Juneteenth and Other Lesser Known African-American Historical Culture

39. Freedom Belatedly Reaches Texas

Of the slave states, none was as remote as Texas. So during the Civil War, many planters and other slaveholders from the rest of the Confederacy migrated to Texas to flee the fighting, and brought their black bondsmen with them. As a result, Texas’ slave population exploded during the war, and by the time the conflict ended, the Lone Star State had over a quarter million slaves.

News of the surrender at Appomattox, April 9^th, 1865, did not reach Texas until the end of April, and the Confederacy’s Army of the Trans-Mississippi, within whose area of operations Texas lay, did not surrender until June 2^nd. It was not until June 18^th that US General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Island with 2000 Union troops to occupy Texas. Until then, many of the state’s black population did not know that they were free. The following day, June 19^th, Granger read aloud a general order, announcing the total emancipation of black Texans.

38. Celebrating Juneteenth

The freed black people of Galveston immediately celebrated their liberty. On the first anniversary the following year, June 19^th, 1866, freedmen throughout Texas celebrated what was then known as “Jubilee Day”. It later came to be more commonly known as Juneteenth. Despite harassment from racists and restrictions by officials, such as prohibiting blacks from celebrating in segregated public parks, the annual commemoration gained in popularity.

Some black communities pooled funds to buy land on which to celebrate Juneteenth, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the annual celebration was drawing thousands. In 1980, Texas finally made Juneteenth a state holiday. Most of the rest of the country followed suit in subsequent years, making Juneteenth either a holiday or a day of commemoration. The delayed freeing of Texas’ slaves was emblematic of the far greater delay in freeing all of America’s slaves – an opportunity missed at the country’s founding.

37. A Turning Point in Black Americans’ Allegiance to the US

The freeing of slaves via the Emancipation Proclamation was followed during Reconstruction by three constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery, the Fourteenth promised equal rights, and the Fifteenth secured blacks the right to vote. Much of the substance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments went unfulfilled for generations. Indeed, practice sometimes falls short of the theory when it comes to those amendments even today. Still, a turning point had been reached in America’s relationship with its black population.

Until then, black Americans – even free blacks – were residents and subjects of America, rather than American citizens. Just a few years before the Civil War, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that the US Constitution was not meant to include citizenship for blacks, whether slave or free. As such, blacks were outside the scope of constitutional rights and privileges granted to citizens. Against that backdrop, it is unsurprising that for generations, while America signified liberty to much of the world, it did not signify liberty to its own black population. Instead, Britain was more of a beacon of freedom for black Americans than was the Land of the Free.

36. A Black Man Named British Freedom

There was a black man in Nova Scotia, whose name was British Freedom. That is not the beginning of a limerick. In the late eighteenth century, there actually was a black man named British Freedom, scratching a living from stingy soil outside the small community of Preston, a few miles from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

British Freedom was not the name he had been given at birth. Nor, for that matter, had he been born in Nova Scotia. How he came by his unusual name, and how he came to be in Nova Scotia, is part of a greater but lesser-known aspect of the American Revolution. A tragic tale of a historic turning point, when American history failed to turn on the issue of slavery and the rights of the country’s black population. A tale whose malign legacy lingers with us to this day.

35. Black Americans in Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia’s British Freedom was not the sole black person eking a living in that out-of-the-way corner of North America. Hundreds of other black men, women, and children, pursued and went about their lives nearby. It was an inhospitable, cold, and wind-whipped coastal region sandwiched between spruce forests and an often-angry ocean.

Harsh and semi-barren Nova Scotia was quite different from the warmer regions and climes to the south, where most of British Freedom’s black neighbors were born and grew up. Still, he and they were fortunate to be where they were: nearly all of them were former slaves who had fled a life of bondage in America, and were resettled by the British beyond the reach of their erstwhile masters.

34. A Fortunate Farmer

British Freedom might have been a hardscrabble farmer barely making ends meet from poor soil. Still, he was better off by orders of magnitude where he was in Nova Scotia, as a free man, than he would have been if he had remained in America, as a slave.

He had title to 40 acres of land that, poor as it was, was nonetheless his private property, to do with as he pleased. He also owned one and a half town lots in Halifax – as yet a no-account town of cleared dirt and a few cabins, but one that was destined to grow, and with it, the real estate value of British Freedom’s lots.

