The Massachusetts Government on Black Soldiers in the Summer of 1775

On 20 May 1775, one month into the Revolutionary War, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s Committee of Safety made this statement about the war it had undertaken and the troops it would employ:

Resolved, That it is the opinion of this committee, as the contest now between Great Britain and the colonies respects the liberties and privileges of the latter, which the colonies are determined to maintain, that the admission of any persons, as soldiers, into the army now raising, but only such as are freemen, will be inconsistent with the principles that are to be supported, and reflect dishonor on this colony, and that no slaves be admitted into this army upon any consideration whatever.

That policy barred slave owners from enlisting their human property, who presumably had less stake in the conflict. It preserved the public image, and self-image, of the New England army as freemen fighting for their traditional rights.

On that same day the committee asked that “Nicholas, a black fellow, now under guard,” be brought to Cambridge and jailed for examination. That was Thomas Nichols of Natick. He was accused of trying to entice black slaves to resist their masters, showing that the Patriot leadership was well aware that other people might fight for freedoms as well.

Seven weeks later, on 8 July, the committee proposed a further restriction on the types of soldiers who could enlist in its army:

Resolved, That the instructions to be given to the officers of the regiments, be sent to the council of war, and if approved, be forwarded: they are as follow:

Instructions for the officers of the several regiments of the Massachusetts Bay forces, who are immediately to go upon the recruiting service.

You are not to enlist any deserter from the ministerial army, nor any stroller, negro, or vagabond, or person suspected of being an enemy to the liberty of America, nor any under eighteen years of age.

As the cause is the best that can engage men of courage and principle to take up arms, so it is expected that none but such will be accepted by the recruiting officer; the pay, provision, &c., being so ample, it is not doubted but the officers sent upon this service, will, without delay, complete their respective corps, and march the men forthwith to camp.

You are not to enlist any person who is not an American-born, unless such person has a wife and family, and is a settled resident in this country.

The persons you enlist, must be provided with good and complete arms.

The new commander-in-chief, Gen. George Washington, and his council evidently did approve that language because it appeared on handbills over the signature of Gen. Horatio Gates two days later.

Back when the war had started on 19 April, the first day’s casualties included Prince Estabrook, still legally a slave and yet in the Lexington militia. Yet a month later, Massachusetts pulled back from enlisting slaves in its army. And in July, the authorities barred enlisting any black men at all. In October, the Continental Army commanders, in consultation with members of the Continental Congress, agreed further to bar any black soldiers already in the ranks from reenlisting in the new year.

The New England authorities almost certainly made those changes under the influence of Gen. Washington, a Virginia plantation owner. They also probably reflected what people thought the Congress that appointed Washington would want. Indeed, the black soldiers already in the ranks became an issue in Philadelphia, as I’ll discuss tomorrow.

I think most Americans see our national history as a story of gradually but unstoppably growing liberties, with equality and legally protected rights spreading from white men of property to poorer white men and then black men and then women and so on. But of course the story isn’t so simple. Progress in achieving individual rights hasn’t always been smooth and one-way. The end of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow laws are the clearest example of retrograde motion.

This period in 1775 is a smaller example as Massachusetts’s Patriot government deferred to a Virginia slaveowner on the question of the black men already in its army. Had the new summer policy prevailed, the enlisted ranks of the Continental Army would have become racially exclusive. The consequences could have been far-reaching: a smaller, weaker army, to judge by estimates from late in the war of how many American soldiers were black men; and less cultural pressure for abolishing slavery, as happened in New England and Pennsylvania in the 1780s.

On Thursday evening I’ll speak at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site about how Washington changed his mind at the end of 1775. That talk starts at 6:30 P.M., and the site asks people to reserve seats by calling 617-876-4491.

[The photo above shows the Edmund Fowle House in Watertown, used by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress for committee meetings in 1775 and 1776.]

What’s Up with Minute Man Park This Month

Today the North Bridge Visitor Center of Minute Man National Historical Park is scheduled to reopen for the season.

It will be open through the end of the month on Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. In April, with the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord coming up, the park’s facilities will surely open for longer hours.

Meanwhile, the Friends of Minute Man Park is sponsoring two lectures this month.

Sunday, 15 March
“Parker’s Revenge Project: Notes from the Field”
Principal investigator Margaret Watters, Ph.D., will give an update on the Friends initiative to study and interpret the site traditionally associated with the afternoon assault on the withdrawing British army column by Capt. John Parker and his Lexington militiamen.

Sunday, 29 March
“War and Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1775-1783”
John Hannigan, Rose and Irving Crown Fellow in the History Department at Brandeis, will share his research on how men of color participated in the opening of the American Revolution, and the effects of their activity on the institution of slavery in Massachusetts.

Both talks will take place in Bemis Hall, 15 Bedford Road in Lincoln. They will start at 3:00 P.M., and are free and open to the public.

Quintal on Black Soldiers in the Continental Army, 7 Feb.

