Two Promises of Freedom: Black Americans in the Revolutionary War

On the night of March 5, 1770, in front of the Custom House on King Street in Boston, a sailor of African and Wampanoag descent named Crispus Attucks was shot dead by British soldiers. He was, by most accounts, the first person killed in what became the American Revolution. He had been free for about twenty years, having escaped slavery in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1750.

Five years later, the war he had unknowingly helped start would put tens of thousands of Black Americans in an impossible position. Two armies were now offering them freedom. One was British. One was American. Most history books pretend only one of those offers existed.

The Math of the War

Historians at the National Museum of the United States Army estimate that between 5,000 and 8,000 Black men served the American cause as soldiers, sailors, scouts, teamsters, laborers, or spies. That figure is hedged because no central muster rolls of Black soldiers were maintained. They served in nearly every Patriot regiment and in every major battle, from Lexington and Concord in April 1775 to Yorktown in October 1781.

The figure on the other side was much larger. Estimates of enslaved people who reached British lines run as high as 20,000 over the course of the war, drawn by two formal emancipation offers — Dunmore’s in 1775 and General Henry Clinton’s broader Philipsburg Proclamation in 1779. Mary Beth Norton and other historians of the period treat the war as the largest single act of self-emancipation in American history before 1863.

That is the central, uncomfortable fact most school-textbook accounts skip past. For an enslaved person in 1775, the side most likely to deliver actual personal freedom was not obviously the side fighting for “liberty.”

The British Offer: Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation

By the summer of 1775, John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, had been driven out of Williamsburg and was operating from a Royal Navy ship off Norfolk. His position was desperate. On November 7, 1775, from on board the HMS William, he drafted a proclamation declaring martial law and offering freedom to any indentured servant or enslaved man owned by a rebel who would bear arms for the Crown. It was formally proclaimed about a week later, on November 14 or 15.

Within weeks, several hundred enslaved men had reached him. By the end of his Virginia campaign in 1776, somewhere between 800 and 2,000 had joined what Dunmore called his “Ethiopian Regiment,” many wearing sashes with the slogan “Liberty to Slaves.” Dunmore’s military aim was strategic, not humanitarian — Encyclopedia Virginia notes that he wanted to break Patriot economic power and the slave-owning planter class supporting it. The effect was both. It was also the first large-scale emancipation in the history of colonial British America.

Thomas Jefferson, drafting Virginia’s June 1776 constitution, listed “prompting our negroes to rise in arms against us” among the king’s grievances. The Declaration of Independence, written that same summer, included a similar accusation in Jefferson’s draft. In other words, one of the original American complaints against George III was that he had offered freedom to enslaved Americans.

The American Reversal: From Exclusion to the 1st Rhode Island

The Continental Army’s first official position on Black soldiers was to exclude them. In late 1775, soon after taking command at Cambridge, Massachusetts, George Washington — himself a Virginia enslaver — issued orders barring further enlistment of Black men, even though African American soldiers had already fought at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Salem Poor and Peter Salem, both at Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, had distinguished themselves enough that fourteen officers later signed a petition praising Poor’s “brave and gallant” conduct.

Dunmore’s Proclamation changed the calculation. As enslaved Virginians began streaming to British lines, Washington and the Continental Congress quietly reversed course. By the end of 1775, free Black men were once again being enlisted; by 1777, several states were actively recruiting enslaved men with promises of freedom in exchange for service.

Rhode Island went the furthest. In February 1778, with the state struggling to meet its Continental quota, the General Assembly passed the Slave Enlistment Act, allowing any “able-bodied Negro, Mulatto, or Indian” enslaved person to enlist for the duration of the war. The act stipulated that anyone who served would be “immediately discharged from the service of his master or mistress, and be absolutely free.” The state would compensate enslavers at market value.

Roughly 88 enslaved men enlisted in the resulting 1st Rhode Island Regiment in the first four months. The regiment ultimately totaled about 225 men, of whom roughly 140 were Black or Native American — the only Continental Army regiment to maintain segregated Black companies. It saw its first major action at the Battle of Rhode Island on August 29, 1778, where it repelled three charges by Hessian troops and helped cover General John Sullivan’s withdrawal. Sullivan said the regiment had borne “a proper share of the day’s honors.” Lafayette, who visited Rhode Island shortly after, called the engagement “the best-fought action of the war.”

