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Episode 3.1 - Black Soldiers in the American Revolution
Transcript
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[National Heritage Areas Podcast Episode 3.1: Black Soldiers in the American Revolution]
[Music]
Peter: Hello, this is Peter Samuel. I'm the National Heritage Areas Program Manager in the Northeast Region for the National Park Service. I'm here today with Jules Long. Jules, tell us about what you did.
Jules: So for this episode I went out to the Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area. That's out in New Jersey. And this Heritage Area is pretty cool because it has a theme. That's the American Revolution really focuses on the history of the Revolutionary War and the impact of that— that's because there is so much of that history there in New Jersey.
Peter: Right.
Jules: I went out there to meet with Daryian Kelton, who works as an educator at the Old Barracks Museum. He's also a historical reenactor, which means he gets to wear cool historical outfits, dress as a Revolutionary soldier, and even act in first-person, be able to talk as if he were an actual historical figure, which the kids really like—we'll talk a bit more about that as well. And he told me a little bit about black soldiers in the American Revolution. The reason why I wanted to go out there and talk about the story a little bit is that this is history that I really didn’t know about until recently. I didn't realize there were black soldiers in the war. Somehow that was missed in my education.
Peter: Well, I'd say it's probably missed in a lot of people's education.
Jules: Yeah, as we learn in this episode there were about 20% of the Continental Army, the American soldiers, during the Revolutionary War, who were black, had African descent. These were both free people as well as people who had been enslaved. It was an integrated army, although it didn't quite start out that way. And there were many who also fought for the British side, for the Loyalists.
Peter: Right.
Jules: One of those black Loyalist soldiers was a man named Colonel Tye, who has a pretty cool story that Daryian’s going to tell us about.
Peter: Great
Colonel Tye’s also featured as one of the Revolutionary Neighbors, which is a program that the Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area puts on. I was able to talk to Janice Selinger, the executive director of the Heritage Area. She'll tell us about Revolutionary Neighbors and other programs that the Heritage Area is working on, including one that brings the kids from Trenton to experience the history that happened in their own backyard.
Peter: Yeah, Janice is great. I've been working with her for a couple of years as the director of the Heritage Area. She's doing some terrific work out there.
Jules: All right, let's get to it.
Jules: Before we start, I do just want to comment that when we recorded this, there were only 49 National Heritage Areas. Since then, there have been 6 new National Heritage Areas designated, bringing the total to 55.
[Music]
Jules: This is Jules Long with the National Heritage Areas Program of the National Park Service. Today I am here in New Jersey at the Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area, here at the Old Barracks Museum. We're going to learn specifically about black soldiers serving in the American Revolution. I'm here with Daryian Kelton, who is a historical reenactor, and he's going tell us about somebody I've been hearing a little bit about, and that is Colonel Tye. Daryian, who is Colonel Tye?
Daryian: So, Colonel Tye is like really, really cool. He's one of the people that is not on the American side of the war but he's on the British side of the war. And he's kind of like this vigilante leader, able to pull together a bunch of black soldiers, and other types of soldiers, together to fight on behalf of the British line. He's given his freedom through the Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, which is basically stating that any enslaved black soldier that comes into the British line, they're able to receive their freedom through service. And also they'll be paid, they'll be fed—there's a lot of perks that come along with that. Colonel Tye comes up and he's this leader and now he’s under his manumission from the British. He's wreaking havoc as this this really cool leader figure, and he’s given the name Colonel Tye, and he has this really great reputation.
Jules: So, Colonel Tye—you said he was originally enslaved. Were there a lot of people who took that opportunity, a lot of enslaved people, to fight for the British and gain their freedom?
Daryian: Yeah, of course the slaves are looking at it as, ‘Well, I would like to be free, so yes, thank you very much,’ and a lot of people thought that this was something that was take advantage of. There’s somewhere around 10 to 11,000 African soldiers fighting in the British Army throughout the war, so that speaks volumes, because that's the contrast of about 9,000 that are serving in the Continental [American] line.
