CHAPTER SIX
“So Sacred a War as This”
THERE ARE FEW AMERICAN MONUMENTS more stirring than the granite obelisk on Lexington Green in Massachusetts, the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War. That marker, put up in 1799, just twenty-four years after the fighting, was the first memorial in honor of the Revolution’s heroes. It was set in place by people who had lost fathers, husbands, and sons in the fatal events of April 19, 1775. In the gray dawn of that day, about seventy-seven Minute Men formed a line on the Green to face a task force of seven hundred British army regulars who had marched from Boston to confiscate weapons and powder the Americans had stockpiled. Alerted by Paul Revere the night before, the Minute Men had gathered to stop the British, and when the sun rose that morning, revealing an enemy that outnumbered them almost ten to one, the Minute Men heard their commander say, “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” The war did begin there and then, as the ranks of British regulars opened fire on the Americans in “a continuous roar of musketry,” as Paul Revere described it. Eight Americans died on the spot; another ten were wounded.
The monument memorializes that moment with unforgettable words:
SACRED TO LIBERTY & THE RIGHTS OF MANKIND!!!
THE FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA.
SEALED AND DEFENDED WITH THE BLOOD OF HER SONS.
The obelisk carries the names of the men who died that morning: Robert Munroe, Jonas Parker, Samuel Hadley, Jonathan and Caleb Harrington, Isaac Muzzy, John Brown, and Azael Porter.
THE BLOOD OF THESE MARTYRS IN THE CAUSE OF GOD AND THEIR COUNTRY WAS THE CEMENT OF THE UNION OF THESE STATES.… RIGHTEOUS HEAVEN APPROVED THE SOLEMN APPEAL; VICTORY CROWNED THEIR ARMS, AND THE PEACE, LIBERTY, AND INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WAS THEIR GLORIOUS REWARD.
One of the men who shed his blood on Lexington Green on April 19, Prince Easterbrooks, was wounded that morning but survived to fight another day. On the list of wounded printed up immediately after the battle and distributed as a broadside, he was described as “A Negro man.” It was a surprise to me, a native of Massachusetts, to discover that a black man had fought on the sacred ground at Lexington Green. And when I first visited Lexington I had no idea that Massachusetts had slaves.1
Prince Easterbrooks was not an anomaly. George Washington won the Revolutionary War with an army that was more integrated than any American military force until the Vietnam War. It is difficult to arrive at a precise count of the black soldiers because in many records race is not recorded. In the 1960s the historian Benjamin Quarles, the first to study the black role in the Revolution systematically, estimated that about five thousand blacks served in the Continental Army. More recently other historians calculated that the black presence in the army in 1778 (a year from which reliable records survive) ranged between a low of 6 percent and a high of 13 percent. At one point, at the end of the war, the figure was even higher.2
Documents and eyewitness accounts from the Revolution attest to a large number of blacks in arms. “You never see a regiment in which there are not negroes,” wrote a foreign officer, “and there are well-built, strong, husky fellows among them.”3 The United States owed its liberty in significant measure to black troops. Here is the mystery of the era written in blood: in the face of the known heroism of these black troops, how is it that the Revolution preserved slavery? George Washington, the slaveholder who led the war for liberty, personifies that paradox.
The paradox was addressed by Richard Brookhiser in his book Founding Father. Quoting the contemptuous jibe of Samuel Johnson—“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”—Brookhiser notes that “the contrast between ideals and practice has amused the Revolution’s enemies and embarrassed many of its friends for two hundred years.” And he suggests that Washington “encompassed the contradictions the way that all men, including ourselves, encompass their contradictions: by not thinking of them.”4 This idea that the issue of liberty for slaves was beneath the concern of Washington and his peers, that it simply did not register on their conscience or consciousness, is widely held. There is also a general feeling that blacks did not and could not become free during the Revolution because whites as a group believed that blacks were an inferior race.
Samuel Johnson’s derisive slap at the Revolution was echoed in more sober and eloquent terms by the friends of the Revolution. The Boston patriot James Otis, in a 1764 pamphlet, Rights of the British Colonies, read throughout the colonies, proclaimed:
The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.… Does it follow that tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curl’d hair like wool, instead of christian hair, as tis called by those whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument? Can any logical inference in favour of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or a short face?5
Abigail Adams grew up in a slaveholding family, yet in 1775, just before the outbreak of the fighting, she wrote to her husband, “I wish most sincerely there was not a single slave in the province; it always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me [to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”6 Washington’s friend and mentor Landon Carter, at home on his plantation in Virginia, was stunned when he read the Declaration of Independence because he thought it meant that the slaves had to be freed; he read the document literally and could see no other interpretation of it.
Washington grappled with the contradiction of revolution and slavery from the first day he took command of the American forces in Massachusetts. He did not ignore the subject; indeed he could not. Fierce debate over the subject of slavery raged around him throughout the war and the years thereafter.
As early as 1774 he had predicted that if a war with Great Britain broke out, “more blood [would] be spilt [than] history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.”7 In May of that year he traveled to Williamsburg for the regular meeting of the House of Burgesses, but this time the session had unusual urgency. Five months earlier tax protesters in Boston had dumped East India Company tea into the harbor, and the British government had responded with a draconian plan of four laws that became known in America as the Intolerable Acts. These laws closed the port of Boston until the tea was paid for, and abrogated key provisions of the charter of Massachusetts Bay Colony by giving the royal governor the authority to pack the Massachusetts courts and legislature with loyal supporters by appointment.8 Furthermore, the Boston Port Act provided for enforcement of the harbor’s closure by British warships.
In Williamsburg, Washington voted with the other burgesses for a resolution that called the closing of the port “a hostile invasion of Boston.” As a further, disguised protest, the burgesses named June 1, 1774, a day of “fasting, humiliation, and prayer to implore the divine interposition, for averting the heavy Calamity which threatens destruction to our Civil Rights, and the evils of Civil War; [and] to give us one heart and one Mind firmly to oppose, by all just and proper means, every injury to American Rights.” Not mollified by the religious cloak thrown over the protest, Governor Dunmore abruptly dissolved the house.9 The burgesses gathered in the Apollo Room at Raleigh Tavern and on May 27 issued the historic call for delegates from all the colonies to meet in a Continental Congress.
George Washington was elected one of Virginia’s representatives, but at Philadelphia that fall he was appointed to neither of the two most important committees. The Virginians who commanded center stage were Peyton Randolph, elected president of the Continental Congress, and the towering orators Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee. Many observers—including British spies—assumed that if the colonists did resort to bloodshed they would turn leadership of an American army over to the fiery Charles Lee (Indians had aptly named him “boiling water”), a former British officer with wide military experience who was then settled in Virginia.10
For much of the month-and-a-half-long session Washington chose to remain quietly in the background, rarely speaking. He described his own role in the proceedings as “an attentive observer and witness.” After hours he gathered with delegates from other regions for drinks, cards (he won seven pounds), and discussions. Recollections of Washington’s military career during the French and Indian War circulated among the delegates; it was particularly remembered that in the aftermath of Braddock’s disastrous defeat in the forest, Washington had saved the battered remnant of the British column from annihilation. One representative from Rhode Island, lost in admiration, wrote a bit of doggerel:
… With manly gait
His faithful steel suspended by his side
Pass’d W-shi-gt-on along, Virginia’s hero.
Word that he was rich (richer than he was in reality) added to his growing luster. John Adams reported that in a speech to the Virginia convention Washington had declared, “I will raise one thousand men, subsist them at my own expense, and march, myself at their head, for the relief of Boston.” Though Washington never made such a statement, the story spread among New Englanders, who were of course much taken with the idea.11
Upon Washington’s return to Mount Vernon, a number of Virginia’s county militias elected him as their field officer. It was apparent that if war came, he would be called upon to be the supreme commander in Virginia.12 An English traveler happened to observe the militia exercises, and thought that the 150 men under Washington’s command made “a formidable appearance.” Northern Virginia was in tumult, according to the traveler, who found “utmost confusion” in Alexandria, where patriot committees seized and read foreign mail, and were interrogating and intimidating tradesmen to stop the purchase of British goods. Some of those who refused to cooperate “have been tarred and feathered, others had their property burnt and destroyed by the populace.”13
When news reached Virginia that shots had been fired at Lexington and Concord, Washington believed it was the start of the long-feared British campaign to enslave the Americans. He wrote to his close friend and neighbor George William Fairfax, a loyalist, to explain the position he had chosen:
Before this Letter can reach you, you must, undoubtedly, have received an Account of the engagement in the Massachusetts Bay.… General Gage [the British commander] acknowledges, that the detachment … was sent out to destroy private property; or, in other Words, to destroy a Magazine which self-preservation obliged the Inhabitants to establish.… Unhappy it is … to reflect, that a Brother’s Sword has been sheathed in a Brother’s breast, and that, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous Man hesitate in his choice?14
Washington wrote the letter from Philadelphia, where he was attending the Second Continental Congress, convened to deal with the crisis in Massachusetts. He had set off from Mount Vernon in his carriage with his fellow delegate Richard Henry Lee. As they rolled north they met up with other Virginia delegates, and as the convoy of Virginians approached Philadelphia, five hundred horsemen came out to greet them. Farther on, a band and companies of foot soldiers joined in an enormous parade leading into Philadelphia.15
The imposing, six-foot-tall Washington strode into the sessions of the Congress wearing his Virginia militia uniform. He was the only delegate in uniform and it made an impression—perhaps exactly the impression Washington intended to make—during the deliberations to choose the commander in chief for the American forces already in the field in New England. Washington did not explicitly put himself forward as a candidate, but there can be little doubt that, fortunately for the American cause, his patriotism and his ambition lay behind his decision to appear before a deliberative body in martial array. He was not the only candidate. John Hancock of Massachusetts felt certain to be chosen. Most radical leaders endorsed “boiling water” Charles Lee, but his English pedigree made him suspect.
Washington had military experience, and he also possessed an air of gravity. One Connecticut delegate described him as “no harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm.” Washington was elected commander in chief on the first ballot; in his first official act he insisted that he would serve without pay. His expenses would be covered, nothing more. He left immediately for Massachusetts.16
In a farewell letter to Martha from Philadelphia he told her he expected to be home at Mount Vernon by autumn. (As it turned out, at Christmas he was still in Massachusetts, so Martha went to him.)17 By winning a quick campaign, Washington hoped to compel the British government to negotiate a settlement of the colonists’ grievances—independence was not yet a goal in the summer of 1775—and avoid the massive bloodshed he had feared and written about the previous year. His determination was absolute. “I can answer for but three things,” he wrote to Burwell Bassett, his friend and Martha’s brother-in-law, “a firm belief in the justice of our cause, close attention to the prosecution of it, and the strictest integrity.” Yet the future remained uncertain. He continued to Bassett, “I am now embarked on a tempestuous ocean, from, whence, perhaps, no friendly harbor is to be found.”18
Whatever shred of optimism Washington carried north with him vanished when he reached Cambridge in July. He had been told his army would number 20,000 men, but the rosters showed only 14,000 present and ready. He had ordered an inventory of the powder supply and was told there was more than enough; when the barrels were counted again an error was discovered—they had only ninety barrels, just a third of what had been claimed in the first report. The men had no tents; they were short of clothing and tools; no one had any idea how anything could be paid for. Altogether the situation was “exceedingly dangerous,” he wrote; and within a few months Washington regretted having accepted command.19
Nor was the Virginian heartened by the class of manpower he found in Cambridge. The “embattled farmers” of New England did not particularly impress this Southern planter—“they are an exceeding dirty & nasty people”; and he found an “unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people,” a stupidity shared, he thought, by many of the Massachusetts officers.20 One of Washington’s aides later deplored “the principles of democracy [which] so universally prevail” and the “levelling spirit” that erased class boundaries.21 The militia seemed likely to melt away when it felt like it. The commander in chief set about the task of assembling a strong and respectable regular army.
