Revolutionary War

By: Betty Wood

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Revolutionary War

Apart from their common physiology, black women on the eve of the American Revolution were no more alike than were their white counterparts. They were differentiated, and differentiated themselves, in various ways: by their legal status, place of birth, age, place of residence, and occupation, as well as by religious and sexual preferences. Regardless of these differences and their precise circumstances, by the mid- 1760s all black women, from Massachusetts in the North to Georgia in the South, were beginning to wonder what the implications of the escalating political crisis between Britain and its mainland American colonies meant for themselves and their loved ones. During the next quarter of a century, they would find themselves presented with an array of challenges and opportunities that both promised and threatened to change their lives forever. Black women would respond in different ways to the situations in which they found themselves. Not for the first time, they would demonstrate their resilience and their resourcefulness; whatever their decisions and choices, nearly all would display a remarkable degree of agency.

Prewar Civil Rights

The colonial policy devised by the British at the end of the French and Indian War, particularly the Stamp Act of 1765, unleashed a storm of protest throughout America. Few in the mainland colonies could have been entirely unaware of the political language being employed by the self-styled Patriots in defense of what they conceived of as their natural rights as freeborn Englishmen. They accused successive British ministries of “tyranny,” of seeking to “enslave” them. To some people, on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed the height of hypocrisy for the Patriots to complain that they were being “enslaved” when roughly 20 percent of the colonial population were legally defined as pieces of property simply on the basis of their ethnicity.

This contradiction was not lost upon black women and men, and by the early 1770s some of them were beginning to employ the Patriots' political language as the basis of their own demand for “liberty” and “freedom” from bondage. They felt that they, too, should enjoy the same natural rights as those who maintained them in a state of slavery. This was the theme of a letter written and published in the Connecticut Gazette in 1774 by Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved black woman based in Boston whose poetry had already secured an international reputation. Yet Wheatley did not pursue this idea. A few months after the publication of her letter, she dedicated one of her poems “To His Excellency General Washington,” wishing him “all possible success in the great cause [he] so generously engages in.” The poem made no mention of black slavery.

Unlike Phillis Wheatley, other black women and men in New England were willing to test the apparent contradiction between their own enslavement and the freedoms demanded by the Patriots. They were able to do this in ways that were completely closed to the majority of enslaved people, those who lived in the southern colonies.

Although legally defined as property, enslaved people were at least recognized as human beings in New England's legal codes. Among other things, this meant that they were able to sue in courts of law. On the eve of the Revolutionary War, black people in Massachusetts fired off petitions to the colonial government and law courts demanding the recognition of their natural right to freedom. Though black men drafted most of these early petitions, many of which were successful, black women also submitted petitions. In 1782, for example, Belinda, about whom we know nothing other than her name, petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature not for her freedom, but for compensation for the fifty or so years she had worked as a slave since being stolen from Africa as a young girl.

In the middle Atlantic and southern colonies, enslaved people were legally denied any civil rights, and the option of petitioning for their freedom was not available to them. In this sense, the Patriots' political language was of no use to them. Moreover, few slave owners, in either region, felt compelled to free their slaves, and this would remain the case throughout the Revolutionary era. If freedom were to be secured, then it would have to be by other means. Militarily and politically, those means presented themselves as the imperial crisis deepened and the mainland American colonies were plunged into war.

Wartime Contributions

From the beginning of the War for Independence, black women would be a highly visible presence both at the home front and at the front line. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, took the momentous, but essentially pragmatic, step of offering freedom to male slaves (those owned by Patriots) who were willing to fight on behalf of the British. Within a few weeks, around five hundred black men had been organized into Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment. Significantly, scores of enslaved black women, usually with their husbands but sometimes traveling alone, also made their way to the British lines. Once there, they performed essentially domestic services; they cooked, laundered, and nursed the sick and the dying, both on and off the battlefield. Throughout the war, black women did the same kind of work for other British regiments as well as for various Loyalist units. They shared many of the hardships and faced most of the same life-threatening situations as did their soldier-husbands, and their courage earned unqualified admiration from their men.

After much debate, and against southern opposition, black men were permitted to serve in some units of the Continental Army; two black battalions were raised in New England. Free and enslaved black women traveled with these regiments. They did exactly the same types of work, and experienced exactly the same kinds of danger and hardships, as did the women who accompanied the British armed forces.

