Harry Washington
One of the slaves who responded to Lord Dunmore’s promise of freedom for slaves who fled their rebel masters was Harry Washington. In 1776, he ran away from Mount Vernon, the plantation of the rebel armies’ commander in chief, and future first president of the United States, George Washington. Harry succeeded in evading pursuit, and made it to safety behind British lines, where he enlisted in the Ethiopian Regiment.
Harry was born in the Gambia river region in West Africa, circa 1740. He was enslaved and transported across the Atlantic, surviving the horrific Middle Passage to disembark in Virginia around 1760, where he was bought by a plantation owner. After his master’s death in 1763, Harry was purchased by George Washington, who put him to work draining swamps in southeast Virginia.
After years of toil in appalling conditions, enveloped by heat, humidity, and clouds of mosquitoes, Harry was taken to Washington’s plantation, Mount Vernon, and tasked with looking after Washington’s horses. In 1771, he was demoted from his skilled tasks to grueling manual labor, prompting him to flee. However, he was recaptured a few weeks later, and restored to slavery.
In 1775, the Revolutionary War started, and Virginia’s governor offered slaves their freedom if they fought for the British. Mount Vernon’s manager assembled the plantation’s slaves, and urged them to trust the benevolence of slavery’s paternalism over the precarious dangers of freedom. Harry preferred the dangers of freedom over the benevolence of slavery, and risking savage penalties if caught, he fled Mount Vernon along with two other slaves.
He evaded the slave patrols and pursuit, and made it to British lines, where he enlisted in the Ethiopian Regiment. He survived the epidemic diseases that wracked the unit, as well as the fighting in Virginia. In 1776, the British position in Virginia became hopeless, prompting the evacuation of the state and the disbandment of the Ethiopian Regiment. Harry then sailed to New York, where he joined the Black Pioneers, serving in a company attached to a British artillery unit.
He rose to the rank of corporal, and accompanied Henry Clinton’s British army in its invasion of South Carolina. There, corporal Harry Washington was placed in charge of a pioneer unit attached to the Royal Artillery Department in Charleston in 1781. After the war, he was evacuated to Nova Scotia, and later joined the first group of colonial black migrants who were returned to Africa, settling in Sierra Leone. In 1800, he joined a brief rebellion against British rule. The rebellion was swiftly crushed, and Harry Washington was arrested, convicted of sedition, and sentenced to internal banishment elsewhere in Sierra Leone, where he died of illness soon thereafter.