In 1777, as the war was moving into its third year, blacks began to be accepted into the military in large numbers.

Congress had started to fix troop quotas for the various states. And, as Quarles noted, while Northern state legislatures might pass laws prohibiting the enrollment of Negroes, "muster masters ignored the law…."

In Massachusetts, for example, the General Court passed an act in January 1776 excluding Negroes, Indians, and mulattos from the militia, and later that year passed an act excluding non-whites from the ranks of the Continental Army.

Many in the North believed that training blacks in the use of arms was a potential danger. Members of the Massachusetts legislature also noted that "there was an inconsistency in assigning slaves to defend the liberty of America--an inconsistency which would expose patriots to the kind of British ridicule that 'we so liberally bestowed upon them because of Dunmore's regiment of blacks.'"

But in May of 1777, Trueman Wheeler, muster master for Berkshire County, had no qualms about enlisting Agrippa Hull. The muster master got his fee, perhaps as much as ten dollars per recruit, and the recruit got his bounty--in Hull's case twenty dollars. The towns that appointed the committees that oversaw the hiring of recruits wanted to keep expenses down and in many cases instructed the muster masters to economize. And, in the North anyway, Negroes would generally accept a lower bounty than whites. (The one hundred-dollar bounty paid to Prince Hall of Medford, Massachusetts, would appear to be an exception to the rule.)

The year 1777 was also when Connecticut, whose towns were having a hard time meeting their quotas, passed an act that exempted any two men who could provide an able-bodied substitute--of any color. They followed this up with a second act that let slaves serve as substitutes for their owners, on condition that the owner granted the slave his freedom.

Rhode Island, always a bit of a maverick, passed a slave enlistment act in January 1778, and in February authorized the formation of a battalion of slaves who, if they volunteered and passed muster, would be declared "absolutely free." The slave battalion became the First Rhode Island Regiment. It was formed during the terrible winter at Valley Forge, from which Washington sent Colonel Christopher Greene north to start drilling his 125 black soldiers, thirty-three of whom had been free prior to signing up.

One of the last to enlist in the new regiment was Jack Sisson, who had made a name for himself the previous summer when he played a crucial part in the capture of British Maj. Gen. Richard Prescott in Newport. The operation, essentially a commando raid, was carried out under the leadership of Lt. Col. William Barton. After selecting a group of about forty men, Barton told them his plan, warned them that it was risky, and added that they were free to back out if they wished. According to a contemporary account, however, "they unanimously resolved to go with him." Using three small boats, Barton's party slipped through Prescott's warships, landed near the general's headquarters, overpowered the guard, and surrounded the house. Only a door now separated them from the sleeping general. Sisson charged the door, using his head as a battering ram, and on the second try, he "forced a passage into [the house], and then into the general's chamber." The general was allowed to pull on his breeches before being taken away. He was subsequently exchanged for imprisoned American General Charles Lee.

Few regiments, of any color, earned such a reputation for bravery and loyalty as the First Rhode Island. Its baptism by fire took place in August 1778 in what has been variously called the Battle of Rhode Island and the Battle of Newport. In command of six brigades, American General John Sullivan hoped to defeat a much larger British force, which included Hessian soldiers, with the assistance of a French naval squadron. When a violent storm forced the French ships to withdraw, Sullivan had no choice but to carry out a strategic retreat from the northern end of Rhode Island. As the battle lines were drawn, the Rhode Island blacks found themselves facing the feared Hessians, who charged three times and were repulsed three times, with heavy casualties. The black regiment had proved equal to any other. In his report on the battle General Sullivan said the regiment was entitled to "a proper share of the Honours of the day." For his part, the German colonel who had led the Hessians asked to be transferred because he was afraid his men, who had seen so many of their comrades die, might shoot him.

Two and a half years later, on May 13, 1781, a number of Colonel Greene's black Rhode Islanders fought at his side in what turned out to be his, and their, last battle, near Points Bridge, New York. William C. Nell, the black abolitionist author of the seminal The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, published in 1855, described the event: "Colonel Greene, the commander of the regiment, was cut down and mortally wounded: but the sabres of the enemy only reached him through the bodies of his faithful guard of blacks, who hovered over him, and every one of whom was killed." The remnants of the First Rhode Island Regiment served for the rest of the war and were among the troops with Washington when he accepted Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown.