Washington had high standards for the type of soldier he wished to enlist. In 1754, during the skirmishes with the French and Indians along the Ohio River, he had complained because his soldiers—and he was referring to white men—consisted of “loose, Idle persons that are quite destitute of House and Home.” The kind of army he wished to put in the field against the British would express the identity of its country. As the historian John Shy writes, “Washington and other … American leaders stressed a regular army … because they felt a need to be seen as cultivated, honorable, respectable men, not as savages leading other savages in a howling wilderness.”22
Blacks did not figure in Washington’s initial military calculations despite his desperate need for troops. He may have shared a view that was common among upper-class white Americans and Britons—slavery was a condition of dishonor and the presence of slaves would dishonor an army. Contemporary statements are quite explicit on this point. Even before Washington arrived, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety passed a resolution opposing the enlistment of slaves because their service would “be inconsistent with the principles that are to be supported, and reflect dishonor on this Colony.” The presence of blacks did not present a problem to Massachusetts officials; however, the presence of slaves did bother them—the order did not exclude free blacks. A similar objection was also raised by one of Washington’s generals, Philip Schuyler of New York, who said the slaves among his troops “disgrace our arms.” He explained, “Is it consistent with the Sons of Freedom to trust their all to be defended by slaves?” The war shaped Schuyler’s view of blacks; he became a champion of abolition and a founder of the New York Manumission Society in 1785.23
The use of slave troops had precedent in the colonies, but so scant that Washington might not have been aware of it. In 1715 South Carolina armed some four hundred slaves to fight alongside six hundred whites against the Yamasee Indians; but the colony did so with great trepidation. One white colonist warned of the grave and obvious danger—“our Slaves when arm’d might become our Masters.” A slave uprising in that colony in 1739 proved the danger of allowing blacks access to arms. In the wake of that revolt, as John Shy writes, “Carolinians no longer dared arm Negroes; in fact, they hardly dared leave their plantations in time of emergency.… increasingly the South Carolina militia became an agency to control slaves, and less an effective means of defense.” During the French and Indian War, Washington used slaves as laborers (their proper place, in his view) but not as soldiers; and at the height of that war Virginia devoted more resources to policing its internal slave population than to patrolling its frontier.24
Arming slaves would have profound implications for the psychology of slave and master. It was one thing to hand a favored “trusty” slave a musket so that he could hunt, with permission, on the master’s land for the master’s table, but it was quite another to hand a slave a musket so that he could go out and kill white men. The preservation of slavery required unremitting psychological degradation. As one Englishman remarked, arming slaves would “instruct them that they are men.”25
What Washington saw when he arrived at Cambridge must have been shocking to him—blacks carrying guns and awaiting action. The New England army had blacks in its ranks for the simple reason that “virtually everyone went to war,” as Shy observes.26 Blacks were enlisted and accepted in Minute Man units. More blacks responded to Paul Revere’s alarm. Blacks had taken part in the engagements at Lexington and Concord on April 19 and at Bunker Hill on June 17. One black man, Peter Salem, so distinguished himself at Bunker Hill that he was presented to Washington after the commander’s arrival. An archetypal figure out of American lore, a sharpshooter, Salem had enlisted in a company of Minute Men from the town of Framingham. He saw action in the fighting around Lexington and Concord, where he became familiar with the figure of Major John Pitcairn, the officer of Royal Marines who led the British detachment at Lexington Green. At Bunker Hill, Pitcairn was leading a charge on the American defenses when Salem shot him. Salem’s act won him the esteem of his comrades. The Boston historian Samuel Swett, writing in the 1820s, said that “a contribution was made in the army for Salem and he was presented to Washington as having slain Pitcairn.” Salem’s story is archetypal in other ways. He served throughout the war, he died in poverty, and his fame was slowly and deliberately extinguished. John Trumbull, “the painter of the Revolution,” depicted Salem clutching a musket in his renowned historical canvas The Battle of Bunker’s Hill. The historian William C. Nell, reviewing in 1855 the published engravings based on Trumbull’s work that were produced for the popular market, noticed that in the older reproductions Salem “occupies a prominent position,” but in the midcentury versions the black hero had disappeared from the scene.27*
In a lecture in Cambridge in 1864, a local historian, Samuel Abbot Smith, told the story of another black Minute Man. Smith said that when the alarm went out that British regulars had fired on Americans at Lexington, a dozen “exempts”—men exempted from armed service on account of their age—turned out anyway, spontaneously formed a unit, and “chose for their leader David Lamson, a mulatto, who had served in the [French and Indian] war, a man of undoubted bravery and determination.” They took up a position behind a wall of earth and stones and, thus concealed, awaited the arrival of the British column. When a British supply column trundled past on the other side of the wall, Lamson called out his order, and his men rose up with muskets leveled. The British tried to escape but the Minute Men fired, killing two of the British and wounding others.28
Thus in the first months of the war in Massachusetts, blacks had spontaneously joined the patriot cause; left to itself, the army had integrated spontaneously. Change was occurring on its own without a formal policy imposing or urging it. The natural movement was toward freedom. Washington and other leaders would have to act to stifle this movement.
The patriotic spirit of the black troops can be seen clearly in a postwar pension petition filed by one Jehu Grant, who served in the army for ten months. He said that the “songs of liberty … saluted my ear, thrilled through my heart.” He described his decision to sign up:
I was then grown to manhood, in the full vigor and strength of life, and heard much about the cruel and arbitrary things done by the British. Their ships lay within a few miles of my master’s house, which stood near the shore, and I was confident that my master traded with them, and I suffered much from fear that I should be sent aboard a ship of war. This I disliked. But when I saw liberty poles and the people all engaged for the support of freedom, I could not but like and be pleased with such things (God forgive me if I sinned in so feeling). And living on the borders of Rhode Island, where whole companies of colored people enlisted, it added to my fears and dread of being sold to the British. These considerations induced me to enlist into the American army, where I served faithful about ten months, when my master found and took me home.29
Southern slaveholders recognized that the New England army was setting precedents that might later bind them. Hearing that blacks were serving in Massachusetts, Edward Rutledge of South Carolina stood before the Continental Congress in September 1775 to demand that all black men, whether slave or free, be immediately expelled from the armed forces. Other Southerners joined Rutledge in his attempt to thwart integration before it got out of control. A diarist wrote that this demand, though “strongly supported by many of the Southern delegates,” failed to carry because it was “powerfully opposed.” Here was an early instance in the national debate over race where Southern sectional prejudices tried to override the Northerners’ preferences and discount the service record of blacks.30
In Cambridge Washington began to lay the groundwork for removing blacks from the army. In a report to the president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, Washington wrote, “From the Number of Boys, Deserters, & Negroes which have been listed in the Troops of this Province, I entertain some Doubts whether the Number required can be raised here.” Though Washington did not seem to think that he could make use of blacks, he thought the British could, so he must have had some inkling that they might make decent soldiers. At his first council of war, held a week after his arrival in Cambridge, the first question he posed to his assembled officers was the enemy’s strength. He inquired as to the number of “Troops formerly & lately arrived … the Tories who may take Arms, such Sailors as may be spared from the Fleet & the Negroes.” He clearly viewed the blacks in Boston as likely enemies.31
Washington was putting in place a national policy for blacks in the military. He was establishing precedents. Soon his headquarters issued general orders forbidding the enlistment of “any deserter from the Ministerial army, nor any stroller, negro, or vagabond.” This order could have resulted partly from Washington’s assumption that any black wandering about was probably a runaway. There was no claim that blacks who had already fought were incompetent, inferior, or in any way unable to discharge the duties of a soldier, nor is there mention in Washington’s papers of any complaint from the white soldiers and officers who had served with the blacks at Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, or in the camp at Cambridge over the summer. There is no record of a popular outcry against the black presence, no record of fights or disciplinary problems caused by racial integration. The common white New England soldier seems to have accepted blacks. The objections to the black presence came not from the rank and file but from the highest levels of policy makers and politicians. Had there been problems, Washington certainly would have been made aware of them and would have cited them in his correspondence to Congress as grounds for an exclusion policy.32
Samuel Swett, the Massachusetts historian, laid the blame on outsiders: “Many northern blacks were excellent soldiers but southern troops would not brook an equality with whites.” But Swett was not entirely accurate. Northern generals joined with Washington in limiting the number of blacks in the army. At a council of war in October, Washington and seven other generals considered the question, “Whether it will be adviseable to re-inlist any Negroes in the new Army—or whether there be a Distinction between such as are Slaves & those who are free?” The decision of the officers was “Agreed unanimously to reject all Slaves, & by a great Majority to reject Negroes altogether.”33
Accordingly, in November 1775 Washington issued a general order excluding all blacks, whether free or slave: “Neither Negroes, Boys unable to bare Arms, nor old men unfit to endure the fatigues of the campaign, are to be inlisted.” The language of this order was deliberately vague with respect to old white men and boys. To simplify matters, Washington could have established a hard-and-fast age requirement; but he knew that some teenaged boys were capable of bearing arms while some were not, and that some fifty-year-old men could endure a campaign while others could not. The order seems directed against recruiters who might have been inclined to sign up youths and oldsters in need of food and lodging at the army’s expense. Once enlisted, an elderly idler might enjoy the hospitality of the army for months before it was discovered that he could not walk more than a mile. The only blanket exclusion was laid down on the basis of color.34
The effect of Washington’s orders on the actual practices of his recruiters is not clear. Revolutionary pension records contain the petition of a black man who signed up and served in Washington’s army without any apparent problem during the very period when Washington had banned blacks. The soldier, Jacob Francis, was a recently freed man from New Jersey who had settled in Salem, Massachusetts. In his petition for a pension he stated, “About the last of October, I enlisted as a soldier in the United States service for one year.” In his account of his time with Washington’s army he does not mention being harassed in any way. Indeed, Francis left a firsthand account of his encounter with Major General Israel Putnam of Connecticut, one of the officers involved in the vote to exclude blacks from the army. (It is not known how he voted, because individual votes at the October council of war were not recorded.) Putnam made no disparaging remarks to him. The account is a rare sample of Revolutionary War humor.
I recollect General Putnam more particularly from a circumstance that occurred when the troops were engaged in throwing up a breastwork at Lechmere Point across the river, opposite Boston, between that and Cambridge. The men were at work digging, about five hundred on the fatigue at once. I was at work among them. They were divided into small squads of eight or ten together and a noncommissioned officer to oversee them. General Putnam came riding along in uniform as an officer to look at the work. They had dug up a pretty large stone which lay on the side of the ditch. The general spoke to the corporal who was standing looking at the men at work and said to him, “My lad, throw that stone up on the middle of the breastwork.”
The corporal, touching his hat with his hand, said to the general, “Sir, I am a corporal.”
“Oh,” said the general, “I ask your pardon, sir,” and immediately got off his horse and took up the stone and threw it up on the breastwork himself and then mounted his horse and rode on, giving directions, etc.35
Francis was not drummed out for being black. His major complaint was that the U.S. government still owed him back pay.