Phillis Wheatley Writes to the General

Between Dunmore’s Proclamation in November and Washington’s reversal on Black enlistment a few months later, an unusual letter reached Continental Army headquarters in Cambridge. It was dated October 26, 1775, sent from Providence, Rhode Island, and signed by Phillis Wheatley — a poet who had been kidnapped from West Africa around age seven, sold into slavery in Boston in 1761, taught to read by the Wheatley family, and emancipated in 1773 after publishing the first book of poetry by an African American. Enclosed with the letter was a 42-line poem in heroic couplets praising Washington as “great chief” and celebrating “Columbia” — her personification of America.

Washington’s reply, dated February 28, 1776, from Cambridge, is preserved on Founders Online at the National Archives. He thanked her for her “polite notice” and praised the poem’s style. He told her he had not published it himself because he feared he would be accused of vanity. Washington’s aide Joseph Reed forwarded the poem to The Virginia Gazette, which printed it on March 30, 1776. Thomas Paine reprinted it in The Pennsylvania Magazine the following month.

Historians at the Gilder Lehrman Institute and George Washington’s Mount Vernon trace a small but real shift in Washington’s expressed views on slavery beginning soon after this exchange. He reversed the enlistment ban in late 1775. He supported a 1779 proposal to free South Carolina enslaved people who fought for the Patriots. By the time of his death in 1799, his will provided for the manumission of the enslaved people he personally owned after Martha’s death. The Phillis Wheatley correspondence is not the cause of that evolution. But it is one of its earliest documented moments.

James Lafayette and the Long Wait for Freedom

Of the Black Americans who fought for the Continental Army, James — enslaved in New Kent County, Virginia, by William Armistead — left the most consequential single legacy. In the summer of 1781, with William Armistead’s permission, he was attached to the Marquis de Lafayette’s Virginia command as a “servant,” which was a cover story. Lafayette had recruited him as a spy.

Posing as a runaway who had answered Dunmore’s call years earlier, James infiltrated Benedict Arnold’s camp after Arnold defected to the British, then moved with the British command to Lord Cornwallis’s headquarters at Yorktown. By late July 1781, he was waiting at Cornwallis’s table. He sent Lafayette repeated reports on British strength, troop movements, and supply problems, while feeding the British misleading numbers in return. In late August, he confirmed for Lafayette that Cornwallis was fortifying Yorktown — intelligence Washington and the French commander Rochambeau used to plan the joint siege that began in September.

Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781. The war was effectively over. A few days later, paying a courtesy visit to Lafayette, Cornwallis is said to have recognised James and remarked that he had been played the whole time.

And then James went home and resumed his life as an enslaved man.

The Virginia Manumission Act of 1782 freed enslaved men who had served as soldiers in the Continental Army. James had served as a spy, not a soldier — he had never been issued a firearm — and was therefore excluded. He petitioned the Virginia legislature. The first petition died in committee. In November 1784 he met the Marquis de Lafayette again, in Richmond, and Lafayette wrote a personal testimonial certifying his service. With that document, and with the support of William Armistead — by then a member of the House of Delegates — James filed a second petition. The House passed the act on December 25, 1786; the Senate followed on January 1, 1787; the governor signed it on January 9. Virginia paid William Armistead £250 as compensation for the loss of “a valuable workman.” James took the surname Lafayette to honour the French general who had helped him.

After Yorktown: The Book of Negroes

The men who had taken Dunmore’s and Clinton’s promises of freedom faced their own reckoning. When the British evacuated New York in November 1783, the senior British officer there — General Sir Guy Carleton — refused American demands to hand back self-emancipated Black Loyalists. Instead, he ordered their names recorded in a registry, the Book of Negroes, listing roughly 3,000 men, women, and children who were then transported as free people to Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, and (later) Sierra Leone.

The British promise was honoured imperfectly — some Black Loyalists who reached Nova Scotia faced racism, land fraud, and broken promises that pushed many to leave for Sierra Leone in 1792. But for thousands of formerly enslaved Americans, the practical outcome of the Revolution was emancipation under a British flag rather than an American one.

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Two distortions recur in popular histories. The first is to treat Black Patriots as inspirational decoration — brave figures who heroically chose the right side, the side of liberty. The second is to flip that and treat Black Loyalists as either tragic dupes or moral traitors who chose the wrong side.

