The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [147]
The First Rhode Island, mobilized in February of 1778, fought on until the victory at Yorktown in the fall of 1781, participating in numerous engagements, providing one of the longest service records in the Continental Army. It was led by Colonel Greene throughout the war until he was killed in a British ambush in the spring of 1781.
The states honored their promise to give freedom to all of the five thousand slaves who served as soldiers and sailors during the Revolution, as well as land that had been guaranteed to some. The victory in the Revolution did not bring about the end of slavery in America, as the black soldiers had hoped. No one freed their slaves to celebrate victory at Yorktown or the signing of the peace accords in 1783. The new Constitution, approved in 1789, did not eradicate slavery either. In fact, the booming cotton market meant an even greater increase in slavery in the southern states in the years following the war.
Life was often harsh for blacks in the North as well as the South after the Revolution. Black veterans awarded their freedom for military service had an even harder time finding work than whites. In 1796 one, Pomp Peters, unable to make ends meet, sold the one hundred acres of land the United States had given him as his bounty to fight for his country for just $20 in order to pay his bills.14 Another, George Knox of New Hampshire, faced such financial woes that in 1784 he and his wife gave up their freedom and became indentured servants for five years in order to be given food and shelter and to collect a promised $100 worth of land or cattle at the end of the term.
Black private Michael Sudrick, who enlisted and reenlisted five different times and fought until the very end of hostilities in 1783, spent the rest of his life in such terrible financial shape that he was constantly sued for nonpayment of bills.15 Another army veteran, Prince Light, who fought at Saratoga, had such financial trouble in the years following the war that when he died in 1821 his recorded estate was worth just $2.20.16 Some, such as Joseph Mun of Connecticut, felt betrayed. His owner, and the Connecticut legislature, agreed to free him if he served the full threeyear term in the army. Mun suffered a broken arm in a battle and had to be discharged short of his three years. The Connecticut courts ruled that he had to go back into slavery because he had not served his full term.17
An ironic footnote to part the black soldiers played in the Revolution, and the smashing of their dream of universal freedom at its end, was the story of the three grown sons of Jude Hall. Black freedmen James, Aaron, and William Hall, of New Hampshire, were all mistaken for runaway slaves or deliberately kidnapped by groups of slave catchers traveling through New England in the early nineteenth century, taken South, and sold into bondage. Their father, Jude Hall, had fought for eight years in the Revolution, longer, in fact, than George Washington, certain that the war would bring an end to slavery in America.18
That would not come for another eighty years and yet another war.
Chapter Twenty-Six
JOHN GREENWOOD, PRIVATEER
Two years after he left the army in January 1777, following the crossing of the Delaware and the victory at Trenton, private John Greenwood felt “uneasy” and wanted to fight in the Revolution again. He had spent three months of 1778 with the Boston Light Infantry when they were assigned the duty of guarding some of the British soldiers captured at the battle of Saratoga. There, he worked once more as a fifer, not as an infantryman. Now, in the winter of 1779, Greenwood turned his back on the army and decided to go to sea to do what he could to win the war. It was a natural choice. Young Greenwood, who had just turned nineteen, had spent most of the previous two years working in Cape Cod fisheries in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He had been on boats constantly and befriended many seaman, some of whom had sailed on the American privateers that preyed on British shipping in the Atlantic Ocean and