Later that year, black and white soldiers again fought side by side, and again, every one of them was killed--but after they had surrendered. The battle took place on September 6 near Groton, Connecticut. The Patriots mustered a force of eighty-four men to defend the town and to try to prevent a much larger British force commanded by Brig. Gen. Benedict Arnold from seizing the nearby port of New London. After a fierce resistance that caused heavy casualties to their attackers, Lt. Col. William Ledyard's outnumbered Americans withdrew to Fort Griswold, a small fortification with a few cannons. When the British tried to scale Griswold's walls, two Americans--one white, one black--drove their pikes into the major who led the assault. The black man was Jordan Freeman. When, finally, the British broke in and an officer asked who commanded the fort, Ledyard replied, "I did once. You do now," and handed his sword to the officer, who thereupon thrust his sword through Ledyard's body. Close by stood a black American, a slave who had run across the fields with his master to join the others. His name was Lambert Latham. To quote Nell's graphic account: "Lambert…retaliated upon the officer by thrusting his bayonet through his body. Lambert, in return, received from the enemy thirty-three bayonet wounds, and thus fell, nobly avenging the death of his commander." Maddened by the loss of so many of their men, the British killed all the Americans in the fort. A tablet at Old Fort Griswold, in Groton, erected in 1830, commemorates the memory of those men, carefully segregating the whites from the blacks.

In Black Heroes of the American Revolution, historian Burke Davis observed, "Other thousands of blacks might have fought for the Americans, but Georgia's white Patriots feared to put muskets into the hands of their slaves (many of whom had run off to join the British, who organized black units themselves and urged all slaves to flee their masters) and refused to send them to join General [Benjamin] Lincoln's army." Indeed, during the October 9, 1777, Battle of Savannah, hundreds of blacks ran off to join the British. They built redoubts and served as infantrymen and as guides--in one memorable case helping a British colonel surprise the Americans by showing him a path through a swamp.

Among the several hundred black Americans who served at sea during the Revolution, perhaps the most renowned was James Forten, who in 1781 at the age of fifteen enlisted as a powder boy on a privateer. This wasRoyal Louis, commissioned in Pennsylvania and commanded by Stephen Decatur, Sr. The ship's first engagement was with a British brig. Royal Louis took a pounding but came out the victor, forcing the brig to surrender. The next time out, the ship ran up against three British warships, and Decatur was compelled to surrender. Forten's young life then took several astonishing turns. The son of an English captain, amazed by the boy's skill at marbles, struck up a friendship with Forten and persuaded his father to offer the prisoner the life of an aristocrat in England. Forten refused to renounce his allegiance to his country and paid the penalty: He was sent to the prison ship Jersey, anchored off Long Island. Jersey's hold was packed with a thousand men. As Sidney Kaplan and Emma Norgrady Kaplan note in The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, "Ten thousand died miserably during the war in the rotten old hulk."

Forten survived and was released in a general exchange of prisoners near the end of the war. Back in Philadelphia, he set up business as a sailmaker and inventor, eventually amassing what was then a fortune. In a speech he made in 1833, Forten stated that his great-grandfather had been brought to this country as a slave from Africa, his grandfather had obtained his own freedom, and his father "never wore the yoke…and rendered valuable service to his country in the war of our Revolution." Thus, both father and son were veterans, and Forten and his sons and grandsons all became leaders in the anti-slavery movement.

Not all blacks who volunteered for service on behalf of the Patriots were granted their freedom on being mustered out. Saul Matthews, a Virginia slave who served as a soldier and a spy, was praised by high-ranking officers such as General Nathaniel Greene and Baron Friedrich von Steuben but returned to bondage after the war. In 1792, he petitioned the Virginia legislature for his freedom and was granted "full liberty and freedom."

Born into slavery in Maryland, James Roberts served under his master, Continental Army Colonel Francis De Shields, throughout the entire war. After De Shields' death in Philadelphia, Roberts, in a remarkable display of loyalty, delivered his master's possessions to the family in Maryland. There, he was sold to a Louisiana planter, stripped of his uniform, separated from his wife and children, and put out to fieldwork.

It has been estimated that during the course of the Revolution, seventy-five to one hundred thousand blacks sided with the British. This touchy subject was generally skirted in studies of black participation in the Revolution. Herbert Aptheker brought the topic into the open in The Negro in the American Revolution. Twenty-one years later, Quarles examined the subject in greater depth, and with considerably more documentation, in a book bearing the same title as Aptheker's. More than a quarter of a century later, the Kaplans provided a useful supplement to Quarles, and like him, they reminded white readers of the dilemma faced by blacks, in particular those who were enslaved: "In a war between white Patriot and white Tory, both upholders of the abominable institution, the question for Africans, enslaved in America for a century and a half, was clear enough: In which camp was there a better chance for black freedom?"

African American Patriots of the Revolutionary War