The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [143]
And so Rhode Island created a black regiment, offering freedom as an inducement. They did so reluctantly because, members of the legislature said, the enlistment of an all-black regiment created two problems. First, the state would have to pay the owners a bounty for the freedom of their slaves (they were eventually reimbursed by Congress). Second, Rhode Island officials would have to explain to America why it needed slaves, who had no freedom, to defend freedom.
The measure passed handily and Governor Nicholas Cooke informed Congress of the vote immediately. Shortly after that, Cooke received a letter from George Washington urging the governor “to give the officers employed in this business all the assistance in your power.”1 That was not difficult. Rhode Island had several hundred male slaves who worked in the shipping industry or for merchants or farmers in and around Providence. Several, such as Barzillar Streeter, had already fought for the state militia. They were eager to reenlist.2
Sergeant Greenman and the others who worked with the black troops fighting for their own freedom as well as America’s did their job well. The black soldiers not only took great pride in their desire to fight like soldiers, but to look like the best of them, too. A French diplomat who saw the black Rhode Islanders later in the war wrote that “they are strong, robust men and those I saw made a very good appearance.” An aide to French General Rochambeau noted that “the regiment is the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in its maneuvers.”3
The First Rhode Island became one of the Continental Army’s best regiments, and quickly, because in August of their first year in arms they were ordered to Newport as part of a massive land and sea invasion to recapture the state capital. They would meet fierce opposition from both British regulars and Hessians firmly entrenched in the seaport city.
Liberating Newport would not only be a military success but a significant public relations coup. The British had evacuated Philadelphia on June 15, 1778, and were forced to retire from Monmouth when Washington’s army attacked them there on June 28. That battle, plus the freeing of Newport, would not only rally the Americans to the cause but add fuel to the growing fire against the war among many residents of England, who would read about it in the increasingly antiwar British press.
Washington ordered an all-out campaign against the three-thousandman army under General Robert Pigot in Newport. The French fleet, under Admiral Charles d’Estaing, had just arrived and was sent to Newport for a sea attack. Washington sent three thousand men under Nathanael Greene and the Marquis de Lafayette to Rhode Island to join John Sullivan and the black regiment in Providence and move against Newport. John Hancock was asked to gather six thousand militia to assist them. It appeared that with a combined force of ten thousand, a three-to-one advantage, and a naval bombardment, that the Americans could not lose.
Other generals were even jealous that Sullivan, as the commander of the attack, had such an opportunity for glory. “You are the most happy man in the world,” Nathanael Greene wrote to Sullivan. “What a child of fortune. The expedition you are going on against Newport I think cannot fail to succeed.” Lafayette begged Sullivan to share the glory. “For God’s sake, my dear friend,” he wrote in a nearly giddy letter, “don’t begin anything