Article #3 of Multi-Article Series >>>>> A Short Course in African American History

African Americans in The American Revolution and the Founding of the United States

                              

When war broke out between the British imperial powerhouse and the upstart American colonists in 1775, people of African provenance, whether free blacks or those of slave status shrewdly calculated their interests.  A given African American might well ask at least these two questions.

 

Should I fight with the British, believing promises that doing so will bring freedom from plantation masters in the American South?

 

Or should I fight with the Americans and trust that a war for the cause of liberty will result in my own?              

 

In all, approximately 5,000 African Americans, mostly free blacks, fought on the side of the Americans.  Another 1,000 people of African descent who had been in slave status gained their freedom by fighting with the British army.  African Americans served as combat troops with both armies.  They also conducted missions of espionage and performed a variety of practical tasks:  clearing roads, cooking meals, hauling equipment, repairing bridges, and driving wagons transporting officers, troops, weaponry, and supplies. 

 

From the beginning, African Americans were involved in famous events leading up to and through the American Revolution.  Crispus Attucks was among those killed in the Boston Massacre of 5 March 1770.  Lemuel Haynes was among the Minutemen who gathered to defend the Concord Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, on the day (April 1775) of the “shot heard round the world.”  Peter Salem also fought at Concord, and he was a mainstay in the battles of Bunker Hill (1775), Saratoga (1777), and Stony Point (1779);  he is credited with some for fatally wounding British Major General John Pitcairn at Bunker Hill, and he appears in a painting by John Trumbull, an artist who captured many key moments in the American revolution on canvass.  Primas Black and Epheram Blackman of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys participated in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga.  Other male African American soldiers whose names gained a place in historical records for having fought in the American Revolution against the British are Pomp Blackman, Samuel Craft, Prince Estabrook, Caesar Ferrit, John Ferrit (Caesar’s son), Barzillai Lew, and Cuff Whittemore.   African American women were among those who fought on the American side:  The memoirs of African American poet Lucy Terry Prince (1730-1821) tell how black women disguised as men fought the British in various battles waged over the full course of the conflict.

 

Up until the end of the colonial period, white colonists prevented African Americans from serving as soldiers.  Whites feared that giving blacks guns would encourage black-on-white violence and even full-scale revolution.  Some whites perpetuated the myth that blacks were inferior and incapable of acquiring the skills of the soldier.  But when war came, many of the colonies, especially those of the North, gave permission to African Americans to wield guns against the British.  Apparently the fear of African Americans bearing arms returned in the aftermath of the American Revolution:  In 1792, Congress passed a law restricting military service to free white men.

 

Upon the founding of the new nation, and after the first attempt at a general statement of constitutional principles in the Articles of Confederation (1781) failed to provide for an effective central government, James Madison took responsibility for writing the United States Constitution of the United States that went into effect in 1789.  Many of the founders, even those who were slaveholders, realized that there was an abiding ironic cruelty in the maintenance of slavery as an institution in a nation whose constitution reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment or Age of Reason.   They knew that as a matter of principle, liberty and justice for humanity should include all of those who are human.  But slavery was a contentious issue that could have torn the young nation apart in a sectional fight involving those whose livelihoods depended on slave labor and those who were not invested in, or morally objected to, the institution of slavery.

 

So Madison finessed the language a bit, avoiding the term, “slave,” but at three points in the United States Constitution, identifying issues of law that most definitely pertained specifically to African Americans.  In Article I, Section 2 reference is made to “other persons” who were to be counted as “three-fifths” of a full human being in each state for purposes of determining level of representation in the House of Representatives of the United States Congress.  And in Article I, Section 9, Madison writes that “the importation of certain persons” could cease as of 1808 and empower the United States Congress to place a tax on such persons brought into the United States thereafter;  reference was clearly to the slave trade.  And in Article IV, Madison writes that anyone escaping from bondage should be returned to the party who owned their labor.

                                                                                                                                                                  

Thus it was that the world’s greatest document of national governance, embodying the general principles of the Enlightenment and embracing the phraseology of John Locke in guaranteeing “life, liberty, and property” (5^th and 14^th Amendments) to citizens, did little to protect life for African Americans, implicitly denied them liberty, and not only failed to guarantee them right to property but rather considered them property guaranteed for ownership by others.