33. A Black American Community in Canada

British Freedom and the black community nearby were clinging to more than their hardscrabble acres: they were clinging to a promise of freedom. Some even had that promise printed and signed by British Army officers on behalf of King George III, stating that the bearer was free to go where he or she chose, and to take up what occupation he or she would.

Although technically unnecessary, that piece of signed paper meant something to those who had been born slaves in America. It was, they told themselves, their just dues. Considering their services to the British Crown, it was but a fraction of the just compensation that they were owed.

32. Serving the British for Freedom

During the American Revolution, British Freedom and his black neighbors had risked their lives, and done exhausting, dirty, and dangerous work on behalf of King George III. They had fought for the British, with black partisans engaging the Patriots along the Hudson River, black dragoons serving in the Carolinas, and black guerrillas harrying the Crown’s enemies in New Jersey. They had dug trenches, recovered the wounded, and buried dead bodies blistering with smallpox.

They had guided Redcoats through southern swamps, piloted ships over treacherous sandbars, and worked as sappers on the ramparts as American and French shot and shell killed and maimed those around them. They had spied on their American slave masters, on behalf of the British who had offered them freedom from slavery. The women had cooked and cleaned and laundered for the British, and nursed the sick while trying to keep their children from harm. In return for their loyal service, their freedom and their acres in Nova Scotia were well earned.

31. Becoming “British Freedom”

Many of British Freedom’s black neighbors kept their slave names, even as they made their passage to freedom. However, his choice of a new name was an important declaration: that he was no longer somebody else’s chattel or negotiable property. It mattered to him that the world should know it.

It is unclear when British Freedom had shed his slave name. It might have been aboard one of the many British ships that evacuated thousands of formerly enslaved black loyalists, saving them from the clutches of their masters. It might have occurred in the terrifying months between the end of America’s War of Independence and the final departure of the British. As Patriot slave owners searched for their escaped slaves, many of them changed their names to avoid detection. However and whenever he changed his name, British Freedom went an extra step in picking a new handle. He gave himself an alias that combined taunting the Patriot slave masters seeking to recover their human property, with a patriotic boast in praise of those who had actually granted freedom and liberty to black people like him.

30. “Freedom”

British Freedom’s choice of name proclaims something startling, that runs counter to the widely accepted narrative of the American Revolution. To wit, that it was clear just who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, and that there were well-defined lines separating those fighting for liberty from those fighting for tyranny. In that narrative, the Patriots fought for freedom, while the British fought to oppress those yearning to be free.

It is a flawed narrative when examined from a contemporary black perspective. In the Declaration of Independence, for example, Thomas Jefferson blamed King George III for the institution of slavery. That held no water for black slaves like British Freedom: they blamed slave masters like Jefferson for slavery. From their perspective, the British monarch was their enemy’s enemy, the emancipator who offered them freedom from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, and was thus their friend.

29. The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Enslaved Blacks

To be sure, many black Americans gave the Patriots the benefit of the doubt. While there was a British Freedom fighting for the Crown, there were also Jeffrey Liberty and Dick Freedom fighting in a Connecticut regiment for the American side, and Crispus Attucks, who was slain in the Boston Massacre. However, blacks who fought with the Patriots were free men. When seen through the eyes of black slaves – and the overwhelming majority of black Americans at the time were enslaved – the American Revolution’s meaning is turned upside down and inside out.

In the southern colonies of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, the Patriots’ war for liberty was actually a war for a continuation of the forced servitude of chattel slavery. That produced no shortage of perverse contortions of logic. When Virginia’s British governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to rebels’ escaped slaves if they fled to British lines and served the British cause, Patriot slave owners grew apoplectic. An incensed George Washington, for example, described Dunmore as “that arch traitor to the rights of humanity” for promising to free slaves.

28. Black Americans’ Relationship With the Land of Liberty Was Fraught From the Start

Even during its birth pangs, the newly emerging United States had a fraught relationship with its black population. They were not citizens, for the rights of citizenship were denied them, along with freedom. Instead, they were severely circumscribed subjects. Despite that, many wanted to help their land of birth gain its independence but were denied by many, including the Continental Army’s commander in chief, George Washington.

Today, the struggle between Britain and the American colonists is usually presented as a fight for freedom between tyranny and a people yearning for liberty. However, from the perspective of many black colonists, it was not so straightforward, and the side that offered them liberty and freedom from tyranny was that of the British, not the Patriots.

