African-American Veterans of the Revolutionary War
by Jack Duggan

February 2, 2024

Black veterans returning to Cape Cod and the Islands from their military service must have brought with them a different outlook than the mindset they left home with when they went to war. Participating in the fight against the powerful British Empire had to have given a boost to their pride. Moreover, wearing a Continental Army uniform had bestowed on them a kind of “temporary immunity from much of the demeaning treatment of civilian life.” [1] They had served in racially integrated units, but now they were back where they had come from and some of them were probably still slaves and all faced the discriminatory practices of late 18th century society. Returning to their former lives afforded few, if any, of the opportunities for youthful expression and the camaraderie that military service provided.

 At least twenty-eight African Americans from towns across Cape Cod  and the Islands served in the militia, the Continental Army or at sea during the Revolutionary War, but to date precious little is known about their lives before or after their service. I hope that this opening research effort on a little explored aspect of our region’s past will inspire others to add a greater human dimension to the men and teenagers who served so that we may get to know them better and perhaps learn more about what motivated them to serve.

The setting for revolutionary service

Black soldiers — enslaved and free men — served in New England colonial militias throughout the 18th century and this held true when the Revolution began in 1775, but the newly formed Continental Army initially dismissed soldiers of African descent. George Washington, however, soon relented to allow the enlistment of free men of color and, eventually, facing manpower shortages, ending the Army ban on enlisting slaves.

Slaves in Massachusetts had access to the courts and some legal protections from harsh treatment by their enslavers but the overall provincial law upheld bondage, and people of color still faced the prejudices of the larger white community. So when war broke out in 1775 and fighting dragged on, opportunity arose for free and enslaved Black men to consider — if they had a choice — serving in the American military as a potential avenue to secure greater personal independence.

The motivations for African Americans to serve were considerable. Men could earn money serving as substitutes for others in the community. Financial inducements such as enlistment bonuses and land grants could be used to buy an enlistee’s freedom or the freedom of a family member. Others might be caught up in the idealism they heard in public discourse about freedom from oppression. Still others could have been motivated by a simple sense of adventure. These motivations, however, had to be weighed against the risk of not surviving the war and the risk that enslavers would not make good on promises of freedom when the war ended.

 Incomplete records

Scholarly research about soldiers of color from Massachusetts has become more sophisticated over time but it is far from an exact science when it comes to accurately identifying African American veterans. The twenty-eight veterans counted in this survey is a conservative number likely to grow with more intricate research. The primary source that I used to identify this Cape & Islands group is the prodigious, seventeen volume publication called Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War [2] which contains descriptive eighteenth century racial terms such as “negro”, “black” and “mulatto” to distinguish  African American enlistees.[3]

•  Use of these descriptors, however, lacked consistency in practice as orderly sergeants and clerks idiosyncratically applied what guidance they had for recording physical characteristics about complexions or race, if at all. Benjamin Quarles, the pioneering scholar on Black Revolutionary soldiers, estimated that not more than one third of the African Americans who served were racially identified in muster rolls, crew lists and other key original documents. [4] 

•  Researchers are also hampered by the fact that several years of records for well over half of the regiments on the Massachusetts Continental Line are incomplete or have not survived. That absence means that coming up with a reliable estimate of the number of African American veterans is a task falling somewhere between problematic and impossible.

On top of these shortcomings, military records make almost no mention of whether African American soldiers and sailors were enslaved or free men. It is likely that enslaved men made up the bulk of the state’s soldiers simply because at the time of the Revolution there were more African American slaves in Massachusetts than there were free Black men. [5]

 Men without surnames

Four of the African American veterans identified in the “Soldiers & Sailors” volumes had no surnames attached to their records. Use of given names only is a certain indicator of enslavement.

• “Cato” from Falmouth was an eighteen year old cook on a American privateer in 1780.

• “Jack” from Sandwich was sixteen years old when he signed up for a six-month enlistment in the Continental Army in 1780 and probably served in the area around West Point, New York.  

• “Jeffery” was a Sandwich militiaman whose unit was sent to Rhode Island in October 1778 to reinforce the Continental Army facing British forces at Newport.