Jules: What was the response of the American army, the Continental Army? George Washington was leading the troops at the time. How did he respond to this event, to Dunmore's Proclamation and black soldiers joining the British lines?
Daryian: So it's kind of funny. So, originally when we think about Washington—remember Washington's a Virginia slave owner, so putting a gun in the hands of one of his slaves—who do you think you would be more likely to turn the gun on? That was something really something he had to weight out in his mind, at least in the early parts of the war. Now most of the population is made up of the slave population, so you're literally not using manpower that's already here. Once the Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation comes out, and he also realizes that there aren't a lot of able-bodied white men who really want to go out and fight for this cause, and the Continental line is really hurting for numbers—he has to change his mind. He starts saying, ‘Okay, fine, you can all start to join the army.’ Because they need the bodies, they need the numbers. Because now, like I said, with the 11,000 [black soldiers] kind of boosting the presence of the British soldiers here in North America, it really changes the dynamic because now it's really easy for the British to outnumber everyone here. So it only made enough sense for Washington to say, ‘Yes, absolutely, you can join the army.’ And you'll have them serving in the 4th Connecticut [Regiment], you have several drummers serving in the Philadelphia Associators with the 2nd Pennsylvania line that were actually here at the Battles of Trenton. You also have them serving in many other different capacities as well, in many other different regiments throughout the war. That's kind of due to that fact that Washington starts to change his mind about the whole thing.
Jules: So it sounds like the black soldiers were serving alongside white soldiers in these regiments, is that correct?
Daryian: Absolutely. This is actually going to be the first [only] time that you'll see an integrated army all the way up until the Korean War, which is a really long, really long time to have the segregated army that’s actually going to come about. So you're going have many major conflicts where we have this segregated army, at least for the American culture, all the way up until then. So it's kind of really mind-boggling to see that everyone's kind of standing side by side here in the American [Revolutionary] Army.
Jules: Wow, that's pretty cool. It’s history that I wasn't aware of until just recently. In fact, I heard that ten to twenty percent of the American Continental Army was black?
Daryian: Yep. You even have during the later part of the war, in the 1780s, you have a regiment known as the 1st Rhode Island Regiment that will come about. They will remain about 80% percent black all the way up to the end of the war. Which is kind of really neat.
Jules: Yeah, that is really cool.
Jules: Let's go back to Colonel Tye. He was attacking the Americans, right? He was doing that on behalf of the Loyalists—the British Army essentially.
Daryian: Colonel Tye is just a natural-born leader. He kind of inherits the “Colonel” as a nickname. So like, he's leading all these guys in all of these raids and they pick up the name “Raiders” and they were kind of ruthless.
Jules: Who were these other raiders?
Daryian: It's kind of like a rough regiment. Mainly, a bunch of other like-minded Loyalist individuals who are also kind of seeking their freedom as well, because some will be black that join up under Colonel Tye. The nickname the Raiders kind of speaks for itself! They did not care about 18th-century war time rules. They were just on their own accord. And you know what? It kind of worked. Like I said, it was kind of unconventional, but they were taking over rebel land and getting rid of all these slave owners—so you have slavery happening in New Jersey, contrary to what we may think. These guys are just really cool. I kind of want to do that. I think I might start doing that! I might start being like Colonel Tye and get a group of guys together just going out and wreaking havoc on the fields.
Jules: Well, you do that sometimes right? I mean, I don't know about wreaking havoc, but you do play Colonel Tye, right?
Daryian: Yes, there's a time I did do Colonel Tye. I was about, like, 20 pounds lighter when I did Colonel Tye, and I looked a little bit meaner. But now I look too jolly. I need to get meaner again so I could look like a nice respectable man from New Jersey who's leading a group called the Raiders. It's really fun to do Colonel Tye, or even to do anyone from the 18th century, because you have to shift your whole thinking. Now you kind of have to carry yourself in this other sort of way and it was really fun, kind of doing that as a different person, being looked at as a different person.