* * *
Unbeknownst to Washington, his November 12 general order barring blacks was trumped by the British. On November 7, in Virginia, Governor Dunmore had issued a proclamation inviting slaves to join the king’s cause and thereby become free. About eight hundred Virginia slaves quickly rallied to Dunmore, forming the “Ethiopian Regiment.” Just as quickly, they were defeated by patriot forces in the Battle of Great Bridge.36
Dunmore’s proclamation seemed to confirm the darkest of Southern fears. Washington wrote to Richard Henry Lee, a fellow Virginian, “If that Man [Dunmore] is not crushed before spring, he will become the most formidable Enemy America has—his strength will Increase as a Snow ball by Rolling.” Washington said that Dunmore was motivated by a “Resentment” that would result in “the total destruction” of Virginia. James Madison had written in 1774 that if war did break out “I am afraid an Insurrection among the slaves may & will be promoted [by the British].” But if slaveholders expected to be murdered in their beds by loyalist slaves, they were wrong. There was no general uprising by the slaves, nor did Dunmore’s Ethiopians pose a genuine military threat, because Dunmore had to abandon Virginia. But when the British returned in force to Virginia in 1781, Thomas Jefferson estimated that 30,000 slaves—men, women, and children—fled their masters for freedom with the British.37
Washington received personal notification of Dunmore’s edict from his cousin Lund Washington, who was managing Mount Vernon for him. On December 3, 1775, Lund wrote, “Our Dunmore has at length Publishd his much dreaded proclamation.… What effect it will have upon those sort of people [the slaves and indentured servants] I cannot tell.” Lund went on to say that he would have no worry about the slaves escaping, but the white indentured servants on the place might try to escape. One of the servants had told him, “there is not a man of them, but woud leave us, if they believe’d they coud make there Escape.… Liberty is sweet.” He may have thought that the blacks would hold themselves back from running because of what he called their “Slavish” character. But Lund was wrong. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, a group of Mount Vernon slaves left on a British warship.38
Despite Dunmore’s gambit Washington remained adamant. He would not recruit slaves. But he did reverse part of his earlier order and gave instructions to allow free blacks to reenlist. His general orders issued December 30, 1775, stated, “As the General is informed, that Numbers of Free Negroes are desirous of inlisting, he gives leave to recruiting Officers, to entertain them, and promises to lay the matter before the Congress, who he doubts not will approve of it.”39
The next day Washington wrote to John Hancock explaining his reversal. He cited grassroots opinion as grounds for his change of mind: black soldiers had come to headquarters to complain that they were “very much dissatisfied at being discarded.” Washington added that if the Continental Army did not take them, the British would. Congress gave Washington the permission he asked for, authorizing the reenlistment of free blacks “who have served faithfully in the army at Cambridge … but no others.”40*
With his order of December 30, for the first time in his life Washington had responded in a fair way to an appeal from free blacks. The consummate man of procedure had “made it a rule” not to recruit blacks, but then he reversed himself because the men were dissatisfied. He was acting contrary to official local practice. In January 1776 Massachusetts passed a militia act excluding blacks, even freemen, from service; later in the year New Hampshire barred blacks from its army.42
If gaining advantage over the British in the recruitment of blacks had been Washington’s main reason for the reversal, he would have pushed for accepting slaves, who were far more numerous in New England than free blacks. But there were two insuperable obstacles to admitting slaves: the slaves’ status was considered to dishonor the free men fighting in the Revolutionary cause; and their principal status was as property, and Washington the slave master would have never tampered with the property of another master. Yet his order had removed race as the defining element; he had managed to see free blacks as being different from black slaves. Though he told Hancock that he feared free blacks would join the British, that is unlikely to have been his main reason for the reversal, since there were not enough free blacks around to tip the military scale. It seems that their personal appeals had moved him, that the humanity of these free black people made itself apparent to him.
There may have been another factor at work as well. At the moment when Washington was considering the change in policy, he was contacted by a most unlikely person—a black poet who sent him verses extolling “freedom’s cause.”
A few weeks before Christmas in 1775 Washington received a letter at his headquarters in Cambridge that had been wending its way through the colonial and military postal systems for several weeks.
To His Excellency
George Washington
Sir,
I have taken the freedom to address your Excellency in the enclosed poem, and entreat your acceptance, though I am not insensible of its inaccuracies. Your being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress to be Generalissimo of the armies of North America, together with the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy to suppress. Your generosity, therefore, I presume, will pardon the attempt. Wishing your Excellency all possible success in the great cause you are so generously engaged in. I am,
Your Excellency’s most obedient humble servant,
Phillis Wheatley43
For George Washington, December 1775 was a month of startling revelations: black men demanding a place in his army; a black woman sending him a poem. Just five months earlier Washington had numbered all of Boston’s blacks among his potential enemies; then came this tribute from a black Bostonian:
Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,
Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
See mother earth her offspring’s fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!
See the bright beams of heaven’s revolving light
Involved in sorrows and veil of night!
The goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,
Olive and laurel bind her golden hair:
Wherever shines this native of the skies,
Unnumber’d charms and recent graces rise.
Muse! bow propitious while my pen relates
How pour her armies through a thousand gates,
As when Eolus heaven’s fair face deforms,
Enwrapp’d in tempest and a night of storms;
Astonish’d ocean feels the wild uproar,
The refluent surges beat the sounding shore;
Or thick as leaves in Autumn’s golden reign,
Such, and so many, moves the warrior’s train.
In bright array they seek the work of war,
Where high unfurl’d the ensign waves in air.
Shall I to Washington their praise recite?
Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.
Thee, first in peace and honours,—we demand
The grace and glory of thy martial band.
Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more,
Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!
One century scarce perform’d its destined round,
When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!
Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.
Anon Britannia droops the pensive head,
While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia’s state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.
Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.44
The poem strikes the modern eye and ear as mannered and antique, but its classical allusions and heroic cadences struck home with George Washington. Wheatley wrote of him in the diction of his beloved play Cato. The first editor of Washington’s papers, Jared Sparks, writing in the 1830s, was familiar with the literary taste of Washington’s time, and he was impressed by the quality of the poetry: “The classical allusions are numerous, and imply a wide compass of reading, a correct judgment, good taste, and a tenacious memory.”45
Writing with the fullest sympathy for Washington and with a deep familiarity with his frame of mind, Sparks suggested that Wheatley’s works might have jolted Washington into a deeper understanding of the humanity of the black people: “it cannot be doubted, that they exhibit the most favorable evidence on record, of the capacity of the African … intellect for improvement.”
Today we can sense only the tiniest aftershock of the tremor this poem would have set off in the mind of a slaveholder. Washington was highly impressed and moved by it. To an aide, Joseph Reed, he wrote, “With a view of doing justice to her great poetical Genius, I had a great Mind to publish the Poem, but not knowing whether it might not be considered rather as a mark of my own vanity than as a Compliment to her I laid it aside.”46
Poets do not write tributes to world leaders today, but in Wheatley’s time it was a standard literary convention. David Humphreys, a Yale-educated Connecticut poet and officer in the Continental Army, composed a similar tribute to the chief, which was circulated among high-ranking officers. When the poem made its way finally to Washington’s desk he hired Humphreys as an aide; the two became close friends, and after the war Humphreys wrote the first biography of Washington.
After receiving Wheatley’s poem, Washington did the unthinkable. He invited the black poet to his headquarters and temporary home in Cambridge. He wanted to meet this extraordinary woman whose talent he so admired. At that time Phillis Wheatley was the most famous black person in America; indeed she was the only famous black person in America. She was the first black, the first slave, and only the third American woman to have a book of poems published. Her second published poem, an elegy on the death of a noted preacher, had brought her fame in the Northeast and abroad; it was published as a broadside in Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia, and was included in an anthology published in Great Britain. After a collection of her work was published in London, she sailed to Great Britain in an eighteenth-century version of an author’s book tour. Benjamin Franklin paid a call on her in London.
Now General Washington himself invited her to his quarters. (It is known today as the Longfellow House, because it was eventually home to the acclaimed nineteenth-century poet.) What must the frail asthmatic young woman have thought as she ascended the stairs of the stately Georgian mansion in Cambridge, a mansion built on the profits from trade in rum and molasses—and slaves—in the West Indies? Its Tory owner had fled, as had his neighbors, so that the houses along this stretch of Brattle Street were known as Tory Row. The aristocrat from Virginia—surrounded by his well-born aides-de-camp, his wife, Martha (who had arrived from the South in her coach manned by slaves in scarlet and white livery), and five house slaves—felt at home amid the spacious house with its carved woodwork and windows that commanded a view of the Charles River.
What must he have thought as he greeted Phillis Wheatley, the African whose verses extolling freedom had moved him so profoundly? Details of the encounter are not known. Washington’s records indicate only that he invited Wheatley, not that she actually visited. There are brief accounts of her visit in two books by Benson Lossing, who may have gotten his information from Martha’s grandson. Lossing stated that Wheatley spent half an hour with the Washingtons and the general’s officers, from all of whom “she received marked attention.” Driven by curiosity, Washington would certainly have asked about her past.
Wheatley’s path to literary fame was a most extraordinary one. In 1761 Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a wealthy Boston tailor and merchant, went down to the docks to shop for a household slave among the newly arrived captives from Africa. The Wheatleys already owned several household slaves, but these servants were getting on in years, and the foresighted Susanna went looking for a young one she could properly train and prepare to take on household duties for many years to come. The ship Phillis had just docked. Among the human cargo being displayed on the wharf she saw several “robust, healthy females,” but her eye was drawn to a wretched, “poor, naked child” covered only by a piece of filthy carpet. Susanna judged her to be but six or seven years old because the child still had her baby teeth. Deeply touched by this tiny bundle of misery, Wheatley bought her, took the child home, and nursed her back to health. The family named her Phillis after the ship that had brought her from Africa.
As a member of the Wheatley family wrote in a later memoir, “She soon gave indications of uncommon intelligence, and was frequently seen endeavoring to make letters upon the wall with a piece of chalk or charcoal.”47 Susanna’s teenage daughter Mary took it upon herself to teach Phillis to read and write. The child proved such a brilliant pupil that she “astonished” Mary. Soon she was learning Latin. By age nine she was acting occasionally as secretary to Mary’s brother, Nathaniel, who dictated letters to her. The family realized that a person of such intelligence, though a slave, should not be condemned to a life of menial household chores. The other Wheatley slaves lived in the carriage house; young Phillis lived in the white family’s own dwelling.
Wheatley began writing poetry just four years after she arrived in Boston, and gained wide attention in the colonies in 1770, when she was about seventeen, for her “Elegiac Poem” marking the death of the evangelist George Whitefield. Three years later a collection of her poems was published in London, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, which went through two other British editions and at least seven American editions. But before publication could take place, Wheatley had to undergo questioning by a committee of Boston’s loftiest political figures to prove that it was she, and not someone else, who had actually written the works that had been appearing under her name in the newspapers.48
Her publisher commissioned a portrait of the author for the collection. It shows a slender, attractive young woman seated at a writing table. Quill pen in hand, poised over a sheet of paper, Wheatley appears lost in thought, but her erect posture and the force of her creative gaze convey strength and certainty of purpose. The engraving for the book was based on an original sketch done by a black artist from Boston, who captured the ambiguous stature of a poet, on the cusp of fame, who was also “Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley,” as the portrait’s caption dutifully notes. Wheatley had to play a careful game, well aware that she occupied a truly unique position. She had been passing through impenetrable social barriers. When she visited the home of a white family, the servants noted “it was the first time they ever carried tea to a colored woman.” For a woman raised as a slave, the experience of breaking barriers was disconcerting and painful. A member of the white Wheatley family wrote, “Whenever she was invited to the houses of individuals of wealth and distinction, (which frequently happened,) she always declined the seat offered her at their board, and, requesting that a side-table might be laid for her, dined modestly apart from the rest of the company.”49
Her diffidence emerges in a poem she wrote when she was fourteen. Entitled “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” the work has become notorious as an apology for slavery from the pen of a slave. One scholar called it “the most reviled poem in African American literature” because of the sentiments of its opening line, though the balance of the poem appeals for racial understanding:
Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die,”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.50
Yet beneath the diffidence and well-polished modesty lay anger, which emerged in a signed letter of February 1774 published in two Boston newspapers: “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.” Referring to slaveholders as “our Modern Egyptians.… those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their Fellow Creatures,” Wheatley implied that some divine retribution might strike them: “God grant Deliverance in his own way and Time.… This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite.” She concluded by saying, “it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher” to choose between “oppressive Power” and “the Cry for Liberty.”51
The author of such a passionate, eloquent, and angry diatribe against the slaveholders could not have written an effusive tribute to a slaveholding general without a motive deeper than flattery. Given that the author was black—what an oddity to him!—Washington would have been inclined to see the poem as a specifically black statement. One modern critic speculated that the “we” in “we demand / The grace and glory of thy martial band” referred to black Americans. More striking is the emphasis in Wheatley’s poem on the epic size of the American army—as thick as golden autumn leaves, so vast that it pours through a thousand gates. With her pointed reference to America as the land of freedom, she may have been making a disguised appeal for Washington to admit her fellow blacks into his army.52
There is no doubt that Washington was deeply impressed by what he read, for he tossed aside the conventions of social contact between a master and a black and wrote Wheatley a letter remarkable for its graciousness, given that he had never done such a thing before. He addressed the letter to “Miss Phillis.” Nothing could have induced him to address a black woman by her last name—a convention reserved for whites—but at least he added a courteous title.
Cambridge, February 28, 1776.