Both readings impose a moral framework that did not exist for the people making the choice. In 1775 and after, an enslaved person in Virginia or the Carolinas was choosing between two armies — one of which formally promised emancipation in exchange for service, the other of which formally prohibited it until late 1775 and only reluctantly relaxed that prohibition later, and then only in some states. Both choices carried lethal risk. Both choices sometimes ended in freedom and sometimes ended in betrayal. James Lafayette spied for the Americans and waited six years for the freedom he had earned. Thousands who took Dunmore’s offer died of smallpox in British camps in 1776.

The honest summary: Black Americans did not have a Revolutionary cause handed to them. They had two armies and a calculation, and they made it under conditions no Founding Father ever faced.

Why It Still Matters

The Continental Army at Yorktown was, by some estimates, around a quarter Black — a striking figure visible in Jean-Baptiste-Antoine DeVerger’s 1781 sketch of American soldiers, the earliest known eyewitness drawing of US troops in the field. A free nation was secured in significant part by the work of unfree men. That contradiction did not resolve itself in 1783, or in 1789, or even in 1865. It is still being argued about. Recognising that Black Patriots and Black Loyalists were both rational actors, working with the limited options they had, is the beginning of telling the Revolution honestly.

For more on the wider founding generation, see our piece on how women shaped the American founding, including the early Anti-Federalist case that became the Bill of Rights.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Crispus Attucks?

Crispus Attucks was a sailor of African and Wampanoag descent who had escaped slavery in Framingham, Massachusetts, around 1750. He was killed by British soldiers on March 5, 1770, in front of the Custom House on King Street in Boston, becoming one of five people killed in what is now called the Boston Massacre. He is widely considered the first person to die in the American Revolution.

What did Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation actually say?

Issued on November 7, 1775, by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, the proclamation declared martial law and offered freedom to any indentured servant or enslaved man belonging to a rebel who would bear arms for the British Crown. It was the first large-scale offer of emancipation in colonial American history and prompted between 800 and 2,000 enslaved people to reach British lines in Virginia within months. Estimates of enslaved people who eventually reached British lines across the war run as high as 20,000.

How many Black soldiers fought for the Continental Army?

Historians estimate that 5,000 to 8,000 Black men served the American cause as soldiers, sailors, scouts, teamsters, or spies — roughly 3.5% of Patriot troops. The figure is approximate because no central muster rolls of Black soldiers were kept. Black men served in almost every Patriot regiment and in every major engagement of the war.

What was the 1st Rhode Island Regiment?

The 1st Rhode Island Regiment, sometimes called the “Black Regiment,” was reorganised in February 1778 under Rhode Island’s Slave Enlistment Act, which allowed enslaved men to enlist in exchange for freedom and compensated their enslavers at market value. The regiment included roughly 88 enslaved enlistees in its first months and totaled about 225 men, of whom approximately 140 were Black or Native American. It distinguished itself at the Battle of Rhode Island on August 29, 1778, repelling three Hessian charges, and later served at the siege of Yorktown.

When did James Lafayette get his freedom?

James was granted his freedom by the Virginia General Assembly, with the governor’s signature, on January 9, 1787 — more than five years after his espionage at Yorktown helped force the surrender of Lord Cornwallis on October 19, 1781. He had been excluded from Virginia’s 1782 Manumission Act because he had served as a spy rather than as an armed soldier. The Marquis de Lafayette’s personal testimonial of November 21, 1784, was instrumental in his eventual emancipation. Virginia paid William Armistead £250 as compensation.

What is the Book of Negroes?

The Book of Negroes is a British registry compiled in 1783 at the end of the Revolutionary War, listing approximately 3,000 Black Loyalists — formerly enslaved people who had reached British lines — whom British commander Guy Carleton refused to return to American enslavers. They were evacuated from New York and resettled primarily in Nova Scotia, with many later moving to Sierra Leone in 1792. The registry is one of the most important surviving documents of Black emancipation in the eighteenth century.

Sources

1. Founders Online, National Archives — Phillis Wheatley to George Washington, 26 October 1775
2. Encyclopedia Virginia — Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation
3. Gilder Lehrman Institute — Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, 1775
4. American Battlefield Trust — James Armistead Lafayette biography
5. Encyclopedia Virginia — James Lafayette (ca. 1748–1830)
6. HISTORY — America’s First Black Regiment Fought the British
7. BlackPast — 1st Rhode Island Regiment
8. George Washington’s Mount Vernon — Phillis Wheatley
9. National Museum of the United States Army — James Armistead Lafayette
10. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Beacon Press, 2006)
11. Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2006)
12. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton University Press, 1991)