Jules: So during this Revolutionary Neighbors program, you're playing Colonel Tye. How did the kids respond to you as Colonel Tye?
Daryian: Most times, when we get a third and fourth graders that come to the [Old] Barracks and we ask them questions and are trying to talk to them—most times you get this kind of generalized idea that the Americans are the good guys and the British are the bad guys. So we don't tend to really care about the bad guys, we just know that they were here and they did stuff. Not many kids like someone that is a Loyalist ever—ever, ever, ever. So in in order to kind of make it work a little bit better so that they don't hate me, you have to kind of paint the picture of why that person would be doing those things. Like, what are the reasons why? You have to give this understanding, which is really hard because there are really complex ideas that you have to kind of truncate into like a sentence. And you have to get them to understand in kind of in a roundabout way rather than like giving them a novel’s worth of information where you're trying to talk to them, so that they understand why this person did what they did. And a lot of the time you have to get them, like, really riled up and excited first for them to really understand your point of view, and how what they think might be right in terms of like, you know, ‘Oh, the Americans are great’—well, it doesn't seem all that great when you really start to unpack some of those other issues. And now they kind of get a light of ‘Well, I could understand why you would want to go do this. Now I understand this person a little bit more than I did when I first got here.’ And that's kind of the cool thing to kind of see with you know even third and fourth graders. They get that ‘aha’ moment, and that's pretty much what I live for. Because once they get to that point, now you can hand them a book and they’ll go explore on their own and they’ll probably find things that you'll never find. But it's that initial kind of breaking point, where you got to get them to think differently.
Jules: That’s pretty cool. So what happened to Colonel Tye after the war?
Daryian: So for this guy that's got this this legacy going for him, and things are starting to go well—he gets shot, he dies of gangrene. He ultimately dies in the war, that's as simple as it is. It's really heartbreaking to see. It’s kind of like, ‘No, that's it? Oh man!’
Jules: But you're keeping his memory alive. The Crossroads of the American Revolution is keeping the memory of Colonel Tye and other black soldiers alive through their programming, which I think is really cool. What would you say the main takeaway is from Colonel Tye's story?
Daryian: This one man, who is an African, who was an African slave who's now let go, and now he's leading underneath the British rule like here in America—that's a lot to kind of take in and digest. There’s a lot going on there for me. For me, I'm only 25, so like for me it's just kind of taking whatever situation you're in, and no matter how bad and bleak it may be, you can always turn it around to be whatever you want it to be. I mean, Colonel Tye certainly turned his entire life around, and he wound up leading a bunch of men on behalf of one of the richest countries, one of the largest land-owning countries—or rather, empires—in the entire world. So I don't have any excuses now on why I can't you know do that one thing I've always wanted to do. I mean, you have to strive to do it.
Jules: Thank you so much for meeting with me today, and keep up the great work!
Daryian: Yeah, I'll go outside and freeze now. [laughter]
Jules: Stay warm!
[Music]
Jules: Also here with me is Janice Salinger, the executive director of the Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area. Tell me a little bit about this program, this Revolutionary Neighbors program.
Janice: Well, one of the things that Crossroads wants to do is make sure that we provide education and materials that students and the public would be interested in. So we have a portion of our website which is the Revolutionary Neighbors, and they are stories of everyday people. Some of them were Loyalists, some of them were fighting, some of them were tavern owners, just everyday people from the Revolution. So we work with historians to make sure that the stories are authentic and provide interesting information. That's basically the Revolutionary Neighbors project. We add to them every year with a few more neighbors, a few more interesting stories. We find that students are really excited about this. We have buttons and magnets and other things that help tell the story, in addition to— obviously sometimes there's photos, sometimes there's videos about the Neighbors.
