By Victoria Mejicanos
AFRO Staff Writer
vmejicanos@afro.com
“The greatest part of those that have enlisted are free Negroes [and] Mulattoes,” a Maryland recruitment officer reported in 1780.
The statement, preserved in the Archives of Maryland, points to a largely untold story in our country’s history. Black men—many of them free— fought alongside White soldiers in Maryland during the Revolutionary War, helping secure the nation’s independence.
Historians like Dr. Walter Gill, a military veteran and commissioner on the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture shared with the AFRO that the first group of Black soldiers from Maryland were organized in the summer of 1776 and were integrated with White soldiers and their families. Oftentimes they were used as laborers and fighting soldiers, with very few advancing past the role of private.
Gill told the AFRO that in terms of enslaved Black men, they were not recruited until shortly after 1778. They often replaced White men and their sons who were drafted.
“The people who owned enslaved people needed them for economic reasons and they weren’t too particular about giving their enslaved guns,” said Gill.
After the war, many enslaved soldiers were not granted the freedom that had been promised to them, though some in more progressive states, including Maryland and Pennsylvania, did earn land or pensions.
One notable Black patriot in Maryland history is Thomas Carney.
Steven Xavier Lee has spent the last 30 years “crusading for recognition of Maryland’s free Black enlistees in the revolutionary war.” He wrote a storybook about Carney and his contributions, which helped lead to the creation of a monument honoring Black patriots and their contributions that is expected to be unveiled in August.
Lee said it’s possible that thousands of Black men enlisted in the Revolutionary War, but only approximately 350 people have been identified.
“They have been completely left out of history, and a lot of people seem to find that hard to accept or believe, which I do not understand because today, we have a president who is trying to erase our history,” said Lee. “So it shouldn’t be a mystery or hard to understand why we were left out of history 250 years ago.”
He also touched on the fact that if this history is not known, it does not change. Which means perspectives don’t change.
(Courtesy Photos)
“Subconsciously, we’re trained to think that the battle for America was outside of our real experience because we were just slaves in the background,” said Lee. “That’s a false image. When you understand that there were many free Black men who enlisted it gives you a different sense of pride in your country, pride in your ancestors, and a different sense of entitlement.”
Dr. Stephani Juleeana Miller has spent more than 20 years researching her Eastern Shore, Md. families. She is the fifth great-granddaughter of Revolutionary War patriot James Due of Hillsboro, Md., and a founding member of the Society of the First African Families of English America, a non-profit lineage organization that unites descendants of African ancestry who lived in English America prior to March 5, 1770. Through this organization she is working on a series of books about forgotten patriots.
Miller is a genetic genealogist, and it wasn’t until six years ago, while connecting with a White relative on ancestry.com, that she learned she was the descendant of a patriot. It wasn’t until she looked up census data that she realized Due was Black. She called it the “biggest find” of her career.
She called the discovery both “humbling and unsettling,” acknowledging that while her ancestor played a role in the nation’s founding, many like him later faced enslavement and hardship. Still, Miller said she is proud to be American and considers herself a patriot.
“We were already here,” said Miller. We were here in the 1600s, we were here early in the 1700s so we were here before America became America. So we are American. This is our country. We have helped build this country from the very beginning.”