[Footnote 1:  Sparks’s Washington, VIII, 322-323.]

From this brief survey we may at least see something of the anomalous position occupied by the Negro in the American Revolution.  Altogether not less than three thousand, and probably more, members of the race served in the Continental army.  At the close of the conflict New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia freed their slave soldiers.  In general, however, the system of slavery was not affected, and the English were bound by the treaty of peace not to carry away any Negroes.  As late as 1786, it is nevertheless interesting to note, a band of Negroes calling themselves “The King of England’s soldiers” harassed and alarmed the people on both sides of the Savannah River.

Slavery remained; but people could not forget the valor of the Negro regiment in Rhode Island, or the courage of individual soldiers.  They could not forget that it was a Negro, Crispus Attucks, who had been the patriot leader in the Boston Massacre, or the scene when he and one of his companions, Jonas Caldwell, lay in Faneuil Hall.  Those who were at Bunker Hill could not fail to remember Peter Salem, who, when Major Pitcairn of the British army was exulting in his expected triumph, rushed forward, shot him in the breast, and killed him; or Samuel Poor, whose officers testified that he performed so many brave deeds that “to set forth particulars of his conduct would be tedious.”  These and many more, some with very humble names, in a dark day worked for a better country.  They died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.

3. The Northwest Territory and the Constitution

The materialism and selfishness which rose in the course of the war to oppose the liberal tendencies of the period, and which Washington felt did so much to embarrass the government, became pronounced in the debates on the Northwest Territory and the Constitution.  At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War the region west of Pennsylvania, east of the Mississippi River, north of the Ohio River, and south of Canada, was claimed by Virginia, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.  This territory afforded to these states a source of revenue not possessed by the others for the payment of debts incurred in the war, and Maryland and other seaboard states insisted that in order to equalize matters these claimants should cede their rights to the general government.  The formal cessions were made and accepted in the years 1782-6.  In April, 1784, after Virginia had made her cession, the most important, Congress adopted a temporary form of government drawn up by Thomas Jefferson for the territory south as well as north of the Ohio River.  Jefferson’s most significant provision, however, was rejected.  This declared that “after the year 1800 there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states other than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted