“I think up until very recently the mental picture was that all of these men were white, and there were maybe a few Black men cooking or something,” Ms. Brunetta said. “But it’s very porous, and everyone was socializing.”
What Washington was seeing was not equality, but the peculiar brand of New England slavery.
In towns such as Cambridge and Newport, enslavement took on a very different guise than it did on the plantations of the South. These were deeply domestic arrangements, in an upstairs-downstairs setting where the Black families were enmeshed and often related, as were the white families who enslaved them.
Given differences in how the slave system operated in the North and in the South, New Englanders were more willing to enlist Black men. Southerners, however, were resolutely against arming captives, believing that Black soldiers could not serve as courageously as white men.
Washington issued a ruling: The Army must not enlist any deserter, “stroller, Negro or vagabond,” but only men “of courage and principle.” From the beginning, Black soldiers had to fight to fight.
Voices of the Revolution
In 1849, William Cooper Nell led what is believed to be the first major effort to uncover the history of Black revolutionary soldiers. As a Black reporter with “The Liberator,” an abolitionist newspaper, he conducted interviews, combed through newspaper notices and reviewed court files to craft “The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution.”