Black Patriots in the American Revolution

In celebration of Black History Month I would like to give some examples of black patriots in the American Revolutionary war:

Crispus Attucks (1723-1770)

Crispus Attucks, the first martyr of the Boston Massacre in 1770, was probably born near Framingham, Massachusetts, a Christianized and multitribal town of Indians, whites, and blacks, in 1723.  Unusually tall for the era at six feet, two inches, Attucks was of mixed ancestry, the son of an African American man and an American Indian woman.  It is believed that he was the slave of William Brown since he was reported in the Boston Gazette on October 2, 1750 as having escaped from Brown; Attucks was listed as age 27 at the time. By the time of the Massacre he was 47 and working as a sailor in Boston and around the Atlantic Basin.

By 1770, the colonists of Boston had been harassed by the British soldiers known as the “Redcoats.” Tired of the harassment, on March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks and his compatriots marched up to the King Streets Custom House with banners calling for independence from England. They allegedly threatened the British guards with clubs, chunks of ice, and rocks. What actually happened in the confrontation between the colonists and the British soldiers is debatable. What is known is that “[a] group of citizens, apparently led by a tall robust man with a dark face appeared on the scene” and confronted the eight British soldiers. The soldiers fired and Attucks and three other men, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, and James Caldwell, were killed.  On November 27, 1770, the soldiers were tried in a Boston court for murder.  During the trial it was reported that Attucks fell first with one bullet lodged in his right chest. He was shot by the British soldier William Warren.

Agrippa Hull

Agrippa Hull was one of the most remarkable and unnoticed African Americans of the revolutionary era.  He served for six years and two months in Washington’s Continental Army, which earned him a badge of honor for this extended service. But Hull’s influence on shaping the abolitionist thought of Tadeuz Kosciuszko, the Polish military engineer for whom he served as an orderly for the last 50 months of the war, is the hidden importance of the young black patriot.  

Said to be the son of an African prince, Agrippa Hull was born free in Northampton, Massachusetts on March 7, 1759.  Little is known of his father, who died when Hull was an infant; but his parents were members of the Congregational Church where Jonathan Edwards occupied the pulpit.  When economic stress overcame Bathsheba Hull, Agrippa’s mother, she sent the boy to Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, to live with a free black farming family.  It was here that Agrippa grew up in the mission town largely composed of Stockbridge Indians.

Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, Agrippa enlisted in the Continental Army, where he was assigned as an orderly to General John Paterson of the Massachusetts Line, At Paterson’s side, Hull witnessed the surrender of British General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York, endured the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania and was part of the battle at Monmouth Courthouse, New Jersey in June 1778. In May 1779, Hull was reassigned to Kosciuszko, who had come in 1776 to offer his services as a military engineer to the Continental Congress and was designing the fortifications at West Point.  This launched a long comradeship. In a day without Christmas leaves and periodic furloughs, Hull was at Kosciuszko’s side for 50 months, serving as attendant and messenger. After Kosciuszko was sent south to serve as the chief military engineer of Washington’s Continental Army, Hull was thrust into the bloodiest and most intense phase of the war. Reaching North Carolina in October 1780, Kosciuszko and Hull confronted the pitiful condition of Washington’s army. General Nathanael Greene, the southern commander, peppered General Washington with pleas to clothe and boot his small army: “The miserable situation of the troops for want of clothing,” wrote Greene on one occasion, “has rendered the march the most painful imaginable, several hundreds of the soldiers tracking the ground with their bloody feet.”

James Armistead Lafayette (1760-1832)

James Armistead [Lafayette] was an African American spy during the American Revolution. Born in Virginia as a slave to William Armistead in 1760, he volunteered to join the Army in 1781. After gaining the consent of his owner, Armistead was stationed to serve under the Marquis de Lafayette, the commander of French forces allied with the American Continental Army.  Lafayette employed Armistead as a spy.  While working for Lafayette he successfully infiltrated British General Charles Cornwallis's headquarters posing as a runaway slave hired by the British to spy on the Americans.

While pretending to be a British spy, Armistead gained the confidence of General Benedict Arnold and General Cornwallis. Arnold was so convinced of Armistead's pose as a runaway slave that he used him to guide British troops through local roads. Armistead often traveled between camps, spying on British officers, who spoke openly about their strategies in front of him. Armistead documented this information in written reports, delivered them to other American spies, and then return to General Cornwallis's camp.

In the summer of 1781, General George Washington sent a message to General Lafayette, instructing him to keep his forces strong and to inform him of Cornwallis's equipment, military personnel, and future strategies.  Lafayette sent several spies to infiltrate Cornwallis's camp, yet none proved able to produce valuable information for him until he received Armistead's reports dated July 31, 1781. The information in these reports helped Lafayette trap the British at Hampton. Later that summer Armistead's reports helped the Americans win the battle at Yorktown, prompting the British to surrender.

Source: American Revolution page from Black Past.org.

There is a lot more black patriots who were in the Revolutionary War on that page.