Jules: Yeah, I saw a button earlier with Colonel Tye on it, which was pretty cool. It was a picture of him, kind of a cartoon character with his name. I understand a lot of the other characters have those as well. And there's a video about Colonel Tye on your website, the Crossroads website, that gives a little more information about his history.
Jules: So Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area is one of the 49 heritage areas, but it is the only one dedicated to Revolutionary history. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you do here?
Jules: Right, we're the only one specifically designated because of New Jersey's rich Revolutionary history. And you know, most people might not think about New Jersey in that way, but more things happened related to the Revolution here in New Jersey than in any other part of the country. So you know we were between the American capital of Philadelphia and the British headquarters in New York, so there was a lot of fighting that took place here in New Jersey.
Jules: Yeah, George Washington spent most of his time during the war in New Jersey, correct?
Janice: That is absolutely true. So we're very pleased to be able to work with about 140 heritage partners throughout the state to help promote and tell the Revolutionary story. The Old Barracks [Museum] is one of those partners, and it's also where we have our offices.
Jules: How do you work with the Old Barracks?
Janice: Well, we've worked on, you know, helped to promote some of their activities as we do with a number of our other heritage partners. What we recently did was we were finding that the Old Barracks was getting students from all around the state to come for class trips. But they were not getting students from Trenton, which is where they're based. And so we came up with a project to bring a hundred students from a fourth grade class in Trenton to come to the Old Barracks. They had an opportunity to come here to learn about what goes on here at the Barracks. One of the interpreters that spoke to them was Daryian, and he was talking to them about drumming. So that was something that the students really could relate to. So it's something that the students, I think, really didn't realize that this happened right in Trenton. . They enjoyed finding out what happened in the Revolution in their own backyard. And so the opportunity—we brought a couple of the reenactors to the school ahead of time, to prepare them and get them excited about coming. We also worked with them on using iPads. Because the idea of this project is not just that they come to visit the Barracks, which is a wonderful thing and we hope that they'll come back and do again, but it's also that they find out something that excites them about the Revolution and they decide to create their own five-minute videos.
Jules: Very cool. That combination of history and technology—it sounds like the kids were pretty engaged in this project
Janice: Oh, they were. I mean and they had you know a series of teams of students that wanted to do the video work they came here and recorded the day that they were here. They were recording when the presentation took place in the classroom. We're going to be bringing other projects to them we have a project with a George Washington and a Ben Franklin coming. We also have someone who does revolutionary medicine from East Jersey Old Town, which is another one of our partners up in Piscataway. They're going to be coming to the school. And we have, I think, a third program that we're going to be doing. Then in the spring, the students will have a chance to show their videos that are special premiere screening that we'll have at the school.
Jules: Oh wow.
Janice: Which, you know, I think they're excited about it. The teachers you know we're particularly excited about working with their students this way and, you know, obviously taking something that they're studying in fourth-grade history but making it real for them. You know to see something that took place right in their own backyard here in Trenton.
Jules: Yeah, that's really cool that they had that opportunity. Why do you think it's important for people to know about this history?
Janice: Well, you know, I think now in particular it's important because we're leading up to the 250th [Anniversary] of the American Revolution in 2026. And actually with all the things that went on in New Jersey 2026 was just the beginning—it goes through 2033 with a lot of activities. But, you know, I think it's important to understand what happened. There's stories that were important stories. You know, one of the things going back to what we have on our website with Revolutionary Neighbors is that—you know, there's short biographies about how people from all walks of life lived in New Jersey back then. And they had certain struggles and were dealing with things. And you know we have struggles today, and so I think we can learn a lot about what happened then and apply it to what's happening today. I think one of the things that we hope to do at Crossroads is to make this be something that means something to everyone. You know, some people might say, ‘Well, I'm not, you know, a Daughter of the American Revolution or a Son of the American Revolution, you know. I've come to this country, or my family's come to this country, recently.’ And what we find with a lot of our heritage partners is when the students come with their schools, they then bring their parents. And so the Revolution becomes real and they can understand why the founding of this country, and what happened for liberty and all that is important to them
Jules: Yeah, it seems like the story of the early fight for freedom and liberty during the American Revolution, that has continued throughout history. You see how that continues even today, all the ideas of freedom in the Constitution, in American democracy. It really helps us to understand what that means when we look at where it came from.