Miss Phillis:
Your favour of the 26th of October did not reach my hands ’till the middle of December. Time enough, you will say, to have given an answer ere this. Granted. But a variety of important occurrences, continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay, and plead my excuse for the seeming, but not real, neglect.
I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant Lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents. In honour of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the Poem, had I not been apprehensive, that, while I only meant to give the World this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of Vanity. This and nothing else, determined me not to give it place in the public Prints.
If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near Head Quarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favourd by the Muses, and to whom Nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great Respect, Your obedt humble servant,
G. Washington53
We should compare Washington’s openness with the dripping contempt that another slave master directed at Phillis Wheatley. Thomas Jefferson was outraged at the enthusiastic acclaim for the Boston poet, and it particularly bothered him that sophisticated foreign readers found much to admire. Voltaire referred to her “very good English verse”; and the naval hero John Paul Jones sent some of his own poetical writings to “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo.”54 Jefferson felt he had to snuff the groundswell of esteem:
Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but not poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum [inspiration] of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion, indeed, has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.55
His low regard for Wheatley sprang from a deeper contempt. He explicitly linked Wheatley’s supposed artistic shortcomings to her race: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
If Washington had shared Jefferson’s racial views, he would never have met Wheatley and he would never have caused her poem to be published. For Washington to entertain a black person at his headquarters shows how far he had come in a very short time. Such a meeting would have been unthinkable in Virginia; he would have opened himself to the scorn of his peers.
Wheatley’s most powerful message was her mere presence. At the time when the commander was mulling the status of black men in “freedom’s land,” a free black woman gained an audience, and presented herself as an emblem of racial conciliation. Washington’s meeting with Wheatley and his decision to admit blacks to his army reveal his dawning awareness of something. The historian Walter Mazyck expresses it succinctly: “One may pity a helpless individual or group but never respect such persons. However, when they first show signs of independent thought and action, at that moment respect is born.”56 It is hard to credit “the North” for the change in Washington, for Northerners held slaves and some of them resisted enlisting blacks as stoutly as any Southerner. Boston’s reigning patriot, John Hancock, had household slaves. Rather, one must credit Northern blacks for the general’s newfound tendency, as tentative as it was, to put aside the customs of mastery and follow humane instincts. Their demeanor, spirit, and patriotism apparently touched him.
Washington did arrange to have the poem published, through his aide Joseph Reed, in Pennsylvania Magazine in April 1776. It also circulated on Washington’s home ground, as published in Williamsburg’s Virginia Gazette. Thus in public print the name of the chief was linked with that of “the famous Phillis Wheatley, the African Poetess.”57
* * *
Washington drove the British from Boston in March 1776. His victory was a bloodless one. By placing artillery in a commanding position atop Dorchester Heights, a brilliant tactical coup, he made the British position untenable and compelled their evacuation. Ordered by the Continental Congress to protect New York from British invasion, he proceeded south with his army, which was integrated then and would remain so throughout the war.
The commander needed his black troops because white enlistment was precarious. As one historian has observed, “The popular enthusiasm of 1775 began to give out rapidly in 1776 and became hardly visible by 1777.” To alleviate a critical shortage of sailors in September 1778, Benedict Arnold (then still loyal to the American cause) proposed to make an offer of freedom to slaves who were already at work as merchant seamen on American vessels. He outlined a plan “to engage in the marine service of the united states about 5 or 6 hundred black and Mulatto Slaves who are employed as mariners in coasting vessels, by giving to them the pay and privileges of American Seamen, and assuring them of their freedom after the war, or three years Service.” But such proposals had to run the political gauntlet. A New Jersey official advanced a plan in August 1776 for a black unit to serve as a home guard, declaring that “neither the Hue of their Complexion nor the Blood of Africk have any Connection with Cowardice.” But John Adams, then a representative of Massachusetts in the Continental Congress, protested that some Southerners would not stand for it: “Your Negro Battalion will never do. S[outh] Carolina would run out of their Wits at the least Hint of such a Measure.” Adams was always concerned over the potential Southern response to the use of black troops or emancipation proposals. He was relieved when the Massachusetts legislature tabled a proposal in 1777 to abolish slavery in the state. “The Bill for freeing the Negroes, I hope will sleep for a Time,” he wrote. “We have causes enough of Jealousy, Discord and Division, and this Bill will certainly add to the Number.”58
Some objections to black troops came from within the army. When Washington’s army arrived in New York in the summer of 1776, a Pennsylvania officer noted that Colonel John Glover’s regiment from Marblehead, Massachusetts, included “a number of negroes,” and “to persons unaccustomed to such associations,” the presence of blacks and whites together “had a disagreeable, degrading effect.”59 This was the opinion of an outsider who judged by appearances and by his own prejudices. If there was something disagreeable about blacks and whites serving together in the Marblehead regiment, it was not apparent in their performance in New York.
Glover’s men were sailors. He had raised his unit from among the hard-bitten seamen of the North Shore of Massachusetts. There were a thousand of them. Ordered south in the wake of the main army, the regiment reached New York on August 28 in the midst of an appalling military disaster. A British fleet of four hundred warships and transports disembarked 32,000 troops, against which Washington could offer 20,000 Continentals, many of them young and untried in battle. In his first experience of combat commanding large numbers of men, he committed the error of dividing his forces between Manhattan and Brooklyn; he also failed to gather intelligence and to send out mounted patrols that would have warned him of British movements. The British outflanked him in Brooklyn: in a single day of fighting they inflicted more than a thousand casualties and drove the Americans into defensive lines near Brooklyn Heights. On the night of August 27, 1776, the Continental Army, and the American cause, appeared doomed to extinction. Only a heavy rainstorm prevented the British from immediately moving in to annihilate the rebels—and annihilation it would have been, for the British were already killing American prisoners. A British historian wrote, “Nine thousand disheartened soldiers, the last hope of their country, were penned up, with the sea behind them and a triumphant enemy in front, shelterless and famished on a square mile of open ground swept by a fierce and cold northeasterly gale.”60
After two days of holding this position under a driving rain, awaiting the inevitable attack, Washington was persuaded that a withdrawal across the East River was the army’s only hope. Glover’s men had arrived on the night of August 28 and had gone immediately into the defensive lines; now they were called out to save Washington’s army. The regiment, with its “number of negroes,” performed a miracle on the night of August 30, evacuating the entire army to Manhattan. The evacuation was covered, but also made more hazardous, by a dense fog. The historian David McCullough writes: “How it was all managed is almost beyond imagination. Every conceivable kind of small craft was employed, manned by Massachusetts men—soldiers from the ranks but sailors and fishermen by trade—from Marblehead and Salem.… It can be said that the fate of the American army was in their hands.”61
Glover’s regiment carried out this “Dunkirk of the American Revolution,” as McCullough calls it, without losing a single man. Among the last to leave was the commander in chief. An eyewitness wrote, “I think I saw General Washington on the ferry stairs when I stepped into one of the last boats.” Through that long night Washington had witnessed personally the skill and courage of the black sailors of Massachusetts, who rescued his army.62
Glover’s sailors, white and black, saved the American cause another time. It was they who ferried Washington and his army across the Delaware River to make the surprise attack on the Hessian barracks at Trenton on Christmas night, 1776. The famous patriotic painting by Emmanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, depicts Washington with a black soldier at his side—his name was Prince Whipple, and he was the slave of a New Hampshire officer.
It would be gratifying to be able to relate a story of Washington’s life being saved in battle by a slave, but such a thing never happened as far as anyone knows. We shall have to settle for the true story of Washington’s cousin, Lieutenant Colonel William Washington, commanding cavalry at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781. Outnumbered, surrounded by British dragoons, Washington was about to be hacked to pieces when a slave boy, a waiter, leaped on a horse with pistol in hand, took aim, and shot the dragoon nearest his commander, saving the life of William Washington. Like the crossing of the Delaware, this exploit is memorialized in a painting. And like the crossings of the East River and the Delaware, this battle was a crucial turning point of the war. By saving William Washington’s life, that slave ensured the success of the colonel’s cavalry charge against Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons. The American victory at Cowpens, bloody, bitterly fought, and won against great odds, blunted the British campaign to consolidate its conquest of the South.63
There were blacks in Washington’s army at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777–78, leaving their bloody footprints in the snow. Indeed, Valley Forge deserves a place in the history of emancipation, for it was here that Washington made a crucial decision to integrate his army further. In this, the nadir of the Revolution, as white patriotism waned, Washington looked to black men to fill the gap. In the camp at Valley Forge on January 2, 1778, Brigadier General James Mitchell Varnum of Rhode Island sent Washington a note asking permission to raise black troops from his home state: “It is imagined that a Batalion of Negroes can be easily raised there. Should that Measure be adopted, or recruits obtained on any other Principle, the Service will be advanced.” Washington gave his immediate approval. He authorized the dispatch of two officers to Rhode Island to carry out the recruitment and sent a letter to the Rhode Island governor requesting “that you will give the Officers employed in this business all the assistance in your power.”64
In the following month the Rhode Island General Assembly passed an act stating that “history affords us frequent Precedents of the wisest, the freest, and bravest nations having liberated their Slaves, and in-listed them as Soldiers to fight in Defence of their Country.” The act granted permission to “every able-bodied Negro, Mulatto or Indian man slave” to enlist and become free—“upon his passing muster, he is absolutely made free, and entitled to all the wages, bounties, and encouragements given by Congress to any soldier enlisting.” About 250 men thereupon joined the First Rhode Island Regiment. The regiment fought a brave rear-guard action in the Battle of Rhode Island the following August, three times repulsing attacks from Hessian units, the mercenaries hired from Germany by King George III. Nearly thirty thousand Germans served in Britain’s royal forces in America.65
* * *
Today, espousing the moral and political values of the twenty-first century, we can look back and see the cruel irony of slavery being preserved despite the brave service of many black Americans in the Revolutionary War. Ironies of this sort multiply in any study of slavery, and we cannot fully understand the eighteenth-century realities by assessing George Washington according to our lights. To assess his actions, and to approach a judgment of them, require us to look carefully at the realities of Washington’s own time.
Many people today believe that an emancipation of the slaves at the time of the Revolution was impossible because the decision makers then, the elite of white society and politics, firmly held the idea that blacks were an inferior species of humanity. This modern view arises from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, whose thoughts on the subject of black inferiority have been taken to reflect the general thinking of his time. In 1781 and 1782 Jefferson wrote a long survey of Virginia’s government, economy, geography, and society at the request of a French diplomat in Philadelphia. He intended it for private circulation among France’s philosophes; but the appearance of a pirated edition in France led Jefferson to have it published in Paris in 1785 as Notes on the State of Virginia.66
In Notes Jefferson railed against slavery as “a hideous evil” and predicted that it might bring a calamity on the United States, but he also laid out his racial theories. The Jefferson scholar John Chester Miller writes that Jefferson tentatively advanced the hypothesis that blacks “were superior to whites in music and equal to them in courage, memory, adventurousness and the moral sense but inferior to Caucasians in reasoning powers, forethought, poetry and imagination.” In a letter of 1807 Jefferson broadened his views with a statement that blacks were “as inferior to the rest of mankind as the mule is to the horse, and as made to carry burthens.”