On Tuesday, 7 February, at 7:30 P.M. in Lincoln’s Bemis Hall, George Quintal, Jr., will speak on the role of black soldiers in the American Revolution. The Lincoln Minute Men will host this presentation.

Back in 2005, Quintal assembled a study of African-Americans and Native Americans in the provincial forces during the Battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill for the National Park Service, and I know he’s continued to research since. (There’s a preview of that study on Google Books. Unfortunately, but the Government Printing Office says it’s no longer available.)

Anyone reading the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s report about the opening day of the war saw that among the wounded was “Prince Easterbrooks (a Negro man)” of Lexington. Salem Poor fought notably in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

But for a major slaveholder like Gen. George Washington, the sight of armed black men was at the least novel, and probably a bit disturbing. He saw it as evidence the New England recruiters had scraped the bottom of the barrel. In his first report back to the Continental Congress, he wrote:

From the Number of Boys, Deserters and negroes which have inlisted in this Province, I entertain some doubts whether the Number required, can be raised here…

That news seems to have produced even more anxiety among the some of the Congress delegates, particularly those from colonies with large enslaved black populations. In September the South Carolina delegate Edward Rutledge (shown above) proposed discharging all African-American men from the army.

According to New Jersey delegate Richard Smith, Rutledge “was strongly supported by many of the Southern Delegates but so powerfully opposed that he lost the Point.” Like a lot of other controversial matters, that debate was kept out of the Congress’s official record. But the vote didn’t settle the question.

TOMORROW: John Adams writes home for reassurance.

The Problem with “Mark Codman”

Yesterday’s Boston Globe included an article by Francie Latour rounding up several books and a movie issued over the past decade about slavery in New England. It offers a good reading list on the subject, including Elisa Lemire’s Black Walden (and avoiding one unreliable recent title).

The article’s subhead says, “More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery”; a bunch of right-wing commenters confirmed that by showing that they’d prefer not to see such essays at all.

I have my own objection to how the article begins:

In the year 1755, a black slave named Mark Codman plotted to kill his abusive master.

The name “Mark Codman” pulled me up short because that’s not how the man was referred to in his lifetime.

John Codman called his slave “Mark,” with no surname. Massachusetts society and legal practices followed suit. Mark was tried, convicted, and executed under that single name. Referring to blacks by only a given name was undoubtedly a way to signal their lesser status in colonial society. But tacking on their owners’ surnames now strikes me as, in its small way, both a distortion of that history and another imposition on those individuals.

In many cases, we know that people who had been enslaved adopted the surnames of their former masters: Tony Vassall of Cambridge, Prince Estabrook of Lexington, Phillis Wheatley of Boston until her marriage to John Peters, and so on. But in other cases, enslaved people used surnames that differed from their owners’ or former owners’.

Crispus Attucks’s last name hints at a connection to the Natick Indians. Peter Salem also went by the name Salem Middlesex; he apparently took surnames from locations rather than from his one-time owners, Jeremiah Belknap and Lawson Buckminster.

In Framingham in 1721, two African-born slaves of the Rev. John Swift married. They are listed in church records as Nero Benson and Dido Dingo, the latter sounding more like an African name than an English one. Subsequent legal records usually refer to this couple by their first names only, but the surname “Benson” got passed down to their free descendants. (In Maryland later, Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Bailey, and never knew where his original surname came from—clearly not his or his mother’s owner. William S. McFeely’s biography suggests it might be a form of “Belali,” a common African name.)

Sally Hemings’s surname came from the ship’s captain who owned one of her ancestors and fathered another. The Hemings family retained that surname for generations despite owners like Thomas Jefferson usually referring to them only by given names. (Even today, one can often detect writers who want to dismiss Sally Hemings and her descendants’ link to Jefferson by how they refer to her only as “Sally,” or spell the name “Hemmings” as a white Jefferson biographer did.)

Being able to control their own names appears to have been significant for African-Americans. Gary Nash showed in a study of Philadelphia that emancipated black families quickly dropped the classical, geographic, and African day-names that colonial slave-owners liked—no more Pompey, Bristol, or Cuffee. Free blacks instead favored Biblical and common English names, like most of their neighbors.

Given those patterns, I always look for the name that an enslaved or formerly enslaved person appears to have freely chosen and preferred, and to try to use it in the same style as I would for white contemporaries: Attucks, Wheatley, Hemings, &c. (Olaudah Equiano presents a difficult case.) But when I can’t find a surname, I don’t add an owner’s surname because I’ve seen enough examples of individuals choosing otherwise. And recognizing people as individuals is what naming is all about.

I can therefore see the motive to give Mark a surname like most of his Massachusetts contemporaries. But he suffered at the hands of John Codman, and killed the man. Would he really want to be retroactively named “Mark Codman”? Enslavement constricted Mark’s life and treated him as less than fully human; the fact that he was called only “Mark” is a significant reflection of that history.