27. “How Is It That We Hear The Loudest Yelps For Liberty From the Drivers of Negros?“

In 1775, Samuel Johnson summed up one of the greatest contradictions of the Patriots’ fight for freedom: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negros?” Many of the American colonists’ foremost advocates of liberty and equality owned hundreds of other human beings as chattel slaves.

Some, such as Thomas Jefferson, lived lavishly off the sweat and blood of hundreds of bondsmen and bondswomen, who toiled for their benefit, driven by the lash and the threat of extreme violence. That contradiction at the heart of the United States would continue to plague the country through the following centuries and into the present.

26. George Washington Disdained Black Patriots

Many black Americans fought for independence in the Patriots’ ranks, risking their lives and shedding their blood in the war’s early battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. However, when George Washington took command of the Independence forces, he was appalled to see blacks bearing arms. With slave uprisings being a constant fear of slaveholders, the sight of armed blacks was guaranteed to discomfit a plantation owner such as the army’s new commander.

So Washington prohibited the recruitment of black soldiers, and eventually purged the ones already in the Continental Army from its ranks. It was only later after his forces were drastically reduced by desertions and diseases, that Washington was forced to turn a blind eye to black soldiers in his army. The British thought differently about arming blacks, and sought to turn the rebels’ slaves against them. In November 1775, Virginia’s British governor, Lord Dunmore, offered slaves their freedom in exchange for service to the Crown.

25. All Men Are Created Equal?

The offer of freedom to black slaves by the British authorities struck slaveholders such as Thomas Jefferson as monstrous. It convinced many of the undecided amongst their ranks to side with the Patriots. In a nod to that sentiment, the Declaration of Independence, despite the “All men are created equal” part, assails the British for offering the colonists’ slaves an opportunity to secure that equality.

In 1779, General Henry Clinton, the British commander in chief in America, went even further than Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s British governor. Clinton issued the Phillipsburg Proclamation, which decreed that any slaves who fled their rebel masters and made it to British lines were free. It further enraged slaveholders, and cemented their commitment to the Patriot cause.

24. Liberty to Negroes

Black bondsmen took up the British on their offer of freedom. Thousands fled from their masters, hoping to trade slavery under the Americans for freedom with the British. For example, in South Carolina, a quarter of the slave population – about 25,000 slaves – fled to the British. So did a quarter of Georgia’s slave population, and about 30,000 slaves in Virginia. Many of the black runaways were caught, savagely punished by their masters, then returned to slavery. However, those who made it to British territory became free.

During the war, over 100,000 slaves succeeded in escaping bondage by making their way to freedom behind British lines. The freed black men and women aided the British as laborers, servants, nurses, guides, spies, and fighters. Many served with conspicuous courage, sporting sashes that read “Liberty to Negroes” – freedom fighters, quite literally. Unsurprisingly, many former slaves, after years of mistreatment and indignities, were eager to spill the blood of their former masters when given the chance.

23. Fighting For Freedom Against The Land of Liberty

When Virginia’s British governor issued a proclamation in November, 1775, offering freedom to slaves in exchange for service to the Crown, the response was overwhelming. Within weeks, hundreds of slaves escaped their American owners and joined his troops in Norfolk. Hundreds more arrived each week, and as the number of runaways steadily grew, so did the fear and ire of American slave owners.

Lord Dunmore’s proclamation did not win him or the British many hearts and minds amongst colonial whites. However, it won the hearts and minds of many black colonials. It also helped alleviate a severe manpower shortage that had confronted the British in Virginia, by increasing their manpower, while simultaneously reducing the manpower available to rebellious colonists.

22. Epidemics in British Black Camps

By arming and hastily training the escaped slaves who flocked to his lines by the thousands, Lord Dunmore, was able to double his available forces within a few weeks. Unfortunately for him and for his black recruits, diseases – particularly typhoid and smallpox – swept through the escaped slaves.

Back then, the standards of medical care and sanitation were generally low even in ideal conditions, and conditions in the camps hastily thrown up for the new black recruits were far from ideal. Epidemics swept the runaways’ camps, killing them off almost as fast as they were assembled. It prevented Dunmore from raising the vast slave armies he had once envisioned.