• “Ezra” from Yarmouth, enlisted in the spring of 1777 for a three-year term in Colonel Gamaliel Bradford’s Continental Army Regiment. He was sometimes recorded on muster rolls as Ezra “Negrow”. Bradford’s regiment was composed largely of men from Plymouth and Barnstable counties. A muster roll shows that Ezra was assigned to a company that included other Yarmouth men, some of whom he may well have known before enlisting.

Who was Ezra?

How did he come to reside in Yarmouth and when? Who was his family? Since his lack of a surname points to enslavement, was Ezra serving as a substitute enlistee for his enslaver? The answer to all these questions is “we do not know.”

A few indicators to Ezra’s possible identity have emerged but to date these clues have simply led to educated guesses rather than clear conclusions. Greater investigative work is in order to learn more about this Yarmouth veteran with no last name.

• The clue closest to home about Ezra’s identity involves Yarmouth militia Captain Joshua Gray and his possible ownership of a slave named Ezra. In three letters written by Gray in early 1776 to his wife Mary while Gray’s company was part of the American force besieging Boston, he mentions the need for “Ezra”, who is obviously part of the Gray household, to “due his duty” and for Gray’s wife to make Ezra “stand in fear of you.” It is conceivable that this Ezra is an indentured servant, but it is more likely that he was a “servant for life”, a New England colonial euphemism for enslavement.  

• A second clue, this one from 1760 Truro, Massachusetts  church records, takes note of a “negro servant to Ebenezer Dyer” named Violet with a son named Ezra who would have been of military age in 1777 when “Ezra Negrow” of Yarmouth enlisted in the Continental Army. Other church records indicate that by 1766 Violet appears to have been sold to a “Mr. Avery” of Truro, which raises the question of what happened to her three children, Nellie, Ezra and Peggy? Were they sold too and to whom?

We were soldiers once

Generalizing from the available military records, this group of African American veterans appears to have had many of the same experiences of white enlistees. They were probably well familiar with cold, heat, rain, snow, sickness, forced marches, fear, excitement, fatigue, sentry duty, skirmishes, battles and, above all, hunger, the constant companion of the Continental Army’s rank and file.

Twenty-two of this group served in Continental Line units as privates for varying lengths of time ranging from “six month men” to soldiers who served for three years or the “duration” of the war. Michael Pease of Nantucket earned the Badge of Distinction award with two stripes created by General Washington for men who faithfully served for more than six years.[6] Jabez Jolley of Barnstable and James Remmon of Falmouth were prisoners of war fortunate enough to be exchanged for British captives held by the American army.

• Where ages were given in military documents, the African American enlistees ranged in years from fifteen to their early thirties but the majority were teenagers when they first joined the Army.

• Heights for this group, where given, varied with the shortest soldier coming in at 5’1” and the tallest at 5’10”. According to academic studies, the average height of a Continental Army soldier was 5’ 8”, about two to three inches taller than the average British soldier in those days.

• Extrapolating from the histories of Army regiments where Cape and Islands veterans saw service, we can surmise that they were at the battles of Saratoga, Monmouth, King’s Bridge and Yorktown and during the Defense of Philadelphia. At least nine suffered the hardship of the 1777-1778 Valley Forge encampment, including two who perished.

• A handful of veterans served in state or county militia units but they were outliers suggesting that Black enlistees preferred service in the Continental Army perhaps because such duty offered enlistment and land bounties as well as an ability to travel about the colonies usually denied to slaves

None of this group held a rank above private, but military records show that several had specialized skills. Jabez Jolley was a drummer, an important role charged with communicating commands on the battlefield. Santee Prince was assigned to an artillery company as a ”matross” or gunner’s assistant loading and firing cannons and mortars. Job Tobias served in a “sappers and miners” regiment (i.e. think combat engineers). And Jesse Ceasar served in an “artificers” unit where he apparently employed his civilian skills as a boatwright and a tailor.  

• Six served aboard privateers where they would have earned a seaman’s share of prize money for any enemy vessels that their ships captured.

Telling their stories

Not much granular information has surfaced about the lives of these veterans, but careful scrutiny of military records as well as chasing interesting looking research clues has produced enough reliable particulars to start filling gaps in a few of these untold stories. The individual narratives below begin to chip away at the anonymity and biases accorded Black veterans who returned to civilian life in communities where they lived and worked but were not fully part of despite growing support in Massachusetts for a nationwide abolitionist movement. 

