Thomas Lynch and the Continental Army’s Black Soldiers

On 23 Oct 1775, Thomas Lynch, Jr., and two of his colleagues in the Continental Congress, Benjamin Harrison and Benjamin Franklin, conferred with Gen. George Washington and political leaders of the New England colonies about setting up the Continental Army for the coming year ahead.

Most of the current army’s enlistments ran out in December. Only the rifle companies from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland had enlisted on different terms. They had promised to serve for twelve months, or until the middle of 1776.

One of the many questions that October conference considered was:

Ought not Negroes to be excluded from the new Inlistment especially such as are Slaves—all were thought improper by the Council of Officers?

Washington’s generals had followed his lead in voting to exclude black soldiers, though there were some opposing voices, as I discussed back here.

Thomas Lynch, as a southern planter and politician, almost certainly supported the idea of keeping black men out of the army. His fellow South Carolinian, Edward Rutledge, had even proposed pushing black soldiers out in September and “was strongly supported by many of the Southern Delegates,” according to the notes of Richard Smith of New Jersey.

That makes Lynch’s letter to Washington on 8 December particularly interesting. By then the general was worried that not enough men of any sort would re-enlist for the new year. If the British heard about an incredible shrinking enemy, Washington feared, in January they would charge out of Boston and Charlestown and overwhelm the thin Continental lines.

Lynch wrote to the commander:

I shall not take upon me to advise. tis as improper as needless. your Rifle Men, Negroes, & Deserters may in proper passes defend your artillery Ammunition & Stores[.] shoud your Lines be deserted, & the glorious, golden opertunity of ending the War be lost, let not Hope be lost also.

Somehow Lynch believed that the “Negroes” in the Continental ranks would still be available to Washington, along with the riflemen (whose enlistments were still in force) and “Deserters.”

It’s such a brief comment that it’s hard to know what Lynch was thinking. Did he expect the black soldiers would be in the same boat as the deserters, with nowhere else to go? Was he so used to ordering around enslaved people that he automatically assumed Washington could demand the “Negroes” stay?

Either way, Lynch’s remark was a backhanded acknowledgment that the Continental Army did have soldiers of African heritage, despite Rutledge’s efforts, and that they might be most valuable in the worst emergency.