Perhaps Jefferson’s most damaging statements were made on the subject of sex. He wrote in Notes that black men lusted for sexual relations with white women because they were more attractive than black women, just as orangutans in the jungle lust for “the black women over those of his own species.” Miller speculates that Jefferson’s statement was actually based on a theory that “in pursuing white women blacks were trying to raise themselves in the scale of creation.” The implication that blacks were close kin to the orangutan, Miller writes, “was unmistakable and devastating.” He continues, “Jefferson helped to inaugurate the historical tendency in America to invest racial prejudice with the gloss of pseudoscientific verification it acquired in the nineteenth century.” Jefferson’s belief in his own racial theorizing must be questioned now that DNA testing has shown that he kept his own kin (either his children or his brother’s, depending on one’s interpretation) in slavery at Monticello; he lived in a condition of deep denial. Writing before the DNA discovery, Miller sees self-rationalization in Jefferson’s racial theories: “it is obvious that the idea of the innate racial inferiority of blacks afforded Jefferson some alleviation to the harrowing sense of guilt which beset him.”67
Whatever his deeper motivations might have been, Jefferson promulgated the notion that blacks were a lower species. If that belief had been widely held in his time, then it would be a rather simple matter to explain the perpetuation of slavery by the American revolutionaries: they did not know any better. These theories of Jefferson’s about race have been remembered and endlessly cited, but Washington’s record has not. Jefferson’s ideas grew on the plantation; Washington’s policies were tested in the camps and on the battlefield. Washington’s writings as a military commander show no evidence that he believed blacks to be an inferior species. At the start of the war this Southern plantation master wanted no blacks in his army, but he changed. Under his leadership, the Continental Army became integrated. The war was a powerful solvent; it eroded even the adamant foundations of slavery. By their valor and by their ubiquity in arms, the black soldiers forced themselves into the consciousness of their officers in an entirely new way. Men of high station, bred to believe in their own superiority, began to realize that the ideas they had about the capabilities of slaves were based not on facts but on prejudice, a prejudice advanced by whites who had an economic interest in preserving slavery. In Congress and in the camps, there was talk that the time had come to give slaves freedom if they would serve. The movement toward emancipation became so powerful that the leaders of that time, including influential officers in Washington’s headquarters, could see the outlines of a new order taking shape. One declared plainly that the Continental Army was creating “a foundation for the Abolition of Slavery in America.”68
The success of the Rhode Island Regiment had a far-reaching effect. When General Washington dictated his letter to the Rhode Island governor endorsing Varnum’s plans to recruit blacks, the staff officer who took the dictation was Colonel John Laurens, a twenty-three-year-old South Carolinian. The members of the general’s immediate staff—“my military family,” as Washington referred to them—were hand-picked from the country’s finest families, and young Laurens was no exception. The artist Charles Willson Peale captured the twenty-six-year-old John Laurens in a miniature watercolor painted on ivory. Though clad in his army uniform, Laurens’s half smile softens the image. He has a rather full face, a prominent nose and dark eyebrows; his eyes engage the viewer in a gentle yet forceful stare.
The scion of a very wealthy family, Laurens also boasted a superb political pedigree. His father, Henry, was president of the Continental Congress from November 1777 to December 1778, and an ardent admirer of George Washington. At one of the dark moments of the war, Henry Laurens said of the general that “his virtues are the only present props of our Cause.”69 Later, the elder Laurens was one of the American representatives at the Treaty of Paris negotiations, along with Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams. In 1782 John Singleton Copley painted him as president of the Continental Congress. With his ruffled cuffs, velvet knee breeches and waistcoat, silver-buckled shoes, and curled powdered wig, he looks as formal and stuffy as the heavy drapes behind him. He sits uncomfortably in his straight-backed chair, taking no pleasure in it. One foot is awkwardly placed atop an ottoman, an arm tensely planted on a table covered with official documents. He appears to be all business—dour, humorless, thin-lipped, and a bit jowly, with a rather full nose—a man clearly accustomed to money and power.
The Laurens men, father and son, came from the highest tier of the country’s financial elite. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Henry was one of the wealthiest individuals in America. His son had been educated in England and Geneva. They owned plantations in both South Carolina and Georgia, but the real source of their immense wealth was slave trading. As a young man Henry Laurens, the son of a saddler, had joined a Charleston trading company and built it into the biggest slave-trading operation in the North American colonies. In his career he imported between 7,000 and 8,000 Africans and traded many thousands more on the domestic market in South Carolina.70
When Washington set in motion the Rhode Island plan, which led to the emancipation of several hundred blacks, John Laurens immediately contacted his father, and the two of them began a scheme to respond to the success of the Rhode Island arrangement. Given the origin of their wealth, one might expect that the Laurenses would have conspired to undermine it before it spread to other states. In fact, the slave trader and his son were laying out a plan for emancipation.
The young Laurens stood ready to make the personal sacrifice that was necessary. He asked his father to turn over to him some able-bodied slaves “instead of leaving me a fortune.” He was ready to give up all the slaves that formed the foundation of his future wealth, but that issue did not concern John Laurens at the moment. The moment had come to take a radical step in the Revolutionary War: “I am tired of the Languor with which so sacred a War as this, is carried on.”71
John Laurens saw “a twofold good” in his plan. In the first place, he hoped his slaves would be augmented by others, enough to form a substantial, formidable new fighting force: “A well chosen body of 5,000 black men, properly officer’d to act as light troops … might give us decisive success in the next campaign.” In the second place, Laurens believed that military service to the United States could be an intermediate and temporary status, a step on the road to full freedom. Enlistment “would advance those who are unjustly deprived of the Rights of Mankind to a State which would be a proper Gradation between abject Slavery and perfect Liberty.” The men would remain slaves while they served, and would receive their freedom at the conclusion of the war. As a student in Europe, Laurens had read the works of John Locke, whose philosophy of innate human liberty underpinned the thinking of many American revolutionaries. He believed that blacks had the same inherent qualities and rights as free whites; their enslavement was unnatural. Service in war would reveal their natural capacities, which had been obscured but not erased by enslavement: “I am tempted to believe that this trampled people have so much human left in them, as to be capable of aspiring to the rights of men by noble exertions.”72
Laurens’s plan grew from a disillusionment with slavery that had been simmering in him for two years. In April 1776, a year after the outbreak of the fighting, Laurens articulated the paradox that lay under the Revolution: “I think we Americans … cannot contend with a good Grace, for Liberty, until we shall have enfranchised our Slaves.” Americans could not reconcile “our spirited Assertions of the Rights of Mankind [with] the galling abject Slavery of our negroes.” In August, his father replied, “I abhor Slavery … in former days there was no combatting the prejudices of Men supported by Interest, the day I hope is approaching when from principles of gratitude as well [as] justice every Man will strive to be foremost in shewing his readiness to comply with the Golden Rule.” Weighing against their efforts were “great powers … the Laws & Customs of my Country,” and “avarice.” Thus, despite his abhorrence of slavery, he realized that with any movement toward abolition it was “necessary to proceed with caution.” He was determined to find some mechanism to free his slaves, and he expected that his son would concur, though it would deprive him of a large part of his inheritance. John wrote back that he agreed completely, but that an emancipation would have to take place by “shades and degrees.”73
The winter at Valley Forge made young Laurens realize that the time had come for the process of “shades and degrees” to begin. Desperate for soldiers, Washington had approved the Rhode Island plan, and that was going to lead to the emancipation of Northern slaves. Would Washington lend his support to a plan that would involve Southern slaves? He did. John reported to his father that General Washington believed that “blacks in the southern parts of the continent offer a resource to us that should not be neglected.” Washington immediately approved Laurens’s plan, stating only that he was sorry for the owner who would lose property.74
Then, just as the plan seemed to be gaining momentum, Henry Laurens began to have doubts that slaves would fight as long as they remained slaves. He proposed that the men should be freed immediately and unconditionally, and then given the choice, as free men, to serve or not to serve: “set them at full liberty—& then address them in the language of a recruiting officer [as you would] to any other free men.” In that circumstance, however, Henry thought that the majority of the blacks, like many of the whites, would choose to stay home with their families rather than risk death in battle. Then he raised a further objection. Having sounded out his fellow delegates to the Continental Congress about the idea, he concluded gloomily, in a letter to John in February 1778, that “I will undertake to say there is not a Man in America of your opinion.” He added that if his son dared to make his proposal public, “you would not have heard the last jeer till the end of your life.” The idealist son could not move the father, a practical politician. Despite Henry Laurens’s misgivings about slavery, he was not yet prepared to see his son exposed to public ridicule. John’s original plan had the virtue of simplicity, a simplicity born of intense idealism. His father concluded, after several weeks of exchanging letters with his son, that such a landmark undertaking could not be launched by one individual or even a few, but could only proceed after “mature deliberation by the Collective Wisdom of States.” Frustrated at his father’s resistance, John Laurens shelved his plan in March 1778.75
Just a year later the situation had changed completely. In December 1778 a British fleet landed an amphibious force on the Georgia coast and quickly captured Savannah, reclaiming Georgia by this one stroke. Southern loyalists flocked to the king’s cause, and the produce of Georgia’s farms went to the British, who were now in position to threaten the Carolinas and, eventually, Virginia. Within months, rumors flew that the British were offering a deal: if they could keep Georgia and South Carolina, they would accept the independence of the other eleven colonies.76
John Laurens revived his plan to raise a regiment of blacks. He wrote to his father saying that if South Carolina did not receive outside support in the form of reinforcements from the Continental Army, only a black regiment could save it from the “impending Calamity.” He renewed his pledge to give up his slave property to establish the black corps—“I would chearfully sacrifice the largest portion of my future expectations to its success.”77
John Laurens had needed no prodding to revive his enthusiasm for the plan. He had fought in two engagements during the previous year—the battles of Monmouth in June and Rhode Island in August 1778—at which black troops had fought bravely. Proof that blacks could and would fight for the American cause was in hand. Laurens had also gained the support of a powerful ally at Washington’s headquarters, Alexander Hamilton, then another of Washington’s close aides. In 1774 Hamilton had left King’s College in New York after the Boston Tea Party to join a radical group. He served as an artillery officer in the New York campaign, impressing Washington so much that he appointed Hamilton to his personal staff with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Hamilton and Laurens became close friends, and they were united also in their personal devotion to George Washington. So deep was Laurens’s esteem for his chief that in December 1778 he fought a duel, with Hamilton as his second, against General Charles “boiling water” Lee, who had made remarks questioning Washington’s character. (His challenge to Lee stated, “I am informed that in contempt of decency and truth you have publickly abused General Washington in the grossest terms. The relation in which I stand to him forbids me to pass such conduct unnoticed.” The duel ended when Lee was slightly wounded and the seconds persuaded the duelists that the honor of both had been satisfied.)78
Laurens and Hamilton spent many days at Washington’s headquarters refining the plan to recruit slaves. Hamilton lent direct support in the form of a passionate letter of March 14, 1779, to the new president of the Continental Congress, John Jay, delivered personally by John Laurens. The letter deserves to be quoted at length; it systematically demolishes objections to freeing and arming slaves, and it expresses ideas hashed out at headquarters, within earshot of the commander himself, if not in actual conversations with him.
Col Laurens, who will have the honor of delivering you this letter, is on his way to South Carolina, on a project, which I think, in the present situation of affairs there, is a very good one and deserves every kind of support and encouragement. This is to raise two three or four batalions of negroes; with the assistance of the government of that state, by contributions from the owners in proportion to the number they possess. It appears to me, that an expedient of this kind, in the present state of Southern affairs, is the most rational, that can be adopted, and promises very important advantages. Indeed, I hardly see how a sufficient force can be collected in that quarter without it; and the enemy’s operations there are growing infinitely serious and formidable. I have not the least doubt, that the negroes will make very excellent soldiers.… I frequently hear it objected to the scheme of embodying negroes that they are too stupid to make soldiers. This is so far from appearing to me a valid objection that I think their want of cultivation (for their natural faculties are probably as good as ours) joined to that habit of subordination which they acquire from a life of servitude, will make them sooner bec[o]me soldiers than our White inhabitants. Let officers be men of sense and sentiment, and the nearer the soldiers approach to machines perhaps the better.