Wartime disruptions, particularly in the South, prompted many other enslaved black women to take flight, sometimes in search of their freedom, sometimes in search of loved ones from whom they had been forcibly separated. Some women ran away alone, others did so in the company of men, usually their husbands. But black women seldom ran away if to do so meant abandoning their children. In practice, and often due to their unwillingness to leave their children, most enslaved women in the wartime South remained where they were. However, sometimes they were able to use the threat of escape to wrench important concessions from their owners and overseers.

For enslaved black women of every description, remaining where they were meant continuing with work regimes long familiar to them. For the vast majority, everywhere in the mainland, this meant agricultural labor; for the minority it meant various kinds of domestic service. But depending upon the ebb and flow of the war, British and American armies alike demanded another kind of dangerous, and usually unpaid, work from black women and men.

During the sieges of Savannah, Charleston, and other smaller, low-country towns, black women were part of the enslaved workforces dispatched to build and repair fortifications. An unknown number of these women were killed; others, like Bess of Sunbury, Georgia, were maimed; and some, such as Venus and Charlotte of Augusta, were removed by the American forces, never to be heard from again by their families and friends. Farther north, and regardless of their political sympathies, black women were among those who endured all the horrors, including starvation and smallpox, associated with what proved to be the decisive act of the war: the siege and eventual British surrender of Yorktown in 1781.

The Postwar Period

In 1783, with the ratification of a peace treaty, all remaining British troops and hundreds of white Loyalists finally took their leave of the newly independent United States. With them, from Savannah and Charleston in the South, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the North, went thousands of black women and men. Hundreds of them remained enslaved, and they traveled with their Loyalist owners to begin new lives either in Nova Scotia or in the British Caribbean. For those who ended up in places like Jamaica, this often meant exchanging the rigors of tobacco and rice cultivation for what was widely regarded as the even worse working conditions associated with sugar production. Some black women evacuees stayed in Nova Scotia; for others, Nova Scotia would be but a stepping-stone along a road that, during the 1790s, led to their involvement in the founding of Sierra Leone in Africa.

Most black women ended the Revolutionary War where they had begun it and, legally, as they had begun it—as slaves. With some notable exceptions, the political settlements by the newly independent states and by the embryonic nation during the 1780s suggested that for the foreseeable future this would remain the case. Slavery was brought quite rapidly to an end in New England, although to most whites freedom from legal bondage by no means qualified black people to fully partake of the rights and equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and in the Constitution of 1787.

In New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey progress was much slower. In these states, slavery would end by means of gradual emancipation. This meant that many black women and men would remain legally enslaved well into the nineteenth century. Further south, in Virginia, wartime legislation making private manumission easier had resulted in freedom for hundreds of enslaved people, but a white backlash effectively brought that process to an end by 1790.

In South Carolina and Georgia, planters remained as committed as ever to the institution of slavery. They reopened the transatlantic slave trade as soon as they could in order to replace those of their slaves who had been “lost” as a result of the Revolutionary War. This development would have two main consequences for black women. First, thousands of African women would be forcibly transported to the Deep South and would be made to endure the many physical and psychological horrors of the “Middle Passage.” Second, as planters began to worry about the possibility of the slave trade closing in 1808, and the effect this would have on their labor supply, they began to emphasize the reproductive, as well as the productive, value of enslaved black women. Black women became increasingly integral to the planters' attempt to secure a self-perpetuating workforce.

One thing that did not change as a direct result of the American Revolution was black women's work. In 1790, as in 1760, all but a small proportion of black women, free and enslaved, in both the North and the South, were employed in various agricultural pursuits. The commercial production of short staple cotton that would underpin the antebellum southern economy, prompt the territorial expansion of slavery, and in the process, introduce new work regimes, did not begin in earnest until the early 1790s. It was a development that had only the most tangential relationship to the Revolutionary War.

Legacy

The ideas and events of the American Revolution, culminating in the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, had mixed, but in the main entirely negative, consequences for black women. The Constitution confirmed what many black women, especially those who lived and worked in the southern states, had always known: if left to their owners, their legal enslavement would be permanent. By 1790, black women had little cause for celebration. The high hopes that had been raised by the political language of the Patriots on the one hand, and by Lord Dunmore on the other, that their freedom from bondage might be one of thefruits of the American Revolution, had been dashed on the rocks of racism and economic self-interest.

See also Military, Black Women in the; and Slavery.

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