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07.04.16 12:15 AM ET
The Secret Black History of the Revolution
As we
know all too well, the Revolutionary War was not fought so that all men could
be free, but its role in creating the seeds of abolition should not be
forgotten.
A central myth of
American history teaching is that the American Revolution was fought for the
“life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” of each person. By each, Jefferson
sadly meant mainly white farmers. This patriotic myth—what I call a Founding
Amnesia—drove Frederick Douglass, in 1852, to declare that the
Fourth of July was not for slaves.
But perhaps in contrast to its long
history of racist exclusion, the Daughters of the American Revolution should
first honor black Patriots. As Georg Daniel Flohr, a German private who fought
at the decisive battle Yorktown with the French Royal Deux-Ponts for the
Patriots, noted while walking around the field of battle the next day: “all
over the place and wherever you looked, corpses… lying about that had not been
buried; the larger part of these were Mohren [Moors, blacks].”
And as I emphasize in Black
Patriots and Loyalists (2012), the acme of freedom in the American
Revolution was the gradual emancipation of slaves in Vermont (not yet a state)
in 1777, in Pennsylvania in 1780, in Massachusetts in 1782, in Connecticut and
Rhode Island in 1784, in New York in 1799, and in New Jersey in 1804. If we ask
the central question in American history: how did there come to be a free North
to oppose bondage in the Civil War, the answer is, surprisingly: gradual emancipation
during and just after the American Revolution. Thus, black Patriots and their
white abolitionist allies played a central, undiscussed role both in battle and
in the deepening of American freedom.
Finally, why did the man believed to
be the first martyr of the American Revolution, Crispus Attucks, an escaped
slave of black and Native American parentage who became a
sailor, fiercely take on the Redcoats in the Boston Massacre? Attucks is
part of a complex history that reveals how much the Revolutionary War and the
Fourth of July are a day that belongs to African Americans.
1. The violent fight against
Imperial press-gangs
The first part of this
story is the emergence of a violent revolutionary movement of self-defense
among sailors in the 18th century. The Imperial Navy needed bodies for its
expanding empire. But the crown had never relied on volunteers. Instead, it
sent armed gangs to kidnap people at sea or in the street. But people did not
go willingly. All around the Atlantic—in Antigua, Jamaica, Halifax, and Boston,
for example—there were 604 uprisings against these royal gangs in the
18th century.
Sailors often defended themselves
with pikes or muskets. Soldiers and sailors were killed in such raids.
The greatest of these
uprisings was a three day battle in Boston against Admiral Knowles’s gangs in
1746. In the Independent Advertiser in 1747, Sam Adams wrote
that multiracial, multinational movement against press-gangs was a driving
force in making a free regime: “All Men are by nature on a Level: born with an
equal Share of Freedom, and endow’d with Capacities nearly alike.”
Whole communities
rebelled against the gangs. Women, left behind, were called “Impressment
widows.” Mary Jones, an Irish teenager, and her children starved
after her husband was taken during the Falklands war scare of 1770. Mary was
arrested for shoplifting a small piece of muslin. Suckling one of her
children even as the noose was put around her neck, she was hung. British “law”
meant hanging and it was used depravedly against the poor. And in the colonies,
it was worse.
Merchants and members of the
Boston House of Representatives feared revolutionary crowds. They denounced “a
tumultuous riotous assembling of armed Seamen, Servants, Negroes, and others...
tending to the Destruction of all Government and Order.” The
phrase, “Armed Seaman, Servants, Negroes, and others” became almost a formula
in such denunciations. They would be echoed by many later historians.
But a vast, Atlantic-wide
succession of rebellions against Impressment was the key feature of the run up
to the Revolution. These rebellions mobilized sailors against the crown,
motivated them to participate vigorously in other demonstrations about taxes,
and taught them, their relatives and communities, in Lockean terms, the need
for violent self-defense. In America, press-gangs made revolutionaries.
Now black escapees, like
Crispus Attucks, often found freedom at sea. Sailors, notably blacks, would
lead revolutionary crowds against press-gangs and other abuses.
