Independence or Freedom: Men of Color in Revolutionary Massachusetts

A Patriots of Color paper by John Hannigan, then a Ph.D. candidate in history at Brandeis University, written as a Friends of Minute Man National Park Scholar in the Park, summer 2014.

What did enslaved men hope to gain by fighting for a liberty that was not meant to include them? And how did service — on either side — change the lives of men who began the war enslaved, and of their families?

Why men of color fought

Freedom. There is at least some evidence that enslaved men hoped to win their freedom. The records are not always clear, but some bargained for manumission in exchange for military service, and others acted on their own. Edom London ran away from his owner and served eight months in the Continental Army in 1775. Richard Hobby, enslaved by Jonathan Hobby of Concord, enlisted in 1781 without his owner's permission; when Jonathan came to camp to reclaim him, the officers put Richard's standing as a soldier ahead of his servitude, and the angry master went home empty-handed.

Money and land. A man who won his freedom through service also stood to gain a great deal. The Continental Congress and Massachusetts both offered large enlistment bounties, towns and recruiting committees offered more, and Congress promised faithful soldiers one hundred acres of land at the end of their service. Free men of color would have found these attractive, with no way of knowing that the fragile post-war economy would drain the promises of their value.

Ideas. Enslaved men in Massachusetts may also have enlisted for the same ideological reasons as white men. They heard the era's republican language of liberty and freedom, and the Revolution coincided with strong anti-slavery feeling that had been growing in Massachusetts all century.

Massachusetts turns against slavery

That feeling had two roots.

• Religion. It began in the religious outlook of the colony's Puritan founders. In 1700 Judge Samuel Sewall published The Selling of Joseph, the first pamphlet in North America to condemn slavery and the slave trade. He attacked the traditional religious defences of slavery, calling "Man-stealing" and forced servitude sins: Black men and women were "the Offspring of God; they ought to be treated with Respect agreeable." Religious arguments like these ran through Massachusetts anti-slavery writing for the rest of the century.
• Natural rights. By 1773 a second strand dominated. Joining the idea of "British Liberty" — self-government, local autonomy, individual freedom — with the Enlightenment's respect for reason, opponents of slavery made a humanitarian case against it. In The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), the radical James Otis argued that slavery violated the natural order: "the colonists are by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black." For Otis this followed from the same reasoning he used against arbitrary taxation and a Parliament he saw as corrupt, and he combined the older religious arguments with the political philosophy of Locke, Machiavelli and Harrington into a distinctly republican case against slavery.

Enslaved people knew these debates. In Boston, where enslaved men such as Pompey Fleet worked in print shops and often delivered newspapers, Black people could hardly miss the pamphlet wars of the 1760s and 1770s — and they used both kinds of argument themselves. A January 1773 petition to the legislature asked for an end to slavery because it forced them into a "degraded contemptuous Life" and kept them from obeying God's commandments. A June 1773 petition began by asserting that people of color "have in Comon with other men a naturel right to be free." And in March 1780 a group of African men reminded the legislature that "many of our Colour… have Cheerfully Entered the field of Battle in the defence of the Common Caus."

Soldiers first

Whatever their reasons, service let men of color remake their place in society. Massachusetts had a colonial military tradition that recruited quickly and paid little attention to race or origin, and the war's endless need for men brought Black soldiers into the Continental Army in unprecedented numbers. In the army they became soldiers rather than slaves, in a community that — officially, at least — treated them as equals. They received the same bounties, wages and rewards, and shared food, tents, clothing and the hardships of the winters at Valley Forge and Morristown with white soldiers, forming bonds that crossed racial lines.

Freedom in court — and in practice

Outside the army, Massachusetts anti-slavery thought peaked in the 1780s. The state constitution of 1780 opened with the words "All men are born free and equal," and by 1783 a series of court rulings had found that slavery broke that promise. The best known is the case of Quock Walker, a thirty-year-old enslaved man in Worcester County, whose suits against his owner, Nathaniel Jennison, ended in a September 1781 ruling that Walker was a free man and not Jennison's slave. At almost the same time, Brom and Bett, enslaved by Colonel John Ashley of Berkshire County, won a similar judgment. Historians generally credit these two cases with ending slavery in Massachusetts.

But slavery did not simply vanish. Between 1780 and 1804 Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania passed gradual emancipation laws; Massachusetts passed only a 1787 law banning the slave trade and left the rest to enslaved people and their owners. Some used the rulings to their advantage — in 1786 Boston's selectmen debated how to support a Black man, formerly owned by a Mr. Gray, who "took his freedom" that year. Yet although the first federal census, in 1790, recorded no slaves in Massachusetts, many people of color still lived in white households, slaves in all but name. Runaway advertisements still appeared now and then, and enslaved people still turned up in wills, increasingly described as indentured servants.

Veterans

Black soldiers came home to this uncertain position: legally free, but often with little to live on. Many built new networks from their service. Brister Freeman and Charlestown Edes, both veterans and former slaves, bought an acre together in Concord's Walden Woods in 1797.

Many also stayed close to the white men they had served with, as nineteenth-century pension files show. From 1818 the federal government required veterans to get sworn statements from former officers or comrades confirming their identity and service, and hundreds of white veterans sought out men of color to vouch for them, some travelling hundreds of miles. For his 1818 application Joseph Wright, a former private in the 6th Massachusetts living in upstate New York, found his old comrade Cato Howe, a man of color, some two hundred and sixty miles away in Plymouth. Howe testified that he "well new him to Be a Faithfull good Solder." That Wright went to such lengths suggests a strong bond, and perhaps a friendship kept up over the years.

What the Revolution changed

Freedom in Massachusetts often meant hardship and marginalisation, but that should not hide how much the Revolution changed. Anti-slavery feeling that had slowly taken root peaked in these years, in pamphlets and in court rulings that set people free. Yet enslaved men appeared in the army far more often than in the courts or the press. The army brought a small, marginalised population into a wider world, and it brought many white soldiers, for the first time, into long companionship with Black soldiers. That did not make the war a crusade against slavery, but it did help create a shared identity among Continental soldiers as men who had won independence and helped found the republic. Carried home and joined to growing anti-slavery sentiment, that shared identity helped turn public opinion. Slavery died a troubled death in Massachusetts, but the Revolution helped ensure it would not survive as an institution into the nineteenth century.

Corrected: the paper spells Walker's first name "Quack" and "Quork" (its notes use Quock), his owner "Jeninson" and "Jennison," and in one place calls Joseph Wright "White."

Sources

• John Hannigan, "Independence or Freedom," Patriots of Color papers, Minute Man National Historical Park — paraphrased except for quotations from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
• The paper draws on George Quintal Jr., Patriots of Color: "A Peculiar Beauty and Merit" (2004); Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War (1996); Arthur Zilversmit, "Quock Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts" (William and Mary Quarterly, 1968); and Revolutionary War pension file S45468 (Joseph Wright), National Archives.