Jules: Thank you so much for meeting with me today.
Janice: Thank you very much for including us in this.
[Music]
Peter: Wow, that was terrific. Thanks, Jules. You know, just as a follow-up: we've been working with Crossroads for a long time. Tell us a little bit more about their involvement with the 250th Anniversary.
Jules: Yeah, so “Rev 250” is the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution we like to say that 1776 that was the big year because that was the Declaration of Independence. But the Revolutionary War started before that, in 1775, and there were all these other events that led up to that such as the Boston Massacre. So over the next few years so from now until 2026, all these anniversary events are happening. So Crossroads is involved with that, as well as many of their partners.
Peter: Right. You know, you mention partners. I know that Morristown National Historical Park, they've always been a really strong partner. I know they do projects together and programs together.
Jules: Yeah.
Peter: And, you know, just to follow up on the Revolutionary Neighbors program…
Jules: Yeah, the Revolutionary Neighbors program, that is something that Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area works on and they've really taken spotlights, biographies, of different people from the American Revolutionary time period. People from all different walks of life not only soldiers but this also tells the stories of regular people, everyday people—workers and farmers and tavern owners—and all these people they were affected by the Revolution, not just the soldiers. So this program revolutionary neighbors it puts features about them on the website or the Crossroads mmm heritage area you can read about them some of them even have videos.
Peter: Yeah, that’s cool.
Jules: A lot of them have little like cartoon images, because a lot of them we don't have historical pictures of.
Peter: Yeah.
Jules: So they were able to commission images of them and make them kid-friendly, right. They want kids to be able to engage with this history because they use this program a lot for kids they even have little buttons and stickers and magnets that have to do with all these people.
Peter: Oh wow.
Jules: And these are real people, not just characters that are made up, but real stories.
Peter: Yeah.
Jules: And Colonel Tye is one of those Revolutionary Neighbors.
Peter: Yeah, that's great. Anytime you can make history accessible to youngsters and make them, you know, really get engaged with it, I think that's a—that's a huge win for the program.
Jules: And that history is still relevant today because that's still the laws, right, the Constitution that we use. Happened a little bit after but it's still part of that Revolutionary time period, our independence, that happened in the 1700s. And all these principles of freedom and liberty, we still talk about and so I think it's important to remember where that came from, to have that context in history, and to know some of these stories that haven't been shared throughout history as well, like the stories of black soldiers. You know, there have been time periods where public history was not talking about that—for a reason, right, they wanted to suppress that history. But I think bringing out that history and understanding what actually happened and how people were able to use those principles of freedom to take them and apply them to their own lives—and also how freedom was denied to certain people. I think that really helps us understand why it's so important to talk about some of these problems so that we can, you know, continue to encourage and support all of these American ideals.
Peter: Great, great. Well, terrific episode and I look forward to the next one. Thanks Jules.
[Music]
Jules: This has been episode 1 of season 3 of the National Heritage Areas Podcast. It was recorded on site at the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, New Jersey, at the Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area office. The recordings with Peter and I talking [were] recorded at the Northeast Regional Office of the National Park Service in Philadelphia. We'd like to thank James Farrell for creating the music.
Description
In Episode 3.1, Jules sits down with Daryian Kelton and Janice Selinger from the Crossroads of the Revolution National Heritage Area to learn about black soldiers in the American Revolutionary War and how the NHA helps share that history.
Duration
23 minutes, 42 seconds
Credit
NPS Northeast Region
Date Created
04/12/2019
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