when a special act prohibited blacks from holding any office, ecclesiastical, civil, or military. Any black carrying a gun, sword, club, staff, or other weapon would be punished. One exception did permit blacks living on the frontier to possess weapons for their safety and defense, but only if they had white supervision. Virginia had passed laws proscribing blacks from carrying weapons or serving in the militia, but amended those laws when necessary.²

Other southern colonies experienced comparable threats and dealt with them in a similar fashion. Near the end of the First Anglo-Dutch War in 1654, the General Assembly of Maryland required that all persons from sixteen years of age to sixty, including free blacks and slaves, be provided with weapons to serve the commonwealth. In 1715, during the peaceful aftermath of some two decades of warfare, the Maryland assembly reversed its previous policy and precluded all Negroes and Slaves from military service. Likewise, the South Carolina assembly used slaves in 1671 to build fortifications around the ill-defended city of Charleston. During Queen Anne’s War, the assembly further required that trusty slaves be armed with a serviceable lance, hatchet, or gun to protect the colony from a Spanish attack. Should those armed blacks capture or kill an enemy—and such a deed would have to be verified by a white witness—the slave would be granted freedom. If a slave was wounded in battle or taken prisoner and then escaped, he too would be emancipated. Apparently these conditions worked so well for South Carolina that in April 1708 the assembly renewed the provisions, employing blacks as full-fledged members of the militia.³

Northern colonies with smaller slave and free black populations faced similar difficulties. The Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1641, experiencing increased problems with the Algonquian tribes along the lower Hudson River, required that slaves be armed with a tomyhawk and a half pick. Recurring Native American troubles, combined with constant encroachments by the surrounding English colonies, also forced the Dutch to arm blacks as a defensive supplement. During the most destructive conflict in New England, King Philip’s War in 1676, Rhode Island required its surprisingly large slave population to muster in the militia and perform the same training as white Englishmen.⁴

By the end of the seventeenth century the English North American colonies had defined their black-white military relationship. Slaves and free blacks served as soldiers during a crisis, but once the trouble had passed both groups were relegated to their former subservient positions. The eighteenth century brought far more crises and more opportunities for African Americans to demonstrate their value as soldiers and citizens, but did not further clarify the already existing black-white relationship.⁵

The troubling Yamasee War, beginning during the spring of 1715 because of white encroachment on Yamasee land and debt owed by the tribe to British traders, brought new opportunities for blacks, as it threatened not only the South Carolina frontier but also red-white relations throughout each of the English North American colonies. Success against the colonists could provide confidence for other Native American tribes and spur bloody conflicts all along the western frontier. Such a possibility demanded concerted action by the colonies. South Carolina’s governor Charles Craven desperately asked Britain, New England, Virginia, and North Carolina for help, but he was forced by the need for men to hire a thousand soldiers (half of whom were African Americans) to meet the Indian threat. Fearing a growing Indian uprising and a possible slave insurrection, North Carolina leaders warned caution lest our slaves when arm’d might become our masters. Not surprisingly, that fear resonated strongly throughout all the slaveholding colonies and emphasized how careful whites would be when arming blacks to counter Native American threats. During 1719 South Carolinians, foreseeing the fears that North Carolina leaders had warned against, revised the state’s militia laws, giving slaves cash rewards rather than freedom for capturing or killing one of the enemy.⁶

Although white Carolinians had used blacks to defeat Native Americans in the past, thereafter the Carolina assembly provided Indians with guns, ammunition, and supplies to capture escaped slaves. They relocated Indians to areas with high concentrations of slaves so they would be an awe to the negroes. According to one Carolinian, it made the Indians & Negro’s checque upon each other . . . [or] we should be crushed by one or the other. Later eighteenth-century wars demonstrated precisely how white southerners hung between the horrors of slave insurrections and the atrocities of an Indian uprising.⁷

