The 1774 colonial census for Litchfield, Connecticut lists 2,554 people living in this western New England town. Of these, just forty-five are people of color, including those of African origin described as “negroes” and indigenous Americans counted as “Indians.” Among fifteen “negro” males, eight are under twenty years old and seven are above.[1] During the […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews history professor and author Shirley L. Greenabout her new book, Revolutionary Blacks: Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence. New episodes of Dispatchesare available for free every Saturday evening(Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatchescan now […]
BOOK REVIEW: Revolutionary Blacks, Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence by Shirley L. Green (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2023) This captivating book tells a new American story. It is the first book to detail the life, challenges, fears and hopes of a Black soldier in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews distinguished historian, author, and JAR contributor Benjamin L. Carp on his discovery of two separate encounters between Capt. Abraham Van Dyck and the military justice system. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and […]
Ned Streater (also spelled Streator) was a twenty-year-old man when he first served early in the American Revolution as a member of a Virginia Minute Battalion from Nansemond County during the Battle of Great Bridge in 1775. Streater served again during the Virginia campaign of 1780-81. What makes Ned Streater unique is not his multiple […]
On October 19, 1781, Gen. George Washington attained his apex as a soldier. Straddling a spirited charger at the head of a formidable Franco-American army, Washington watched impassively as 6,000 humiliated British, German, and Loyalist soldiers under the command of Lt. Gen. Charles, Second Earl Cornwallis, emerged from their fortifications to lay down their arms […]
When the War of the Revolution began in April 1775, Connecticut resident Judith Jeffords née Philips was nineteen years old, had been married for two years, and had at least one child. She was, in the descriptive jargon of the time, a mulatto, meaning of mixed Afro-European lineage. We would know little to nothing of Mrs. […]
Last spring, the Varnum Memorial Armory Museum in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, announced its discovery of a handwritten letter from a formerly enslaved man who had gained his freedom by enlisting in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment during the Revolutionary War. The letter, written in 1781, is one of only a few known existing letters […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews writer, researcher, historian, and JAR contributor John Rees on his series of articles about nineteenth-century remembrances of Black Revolutionary War veterans, including Hannah Till, Thomas Carney, Edward Hector, Jacob Francis, and Oliver Cromwell. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States […]
At the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, there is an exhibit in the core gallery examining the choices, opportunities and constraints of African Americans in Virginia in 1781. Titled “Sometimes, freedom wore a red coat” it seeks to educate people on the effect the British Army had on operating in areas where slavery […]
Nat Turner launched a bloody uprising among enslaved Virginians in Southampton County in 1831 the same year that William Lloyd Garrison of Boston began publishing The Liberator, the most famous anti-slavery newspaper. In 1833, the American Antislavery Society, led by Garrison, was organized in Philadelphia. For the next three decades, the Society campaigned that slavery […]
The 1820 Missouri Compromise allowed Missouri to become a slave state, established Maine as a free state, and banned slavery in the territory west of Missouri. The same year saw the first organized emigration of Blacks from the United States back to Africa, from New York to Sierra Leone. In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a free […]
