Prince Jenckes, an Enslaved Soldier of the Revolution

"An Act authorizing the Manumission of Negroes, Mulattoes, and others, and for the gradual Abolition of Slavery." Image from the National Park Service's page.

In the late 1770s, hundreds of Africans living in Rhode Island bore the surname of the people who held them in bondage. One was a man called Prince Jenckes.

Enlisted by his enslaver

Prince joined the Continental Army in late February 1777, less than a year after the Declaration of Independence. The records describe him as five feet six inches tall with black hair, born somewhere in Guinea. He had survived the Middle Passage and lived in Providence, Rhode Island. His occupation was listed as laborer, though the fruits of that labor were never his, and official papers identified him as the "slave of John Jenckes," a prominent Providence man.

Historian Clare Tyler, who has researched his life in depth, argues that John Jenckes, a member of the Rhode Island legislature, would certainly have known of Congress's 1777 call for recruits, who were promised a 20-dollar bounty, a new suit and 100 acres of land after the war. Unwilling to serve himself, Jenckes sent two enslaved men to fight in his place: Prince and a man named Primus.

Freedom with a price tag

A year after Prince enlisted, the Rhode Island General Assembly created the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, later known as the "Black Regiment." People of African descent were already serving, but the act allowed "every able-bodied negro, mulatto, or Indian man slave" to enlist for the rest of the war, to be discharged from his enslaver's service once he passed muster and to serve "as though he had never been encumbered with any Kind of Servitude or Slavery."

In a move that foreshadowed many later concessions to enslavers, the act also restated that enslaved people were "deemed the Property of their Owners," and so promised the owners "Compensation ... for the Loss of their Service." In August 1782 Rhode Island's records show John Jenckes receiving "thirty six pounds six shillings and four pence one farthing silver money" from the general treasury for "his negro man Prince who enlisted into the Continental service," along with a payment for Primus. At the time, few soldiers, Black or white, were being paid properly, if at all.

At war

Prince served first as a drummer, transferring with Primus to the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, and later as a private. Much of what is known of those years comes from the records of a fellow soldier, Jeremiah Greenman, who became an officer. After fighting closer to home, Prince fought at Pines Bridge, New York, in May 1781, was captured by the British, and survived imprisonment in a sugar house until his unit was released that September. In 1782 he traveled through Pennsylvania, back to the site of the Battle of Red Bank, and then to New York.

A sugar house where captives were held during the Revolutionary War. Image from the National Park Service's page.

In February 1783 he joined an expedition to capture Fort Oswego (Fort Ontario) and suffered terribly in the bitter cold, losing parts of several toes. He was discharged on June 28, 1783. Tyler notes that although he was one of the longer-serving men in his regiment, he never rose above drummer, and the records even show him reduced in rank without explanation.

Providence, Rhode Island, in 1790. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Free and destitute

Prince should have received a veteran's pension, but Tyler found no sign that he ever did. His enslaver had been paid; nothing helped the freedman start over. Prince received only meager help from the town and ended up in a workhouse.

Months before his discharge, Rhode Island passed its Gradual Emancipation Act, which declared that no one born in the state on or after March 1, 1784, "shall be deemed or considered as servants for life, or slaves." It freed no one immediately: some people stayed enslaved for decades, children of enslaved mothers worked as unpaid apprentices until 18 or 21, and the law said nothing about civil rights.

Prince's first years of freedom are poorly documented, but his poverty and failing health must have made them hard. Once again he appears in the record through money paid to others: in late 1787, the overseers of the poor paid a Providence doctor for "attending Prince Jenckes a Black invalid Soldier who has had his Legg Amputated." Finding fair, safe work had been hard for a free Black man before the war; with his injuries, steady work seems to have been all but impossible.

The Jenckes house in Providence, where Prince was enslaved. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Primus

If Primus kept the Jenckes name, he may have returned to live in Smithfield, Rhode Island, and he may be the Primus Jenckes who worked for Samuel Slater. The logbooks of Almy, Brown, and Slater list a number of Black laborers who earned wages at the first successful cotton-spinning mill in the United States. The mill still stands on the Blackstone River, and so does the Jenckes house at Benefit and Jenckes streets, on high ground above the city. Both are painted yellow. Neither has a plaque for Prince or Primus.

"Two thirds of a human body"

Prince Jenckes's letter as printed in a newspaper. Image from the National Park Service's page.

In the winter of 1799, Prince wrote or dictated a plea for help to a "Mrs. F----," later printed in a newspaper:

I am poor, Madam---- so miserably poor, that all my possessions are about two thirds of a human body, containing, however, a grateful heart. There is not left me even to choose between working and begging.

To him who has nothing any thing will be acceptable, and ever so little will be valuable…

Like many veterans, he invoked his service: "I assisted General Washington, Madam, in achieving the liberties of America." He asked for no honor or fortune — only a warm meal and shelter from the weather.

His name itself told a story. Prince was among the more common names given to enslaved men; classical and aristocratic names were imposed not to honor them but to belittle their humanity. In a port city where many families' wealth rested on the slave trade, "Prince Jenckes" announced who owned him and where he was made to live. Drummer, laborer, soldier and supplicant, Prince asked the public he had served for a little support. To date, only his enslaver has been repaid.

Sources

• National Park Service, Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park: "'Achieving the Liberties of America' – the Story of Prince Jenckes," drawing on Clare Tyler's 2022 University of Rhode Island thesis and the Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Period documents are quoted; the historian's words are paraphrased.
• The source says both that Prince served "almost six years" and that his discharge came "more than six years" after his enlistment, so neither length is given here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.