21. The Ethiopian Regiment

Despite the waves of illnesses and epidemics that devastated the British camps set up for runaway slaves, the blacks who lived were game for service. The survivors were assembled in what came to be known as Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, led by white officers and sergeants. On November 15^th, 1775, the new black soldiers got their first taste of combat in the small-scale Battle of Kemp’s Landing. It was a British victory over the colonial militia, during which a Patriot colonel and slaveholder were captured by a former slave.

However, the easy victory at Kemp’s Landing made Dunmore overconfident, and he became convinced that the Patriots were cowards. A few weeks later, on December 9^th, 1775, the Ethiopian Regiment fought in the Battle of Great Bridge, in which the British were tricked by a double agent into making a frontal assault across a bridge. They were decisively repulsed, and the Patriot victory forced the British to evacuate Norfolk.

20. Seeding Black Fighting Men

With British prospects in Virginia collapsing, Lord Dunmore disbanded the Ethiopian Regiment in 1776. The experiment had nonetheless demonstrated that black runaway slaves were of military value, both in combat and in support functions. Many of the Ethiopian Regiment’s alumni joined other units, particularly the Black Pioneers, in New York. A former member, an escaped New Jersey slave named Titus Cornelius, gained renown – or from a Patriot perspective, notoriety – as a Loyalist guerrilla leader nicknamed Colonel Tye.

The Ethiopian Regiment marked a significant step in British policy, as its members were the first of thousands of escaped slaves who fought for the British during the war. The recruitment of black soldiers by the British also led the Continental Congress to override George Washington’s wishes to keep blacks out of the Continental Army. In 1777, Congress restored the eligibility of blacks to serve in Continental forces – which Washington had rescinded in 1775.

19. Armed Blacks in the South

In April, 1776, a British expedition into North Carolina under the command of General Henry Clinton was joined by 71 escaped slaves. Clinton took an immediate liking to the black runaways, and formed them into a company that came to be known as the Black Pioneers. He placed a Royal Marine lieutenant in charge, assisted by white subalterns and black non-commissioned officers. The rank and file were comprised of escapees, mostly from North and South Carolina, plus a few from Georgia.

Clinton ordered that the Black Pioneers be treated with respect and decency, and that they be adequately clothed and fed. He also promised the runaways emancipation at the end of the war. Clinton’s North Carolina expedition ended in failure, but he took the Black Pioneers with him when he sailed north, where they participated in that city’s capture by the British in 1776.

18. The Black Loyalist Company

Later in 1776, General Clinton was tasked with taking Newport, Rhode Island, and the Black Pioneers were the only provincial unit that accompanied his British regulars. From Rhode Island, they were sent back to New York, and thence to Philadelphia, which fell to the British in 1777.

In 1777, Clinton’s runaways became the nucleus of the Black Loyalist Company – a noncombatant force to replace Lord Dunmore’s disbanded Ethiopian Regiment. In 1778, the company was merged into the Guides and Pioneers in New York, and given the name the Black Pioneers and Guides. As Pioneers, the new unit’s soldiers were tasked with military engineering, fortification, and construction tasks. As Guides, they served as scouts and raiders.

17. The Black Pioneers

The Black Pioneers were not treated as a standard regiment. Instead, they were parceled out in small ad hoc units – typically companies of about 30 men each – that were attached to British armies. They served those armies by performing scouting, raiding, and military engineering missions. In their role as engineers, they were not a fighting unit, but they were often called upon to work under heavy fire, digging and shoring up entrenchments and fortifications.

In 1779, Clinton sailed to besiege Charleston, South Carolina, and took the Black Pioneers with him. They performed vital military engineering tasks that contributed to the city’s fall. The company then returned with Clinton to New York, where they remained until the end of the war. The Black Pioneers were one of the last provincial units remaining in New York, and accompanied the British when they evacuated the city in 1783.

16. Washington’s Slave

One of the black bondsmen who responded to Lord Dunmore’s promise of freedom for slaves who fled their rebel masters was Harry Washington. In 1776, he ran away from Mount Vernon, the plantation of the rebel armies’ commander in chief, and future first president of the United States, George Washington. Harry succeeded in evading pursuit, and made it to safety behind British lines, where he enlisted in the Ethiopian Regiment.

Harry had been born in the Gambia River region in West Africa, circa 1740. He was captured by slavers, and transported across the Atlantic, surviving the horrific Middle Passage to disembark in Virginia around 1760, where he was bought by a plantation owner. After his master’s death in 1763, Harry was bought by George Washington, who put him to work draining swamps in southeast Virginia.

