The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [141]
The charismatic Laurens was quite unpopular back home though, since his opposition to slavery was common knowledge. The British also let it be known that any slave they captured would be sold into slavery somewhere else, hardly an inducement to owners to relinquish their slaves. Laurens and his father were both disappointed when his mission failed.33 The young Laurens wrote that his efforts were “drowned by the howlings of a triple-headed monster, in which prejudice, avarice, and pusillanimity were united.”34
Almost all of the black soldiers served as privates, although some did move up in the ranks to corporals and sergeants. None became officers. Many blacks held menial jobs, such as waiters to generals, but white soldiers held those posts also. Some very young blacks were also held back from battle and placed in fife and drum corps, but so were whites.
Despite George Washington’s acceptance of blacks and a desire to keep them in the army, the African American troops received no leniency when it came to punishment. They were given lashes for transgressions like every other soldier. Some, like the black soldier from Virginia who was convicted with three other men of robbing inhabitants of Westchester County, New York, were even hanged.35
All of the black volunteers did not serve in the army. When Esek Hopkins took over as the U.S. naval commander in chief in charge of the first four American ships, he brought three of his slaves with him to serve as seamen on two ships under his leadership, the Cabot and Andrea Doria. They were the first of several hundred slaves that worked on U.S. ships. Several blacks sailed with the legendary John Paul Jones on his first warship, the Ranger. One black freedman wanted to fight the British on a privateer so desperately that he took out an ad in a local newspaper imploring any sea captain who read it to hire him.36
The slaves who earned their freedom in the navy had an easier time of integrating themselves into the service than their counterparts in the army. The American army was brand new, but American shipping had thrived for one hundred fifty years and black seamen, especially young black cabin boys, had been common. The African American sailors fell into three categories. Some were brought along by their owners, who were sea captains. Some were black freedmen who were experienced sailors on merchant ships before the war. The others were ordinary slaves who were trained to be sailors.
Blacks also enlisted as seamen on ships that sailed in the state navies. These navies offered freedom for shorter terms of enlistment, sometimes just one year, and provided their black sailors the same cut of any booty seized from British ships on the high seas as white seamen. The state navies also operated out of local seaports, such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Newport, so that the sailors had more opportunities to visit relatives. On both the state and federal ships blacks, like whites, had chances for advancement from their original jobs as cabin boys and ammunition carriers; some were made gun captains of crews that fired the cannon.
Some black pilots operated small craft for the state navies in the southern states, especially Virginia and Maryland. These men were slaves on plantations located on the bays and rivers of the region and had piloted their masters’ small boats for years. They knew all of the depths, shallows, currents, and the tides and were, according to Thomas Anderson, the Virginia commissioner of provisions, “accustomed to the navigation of the river.” They were also reliable. “[They are] as fine fellows that ever crossed the sea,” one planter, Stephen Seward, said of his slaves in the Maryland state navy.37
The state navies were large; Virginia’s had seventy vessels. There were some frigates and schooners, but most consisted of “galley ships.” These were seventy feet long, relatively narrow, nearly flat bottom boats with two masts and small sails, like a schooner. The difference was that these galley ships, named after