I foresee that this project will have to combat much opposition from prejudice and self-interest. The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience; and an unwillingness to part with property of so valuable a kind will furnish a thousand arguments to show the impracticability or pernicious tendency of a scheme which requires such a sacrifice. But it should be considered, that if we do not make use of them in this way, the enemy probably will; and that the best way to counteract the temptations they will hold out will be to offer them ourselves. An essential part of the plan is to give them their freedom with their muskets. This will secure their fidelity, animate their courage, and I believe will have a good influence upon those who remain, by opening a door to their emancipation. This circumstance, I confess, has no small weight in inducing me to wish the success of the project; for the dictates of humanity and true policy equally interest me in favour of this unfortunate class of men.79
With his home ground facing grave danger, Henry Laurens dropped all his previous objections to raising a black corps. Now he saw the enlistment of black troops as vital to the defense of South Carolina. With mingled optimism and desperation, on March 16 Laurens sent an urgent request to General Washington to throw support behind the most ambitious plan yet to free slaves for the cause:
the Country is greatly distressed, and will be more so, unless further reinforcements are sent to its relief. had we Arms for 3000 such black Men, as I could select in Carolina I should have no doubt of success in driving the British out of Georgia and subduing East Florida before the end of July.80
Given that Washington had supported the Rhode Island plan, and had encouraged John Laurens to embark on his campaign of raising black troops in the South, Henry Laurens clearly expected to receive a ringing endorsement from the commander in chief, which he could use to overawe any opponents. Instead, on March 20 Washington sent a stunning rebuff:
The policy of our arming Slaves is, in my opinion, a moot point, unless the enemy set the example; for should we begin to form Battalions of them, I have not the smallest doubt (if the War is to be prosecuted) of their following us in it, and justifying the measure upon our own ground; the upshot then must be, who can arm fastest, and where are our Arms? besides, I am not clear that a discrimination will not render Slavery more irksome to those who remain in it; most of the good and evil things of this life are judged of by comparison; and I fear a comparison in this case will be productive of much discontent in those who are held in servitude; but as this is a subject that has never employed much of my thoughts, these are no more than the first crude Ideas that have struck me upon the occasion.81
This is one of the most puzzling letters Washington ever wrote, because so little of it is true. First, the enemy had already “set the example” of arming slaves more than three years earlier, when Governor Dunmore invited Virginia’s slaves to obtain their freedom by joining the British cause. Washington himself had written in 1778, in a letter to a Congressional committee, “The enemy have set every engine at work, against us, and have actually called savages and even our own slaves to their assistance.” Second, the subject of enlisting slaves, despite Washington’s denial, had indeed occupied his thoughts: in 1775 he wrote general orders about it and discussed the question in councils of war; in January 1778 he endorsed the Rhode Island plan for recruiting slaves as well as John Laurens’s initial efforts to form a South Carolina slave battalion. The British could not have failed to notice the seven hundred American blacks who fought in Washington’s army at the Battle of Monmouth.82
Washington’s greatest fear about the Laurenses’ plan was not that it was premature or inappropriate or that it would fail, but that it would succeed. By withholding his support, Washington was trying to derail a scheme that would be “productive of much discontent” among slaves remaining in bondage, including his own. At the moment, the Laurenses’ plan aimed at South Carolina and Georgia, but Virginia would be next. Just days later, Congress would formally call on Virginia to raise troops; if white recruits could not be found in sufficient numbers, Congress might extend the emancipation plan to Washington’s home ground. A letter of February 24, 1779, from the general to his manager, Lund Washington, reveals that when Henry Laurens was appealing to him for help in recruiting and freeing slaves, Washington was considering a massive sale of slaves.
The advantages resulting from the sale of my negroes, I have very little doubt of; because, as I observed in my last, if we should ultimately prove unsuccessful (of which I am under no apprehension unless it falls on us as a punishment for our want of public, & indeed private virtue) it would be a matter of very little consequences to me, whether my property is in negroes, or loan office certificates.… the only points therefore for me to consider, are, first, whether it would be most to my interest, in case of a fortunate determination of the present contest, to have negroes, and the Crops they will make; or the sum they will now fetch and the interest of the money. And, secondly, the critical moment to make this sale.83
The letter suggests that Washington withheld his support from the South Carolina plan because he feared the consequences for his own slave property. If the existence of free black battalions turned out to be “irksome” to Washington’s slaves, they would demand their freedom, too. He was “revolving” in his mind not only the price of slaves but the uncertain consequences of setting some slaves free while trying to keep the others in bondage. Preserving slavery in the midst of the Revolution—indeed, laying plans for selling his slaves—might be a moral crime so severe it called for providential punishment: defeat by the British, which Henry Laurens had told him would occur without black troops. The choice seemed plain: enlist the black battalion and win the war, or cling to the slave system and face the heightened prospect of defeat. In the middle of this letter to Lund, he speaks in an aside of a divine retribution that might befall the Revolution for its moral failings—the “punishment” that would befall the rebels “for our want of public, & indeed private virtue.” There seems little doubt, given the context, that the moral failing Washington had in his mind was slavery.
His letter to Lund makes it plain that the humanity of the slaves was not in question. Washington already was refusing to separate families by sale, but he continued to think of slaves as property, property that would be the financial foundation of his life after the war, if he could win it. And if he were to sell this property, he needed to calculate the optimum time for such a sale:
With respect to the first point (if a negro man will sell at, or near one thousand pounds, and women and children in proportion) I have not the smallest doubt on which side the balance, placed in the scale of interest, will preponderate: My scruples arise from a reluctance in offering these people at public vendue, and on account of the uncertainty of timeing the sale well. In the first case, if these poor wretches are to be held in a state of slavery, I do not see that a change of masters will render it more irksome, provided husband and wife, and Parents and children are not seperated from each other, which is not my intentions to do.
In the Mount Vernon archives, the historian Fritz Hirschfeld found two unpublished letters revealing that at the moment when the success of the Laurens plan hung in the balance, Washington felt caught between financial considerations and his conscience. The letters were written by Lund Washington on the subject of selling slaves. The general had made it clear to Lund that he wished “to get quit of negroes” but had set impossible conditions. In April 1778 Lund wrote, “with regard to sell[in]g the Negroes … you have put it out of my power, by saying you would not sell them without their Consent.” He then described how he had been on the verge of selling a woman named Bett who had apparently given him some trouble: “her Mother appeared to be so uneasy about it, and Bett herself made such promises of amendment, that I could not Force her to go with the Man.” Another woman about to be handed over to a buyer “was so alarmed at the thoughts of being sold that the man could not get her to speak a Word of English, therefore he believed she cou’d not speak.” Lund concluded, “unless I was to make a Publick Sale of those Negroes & pay no regard to their being Willing or not, I see no probability of sell[in]g them—but this is a matter that may be fixd upon you.” In September Lund wrote, with obvious irritation, “you say again you wish to get quit of negroes … tell me in plain terms, whether I should sell your negroes at Publick sale or not, & how many of them & indeed who.”84
Virtually paralyzed, Washington grappled with his conscience, hoping to be able to sell slaves in a manner he could justify to himself. (Jefferson solved this problem by the simple expedient of selling slaves from a distant plantation, where he would not have to see the sale.) The only morally acceptable solution he could imagine at that time was a sale or barter by which whole families would be transferred intact. (As it turned out, Lund sold nine slaves in January 1779, including the two women he mentioned, perhaps without Washington’s knowledge.) Having witnessed the breakup of families in the past, Washington vowed never again to do such a thing himself; and yet the slaves represented one of his most valuable assets, so he resisted a recruitment plan that might lead to the loss of his property, despite compelling military necessity.
A moment when radical change might have been possible thus passed. The window had opened at Valley Forge, when Washington was in desperate need of black men for the American cause. He had felt the presence of the revolutionary moment and sensed it melting away. Washington’s view of human nature was pragmatic—and pessimistic. And in his role of mentor Washington wrote to young John Laurens, the passionate idealist, his gloomy assessment of the reason emancipation would fail: the moment for such a sacrifice was gone. He fastened no blame on the blacks, did not claim that they were inferior or unworthy, but passed his judgment on the character of the country, and may very well have been speaking of himself and his own imperfection:
That Spirit of Freedom which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed every thing to the attainment of its object has long since subsided, and every selfish Passion has taken its place—it is not the public but the private Interest which influences the generality of Mankind nor can the Americans any longer boast an exception.
Despite Washington’s refusal of support, John and Henry Laurens persevered. On the surface their scheme was an enlistment plan, but everyone, especially Washington, recognized the implications. Emancipation, which had been heretofore an incidental side effect of black enlistment, was gaining momentum as a goal in itself. The enlistment of slaves in the heart of plantation country would have far greater impact than the enlistment of blacks in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The slave masters knew that freedom, once loosed, could not be readily contained and that slavery could not long coexist with it.
Yet some Southern leaders were so desperate to raise troops that they were now willing to tolerate emancipation. John Laurens had powerful Southern allies when he presented his proposal to the Continental Congress—William Henry Drayton, who represented South Carolina in the Congress, and Daniel Huger, the governor’s envoy. Thus, on March 29, 1779, the Continental Congress unanimously passed a resolution, which one might call the first Emancipation Proclamation:
Resolved, That it be recommended to the states of South Carolina and Georgia, if they shall think the same expedient, to take measures immediately for raising three thousand able bodied negroes.
Resolved, That congress will make provision for paying the proprietors of such negroes as shall be inlisted for the service of the United States during the war, a full compensation for the property at a rate not exceeding one thousand dollars for each active able bodied negro man of standard size, not exceeding thirty five years of age, who shall be so inlisted and pass muster.
That no pay or bounty be allowed to the said negroes, but that they be cloathed and subsisted at the expence of the United States.
That every negro who shall well and faithfully serve as a soldier to the end of the present war, and shall then return his arms, be emancipated and receive the sum of fifty dollars.85
A biographer of John Laurens wrote, “Few delegates in Congress failed to recognize the revolutionary implications of the resolution.” William Whipple, a delegate from New Hampshire, said the plan would “produce the Emancipation of a number of those wretches and lay a foundation for the Abolition of Slavery in America.” No one envisioned an immediate, general emancipation, but the Continental Congress had unanimously taken a step on the path toward a gradual one.86
John Laurens headed to South Carolina to push his plan, which required the consent of the South Carolina and Georgia legislatures. Hamilton wanted to join him, but Washington refused to allow Hamilton to leave his staff post. In May 1779, in the lower house of the South Carolina Assembly, the Laurens proposal “was received with horror by the planters, who figured to themselves terrible consequences.”87 One member of the upper house of the South Carolina Assembly was so outraged by the Laurens plan that he set forth a proposal to secede from the American war effort. The plan was voted down. It was of course highly ironic that a proposal to arm and free slaves be considered by an assembly of slaveholders, but such was the composition of every Southern government.
It is tempting to ask what would have happened if Washington had thrown his support behind the Laurens plan. Would his prestige have cowed the planters into submission? Military necessity demanded the recruitment of black battalions. There were no other men available. But the planters regarded the preservation of slavery as the bedrock of their postwar society and economy. If the United States had won independence but put slavery on the road to extinction, then they would have lost the war. The planters were prepared to see their region fall to the British before they would arm three thousand slaves. Independence had to be accompanied by the preservation of slavery. If preserving slavery prolonged the war—so be it.
When a British fleet landed an invasion force near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1780, and proceeded slowly to prepare its siege, Laurens wrote to Washington from the threatened city. He was bitter about the haughty blindness of his fellow citizens: “the Carolinians as usual have been superior to foresight and precaution. The delay of the enemy produced no other effect than to increase their supineness, and finally to produce a disbelief of the enemys intentions.” Several days later, with the siege under way, he wrote to another correspondent that the number of men at his disposal was “far too few for defending works of nearly three miles in circumference, especially considering many of them to be citizens, and unaccustomed to the fatigues of a besieged garrison, and many of the Continental troops half naked.”88
As a direct result of the failure to form a black legion to defend South Carolina, Charleston fell to the British. Much of it was reduced to rubble by British bombardment; John Laurens was captured and the American side suffered some of the heaviest casualties of the war. But slavery remained intact. In an eerie portent of the Civil War, as Philip S. Foner writes, “when the British threatened them with the expropriation of their slaves unless they took an oath of allegiance to George III, the majority of South Carolina planters, including prominent former leaders of the Revolution, foreswore their allegiance to the Patriot cause and solemnly pledged loyalty to the British crown.”89
John Laurens did not give up. Released in an exchange of prisoners, he gained a seat in the South Carolina Assembly and pressed his plan again. To Alexander Hamilton he wrote that he would not cease his efforts “while there remains the smallest hope of success.” This time he had a powerful ally in the person of General Nathanael Greene, the commander hand-picked by Washington. “What a Herculean task we have,” Greene wrote in 1781, “to contend with a formidable enemy with a handful of men.” At the Battle of Rhode Island in 1778, Greene had fought alongside black troops, and he could not understand why South Carolina neglected this resource. To the governor Greene tartly observed that “the natural strength of this country in point of numbers seems to consist much more in the blacks than in the whites.” But South Carolina did find a way to make use of its slaves. In 1792 the legislature passed a law by which white recruits were lured into South Carolina’s service by the promise of payment in slaves confiscated from loyalists.90*
Greene warned South Carolina officials that if peace were suddenly declared with Great Britain remaining in possession of lands actually occupied by her troops, South Carolina would lose the city of Charleston, which was still in British hands. But black regiments could expel the British and forestall that possibility. The situation was so dire that Laurens was beginning to garner support. One delegate wrote in February 1782: “We have had another hard Battle on the Subject of arming the Blacks.… About 12 or 15 were for it & about 100 against it.… But I do assure you I was very much alarmed on the Occasion. I was repeatedly told that a large party [of supporters] was made & I believe it was; but upon a fair full Argument, people in general returned to their Senses, & the business ended.”
