Many African Americans Were Dedicated Patriots During the American Revolutionary War

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Probably no historical painting is as familiar to the American public as Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s dramatic Washington Crossing the Delaware. Painted in 1851, seventy-five years after the event, it may not be true to the facts, but it catches the spirit of dauntless courage exhibited by General George Washington and his soldiers on Christmas Eve 1776. Among the men to whom Leutze grants a place in the rowboat is the fifth American president, James Monroe, who did not actually make the crossing. Another is a man who, in most reproductions, is hard to make out. He is shown pulling the stroke oar just behind General Washington’s forward-thrusting kneecap. He is a black man, and he did make the crossing. His name was Prince Whipple.

According to the earliest account of Whipple’s remarkable life, he was born in Africa ‘of comparatively wealthy parents’ and, when about ten, was sent by his parents ‘in company with a cousin, to America to be educated.’ Instead, both young men were sold into slavery in Baltimore and purchased by William Whipple of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. During the Revolution, William Whipple served as an aide to Washington and rose to the rank of general. Prince Whipple served at his master’s side throughout the Revolution and, according to historian William C. Nell, ‘was emancipated during the war.’

When I was growing up, I had never heard a teacher mention the role blacks played in the Revolution. In fact, I suspect my ignorance on this score would have remained intact if I had not looked into the story of a black woman who sued for her freedom in 1780–and won. The liberated woman, Elizabeth Freeman, subsequently took service in the household of the lawyer who had taken her case, Theodore Sedgwick of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Another servant in that household, I discovered, was a freeborn black veteran named Agrippa Hull.

Hull enlisted on May 1, 1777, and served for the duration of the war, first under Brig. Gen. John Paterson and later under the celebrated Polish volunteer and master military engineer General Thaddeus Kosciuszko. In his biography of General Paterson, Thomas Egleston, his great-grandson, recalled that Hull ‘always claimed that he was the son of an African prince,’ adding, ‘His aptness and wit and his readiness in repartee, as well as the intelligent manner in which he performed all his duties, made him a great favorite with all the officers of the army stationed at ‘the Point”–a reference to the fact that Hull was at West Point at the time Kosciuszko was engaged in fortifying that strategic high point on the west bank of the Hudson River.

Historian Richard S. Walling lists Hull among those whose service at the June 28, 1778, Battle of Monmouth is ‘probable, but not yet researched for verification.’ Considering that Hull served under Paterson for the first two years of his enlistment and Paterson’s Third Massachusetts Brigade took part in the battle, it seems very probable that the volunteer from Stockbridge was one of the more than eight hundred African Americans present at the war’s last major engagement in the North.

At war’s end, Kosciuszko, who had taken a great liking to Hull, invited him to return to Poland with him, but Hull declined. Mustered out at West Point in 1783, he returned to Stockbridge, served as a butler, saved enough money to buy a farm, raised a family, and died in 1848 just short of his eighty-ninth birthday. ‘As long as he lived,’ Egleston wrote in his memoir, ‘the children and the grandchildren of the officers he had known went frequently to Stockbridge to see him. He was never tired of telling stories of the Revolution.’

Black Americans–in and out of uniform, on land and at sea, and on both sides of the conflict–played a significant part during the struggles that would separate the colonies from England. Crispus Attucks, part black, part Natick Indian, and a towering six feet two inches tall, was among the five Americans killed by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, which took place five years before the Battle of Lexington. In the words of a nineteenth-century memoirist, Attucks was ‘the first to defy, and the first to die.’ Similarly, on April 19, 1775, among the first to take a bullet at Concord Bridge was Prince Easterbrooks, a Lexington slave who had been enrolled in Captain John Parker’s company, which was the first to engage the British. But Easterbrooks survived to fight in nearly every major campaign of the war.

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Tags: 17th - 18th Century, African American History, American Revolutionary War, Historical Conflicts

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