In the Margins

- Imagine standing on the front lines of the American Revolution, where the very ideals of freedom and equality are being fought for.

But a significant portion of the population, even some of the soldiers beside you, remained shackled by slavery.

This was the case in 1775, when the shots fired at Lexington and Concord sparked the Revolutionary War.

500,000 Black people were living in the colonies at the time, 90% of whom were enslaved.

But as the war raged, did you know that far more Black men fought for the British Loyalists than the American Patriots?

In an America rampant with slavery and racism, many Black soldiers saw a British victory as their best chance for freedom.

And the British promised them liberation in exchange for their service.

While some promises were fulfilled, what happened next was much more complex.

- You leave to go to the unknown when you are absolutely sure that what's behind you, what you are leaving, is worse.

So that kind of impassioned service is always going to have an edge.

- This is the story of the broken promises and betrayal that characterize experiences of Black soldiers, and how it ultimately shaped the fight for equality in the land of the free.

I'm Harini Bhat, and this is "In the Margins."

Black men, both enslaved and free, played a vital role in the Revolutionary War.

As news of the battle at Lexington and Concord spread down the East Coast, thousands of soldiers gathered to fight against British forces.

Historical records show there were at least 18 Black men, both enslaved and free, engaged in battle that day.

This was the informal start of the American Continental Army.

In the months that followed, over 14,000 Massachusetts men, including both free and enslaved Black men, enlisted to fight for the Patriots.

But by July, George Washington, a Virginia enslaver, took command of the Patriots and excluded Black men from the ranks.

His order was rooted in the fear of enslavers losing their valuable property in combat, and the potential for an armed rebellion of people who were enslaved.

- George Washington, as a southern plantation owner, this is his worst nightmare.

He looks out into his men and he sees Brown faces and Black faces.

And when he sees the Brown and Black faces, he looks at them and he's like, "Who are these men and who are they going to shoot?"

So their biggest fear is that these men, if allowed to continue, would rampage through the colony.

- Meanwhile, the British saw an opportunity.

Through Dunmore's Proclamation on November 7th, 1775, John Murray, the Royal Governor of Virginia, urged enslaved people to escape their captors and join the Loyalist forces.

The British saw this as an opportunity to bolster their ranks and weaken the American colonial system.

- But Lord Dunmore was not an abolitionist.

He was thinking purely military.

This wasn't necessarily done as a moral thing.

He was a slave owner himself.

- Within one month, 300 Black men and women had escaped slavery and enlisted.

And that number grew into the tens of thousands in the years that followed.

Nervous about this influx of Loyalist manpower, Washington lifted his restriction on free Black men.

And soon enslaved men would also enlist, often coerced by their owners.

By the end of the war, some 9,000 Black men were fighting for the Patriots.

So how did the Patriots persuade Black men to fight for a colonial system that oppressed them?

And how did the Loyalists convince people to risk their lives escaping slavery?

The answer lies in three major promises, fairness, freedom, and land.

Let's unpack these promises.

First, the promise of fairness.

Many Black men had expected fair and equal treatment while fighting for the Patriots.

This was sometimes true, but not always.

Black soldiers mostly received the same pay and provisions as their white counterparts.

That said, they often served longer terms than white soldiers, weren't promoted to high rankings, and their pension payments delayed or completely denied when the war was over.

- A number of men of color were not given their pensions because they would not believe that they actually served.

Unless you brought a white person that could vouch for you, 9 times out of 10 they would have denied you your pension.

- On the Loyalist side, it soon became clear that promises of freedom, more on that later, did not mean fair treatment while serving.

Many Black soldiers were relegated to servitude or manual labor jobs in the toughest conditions.

Take the Black Pioneers, for example.

The Pioneers were an all-Black British regiment who mostly filled engineering, construction, and labor roles, and they often worked in harsh conditions at the most dangerous battles.

Next, the promise of freedom.

The Continental Army never promised freedom for military service, but some individual units, like the First Rhode Island Regiment, did promise freedom in exchange for service in order to fill their quotas.

That said, many were returned to slavery after the war.

Take the story of Samuel Sutphin, for example.

Sutphin's enslaver sent him to fight for the Patriots in his stead with the promise of freedom after serving.

Between 1776 and 1778, Sutphin served in several major battles, receiving accolades as a soldier.

But when the war was over, his enslaver reneged on his promise of freedom and Sutphin remained enslaved for another 20 years.

On the British side, Dunmore's proclamation promised freedom for those who escaped slavery and joined the ranks.

It sparked a wave of tens of thousands of men and women escaping slavery.

However, once safely behind British lines, most of them found themselves in service roles rather than as soldiers.

Although a few hundred recruits did form the Ethiopian Regiment, a Black-centered combat unit, and wore uniforms that read, "Liberty to Slaves."

As the war died down in 1783, the liberty promise became a reality for thousands of Black Loyalists.

Between April and November that year, 3,500 Black soldiers and their families were relocated to the British colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in what would later become the largest concentrated population of free Black individuals outside of Africa.

But it didn't take long for discrimination and racism to undermine their newfound liberty.

Here they worked low-paying jobs, including servitude, and had limited access to education, fell victim to hate crimes, and even faced starvation.

As for the tens of thousands of Black Loyalists left behind in the American colonies, it turned out that Dunmore's Proclamation only intended to free those who had been enslaved by the Patriots and their supporters.

In turn, many were recaptured and returned to slavery.

Finally, the promise of land.

It was 1779, and the British refocused their strategy on the southern colonies.

British commander in chief, Sir Henry Clinton, then promised the ultimate protection, freedom and land to any Black man or woman who joined their army.

But it quickly became another broken promise.

Nearly 30,000 white soldiers relocated to Nova Scotia too, and they were prioritized for land grants.

Many Black Loyalists didn't receive any land at all.

And for those that did, their plots weren't only smaller, but the British government didn't provide titles to them, meaning they did not own the land they lived on.

- They also could not afford to have things like getting their land surveyed so they can develop their land.

So even though they might have had land, it was poorly developed.

- The experiences of Black soldiers during the Revolutionary War revealed a troubling contrast between the era's ideals of freedom and the harsh enduring reality of racism.

But their experience had far-reaching consequences, like the 1792 exodus of over a thousand Black Loyalists to Sierra Leone to establish a colony called Freetown, and inspiring the U.S. abolition movement.

Figures like Prince Hall emerged, who went on to push for the end of the slave trade.

And the legacy of these soldiers, their contributions, hopes, and disappointments still resonates today.

- Our military service throughout history, although people always forget how well we perform, but I feel like that buildup of history eventually resulted in a lot of the civil rights that we are now able to enjoy.

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. drew on rhetoric from the American Revolution in his speeches, urging Black Americans to reclaim the spirit of resistance.

"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism."

And in 2017, the government of Nova Scotia announced it would invest $3 million in helping the Black population finally secure legal title to their land.

As the war progressed, it became clear that despite championing freedom and equality for themselves, neither the colonists nor the British truly sought to extend those ideals to the some 500,000 Black Americans living in the colonies.

Not only were countless promises broken along the way, but the Three-Fifths Compromise enshrined inequality into the U.S. Constitution soon after the war ended.

- African Americans spent a great deal of time and energy proving that they were human, trying to express to the European Americans, and the society at large, that they were worthy of being treated as human beings.

- This history serves as a reminder that the American ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for Black Americans were, and in many ways still are, entangled in policy and held at the whims of those in power.

How do you think these historical disparities resonate today?

Hope you enjoy this episode on Black Revolutionary soldiers as much as I did.

Thanks for watching.

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