One of the last to enlist in the new regiment was Jack Sisson, who had made a name for himself the previous summer when he played a crucial part in the capture of British Maj. Gen. Richard Prescott in Newport. The operation, essentially a commando raid, was carried out under the leadership of Lt. Col. William Barton. After selecting a group of about forty men, Barton told them his plan, warned them that it was risky, and added that they were free to back out if they wished. According to a contemporary account, however, ‘they unanimously resolved to go with him.’ Using three small boats, Barton’s party slipped through Prescott’s warships, landed near the general’s headquarters, overpowered the guard, and surrounded the house. Only a door now separated them from the sleeping general. Sisson charged the door, using his head as a battering ram, and on the second try, he ‘forced a passage into [the house], and then into the general’s chamber.’ The general was allowed to pull on his breeches before being taken away. He was subsequently exchanged for imprisoned American General Charles Lee.

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Few regiments, of any color, earned such a reputation for bravery and loyalty as the First Rhode Island. Its baptism by fire took place in August 1778 in what has been variously called the Battle of Rhode Island and the Battle of Newport. In command of six brigades, American General John Sullivan hoped to defeat a much larger British force, which included Hessian soldiers, with the assistance of a French naval squadron. When a violent storm forced the French ships to withdraw, Sullivan had no choice but to carry out a strategic retreat from the northern end of Rhode Island. As the battle lines were drawn, the Rhode Island blacks found themselves facing the feared Hessians, who charged three times and were repulsed three times, with heavy casualties. The black regiment had proved equal to any other. In his report on the battle General Sullivan said the regiment was entitled to ‘a proper share of the Honours of the day.’ For his part, the German colonel who had led the Hessians asked to be transferred because he was afraid his men, who had seen so many of their comrades die, might shoot him.

Two and a half years later, on May 13, 1781, a number of Colonel Greene’s black Rhode Islanders fought at his side in what turned out to be his, and their, last battle, near Points Bridge, New York. William C. Nell, the black abolitionist author of the seminal The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, published in 1855, described the event: ‘Colonel Greene, the commander of the regiment, was cut down and mortally wounded: but the sabres of the enemy only reached him through the bodies of his faithful guard of blacks, who hovered over him, and every one of whom was killed.’ The remnants of the First Rhode Island Regiment served for the rest of the war and were among the troops with Washington when he accepted Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown.

Later that year, black and white soldiers again fought side by side, and again, every one of them was killed–but after they had surrendered. The battle took place on September 6 near Groton, Connecticut. The Patriots mustered a force of eighty-four men to defend the town and to try to prevent a much larger British force commanded by Brig. Gen. Benedict Arnold from seizing the nearby port of New London. After a fierce resistance that caused heavy casualties to their attackers, Lt. Col. William Ledyard’s outnumbered Americans withdrew to Fort Griswold, a small fortification with a few cannons. When the British tried to scale Griswold’s walls, two Americans–one white, one black–drove their pikes into the major who led the assault. The black man was Jordan Freeman. When, finally, the British broke in and an officer asked who commanded the fort, Ledyard replied, ‘I did once. You do now,’ and handed his sword to the officer, who thereupon thrust his sword through Ledyard’s body. Close by stood a black American, a slave who had run across the fields with his master to join the others. His name was Lambert Latham. To quote Nell’s graphic account: ‘Lambert…retaliated upon the officer by thrusting his bayonet through his body. Lambert, in return, received from the enemy thirty-three bayonet wounds, and thus fell, nobly avenging the death of his commander.’ Maddened by the loss of so many of their men, the British killed all the Americans in the fort. A tablet at Old Fort Griswold, in Groton, erected in 1830, commemorates the memory of those men, carefully segregating the whites from the blacks.

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