What happened to the blacks who sought freedom with the British? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died of smallpox. Others died in combat, in field hospitals, and in prison ships. But other thousands survived the war. Some, shortly after the peace treaty between Great Britain and the United States was signed in 1783, took part in the British recapture of the Bahamas from Spain. At war’s end, some fifteen thousand blacks sailed with the British from Charleston, Savannah, and New York toward various destinations: England, Nassau, Jamaica, and Nova Scotia. From Halifax and London roughly a thousand blacks would subsequently move on to Sierra Leone, on Africa’s west coast. Among the roughly thirty-five hundred blacks who sailed to Halifax was one Stephen Blucke, a colonel in the Black Brigade, a British unit that waged guerrilla war against New Jersey Patriots.

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And then there was the odd case of the corps of black drummers attached to the Hessian Third Guard Regiment. At the end of the war, the soldiers took the snappily uniformed drummers back to Hesse with them.

In 1859, four years after the appearance of Nell’s pioneering The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, New Hampshire journalist Charles W. Brewster produced a book, Rambles About Portsmouth: Sketches of Persons, Localities, and Incidents of Two Centuries. One of the subjects is Prince Whipple, the black man in Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware.

In his book, Brewster included a conversation between William Whipple, a forty-three-year-old retired sea captain, and his young African slave, Prince. The conversation takes place in the summer of 1777, shortly after Whipple was appointed brigadier general with the command of the First New Hampshire Brigade. Whipple had been given orders to march with his brigade to Vermont to take part in a campaign to stop the advance of the British force led by General John Burgoyne. General Whipple notices that Prince has suddenly grown sullen and sulky, and asks him what has gotten into him. ‘Master,’ Prince replies, ‘you are going to fight for your liberty, but I have none to fight for.’ According to Brewster, Whipple thereupon replies that if Prince behaves like a man and does his duty in the fighting he will be granted his freedom at the end of the campaign. The campaign ends with Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga in October, and Prince Whipple is promptly given his freedom.

It is a good story–too good, in fact, to be true. As Mark Sammon and Valerie Cunningham observe in the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail Research Book, ‘In the 1850s, Brewster told the story as an increasingly abolitionist local white society preferred to remember it.’ The fact is that Prince Whipple remained enslaved for another seven years and was manumitted only after the war, in February 1784. He died in Portsmouth in 1796. ‘His grave,’ Sammon and Cunningham write, ‘is marked with a headstone and emblems of veteran’s service in the Revolutionary War.’

This article was written by Jon Swan and originally published in MHQ Magazine in Autumn 2000.

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