Women in The American Revolution - African American Women, Patriot and Loyalist

African American Women, Patriot and Loyalist

Patriot freedom from the Crown did not mean the end of bondage for the vast majority of African Americans. Moreover, there were few educational opportunities for women in this period. Zinn explains, "women struggled to enter the all male professional schools. Elizabeth Blackwell got her medical degree in 1849, having over come many rebuffs before being admitted to Geneva College" (Zinn 90). Although the American Revolution is famous for its rhetoric of liberty and equality, one of the most downtrodden groups in the soon-to-be United States is all but forgotten in contemporary scholarship. African American women, the majority of whom were slaves, played an important role in the war but most ultimately gained much less than they had hoped at its inception. The majority of African Americans in the 1770s lived as slaves, both in the south and the north. The majority of African Americans in the 1770s lived as slaves, both in the South and the North. Between 1716 and 1783, fourteen northern black women brought civil lawsuits to gain freedom. Black women brought freedom suits for one of the following legal technicalities: there had been a fraudulent sale; the plaintiff’s mother was not black (enslavement was determined by one’s mother’s status); or the plaintiff had entered a manumission agreement and the documentation had disappeared. Elizabeth Freeman is arguably the best known of these plaintiffs. She “brought the first legal test of the constitutionality of slavery in Massachusetts in 1781,” with Brom & Bett v. J.Ashley Esq. The state legislature never outlawed slavery outright, but its 1780 Bill of Rights declared all men free and equal; Freeman effectively used this rhetoric to challenge slavery forever in Massachusetts. Along with Brom, another of her owner’s slaves, Freeman, won her freedom in 1781. Similarly, in 1782 a slave woman named Belinda petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature, not for her freedom, but for compensation for the fifty years she served as a slave. However, not all states followed Massachusetts’ example so quickly: in 1810 there were still 27,000 slaves living in the Northern states.

In the tense years leading up to the war, Britain recognized that slavery was a colonial weak point. Indeed, unrest in slave communities was greatest in the two decades surrounding the American Revolution. In January 1775, a proposal was made in the British House of Commons for general emancipation in all British territories, a political maneuver intended to “humble the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the Southern Colonies” (Edmund Burke, from The Speeches of the Right Honorourable Edmund Burke, in the House of Commons, and in Westminster-Hall). Slaves in the colonies recognized a certain British openness to their claims: in 1774, two slaves petitioned General Thomas Gage, the British commander-in-chief of America and the governor of Massachusetts Bay, for their freedom in exchange for fighting in the incipient war.

Slavery was the backbone of Southern society and the British reasoned that dismantling it would undermine southern resistance. In April 1775, Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, appropriated the colony’s store of gunpowder because he suspected the Virginia Assembly of rebellious sentiments. This precipitated an armed uprising. From his warship off the coast of Virginia, the governor issued Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, which declared martial law and offered freedom for “all indentured servants, Negroes, and others…that are able and willing to bear arms.” Like the 1775 House of Commons proposal, Dunmore’s Proclamation was intended to scare the white slaveholders of Virginia and to encourage slaves, especially black males, to abandon their masters, not to create a slave rebellion based on the ideology of equality.

One third of all of the slaves that responded to Dunmore’s Proclamation were women. In the colonial period, approximately 1/8 of all runaways were women. The small percentage of women attempting escape was because they were the anchors of slave family life. Most women would not leave without their families, especially their children, and since running in large groups increased the odds of capture exponentially, many women simply chose not to run at all. If slave women did leave their owners, it was often to attempt to reunite with family members who had been sold away.

Of the men that flooded Lord Dunmore’s camp, some actually saw combat. Dunmore formed an “Ethiopian Regiment” of approximately five hundred of these former slaves and put them to work fighting their former masters. Often their wives followed them, working as cooks, laundresses, and nurses in camp. Single women who stayed with Dunmore’s main camp performed similar tasks.

In June 1776, General Henry Clinton similarly promised that any slave deserting his master to a British camp would have “full security to follow within these Lines, any occupation which he shall think proper.” Like all British slave pronouncements, Clinton’s was self-interested and ambivalent – he was alarmed by the prospect of African American men joining the Continental Army in an effort to gain freedom after the war. However, southern slaveholders saw Clinton’s Phillipsburg Proclamation as an attack on their property and way of life and an invitation to anarchy. The Proclamation aroused much anti-British sentiment and became a rallying cry for Southern Patriots.