In a letter to Washington in May 1782, Laurens attributed the final demise of his plan to “the howlings of a triple-headed monster in which Prejudice Avarice & Pusillanimity were united.” Nathanael Greene’s analysis, less colorful but more revealing, was that the plan failed “from an apprehension of the consequences.” One South Carolinian foresaw that the Laurens plan would inevitably lead to a general emancipation after the war, which would bring about the ultimate horror of the Southerner: “whites & blacks inter-married.”91 For many slaveholders, the union of a white woman and a black man was indeed the ultimate horror. When Jefferson worked on revising Virginia’s slave codes in the late 1770s, he proposed a law that would have required exile from the state for a white woman who had a black man’s child; if she had insisted on remaining in her homeland, she would have been outlawed, meaning she could have been beaten or killed with legal immunity for the perpetrators. Thus Jefferson would have authorized the legal lynching of such women.
The failure of emancipation to take root during the war is one of the great What ifs of the Revolution. Another is: What if blacks had not fought for the American cause? What if a slave had not saved Colonel William Washington’s life, with the result that his cavalry charge dissolved and the Battle of Cowpens had become a British victory? As the historian Thomas Fleming speculates, both North and South Carolina might well have gone over to the British. What if Glover’s regiment of Massachusetts sailors had not had the manpower to complete the evacuation of Washington’s army before the fog lifted in New York—and Washington himself, waiting for the last boat, had been captured?
* * *
In reading Washington’s wartime letters I came across a thoroughly mundane note of February 1776 from the headquarters in Cambridge to his kinsman Burwell Bassett in Virginia. “Few things of importance have occurred here of late,” he wrote, while sending along some routine military information (which surprised me; surely it was a security lapse) as well as greetings from Mrs. Washington, who was with him. But there was an arresting aside. Washington thanked Bassett for looking after his lands in the distant Ohio country, and continued, “in the worst event, they will serve for an Asylum.” Here was his plan of what he would do in the event of a military catastrophe. He would not surrender to British justice, for surely he would be drawn and quartered as a traitor, but would go to ground out west. In such an event he could not bring his family, of course, because he would be a hunted man. He knew every foot of that terrain, having surveyed it and fought on it. One wonders if he had in mind some hollow in the hills or a cave he had found, isolated, suitable for a crude habitation, defensible by a small band of men, and with a way out. He had to know that such an asylum would not be safe for long, that inevitably he would have to disappear farther west. The letter showed that, though ever resolute, George Washington knew also that he could lose, that the stupendous force arrayed against him might one day annihilate his army. Certainly he would wish to be in the thick of the fighting on such a day, but he might not be, and might find himself cut off with a handful of staffers from “my military family.” Here in this letter was a slight note of dread and, perhaps, a coded message—in “the worst event,” if you hear nothing of my whereabouts, you will know where to look.92
In keeping with Washington’s contradictory nature, the hallmarks of his generalship were caution and boldness. His primary purpose in the war was to keep the American army intact until luck brought him the moment when he could strike a heavy blow against the British. In reply to demands from Congress that he engage the British in a major battle that would decide the outcome of the war at once, Washington wrote, “we should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the risk, unless compelled by necessity, into which we ought never to be drawn.” His aim, he said, was to “protract the war” until the British wearied of it. On the other hand, as the historian John Ferling writes, “there was a gambler’s audacity to Washington’s makeup, a willingness to run great risks by attempting bold strokes.” The nighttime crossing of the Delaware to attack Trenton was one such stroke; and when Washington had the British cooped up in Boston, he considered launching a major assault to end the war quickly, but he thought better of it.93 Nevertheless, another hallmark of Washington’s command, which derived from his essential character, was iron discipline, which informed his acts and military thinking, from camp life to strategy. On a day-to-day basis, Washington’s personal adherence to discipline inspired his staff with devotion to duty and to the commander himself. One of his officers, James McHenry, wrote to a family member in 1778:
I cannot say that the fatigues of our late march [have] been of any disservice to my constitution—in sleeping in the open fields—under trees exposed to the night air and all changes of the weather I only followed the example of our General.… When I joined his Excellency’s suite I gave up soft beds—undisturbed repose—and habits of ease and indulgence which reign in some departments—for a single blanket—the hard floor—or the softer sod of the fields—early rising and almost perpetual duty. These habitudes however I prefer to those of idleness and inactivity—they are more consistent with the profession of the soldier and repetition has now made them agreeable. This however is descriptive of all the General’s family.94
On the highest plane, discipline governed Washington’s conduct of the war. Irksome as the Congress was in its delays, meddlings, and failures, Washington never wavered from the principle that the civilian government controls the state’s military forces. And in strategic matters, Washington brushed aside urgings from his erstwhile competitor for the post of commander, General Charles “boiling water” Lee, that the army fundamentally alter its methods to bring the war to a swifter conclusion. Lee thought as a general; Washington thought in terms of a military, political, and social totality larger and more lasting than a theater of war.
Early in 1778 Lee proposed to Congress, where he found strong supporters, and to Washington that the army adopt the tactics of guerrilla war. As John Shy writes:
He sought a war that would use the new light-infantry tactics already in vogue among the military avant-garde of Europe, the same tactics the free men at Lexington and Concord had instinctively employed. [But] to Washington—a practical man not given to theorizing—this was all madness. He never seriously considered resorting to a war of guerrilla bands drawn from the militia.… A strategy of that kind would change the war for independence into a genuine civil war with all its grisly attendants—ambush, reprisal, counter-reprisal. It would tear the fabric of American life to pieces. It might even undermine the political process, and throw power to a junta.95
In Washington’s mind a disciplined path, though slow and arduous, offered the only acceptable route to victory, for to throw discipline aside invites chaos, and risks winning a victory that is hollow because it lacks honor, and tenuous because it leaves wanton destruction and bitterness in its wake.
Washington needed every ounce of personal discipline and resolve to endure the string of defeats the war dealt him. After driving the British from Boston in March 1776, he suffered the disastrous defeat in New York in June, barely managing to escape with his army into New Jersey. He won bold, morale-boosting victories at Trenton on December 26 and Princeton on January 3; but in September 1777 he was thoroughly beaten at the Battle of Brandywine, a loss that allowed the British to occupy Philadelphia, forcing Congress to flee to a temporary capital at York, Pennsylvania. Even Washington’s admiring biographer Freeman concludes that the general conducted the Brandywine operations “as if he had been in a daze.”
But just twenty-three days later, on October 4, Washington led eight thousand Continentals and three thousand militia in a surprise attack on nine thousand British regulars camped at Germantown, then a separate settlement but now a northern part of Philadelphia. Certain that the Americans could not launch another major attack so soon after their defeat at Brandywine, the British had taken only minimal precautions. Washington decided upon a highly complex plan requiring coordinated maneuvers of different columns. The assault, launched at sunup, was enveloped in thick morning fog that initially aided the Americans; Washington was about to give the order to push onward into Philadelphia. But then the American units began to collide in the fog and fire on each other. A stunned Washington watched as an imminent American victory dissolved into panic.
Even in defeat Washington seemed to possess an almost mystical good luck. Far from being demoralized, the men felt that they could have won had it not been for the fog. An officer said, “They are now in high spirits and appear to wish ardently for another engagement.” More important, Washington’s pluck and determination echoed loudly across the Atlantic. Flexner writes: “In Europe, it seemed almost inconceivable that an untrained rabble would attack a mighty regular army so effectively and so soon after they had been defeated.… The French foreign minister, Vergennes, when discussing a possible alliance with American commissioners, stated that ‘nothing struck him so much’ as the Battle of Germantown.” Such an army, Vergennes said, could do anything.96
The other major factor in the deliberations in France was the American victory in October at Saratoga, New York, where General Horatio Gates captured a large British army under General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, wrecking the British strategy to split New England from the rest of the rebels along the axis of the Hudson River. American messengers raced to Boston, where a dispatch was sent by a fast ship to France. The note was handed to the envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, on December 4. News of Burgoyne’s surrender electrified the French capital, and within days the French informed Franklin that they would join the Americans in an alliance against Great Britain. Congress ratified two treaties with France on May 4, 1778. In one of these documents France recognized the independence of the American colonies.
Washington took his tattered army of ten thousand into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in December 1777. Over the next six months perhaps as many as 2,500 soldiers died of starvation and exposure. The ragged clothes of the dead were reclaimed and reissued to the living. In the comfort of Philadelphia the British fed themselves on the bounty of Pennsylvania’s farms, purchased with hard cash. Much of the blame for the suffering at Valley Forge has to be fastened on Quartermaster General Thomas Mifflin, whom Washington eventually replaced with the more energetic Nathanael Greene. Yet despite the privations, the high spirit of the army remained intact. The military historian Mark M. Boatner writes: “Washington was never faced with the expected mutiny or mass desertions. Much of this can be attributed to the faith Washington’s officers and men had in his leadership.”97
Against all odds, Washington’s army emerged from Valley Forge stronger than it had been in December. In January at Valley Forge he gave his approval to General Varnum’s plan to recruit black troops in Rhode Island. General Greene got the men fed, clothed, and equipped (though erratic supplies and pay would bedevil the Americans for the rest of the war). Washington’s circle of officers had been enhanced the previous summer by the unexpected arrival of a young French aristocrat (he was nineteen), the Marquis de Lafayette, burning with admiration for the American cause and eager to lead troops. He acquitted himself so well at the Battle of Brandywine, where he was wounded, that Congress gave him command of a division of Virginia troops, at Washington’s recommendation. Also, the harsh, profanity-laden ministrations of a Prussian drill master, Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus von Steuben, absolutely transformed the army. Descending on Valley Forge in February, he won Washington’s approval to train the troops in classical European battlefield techniques. One authority called his program “perhaps the most remarkable achievement in rapid military training in the history of the world.” In large measure Steuben’s training allowed Washington to pull victory from defeat at the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, which took place in June 1778, just after the army left Valley Forge.98
The Battle of Monmouth was the last major engagement in the North, as the British shifted their attentions to the South, where for a long while everything went in their favor. The fall of Savannah in December 1778 brought Georgia under British control, a hold that was strengthened by the failure of a combined American and French counterattack in October 1779. After the capture of Charleston in May 1780, the British had a secure base for their 8,300-man force, under Lord Cornwallis, which maintained control of a 15,000-square-mile region with the aid of local loyalists. Without consulting Washington, Congress dispatched the hero of Saratoga, General Gates, to dislodge the British, but Gates met with disaster at the Battle of Camden in August 1780. A chastened Congress now asked Washington whom to send, and he unhesitatingly picked Nathanael Greene, with Steuben as second in command.
