Fortune Freeman or Fortune Conant? Tracing a Black Soldier of the Revolution

In the spring of 1818 an old man named Fortune Freeman stood before the Mayor's Court of New York City — whether he came on his own or was brought by an official is unclear. "Extremely poor" and unable to work, he swore he had been a soldier in the Revolution and asked for a veteran's pension. He came with little more than the clothes he wore and said almost nothing of his private life. Besides his own testimony, few records of him survive. The one he still carried was a discharge from the 4th Massachusetts Regiment, issued at the end of the war in 1783.

Freeman, a Black private from Massachusetts, had moved to New York after the war, like thousands of veterans who left their home states. His poverty was not unusual. A pension law of 1818 promised support to veterans "in reduced circumstances" who had served at least nine months in the Continental Army, and by the end of the year 20,000 had applied, with ten thousand more the next year. Congress had expected fewer than 2,000 and a cost of $155,000; by the end of 1818 the programme had cost nearly $2 million.

Two names, one story?

Freeman said he first enlisted in Boston in 1776, in Captain Elijah Danforth's company of Colonel Thomas Nixon's regiment (numbered the 6th Massachusetts in 1779), and served there until 1783. But the muster rolls show no Fortune Freeman in Danforth's company at all — and his discharge came from a different regiment, the 4th Massachusetts. What they do show is a Fortune Conant who joined Danforth's company in 1777, and a Fortune Freeman who joined the 4th Massachusetts in 1781 and served until 1783.

Were they the same man — perhaps enslaved, perhaps freed during the war and renamed "Freeman"? The records cannot say. The National Park Service tells the two stories as parts of a possible whole. Either way, they show how little survives about the soldiers, especially the soldiers of color, who helped found the United States.

Part 1: Fortune Conant

Billerica, before 1777. Fortune Freeman was born sometime between 1747 and 1760. Fortune Conant was credited to Billerica, Middlesex County, toward the town's recruiting quota. Conants lived all over Massachusetts, and some probate records show Conant family members enslaving people of African descent, but Fortune appears in none of those records, nor in any land record. A William Conant paid tax in Billerica from 1776 to 1779. Was Fortune enslaved by the family, born into slavery or born free? Who were his parents? His name survives only on muster rolls.

Boston, 1777. "Forten" Conant appears on a list of men mustered in Middlesex County on May 16, 1777, joining Danforth's company — the very captain Freeman named more than 40 years later — and enlisted in the Continental Army for three years on June 4. Danforth was a Billerica man, a minuteman in 1775 and a member of the town committee that recruited men for the Continental service; that may be why his was the one captain's name Freeman remembered. Conant very likely collected bounties of £24 from Billerica, £20 from Massachusetts and 20 dollars from Congress. What drew him in — a promise of freedom, the hope of it, money to buy it, pride in independence? Something kept him in the war for more than six years.

Saratoga, not Brandywine. Freeman said he was wounded in the thigh by a musket ball at Brandywine (September 11, 1777) and also saw General Burgoyne's surrender after Saratoga in October. The two battles were hundreds of miles and only weeks apart, and no Massachusetts regiment is recorded at Brandywine. Nixon's regiment, with Conant, marched north that summer to support General Horatio Gates, fought at Freeman's Farm on September 19 and saw the campaign through to Burgoyne's surrender on October 17. Freeman may have misremembered where he was wounded — or, desperately poor, added a wound to strengthen his claim.

White Plains, 1778. Freeman also claimed the Battle of Monmouth (June 28, 1778), but Nixon's regiment was then guarding the Hudson Highlands and is not recorded there. Conant is on the rolls at White Plains on September 9, 1778, where Washington camped after Monmouth; Freeman could have heard the battle told around the fires and later come to believe he had been in it.

New York, 1779–1780. Conant stayed with the regiment through 1779 as it hemmed the British into New York City: at King's Ferry on the Hudson from March to May — once listed "on command on the lines", probably on a raid or patrol — then, after the British drove the Americans from the crossing, in the Highlands, at Bedford and at Peekskill. Massachusetts issued him a bounty note on January 1, 1780, and he was discharged on June 4, 1780, at the end of his three years. He never appears again.

Freeman's own account also has a discharge in 1780 and says he re-enlisted at once in the same regiment. No Fortune of either surname served in Nixon's regiment after June 1780 — but his tattered 1783 discharge leads to a Fortune Freeman in the 4th Massachusetts.

Part 2: Fortune Freeman

Hingham, 1781. That Fortune Freeman enlisted in March 1781 in Hingham, Massachusetts, in Elnathan Haskell's company of William Shepard's regiment. If he was Conant, he may have come back to Boston, claimed his freedom and tried a new life in a harbour town with more work than the farms. Bounty bonds from earlier service would not mature until 1785, and Continental money kept losing value; a new enlistment at least guaranteed pay.

West Point, 1781. By June he was at West Point with Haskell's company, listed "on command" through August and September. New York had been at a stalemate since 1778 while the British fought in the Carolinas; when General Cornwallis moved toward the Chesapeake, Washington saw his chance.

Yorktown, 1781. Freeman was "on command" with Colonel Alexander Scammell, Washington's former adjutant general, who led a fast-moving light infantry regiment of Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire men south to Virginia; it fought in the Light Infantry Division at the Siege of Yorktown. The last event Freeman named in his application was Cornwallis's capture after the three-week siege. If he was the man with Scammell, he was there. By November he was back with Haskell's company in winter quarters in New Jersey.

West Point, 1783. On December 31, 1783, he received his honourable discharge, issued in the name of Major General Knox, having enlisted for three years. The 4th Massachusetts had disbanded at West Point that November. With no home of his own to return to, he seems to have stayed in New York; no record shows where he lived or worked until he appeared in the city, old and infirm, in 1818.

"All old and nearly worn out"

In 1820 Congress amended the pension law: every claimant had to prove his poverty to a court, giving his age, occupation, health and ability to support his household, with an inventory of everything he owned. Freeman applied again. His war story was unchanged, and he declared:

I am infirm, and unable to labour, except in doing light work in which I can only obtain casual employment, and for which I can obtain scarcely more than mere nominal wages. And that I have no other means of obtaining a subsistence, except the pension allowed by Congress, and do actually need the assistance of my country to prevent my being dependent on charity.

His only family was an 18-year-old daughter, Mary, "bound out to service". Had he married, and was his wife dead? Why was Mary bound out? Nothing more is known.

Pension payments continued until September 1824 and then stopped without explanation. Freeman may have died then, somewhere between 64 and 77 years old — or he may have moved and lost touch with the pension office. How and where his life ended is unknown.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Fortune Freeman/Conant." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/fortune-freeman-conant.htm — drawing on muster rolls, the Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Application Files (National Archives, M804) and Henry Allen Hazen's History of Billerica.
• Images: Jean Baptiste Antoine de Verger's watercolour and eighteenth-century maps, Library of Congress; Freeman's pension papers, muster roll and discharge, National Archives; John Trumbull's Surrender of General Burgoyne, Architect of the Capitol; the 1780 bounty note, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the map of Billerica from Hazen's history.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.