In 1760 in Jamaica, Tacky’s
Rebellion, the largest uprising against bondage until that time, lasted for 4
months. Between 1760 and 1775, the outbreak of the American Revolution, some 20
slave uprisings took place in Bermuda, Nevis, Surinam, British Honduras,
Grenada, Montserrat, St. Vincent, Tobago, St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St.
Kitts.
Seized without compensation, forced
to abandon their families, sailors on British ships often identified with
slaves. They took the word to London and Boston. In 1760, J. Philmore talked
with mariners on London docks, and wrote the memorable Two Dialogues
concerning the Man-Trade. In the broad abolitionist movement in England and
America, Philmore’s 1760 pamphlet marks the most thorough transition
politically from fighting for the basic “rights of an Englishman” to natural,
universal or what we name today human rights. Unlike
non-abolitionist authors, Philmore replaces the commonly labeled “slave trade”—a
pro-bondage appellation which falsely legitimizes owners, merchants, and
hunters—with the shocking but true name: the Man-trade. James Otis
wrote a similar pamphlet in Boston. These ideas would be discussed in every
poor people’s tavern in the 11 years leading up to the Revolution and shape
rank-and-file abolitionism.
Integrated riots against press-gangs
marked the pre-Revolutionary period as well as protest against taxes on tea or
stamped paper. In Newport in June 1765, 500 “seamen, boys, and Negroes” rioted
after five weeks of impressment. In Norfolk in 1767, Captain Jeremiah Morgan
retreated, sword in hand, before a mob of armed whites and Negroes. “Good God,”
he wrote to the governor, “was your Honour and I to prosecute all the Rioters
that attacked us belonging to Norfolk there would not be twenty left unhang'd
belonging to the Toun.” According to Thomas Hutchinson, the Liberty Riot in
Boston in I768 was as much against impressment as against the seizure of John
Hancock's sloop. To understand this militancy, we might say that a second and
deeper emancipatory revolution against bondage surged from the Caribbean via
sailors into the U.S. and London, and shaped the revolution for independence
from Britain.
In 1776, the crown authorized large
numbers of press warrants in London for bodies to fight the American
Revolution. But sailors, armed, marched together “having resolved to oppose any
violence that might be done to them, and rather die than assist the Royalists
in shedding the Blood of their American Brethren.” This was a startling example
of democratic solidarity or internationalism from below, anti-patriotic,
despising the Royalists’ haughty colonialism.
2. Lord Dunmore’s
Proclamations and massive black Toryism
Freedom for blacks did
not come about initially on the side of those who opposed the
British. From 1772 on, Royal Governor Dunmore of Virginia had threatened
rebellious Patriots. “It is my fixed purpose,” he said, “to arm my own Negroes
and accept all others whom I shall declare free… and I shall not hesitate at
reducing [Patriots’] houses to ashes and spreading destruction wherever I can
reach.” By the time he issued his Proclamation on Nov. 7, 1775, thousands of
blacks had flocked to the British side to join his Royal Ethiopian Regiment.
Because of Dunmore and the High Court’s 1772 Somersett decision
that bondage was outlawed on English soil, the Southern states seceded from
Britain to preserve slavery. In his 1775 “Taxation not Tyranny,” Samuel
Johnson, the great English essayist, rightly quipped: “How come we hear the
greatest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”
But Dunmore’s black troops
suffered smallpox; he was eventually forced to retreat to Manhattan. One of his
soldiers, Titus, however, became Captain Tye, the leader of successful
multiracial guerrillas operating in New Jersey. In addition, every English
commander recruited blacks. And thousands of the unorganized followed every
command, gradually being recruited to become soldiers or pursue jobs around the
camps.
In 1779, the commander
of British forces in the colonies, Sir Henry Clinton, issued a Proclamation
welcoming blacks in any occupation. A huge number of escapees, perhaps
40,000, ultimately joined the Loyalists; many became regular troops, including
at Yorktown. Britain did not have so many Redcoats in America so they had to
rely on black troops. In 1781, Murphy Steele, a Black Pioneer, reported a
vision to an aide of Sir Henry Clinton. A voice had come to him—God’s voice, he
said—telling him to tell Clinton to tell General Washington that he must
surrender or Clinton would recruit every black man in America to fight.
