[Footnote 1:  Herbert Friedenwald, The Declaration of Independence (New York, 1904), pp. 130, 272.]

Negroes had a barely appreciable share in precipitating the Revolution and in waging the war.  The “Boston Massacre” was occasioned in part by an insult offered by a slave to a British soldier two days before; and in that celebrated affray itself, Crispus Attucks, a mulatto slave, was one of the five inhabitants of Boston slain.  During the course of the war free negro and slave enlistments were encouraged by law in the states where racial control was not reckoned vital, and they were informally permitted in the rest.  The British also utilized this resource in some degree.  As early as November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the ousted royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves “appertaining to rebels” who would join him “for the more speedy reducing this colony to a proper sense of their duty to his Majesty’s crown and dignity."[2] In reply the Virginia press warned the negroes against British perfidy; and the revolutionary government, while announcing the penalties for servile revolt, promised freedom to such as would promptly desert the British standard.  Some hundreds of negroes appear to have joined Dunmore, but they did not save him from being driven away.[3]

[Footnote 2:  American Archives, Force ed., fourth series, III, 1385.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., III, 1387; IV, 84, 85; V, 160, 162.]

When several years afterward military operations were transferred to the extreme South, where the whites were few and the blacks many, the problem of negro enlistments became at once more pressing and more delicate.  Henry Laurens of South Carolina proposed to General Washington in March, 1779, the enrollment of three thousand blacks in the Southern department.  Hamilton warmly endorsed the project, and Washington and Madison more guardedly.  Congress recommended it to the states concerned, and pledged itself to reimburse the masters and to set the slaves free with a payment of fifty dollars to each of these at the end of the war.  Eventually Colonel John Laurens, the son of Henry, went South as an enthusiastic emissary of the scheme, only to meet rebuff and failure.[4] Had the negroes in general possessed any means of concerted action, they might conceivably have played off the British and American belligerents to their own advantage.  In actuality, however, they were a passive element whose fate was affected only so far as the master race determined.

[Footnote 4:  G.W.  Williams, History of the Negro Race in America (New York [1882]), I, 353-362.]