To the wound may be applied a leaf of good tobacco, moistened with
     rum.

     The Massachusetts Magazine, IV, 103-104 (1792).

[2] The Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept. 11, 1740.

[3] The City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, June 22, 1797.

[4] The Columbian Gazette, II, 742-743.

[5] Delany, “Condition of the Colored People,” 111.

[6] C. G. Woodson, “The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861.”

THE NEGRO SOLDIER IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The facts as to the participation of Negroes in the American Revolution have received the attention of several writers.  Yet not one of them has made a scientific presentation of the facts which they have discovered.  These historians have failed to consider the bearing of the status of the free Negro during the colonial period, the meaning of the Revolution to the Negro, and what the service of the Negro soldiers first enlisted effected in changing the attitude of the people toward the blacks throughout the original thirteen colonies.

To a person who has lived in the nineteenth or twentieth century it would seem incredible that Negroes, the majority of whom were then slaves, should have been allowed to fight in the Continental Army.  The layman here may forget that during the eighteenth century slavery was a patriarchal institution rather than the economic plantation system as it developed after the multiplication of mechanical appliances, which brought about the world-wide industrial revolution.  During the eighteenth century a number of slaves brought closely into contact with their masters were gradually enlightened and later emancipated.  Such freedmen, in the absence of any laws to the contrary, exercised political rights,[1] among which was that of bearing arms.  Negroes served not only in the American Revolution, but in every war of consequence during the colonial period.  There were masters who sent slaves to the front to do menial labor and to fight in the places of their owners.  Then there were slaves who, finding it easier to take occasional chances with bullets than to bear the lash, ran away from their masters and served as privateers or enlisted as freemen.[2] The newspapers of the colonial period often mentioned these facts in their advertisements of fugitive slaves.  In 1760 a master had considerable difficulty with a slave who escaped from New England into New Jersey, where he said he would enlist in the provincial service.[3] Advertising for his mulatto servant, who was brought up in Rhode Island, James Richardson of Stonington said that the fugitive had served as a soldier the previous summer.[4] A few free Negroes found their way into the colonial militia along with white soldiers.  This passed, of course, not without some opposition, as in the case of Massachusetts.  In 1656 that colony excluded Negroes and Indians from the militia, and according to Governor Bradstreet’s report to the Board of Trade in 1680 and subsequent action taken by that colony in 1775 and 1776, it adhered to this policy.[5]