The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [139]
In the end, Dunmore’s slave soldiers were annihilated, but not by the Continental Army. By housing hundreds of men in close quarters on small, badly ventilated ships—and not providing much clothing beyond the uniform—Dunmore had created a classic environment for smallpox. The dreaded disease that had decimated the American army in Canada earlier that winter struck the slave army the British had recruited in June 1776. The disease spread rapidly in the close quarters of the ship holds and the sick infected the healthy. Dunmore had bombarded and burned Norfolk a few months earlier and was not a popular man there, so he sailed away, desperate to find any harbor to unload his diseased slaves, but no one would take them. Dunmore sent some of his ships with healthy slaves north, to Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Several dozen of those members of the Ethiopian Regiment fought with Sir Henry Clinton’s army. The rest of Dunmore’s black regiment had to sail all the way to British-occupied Bermuda to find a safe harbor. There, his dream of a slave army dissipated. More than half of his eight hundred slave soldiers had perished from smallpox by the time his fleet anchored and most of the others wound up back in slavery in the West Indies.
Not all of the American slaves who obtained freedom in the ranks of the British army fought for Dunmore. One group of fifteen men enslaved on a Maryland plantation stole a planter’s small boat and sailed it to a British frigate. One British regiment in New York had a corps of black drummer boys. Several slaves who were horsemen fought for a British cavalry troop. At the end of the war, the British evacuated their army to Halifax, taking with them several hundred black soldiers.24
At the same time that Dunmore was recruiting his army, before Christmas 1775, George Washington made up his mind to overturn the decision of his generals to end black enlistments and permitted recruiters to sign up black soldiers wherever they could find them. He needed men, any men, because nearly half his army had returned home at the end of 1775. The offer of freedom for military service was alluring and from late 1777 on hundreds of black soldiers joined the army. Although there are no reliable figures on black enlistment, it has been estimated that over five thousand black freedmen or slaves fought for the Continental Army. More than seven hundred were said to have participated in the battle of Monmouth alone (about 6 percent of the American force there), one of the critical engagements of the war. In addition, blacks served as boat pilots and spies.
Several African American fathers and sons in slavery signed up together and fought in the same company. Slave brothers enlisted together. Black freedmen fought alongside their white neighbors in county companies. In a few companies a slave given freedom to join the army fought in the same company as his former master.
Most black soldiers served their entire term in the Continental Army, which ranged from eight months in the early years of the war to three years in its second half, but some remained in the army for five or six years and a few for the entire length of the war, even until peace arrived in 1783. Many who fought until the very end were awarded the Badge of Merit and had their discharge papers personally signed by George Washington.
Many black soldiers did not leave the army even when they had an understandable reason to do so. Primas Coffin, said to be a superb violinist while the slave of a New Hampshire minister, joined the Second New Hampshire regiment in February 1777 and fought at Fort Ticonderoga, Saratoga, Monmouth, and the 1779 campaign against the Indians. He was married while on furlough in the spring of 1779, an event that motivated