Freedom for service: Rhode Island's Black soldiers of the Revolution

In the summer of 1776 the Continental Congress declared that "all men are created equal" while more than 400,000 Black Americans were enslaved — and not only in the South. When the Revolution began, more than 5 percent of Rhode Island's people were enslaved. Two years later, short of soldiers, Rhode Island offered enslaved men their freedom in exchange for enlisting, and Black soldiers came to make up most of one of its regiments. A 2024 grant is paying to tell their story in one of Newport's oldest houses.

The Slave Enlistment Act of 1778

Early abolitionists such as Thomas Paine attacked slavery as an offence against religion and a vice of Old World aristocracy, but most legislatures ignored the question until the war forced it. In the winter of 1778 Rhode Island could not fill its quota of men for the Continental Army, and its governor and General Assembly passed the Slave Enlistment Act. An enslaved man who enlisted would be

"immediately discharged from the service of his master or mistress, and be absolutely free, as though he had never been encumbered with any kind of servitude or slavery."

The same act paid the enslaver a bounty for the "loss of their service".

The 1st Rhode Island Regiment

Flawed as it was, the act was a road to freedom that many men took. By the autumn of 1778, more than 60 percent of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment were free or formerly enslaved Black men. Most served to the end of the war, and were at the Siege of Yorktown, where the storming of the British redoubts led to Lord Cornwallis's surrender on October 19, 1781.

Cardardo Wanton and the house

The Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House in Newport, built in the late 1600s, was home and workplace to Cardardo Wanton, an enslaved labourer who won his freedom and joined the Continental Army in 1775 — one of hundreds of free and formerly enslaved Black Rhode Islanders who fought for the American side.

The programme

The American Battlefield Protection Program funds the preservation and interpretation of battlefields and related sites of armed conflict on American soil, through four kinds of grant — Preservation Planning, Battlefield Land Acquisition, Battlefield Interpretation and Battlefield Restoration — to support stewardship led by states, Tribes and local communities.

Sources

Written from "Life, Liberty, and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery: Uncovering the History of Rhode Island's Black Soldiers during the American Revolution", National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, 2024 Preservation Planning Grants series, a work of the United States government in the public domain.