29. The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Enslaved Blacks
To be sure, many black Americans gave the Patriots the benefit of the doubt. While there was a British Freedom fighting for the Crown, there were also Jeffrey Liberty and Dick Freedom fighting in a Connecticut regiment for the American side, and Crispus Attucks, who was slain in the Boston Massacre. However, blacks who fought with the Patriots were free men. When seen through the eyes of black slaves – and the overwhelming majority of black Americans at the time were enslaved – the American Revolution’s meaning is turned upside down and inside out.
In the southern colonies of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, the Patriots’ war for liberty was actually a war for a continuation of the forced servitude of chattel slavery. That produced no shortage of perverse contortions of logic. When Virginia’s British governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to rebels’ escaped slaves if they fled to British lines and served the British cause, Patriot slave owners grew apoplectic. An incensed George Washington, for example, described Dunmore as “that arch traitor to the rights of humanity” for promising to free slaves.