In Black Heroes of the American Revolution, historian Burke Davis observed, ‘Other thousands of blacks might have fought for the Americans, but Georgia’s white Patriots feared to put muskets into the hands of their slaves (many of whom had run off to join the British, who organized black units themselves and urged all slaves to flee their masters) and refused to send them to join General [Benjamin] Lincoln’s army.’ Indeed, during the October 9, 1777, Battle of Savannah, hundreds of blacks ran off to join the British. They built redoubts and served as infantrymen and as guides–in one memorable case helping a British colonel surprise the Americans by showing him a path through a swamp.

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Among the several hundred black Americans who served at sea during the Revolution, perhaps the most renowned was James Forten, who in 1781 at the age of fifteen enlisted as a powder boy on a privateer. This was Royal Louis, commissioned in Pennsylvania and commanded by Stephen Decatur, Sr. The ship’s first engagement was with a British brig. Royal Louis took a pounding but came out the victor, forcing the brig to surrender. The next time out, the ship ran up against three British warships, and Decatur was compelled to surrender. Forten’s young life then took several astonishing turns. The son of an English captain, amazed by the boy’s skill at marbles, struck up a friendship with Forten and persuaded his father to offer the prisoner the life of an aristocrat in England. Forten refused to renounce his allegiance to his country and paid the penalty: He was sent to the prison ship Jersey, anchored off Long Island. Jersey’s hold was packed with a thousand men. As Sidney Kaplan and Emma Norgrady Kaplan note in The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, ‘Ten thousand died miserably during the war in the rotten old hulk.’

Forten survived and was released in a general exchange of prisoners near the end of the war. Back in Philadelphia, he set up business as a sailmaker and inventor, eventually amassing what was then a fortune. In a speech he made in 1833, Forten stated that his great-grandfather had been brought to this country as a slave from Africa, his grandfather had obtained his own freedom, and his father ‘never wore the yoke…and rendered valuable service to his country in the war of our Revolution.’ Thus, both father and son were veterans, and Forten and his sons and grandsons all became leaders in the anti-slavery movement.

Not all blacks who volunteered for service on behalf of the Patriots were granted their freedom on being mustered out. Saul Matthews, a Virginia slave who served as a soldier and a spy, was praised by high-ranking officers such as General Nathaniel Greene and Baron Friedrich von Steuben but returned to bondage after the war. In 1792, he petitioned the Virginia legislature for his freedom and was granted ‘full liberty and freedom.’

Born into slavery in Maryland, James Roberts served under his master, Continental Army Colonel Francis De Shields, throughout the entire war. After De Shields’ death in Philadelphia, Roberts, in a remarkable display of loyalty, delivered his master’s possessions to the family in Maryland. There, he was sold to a Louisiana planter, stripped of his uniform, separated from his wife and children, and put out to fieldwork.

It has been estimated that during the course of the Revolution, seventy-five to one hundred thousand blacks sided with the British. This touchy subject was generally skirted in studies of black participation in the Revolution. Herbert Aptheker brought the topic into the open in The Negro in the American Revolution. Twenty-one years later, Quarles examined the subject in greater depth, and with considerably more documentation, in a book bearing the same title as Aptheker’s. More than a quarter of a century later, the Kaplans provided a useful supplement to Quarles, and like him, they reminded white readers of the dilemma faced by blacks, in particular those who were enslaved: ‘In a war between white Patriot and white Tory, both upholders of the abominable institution, the question for Africans, enslaved in America for a century and a half, was clear enough: In which camp was there a better chance for black freedom?’

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