Harry Washington Eventually Returned to Africa
When Virginia’s governor offered slaves their freedom if they fought for the British, Mount Vernon’s manager assembled the plantation’s slaves. He urged them to trust the benevolence of slavery’s paternalism over the precarious dangers of freedom. Harry preferred the dangers of freedom over the benevolence of slavery. At risk of savage penalties if caught, he fled, along with two other slaves. Harry evaded the slave patrols and pursuit, and made it to British lines, where he enlisted in the Ethiopian Regiment. He survived the epidemic diseases that wracked the unit, as well as combat in Virginia. In 1776, the British position in Virginia became hopeless, so the state was evacuated and the Ethiopian Regiment was disbanded.
Harry then sailed to New York, where he joined the Black Pioneers, and served in a company attached to a British artillery unit. He rose to the rank of corporal, and accompanied Henry Clinton’s British army in its invasion of South Carolina. There, Corporal Harry Washington was placed in charge of a pioneer unit attached to the Royal Artillery Department in Charleston in 1781. After the war, he was evacuated to Nova Scotia. He later joined the first group of colonial black migrants who were returned to Africa, and settled in Sierra Leone. In 1800, he joined a brief rebellion against British rule, that was swiftly crushed. Harry was arrested, convicted of sedition, and sentenced to internal banishment. He died of illness soon thereafter.
