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PREFACE
Look for Patriots
of Color, published by Eastern
National Press, in Winter 2004.
"Patriots of Color, 'A Peculiar Beauty and Merit' African
Americans and Native Americans at Battle Road and Bunker Hill"
by Alfred F. Young
Senior Research Fellow, Newberry Library, Chicago
Every once in a while a piece of scholarship comes along that changes
the way you look at a historical event. The prevailing wisdom about
the Battle of Bunker Hill is that only a handful of African American
soldiers were there. After almost three years of research George
Quintal reports that there very likely were 103 "patriots of
color" at Bunker Hill (and may have been as many as 150). If
there were as many as 3000 American soldiers at that Battle, this
would mean that men of color might have been five percent of the
total, which makes the percentage almost as high as at the Battle
of Monmouth, New Jersey, when an estimated 800 men of color were
seven per cent of a likely army of 12,000 soldiers.
How come we did not know about these soldiers? In truth the clues
were hidden in plain sight. John Trumbull's 1786 painting of the
Battle portraying the deaths of General Joseph Warren and several
British officers shows one black man standing behind an American
officer holding his master's gun and still another among the many
faces in the battle. It is perhaps the most famous painting of a
Revolutionary war scene. Alonzo Chappel's mid-nineteenth century
rendering of a similar scene puts a young black man in the center
of the action wielding a gun on his own, by implication not a slave.
Both paintings were widely reproduced.
Even after the rediscovery of black history in the wake of the
civil rights movements of the twentieth century, the assumption
was blacks were present only in small numbers. In 1961, Benjamin
Quarles, then the dean of black historians, in The Negro in the
American Revolution, could  enumerate
only six men (and for Battle Road he could list nine). In popular
memory, it seems to have been taken for granted that there was Peter
Salem (wrongly identified as the Negro in Trumbull's painting) and
there was Salem Poor (singled out by fourteen officers in a petition
as a "brave and gallant soldier"). On this same wave of
tokenism, the poet Phillis Wheatley and the sailor Crispus Attucks,
killed at the Boston Massacre, entered textbooks as representatives
of black patriotism in Boston. In 1964, Ebony, the black popular
magazine, named sixteen blacks at the Battle (half misidentified).
When George Quintal accepted a contract from the National Park Service
to research blacks at the Battle, he had documented two dozen and
took a guess that further research might uncover another dozen.
Quintal is not an historian of black history. A native of rural
Maine, he began his foray into common soldiers almost three decades
ago in pursuit of twelve of his own ancestors who were in the Revolutionary
War. He is a self-taught genealogist and military researcher, skilled
as a computer specialist. Beginning with an interest in the expedition
to Canada led by Benedict Arnold, he moved into the Battles of Bunker
Hill and Saratoga. Then he began to read systematically the 2670
microfilm reels of pension applications filed by veterans in 1820
and 1832, a huge treasure trove of evidence about the ordinary soldiers,
largely unmined by historians.
The scope of his research on the patriots of color at Bunker Hill
and Battle Road is staggering. Some years ago the Daughters of the
American Revolution in Washington compiled lists of soldiers of
color for each New England state based on the army's descriptive
muster rolls--the one for Massachusetts listed 750. Not content
with this, Quintal began with the United States Census for 1790
which designated every family of color. Armed with these names,
he turned every page in the seventeen volumes of Massachusetts Soldiers
and Sailors of the Revolutionary War and the comparable compilations
for other New England states. With a data base enhanced by family
and town histories, he hunted for evidence from primary sources
for every "name" he had, and not for their military service
alone but for their life histories. His results actually are on
the conservative side; the large number of men in his "probable"
category in fact are listed as members of military units known to
be at Bunker Hill and therefore very likely there. He has still
other names on a "maybe" list that may be verified by
the sources. This is, we might say, "a work in progress."
The author's citation of Harriet Beecher Stowe in his subtitle seems
particularly apt. In light of the fact that the nation did not "acknowledge
them as citizens and equals," the novelist wrote, the bravery
of the "colored patriots" indeed had "a peculiar
beauty and merit." Abigail Adams said the same thing in 1782
about the "patriotism in the female sex;" because women
were "excluded from honors and from offices," it was "the
most disinterested of all."
Who were these men? They were almost all from Massachusetts. It
may be hard to grasp two centuries later, but on the eve of the
Revolution Massachusetts was a colony with about 5000 slaves. In
Boston in 1765 there were about 800 Negroes in a population of 15,500.
Some of the best patriot families--Bowdoin, Hancock, Otis, Rowe,
Warren--held slaves at one time or another. Patriot leaders, moreover,
did not welcome blacks who sometimes joined mob actions. And the
patriots who dominated the Massachusetts legislature turned down
petitions from slaves demanding abolition in 1773, 1774 and as late
as 1777.
It is hard to pin down the precise status of each individual black
soldier in April and June, 1775. Some were slaves (like Asaba, the
black man in Trumbull's painting, a servant to Lieutenant Thomas
Grosvenor of Connecticut); some had been freed in earlier years;
a large number were taking their own freedom. The soldiers at the
Battle Road were all members of the militia from their home towns
who turned out in response to the alarm, some of them "minute
men." The soldiers at Bunker Hill were men who enlisted for
a term of eight months in what was becoming the Continental Army.
Contrary to the comforting mythology, there was nothing automatic
about the abolition of slavery in the "cradle of liberty."
The Continental Army opened its doors only part way to blacks. The
new state legislature did not abolish slavery; nor did the new state
constitutions in 1778 and 1781. It was abolished, "by a legal
process so obscure that historians continue to puzzle over slavery's
demise," writes Ira Berlin in 2003 in Generations of Captivity:
A History of African-American Slaves. There had to be lawsuits.
But here the new knowledge Quintal has uncovered comes into play:
undoubtedly the military service of so many blacks helped change
the climate of opinion. After successful law suits of the early
1780s, slavery disappeared, and the census of 1790 counted 5463
"free persons of color" in the state and no slaves.
For the statistical-minded, the charts sum up the data about these
soldiers. I took Quintal's recommendations under "Highlights"
as to which stories were "especially interesting" and
was not disappointed by his life stories about who was "probably
the strongest man," who "had the longest service (8 years)"
and who "probably served in the most battles (7)." As
much as the life histories, I suspect many readers will also be
as fascinated as I was by the fact that it was possible to reconstruct
so much information about people who through their lives remained
at the bottom of society.
We owe this report to the perseverance and skills of the compiler
and the vision of Martin Blatt, Historian, Boston National Historical
Park. The author's numerous acknowledgements suggest that a company
of keepers of the past joined enthusiastically in his explorations.
Reading between the lines, one can see our compiler and friends
walking through overgrown cemeteries in search of gravestones, dusting
off old town records, and sharing copies of worn documents. You
can't do this kind of research without help. How fitting that Quintal
should dedicate the book to David Lloyd Garrison (1906-2001), great-grandson
of William Lloyd Garrison, Boston's most famous abolitionist, who
literally gave him a roof over his head for two years of research.
This clearly is a project whose time has come.
Look for Patriots
of Color, published by Eastern
National Press, in late 2003 For
ordering information, email Paul
Tiemann.
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