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[[File:Black loyalist copley.jpg|left|thumbnail|250px|A Black Loyalist in John Singleton Copley's Death of Major Pierson (1782)]]
During the nineteenth century, freed enslaved Africans in the North designated March 5th a holiday to commemorate the sacrifice of Crispus Attucks. Attucks, who worked as a sailor, had been the first person killed in the long conflict over the question of colonial independence during what has become known as the [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674048334/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0674048334&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=711cf798dc9a69031f996021ceb9fb70 Boston Massacre in 1770]. In the North, among abolitionists his life demonstrated how intertwined Black lives were with the founding of the American republic. They added evidence of Attucks’s sacrifice as well as the sacrifice of many more free and enslaved African patriots to the ledger of proof of African America’s loyalty and as a rationale for the ending of the system of enslavement. <ref> John Ernest, ''[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807855219/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0807855219&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=6e26d8c2230af29dc74042889a19f9bf Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861]'' (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 141.</ref>
Military service has been traditionally offered as a demonstration of both patriotism and the obligation to return such favors with the benefits of citizenship. Although the abolitionists were right to affirm the sacrifices of a veritable segment of the African American community, more people of African descent actually fought on the side of the British army. It is likely for this reason that many of the subsequent episodes of enslaved people’s repression came to fruition. Unlike other “Loyalists,” a sizable segment of those who fought for the British, and most importantly their descendants, remained to incur the wrath of the victorious American rebels.
It is useful to begin to understand the context by briefly reviewing the history of British abolitionism. The moral fervor around the brutality and horrors of the Middle Passage led to a movement by abolitionists in the eighteenth century to outlaw the Atlantic Slave Trade. These exposés were based upon both religious and economic arguments, but perhaps most of all they were part of a liberal natural rights logic that asserted humans were born with certain inalienable rights. Enslavement, inasmuch as it was crystallized by the treatment of human beings as property, was a negation of this very logic. As the contradictions sharpened, those who had invested much political and economic capital into the system began to withdraw their support at varying levels.
This was the context that gave rise to ''Somerset v. Stewart'', where an enslaved African that had been transported to the English mainland had sued for his freedom based on English common law. Lord Mansfield, the judge who decided the case, had been influenced by the arguments of the abolitionists, and eventually awarded freedom to the plaintiff, James Somerset. This decision sent shockwaves throughout the British Empire—especially the American colonies. But it signaled to the enslaved that the British could serve as a vehicle to remove the thumb of their enslavers, much like the Spanish had done during the eighteenth century. <ref> Cedric Robinson, ''Black Movements in America'' (New York: Routledge, 1997), 14-29; Gerald Horne, ''[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1479806897/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1479806897&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=33df1e3a0cca71760d2d526032a6f4f6 The Counterrevolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States]'' (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 209-19. </ref>
====The Impact of Somerset====
Virginia was ground zero for much of the political debates and decisions regarding the colonies. It was here where much of the political systems that would define America would be created. By 1775, as the colonists began to fear the incursions of the British, revolutionary sensibilities had already emerged there. It seemed imminent that a more thoroughgoing conflict was on the horizon as militias began to form. It is important to note that this revolutionary fervor was not universal. There was a large swath of colonists who remained loyal to the union. These Loyalists sought to ensure the continuity of British rule, as many of them were direct beneficiaries of their control.
To fortify British rule, Lord Dunmore, the governor Virginia, decided upon a shrewd tactic. By this period, Virginia had erected a one of the largest slave economies in the Americas, with forty percent of its population made up of bondsmen. As a result , it had experienced sporadic revolts and varying levels of marronage. <ref> Robinson, ''[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415912229/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0415912229&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=0aa7f400d246fc098efe80c7e7833f82 Black Movements in America]'', 1-14. </ref> Seizing upon this opportunity and facing the risings of a veritable militia of patriots, Dunmore declared in November of 1775, that all who did not pledge loyalty to the crown would be declared traitors and that enslaved Africans would be given freedom in exchange for military service.
The “Ethiopian Regiment” was then mustered, having ramifications far beyond this proclamation. Many Black loyalist regimes were created following the 1779 Phillipsburg Proclamation, issued by Sir Henry Clinton, which was more wide-ranging than Dunmore’s edict as it covered all of the colonies. <ref> Horne, The Counterrevolution of 1776, 219-52. </ref>
====The Declaration of Independence====
The impact even found it’s way into the founding document of the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The history of this document demonstrates, of course, that Jefferson was one of a few authors. However, Jefferson as a Virginian slaveholder, had a specific axe ax to grind. In a much-heralded statement, Jefferson wrote,
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” <ref> Blackpast.org, “The Deleted Passage of the Declaration of Independence.” http://www.blackpast.org/primary/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery </ref>
Carleton’s now famous “Book of Negroes”—which was made into a historical novel and television miniseries—recorded the names of those who he, working on behalf of the crown, would endeavor to fulfill promises embedded in the Dunmore and Phillipsburg proclamations. In Nova Scotia, emancipated Africans lived a relatively harsh life as Canada provided an unforgiving climate. Others would later find their way to Africa and help settle Sierra Leone, thought to be a haven for Africans who were seized by the British patrols that were intending to enforce the ban of Atlantic Slave Trade.
Their lives under the Crown were only an improvement for the simple reason that they were not enslaved. It is , however, folly, to believe that things were easy. One of the complicated realities of this and subsequent periods is that emancipation, while lessening the pain of chattel enslavement, did not eradicate the larger problems at the heart of Black existence in the modern world. <ref> Gilbert, ''Black Patriots and Loyalists'', 207-42.</ref>
Others stayed in the new country and found themselves subject to a deepening and more vicious enslavement than that which had existed before. Among those that were re-enslaved (though many were not), an important group became maroons utilizing their military skills to wage war against the new country in South Carolina and Georgia in the years leading up to the nineteenth century. This group called themselves, the “King of England’s Soldiers.” <ref> Sylviane Diouf, ''Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons'' (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 165.</ref>
====Conclusion====
In conclusion, let us briefly note the inspirations of the enslaved. While the freed Africans discussed above were inspired to demonstrate their fitness for citizenship, it is critical to emphasize that the enslaved Africans who fought for the British were not similarly concerned with demonstrating loyalty. As such, the term “Black Loyalist,” which has come to define these soldiers is somewhat of a misnomer. As a historian, James W. St. G. Walker indicates, it is likely that these soldiers “were less Pro-British than they were Pro-Black.” <ref> James W. St. G. Walker, “Blacks as American Loyalists: The Slaves' War for Independence,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 2 (Summer/été 1975): 53. </ref> This framing helps to explain why Black soldiers would again fight on the side of the Redcoats, and perhaps may be used to help frame Black participation in American military conflict up to the Vietnam conflict.
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===References===