15. Turning Down the Benevolence of Slavery

Harry Washington spent years toiling in appalling conditions, enveloped by heat, humidity, and clouds of mosquitoes, before he was taken to his master’s plantation, Mount Vernon. There, he was tasked with looking after Washington’s horses. In 1771, he was demoted from his skilled tasks, and was sent back to grueling manual labor. That prompted him to flee, but he was recaptured a few weeks later, and was restored to slavery.

In 1775, the Revolutionary War started, and Virginia’s governor offered slaves their freedom if they fought for the British. Mount Vernon’s manager assembled the plantation’s slaves, and 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. Risking savage penalties if caught, he fled Mount Vernon along with two other black bondsmen.

14. Corporal Washington

Harry Washington 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 the fighting in Virginia. In 1776, the British position in Virginia became hopeless, prompting the evacuation of the state and the disbandment of the Ethiopian Regiment. Harry then sailed to New York, where he joined the Black Pioneers, serving in a company attached to a British artillery unit.

He was promoted to corporal, and accompanied Henry Clinton’s British army in its invasion of South Carolina. There, in 1781, Corporal Washington was placed in charge of a pioneer unit attached to the Royal Artillery Department in Charleston. After the war, he was evacuated to Nova Scotia. Later, he joined the first group of colonial black migrants who were returned to Africa, settling in Sierra Leone. In 1800, he joined a brief rebellion against British rule. The rebellion was swiftly crushed, and Harry Washington was arrested, convicted of sedition, and sentenced to internal banishment elsewhere in Sierra Leone. There, he died of illness soon thereafter.

13. The Black Brigade

Titus Cornelius, better known as Colonel Tye, was born a slave around 1753 in Monmouth County, New Jersey. He grew up toiling in the farm of a Quaker owner named John Corlis, who parted company with his denomination’s growing opposition to slavery. The few Quakers who did own slaves were in the habit of teaching their black bondsmen how to read and write, then freeing them at age 21. Not so Titus’ master, who not only refused to educate his slaves, but was a cruel master to boot.

Slavery was gradually declining in New Jersey, and Titus’ master became one of the last few slaveholders in Monmouth County. As Titus grew up, he was frequently whipped for trifles, and witnessed other slaves enduring the same cruelties from Corlis. When Titus reached 21, the age when most owners in the region – particularly Quakers – typically freed their slaves, it became clear that Corlis had no intention of freeing him. So he freed himself.

12. Self Help

In 1775, upon realizing that his master had no intention of freeing him, Titus Cornelius decided to free himself by running away. Lucky for him, he fled one day after Virginia’s governor had issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves who escaped their American masters to serve the British. So the young black man made his way to the Virginia Tidewater region, where he changed his name to Tye.

Tye settled in Williamsburg, Virginia, and initially made his living performing a series of odd jobs. Eventually, he enlisted in Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, took to his new life under arms like a fish to war, and distinguished himself. The fortunes of war eventually returned him to New Jersey, and he ended up where he had once been enslaved, Monmouth County, as a freedman under arms in British service. There, he ended up distinguishing himself and earning a place in history as Colonel Tye.

11. Blacks in the Civil War Between Patriots and Loyalists

Titus Cornelius – or Tye as he named himself after escaping slavery – had his first combat experience at the Battle of Monmouth, on June 28^th, 1778. During the battle, Tye distinguished himself by capturing a Patriot captain of the Monmouth militia, and returned with his captive to British-held New York City.

Having grown up in Monmouth County, Tye had intimate knowledge of the local geography. That made him well suited to the guerrilla warfare that wracked the region. While the Redcoats and the Continental Army fought each other in formal pitched battles, a nasty civil war was simultaneously being fought between Loyalist and Patriot militias and armed bands throughout much of the colonies.

10. New Jersey’s Black Guerrillas

The guerrilla warfare was intense in New Jersey, a border region sandwiched between the British stronghold of New York, and the Patriot capital of Philadelphia. In Monmouth County, things got particularly vicious, as Patriot vigilantes took to hanging Loyalists and confiscating their property. That prompted William Franklin, New Jersey’s Loyalist governor despite being Benjamin Franklin’s son, to sponsor Loyalists in fighting fire with fire.