Most of the slaves that joined General Clinton after his Phillipsburg Proclamation left their homes in family groups. Clinton attempted to register these blacks to control the numerous masterless men who were viewed as a threat to peace and order. In the registration process Clinton returned all those slaves that had run away from Loyalist sympathizers. Of the slaves permitted to stay, the division of labor was highly gendered. Men were generally employed in the engineering and Royal Artillery departments of the army as carpenters, wheelwrights, smiths, sawyers, equipment menders, wagon and platform builders and menders, etc. Both men and women made musket cartridges and butchered and preserved meat for the hungry army. Southern black women and children who knew the territory often served as guides to the confusing, swampy territories.

The British army saw these slaves as spoils of war. Individual officers claimed slaves as their own, thus many former slaves served as personal servants. The British government claimed some as crown property and put them to work on public works projects or, more commonly, agriculture. Agricultural labor was vital because the large British army needed constant food supplies and it was expensive to ship food. These slaves were promised manumission in return for loyal service.

Many Southern slaveholders “refugeed” their slaves to prevent them from escaping and/or being killed during the war. They force-marched slaves to holdings out of the way of the war, usually in Florida or in the territories to the west.

Like the British, the new American government recognized that blacks were potentially a powerful military force. However, George Washington was initially reluctant to encourage slaves to fight in exchange for freedom because of race-based objections and because he feared numerous black recruits that he could not control. Therefore, at the onset of the war, only free blacks, a tiny percent of the population, were allowed to fight. However, in the winter of 1777-78, the winter of Valley Forge, Washington was desperate for men and thus opened enlistment to all black males. Additionally, black slaves could serve in the place of or under custody of their masters.

In the South, black slave women were vital to the Patriot cause. They made up the bulk of the workforce that built and repaired the fortifications used during the sieges of Savannah, Charleston, and other low country towns and cities.

The period directly following the war was one of much hope and indecision for African Americans. Many expected the new country would live up to its ideals and abolish slavery. However, slavery was in fact built into the new Constitution – and even in many northern states, where slavery was neither prevalent nor particularly profitable, it took years and many court challenges to gradually abolish slavery.

There was a massive migration, not unlike the Great Migration, of blacks to urban areas in the North after the close of the war. This migration was largely female. Prior to the Revolution, Northern urban populations were overwhelmingly male; by 1806, women outnumbered men four to three in New York City. Increasing this disparity was the fact that the maritime industry was the largest employer of black males in the post-Revolutionary period, taking many young black men away to sea for several years at a time. The rural African American population in the North remained predominately male.

Most free urban blacks in the North were employed in “service trades,” including cooking and catering, cleaning stables, cutting hair and driving coaches. Family life was often broken up in these urban black communities. Many families lost members in the Revolution, either to the chaos of the time or back to slavery. Many employers refused to house whole families of blacks, preferring to board only their “domestic” woman laborer. Despite these challenges, many Black women made efforts to support and maintain ties to their nuclear kin. In the Pennsylvania colony, for instance, church records document many Black unions. Especially since women held as slaves needed masters’ permission to wed, “there are enough records to point out that Black women had a value for solidifying the family structure according to the laws of the colony”. Those families that did live together often took in boarders to supplement income or shared a dwelling with another black family or more, contributing to the nontraditional shape of black family life in the post-Revolutionary period. Those families that did live together often took in boarders to supplement income or shared a dwelling with another black family or more, contributing to the nontraditional shape of black family life in the post-Revolutionary period.

In the South, broken families increased as slavery became more entrenched and expanded westward. For example, in the Chesapeake region, agricultural and economic patterns changed after the war, with many planters moving away from labor-intensive tobacco as a cash crop and diversifying their plantings. Many slaves were sold, usually to the Lower South or West, where slave agriculture was expanding. Of those slaves that were not sold, many men with skills were hired out, taking them away from their families.

Following the war, significant numbers of African American women and men relocated to Nova Scotia and the British Caribbean. While many moved with their Loyalist masters, others relocated independently. For example, enslaved women living in Philadelphia, rather than waiting for their husbands to return from fighting for the colonists, left with the British occupations in the late 1770s and early 1780s. These African American women moved of their own accord to Great Britain, Nova Scotia, and the West Indies –in search of a better life. Another way that Black women in the North tried to empower themselves and their children after the Revolution was through education. Early Black women’s organizations were local efforts to support their children‘s access to schooling. For example, Dinah Chase Whipple, a young widow and mother of seven, founded the Ladies African Charitable Society of Portsmouth in New Hampshire. The Ladies Society was “a highly practical undertaking designed to provide financial backing for a school two sisters-in-law ran out of their home”. Although the rhetoric of the Revolution brought much promise of change, that promise was largely unfulfilled for African Americans, especially African American women. Most women’s status did not change appreciably. If anything, family life became more unstable in the south and, although slavery was gradually abolished in the north, economic opportunities and family stability slowly diminished in urban areas. However, black women contributed significantly on both the Patriot and Loyalist sides, and have thus far gone unheralded.