 undertaking missions into British camps to collect information on troop positions and movements. He, too, drew praise from top leaders of the Revolution.
When the war ended, Matthews was returned to slavery for nearly 10 years.
He petitioned the Virginia General Assembly for his freedom. It was granted in 1792.
The 1st Rhode Island Regiment, called the “Black Regiment” because of its large number of African American soldiers, engaged in five years of fighting in New York, New Jersey and Virginia.
Christopher Greene commanded the 1st Rhode Island Regiment until 1781, when he and many of his black soldiers were killed in a skirmish with loyalists. Greene’s wounded body was reportedly dragged from his house into the woods and mutilated as possible punishment for having led black soldiers.
After the war, as the Army’s official Web site reports, some black soldiers, like those who served in the 1st Rhode Island, went on to live as freed men. However, many others, after having fought for freedom, were returned to slavery.
Frederick Douglass’s “This 4th of July is yours” assertion was biting oratory. But in helping to earn America’s freedom, the black soldiers of the Revolution have made the Fourth of July all of ours. The nation should salute them, too.
American Revolution for the Non-White
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Attempting Legal Channels to Freedom During the Revolution
A few educated slaves managed to make a written challenge to the hypocrisy of bondage amidst a war for freedom.
In Boston, Massachusetts, four Black men petitioned the governor and state assembly in April 1773, expressing gratitude for recent attempts to abolish slavery but asserting that, “as the people of this province seem to be actuated by the principles of equity and justice, we cannot but expect your house will again take our deplorable cause into serious consideration, and give us that ample relief which, as men, we have a natural right to.”132
African Americans of the counties of Bristol and Worcester in Massachusetts also petitioned the Committees of Correspondence in March 1775 for assistance in obtaining their freedom, and the Worcester County Convention responded by passing a resolution that “we abhor the enslaving of any of the human race, and particularly of the Negroes in this country. And that whenever there shall be a door opened, or opportunity present, for anything to be done toward emancipating the Negroes: we will use our influence and endeavor that such a thing may be effected.”133
Some Black and white abolitionists penned broader appeals that addressed not just their state assemblies but the general public, too.
Though she was a devout Christian owned by exceptionally doting masters in Boston, the African-American child prodigy and poetess Phillis Wheatley nonetheless began inserting subtle pleas for emancipation into her work by 1772. This young slave, the first published Black poet in North America, recognized the powerful symbolic ties between America’s cause and the cause of freedom for her people.
She wrote verse directed at King George III to request a repeal of the Stamp Act, decried a British customs officer who murdered a Boston teenager, and wrote a poem praising George Washington, to which Washington responded with a hand-written letter humbly thanking her.134
Wheatley followed the classical poetic conventions of her time, but incorporated an unmistakable message in her lines, as when she celebrated:
The silken reigns, and Freedom’s charms unfold.
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain.135
Wheatley also reminded her readers that—as a slave—”can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?”136
Such eloquent appeals weren’t exclusively the product of well-known child prodigies. An anonymous New England mulatto—then a term for a person who was half white and half Black—penned an attack on slavery in 1776 that quoted the Declaration of Independence (“that all men are created Equal”) and the Bibl