In July of 1779, Tye led a racially integrated guerrilla group of black and white Loyalists in a daring raid on Shrewsbury, NJ, in Patriot territory. They captured dozens of cattle and horses, as well as two prominent local Patriots. Tye and his men eventually set up a base in Sandy Hook, at the northern end of the Jersey Shore, which they named Refugeetown. From there, they conducted a series of nighttime raids that targeted prominent Patriots, particularly slaveholders.

9. Colonel Tye

Cornelius Tye proved himself a successful guerrilla leader in the summer of 1779. He led his band of black and white Loyalists in a hit-and-run campaign that terrorized and enraged the local Patriots, seizing food and provisions, destroying property, and freeing numerous slaves. It was during this period that Tye became known as Colonel Tye – an honorific bestowed upon him by the British, albeit not an actual rank.

By the winter of 1779, Colonel Tye, after distinguishing himself in combat, joined a detachment of the Black Brigade – a unit of about two dozen black Loyalists. They fought alongside the Queen’s Rangers – a white Loyalist unit that was eventually integrated by incorporating into its ranks the Black Brigade, and black Loyalists from some other units.

8. The Guerrilla Campaign in Monmouth, New Jersey

By 1779, the war in the northern colonies had entered a stalemate. So units such as the Queen’s Rangers and the Black Brigade fought to defend the Loyalist stronghold in New York, while the British shifted their military focus to the southern colonies. The Black Brigade continued Tye’s guerrilla campaign of raiding into Patriot-held territory in Monmouth County and the surrounding region.

In addition to arming Tye and his men, the British paid them bonuses in gold for their raids and other successful military operations. The Black Brigade rustled cattle and other livestock, then drove it across British lines to feed Loyalist forces. They also seized valuables, and captured prominent Patriots, whom they took to New York as prisoners.

7. The Black Brigade’s War Against Slaveholders

There was one type of raid for which Colonel Tye and his black men needed little encouragement or financial reward from the British: raiding slave owners. The Black Brigade fell upon slaveholders with a special relish – paying particular attention to the farms and holdings of the brigade members’ former masters. They freed numerous slaves, or otherwise facilitated their escape into freedom behind British lines. They then helped transport the escapees to a new life as freedmen and freedwomen in Nova Scotia or other British holdings.

Tye and his men were particularly dreaded by their foes. As rumors flew that the Black Brigade planned to lead blacks in massacring whites in various parts of New Jersey, many Patriots were gripped by panic. As one commented: “The worst is to be feared from the irregular troops whom the so-called Tories have assembled from various nationalities- for example, a regiment of Catholics, a regiment of Negroes, who are fitted for and inclined towards barbarities, are lack in human feeling and are familiar with every corner of the country“.

6. The Black Brigade vs the Association of Retaliation

Fearful Patriots in Monmouth County set up an Association of Retaliation, and persuaded the Patriot governor to declare martial law. Throughout the opening months of 1780, the Black Brigade’s raids increased in both frequency and intensity, as the fighting between Patriots and Loyalists descended into a cycle of tit-for-tat killings.

In September 1780, Tye led a raid against a particularly vicious Patriot militia leader named Joshua Huddy, who had become infamous for his habit of executing Loyalist prisoners. The raiders captured Huddy, only to promptly lose him when he was freed in a surprise Patriot counterattack. Tye was shot in the wrist during the fight – a minor injury in of itself, but one which soon became infected. He died of gangrene and tetanus a few days later.

5. Black Loyalist Stephen Blucke

The origins and eventual demise of black Loyalist Stephen Blucke (circa 1752 – circa 1795) have long been shrouded in mystery. The historical record shows him taking over the command of the Black Brigade after the death of Colonel Tye in 1780, and successfully leading it through the end of the war. After the war, he went on to found Birchtown in Nova Scotia. The details surrounding the rest of his life are decidedly sparse, other than that he had been born in the British island of Barbados to a white father and a black mother, sometime around 1752.

At some point, exact year unknown, Blucke arrived in Britain’s American Colonies, where he married a woman named Margaret. The couple eventually adopted a daughter, Isabel. When the American Revolution erupted, Blucke was swayed by British promises to free all negroes who voluntarily joined them, and became a black Loyalist. He joined the Black Brigade in the late 1770s, and distinguished himself while serving in its ranks. In 1782, he took command of the unit after the death of its leader, Colonel Tye.

