(en) US, WSA Ideas and Action - Freedom Betrayed - Review of Black Patriots and Loyalists Author Alan Gilbert - by Mike Kolhoff

Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War of Independence, Alan 
Gilbert, 2012, University of Chicago Press ---- The participation of African Americans in 
the War of Independence is widely known but only vaguely understood. Almost everyone knows 
that Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave and sailor, took an active part in the 1770 fight in 
Boston that became known as the Boston Massacre, reportedly being the first to fall to 
British gunfire. In the sketchy picture of American history offered to most students in 
primary school the impression might be understandable that Attucks was indeed the ONLY 
Black man with a notable role in the war. ---- More interested students of history are 
aware of lord Dunsmore?s proclamations of 1774, which offered freedom for any slave of a 
rebel master who came to join the British (in Virginia only) and joined his army.

But sadly, other than knowing that this occurred, most people have no knowledge of the 
results of this act and the dual nature of the American Revolution that it created.

While both the American colonials and the British offered freedom for blacks who joined 
their cause, it was only on a very limited basis that the Americans did so. The states of 
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania all mustered armed all-black bodies of 
troops. But these forces were very small in comparison to the black troops the British 
were able to field.

In the southern colonies the British were inundated with large numbers of insurrectionary 
ex-slaves who had freed themselves and come to join the Royal army. From the beginning of 
the war, largely due to Lord Dunsmore, the British forces in the south had no trouble 
assembling regiment-sized units of freedmen who were eager and highly motivated. Having 
run away from plantations with their entire families, the black forces were followed by 
large trains of women and children.

Racism and white supremacy infected the officer-class of the British no less than it did 
that of the Colonial forces, both north and south. The reason for their offer of freedom 
was not based on any egalitarian ideals. The idea was to disrupt the plantation economy; 
in this it was very successful. Likewise more than a few plantation owners began to have 
serious misgivings about the slave-based economy they ran. Even slaves that didn?t run 
away began to act in their own interests, refusing to obey their masters and, in several 
cases, murdering brutal overseers and farming small plots for their own use. This was the 
most obvious and opportune time for the founding fathers to settle the matter of ending 
slavery. It is to their eternal discredit that they chose not to do it.

Even the author of the Declaration of Independence found himself at the mercy of his own 
logical incongruity. Many of Jefferson?s slaves packed up and left to join the British. In 
a letter written after the war he bemoaned that Cornwallis had burnt all of the crops and 
buildings on his plantation and ?carried off also about 30 slaves?? His choice of words 
indicate that he could not bring himself to accept that his human property were so unhappy 
that they would leave on their own. In the same letter he guessed that as many as 30,000 
slaves had joined the British in 1781 alone.

The strongest recommendation for this excellent work is the forgotten incidents, freedom 
fighters and martyrs it rescues from obscurity. From the moderately known, such as Colonel 
George Middleton, commander of the American Massachusetts Bucks, a black regiment led by a 
black officer, who also championed resistance to Yankee racism after the war; to such men 
as Murphy Steele who escaped slavery in North Carolina and joined the British Army as a 
scout, and to the very obscure, such as Captain March, Lieutenant Mingo, and Adjutant 
Garrick, black officers of a company of British dragoons, who fought for the freedom of 
their people on the side that seemed most likely to grant it.

It speaks to a need to revaluate and reframe the ?American Revolution? as both a war 
against British colonialism and, simultaneously, a war for the emancipation of the large 
population of African men and women held in slavery throughout the colonies, and also as a 
war of the Native peoples to contain encroachment on their own lands. That the American 
rightwing has successfully framed the conflict as a war against ?unfair taxation? 
indicates only the slobbering idiocy of our public discourse.