The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [136]
The next day, Jeremiah Greenman found himself marching through several inches of snow in hilly Providence toward East Greenwich to undertake one of the most unusual, and historic, assignments of the war. He had been selected by his commanding officer as one of the drillmasters to train America’s first permanent regiment of all-black troops, the First Rhode Island.
Greenman thought little about the assignment. He trained the black recruits on how to parade, maneuver on the battlefield, load, fire, and care for muskets. The more than two hundred men in his regiment were given their guns on April 15. Arming former slaves meant little to Greenman, who remarked casually in his journal that “we got our guns draw’d,” and nothing more.
George Washington, who held mixed feelings about freeing slaves all of his life, did not initially want “a black corps,” as he later wrote General William Heath and others.1 Now, though, needing as many trained men as he could obtain, he had changed his mind, albeit reluctantly, and was happy to have men from among Rhode Island’s 2,671 slaves.2
Washington recognized them as a huge pool from which to enlist much needed troops. He wanted this new all-black unit in Rhode Island to succeed, too, and so he put it under the command of Greene, a relative of his trusted aide, Nathanael Greene.
Washington had seen the reliability of black soldiers during the French and Indian War, when he served as a colonial officer under British General William Braddock, the head of a British army in Virginia in 1755.3 One New Hampshire black, Robert Miller, fought for the colonial militia that was part of the British army in that war; twenty years later his son fought in the Continental Army against the British.4
The coming of the Revolution gave antislavery forces their greatest ammunition. Rev. Samuel Allinson, of New Jersey, used that argument in a letter to Patrick Henry, reminding him that it would be “the lasting disgrace” of Congress not to grant freedom to blacks “if they should spend so much time to secure their own liberties and leave no vestige of their regard to those of their fellow men in bondage to themselves.” Congressional delegate James Otis wrote that “those who barter away other men’s liberty will soon care little for their own.” 5
One of the voices against slavery belonged to George Washington, who had spoken out against it several times during the previous decade. He introduced a bill to halt the transportation of slaves to Virginia in the 1760s. In 1774, he introduced, with his friend George Fairfax, “resolves,” or formal proposals, on the issue. In them, again, Washington called for curbs on slavery, describing bondage as a “wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade.” Later, connecting the Revolution to slavery, he wrote that Americans had to free themselves from England or be turned into as “tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway,” adding that the blacks were “poor wretches.”6 It was no surprise then, when he badly needed troops, that George Washington turned to the slave population of the states and offered freedom as an inducement.
Most African Americans fought in integrated units that were raised in the different states. Their number depended on their geographical location and the population of blacks, freedmen and slaves, in that area. One rural county in Connecticut had just one black soldier, but a company from New York City had eleven on its muster of fifty-nine.7 A New Hampshire company’s roster was 15 percent black.8 At one point in 1777, nearly one-third of all the American troops at Fort Ticonderoga under General Anthony Wayne were black.9 By the time the Americans had tightened their noose around the British in Boston in the summer of 1775, there were several hundred black troops in the twenty-thousandman army.
Hundreds of black freedmen joined the army, too. Some did believe strongly in the cause of independence for America. More importantly,