African American Loyalists
The British also feared that if blacks had weapons that they would start slave rebellions. The British did use African Americans as laborers, skilled workers, foragers and spies. Except for those blacks who joined Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, there were only a few blacks, such as Seymour Burr, who served in the British army while the fighting was concentrated in the North. It was not until the final months of the war, when manpower was low that blacks were used for fighting for Britain.
In Savannah, Augusta, and Charleston, when threatened by Patriot forces, the British filled gaps in their troops with African Americans. In October 1779, about 200 Black Loyalist soldiers assisted the British in successfully defending Savannah against a joint French and rebel American attack.
Read more about this topic: African Americans In The Revolutionary War
Famous quotes containing the words african american, african and/or american:
“I’ve never been afraid to step out and to reach out and to move out in order to make things happen.”
—Victoria Gray, African American civil rights activist. As quoted in This Little Light of Mine, ch. 3, by Hay Mills (1993)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)
“The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)