4. Blucke and the Black Brigade

Stephen Blucke successfully led the Black Brigade for the remainder of the war, even after the British surrender at Yorktown. On March 24^th, 1782, Blucke and his men completed Tye’s final (and failed) mission, and took part in the capture of Joshua Huddy, New Jersey’s most vicious Patriot militia leader. The Loyalists finally avenged themselves on Huddy by hanging him in the Navesink Highlands in Monmouth County, NJ, on April 12^th, 1782.

After the war, Blucke joined the exodus of Loyalists, and ended up in Nova Scotia. There, in 1784, the governor commissioned him a lieutenant colonel in the province’s black militia. Blucke was also tasked with scouting land in which to settle fellow Black Loyalists, and decided on Birchtown. There, he built himself a comfortable and spacious home, and took up a career as a schoolmaster. Then, one night, he simply disappeared. It was speculated at the time that he must have been killed by wild animals, as torn clothes resembling his were found in the town’s outskirts.

3. America’s Birth and the Death of Black Americans’ Hopes of Freedom

In October, 1781, an allied Franco-American force trapped, besieged, and eventually forced the surrender of general Cornwallis’ British army at Yorktown. It was the war’s final major pitched battle, as the British, exhausted by years of fruitless fighting and the mounting costs in blood and treasure, threw in the towel. Defeat at Yorktown led to the fall of the pro-war government in London, and its replacement with one that sued for peace.

From the Black Loyalists’ perspective, that was calamitous news. It meant that the side that had offered them freedom had lost, and their former masters had won. Thousands of slaves-turned-freedom-fighters found themselves bottled up with the British in enclaves such as Charleston and New York, unsure whether the Crown would actually honor its promises to them.

2. Deciding the Fate of Black Loyalists

The runaway slaves who had fought for freedom in British ranks had good reason to worry when the Patriots won the American Revolution. When negotiating the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the war, the victors’ negotiators had added a last-minute clause, forbidding the British from “carrying away” American property. That “property” included the black escapees who had fought for the British.

With the signing of the peace treaty, the fate of the Black Loyalist escaped slaves became a bone of contention between the Patriots and British military commanders. According to the terms of the treaty, the British were bound to deliver their black comrades in arms to their former masters. However, the British on the ground refused to do so.

1. Resettling America’s Black Freedom Fighters

In addition to matters of honor and basic decency, the dispute over the fate of the escaped Black Loyalist slaves offered the British an opportunity to demonstrate moral superiority over the victorious Patriots. As the British commander in South Carolina put it: “those who have voluntarily come in under the faith of our protection, cannot in justice be abandoned to the merciless resentment of their former masters“. The British commander in chief concurred, and ordered that: “such that have been promised their freedom, to have it“.

George Washington was infuriated, and it was touch and go for a while whether hostilities would erupt anew over the issue. The British in New York finally resolved the issue, to the ire of the slave owners, by issuing thousands of “Certificates of Freedom” to Black Loyalists. The documents entitled their bearers to decamp to British colonies such as Nova Scotia “or wherever else He/She may think proper.” In South Carolina, the British also honored their commitment to Black Loyalists, taking them with them when they evacuated the state.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Black Loyalist – Washington’s Revolution (Harry, that is, not George)

Black Then – Stephen Blucke: Black Loyalist and Birchtown Founder

Bright Hub Education – Famous African Americans Of the Revolutionary War

Encyclopedia Britannica – Dred Scott Decision

Encyclopedia Britannica – Juneteenth

Foner, Eric – The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2011)

Horne, Gerald – The Counter Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014)

Kolchin, Peter – American Slavery: 1619-1877 (2003)

National Museum of African American History and Culture – The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth

History Collection – African American Loyalists During the Revolutionary War: 10 Significant People, Events, and Things

New York Times, June 10^th, 2012 – Liberation as Death Sentence

Online Institute For Advanced Loyalist Studies – A History of the Black Pioneers

PBS – George Washington’s Runaway Slave, Harry

Schama, Simon – Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2006)

Selig, Robert A. Colonial Williamsburg, Summer, 1997 – The Revolution’s Black Soldiers

Smithsonian Magazine, May, 2006 – Dirty Little Secret: To See the Revolutionary War Through the Eyes of Slaves is to Understand Why So Many of Them Fought For the Crown

History Collection – History Battle of Black Race for Liberty and Justice

Virtual Museum of Canada – Margaret and Stephen Blucke

Wikipedia – Black Loyalist

Wikipedia – Colonel Tye

Wikipedia – Juneteenth