The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [140]
The black freedmen enlisted under their legal names, but most of the slaves enlisted under their actual first name but owner’s last name. Some, such as William Griffith, were enlisted as simply “William Negro.”26
Congress, the army, and state and county governments entered several financial schemes in addition to freedom to procure black troops. Any black freedman who entered the service was given a bounty, just like white recruits. The owner of a slave who left bondage to fight in the Revolution was paid a bounty by either the state or Congress for his loss, usually $100 and sometimes equal to the market value of the slave. Some states, such as New York, even added five hundred acres of farmland as an inducement for owners.
A common practice to recruit as many troops as possible involved the substitution system used by states. Under it, a man drafted by his militia company could pay another to serve in his place. This was sometimes used by many wealthy merchants or southern planters to avoid service. One powerful new inducement to recruit black slaves was to let an owner use his slave as his substitute without paying him.27
Some of the slaves who fought in the war never received their freedom, including Peter Bartlett, the slave of well-known congressional delegate and signer of the Declaration of Independence Josiah Bartlett. In fact, some owners were so eager to keep their slaves that they sued each other to retain their services. Peter Blanchard was owned by William Frost, of New Hampshire, who hired him out as a seaman on the Minerva, a ship owned by Daniel and Samuel Sherburne and captained by Blanchard’s former master. Frost wound up filing suit against all three in order to get his money and his slave back when the Minerva returned after a five-month cruise. Some slaves were sold by their owners to other men while they served in the army and had to go to court to win their promised freedom at the end of the war.28
One surprise was the high number of runaways who were living free and decided to enlist in the army to fight for their country, even though their enlistment records might be checked by the owners who were looking for them. Another was the continued relationships between the nowfree slave soldiers and former owners. Some masters and slaves had always maintained close attachments and during the war this relationship continued. A few slaves kept up a friendly correspondence with their former owners, sometimes to urge them to lobby their states for higher wages for the troops but often just to continue the relationship. One slave who did so was Cato Baker, who kept up correspondence with his former master, Otis Baker. He ended his letters, “I remain your most humble servant until death.”29
Many blacks in the service were killed, wounded, and taken as prisoners of war. Some, such as Scipio Gray, were captured on the high seas, brought to England, and incarcerated in the notorious Old Mill Prison in Plymouth.30
Congress asked some states to make an effort to recruit blacks. The only states that refused to do so were Georgia and South Carolina, where legislators feared that armed black soldiers would foster a slave insurrection. Washington had sent John Laurens, twenty-two, one of his aides and the son of South Carolina’s Henry Laurens, to convince the states’ legislatures to authorize the recruiting of slaves. Washington hoped to raise three thousand slave troops in the two states; in return, their owners would be compensated at the rate of $1,000 per man. Laurens had written his to father that his mission home to South Carolina not only gave him the chances to raise troops, but to aid “those who are unjustly deprived of the rights of mankind.”31 Colonel Laurens also believed, oddly, that slavery was a beneficial background for soldiering. Referring to slaves, he wrote, “Habits of subordination, patience under fatigue, sufferings and