The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [135]
Revolutionary activity took place in the west that spring when George Rogers Clark gained authorization from Virginia governor Patrick Henry to lead an expedition west to attack British forces and their Indian allies in the territories of Ohio and Illinois. He captured Kaskaskia, in Illinois, without resistance and then convinced the French settlers at Vincennes to side with the Americans. The British governor of the territory gathered a force of regulars and Indians from headquarters in Detroit and took back Vincennes in December 1778. The governor sent his Indians home a few weeks later and in February 1779, Clark returned and captured the fort for a second time following a short siege.
One of the Continental Army’s continuing problems in the winter and spring of 1778 was the loss of men. Measures taken by George Washington to curb desertions following the large exodus of troops the year before had cut down the number of deserters, but they were still a problem. Officers continued to have difficulty convincing others to reenlist when their time was up. Recruiting new troops always proved difficult and doing so became even harder following the terrible winter at Valley Forge and the recent smallpox epidemic.
One of the answers to the problem was the recruitment of African Americans, both freedmen and slaves. Freedmen would earn salaries and receive cash or land bounties, like white recruits, but slaves would be given something more valuable—their freedom. Any slave who served a full term, ranging from one to three years, would be freed when he left the army; they would also be paid. There were a half million slaves in the southern colonies in 1776, but there were also sixty thousand in the north. They worked for farmers, city merchants, shipping companies and as domestics. Some states, such as New York, had as many as twenty-one thousand slaves.
Black American soldiers were not new; a few had fought for the colonial militias that served with the British army during the French and Indian War from 1756–1763. Prior to the war, and during its early days, several blacks had fought for local state militias. Washington was hopeful that freedom would be a powerful incentive to persuade African Americans to enlist and to remain in the army, thus swelling the ranks for the 1778 summer campaign. And, too, African Americans who joined the service and some white public figures believed victory in the Revolution, fought to end America’s slavery to England, would end slavery itself in America.
African American soldiers were needed because in 1778 states found it hard to recruit white residents for troop strengths mandated by Congress. One state, Rhode Island, had such trouble signing up soldiers that it even created an all-black regiment and assigned some of its better soldiers to come home to train its members. It was the most prominent of three black regiments fighting for America. One small group, the American Bucks, was raised in Massachusetts and a third, the Black Brigade of Saint Domingue, from Haiti, fought with the French army in Georgia in 1779.
Sometime during the morning of March 26, 1778, newly promoted Sergeant Jeremiah Greenman, sent home to Providence from Valley Forge to recruit troops, picked up a copy of the Providence Gazette and read a notice published in its pages by his commanding officer, Colonel Christopher Greene. Colonel Greene ordered all of the new recruits for Rhode Island’s two regiments to report to East Greenwich, twenty miles south on the western side of Narragansett Bay, for the spring campaign. The weather had been unusually mild during the past two weeks, but a few hours after