Steele’s was wise strategic advice. But Clinton did not listen.
Before the Civil War,
American abolitionist authors did not discuss the central role of the Empire as
the freer of the most oppressed for fear of being thought unpatriotic.
Afterward, this matter has long been eschewed as, in Gary Nash’s apt phrase,
“the revolution’s dirty secret.”
3. Black Patriots as the best
American soldiers
Free blacks and slaves fought
in every American battle. Initially, George Washington sought to discourage
black recruitment. But he soon realized that Lord Dunmore’s strength might grow
against him, “like a snowball in rolling,” and become an avalanche. It was thus
military competition which produced a major impetus to recruit black Patriots.
In 1778, Governor James Mitchell
Varnum of Rhode Island wrote to Washington that he could not find enough
recruits among whites and wanted to form a black regiment. Washington agreed.
Promising to purchase the freedom of black volunteers, the governor formed the
First Rhode Island Regiment of some 250 blacks and Narragansett Indians. Most
militiamen fought for only nine months. In contrast, these Rhode Island
soldiers, who did not desert or were not killed, fought for five years. They
became, as Baron von Closen, Washington’s advisor, observed in the march to
Yorktown in 1781, “the most neatly dressed, the best under arms and the
most precise in maneuvers” among Patriot soldiers. Another black unit was
recruited in Connecticut and another in Massachusetts. According to von Closen,
these composed one-quarter of the American forces at Yorktown.
In 1855, the black abolitionist
Henry Nell reported in his Colored Patriots of the American Revolution that
5,000 African-American soldiers fought for the Patriots. This number has been
echoed by American historians ever since. But multiracial protest has finally
forced the Daughters of the American Revolution, hesitantly, to count. In their
2008 Forgotten Patriots, Brianna L. Diaz and Hollis L. Gentry list
by name 6,600 black and indigenous soldiers. Their dedication is to known
and unknown nonwhite Patriots. With more research, this number
will increase.
4. That genuine freedom is
freedom for all
The revolutionary struggle in the
United States was led by sailors and artisans, black and white, slave and free.
It produced gradual emancipation in the North. It also inspired a deeper sense
of liberty from below. For instance, General Washington had promised farmer
recruits that their lands would be there when they returned. But soldiers from
the Northeast came back to find their farms threatened with seizure for debt by
banks. Led by Captain Daniel Shays, they rebelled in 1786-87.
These soldier-farmers of Western
Massachusetts also protested the Constitution becauseit sanctioned
bondage. Here are the words of three of these men in The Hampshire
Gazette. As Consider Arms (a pseudonym), Malachi Maynard and Samuel Field
put it,
“Where is the man who under the
influence of sober, dispassionate reasoning, and not void of natural affection,
can lay his hand upon his heart and say, I am willing my sons and my daughters
should be torn from me and doomed to perpetual slavery? We presume that man is
not to be found amongst us: And yet we think the consequence is fairly drawn
that this is what every man should be able to say who voted for this
constitution.”
Their words prefigure John Rawls’s
later modeling of an original position in which a moral judgment is one that
empathically puts ourselves in the position of “the least advantaged.” The
ardor of revolutionary soldiers like John Laurens extended this vision even
into South Carolina. The movement that created gradual emancipation in the
North would eventually explode bondage and, a century later, segregation in the
South. As Black Lives Matter and Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s powerful dissent
this June in Utah v. Strieffshow, the fight for a decent,
multiracial America continues to this moment. The long struggle before, during
and after the Revolution on the Patriot side was a great and heroic beginning,
and deserves, at last, to be widely known.
Alan Gilbert is John Evans Professor
at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, and
author of Black Patriots and Loyalists; Fighting for Emancipation in the War of
Independence, University of Chicago Press, 2012 and “Slave-gangs, Press-gangs and
Emancipation in the American Revolution.”
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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