When America Won Its Independence, What Became of the Slaves Who Fled for Theirs?

George Washington’s slave, Hercules, pictured.
In this in-depth article from The New Yorker magazine, we find a detailed account of the lives of slaves who fled to the British during the Revolutionary War, only to be abused, dispersed and sold around the world. To learn more about slavery during the Revolutionary period, check out a book called, “An Imperfect God: George Washington and His Slaves.

“No one knows how many former slaves had fled the United States by the end of the American Revolution. Not as many as wanted to, anyway. During the war, between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five) left their homes, running from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on a British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore’s regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.) When the British evacuated, fifteen thousand blacks went with them, though not necessarily to someplace better.”

“From the moment that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, in 1781, American allies reported seeing “herds of Negroes” fleeing through Virginia’s swamps of pine and cypress. A few made it to a warship that Washington, under the terms of the British surrender, had allowed to sail to New York. Some ran to the French, on the not unreasonable supposition that earning wages polishing shoes in Paris had to be better than planting tobacco in Virginia for nothing but floggings.”

TheStateOf . . . The “Revlutionary” Period. During this period, the American ‘Revolutionaries’ came close to freeing the slaves, but backed off when the South, as well as Northern and British slave traders, balked. I (Justin) tremble when I think of how much better America would be now if they would have done the right thing.