James Remmon, whose military record shows two separate Continental Army enlistments for the towns of Falmouth and Sandwich, served a total of about five years between 1777 and 1782,  His first enlistment was in a regiment that saw action at the Saratoga and Monmouth battles and endured the brutal winter of 1777-1778 at Valley Forge. Those experiences must have been imprinted on Remmon’s mind but a more memorable trial came during his second enlistment when he was a prisoner of war for nine months. 

• While his regiment was stationed in New York’s Hudson River valley, James was “taken prisoner October 17th 1781 at Croton River”, most probably by a notorious Loyalist militia unit that plagued the no-man’s land area of Westchester County separating American and British forces. The record of his release is terse, simply stating that Remmon was “reported exchanged June 20, 1782” leaving us to ponder what he endured during his captivity which likely occurred in the infamous British military prison system in the New York City area.

Isaac Wickham stands out among the group of Cape & Islands veterans because of what we know about his service achievements and his life after the War from military records and Isaac’s fifteen page pension application file. Wickham's first service came in the state militia in the fall of 1777 when he was a young teenager whose unit was briefly sent to Rhode Island to reinforce Continental  troops. Then, as a 16 year old in 1779, he served the first of two Continental Army enlistments that began and ended in the Hudson River Valley of New York. In 1781 during his second enlistment Isaac was transferred to General Lafayette’s Light Infantry Division,[7] which during that spring and summer led British General Cornwallis on a chase around central and eastern Virginia, always staying just out of reach of the superior British force. In August, Cornwallis, tiring of the pursuit, made for camp in Portsmouth and then made his fateful move to the Yorktown peninsula.  General Washington — along with his French allies — seized the occasion to trap the British army, securing the surrender that effectively ended the war. And Isaac Wickham was there, declaring in his pension application that he “was at the capture of Cornwallis”.

 Wickham received an honorable discharge at the conclusion of the war at Newburgh near West Point.

• Army records in 1780 described Isaac as an eighteen year-old “mulatto” with black hair standing 5’3’ tall. He had grown two inches since his height was recorded as a sixteen year-old enlistee.

• Wickham’s 1818 pension file gives us a rare glimpse of the post war life of a then 57-year-old Black veteran who stated that he is “now in reduced circumstance in life and stands in need of the assistance of his country for support”.  We learn that he was a “farmer” from Barnstable living with his 42-year-old wife in a one story house measuring 10’ by 14’. Isaac owned a cow and a pig. His house was furnished with “four old chairs, one iron pot, one dish kettle, one small table, one tea kettle, one spider,[8] one chest.” He had some small debts and owned no land.

That’s all we know about Isaac Wickham save for a fascinating anecdote that emerged from his pension file which reveals an inclination to stand up for himself amid the racial bigotry of the day to demand the enlistment land bounty he was granted but never received. In 1820 Wickham seized the opportunity provided by the pension application process to put on the record that he had appointed a Plymouth County attorney to pursue his unrealized bounty claim with the Secretary of War. That lawyer was Zabdiel Sampson, a sitting US Congressman, which leaves us to ponder how it came about that Isaac was represented by a prominent politician. More investigative work remains to determine if Wickham or his heirs were successful in acquiring the land bounty.

Peter and Silas Boston, two brothers from a Nantucket family with deep roots in the island’s Black community served as seamen during the Revolutionary War. Both were on the crew of the Massachusetts Navy brig “Hazard” which was part of the ill-fated Penobscot Expedition in the summer of 1779. The largest American naval task force of the war suffered a humiliating defeat, experiencing hundreds of casualties and the loss of some forty warships and support vessels scuttled or burned along the upper Penobscot River to prevent the ships from falling into British hands.

Both brothers reportedly applied for military pensions, but research has only located Peter Boston’s file.[9] We are fortunate that the lengthy file survived because it provides rich, first-person details about Peter’s service at sea as well as insights into how Boston was viewed by fellow Nantucketers — Black and White — who gave depositions on his behalf.

Over at least four separate cruises between 1778 and 1781, Peter saw duty in the Eastern Atlantic and in the West Indies aboard privateers and ships of the Connecticut and Massachusetts navies. His vessels captured prizes and engaged in battle with armed British merchantmen. Nantucketer Brown Coffin who shipped out with Boston on the “Hazard” declared that Peter “was as good a seaman as anyone onboard. The officers were satisfied with him and he was always ready at a call.”