The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739) (Jenkins’s ear was cut off by a Spanish Coast Guard official off Cuba), which evolved into the larger and more important King George’s War in North America (beginning in 1744) and was also part of the general European War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), exacerbated an already tenuous situation. British and Spanish frontier fighting along the Georgia-Florida border, which had been ongoing for years, offered slaves and free blacks renewed opportunities for freedom. During January 1739 Gen. James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia colony, led an unsuccessful eighteen-month assault-turned-siege against Spanish St. Augustine. Although the assault—executed by regular redcoat soldiers, white militiamen, Indian allies, royal naval forces, and about eight hundred slaves—and subsequent attacks during 1742 and 1743 failed to dislodge the Spanish from Florida, according to one colonial they temporarily spoil’d [Spain’s] usual Methods of decoying our Negroes from Carolina, and elsewhere. The attacks also accentuated a growing American problem. The Spanish government and military warmly received runaway slaves and free blacks as a means of bolstering isolated segments of their far-flung empire, and the shortage of white troops forced Spain to rely on black soldiers as a means of ensuring the defense of Florida.⁸

By 1744 diplomatic relations between Britain and France had deteriorated, and the two countries declared war on each other, joining the War of Austrian Succession. France enlisted the support of her Native American allies, setting the northern frontier ablaze in violence. Although the New England colonies, which bore the brunt of this war, had forbidden blacks from bearing arms and mustering with the militia, this immediate crisis and the shortage of white soldiers again forced New Englanders to accept blacks within their ranks. When Massachusetts governor William Shirley recruited soldiers to meet the French threat, blacks from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island volunteered, often identified as Nero, Cuffee Negro, Adam a Negro, or a similarly descriptive name.⁹

African Americans played important, although often overlooked roles in the military operations that made Britain the greatest imperial power of the late eighteenth century. Regardless, defining the motivation that prompted these men to bear arms proves far more difficult than chronicling their activities. One slave, Toney, a cook who served aboard several Boston privateers, did so because his master Samuel Lyndes enrolled him in the service; generally, slaves surrendered to their masters half of any wages or prize money earned, which meant that military service could be profitable, provided the slave survived the experience. Even so, some colonies such as New Jersey refused to arm blacks. In other instances slaves attended their masters who were fighting in the conflict and became unwilling participants in a struggle in which they had no interest.¹⁰

Many free blacks, such as George Gire, saw the military as a means of advancement. After the French and Indian War, Gire petitioned the Massachusetts legislature and received, because of his hard service, a pension of forty shillings per year. Forty shillings was not a great fortune, but the money demonstrated nonetheless that the legislature acknowledged and appreciated his sacrifice. Some may have chosen to bear arms because they believed it their duty as freemen, while others joined the conflict only because they had been forced to do so. In fact, some communities tried to use war service as a means to purge all criminals, paupers, and free blacks from their neighborhoods. Despite the reasons for their service, it cannot be denied that free blacks and slaves had found a place for themselves in the eighteenth-century military.¹¹

A single theme regarding blacks and the military had emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Colonial law and social pressure forbade free blacks and slaves from bearing arms, but the defenselessness of the colonies, the constant Indian and foreign threat, and a limited white population willing to muster in the military revealed an immediate need to enlist the services of black soldiers. By the 1770s that pattern had been well established, and it remained in place during the first months of the American War for Independence.¹²

Blacks had played prominent roles in the events leading to the war. The first martyr of the struggle was the runaway slave Crispus Attucks from Framingham, Massachusetts, who died during the March 1770 Boston Massacre. A Rhode Island mulatto named Aaron helped torch the infamous British revenue cutter Gaspee off the coast of Providence in June 1772, while black militiamen Prince Easterbrook of Lexington, Pompey of Braintree, and Sam Croft of Newton all fought against the British on April 19, 1775, at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. At the June 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill black and white militiamen again confronted the British. One black soldier, Salem Poor, fought so bravely during the battle that fourteen white officers recommended him to the Massachusetts General Court for commendation; this brave and gallant soldier later suffered alongside his white compatriots at White Plains and Valley Forge.¹³

After Bunker Hill, British forces withdrew to the safe confines of the Boston peninsula while colonial militiamen swarmed the outskirts of the city, making sure that redcoats did not venture into the countryside again. Included among the units that surrounded the city was Col.