After the war, Lafayette wrote a certificate on James Armistead’s behalf, which states, in part: ‘This is to Certify that the Bearer…Has done Essential Services to me While I Had the Honour to Command in this State. His Intelligences from the Enemy’s Camp were Industriously Collected and More faithfully deliver’d. He properly Acquitted Himself with Some important Commissions I Gave Him and Appears to me Entitled to Every Reward his Situation Can Admit of.’

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Lafayette sent the certificate to Virginia’s General Assembly, together with a request that James be granted his freedom, pointing out that the black man had repeatedly risked his life in the service of the Patriot cause. The Assembly agreed, and henceforth James Armistead called himself James Lafayette.

Forty years later, on his last visit to the United States, the ever-popular French general paid a visit to Richmond, where, before an applauding public, he greeted his sixty-four-year-old namesake and comrade. It was shortly after this reunion that James Lafayette sat for his portrait.

By coincidence, during the Revolution the marquis de Lafayette had also made the acquaintance of Agrippa Hull. Thomas Egleston later recalled that ‘General Lafayette knew Grippy in the army, and on his second visit to this country [in 1784] the Sedgwicks of Stockbridge took Grippy to New York to meet him.’

It is worth noting, too, that both Lafayette and Kosciuszko took more than a passing interest in the plight of the Negroes of America. Kosciuszko donated funds derived from the sale of Ohio land granted him for his war service to the establishment of one of the first schools for blacks in America. For his part, Lafayette, back in Paris, became a charter member of a society called The Friends of the Blacks. A British abolitionist said of the egalitarian marquis that he was ‘as uncompromising an enemy of the slave trade and slavery as any man I ever knew.’

In 1777, as the war was moving into its third year, blacks began to be accepted into the military in large numbers. Congress had started to fix troop quotas for the various states. And, as Quarles noted, while Northern state legislatures might pass laws prohibiting the enrollment of Negroes, ‘muster masters ignored the law….’ In Massachusetts, for example, the General Court passed an act in January 1776 excluding Negroes, Indians, and mulattos from the militia, and later that year passed an act excluding non-whites from the ranks of the Continental Army. Many in the North believed that training blacks in the use of arms was a potential danger. Members of the Massachusetts legislature also noted that ‘there was an inconsistency in assigning slaves to defend the liberty of America–an inconsistency which would expose patriots to the kind of British ridicule that ‘we so liberally bestowed upon them because of Dunmore’s regiment of blacks.” But in May of 1777, Trueman Wheeler, muster master for Berkshire County, had no qualms about enlisting Agrippa Hull. The muster master got his fee, perhaps as much as ten dollars per recruit, and the recruit got his bounty–in Hull’s case twenty dollars. The towns that appointed the committees that oversaw the hiring of recruits wanted to keep expenses down and in many cases instructed the muster masters to economize. And, in the North anyway, Negroes would generally accept a lower bounty than whites. (The one hundred-dollar bounty paid to Prince Hall of Medford, Massachusetts, would appear to be an exception to the rule.)

The year 1777 was also when Connecticut, whose towns were having a hard time meeting their quotas, passed an act that exempted any two men who could provide an able-bodied substitute–of any color. They followed this up with a second act that let slaves serve as substitutes for their owners, on condition that the owner granted the slave his freedom.

Rhode Island, always a bit of a maverick, passed a slave enlistment act in January 1778, and in February authorized the formation of a battalion of slaves who, if they volunteered and passed muster, would be declared ‘absolutely free.’ The slave battalion became the First Rhode Island Regiment. It was formed during the terrible winter at Valley Forge, from which Washington sent Colonel Christopher Greene north to start drilling his 125 black soldiers, thirty-three of whom had been free prior to signing up.

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