In March 1781 Greene managed to repeat a Battle of Bunker Hill in North Carolina at Guilford Court House, near the Virginia border southwest of modern Danville, when his militia and Continentals inflicted savage casualties on Cornwallis’s 2,000-man force. North Carolina sharpshooters fired two volleys at the approaching enemy line and, as a British officer reported, “one half of the Highlanders dropped on that spot.” Royal Welsh Fusiliers dutifully followed, though they could plainly see the Americans, forty yards ahead, “taking aim with the nicest precision.” When the fighting became hand-to-hand and the enemies merged, Cornwallis reached for the devil’s tool: over the protests of his officers he ordered grapeshot fired into the mob, killing his own men as well as enemies. Greene called out to retreat and the Americans melted away. Cornwallis held the field, but the size of his losses—a fourth of his command—compelled him to retreat to the coast. “I never saw such fighting,” he said, “since God made me.”99
Frustrated at his failure to bring Greene to heel, Cornwallis decided, in defiance of orders, to march north into Virginia. There he joined other British commanders, including the traitor Benedict Arnold, who had been busily laying waste in a series of devastating raids, some of them mere plundering expeditions. One raiding party very nearly captured Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. In January 1781 Washington dispatched a force under Lafayette to bring some relief to Virginia.100
By May, after six years of fighting, an American victory seemed not only uncertain but unlikely, by Washington’s own estimate. At the army’s encampment in White Plains, New York, he began to keep a wartime journal in which he set down “our prospects.” The words that leap from the page are “bewildered and gloomy.” He enumerated the woes that beset him: “Instead of having Magazines filled with provisions, we have a scanty pittance.… Instead of having our Arsenals well supplied with Military Stores, they are poorly provided, and the Workmen all leaving them.” As for “Field equipage,” all he had were the promises of the several states to deliver something at some unspecified time. His greatest lack was men: “Instead of having the regiments compleated … scarce any State in the Union has, at this hour, an eighth part of its quota in the field and little prospect, that I can see, of ever getting more than half.”101
Washington’s situation changed utterly in August when he received two pieces of news. From Virginia Lafayette reported that Cornwallis had given up seeking a battle on the open field and had withdrawn to Yorktown on the York River, which empties into Chesapeake Bay. The other dispatch informed him that a French fleet was heading toward the Chesapeake. This unexpected combination of circumstances presented a unique but fleeting opportunity to change the course of the war. Washington put aside plans to dislodge the enemy from New York City, ordered feints and diversions to persuade the British he was remaining in New York, and commenced a fast march south.
The men with Washington represented the hard core of devotion to the cause and to their commander. An astonishing number of them were black. In July 1781 Washington’s camp was visited by an officer serving on the staff of the French allies. The officer, Baron Ludwig von Closen, surveyed the American army and wrote in his journal: “A quarter of them were negroes, merry, confident, and sturdy.” Indeed, in the judgment of that officer, the blacks were among the finest soldiers Washington had: “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.”102
Two historians, Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, wrote a book published in 1989 entitled The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution. The title rightly suggests that Americans had to be informed that there was a black presence in the founding moment. Blacks had been so systematically overlooked or deliberately erased from the history texts that average Americans found it hard to imagine that blacks had played any role at all in creating the country. Worse, they might tend to have a naive faith in the history they learned as children, and question any attempts to tamper with an image of the past that they believed served the country well. If blacks were actually important during the Revolution, then why did we not know about it earlier?
I put that question to a historian, Robert Selig, whose reply was that there were so many black soldiers in the Revolutionary army that their presence had ceased to be remarkable to contemporary observers and therefore was underreported. Washington did not comment on the large number of black men in his army at White Plains because by 1781 he was used to seeing them in the uniform of the Continental Army. But when an outsider, Baron von Closen, visited the camp he was struck by the fact that one of four Continental soldiers was black. Closen had no political agenda to advance, he had no reason to lie or exaggerate, and he wrote down his observations privately. We also learn of the black presence through the complaints of those who didn’t like it. In this fashion the once obscure facts of history reemerge.
In the judgment of the outsider Closen, the finest regiment in Washington’s command, “the best under arms … the most precise in its maneuvers,” happened to be 75 percent black. This observation would be nothing more than an intriguing footnote except that this Rhode Island unit, mostly black, would be hand-picked by Washington and Lafayette to carry out the most important assignment of the climactic battle of the Revolution—the assault that ended the war.
On its march to Yorktown, Washington’s army of 2,000 Continentals and 4,500 French troops crossed the Hudson River on August 21, passed through Philadelphia on September 2, and by September 26 reached Williamsburg, where Lafayette was waiting with another 3,000 French soldiers put ashore by the fleet. Altogether Washington would have 17,600 men against about 8,300 British, Germans, and loyalists. When Cornwallis withdrew behind formidable defensive works, Washington settled in for a methodical siege. Time would seem to favor the Americans, but they received information that a British relief fleet had set sail from New York. While French and American artillery pounded Yorktown, troops dug a series of trenches that inched closer and closer to the British fortifications. To protect the diggers, Steuben organized a system of sentries to shout warnings of British artillery fire. On October 9 Lafayette was about to give the order for a battery to fire when he asked Thomas Nelson, a resident of Yorktown, to suggest a target. A militia commander and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Nelson pointed out his own house, the finest left standing, and said in all likelihood that’s where Cornwallis would be. The barrage struck the house but it survived, with the marks of the bombardment visible today.
On October 14, General Washington realized that the moment had come when the entire war could be determined in a single bold coup. He had identified two points in the British defenses that held the key to the British position. These points were the heavily fortified Redoubts 9 and 10—formidable strongholds consisting of earthen mounds surrounded by moats and ringed by rows of sharpened stakes. French and American artillery had pounded these strongholds, but still the British held on. Victory could not be won without the capture of the redoubts, which could only be taken by storm. To carry out this assignment Washington selected the elite units of his army, including the First Rhode Island Regiment. The attack had to be carried out with stealth and under extraordinary conditions at night.
To preserve secrecy the selected units—two detachments with four hundred men in each—camped apart from the main army on the day preceding the attack. Late in the day, in a sign of the supreme importance of the mission, Washington himself appeared in their camp and addressed the men, something he had only rarely done during the war. The officer who commanded the Rhode Island men, Captain Stephen Olney, recalled later that Washington’s remarks were brief. He told them “to act the part of firm and brave soldiers”; the success of the American enterprise depended on the capture of the redoubts. It was a moment of great emotion and of great fear; as Olney listened to his commander address the troops, “I thought then, that his Excellency’s knees rather shook, but I have since doubted whether it was not mine.” After Washington concluded his remarks, “the column marched in silence … many, no doubt thinking that less than one quarter of a mile would finish the journey of life with them.”103
French units were assigned to attack Redoubt 9; American troops were assigned Redoubt 10. They were commanded, ironically, by Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens: this action would either vindicate their faith in the black troops or end in their humiliation. Olney’s Rhode Islanders took the position of honor in the vanguard of the column that would attack the front of Redoubt 10. Washington looked on as the soldiers filed off silently into the darkness, enduring the agony of the commander who can only watch and wait. Because the attack depended on surprise, Washington had issued an extraordinary order: lest an accidental shot give away the surprise, the men were forbidden initially to load their weapons. They were ordered to fight hand-to-hand, with bayonets. As Freeman describes the scene (without any mention of the presence of black troops), “Washington and the other Generals might almost have held their breath as they waited for the discovery of the attack.” The commander was banking on the discipline of his troops; the slightest sound, carried in the night air, could give away the operation. Abruptly, the silence was shattered. As Freeman writes, “the jaw of every waiting officer must have set as there rolled swiftly down from the North the sound of the fire of the guard … the sharp bark of small arms came from the redoubt the Americans were assaulting.”104
The American column had crept to the edge of the fortification, the ring of sharpened tree trunks called the abatis, when they were spotted by the defenders, who “fired a full body of musketry.” With surprise lost, the Americans let out a loud “Huzzah!” and charged. Some men hacked away at the abatis with axes while others looked for gaps made by the artillery bombardment. About a dozen Rhode Islanders squeezed through the abatis, climbed over the earthen wall supporting it, and tumbled into a ditch. Olney rolled in after them and called out, “in a tone as if there was no danger—Captain Olney’s company, form here!” In an instant he felt the stabs of British bayonets in his hand, leg, and abdomen. Two of his men hastily loaded their muskets and fired into the British defenders, saving Olney from further harm. All along the line the British were firing madly into the darkness and hurling grenades. One American sergeant thought the column was being wiped out: he could see his men falling everywhere he looked; then, as if in a dream, they rose again. The sergeant realized the men had not been shot but, in the darkness, had fallen into shell holes. Someone called out, “Rush on, boys! The fort’s ours!” The Americans clambered up the side of the redoubt. Hamilton ordered a soldier to kneel and jumped from the man’s back into the redoubt. After ten minutes of hand-to-hand fighting, the British surrendered. Lafayette appeared and sent a jaunty message to the French officer leading the other attack, “I am in my redoubt. Where are you?”105
The next day Washington himself, elated by the victory at Yorktown, visited his men in the captured fort. In frustration British snipers were pecking away at their lost redoubts, and an occasional artillery round landed nearby, but Washington ignored the danger to savor the triumph. “Washington could not conceal his enthusiasm over the success of these brilliant feats,” writes the historian Henry Johnston, “and in General Orders he praised the troops unstintingly.” No mention was made of the fact that the Rhode Island contingent was mostly black—it was no longer extraordinary to see black men in arms. To preserve a shred of British honor, Lord Cornwallis ordered one more pro forma attack on the American lines, but the capture of the redoubts had sealed the fate of his army. After brief negotiations, the British and Hessians, some of them in tears, filed silently out of their fortifications and stacked their arms as drummers beat out a solemn march.106
Every victory has its price. In the wake of such a grand triumph no one wished to dwell on the cost in human lives. Paintings of the Yorktown victory show its undeniable glory and give no hint of the scene of horror beyond the lines of fluttering banners and crisply uniformed officers. Once again, a foreigner noted it, Private Georg Daniel Flohr of the Royal Deux-Ponts. Walking over the now calm battlefield, he wrote of seeing “all over the place and wherever you looked—corpses—lying about that had not been buried.” He took note of who these people were: “the larger part of these were Mohren”—Moors, Negroes. Blacks had fought on both sides, with the Americans and the French, with the British and the Hessians; and, as Flohr observed, blacks had paid the highest cost in defeat and victory.107
The heaps of dead also represented a betrayal by the British. They had promised freedom to any slave who would join them, and in the panic of the final days of siege, as food ran short and disease swept the trenches, Cornwallis had issued a brutal order. A Hessian officer wrote:
I would just as soon forget to record a cruel happening. On the same day of the enemy assault, we drove back to the enemy all our black friends.… We had used them to good advantage and set them free, and now, with fear and trembling, they had to face the reward of their cruel masters. Last night I had to make a sneak patrol, during which I came across a great number of these unfortunates. In their hunger these unhappy people would have soon devoured what I had; and since they lay between two fires, they had to be driven on by force. This harsh act had to be carried out, however, because of the scarcity of provisions; but we should have thought more about their deliverance at this time.
A Virginian who was present wrote that “an immense number of Negroes” died “in the most miserable Manner.”108
Many of these men were suffering from smallpox. An epidemic had broken out, but there is evidence that the British had deliberately infected some blacks with the disease and expelled them toward the American lines to spread the contagion. An American soldier wrote, “During the siege we saw in the woods herds of Negroes which Lord Cornwallis … in love and pity to them, had turned adrift, with no other recompense for their confidence in his humanity than the smallpox for their bounty and starvation and death for their wages.”109
During the war many Virginia slaves had served in the army as substitutes for their masters. Their number is not known, but there were enough of these veterans around to prick the conscience of the Virginia legislature after the war. They had served with the promise of emancipation, but once independence was won, with their assistance, their masters managed to forget their promises and returned the men to slavery. The Assembly passed a bill denouncing masters who “contrary to principles of justice and to their own solemn promise” had kept such men enslaved. By blanket decree, it emancipated these men and ordered the attorney general to represent any black claimants. But the black veterans fell afoul of a loophole: though entitled to end their enslavement, they could not begin legal proceedings on their own because they were still slaves. The legislature itself, moved by a sense of justice, freed some men by statute; the total of these emancipations was eight.110
The success of Washington’s rebellion against tyranny fed hopes for freedom among Virginia slaves for many years. About two decades after the Revolution a Richmond slave named Gabriel Prosser launched a revolt to obtain freedom with as much courage, but with as much chance of success, as the men at the Alamo. This doomed crusade, led by a messianic blacksmith, remains one of the most poignant episodes in our history. The revolt was betrayed by one of the conspirators; twenty-seven men were rounded up and condemned to hang. Given the chance to speak his last words as he stood facing the noose, one of the condemned men declared: “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”111