•  Boston and Coffin were among those unlucky souls from the Penobscot Expedition who found themselves cast ashore in the Maine woods, forced to find their way back home on their own. In his pension deposition, Peter relates that he and some of his stranded shipmates fell in with some “friendly Indians” who were going to help “conduct us to Boston. We found out that they did not know the way and undertook to pursue our own course and we finally arrived at Boston."

Several other depositions in the pension file from men who had known Peter for 50-60 years clearly show that his character had earned the respect of white Nantucketers. Perhaps even a friendship might have existed, but trying to read between the lines of pension declarations can be a tricky business in an era when racial biases were commonplace.

• Benjamin Bunker, a prominent Nantucket silversmith and the “Hazard” armorer, said Boston had been his apprentice in the mid 1770s and went on to praise Peter’s character “founded upon an acquaintance during more than a half century. I fully believe any statement which he makes.” [10]

•  Nantucket Probate Judge Isaac Coffin, who was “acquainted with Boston for more than fifty years”, said “his veracity is unquestionable and whatever statements he makes may be relied upon.”

•  Peter’s pension file also contained an 1834 letter of support from Massachusetts Congressman John Reed who was well known in Barnstable County for helping Revolutionary veterans navigate the cumbersome bureaucracy of the Washington Pension Office. Reed said he knew Boston well and that he was “an honest upright good man.”

When Peter died in 1837 probate records indicated that after the war he was a “mariner” who left a modest estate, including a small house, to his wife Rhoda Jolly, the half sister of Jabez Jolley, another Black veteran. Rhoda’s widow’s pension benefit application was supported by depositions from multiple Nantucketers.

Jabez Jolley, a young Black man from Barnstable, must have seen it all during his years in the Continental Army, according to military records, land bounty files and tracking the whereabouts of the regiments where he served. 

Before Jolley appears in army records, however, we first see his name on a February 11th 1777 list of prisoners being exchanged at Newport, Rhode Island. The list states he is a “seaman”, an occupation echoed in later Army files where it is noted that he had been a “sailor and farmer” in civilian life. The prisoner exchange document does not name his vessel or how and where he was taken captive but Jabez was most likely a crewman on an American privateer.

In May 1777, just a few months after his exchange, Jolley enlisted for three years in Colonel Bradford’s Regiment of the Continental Army, a unit which included many men from Barnstable County. The regiment saw action at Saratoga and Monmouth and endured the 1777-1778 winter camp at Valley Forge. Jabez served as a private but when he turns up next he has reenlisted for the duration of the war in Lieutenant Colonel John Brooks’s Regiment where he was promoted to  the position of company drummer, a role he held until the end of the war.

•  Jolley’s drummer status earned the pay of a corporal making him, at least unofficially, the highest ranking member of this group of Black Cape & Islands veterans. 

During his second enlistment Jolley’s regiment was stationed in the Hudson River valley north of the British stronghold in New York City where the unit mostly saw typical garrison duty. The monotony, however, was broken for Jabez and a sergeant from his company in May 1781 when they were assigned to Colonel Alexander Scammell’s newly formed Light Infantry Regiment which engaged in the heated Battle of King’s Bridge on July 3rd, suffering six killed and 34 wounded. In late August, the regiment was on the march from New Jersey as the vanguard of Washington’s army heading to southern Virginia and its date with destiny at Yorktown. Jolley’s regiment reached the head of Chesapeake Bay by early September and then, moving by ship, arrived late in the month near Williamsburg to join the siege of Cornwallis’s army.

• At Yorktown Scammell’s troops were assigned to General Lafayette’s Light Infantry Division. They were in the thick of the fight, including at the end, when the regiment participated in the capture of one of the two British redoubts defending Yorktown leading directly to Cornwallis’s surrender on October 17th. Drummer Jolley would have had a front row seat for the action and also would have witnessed the elaborate surrender ceremony when British soldiers laid down their arms in what turned out to be the last major battle of the the War for Independence.

Jabez received his Army discharge on June 8th, 1783 and then disappears from history, save for a puzzling passing remark from a Sandwich lawyer in 1832 that surfaced in a bounty claim on behalf of the heirs of several Revolutionary veterans of color. The lawyer stated Jolley was “from the north shore of this cape” and then went on to declare that “said Jabez, being a drummer, was prevailed upon to accompany the French Army and Fleet to France and has not been heard from since.”

•  What kind of a tale about a Black expatriate from Cape Cod lies beneath the lawyer’s baffling comment about Jolley’s migration to France?  Did Jabez envision a better life there? Who “prevailed upon” him to make that decision? Does his experience as a battle tested military drummer suggest that Jolley was recruited to join the French army? Was he a slave who decided to escape his subjugation after his Continental service ended? The odds are long that something will turn up to help determine what happened after Jolley left America’s shores, but that’s a subject for  another day.

Epilogue

An end to slavery in Massachusetts began in 1780 with the ratification of the state’s new constitution which declared “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.”  Those words led to two court cases brought by slaves in the early 1780s that resulted in judgments that effectively ended slavery in the state. But those rulings did not lead to a separate law abruptly ending enslavement as a legal practice. Instead, as word of the court decisions slowly spread and slaves began to assert their right to freedom, enslavement in the state gradually faded away until in 1790 the federal census recorded no slaves in Massachusetts. The service of soldiers of color who fought to secure the independence of their new country probably contributed to the end of slavery in Massachusetts but societal biases, economic inequality and segregation outlived legal lifetime bondage despite the service of these Black patriots.

Footnotes:

[1] For a closer look at the lives of African Americans who joined the Revolutionary cause, see Judith Van Buskirk’s intensely researched, well written study on that subject. Professor Van Buskirk’s book draws heavily on the Revolutionary War pension files of five hundred Black veterans. Judith L. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light:  American Patriots in the American Revolution, University of Oklahoma Press. 2017

[2] Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War; A compilation from the Archives…Prepared and published by the Secretary of the Commonwealth in accordance with Chapter 100, Resolves of 1891… Boston; Wright & Potter Printing Co, State Printers; 1896 - 1908.

[3] In addition to using the Continental Army’s racial descriptors found in the Soldiers and Sailors volumes, I have occasionally relied on a nomenclature methodology used by historians to help identify soldiers of color by examining names, where available, of classical origin (e.g. Cato, Pompey, Scipio) or location (e.g. Boston, Providence, London) imposed by 18th century slave owners. It is not a foolproof methodology but it is a useful research tool that bears fruit for the persistent.

[4] Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961)….Quarles’s pioneering study has become a landmark achievement about Black Revolutionary history. A more recent work with updated information about Black soldiers and sailors is Eric G. Grundset, ed., Forgotten Patriots: African American and American Indian Patriots in the Revolutionary War (Washington DC: National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 2008).

[5] A 1776 Massachusetts census shows that Nantucket (2.9% - 133 individuals) and Dukes (2.0% - 59 individuals) counties had the highest percentage African American populations for the Cape and Islands.  Barnstable County’s African American population was 171 people (1.1% of the total county population). The census did not differentiate between enslaved or free people of color.

[6] On August 7, 1782, George Washington created two military badges to honor the service of his troops. The first Badge of Distinction was to be "conferred on the veteran non commissioned officers and soldiers of the army who have served more than three years with bravery, fidelity and good conduct," and would consist of "a narrow piece of white cloth of an angular form…to be fixed to the left arm on the uniform Coat." Non-commissioned officers and soldiers worthy of honor who served more than six years were "to be distinguished by two pieces of cloth set in parallel to each other in a similar form."

[7] Most Continental Army enlistees served as privates in regular infantry regiments. As the war dragged on, however, General Washington, recognizing the need for more mobile units, ordered each regiment to create an elite light infantry company made up of younger, more fit and battle-tested men with the stamina to deploy rapidly in combat situations.

[8] A “spider” is a long handled frying pan with three legs used around the fire to catch drippings from roasting meats and to sauté vegetables. The long handle provided some space between the fire and cook.

[9] The 67 page pension application file (# W3650) for Peter and Rhoda Boston can be found at ancestry.com. The file is yet another example of a documentary source that exceeds the summary records in the classic Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War volumes, a circumstance that particularly applies to naval service where original records are far more scarce than Continental Army and militia enlistments.

[10] In November 1832, Peter Boston gave a deposition supporting Bunker’s pension application testifying to his naval service and good character which suggests Bunker was comfortable accepting the help of a Black compatriot from the Hazard. Boston’s deposition was certified by a Nantucket Justice of the Peace who cited Peter as “a man of irreproachable character."